Quotulatiousness

July 19, 2023

Ever wonder where the term “two-spirit” came from?

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

In Spiked, Malcolm Clark explains the origin of the now commonly used term as a portmanteau for many different words — with significant variation in meaning — in indiginous languages:

Typical media presentation of Two-spirit individuals

The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.

From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.

Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about “2SLGBTQQIA+ rights”.

The term’s success is no doubt due in part to white guilt. There is a tendency to associate anything Native American with a lost wisdom that is beyond whitey’s comprehension. Ever since Marlon Brando sent “Apache” activist Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Oscar in 1973, nothing has signalled ethical superiority as much as someone wearing a feather headdress.

The problem is that too many will believe almost any old guff they are told about Native Americans. This is an open invitation to fakery. Ms Littlefeather, for example, may have built a career as a symbol of Native American womanhood. But after her death last year, she was exposed as a member of one of the fastest growing tribes in North America: the Pretendians. Her real name was Marie Louise Cruz. She was born to a white mother and a Mexican father, and her supposed Indian heritage had just been made up.

Much of the fashionable two-spirit shtick is just as fake. For one thing, it’s presented as an acknowledgment of the respect Indian tribes allegedly showed individuals who were gender non-conforming. Yet many of the words that two-spirit effectively replaces are derogatory terms.

In truth, there was a startling range of attitudes to the “two-spirited” among the more than 500 separate indigenous Native American tribes. Certain tribes may have been relaxed about, say, effeminate men. Others were not. In his history of homosexuality, The Construction of Homosexuality (1998), David Greenberg points out that those who are now being called “two spirit” were ridiculed by the Papago, held in contempt by the Choctaws, disliked by the Cocopa, treated by the Seven Nations with “the most sovereign contempt” and “derided” by the Sioux. In the case of the Yuma, who lived in what is now Colorado, the two-spirited were sometimes treated as rape objects for the young men of the tribe.

July 5, 2023

Intersectionality showdown

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

Chris Bray on the major break in progressive solidarity caused by non-white American Muslims’, Ethiopian Christians’, and Peruvian Catholics’ unexpected reaction to woke teachers wanting to sexually indoctrinate their children:

We’re wading through this culture war sewage because we have a political class that’s deliberately pumping it into the culture to keep us from noticing that, how can I put this in a sophisticated way, they suck.

But this really tedious maneuver is increasingly leading to moments like this — and Twitter still won’t let Substack writers embed tweets, so click to watch video, but here’s the substance of the thing:

The fake conflict is increasingly likely to be a dozen sanpaku-eyed AWFL’s against a thousand genuinely multicultural parents, battling over insane questions like the “book bans” that remove highly explicit sexual content from elementary school libraries. In 2023, the culture war is rapidly cooking down to STOP PREVENTING US FROM TALKING TO YOUR EIGHT YEAR-OLDS ABOUT SUCKING DICK, YOU NAZIS.

If you’ve never read what I wrote about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, please take a moment to go read this. About 900 people died at Jonestown in 1978, but Jones started in Indianapolis in the 1950s. He moved his church to a rural property in California, and then to Guyana, by constantly telling his parishioners that they were threatened by hostile forces outside the church that were maneuvering to destroy them. The frequent recourse to invented threats is a sign of a sick movement, not a sign of something the grows and flourishes.

That’s where we are. We’re watching a sick thing die. The question, now, is how long it takes to die, and how much damage it does in its death throes. But the increasingly hysterical tone, against an increasingly matter-of-fact response — a thousand parents saying calmly that no, we won’t let you inflict this curriculum on our children — suggests that the inflection point is getting closer.

June 26, 2023

The struggle for equal rights turned into the struggle to oppress others so gradually, most people didn’t notice

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

From the most recent Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan:

Many, many moons ago, when I was a marriage equality pioneer and not a total pariah among the gays, I was asked to speak at the Human Rights Campaign Fund, as it was then called. Determined as ever not to read the room, I said (paraphrasing from memory): “The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.”

