Quotulatiousness

March 7, 2026

The massive blind spot in gender studies programs

Filed under: Education, Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, stepfanie tyler recounts her own experience in university with gender studies:

Some feminists romanticize mandatory hair coverings, social exclusion and lack of rights for women in Islamic countries. Because reasons.

When I was in “Women’s and Gender Studies” in college, we spent a lot of time talking about “systems”, “the patriarchy” and all these hidden structures supposedly shaping women’s lives in the West

I entertained a lot of those ideas back then and I was trying my best to understand the frameworks they were teaching

But the one place I never gave them an inch on was women in the Middle East

Every time someone would say “that’s just their culture” something in me short-circuited. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t reconcile it

We were told American women were oppressed because of wage gaps or subtle social expectations, but when the conversation turned to women who could be punished by the state for showing their hair, suddenly we were supposed to become culturally sensitive (some of these lunatics even romanticized it!)

My professors used to get irritated with me when that topic came up bc they knew I wasn’t going to play along and my pushback would cause a rift in their narrative

They didn’t like it when I pointed out the hypocrisy of calling Western women oppressed while treating literal legal restrictions on women’s bodies as a cultural difference

One of my professors even had a running joke she’d use to preface discussions on Islam—she’d do this smug smirk and say something to the effect of “we all know Stepfanie’s take on Islam” as if I was the ridiculous one

Looking back, I wish I had the language and wit to verbally obliterate her but I was 22 and simply did not have the intellectual capacity yet. I didn’t know the first thing about geopolitics, I just knew in my bones how fucking stupid it sounded to be bitching about making 20 cents less than men when women in the Middle East were being stoned to death for showing their hair

Even back then, before my politics changed, that contradiction never sat right with me. And it’s one of the many reasons I despise so-called feminists so much today

February 22, 2026

“[T]he trans cult … attracted many mentally ill people [offering] instant visibility, attention, and status”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the visible-to-cheapskates portion of his Weekly Dish post, Andrew Sullivan tries to point out how the Democrats can salvage something from their decade-long, all-in approach to all things trans (warning, contains Andrew Sullivan):

I had dinner this week with a young gay man who was castrated and had his endocrine system permanently wrecked as a result of “gender-affirming care” for minors. He was super girly as a kid and had an undiagnosed testosterone deficiency which delayed his male development. He liked playing with girls, seemed to act like one, and when he socially transitioned as a teen, he passed easily. Suddenly all the sneers of “faggot” he’d endured as a boy went away. In today’s “gender-affirming care” environment, that was enough.

“Compassion” and “science” took a gay boy, flooded his young male body with estrogen, and removed his genitals — because the docs and the shrinks determined he was too effeminate to be a “real man”. Only when he personally figured this out as an adult and got himself off estrogen and onto testosterone did everything change. He felt energy and mental clarity for the first time. And his life as a man could finally begin — although his body will never be fully repaired.

Readers keep telling me to shut up about this topic (I can hear your groans now). I’m obsessed, you say, and this is a trivial (boring) matter. I’ve lost some good friends who feel very much that way, and my social life has shrunk. But then I meet someone like Mike (a pseudonym) — and I’ve met many others, gay and lesbian — and realize not a single gay group or resource is on his side. In fact, the “LGBTQIA+” lobby all but denies he exists, or dismisses him as transphobic — a dreaded “detransitioner”.

I was thinking about Mike as I read the latest polling — out this week in a liberal online mag, The Argument. The poll shows what we well know: 63 percent of Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination. This isn’t a transphobic country. But, equally, 62 percent oppose transing minors (50 percent strongly), 60 percent support banning transwomen competing against women in sports, and 53 percent want to ban gender ideology in elementary schools. These numbers have gone up the more the debate has raged. The backlash is so intense it has even reversed the public’s previous opposition to bathroom bills.

Now check out the liberal response. Bluesky erupted in fury that the poll was published at all. “Please help us,” one X member tweeted with direct appeals to Tim Cook and McKenzie Scott, who have bankrolled this campaign. Jill Filipovic complained that the “Dems … should have focused on things like ending discrimination in housing and employment”, rather than sports and kids, unaware that the Bostock decision already did that with employment. Most liberals have literally no idea that trans people already have civil rights. Off-message.

In this air-tight ideological bubble, where Bostock is unknown, the Dems flounder. “This isn’t happening” was the first gambit. Good try. Then: “this has all been ginned up by the far right, and Dems did nothing”. Did they miss the Obama and Biden Title IX diktats, Admiral Levine’s removal of lower age limits for transing kids, Biden’s “nonbinary” official Sam Brinton stealing dresses, or other embarrassments like the White House invite to Dylan Mulvaney? Then they say it’s a tiny issue. But it helped Trump massively in 2024. And if it’s tiny, why not compromise? After that, it’s just MLK-envy all the way down, the desire to be the next Rosa Parks. But it’s odd to campaign for “civil rights” when you already have them.

