Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?
- Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
- Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
- Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
- Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
- As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
- As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
- Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.
If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?
Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.
September 16, 2019
QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?
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June 16, 2019
QotD: Critical gender studies
But remember that the generic people we meaninglessly call “women” are beautiful and powerful and their arbitrary womanhood should be constantly celebrated. Women must band together and lift each other up. Women must be represented equally in all of our institutions. Women are truly wonderful, splendid, special creatures.
But there is nothing special about women. Literally anyone can be a woman. A woman is not anything in particular. A person with a penis can be a woman. A person with a vagina can be a woman. If a bucket of sand came to life and wanted to be a woman, it could be a woman. There is no aspect of womanhood that is ingrained or biological or inaccessible to males. And womanhood certainly has nothing at all to do with your body parts.
But if you don’t have a uterus then you shouldn’t be giving your opinion on women’s rights. No uterus, no opinion. That’s the motto. We’re tired of men making decisions about women’s bodies.
But there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Transwomen are women, too. A transwoman is just a much a woman as any other woman. There is absolutely no difference between the two and to suggest otherwise is the height of bigotry.
Matt Walsh, “Explaining Progressive Gender Theory To Right Wing Bigots”, The Daily Wire, 2019-05-14.
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April 18, 2019
Shakespeare’s work is merely used to highlight the brilliance and originality of modern theatrical directors
Anthony Daniels reports for Quadrant Online of how he recently attended a performance of a play by some unimportant dead English white guy:
The precise date of the discovery by theatre directors that they are greater than Shakespeare cannot be specified: the discovery was more a process than an event. But by the time I saw a production of Richard II at the Almeida Theatre a few weeks ago, the superior genius of any director over that of Shakespeare was an established principle and indisputable fact.
[…]
But if I had an elevated conception of Shakespeare, how naive and mistaken I was! I knew nothing of Richard II — the play, that is, not the king — until I saw the production by Joe Hill-Gibbins. How narrow had been my previous conception of it! I discovered, among other things, that Richard was a short, fat fifty-eight-year-old in a black T-shirt, with a crown of the kind that is awarded to the person who finds the fève in the galette des rois that the French eat on the sixth of January, that the Duke of Norfolk was a woman dressed like a cleaning lady, and that all the action of the play takes place in what looks like a large biscuit tin, without exit or entrance. All this, of course, means something far deeper than anything that a mere Shakespeare could convey, being deeply symbolic, and therefore required real inventive genius on the part of the director to bring forth.
While the same actress took the parts of the Duke of Norfolk, Bushy and Green (all of them looking like cleaning ladies and each indistinguishable from the other because they could not leave the stage even to change costume), and the parts of both the Earl of Northumberland and the Bishop of Carlisle by other actresses, actual women’s roles such as that of Richard’s Queen were expunged entirely from the text. Between them, three actresses played five male parts and only one female. There is a profound lesson in this somewhere, no doubt in enlightened gender fluidity.
Most of the lines were delivered as if they were a religious incantation in a dead language that both the celebrants and the congregation desired to get over with as quickly as possible, clear diction being one of the many tools by which class hegemony is so unjustly exercised. The actor who took the part of Richard, it is true, was comprehensible, but made the acting of Sir Henry Irving appear taciturn by comparison. If emphasis is good, overemphasis must be better: no more stiff upper lip, we are all hysterics now, and can understand nothing that is not accompanied by gesticulation.
The director fortunately realised that Shakespeare got the order of his play wrong: Richard’s great speech in Act V scene 5 (“I have been studying how I may compare / This prison unto the world …”) was actually a prologue. The director is not the interpreter of Shakespeare, but rather Shakespeare is, and ought to be, the occasion, the opportunity, for the director to place his own immortal (and highly original) genius before the world.
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March 15, 2019
QotD: Gender correctness
Five years ago, if someone had told you it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘There are two genders’, you would have thought them mad.
Sure, we live in unforgivably politically correct times. Ours is an era in which the offence-taking mob regularly slams comedians for telling off-colour jokes, demands the expulsion from campus of speakers who might offend students’ sensibilities, and hollers ‘Islamophobe’, ‘homophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ at anyone who transgresses their moral code on anything from same-sex marriage to respecting Islam. (A phobia, we should always remind ourselves, is a mental malaise, a disturbance of the mind. How very Soviet Union to depict your opponents essentially as mentally diseased.)
And yet for all that, surely it would never become a risky business to utter the opinion: ‘There are men and women and that’s all.’ Well, that has now happened. It is now looked upon as hateful, sinful and phobic, of course, to express a view that has guided humanity for millennia: that humankind is divided into two sexes, and they are distinctive, and one cannot become the other.
