There were some folks who didn’t like Bill Clinton getting his dick sucked in the White House, plus some folks who didn’t like what every other president did to the place
The difference of course, is everything that Obama did there was necessary and 100% democracy approved.
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So Graham Platner got his Nazi SS tattoo covered up and he is leading in the Democrat primary polls, which I don’t find shocking at all in 2025.
He calls Republicans and independents fascists, seemingly unaware that nearly every economic policy he supports would make us objectively more like Nazi Germany. All while he was allegedly unaware that he was rocking a Nazi tattoo his whole life.
He also ran firearms training for our local Socialist Rifle Association, proud members of Antifa.
Maine politics keeps getting weirder by the day. There’s no way to know if his new tattoo will be a final solution to his campaign problems, or if he can regain momentum on his blitzkrieg across Maine politics. He seems optimistic that there will be a triumph of the will, but it remains uncertain if that will be enough to overcome his struggle.
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Sure, and while I don’t personally care for some of the interior renovation choices, that’s fine.
There is however a difference between renovating something and altering the structures on a site. I don’t know how it is where you are, but it’s significant enough that new structures or changes to existing structures affect the property tax valuation and permitting.
Even then, I don’t have anything against changing the structures themselves, as long as its done within the appropriate existing framework for doing that, with procedures followed and sign-offs achieved. However, these processes were sidestepped and modified to push this through.
As far as the design, there is the “MAKING FEDERAL ARCHITECTURE BEAUTIFUL AGAIN” executive order. This sets forth a number of principles for federal building design, such as:
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“Washington and Jefferson personally oversaw the competitions to design the Capitol Building and the White House. Under the direction and following the vision of these two Founders, Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed the Nation’s capital as a classical city.”
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“The choice and development of the building site should be considered the first step of the design process. This choice should be made in cooperation with local agencies.” (emphasis mine)
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“They should also be visually identifiable as civic buildings and, as appropriate, respect regional architectural heritage.”
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“In the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings”
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““Classical architecture” means the architectural tradition derived from the forms, principles, and vocabulary of the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity, and as later developed and expanded upon by such Renaissance architects as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Palladio;” … etc.
From what I’ve seen, the proposed building does meet those criteria. The interior renderings are very reminiscent of Renaissance Italian architecture, especially that of Florence’s Pitti Palace and the Palazzo Medici Riccardi.
However, the site plans don’t. Even if you’re not familiar with Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s work, you can still look at an overhead plan and see the symmetry inherent in the White House and its surrounding buildings, parks, roadways, etc. The proposed plan breaks that symmetry.
There actually are places on the White House property that would make sense for a building of this size.
It could go on the south side, centered on the North South axis. This would block the view from the south. That’s not really a functional problem, but a lot of people (and photographers) like that view and would probably object to it.
Alternatively, it could go on the southwest or southeast, and be paired with another structure or garden on the opposite corner. Personally I’d consider a courtyard-style garden surrounded by a colonnade, mirroring the height and ground layout of the ballroom.
To recap: I don’t object to renovations, or a new structure. I object to the way it’s being done, both in terms of physical site layout, and process. It doesn’t even adhere to the principles and examples laid out in the executive order.
Edit: I also don’t think this is the best use of funds. Even private funds could go toward something more nationally productive.
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Architecture and design aren’t interests of mine, but I can understand why you may not like the changes. It will still be The White House when they’re done, and now it will have a ballroom.
If we’re pretending that it is hallowed ground of some kind, or it should be a symbol of national unity, all of the ideological extremist pride flags and topless trannies seemed a bit more concerning to me. Luckily, that particular ship seems to be losing the wind in its sails. Transgender identification is plummeting among young people, which is a very good thing for society.
All of the state-funded and state-mandated physical and psychological manipulation of children will eventually be remembered as one of humanities ghastliest medical experiments, right up there with Hunnic skull elongation and Nazi experimentation on people who did not or could not consent.
Rejecting transgenderism is one of the only things Nazis actually got right.