You can imagine how well that went down. And, sure enough, 30 years later, with marriage, military service and trans equality enshrined in the law, the HRC building now has a massive, six-story high poster hanging on it: “BLACK LIVES MATTER. TRANS BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

That tells us a bit about where we are today, and how we got here.

The point I was making in the early 1990s was that liberalism knows limits. A liberal politics does not seek to impose meaning on everyone; it creates the space for individuals to choose that for themselves. It doesn’t seek to deliver the truth about anything either; it merely provides the mechanisms for the open-ended pursuit of truth. A liberal politics will seek formal equality for members of minorities; but not substantive equality — what is now called “equity”. It would not require us to come to one, single understanding of reality; it would always allow diversity of opinion and encourage free debate. Live and let live. Remember that?

Technically speaking, that makes me a liberal conservative: accepting the reality of liberal modernity (even, in my own case, being happily at home in it), while seeking to limit its illiberal overreach and utopian ambitions. And that was what I tried to sketch out in Virtually Normal. It’s a book less about homosexuality than about politics itself. It’s about a politics of going this far — and no farther. From the NYT review in 1995:

    Mr. Sullivan offers his own prescription for a “politics of homosexuality” that reconciles “the best arguments of liberals and conservatives”. It is a liberal stand, Mr. Sullivan argues, in that it puts a premium on individual liberty and equality before the law, but its requirements would apply only to government policies on homosexuality, avoiding “the regulation of people’s minds and actions” in the private sphere.

Homosexual citizens absolutely deserved equal rights, but the question of homosexuality itself would — and should — always be open to dispute and debate. Since a liberal society contains both fundamentalist preachers as well as lesbian atheists, it cannot resolve the core question. So it shouldn’t try. And it should celebrate, not bemoan, this ideological diversity.

I can see why the religious fundamentalists are queasy with the settlement that came from this. They have to live in a society that accepts civil marriages for couples of the same sex. The deal is that in return, they are free to deny the morality of such marriages, to reserve religious marriage to heterosexual couples, and not be forced to participate in any way. I can also see why queer theorists are queasy as well. They don’t like the heteronormativity of civil marriage, or the respectability politics that goes with it. But they in turn are free to live their lives as “queerly” as they want in society, to create culture that seeks to subvert and radicalize.

This, in the end, is my response to all the “slippery slope” arguments about gay marriage now being raised again on the right. There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides. From my liberal conservative perspective, the gay rights movement should have shut down in 2015 after Obergefell; and the trans rights movement should have shut down in 2020 after Bostock. Once gay men and lesbians and trans people achieved legal and constitutional equality, the fight was over.

But in the movement I was once a part of, many, of course, were not liberals, let alone liberal conservatives — but radicals, who reluctantly went along with marriage equality, but itched to transform society far more comprehensively. And these radicals now control everything in the hollowed-out gay rights apparatus. Their main ticket item is a law that would replace biological sex with gender in the law, and remove protections for religious liberty: smashing the liberal settlement. Combine that with acute polarization in the Trump era, and information silos, so that many gays get their sense of reality from MSNBC and Elton John, and you can see how the spiral into illiberal madness began.

June 25, 2023

British schoolchildren mock their oh-so-woke teachers

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

In Christopher Gage’s weekly round-up, I discovered that I shared a trait with Ted Kaczynski (“austere anarchist scholar” as US mainstream media might have described him). Not just any trait, but the one that ended up putting him in prison after nearly twenty years of sending bombs through the mail:

Elliot Rodger, Ed Kemper and Ted Kaczynski.
Photos from Quillette.

… Ted insisted on the proper use of the idiom, “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too”. Ted rejected the common and logically fraught version: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”. Indeed, you can. You must have your cake if you are to eat your cake. You cannot have your cake once you’ve eaten your cake.

That turn of phrase helped F.B.I agents snare Ted. His sister-in-law read his essay, recognised the writing style, and the peculiar diction, and then grassed him up to the rozzers.

For the record, this may be the only point of agreement I have with that noted austere scholar, although I’ve never read any of his writings to find out.