Say that today in a university lecture room packed with right-on millennials and watch their faces contort with fury. Write it in a newspaper column or blog post and witness the swift formation of a virtual mob yelling for you to be fired. Say it on TV and there will be protests against you, petitions, demands that you and your foul, outdated ideology be denied the oxygen of televisual publicity.
Brendan O’Neill, “It isn’t TERFs who are bigoted – it’s their persecutors”, Spiked, 2019-01-28.
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February 27, 2019
January 24, 2019
November 21, 2018
QotD: Occupations and sex differences
Sex differences are a distribution, not a hard, bright line. For example, the women’s world record in the hundred-meter dash is slower than the U.S. high school boys’ record. Men on average are faster than women. But the women at the top of the distribution — those Olympians — are still faster than most men. It would be absurd to say that a woman can’t run the hundred meter in 11 seconds, just because most women can’t. It would be equally absurd to say that men are not, on average, faster than women.
So it’s possible that the distribution of nurturing traits is skewed enough that fewer men will be good at the difficult and emotionally taxing job of providing intimate care for sick and needy people. While there are plenty of health care jobs that don’t require so much direct human interaction, they tend to require more training. And the ability to sit in a classroom and absorb material from a textbook is also a human trait that is unevenly and unfairly distributed. It’s not that no men can succeed in transitioning from old-style “manly” jobs to the pink-collar professions, but that fewer men may be able to do so than we’d like to think.
Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.
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November 18, 2018
QotD: “Sexist” toys
As a female journalist who writes mostly about traditionally “male areas” such as economics and business, I should perhaps be expected to endorse a “blank slate” theory of male and female gender roles, where the preference for certain kinds of activities is driven by sexist socialization and discrimination, not innate ability. The problem is that this doesn’t necessarily match up with the evidence. Human children show gender-driven preferences for toys, as can be attested by those faultlessly progressive parents who have seen their boys turn their hands into a gun while their daughters make a doll out of an ear of corn. These preferences show up even in children too young to have gotten much socialization; they turn up even in rhesus monkeys, as males show a marked preference for wheeled toys over soft plush animals. I certainly believe that human society has a lot of sexist hangovers from its past. I draw the line at believing that this hangover is influencing rhesus monkey infants.
Megan McArdle, “Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs”, Bloomberg View, 2017-01-06.
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October 19, 2018
QotD: “None of us are standard issue”
Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)
The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.
It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”
You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.
This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale. I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal. A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people. Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that. There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare. But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable. If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls […] a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.
In fact, none of us are standard issue. The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd. In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics, I not only was pulled away from groups of boys I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling. I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell. This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine. In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.
Sarah Hoyt, “Gears and Patterns”, According to Hoyt, 2016-12-16.
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October 10, 2018
Bryan Caplan on “Sokal 2.0” or the “Grievance Studies Affair”
Much has been said and written about the successful academic hoax pulled off by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian to get multiple bogus papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the “grievance studies affair”. Bryan Caplan rounds up several comments and then explains why he is impressed by the work of the hoaxers:
My idea has inspired multiple actual tests. But frankly, none of them are in the same league as Sokal 2.0. Three scholars who held a vast academic genre in low regard nevertheless managed to master the genre’s content and style expertly enough to swiftly publish enough articles to earn tenure! Frankly, if that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what would.
The main question in my mind: Does Sokal 2.0 primarily show that the authors are intellectually strong… or that “grievance studies” is intellectually weak? Both can be partly true, of course. But the harder the authors had to toil to achieve their goal, the less they impugn the honor of their target. So how hard did they toil? The authors’ self-account:
[W]e spent 10 months writing the papers, averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days… As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field. We improved this ratio from 0% at first to 94.4% after a few months of experimenting with much more hoaxish papers.
In other words, they barely broke a sweat. While you could accuse the authors of self-deprecation, this is a rare human failing. When we succeed, most of us like to highlight our own awesomeness, not the ease of our goals. While most people would have been less successful than the hoaxers, what they did was far from superhuman. And that, in turn, amply supports their main theses: the fields they hoaxed have low intellectual standards and don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Does this mean that the subjects of race, gender, sexual orientation, body image, and so on don’t deserve to be taken seriously? Not at all. You shouldn’t blame subjects just because the fields that study them fall short. Identity is too important to be left to people who embrace their own identity. Still, until the researchers who study these subjects calm down, speak clearly, and treat dissent with civility, they will continue to produce little knowledge.
