Sean Hoyer

"Great question, Croesus! While my status as a delphic model prevents me from elaborating further, I can affirm that by going to war with Persia you *will* destroy a mighty empire. Would you like me to write this up as a set of daily affirmations, or perhaps you'd like a list of mighty empires?"

Israeli Jewish man arrested for bomb threats against Canadian, U.S. Jewish targets | CBC News A 19-year-old Israeli Jewish man was arrested in Israel Thursday as the primary suspect in a string of bomb threats targeting Jewish community centres and other institutions in Canada and the U.S., ma...

This man phoned in dozens of anonymous antisemitic threats across Canada, the US and Australia www.cbc.ca/news/world/i...

A minor league hockey team had a wiener dog race. Zero thoughts, just vibes and absolute chaos. A thing of beauty

An executive at a large global hedge fund with a presence in Dubai said: "We have been exploring how to evacuate people but it's not easy." He added: "It's pretty scary -- this is going to have implications for some of my guys . . . the trade was not that you were getting exploded to geopolitics when moving to Dubai. It was not a consideration. People have moved families. This element of concern is new."

ALT VERSION:

Over the past year, every single time one of the apps or services I use suddenly became less reliable and more buggy, I never have to look far for the "Claude is amazing and now writes most of my code" post for the devs involved.

THE BIGGER PICTURE BEN APPEL Genspect NOVEMBER 4-5, 2023 DENVER, USA Ben Appel is a writer living in New York. His memoir, "Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic," with Bombardier Books, is forthcoming. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Spiked, Daily Mail, Washington Examiner, Queer Majority, and UnHerd. Follow him on X @benappel.

From a Genspect article... We all agree that autogynephilia is a paraphilia that can cause dreadful harm to women. How to tackle this issue is where the conflict lies. Some people believe that all AGP men should never be allowed to speak; nor should they be allowed to show their face in public; indeed, according to many, there is no space where AGP men should ever be allowed to exist. Put simply, some people believe that they should either hide themselves for ever more or they should die.

Ben has done quite a bit of work with Genspect, and he was a panelist at their conference in Denver in 2023.
That’s this conference👇that afterwards the Genspect board had to write an article wherein they stated that their members wanting to kill trans people was going too far.

The interpersonal costs have been worse than the professional ones. Two years ago, at my best friend’s baby shower, someone I have known for decades—someone who came to my wedding and my father’s funeral, and who has seen me ugly-cry on many occasions—bristled when I hugged her and later told a mutual acquaintance that I was hurting trans kids. After I published a memoir late last year, another old friend wrote on my Facebook page, “You and your book are disgusting.” At times, I’ve been tempted to join the right—especially because so many conservatives have been kind to me and my own people have been so cruel. But the politicization of gender-nonconforming kids is what has made healthy debate about it so difficult, and my leaving one side for the other would only add to the problem. We need less black-and-white thinking about this complex issue.

It's always the same exact origin story with these people. They get radicalized online and their friends think they're obsessive bigoted freaks. Then they make it everyone's problem that they are disliked and disowned by their own friends.

And for a long time, you were only allowed to transition if you were attracted to men if you were a trans woman or women if you were a trans man. That was based on homophobia. It was extremely coercive and many trans people had to fake attraction to the opposite gender in order to transition.

The medical community had this debate in the 2000's specifically because of the abusive practices of patholigizing effeminate behavior of cis boys. They updated the DSM-V in 2013 specifically to add in a persistent strong desire to be treated as a different gender, not just gender non-conformity.

It's ultimately just "they're recruiting your kids!" over and over again forever

It was in those spaces, in the late 2010s, that I realized that the fundamentalist Christians I’d grown up with weren’t the only people enforcing rigid ideas about how others should think. After arriving in New York with mainstream Democratic views, I took classes heavy on critical theories that fixated on identity categories and reflexively decried capitalism and the West. Within influential LGBTQ organizations, gay rights had given way to radical queer politics, and academic theories about sex and gender had hardened into doctrine. Widespread revulsion toward Donald Trump had narrowed the boundaries of permissible discussion on the left. The more Trump and his followers opposed something, the more we were supposed to support it. The prevailing view was that any debate within our side would become ammunition for the right.

