Month: September 2022

Transgender safety equipment

The news about the Canadian transgender teacher teaching shop class with ridiculously large, fake breasts has already made the rounds in the news. Plenty of people have expressed outrage, or snickered at the over-the-top photos, or smacked their forehead in disgust.

What hasn’t been discussed is safety equipment. I’ve worked in plenty of industrial environments, from shipyards to metal shops, and have had my share of flying metal objects that cracked safety helmets, broke safety glasses, and in general tried to kill me in a variety of unique and interesting ways. If Tik-Tok is any indication of the trajectory of our society (and one shudders at THAT thought), we should be teaching teenagers how to properly use safety equipment.

And yet, this Canadian teacher is not doing any of that.

Let’s start with the skirt. Unless you are a secretary, nobody in a shop wears a skirt. Even most secretaries in shops wear a long maxi skirt, especially if they have to walk out of the office for any reason. If you’ve ever had a burning piece of metal touch your skin, or brushed up against something sharp, you’ll only do that once or twice before you become best friends with your jeans. Let’s be honest, you can wear some pretty sexy jeans if you want, all while still protecting your legs from being impaled by the splinters flying out from a nearby cutting saw.

The other reason skirts aren’t a good choice is because rotating machinery tends to grab loose items, and having your skirt violently ripped off your body by lathe is just not appealing. Jewelry, especially necklaces and earrings, are also at risk of being forcibly ripped from your body. Hair is the same way. This Canadian teacher should have her hair (wig?) up in a bun, or at least in a ponytail secured with a hat, and most certainly not in her face. Not only is it at risk of being ripped out of her head, but it impedes her ability to see what she is working on.

Speaking of seeing things, I see no gloves or safety glasses.

Seriously, WTF?

Gloves and glasses are an absolute necessity when running a saw. I can’t tell you the number of times my miter saw has kicked up a chunk of wood that smacked me in the hand or the face. It sucks when it happens, but at least I can STILL SEE OUT OF EACH EYEBALL in the end. If you open any user manual, the first section will tell you to wear gloves and eye protection. Heck, the company that provides insurance for the school should be calling and complaining that this teacher is placing them at significant risk for an insurance claim.

All this makes me view this as a dumb, attention-grabbing prank. If this teacher cared about her students and also happened to be transgender, she would be dressing appropriately for class, teaching her students how to properly run saws and other equipment. As a teacher, she should dress appropriately anyway, and if she had large breasts like that (and some women do), she should at least wear a bra.

Which brings up my final point, and that is if the transgender community wants to be taken seriously, they are going to have to divorce themselves from these attention-grabbing idiots. It’s not dissimilar from the Westboro Baptist Church, a very small community that doesn’t represent anything close to mainstream Christian theology. Plenty of transgender individuals want us to believe that they are normal members of society, and truth be told, plenty of them are. But just like the Westboro Baptist Church, people should call out bad behavior when they see it, and most transgender people should join them in saying “This behavior isn’t normal.” Just because a teacher is transgender doesn’t mean we should allow that person to run roughshod over basic safety protocol and dress codes. Until we see more pushback on these people, its going to be harder for most people to normalize transgender individuals in society.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked this article, you should purchase a book from the author for you or a friend, or drop a tip for DaTechGuy.

Renaming the MAURY, and how I predicted the future

Well, that didn’t take long. Remember this from way back in…June?

Any human being we’re going to name ships after is going to offend someone. Should we rename the USNS Maury, who despite contributing much to the study of weather and oceanography, fought in the Confederate Navy? Or the USNS Cesar Chavez, who advocated against immigration? Should we look deeper into the Kennedy family, which has plenty of skeletons in the closet and has two ships named after John and Robert Kennedy?

From “Renaming the Stennis is dumb“

Well, it happened

From USNI

And its officially happening, as part of a larger effort to rename…everything.

All told, according to commission member Lawrence Romo, the list topped out at 1,100 items, from posts and ships to monuments, building names and streets.

Among the monuments recommended for removal in part 3 of the report is a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

“The statue atop of the monument should be removed. All bronze elements on the monument should be deconstructed and removed, preferably leaving the granite base and foundation in place to minimize risk of inadvertent disturbance of graves,” according to a Wednesday release, leaving the Army in charge of disposal.

From The Air Force Times

As I predicted before, anything named after people is destined to become a hot issue. We discover things long after someone dies, and perhaps the person isn’t quite who we thought they were. Or that person was biased against skin color, sexual orientation, or who knows what, which makes them 100% unacceptable now. Now, we could use that as an opportunity to highlight that people are fallible and we’ll have to accept both the good and bad that comes with that. We could highlight how brilliant people can still succumb to everything from the Confederacy to Nazism, and use that to teach our future generations how to not fall into that trap. Or we can simply say those people are evil and scrub them from mention while looking for the next person to cancel.

Never mind that Matthew Maury contributed a lot to our understanding of oceanography. He’ll get scrubbed from existence. And don’t worry, its coming for Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Cesar Chavez, and many others. Want to bet Donald Trump is on that list? Or what about lesser known people like Kyle Rittenhouse, whose only “crime” was standing up to criminals?

At some point we’ll either learn to accept that historical figures will always have flaws when viewed from the present day, or we’ll risk repeating their mistakes in the future.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. You ought to buy the author’s book, or listen to it on Audible, to help support his writing efforts.

Why LGBT voters should be prolife

This is part of a short series on why many LGBT voters would be better served under conservative values then far leftist values.