Another amusing incident involved children taking the Mickey out of ultra-progressive teachers in British schools:

Last week, schoolchildren in Sussex dropped themselves into the soup after suggesting that their fellow classmate is not actually a cat.

Two thirteen-year-old girls at Rye College were told they “should go to a different school” if they didn’t believe that a girl could identify as a cat.

During a “life education” class, the pair said there was “no such thing as agender” and: “If you have a vagina, you’re a girl, and if you have a penis, you’re a boy — that’s it.”

When they queried how someone could identify as a cat, the pair were blasted for questioning their classmate’s identity.

An investigation found children at schools across the land now identify as dinosaurs and horses. Another often dons a cape and demands to be acknowledged as a moon. Another identifies as Bambi.

After the hysteria simmered, it became obvious what was going on here. And it too became obvious that this is a good thing.

Reader, these children are taking the Mickey.

When confronted with obvious nonsense held by their preachy, supposedly superior teachers, these kids cannot resist mocking them to a nub.

After all, if one can identify as whatever one wants then that includes anything one wants. For teenagers primed with mischief, this is just too good a brew not to sup on a daily basis.

And it is a promising sign. Ridicule, the sharp-elbowed sister of truth, is essential to all progress. Clearly, these kids are unafraid to think for themselves and are determined to see that which is beyond their own nose.

Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what almost everybody knows to be patent nonsense. As history assures us, once something becomes a laughingstock it soon dies of ridicule.

As James Thurber put it, that which cannot withstand laughter is not a good thing.

June 18, 2023

Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This is an extract from A Heretic’s Manifesto thanks to Spiked:

Words hurt, they say. This is the ideological underpinning to so much censorship today – the idea that words wound, as a punch might wound. The imagery of violence is deployed in almost every call for censure in the 21st-century West. Speech has been reimagined as aggression, hence “microaggressions”. People speak of feeling “assaulted” by speech. “Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude” – that’s the thesis of Words That Wound, an influential tome published in 1993. Activists claim to feel “erased” by controversial or disagreeable utterances. Trans campaigners speak darkly of “trans erasure”, as if words from the other side of the divide, the speech of gender-critical feminists, might contain that most awesome and nullifying power of genocide.

Words make us feel “unsafe”, people say. Witness the rise and rise of Safe Spaces on university campuses, designed to ensure students’ psychic security against the terrible threat of their hearing an idea they disagree with. Safe Spaces recreate the state of childhood, complete with colouring books and ice cream, speaking to how determinedly some long to retreat from the adult world of hurtful chatter and brickbats.

The United Nations wrings its hands over “hate speech and real harm” (my emphasis). The “weaponisation of public discourse for political gain” can lead to “stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence”, it says. Better keep a check on those hurtful words. One US university even maintains a list of “words that hurt“. It includes the phrase “You guys”. That scandalous utterance “erases the identities of people who are in the room” and “generalise[s] a group of people to be masculine”. Shut it down. Silence that act of violence.

Both the formal and informal punishment of words rests on the belief that they can wound. Laws in Europe claim to guard people from speech that is alarming, distressing, hurtful. The overlords of social media censor speech for “the wellbeing of our community“. Everywhere the cry goes up: words injure, they can cut like a knife, they can be used as “weapons to ambush, terrorise, wound, humiliate and degrade“. And just as the law protects us from such dreadful things when they are done to our bodies with fists and kicks, surely it should also protect us from them when they are done to our minds with words and ideas. Surely our psychic wellbeing should be accorded as much respect by the powers-that-be as our physical integrity is.

The temptation of many of us who believe in freedom of speech, in the liberty of all to utter their beliefs and ideas, is to damn this claim that “words hurt” as a libel against public discourse. As a slippery untruth that is cynically designed to depict words as all-powerful, as containing so much energy, so much heat, that they can lay waste to self-esteem and even make us fret over erasure, over being wiped out entirely by that sore comment or that disturbing idea. Actually, we often say, words are just words. They’re not sticks, they’re not stones, they’re words. They won’t kill you, they won’t hurt you, you’ll be fine. They say words are a force of nature like no other, we say: “Relax. It’s just speech.”