P.S. My main caveat about my positive evaluation of Sokal 2.0: I’ve seen too many hoax movies not to wonder if there’s a hoax within a hoax. Probably not, though.
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August 24, 2018
August 9, 2018
Scottish schools’ proposed gender initiative will encourage gender uncertainty in 5-year-olds
Joanna Williams explains why authority figures actively undermining one of the few certainties in a young child’s world is bound to cause much more harm to many children:
Education Scotland, regional NHS boards and the Scottish government jointly came up with this new gender initiative’s daft – sorry, draft – guidelines, which are set to come into effect from 2019. The plan is to tell children: ‘Your sex is what you are told by a doctor when you are born. Most people are told they are a male child (a boy) or a female child (a girl).’ But this ridiculous statement contradicts everything children will later learn in biology lessons. Babies are not ‘told’ they are a particular sex in some odd conversation between parents and midwives on the labour ward. The overwhelming majority of babies actually are male or female, boys or girls. Sex is not a lottery. It doesn’t depend on how the doctor happens to be feeling at a certain point in time. It is there in the child’s genitals and in their chromosomes. Telling children that sex is simply something that is arbitrarily announced by a doctor is a lie.
But propagating this lie and encouraging children to believe that sex is a random declaration allows teachers to go on to tell children: ‘Your gender is what you decide.’ In other words, children will be told to ignore the evidence they see before them every time they go to the toilet or get undressed. Ignore what the nasty doctor said. And ignore what family members have wickedly led them to believe. Not only does this undermine parents, it also heaps a lot of pressure on to the shoulders of five-year-olds. Most find it difficult enough to decide what to have for breakfast. Their brains are full of Minecraft, superheroes or Friendship Fairies. They worry about dinosaurs coming back to life and unicorns not being real. It is hard to see how telling children this age that one of the few things they know for certain isn’t certain after all can do anything other than cause distress.
But the problematising continues. ‘People might think they know your gender because of the clothes you wear or the things you like to do’, children will be told. But, of course, these people are wrong: ‘You are a unique person, you know who you are.’ This confuses two separate issues – gender stereotypes and actually being a boy or a girl. It also seriously underestimates children. The youngest children distinguish between boy stuff and girl stuff; they know whether they are a boy or a girl and which clothes and toys they are supposed to like. But while some children might police gender stereotypes with enthusiasm, others do not. They know, better than the Scottish government it seems, that you can play football and still be a girl or dress up as a princess and still be a boy. Even those keen to enforce gender conformity at age five may well rebel by the time they are 15. And so what if they don’t? If a boy enjoys being a boy and wants to grow up into a man, is that really so bad?
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August 2, 2018
The role of the gatekeepers for Trans youth
This is a debate that has been bullrushed by the sudden political success of Trans activists, but there are genuine medical and ethical issues that need to be taken into account:
I’m a transsexual woman in my thirties who transitioned in my early twenties, and I wish I could have done so earlier. Even so, I am wary of today’s Brave New World of transgender activism in which important safeguards of transition are under attack and any counter opinion, even if made by a trans woman such as myself, are labelled as an attack on trans rights. At first it was easier for me to not ruffle the trans activists’ feathers, but my conscience got the better of me, and now I am continuing to speak up in order to help those who deserve better in their own journey of transition.
Through talking to other trans people in my life, it has become apparent to me that transition surgeries are an answer but not the answer to the long-term health and well-being of gender dysphoria patients. Unfortunately, many trans people get so fixated on surgery for so long, that they may forget that there is more to life and transitioning than just surgery and other medical intervention. The fixation is often driven by the fantasy that surgery, and transition in general, will transform them into a new person, and that all the problems in life will go away.
I haven’t known a lot of trans people over the years, but of the few that I know, there did seem to be a powerful belief that if they could fix just this one thing — their gender — then their lives would be perfect forever. In at least two cases, having transitioned, they then discovered that they were just as miserable as they had been before despite having changed to their preferred gender. All the surgery in the world won’t fix mental problems, and the disappointment and anger seemed to be that much greater when the situation finally came home. I’m not claiming this is in any way universal, but of the small number of trans people I’ve known, it was true for half of them.
During my gender transition, I didn’t fixate on surgery even though I was highly dysphoric back then. I’ve had my ups and downs, but I’ve always done okay. To be honest, thinking about sex and gender a lot is unhealthy, particularly during high-conflict public debates on what it means to be transgender and what rights we have to get the help we need. As the debate grows more divisive, the media valorization and glamorization of trans people, especially trans children, is not helping but rather, it is pulling us away from the honest conversations we need to have.