After trying to debate, you come to realize it’s pointless. The woke mind is not really a mind; it’s more like a bunch of synapses. Presented with an actual argument, they snap shut. This is part of what Eric Kaufmann calls the “sacralization” of minorities. For the woke, the “oppressed” are sacred. And in the social justice hierarchy, no minority is as oppressed and thereby as sacred as trans.

And so what sacred trans people say they want — or rather, what a tiny group of trans activists say they want — is all that matters. Anything else is illegitimate or “hate”. And any opponent is a bigot. Try arguing your way out of that dogmatic thicket. It’s like trying to disprove the Holy Trinity. I’ve given up.

But the real world keeps intervening. We just saw a ground-breaking lawsuit that won a $2 million judgment for a double mastectomy at 15. And this month saw two awful mass shootings by mentally unwell men caught up in the trans craze. Between Tumbler Ridge, Canada, and a Rhode Island hockey match, 12 people are now dead, including 6 children. And this is no longer a shock. Ask yourself what the 2023 Nashville Covenant School shooting, the 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, and even the 2024 attempted assassination of Trump, have in common.

Yes, it’s categorically wrong to link trans people to mass killings. That’s false and dangerous. But you’d be dumb not to worry that the trans cult of the last decade may have attracted many mentally ill people into a space where they have instant visibility, attention, and status. We have set up an open-ended subjective category — anyone who says they’re trans is trans, period — almost designed to attract delusional narcissists, and, with every safeguard thrown away, there’s no way to distinguish the nutters from the genuinely in need.

February 6, 2026

The unspoken rule: “Men must regulate themselves; women must be accommodated”

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It was getting a bit quiet around here, so to liven things up here’s Tom Golden exploring the idea of holding women accountable in the way that men almost always are:

What Would Happen If Women Were Held Accountable?

It’s a provocative question, and one we’re usually not allowed to ask without being accused of hostility or resentment.

But it’s worth asking — not to attack women, and not to excuse men — but because accountability is not evenly distributed, and that imbalance quietly shapes modern culture, relationships, and institutions.

If women were suddenly held accountable in the same way men are, the world wouldn’t become harsher. In many ways, it would become more honest.

The Moral Language Would Change

Much of our moral language today is asymmetrical. Men are expected to explain themselves. Women are often allowed to feel their way out of responsibility.

Emotions matter — but in our current culture, women’s feelings frequently function as moral trump cards. “I felt unsafe.” “I was hurt.” “I was overwhelmed.” These statements don’t just describe an experience; they often end the discussion.

Equal accountability wouldn’t invalidate emotions. It would simply mean that feelings no longer substitute for responsibility. That shift alone would raise the level of adult discourse.

Relationships Would Become More Stable — and Initially More Difficult

Many modern relationships operate on an unspoken rule:

    Men must regulate themselves; women must be accommodated.

Men are expected to stay calm, absorb escalation, de-escalate conflict, and tolerate shaming — all in the name of maturity. Women, meanwhile, are often excused from examining how they escalate, provoke, withdraw, or punish.

If women were held accountable for:

  • Escalation
  • Shaming
  • Relational Aggression
  • Double standards
  • Weaponized vulnerability
  • Using social or institutional power to avoid conflict

Relationships would feel more confrontational at first.

But over time, they would become more grounded and more real.

Intimacy requires mutual responsibility. Right now, many men experience intimacy as liability without authority.

December 31, 2025

Do you want tribalism? Because this is how you get tribalism

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort asks the key questions about where our “elites” are taking us:

What’s the point? No, tell me, what’s the point?

What’s the point of laws if judges reinterpret them until they protect everyone except the people who obey them?

What’s the point of defending a nation if the same system refuses to defend your family from criminals it imported on purpose?

What’s the point of paying taxes if they fund fraud, reward deception, and subsidize parallel systems that never owed this place loyalty?

What’s the point of working, building, serving, if your labor is redistributed to those who broke the rules to get here?

What’s the point of accountability if paperwork matters more than reality, and intent matters less than optics?

I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that any human with a brain is going to retreat to whatever group rewards his values and sacrifice. If it isn’t the nation, it becomes the tribe. And when it becomes the tribe, this American experiment is over.

A warrior can endure hardship, loss, and some long odds. What he cannot endure is betrayal by design.

When a nation stops enforcing its boundaries, its laws, and its obligations to its own people, it doesn’t just lose control, IT BURNS THE VERY WILL REQUIRED TO DEFEND IT.