For a long time, I feared that if I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself, I would lose the only community I’d ever really belonged in. As controversy flared up nationally about pediatric gender medicine, though, I started voicing concerns, rooted in my own experiences, over what looked to me like a rush to medical treatment. For all the sloganeering about protecting trans kids, I heard no discussion about protecting effeminate gay boys from unnecessary medicalization. When I and others asked whether progressive norms might be nudging effeminate gay boys to think of themselves as girls, no one wanted to hear it. Instead of answers, we were given the LGBTQ community’s official line. “Gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things,” the Human Rights Campaign asserts. But the confidence with which people claim that the two have nothing to do with each other is hard to square with research findings: According to data collected mostly before the recent surge in pediatric-dysphoria diagnoses, most prepubescent children who experienced gender distress went on to experience same-sex attraction and ultimately did not pursue a gender transition. Of 70 adolescents whom Dutch clinicians subjected to puberty suppression from 2000 to 2008, the overwhelming majority were attracted exclusively to people of their biological sex.

Straightforward right-wing agitprop. The idea that thousands of kids were pushed into gender-affirming surgeries because the left shuts down debate is a laughable conspiracy theory. The overwhelming social pressure is to be cis, not trans!

So, in launching a huge bombing campaign on Iran they apparently didn't plan for:

- Who takes over;
- Interceptor shortages from sustained drone retaliation;
- How to defend US bases in the region;
- Threats to ships in the Strait of Hormuz; and
- How to evacuate Americans with airspace closed.

In Defense of Effeminate Boys If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded. By Ben Appel

If medical authorities have a rigorous way of distinguishing effeminate boys from transgender kids—or of distinguishing transgender kids from proto-gay kids—they aren’t saying. I have met a number of detransitioned gay men who tried to live as women for a time because they and their families were so averse to homosexuality. According to a 2019 report in The Times of London, staffers at Britain’s foremost gender-identity clinic joked darkly that, as a result of the facility’s work, “there would be no gay people left.” A statement last month by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons noted that there is no validated way to assess whether a child’s gender distress will persist over time or disappear without medical intervention. A lack of good research and recordkeeping means that we may never know how many patients who would have been considered effeminate gay boys not so long ago have undergone medical treatments for gender dysphoria.

Absolute trash. The author did not speak to a single medical professional and the article does not contain a shred of evidence that effeminate gay boys are being bamboozled into thinking they're trans.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Discussion about trans people is so desperately locked down that these poor skeptics have been reduced to spreading their brave heterodox views through long articles obscure, niche outlets like the Atlantic, New York Times, and every right-of-center media outlet on the planet.

He basically writes this same exact article every year, going back to at least 2022 when he had it published in Newsweek (and had it shared by Rowling).

Lot of people being real defeatist about LLM news today and acting like you lost when you can just put that energy to mocking companies and organisations that use any kind of genAI and shame the fuck out of them. They hate that and it’s easy to do. Try inventing more words for them to ban!!

Images of an old silver 1999 Toyota Corolla for sale

You want a car that gets the job done? You want a car that's hassle free? You want a car that literally no one will ever compliment you on? Well look no further. The 1999 Toyota Corolla. Let's talk about features. Bluetooth: nope Sunroof: nope Fancy wheels: nope Rear view camera: nope...but it's got a transparent rear window and you have a fucking neck that can turn. Let me tell you a story. One day my Corolla started making a strange sound. I didn't give a shit and ignored it. It went away. The End. You could take the engine out of this car, drop it off the Golden Gate Bridge, fish it out of the water a thousand years later, put it in the trunk of the car, fill the gas tank up with Nutella, turn the key, and this puppy would fucking start right up. This car will outlive you, it will outlive your children. Things this car is old enough to do: Vote: yes