President Truman taking it down to the just the exterior walls. Kinda interesting, I assumed all that interior stuff was original.
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Why is transgenderism such a big issue for you?
I kind of mean that as a twofold question:
1. given all the issues out there, from food security, healthcare accessibility, crime, homelessness, job growth (in general, and for specific industries), etc., why is transgenderism such an important topic for you and others? Why does it even make the top 10?
- in what ways does it personally affect you beyond “I don’t want to look at or hear about you and your symbols”? Christianity chose to use an instrument of torture as their primary symbol, and honestly I’m not a huge fan of having crosses all over the place given what they are. I’m even less a fan of the typical Catholic incarnation of them, showing the torture itself. Yet, I tolerate it and don’t make a big deal of it.
As an adult sexual fetish, it couldn’t possibly bother me less. I trained for years with a transgender who could reliably whoop my ass on the mats before and after he started asking people to use “it” as his default pronoun, or “she/hers” whenever makeup and high heels were worn, which I never did. I can’t call people “it” and I don’t like saying “she” either, since it felt like a lie every time I did. I just used neutral language like “my friend” instead of playing the pronoun game.
My main objection is teaching it to children in public schools as scientific fact using public resources, including sucking up valuable education time that could be spent on learning how to discern true facts from false. It is actively detrimental to that cause, as it deliberately blurs the lines and molds minds into accepting subjective “my truth” as something objectively true. In Maine a child can be transitioned by public school staff without parental knowledge, which is incredibly unethical for a state to do. We’re talking about messing with kid’s bodies through hormones and surgery, along with messing with their minds. It is sick and I’m glad I grew up before the government was doing that to me and my peers. We all got to ride out our teenage angst by being goths, punk rockers, hippies, etc.
It also is a state-sanctioned religious cult who literally believes that we can somehow transcend our bodies to become legally-recognized members of the opposite sex. This idea is legally enshrined as a human right in Maine, and it is reflected in policies businesses are forced to adhere to. That’s why I could go sign up to planet fitness or the YMCA in town, decide right there that I’m a woman, and go get naked in the women’s locker room and leer at underage girls as they get changed. That’s the reality of the public policy in Maine.
It also seems to actively prey on already-troubled children, especially kids on the autism spectrum. There’s a massive industry behind it and even though much of it is ostensibly “nonprofit”, there is a LOT of money to be made from the transition business. Medical nonprofit CEO’s in Maine can earn upwards of a million dollars per year.
Mostly explained above, but my personal concerns are for my nieces and nephews and future members of the family. My kid is almost 25 and too straight for his own good, having plowed his way through half the town at this point. Still, I’m glad it wasn’t being taught when he was a student at LPS. I’d rather he have a well-earned reputation as a fuckboy and have to overcome that than be a lifetime medical patient. He’s cooled off on that a bit over the last couple of years, thankfully. I’m not sure I would’ve handled Tinder any better if it existed in my teens and early 20’s, especially in the midst of Covid lockdowns.
If I compare it to the most intrusive transgressions of Christianity into public policy, transgenderism is much, much more of a supremacist belief than Christianity. Putting the 10 commandments in a classroom or allowing children to opt out of evolution in biology pale in comparison to the state actively cultivating the idea that a child was born in the wrong body.
It also contributes to public school staffing shortages, as it is a very potent ideological purity test that any employee has to pass. Simply stated, you have to go along with the whole idea to keep your job in Maine public education, which rules out an awful lot of people who could be fantastic public school educators.
I think you made valid points why it’s an important issue for you. I didn’t follow how it bubbled up to the top in importance relative to other issues, though. It seems that it becomes a topic of discussion far more than others.
(But I get it too, the whole White House thing doesn’t really affect me either, even though I put a lot into that topic.)