I want something to defend that I believe in. We all do. I take the oath deadly serious. But one begins to wonder after awhile if that makes for a patriot or a sucker.

If a Soldier can follow it and die in defense of his country, but on the other side of the coin, there is a politician who can spit on it and get rich while importing and funding pirates … it really makes one wonder: What’s it all for?

@POTUS we know what problems you face. It’s not lost on us. But we are running out of time sir.

One of the things that makes these kinds of scam viable in western culture is that we are high-trust cultures with default assumptions that most people are not trying to exploit kindness and charity. This breaks down quickly once you introduce enough people from low-trust and tribal cultures:

The fraudulent spending of taxpayer dollars we are seeing uncovered nationally all rotates around the essential goodness of the American people.

Daycare for children? Of course — we don’t want our children or parents to suffer because Mom has to work.

Foodbanks? We don’t want anyone to starve. Our nation is better than that.

Homeless shelters? Homelessness is a scourge upon the American dream. We’re better than that.

Home elder care? The generations before us deserve dignity and respect. How could anyone oppose that?

Deep down we are a charitable and giving nation unlike most others. That sense of goodness and charity has been hijacked and exploited by foreign predators for their own material gain.

We need to wise up and toughen up, and understand that not every siren song of charity is on the level, particularly when our tax dollars are involved.

(Also, this reality gives an added layer of meaning to the concept of “suicidal empathy”.)

Ian at The Bugscuffle Gazette explains that importing the third world means that you need to expect your culture will start becoming more like the third world:

It says something1 about he state of Legacy Media when a 20-something kid with an iPhone can do a better imitation of 60 Minutes than 60 Minutes can.

No, Gentle Readers, I am not — in any way — surprised that Somalian immigrants in Minnesota are happily committing fraud — remember, do, that I grew up in Africa.

One of the things that endear Americans — and Western Europeans in general — to me is the sheer naiveté displayed by same. The ability of the average American to remain convinced that the entire World is just like them is rather cute.2

Folks, fraud and bribery is the norm in the Third World. In tribal cultures fraud and bribery are not only the norm, but are the rule.

If the average American reader takes nothing else from this essay, please understand that fraud and bribery are not crimes in the Third World; that fraud and bribery are not only not crimes in tribal society, but they are expected, required, and a perfectly acceptable part of every day tribal life.

And Somalia is not only Third World, but it is excessively tribal.

So, I’m not really mad at the Somalis. You can’t get mad at a gopher for digging up your yard. Gophers got to dig, and tribal cultures got to tribal.

That by no means signals that I don’t think the fraudsters should be excused. Hell, no. Public trials, and if found guilty — maximum sentences. Those lacking in U.S. citizenship, once the full prison sentence is completed, loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy and bodily pitched off of the ramp onto a random Somalian airport tarmac.3

What has stoked my ire is the fact that the Somalis used one of the most heavily-regulated industries to commit their fraud — that should have everyone up in arms.

Childcare is the responsibility of at least one Minnesota State agency — probably more — and will have mandated State-level inspections and audits.

Let me re-state that: Minnesota government employees would be legally-required and paid to walk their happy little arses into those businesses and use their Mk1 Mod 0 Eyeballs to look around at least once a year. If you were an inspector for whichever Minnesota agency(ies) regulates child care facilities, and you never filed a “Hey, something ain’t right” report, it’s time for a Come-To-Jesus Meeting in a brightly-lit room with humour-impaired law enforcement types.

If nothing else, the fact that one of these allegedly fraudulent pre-schools not only mis-spelled “Learning” as “Learing”, but mis-spelled the name of the street in the publicly-posted address should have been a red flag to someone.4

This sheer dollar amount of fraud, over this amount of time, and using this many separate corporate entities means that multiple people in the Minnesota State government knew something stunk to high heaven.

Minnesota government employees who knew of this fraud need to do the maximum allowed felony time.

  1. Not, you know, anything good.
  2. The ability of the average American leader — who is supposed to know better — to do the same is aggravating and dangerous.
  3. Bringing the aeroplane to a full stop during this process not absolutely required.
  4. Us cynical retired law enforcement types call this a “clue”.

December 23, 2025

How Black WWII Veterans Ignited the Civil Rights Movement – W2W 058

Filed under: Education, Government, History, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 22 Dec 2025

Decades before the words Black Lives Matter existed, Black American veterans were already fighting the same battle at home. After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers returned from the frontlines of Europe and Asia believing they had earned the rights they had defended abroad. Instead, they were met with segregation, voter suppression, police violence, and terror under Jim Crow laws.