LGBT voters are traditionally associated with voting on left-leaning policies and almost always for Democrat candidates, yet during the last election almost a third of LGBT-identified voters said on exit polling that they voted for Trump.

Despite President Trump’s anti-LGBTQ past, including opposing LGBTQ workplace protections, he was able to attain 28% of the LGBTQ vote improving on his 2016 showing, when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and only won 13% of the LGBTQ vote.

thepridela.com

The article, not surprisingly, is shocked that any LGBT individual would even contemplate voting for a Republican candidate, much less President Trump. Yet I think this site, like so many others, misses the fact that in most cases conservative positions on issues are far more advantageous for LGBT individuals then leftist ones. I actually think that Republican candidates can probably capture more like 40% of the LGBT vote, which would finally start to highlight that LGBT individuals are not in fact one large, homogenous group of people, but rather individual voters that each have very different needs.

(A quick note: For this series I’m leaving of the …QIA+-= alphabet soup of people, which includes the pansexuals, cats and other really odd identities. Honestly, I think these people are overrepresented because they are so strange as to capture immediate attention and have an outsized impact via social media.)

First, lets look at who is considered an LGBT voter. In the case of the exit poll, its whomever happens to tell the pollster they identify as somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. This is somewhere around 1-5% of voters nationwide, by conservative and liberal estimates. However, I actually think its a bit higher, for two reasons. First, lots of people don’t like talking to pollsters, so exit poll sampling is notoriously very skewed liberal. Second, the LGBT people that would openly agree to the label are likely people comfortably out to their families, employer and the world…which is not the majority. There are likely a lot of closeted LGBT voters that simply stay quiet about their homosexual or transsexual inclinations.

That said, the ones most likely to be closeted are also most likely to lean conservative, since conservative voters are less likely to discuss this and other issues with…well, anyone really. This sets up a Harry Truman-esque scenario where traditional polling and thinking concerning LGBT voters and what they care about can be very easily misunderstood.

That doesn’t answer the bigger question of why LGBT voters would benefit from conservative policies. Let’s start with abortion, and over the next few weekends we’ll look at the economy, foreign policy and the military, plus marriage and the nuclear family. I’m leaving out religious discussions on these issues because 1., I’m not a religious scholar and thus not qualified to discuss it, and 2., Religions, especially Christian ones, vary widely on LGBT issues.

LGBT voters should be pro-life for many reasons, the most important being that as technology, and especially genetic testing, becomes easier and cheaper, there will be more people inclined to abort babies that aren’t “perfect.” This has been predicted for years, even appearing in science fiction films like Gattaca, where babies are tested and sorted into “Valids” and “In-valids.” The “Valids” are genetically perfect and given access to the best jobs, while the “in-valids,” if they aren’t euthanized, compose the underclass of citizens.

But that’s science fiction, you might think. One only needs to look across the Atlantic to see Europeans wipe out Down Syndrome kids through testing (which is not perfect, so plenty of otherwise healthy kids are lost to abortion in the process). It’s not a far stretch to assume that as we develop more and more genetic markers for what we consider disorders, it’ll be easier to “justify” aborting more and more babies that don’t line up to our idea of perfect.

Which brings up the LGBT issue, because scientists have been quite happily searching for a genetic link to explain homosexual and transgender individuals. If they find that there is a gene, or set of genes, that would incline an individual to this behavior, could there be an increase in people saying “I don’t want to bring life to this world that would suffer as a transgender individual.”? If abortion is available on demand, I can see a large number of religious mothers making this justification.

Which begs the question: don’t LGBT individuals have a right to life? Don’t babies with these genetic markers deserve a chance in this world? Who is to say that their genetics will ultimately determine how they think on any particular issue? I would argue that they do. Just because someone is genetically inclined towards something doesn’t mean they will take those actions. More importantly, this walks us down the slippery slope of euthanizing people who’s only crime is existing, which never bodes well for any minority group.

LGBT voters are best served with prolife policies, which may one day keep them from being literally aborted out of existence.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

No Innuendo Needed

craiyon AI-generated image of Joe Biden, from craiyon.com

Holy crap, if you didn’t get Nazi vibes after watching President Biden’s speech last night, I have to wonder if we watched the same speech. Between the red backdrop, the hand gestures, the timing with the invasion of Poland, and the military personnel…all of it screamed Nazi Germany. The fact that its not photoshopped still baffles me. Innuendo is supposed to be subtle.

Seriously, who did it better?

Trump wasn’t immune to bad speeches, the worst being his speech early on at the Boy Scout Jamboree. But even this speech made me think “Sheesh, is Trump just that full of himself?”, not “Holy crap, we’re descending into an authoritarian government!” Plenty of people have commented online that Joe Biden just might be off his rocker. I thought it was worthwhile asking an AI what image was conjured with the words “Joe Biden,” and well, its probably not far off.

All the internet comments in the world won’t change the simple fact, as I pointed out during the Virginia elections, that unless you get out to vote, volunteer to help a candidate and donate money specifically to the candidates you like, nothing is going to change. Yet conservatives are far more likely to “go with the flow” and continue to not vote, not volunteer and not donate. Remember all the annoying Obama kids that incessantly knocked on doors? I do. I hated those people, but I bet that they helped tilt the election (that and running a crappy candidate in John McCain).

Joe Biden said all the quiet parts out loud on Thursday. There was no innuendo. It wasn’t subtle. It was in your face for all too see. He’s laid it out for you. So, what will you do about it?

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to DaTechGuy or buying one of the author’s books from Amazon.