I don’t really think we’re in opposition about many of the things you brought up. I don’t think men-masquerading-as-women should be leering at underage girls… but I also don’t think anyone should be leering at anyone underage. I don’t think valuable school resources should be spent teaching it as a universal truth, nor do I think “creationism” in any form from any tradition should be taught as a universal truth. I think the only truth in both cases is “some people believe this to be true”. I also don’t think anyone should be engaging in hormonal or surgical changes without the parents permission, and even then, I think it should be the child’s choice, and deferred toward adulthood when all the other dumb decisions are allowed to be made.
There’s massive industries around a lot of things that prey on people, and I’d argue that many of them affect far more people negatively than this does. This is a common thing, just a different thing to prey on. Credit card companies prey on gullible high school graduates all the time. Finance, medicine, education, construction, etc., there’s always going to be grifters who have good lawyers.
As far as the pronoun bit, you can’t control what other people do and think. You might want me to call you something, but the choice is yours. If they want X from you, and you don’t give them that, it’s up to them to decide whether they want to continue to engage. Same issues in every type of relationship; you either compromise or you don’t.
When it comes to a person born as a biological man who transitioned to be more like a woman, I think it’s pretty obvious they are not the same as a biological woman.
I used to be a lot more black and white, but I think a lot of things are more gray these days. I think there are spectrums in everything, and I think one of the more significant problems is that we create discrete categories in the first place.
If you create two categories, two buckets, “male” and “female”, and you say males have these traits, behave these ways, like these things, don’t like these other things… and you do the same for females… not everyone is going to cleanly fit in one of those two categories. Some men like pink and purple and sparkles and rainbows more than others. Some men like gossiping more than others. Some men care about using clothing, hair, makeup as a means of expression. Some men are attracted to men, and not women. Some men don’t like beer and heavy metal and motorcycles.
None of these things are fundamentally gendered, but socially those traits have traditionally fallen more into the bucket of “female” than “male”.
If you force someone to make a choice, and those are the only two choices, well, sometimes a born biological male is going to find themselves closer to the “female” bucket. But I don’t think a choice needs to be made in most cases. I don’t think people should be pressured into categories into the first place.
There’s very few situations that need a strong distinction between the two.
For example, most people can use most bathroom stalls. Some people physically can’t, and that’s why there’s ADA compliant stalls. Some people would rather use a urinal than a stall, and as a society, we often provide that. It’s a preference to use a urinal, but it’s a necessity to have a place to relieve oneself. If anything, males are the ones who get special treatment here.
Different people have different needs; different people have different preferences. I don’t think it’s wrong to provide options to meet the needs and preferences across a whole range of people. From a policy standpoint, I think it’s more important to focus on needs than preferences, but in an ideal world, I see no reason why both can’t be addressed, even if not every group feels adequately represented.
(To add to this a bit, I think it’s appropriate to address things in order of prevalence. E.g., urinals should be added before lactation rooms or baby changing stations, not because men are more important than women, but because there’s a quantitatively larger group of people who can and will use them at any given point in time.)
When it comes to male and female, about the only place I think this distinction matters is when it comes to dating for the purpose of reproduction.
There are many species where actual traits and preferences have a very wide spectrum regardless of biological sex. For what it’s worth, humans may actually be one of the weird ones where the males put less emphasis on appearance.
But, I also I don’t think we should waste money teaching that gender or sexuality is a spectrum. I just don’t think these are important topics to begin with. Biological reproduction can be covered, as part of teaching biology. How to protect from venereal diseases and pregnancy are debatable, but I personally think those are worth teaching given that lack of knowledge can cause long-term negative outcomes. Whether you chose to implement what you learn, that’s a personal and/or parental choice.
That said, I also think things like basic financial literacy are more important than any of them.
That is exactly the reason
Phil 2: 8 “And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
“…EVEN the (torturous) death of the cross.”
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I don’t really rank issues in importance anymore, given the ideological sorting that has taken place in the last 10 or so years. Transgenderism is just one component of the slow and soft socialist revolution we’ve all experienced together, and it plays a VERY important role in tearing down the old ideas both directly and indirectly.