This episode explores how Black WWII veterans became a driving force behind the early Civil Rights Movement — joining the NAACP, challenging segregation in court, organizing protests, and refusing to accept second-class citizenship in the nation they had fought to protect.

From the brutal blinding of veteran Isaac Woodard Jr., to landmark legal battles led by Thurgood Marshall, from the Journey of Reconciliation to Brown v. Board of Education, this is the story of how the fight for freedom moved from foreign battlefields to American streets, courtrooms, buses, and classrooms.

We follow the rise of mass nonviolent resistance through figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the creation of the SCLC — while also confronting the violent backlash, political resistance, and human cost that defined the struggle.

This is not just the history of civil rights legislation. It is the story of veterans who refused to stop fighting — and a reminder that equality in the United States has never been automatic, inevitable, or finished.
(more…)

November 8, 2025

All cultures are not equal, especially when it comes to crimes like rape

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Sydney Watson responds to a post on feminists blaming all men for the actions of some men from other cultures:

    Jessica Pin @jess_ann_pin

    It bothers me so much when some feminists act like men are just as misogynist and violent everywhere.

    That’s not true. Men from some cultures are absolutely worse than others.

    I’m not saying there is a genetic difference. But there are definitely cultural differences, and we need to be careful about who we let in.

    [Full sized images in the linked post]

I don’t know how to explain this succinctly —

But, ages ago I watched this series about prisons around the world. There were a few episodes that focused on prisons in African countries – how the prisons ran, what people were charged with etc.

What stood out to me was that over 50% of the male prisoners were there for some sort of sex crime – rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse etc.

What was even worse was that, when asked about why they committed these crimes, a lot of the men said things about how they were “teaching the woman a lesson” or raping her was some sort of “punishment.”

And I couldn’t help but think, “well, that checks out. Given how these men from these places come to Western countries and rape women.”

People might not like hearing that, and the less evolved among us chalk it up to “racism” (lol) but if someone comes from a culture that views rape as a form of punishment for unruly women, then why would that viewpoint suddenly change when their feet hit British/Swedish/Canadian soil?

If, culturally, you view women as barely people, why on earth would you suddenly start because you’re in a new place?

Point being – it’s utterly mad to put women and girls at risk because people don’t want to admit that some cultures are horrible. I’m tried of pretending that all cultures are equal when they’re so obviously not.

Update, 10 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 3, 2025

Women and credit card access … another “just so” story

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo debunks a common “just so” story about women only gaining the right to hold a credit card in the 1970s:

A few years ago, I started hearing that women, before feminism, couldn’t have their own credit cards. Or they couldn’t get one without a man’s signature. Or married women couldn’t have one in their own name. Divorced women, apparently, couldn’t get credit at all. Men conspired to keep women powerless and dependent.

THANK THE GODDESS FOR FEMINISM!

Just last June, on the podcast Diary of a CEO (in an episode viewed by nearly two million people), three feminists debating feminism agreed that, in the words of one of the panelists, “None of us could get a credit card a few decades ago … We couldn’t have anything …” (see 1:50:37).

Before correcting herself, in fact, the panelist had started to say, “None of us could get a credit card a couple of decades ago …”

The statement struck me with the full force of the ludicrous. I started school in 1970. My teachers were nearly all women, at least half of them unmarried. They certainly seemed to live full, normal lives in obeisance to no man. They were paid a salary; they had bank accounts; they owned cars; they bought things and went on vacations.

My mother had worked in an insurance office for years both before and after she married my father in 1956. She had purchased appliances and paid her own rent, helped my father buy his first commercial fishing boat, and handled all the household expenses when my dad was away fishing for months every summer.

My friends’ mothers were similarly active and self-determining. Were all these women actually hobbled by the patriarchy, cut off from the economy?

Received knowledge would have us believe so. Last year, The Globe and Mail published a paid advertisement for Women’s History Month titled “50 Years Ago: Women Got the Right to Have Credit Cards”. Written by a financial services company seeking to drum up business, the article repeated the popular story that women in North America could not get their own credit cards until 1974.

Credit cards were one of the growth areas for banks and other financial service companies in the 1960s and 70s … from something only relatively wealthy travellers and business executives used, they expanded to become widely used by ordinary consumers for all kinds of purchases. Consumers benefitted from access to useful financial tools, while banks enjoyed the profits from the widespread use of credit cards. So where did the idea that they were male-only come from?

The reality is that from the 1950s on, credit cards were a new invention being aggressively marketed to both men and women. Advertising from the era shows how keen credit card companies were to target female customers, how eager to tap into women’s spending power.

Originally introduced as a convenience for travelers on business, credit cards began to expand their purview in the late 1950s. Bank Americard (later Visa) became the first consumer credit card in 1958. A network of banks formed the Interbank Card Association, originally named Master Charge (later Mastercard), in 1966.