Forty-one percent of transgender people [PDF] have experienced suicidal ideation or self-harm, though this statistic does not indicate to what extent the attempts were before or after transition, or at what stage of transition. Nevertheless, studies have shown high rates of suicide among (alleged) trans people post-medical transition. Why is this the case and can the quality of transition be a factor?
As I understand it, the overall success rate of transgender surgery is higher the earlier it is conducted … within reason. This is where the ethical issues are the most pressing:
The move away from the medical gatekeeping model for treating gender dysphoria is not only unfortunate, it is irresponsible. Over the past few decades, the strictness of the standards of healthcare used to determine suitability for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and related surgeries have been relaxed significantly. In 2008, the Endocrine Society endorsed puberty blockers as a treatment for trans teenagers. Then in 2011, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) issued new Standards of Care internationally for treating such patients via puberty suppression, while formalizing the ‘informed consent’ model. But it didn’t end there.
Last month here in Australia, new guidelines published in the Medical Journal of Australia gave the green light for potentially more trans children to go on HRT as young as 13, defying international guidelines. Specifically, “decisions about affirming a young person’s gender identity should be driven primarily by the child or adolescent, in conjunction with their family and health care providers.” While this experiment was hailed as world-leading, the minimum legal age for smoking, drinking and voting in Australia remains at 18, and it’s still 16 for consensual sex. So in Australia, a 15-year-old teen cannot consent to sexual activity but they can consent to life-altering medical treatments that they almost certainly cannot fully grasp at that age.
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June 14, 2018
QotD: The gender-neutral child
The media is full of excited stories heralding the revolution in children’s play. This recent headline in Time is typical: “The Next Generation of Kids Will Play With Gender Neutral Toys.” But children are not gender-neutral, and they famously resist efforts to make them so. If 40 percent of millennials think otherwise, that’s probably because they haven’t had kids yet.
Parents and teachers should certainly expose their kids to a wide range of toys and play, and teach them to accept kids who enjoy gender non-conforming toys. When toy companies rigidly classify certain toys as girl-only or boy-only, that may create a stigma against those who cross the line. Overt signage is superfluous anyway. So let’s hope other retailers follow Target’s example.
But the crusade promoted by the White House is not about tolerance for non-conformers. Its goal is to re-socialize the majority of gender-typical children toward gender neutrality. Jarret is right that it won’t be easy. With few exceptions, children are powerfully drawn to sex-stereotyped play.
Parents who read too much Judith Butler in college and view gender as fluid and malleable may be startled by the counterevidence their three-year-olds provide. The usually eloquent Julia Turner, editor of Slate, became tongue-tied a few weeks ago when she tried to explain a mysterious development at home: Her little twin sons were obsessed with wheeled objects — particularly cement mixers. Parenthood, she confessed, had “complicated” her worldview. Turner kept affirming her loyalty to the gender-is-a-social-construct school. But then, referring to her sons’ insistent boyishness, she uttered four heretical words: “There’s a there there…”
Indeed there is. And it takes a liberal arts degree not to see it. A 2012 cross-cultural study on sex differences confirmed what most of us see: despite some exceptions, females tend to be more sensitive, esthetic, sentimental, intuitive, and tender-minded, while males tend to be more utilitarian, objective, unsentimental, and tough-minded.
The female penchant for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species. Among our close relatives such as rhesus and vervet monkeys, researchers have found that females play with dolls far more than do their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. It seems unlikely the monkeys are acting out a culturally manufactured gender binary. Something else is going on. Most scientists attribute typical male/female differences to some yet-to-be understood combination of biology and culture.
Christina Hoff Sommers, “Those Who Push For Toy Neutrality Don’t Get Little Girls At All”, The Federalist, 2016-09-11.
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May 25, 2018
Progressives: “Gender is a social construct!” Science: “Wait just a second there…”
Toby Young wonders why a woman can’t be more like a man:
A fascinating paper about sex differences in the human brain was published last week in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex. It’s the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants (2,466 male and 2,750 female). The study has been attracting attention for more than a year (see this preview in Science, for instance), but only now has it been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women’s brains, this paper is something of a reality check. The team of researchers from Edinburgh University, led by Stuart Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters, found that men’s brains are generally larger in volume and surface area, while women’s brains, on average, have thicker cortices. ‘The differences were substantial: in some cases, such as total brain volume, more than a standard deviation,’ they write. This is not a new finding – it has been known for some time that the total volume of men’s brains is, in general, larger than that of women’s, even when adjusted for men’s larger average body size – but all the studies before now have involved much smaller sample sizes.
Does this paper have any implications when it comes to men and women’s intellectual abilities? The answer is yes, but they’re not clear cut.
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