Past versions of socialism might have focused on dividing people up into class (classical Marxism, for instance) or race (National Socialism) or a combination of both (National Socialism did both, but it was race first, then class). Many African conceptions of Socialism are EXTREMELY racist as well as classist, such as what we see in South Africa where they are literally saying Hitler stuff like “kill the Boer, kill the Farmer”, which also sounds a lot like Soviet Communist de-Kulakization.
Democratic Socialism sorts people into two groups, Marginalized People (the in-group) and everyone else (the out-group from whom wealth is extracted). Transgenderism is the only way a straight white guy like me can become marginalized, and transgenders are generally at the top of the victimhood hierarchy in today’s conception of socialism. It is a fiendishly clever way to expand the ideology, along with getting people surgically invested in the new identity.
We have had transgenderism for a long time and it was always more or less tolerated in the USA. Nobody passed any laws in the 1980’s saying Poison couldn’t dress like futuristic people who go to the library to read books to children, or that Dennis Rodman couldn’t wear a dress while dating Madonna.
Transgenderism is just another instrument of social division in the big picture, best explained by Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost on X. He is doing the best job I’ve come across explaining the ideological origins of the woke left in academic terms. He’s very interesting to follow if you’re interested in the philosophy of woke.
We’re not arguing over policies in the USA anymore. We’re making a choice between socialist revolution that is incompatible with Western liberalism and all of the ideas we took for granted as agreed-upon during most of the 20th century like equal protection under the law, freedom of speech, and the concept of US Citizenship as the basis for voting rights.
Here’s all of those ideas explained in a meme.
It’s not even about the people that are actually trans. They somewhat have my sympathy. All .03% of them, or what ever their actual occurrence is.
Its about the political opportunists that coopted their situation and made it a lever to wrench their agendas through while an ever increasing number of useful idiots became more and more violent, all under the false premise that they are being oppressed.
It has way less to do with actual transgenders and much more to do with radicalizing a population for political gain.
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For a local explanation of The Socialist Revolution I harp on about in-action, consider the following facts:
This week the Lewiston City Council passed a “needle exchange” ordinance that shot down a 1:1 and even a 1:30 requirement, going with a 100:1 exchange rate, meaning any individual can be given up to 100 needles at a time.
We learned through FOAA that absolutely NO Lewiston residents submitted public comments in support of this idea in at least 3 wards while MANY of us submitted public comment against the idea altogether or in support of a 1:1 exchange. All of the public comment submitted in support of the council’s adopted ordinance were from non-residents, typically NGO workers in the harm reduction industry. The studies used to support this were all very old and examined heroin users, not fentanyl users. A recent study in Vancouver, BC that doesn’t support the idea of unlimited “harm reduction” concepts was not considered, but the old studies using heroin were.
This is a common pattern among local government in Lewiston, where they continuously vote in favor of rather radical policies straight from the Democratic Socialists of America’s policy platform such as “harm reduction”, “decarceration”, transgenderism, race-based consciousness in public education, social and emotional learning, and of course spending ENORMOUS amounts of money on importing new voters, which is absolutely a cornerstone to their continued power.
They can do this because they have successfully subverted our system of elections and literally do not need to respond to the citizens they ostensibly represent, because they can reliably drum up enough “votes” in many jurisdictions across the state because we have absolutely no mechanisms that validate eligibility to participate in our elections. Literally anyone can make up a fake name, a fake last 4 digits of a fake SSN, say you live at the homeless shelter or any number of other locations, depending on which ward you want to vote in, do it all through a translator, and then go vote a couple of minutes later and have that vote counted hours later.
All while Democrats lie and say that question 1 will “erase” absentee voting in Maine, which isn’t true at all. It will still exist in a perfectly reasonable form, you just won’t be able to cheat with reckless abandon anymore.