Yet we are somehow to believe that half the population was deliberately excluded from this new consumer venture for no other reason than that they were female?

“It wasn’t until 1974 that women were allowed to open a credit card under their own name,” the Globe article states emphatically. “Before 1974, if women wanted to open a credit card, they would be asked a bunch of intrusive questions, like if they were married or whether they planned to have children. If a woman was married, she could (hopefully) get a credit card with her husband. But single, divorced, or widowed women weren’t allowed to get a credit card of their own — they had to have a man cosign for the credit application.”

The explanation is dramatic and incoherent, undoing its own logic from the beginning. It backtracks to allege that women were in fact “allowed” to have a credit card so long as they answered “a bunch of intrusive questions” or found a co-signer. Even this lesser claim is false, but it is rather different from the prior assertion about women “not having the right” to a card.

At a time when many married women either did not work outside the home or worked only part-time and on a temporary basis, there would have been nothing unreasonable about a woman’s husband co-signing her credit card application. Many married women were happy to purchase what they wanted on the assurance that their husbands would pay the bill when it came in, and credit card issuers saw joint accounts as a way of ensuring payment.

Update, 4 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 2, 2025

Too much empathy can be more dangerous than too little

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spaceman Spiff explains why boundaries matter, in so many different areas of modern life:

Empathy is a virtue many strive to demonstrate. But few will discuss its downsides. Why it is not universally good or useful. How it can be misdirected.

In some situations it is lethal. It can reflect a suicidal urge we now see in Western nations.

Much empathy in society is in fact sentimentality, which is dangerous. Sentimental ideas about mixing cultures, elevating poor performers through quotas, or tinkering with traditional gender roles have real world effects.

With such an emphasis on empathy, which many think of as niceness, we overlook the need for boundaries to maintain a functioning society.

This is the issue at the heart of much that is damaging us today.

Individual rights

We live in an era that champions individual rights to an almost autistic degree. This is a product of Western liberalism, which now seems to be entering its terminal phase as its effects ultimately destroy what made Western societies strong.

Since an individual’s rights trump everything we cannot easily enforce boundaries our ancestors could take for granted. Try challenging a gay pride parade or transgender material in schools on the grounds of public decency and the least you can expect is to lose your job.

Profound changes have happened just in the last few decades and all in the name of individual rights. The erosion of boundaries on behaviour is one of the most visible aspects of this.

Physical boundaries

The concept of boundaries is almost universal and spans everything from the mundane to the spiritual.

Most countries recognize the right to private property and inherent within this is the notion of boundaries. My car is mine and no one else’s, for example.

This is applied to our homes and gardens. These are ours and defendable from theft. Ultimately this in turn includes a neighbourhood or locale, even a region or state. All these things have visible boundaries that demarcate where they begin and end.

Most famously this applies to national borders, a traditional form of boundary in use for thousands of years. Failing to enforce this barrier is national suicide. The world is not like us and if it comes to us we will look like the world in return. Borders keep the barbarians out.

Everyone instinctively grasps these kinds of boundaries. We close our windows and have locks on our doors because of this understanding.

Using boundaries to exclude others feels natural.

Cultural boundaries

Less explicitly visible are cultural boundaries, often transmitted via tradition and convention. We have spent the last century attacking many of these as old fashioned, with little pause to consider why tradition emerges in the first place.

Marriage between men and women. Complementary gender roles. Sexual mores kept private. The sanctity of childhood, its innocence protected from intrusion.

As we removed constraints in the name of progress we destroyed much of the glue that held our societies together. We are now watching things unravel as people marry less and produce fewer children. We see widespread mental illness and anguish as the few basic certainties of life are destroyed in the name of progress.

People don’t know who or what they are when cultural boundaries are deleted. Women, men, natives, newcomers, the working class. Who are we really without some certainties in life?

June 12, 2025

There definitely used to be a gender pay gap

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m sure activists will keep slinging around the “women are paid 82 cents for every dollar men are paid” factoid, because it’s politically useful (if statistically untrue in the way most people interpret it). But it used to be true that women were systematically paid less for doing the same work as men:

Dame Stephanie Shirley, entrepreneur, IT pioneer, philanthropist, at her 80th birthday party in September 2013.
Photo by Lynn Hart via Wikimedia Commons.

At which point enter Dame Stevie:

    Dame Stephanie Shirley, 91, is a tech pioneer and philanthropist who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. She built a £3 billion business, Freelance Programmers (later renamed F International), and 70 of her staff became millionaires due to its shared ownership structure. Since retiring in 1993 she has donated more than £70 million to charity. She was made a dame in 2000 and became one of the prestigious few members of the Order of Companions of Honour in 2017.

