Thursday, December 26, 2024
The President of the NCAA has stated that there are 510,000 NCAA athletes and that less than ten are transgender. That’s .00196078431% if I take the high side of the numbers suggested (i.e. 10).
Listening to Senators Hawley and Kennedy question NCAA President Baker was the typical right wing attack. Rather than letting Baker explain his position they wanted to put words in his mouth and try and force him to admit to something he never said.
Basically, Baker said the NCAA has followed court decisions on the question of trans athletes and Hawley et al accused Baker and the NCAA of not taking responsibility. Baker said every time the issue has come before a judge the issue has been decided in favor of participation.
Puppy killer Kristi Noem has taken what some would say is bold swift action by banning transgender athletes from competing in her state of South Dakota. Why has a trans athlete not challenged her in court? Well, the answer is simple. There are no trans athletes in South Dakota.
So why are Senators Hawley and Kennedy so invested in a situation that rarely happens, or in the case of South Dakota non-existent?
Well, okay, we can talk about the few cases there are, and there is merit to the argument in those cases, but what happens when a case has no merit and these elected officials go ape crazy over them?
It seems many of the elected right wing politicians get excited and spend a lot of their time on low percentage or non-existent problems and no time on problems that affect many of us.
It will get worse when the new administration comes in. Fueled by false hypothesizes and perceptions devoid of fact these Don Quixotes will go off tilting at windmills that they and their partisan hacks have created. We can talk about the whys if we like, but it is a useless pursuit in that there is no reasons to do so. Would a Josh Hawley or Louisiana’s Kennedy change their minds? Why no of course not. Why take a position based on fact or that would solve a non-existent problem? In fact, why work on real problems when you can gin up more coverage by screaming about non-existent BS?
Okay, there are some situations that “we” may agree were not solved in the best way possible. But is that what a U.S. senator should be working on? How does continually interrupting the NCAA President and claiming stupid stuff change anything?
But this is tiny compared to what I fear is coming. I’m afraid we’ll see plans put into action based on nothing. I remember watching Shoah. The 1985 French documentary about the Holocaust. The director gathered whomever he could that had been part of the Holocaust to document their memories about it. One scholar pointed out that Hitler really needed to add little to the cultural prejudice that had been handed down for generations against the Jews to approve the extermination of them. In fact, he did little more than use approve the term “final solution.” The rest he left up to his sadistic underlings.
What term will a Ron DeSantis of a Josh Hawley or a Steven Miller use to approve some heinous sponsored state approved crime against humanity? “Deconstructing the Administrative State” is their term for destroying the government. Not totally, just the parts that help people. Why do we need that? Musk claims he will cut two trillion in government spending. That’s 2/5s of the government annual spending. Could it be done? Not really, but if it is even attempted the country we live in will be radically changed. Aside from creating a depression that will make the 1930s look like child’s play and plunging the world into a financial crisis that will take decades to recover from I don’t see much of a problem.
The sadistic underlings of the new administration have announced their intention to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare. They’ve announced a plan to strip the government of people who know what they are doing and replace them with fools.
It’s not the windmills that are there or might be there that concern me as much as the ones that aren’t, and never have been. Along with machinations laid out in various right wing media and literature that could destroy the economic world we know and the democratic government that our founders created.
But then maybe repeatedly showing pictures of Mussolini hanging by his heels in the town square will be a deterrent. Maybe, when Bobby Kennedy gets rid of vaccines and starts multiple global pandemics people will think, “Hey, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea?” I don’t know. We’ll see. Unfortunately.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the leadership on the right wing knows this is a non-issue. But if they can’t demonize people, and create a bogeyman for their followers to fear, they lose relevance. This was never about trans people, it has always been about control. Next week there’ll be some other bogeymen for the people on the right to fear, and a different one after that. But the ones who suffer are the minorities being demonized.
What isn’t being mentioned is the gorilla in the room-Evangelism. This whole election and prior one was based on appealing to the Evangelical base. Once these politicians grasped the value of getting their cult like vote they had preachers preaching it from the pulpit. Anything that has to do with gender change fires up that base. Anything about “wokeness” for that matter, fires up the base. How do I know this? I have two members of my family preaching what they heard their preacher preach. The Dark Ages are rearing their ugly head. It’s all about getting the vote. Getting the vote gives them power. Nothing like a little religion to stir the pot.
Playing on the fears and bigotry of their base is always their method. It’s all about keeping them scared of ‘the others’. It’s the shit that goes on behind the curtain while everyone is distracted by this bullshit that scares me.