Consent to sex: yes Rent a car: it IS a car This car's got history. It's seen some shit. People have done straight things in this car. People have done gay things in this car. It's not going to judge you like a fucking Volkswagen would. Interesting facts: This car's exterior color is gray, but it's interior color is grey. In the owner's manual, oil is listed as "optional." When this car was unveiled at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show, it caused all 2,000 attendees to spontaneously yawn. The resulting abrupt change in air pressure inside the building caused a partial collapse of the roof. Four people died. The event is chronicled in the documentary "Bored to Death: The Story of the 1999 Toyota Corolla You wanna know more? Great, I had my car fill out a Facebook survey. Favorite food: spaghetti Favorite tv show: Alf Favorite band: tie between Bush and the Gin Blossoms This car is as practical as a Roth IRA. It's as middle-of-the-

When I ran the CarFax for this car, I got back a single piece of paper that said, "It's a Corolla, It's fine." Let's face the facts, this car isn't going to win any beauty contests, but neither are you. Stop lying to yourself and stop lying to your wife. This isn't the car you want, it's the car you deserve: The fucking 1999 Toyota Corolla. Google map of cars location

Never forget: 8 years ago a random person on Craigslist wrote the most effective ad for the Toyota Corolla, ever.

How Antisemitism Is Linked to Anti-Trans Conspiracy Theories At its core, transphobia is a conspiracy theory—and so is antisemitism.

I wrote about how antisemitism and transphobia are linked for @rewirenewsgroup.com a while ago
rewirenewsgroup.com/2023/11/01/h...

Calling AI "slop" has been one of the most effective instances of the public rebranding a product and it pisses them off.

I wrote this post hours before the Associated Press announced a new partnership with Kalshi.

What a US$ 345 million judgment means for Greenpeace - Greenpeace International A US court has just sided with fossil fuel pipeline giant Energy Transfer and ordered Greenpeace International and Greenpeace entities in the US to pay US$ 345 million.

www.greenpeace.org/internationa...

Global News’ Ben Mulroney Shared a Video of Airstrikes. The Footage is Actually from a Video Game. The host of Global News’ West Block gets lost in a misinformation-driven fog of war as American and Israeli forces strike Iran

NEW FROM ME:

While US and Israeli forces launched strikes against Iran this weekend, Global News' The West Block host Ben Mulroney reposted video of fighter jets that had been miscaptioned as American F-15s attacking Iran

I double-checked. Ben was actually sharing footage from a video game

A house at night with Christmas decor still up. Window has a huge NO ICE lights display (red cross out circle in lights over the word ice in blue lights)

Seen in Minneapolis

Yeah, not a great sign that they're just going to be experimenting on trans inmates like this and it's not a big story.

So, so instructive to compare media response to Afghanistan withdrawal -- months of hysterical garment-rending & catastrophizing, relentless criticism of the admin -- with the response to an unprovoked, unmotivated, illegal war of aggression, ie, "some critics say maybe Trump should have reasons."

graham platner's team rn

Torturing trans women prisoners by executive fiat, and doubling down on said torture as soon as they attempt to fight back.

This is what trans genocide in the USA right now looks like.

Kansas invalidates driver’s licenses, birth certificates of over 1,000 transgender residents The Kansas state government has invalidated the driver’s licenses and birth certificates of transgender residents who changed the gender on those documents, in accordance with a law that took effect o...

Kansas invalidates driver’s licenses and birth certificates amended by its trans residents. "The move affects more than 1,000 people. The law requires residents to change their gender identification to the sex they were assigned at birth..." www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

A highly complex website showing two betting accounts earning nearly $500,000 and $120,000 on a minimal number of positions.

In case you were wondering, Polymarket had yet another spate of likely inside traders betting that the US would strike Iran by February 28.

Per the due diligence investigation service Bubblemaps, the wallets used were created 24 hours earlier.

The Pentagon Pizza Index has been replaced.