Back when she was building F1 the sexism in industry was such that she called herself Stevie, not Stephanie. You know, deniably pretending to be male sorta thing. Also, given that background, something of a tough nut and certainly nobody’s fool. F1, among other things, did the programming on the Black Box for Concorde. Proper, serious, company.

The sexism in industry was such that there really was a gender pay gap. A general assumption — to the point of rigid rule — was that wimmins didn’t work after marriage and certainly not when they had children. So, Stevie went out and hired all those birds who had been programmers before parturition, set ’em up with a home terminal and paid ’em peanuts. Then went around winning vast contracts with her price advantage.

This worked. To the extent that Stevie is on record as saying the Equal Pay Act was the worst thing ever for her business (note, not societally wrong, but bad for her business).

Which actually gives us a nice test of something that bastard neoliberals like me insist upon. Or as Gary Becker pointed out. If it is true that wimmins is underpaid in our capitalist bastardry patriarchal society then it must also be true that it’s possible to deliberately and specifically hire women and so gain a price advantage.

Dame Stevie did this and did so very successfully. Which is a nice proof that the first part of the contention works. If women are underpaid then hire them and make a fortune. Cool!

The apparent fact that nobody else has done this is a strong indicator that there isn’t a significant gender wage gap these days.

April 13, 2025

Gender is a social construct … or isn’t a social construct [confused screaming]

Filed under: Media, Politics, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that some female athletes choose not to compete against transgendered athletes? Yes. No. Answer unclear, ask again later:

Feminist and gender ideologies have always appealed to women (and continue to appeal) with the promise that women are strong and should be applauded for competing with and winning against men. Any woman who does so is almost automatically granted elevated status in our culture, praised for her guts, stamina, and even “balls”. Women who “break [gender] barriers” enter a special pantheon of heroines. Cartoons and action-movies are filled with super-athletic females who successfully battle all manner of male antagonists.

Feminists were, for a long time, extremely enthusiastic about this view of things. It was radical feminist Kate Millett, author of feminism’s bible Sexual Politics (1970), who praised sexologist John Money for experiments allegedly showing that gender had little or nothing to do with biological sex. She declared approvingly that “In the absence of complete evidence, I agree in general with Money and the Hampsons who show in their large series of intersexed patients that gender role is determined by postnatal forces, regardless of the anatomy and physiology of the external genitalia” (p. 30).

Many other feminists similarly emphasized gender’s social character and declared transgenderism a form of sexual liberation for women, with feminist writer Jacqueline Rose pronouncing in an essay for The New Statesman that “The gender binary is false” and that “Challenging the binary by transitioning becomes one of the most imaginative leaps in modern society”.

Feminist sociologists Judith Lorber and Patricia Martin argued extensively in “The Socially Constructed Body” (see especially the gob-smacking pp. 258-261) that women would at last pass men in many traditional sports when they truly believed they could, for “If members of society are told repeatedly that women’s bodily limitations prevent them from doing sports as well as men, they come to believe it […]”. Lorber and Martin lamented that opportunities were so rare for men and women to compete directly with one another (strongly implying that the patriarchy kept men and women apart so that women couldn’t judge for themselves), and they looked forward to a feminist future in which women could at last demonstrate their true physical capabilities.

From the first, the machinery of this kind of celebration backed men into an impossible corner. Most men have always known that women are not as strong as they; few men want to compete against a woman in sport or elsewhere. Yet no man dared gainsay the right of any woman to show herself equal to or better than a man if she could, whatever the context. If a man refused to compete with a woman, to welcome her into his club, to hire her into his firm, to respect her in any athletic endeavor — then he was a Neanderthal and a misogynist who should be shamed, shouted down, and immediately dismissed from his job.

But a man who competes with a woman, or treats her as he would treat a man, is often in trouble too, as we are seeing now. Yes, a woman was just as good as a man, our culture has insisted, but always and only on the woman’s terms. Sometimes the woman did not wish to be treated as an equal or a competitor, and that too was her right. Men had no say in the matter.

Over the years, there have been cases in which women didn’t like the culture men had created in their places of business; didn’t like male jokes, male camaraderie, male means of competition, or male methods of evaluation. Some women felt harassed, disrespected, held to an unreasonable standard, judged too harshly, given inadequate mentoring, singled out, left too much alone, treated cruelly, looked down upon, forced to behave in ways they didn’t prefer.

In general, women like competing against men and getting praise for it, but they don’t like losing to men.