“Harm reduction” and increased crime and squalor 100 percent benefit Democrats by driving opposition out of the jurisdiction, which opens up housing for organized NGO’s to shuttle more migrants, more needy people from out-of-state who are only in Maine to collect benefits, and other likely Democrat voters. We’ve watched it play out in rather dramatic ways here in Lewiston, especially over the last five years.
I’m not arguing the reason for that choice.
What I was getting at was the idea that a vocal group of people think flying an LGBTetc. flag isn’t acceptable, yet displaying the cross is.
Now, I don’t think it’s obvious without prior knowledge to identify a cross as a torture device. But as a thought exercise, is really appropriate for a child to learn “this is how they used to torture people, and people proudly display it for all to see”?
I’m not pushing back against the public display of the cross. I’m only trying to point out the relative [in]offensiveness of the cross as compared to a rainbow flag.
There are far more offensive symbols. I think if they were adopted by an organization and displayed publicly, it’s fair they would get pushback.
I agree all of these are problems, regardless of who does it.
Divide and conquer and all that.
There’s a lot of “the other people are trying to make X happen”, just to appeal to some base, when the other side is like “what are you even talking about? why did you pick up on that minor thing and not the things we’re actually trying to do?”
I mean, I’m not going to force your kids to be transgender any more than I expect you to kidnap and deport my kids because they’re not 100% white. Yet those are the talking points.
It’s not the rainbows that are offensive, it’s the ideas that are offensive, along with the subversion of parental rights to implant them in children. It is literally creepy adults telling very young children about adult sexual fetishes to confuse them about their own identities, then telling them to keep it a secret from their parents by giving them the idea that their parents are out to harm them. It’s just straight-up cult stuff, and not at all similar to anything taught in mainstream Christianity of any sect.
If The Catholic Church can be infiltrated by sexual predators, and it was, so can public schools. In Maine at least, the sexual abuse is formally institutionalized by legislation that recognizes the cult of transgenderism as the true belief system of the state, and it is considered “harmful” to question the entire ideology.
It’s just one of those topics that don’t belong in public education at all, especially at the elementary age level. If it wasn’t incorporated into public policy, it wouldn’t be such a hot button issue, even if Hollywood still wanted to sell people transgenderism in film and other arts, which people are free to not consume.
In Maine it has also coincided with our actual education outcomes completely plummeting by any objective metric, even as spending has doubled and we began with best-in-the-nation public schools just 20 short years ago.
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But that’s kind of my point. You’re attributing a portion of the thing to the symbol.
Many Christians abhor the things done in the name of Christianity in the past, but that’s not the only thing the cross represents. Wearing a cross doesn’t mean you’re part of the Inquisition any more than flying a rainbow flag means you support “the subversion of parental rights […] confuse them about their own identities, then telling them to keep it a secret from their parents by giving them the idea that their parents are out to harm them.”.
Unless you think it actually does. I don’t see how it does, but maybe I’m missing something.
I do agree with this, if that wasn’t clear in the wall of text above.
The Inquisition was minor and limited in scope compared to transgenderism, and it isn’t really a valid comparison. It happened a long time ago in a different society without all of the advantages we possess today to help us understand the world around us.
I would no sooner march in a Pride parade than I would a Nazi parade. Not because I particularly dislike both flags, but because of all the rotten ideas the flags represent.
Christianity isn’t perfect, but its instructions for how to live life have produced the best societies in the world that we’re all still choosing to live in, along with the most secular conception of government the world has ever seen that tolerates non-Christians.
I’d probably argue that Confucianism did that to an even larger extent. A different topic though.
The way you’re talking about the various Pride flags makes me think of the various Norse symbols that got co-opted by white nationalism. I’ve never had the understanding that the flag represented what you’re saying, but perhaps it has been co-opted for that purpose to such an extent that it should be considered equally offensive.
I just haven’t seen it myself. I haven’t seen anyone push those ideas on me, my family, my friends, or have the kind of impact you describe in any community I’ve been a part of.
But I mean, yeah, of course I don’t support exposing children to adult sexual fetishes. Nor do I support sexual predators, in any form.