Nobody ever asks this when people do reviews of movies from 25 years ago. I don't remember anyone scoffing at the idea of this own site's A History of Violence analyzing the action scenes of movies from the 70s. It's only when people talk about potentially harmful aspects of older media that this response comes out.

People should definitely not talk about how the media of their youth influenced them except to say how awesome it was.

I think Soloway basically meant it was used as propaganda, not written as propaganda, and that's fair enough. Same is true of Buffalo Bill, who is explicitly stated not to be trans but who certainly contributed to a perception of gender nonconforming people as criminal deviants.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Especially where you couldn't help but jab at the concept of genderqueer people at the end. Next time leave that out and the "jes' common sense" take might actually seem more credible.

This is important to some of us.

That's fair. I don't think the intention of the sketch was to make fun of nonbinary people, but it's absolutely used that way today.

The trans women and nonbinary people I know have heard a lot of Pat jokes. It's basically the go-to. The panel was specifically about trans representation on TV, and Pat is really significant there.

Pat and Silence of the Lambs are the two cultural artifacts I see cited the most by trans women as harmful to them — as in people make references to those to their faces, that kind of thing. This seems like an uncontroversial point to make and not a particularly new one, other than the term "propaganda" which I think…

Doesn't "propaganda" imply intentional advocacy for or against a particular position? Otherwise, sure, I don't think there's any controversy here.

Wow, really? And Jeff Lord is already the poor man's poor man's Sean Hannity.

"Antiquity was made up out of whole cloth" — also Garry Kasparov

The other day I got a live one saying that because Montreal bagels aren't like New York bagels they "aren't really bagels, now are they". This was followed by a paragraph complaining about people saying New Yorkers are arrogant and provincial.

I should have grown up over there

Is there a difference?

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out!

I remember running into one of those guys years ago. He identified as an "androphile", not a "homosexual" or "gay". He really fucking hated feminists.

He calls himself a "classical liberal" who believes in "reason and individualism" and has a long rant about Marxism and political correctness in the footnotes, so definitely a libertarian.

Recursive nerd singularity detected

Considering the popularity of the term "cuck" with the hard right, it's clear that a lot of racial hatred is bound up closely with suspicion and fear of women.

When it comes to human interaction, all facts are interpreted in an emotional context. It is impossible to make an objective evaluation of another person's behavior. Claims to favor "reason" over "empathy" when dealing with social situations are always a thinly veiled excuse to favor one's own self-interest above all.