Some women have turned in fury on the men who took the feminists at their word, preposterously claiming, as did “gender critical” (i.e. anti-trans) feminist journalist and former academic Helen Joyce in her Quillette essay “The New Patriarchy: How Trans Radicalism Hurts Women, Children, and Trans People Themselves” (2018), that trans women exemplify the latest form of the patriarchy that seeks to subjugate women, usurping their bodies and silencing their voices.

Many men, keen to avoid the gender wars they’d never wanted to fight in the first place, have felt understandably flummoxed and on the defensive. Which is it? Are women equal to men in all areas of endeavor, or not? Should women be kept out of direct competitions, or encouraged to show their mettle? Should men champion male-female sameness, or respect male-female difference?

In some once-exclusively-male areas, elaborate protocols have had to be worked out to protect women from feeling as if they have been beaten by men, while also protecting them from the knowledge that they were being protected.

March 20, 2025

QotD: “[T]here is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it”

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I had an acquaintance in college who was a dedicated leftist and who also believed in substantial group differences in average IQ.1 One day she was fretting at me that advances in data science, genetics, etc. were going to make this unpalatable reality impossible to ignore, with detrimental consequences for both racial justice and social harmony. Facts and logic were going to explode the noble lie, oh no!

Obviously I had to physically restrain myself from laughing at her. Assuming for the sake of argument that such differences exist and are easily measurable, only somebody totally autistic would think that mere scientific evidence for them would cause them to be acknowledged.2 Just look at all the ridiculous “sky is green” type beliefs that society already successfully forces everybody to internalize. You mentioned biological and cognitive differences between men and women, which are far more obvious and noticeable than those between populations, but which we successfully force everybody to pretend do not exist. And that’s far from the silliest thing everybody pretends to believe, in our society or in others.

Put it another way: there is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it. Were there people in Tenochtitlan who secretly believed that blood pouring down the sides of the great step pyramid day and night wasn’t actually necessary to placate the gods? Yeah probably, but if any of them had tried to point that out, they would have been laughed at (and sacrificed). Were there people in the Soviet Union who privately doubted whether dialectical materialism was the true engine of history? Probably, yes, but everybody besides Leonid Kantorovich was smart enough not to mention it.

What are the religious precepts on which our society is founded? There are a few, but a belief in absolute racial equality is clearly one of them, and that view is now enshrined in the “real” constitution (civil rights caselaw and its downstream effects on corporate HR). Anything which contradicts that precept is just a total nonstarter. If a few nerds somewhere found irrefutable evidence of important differences between groups, they would quietly hide it, and if some among them were like Reich too autistic or principled to do that, they would be ignored, shouted down, or persecuted. Possibly this would even be a good thing — every society needs its orthodoxies, and sometimes those who corrupt the youth need to drink the hemlock.

We’ve gotten far afield, though. As an inveterate shape-rotator, my favorite part of the book was Reich’s description of the statistical and mathematical techniques that can be used to determine when population bottlenecks occurred, how recently two populations shared a common ancestor, and when various mixing events occurred.

Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.

    1. Not to get all “Dems are the real racists”, but anecdotally this view does seem slightly more prevalent among my left-wing friends than my right-wing friends, though that seems to currently be changing.

    2. Somebody totally autistic or somebody who had already drunk the kool-aid on literally every other ridiculous official viewpoint imposed by our society. In her case it was probably the latter. As I said she was a leftist, and women in general are much less likely to be autistic but much more likely to value social conformity.

February 28, 2025

QotD: A jaundiced view of the feminist movement

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The idea of the suffragettes was that women should share in the political business of the menfolk voting on leaders whose main task was deciding matters of crime, taxation, and war, on the grounds that they share in the outcomes and burdens of any bad decisions in that area.

Note that governments, back in the day, did not attempt to act as a nanny, warding off daily harms from unsafe commercial products, or was government in the business of educating the young, nursing the sick, or managing the personal lives of all the children of all ages inhabiting the nation.

The idea of the men who invented feminism was that propelling women into the workforce would increase the tax base, break apart the nuclear family, and increase sales of expensive drugs to promote temporary sterility.

Breaking the family in turn would make women more dependent on the government than on their menfolk, and draw the unreasoning admiration women typically bestow upon their protectors and breadwinners onto the Powers That Be. The fanatical devotion that mothers of convicts show, when they insist forever that their child is innocent, would then be channeled into the ballot box toward whatever demagogue with a vacant smile promised to remove dangerous liberty from the hands of the children, regardless of age, inhabiting the nation.

Pornographers like Hugh Hefner encouraged feminism on the grounds that it would increase vice, and hence the monetary gain from the public sale of vice.

Then, once women were in the workforce, excluding them from the military and other areas where men are better qualified was said to be a sign of hidden bigotry against them. The idea of this bigotry was so stupid that a new word had to be coined to hide its meaning, and that word is “sexism”.

The word “racism” — which at the time had a meaning — was decapitated and the word “sex” — and at the time this word also had a meaning — was sutured onto the neckstump, to produce a new word intended to denounce a nonexistent hatred and contempt felt by men against women.

There have been wars between races and tribes since time immemorial, and hatred between races and tribes. But the war between the sexes is not really a war, because both sides keep flirting with the other, and settling down, and having babies and suchlike.

John C. Wright, “No More Lads”, John C. Wright’s Journal, 2020-01-28.

January 20, 2025

“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:

There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.

“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:

    Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.

But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

December 14, 2024

Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:

📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.

In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…

Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.

It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.

This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.

And a follow-up response to another comment:

THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.

November 23, 2024

Common sense on males in female sports from … checks notes … the United Nations?

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ramesh Thakur summarizes some of the findings from a recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls which somehow defies the narrative from most of the legacy media in the Current Year:

Has Hell frozen over? Uncommonly for the UN (think Antonio Guterres with the global warming hyperbole), one of its recent reports is full of common sense. In the last three years, I have been critical of UN performance regarding some high-profile issues, including World Health Organisation failings in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and a power grab for future pandemic management; lawfare against Israel by the world court and International Criminal Court; and UN Women’s betrayal of the raison d’être for its creation and existence with a shamefully delayed acknowledgment of the weaponisation of mass rape, sexual violence, mutilation and public humiliation of Israeli women on October 7th 2023.

Enter Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. It’s a relief and a pleasure to acknowledge her positive report “Violence against women and girls in sport“. Published on August 27th, it was presented to the UN General Assembly last month. She notes that until very recently, the need for a separate category for females “to ensure equal, fair and safe opportunities in sports” was a “universally recognised principle”. Maintaining separate-sex sports is a proportional action that corresponds to legitimate aims within international law. Females also have a right to privacy under international law which is forfeited by compelled mixed-sex spaces in intimate facilities. Alsalem explained to Fox News on October 21st that this is primarily a human rights issue, not a cultural or an individual issue.

Biological advantages for males in competitive sports include strength (162% greater punching power on average!), weight, muscle mass, speed, height, reach and endurance. Separate categories for males and females were created to recognise this biological reality and provide equal, fair and safe opportunities for females to win recognition, prize money, fame and career advancement. Allowing biological males into female sports is unfair and amounts to cheating by males who are simply not competitive in male sports (think swimmer Lia Thomas). It steals women’s dreams, aspirations and rewards. Alsalem’s data show that more than 600 female athletes in over 400 competitions have lost nearly 900 medals across 29 different sports. Other reports document instances of injuries from trans-on-females encounters, including teeth knocked out, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures. Thus safety is yet another another concern.

Despite the unfairness, invasion of privacy, opportunity costs and safety risks, many athletes and coaches who object to trans-inclusion policies are silenced or forced to self-censor at the risk of losing sporting opportunities, scholarships and sponsorships. Many who do speak out despite such formidable hurdles are accused of bigotry, suspended, expelled and subjected to unfair disciplinary proceedings. Many (like Moira Deeming) face hostility if they assemble to discuss how to deal with these issues, violating the fundamental human rights to freedom of belief, opinion and expression. Some have quit sport entirely under the cumulative stress. Because “biological sex is central” to women’s “experiences of discrimination and violence”, countries that permit biological men to compete in women’s sports deny women “their femaleness”. To counteract the “worrisome trend”, she recommends the creation of open categories in sports competition and non-invasive and confidential sex screening procedures to ensure fairness, safety and dignity for female athletes alongside inclusive participation for everyone.

The trans-extremist assault on female spaces in the workplace and sporting arenas has been in the thick of the culture wars. Amidst the wreckage of those wars, the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) industry has morphed into DIE (division, intolerance, exclusion), promoting resentment, language-policing and unjust outcomes instead of real solutions. Trade-offs are central to public policy decision-making. The last major issue on which this was ignored was the panicked response to Covid and we will be paying for the resulting disasters for many years yet. By putting the spotlight back on the importance of balancing competing and clashing rights through policy trade-offs, this report provides a key to navigating our way out of the wreckage. It’s potentially also helpful in Sall Grover’s appeal in the Giggle v. Tickle case, as is the return of Trump to the White House. Alsalem is right to note that these policies originate from and exist almost entirely in Western countries. Their hold on many parts of the UN system is evidence of the hegemony of Western ideas and practices as the global norm. The adoption of trans and multigender language and the inclusion of trans athletes in international sports is confirmation of cultural imperialism at the cost of women-specific human rights.

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