We need to stop doing this. We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We need to stop responding to their painting of speech as a dangerous, disorientating force by defensively pleading that words don’t wound because they’re just words. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: “It’s only speech.” As if speech were a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, more likely to contain calming qualities than upsetting ones, more likely to help us overcome conflict rather than stir it up, more likely to offer a balm to your soul than to stab at it as a knife might stab at your body.

For when we do this, we play down the power of words. And that includes the power of words to wound. Words do wound. It’s true. Words hurt people, they hurt institutions, they hurt belief systems. Words make churches tremble and ideologies quake. Words inflict pain on priests and princes and ideologues. Words upend the social order. Words rip away the comforting ideas people and communities might have wrapped themselves in for decades, centuries perhaps. Words ambush the complacent and degrade the powerful. Words cause discord, angst, even conflict. Isn’t every revolution in history the offspring of words? Of ideas? Words do destabilise, they do disorientate. People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: “I agree.”

Today, “‘gender-critical’ is a jargonny way of describing the ordinary views held by the vast majority of the planet’s population”

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

The Quillette Editorial Board on the startling difference between LGBT activists’s views and the default view of most of humanity:

“What is feminism? Who is it for? Can men be feminists, or only allies? What is intersectionality, and must feminism be intersectional?” These are some of the questions tackled in a University of Melbourne course on the philosophy of feminism, formally designated in the university’s handbook as PHIL20046. Prospective students are informed that course content will include “a range of feminist theories, including both radical feminism and liberal feminism, and from all four ‘waves’ (with an emphasis on second wave feminism). We’ll also consider a range of applied topics like prostitution and pornography, inclusion of transwomen, theories of gender, gendered social norms, and reproductive rights.”

Content that is not included in PHIL20046, on the other hand, includes white supremacist propaganda, neo-Nazi talking points, and an approving literary exegesis of Mein Kampf. This might seem like an odd detail to note. But it is important to state for the record, given the profusion of stickers and posters recently plastered around the University of Melbourne campus, accusing the course instructor, Holly Lawford-Smith, of crafting her syllabus for the exclusive benefit of “fascists”.

Those who are familiar with the mantras of “intersectional feminism” likely won’t require an explanation for the quantum logic leap by which feminist philosophizing might be casually equated with the doctrines of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. But for those unschooled in such matters, the basis of complaint here is that Lawford-Smith is a “gender-critical feminist” — a term indicating one’s belief that biologically rooted differences between men and women are real; and so must be considered when marking the boundaries of female-protected spaces, such as women’s sports leagues, prisons, and domestic-violence centres.

Which is to say that “gender-critical” is a jargonny way of describing the ordinary views held by the vast majority of the planet’s population. And it speaks to the shocking extent of academia’s radicalization that Lawford-Smith’s belief in biological science would be regarded as the academic equivalent of a Nazi salute.

Gender-critical feminists trace their roots to the radical-feminism movement of the 1960s. They often focus on the pernicious effects of gender stereotypes; and critique the industries that profit from women’s pain, such as pornography. This kind of analysis focuses attention on the hardships that have historically gone along with existing as a woman. It also focuses attention on the real policy solutions required to address such hardships, including, where necessary, the maintenance of safe single-sex spaces. As one might assume, gender-critical feminists typically have little time for men who, having recently announced the discovery of some soul-like spark of womanhood within them, commence hectoring women about the imperfect nature of their intersectional feminism.

Gender crits speak their mind at their professional peril. In 2021, Kathleen Stock, a British analytic philosopher, was forced to abandon her academic position at Sussex University following a prolonged harassment campaign. Like other prominent gender-critical intellectuals, Stock is perfectly forthright about her support for the rights of trans people to live, study, and work as they please, free from discrimination and harassment — while also being equally forthright about the plain fact that transwomen are not literal women. As a consequence of expressing such (again, widely held) views, Stock was advised to install CCTV cameras in her home and to venture onto campus only when accompanied by bodyguards.

June 15, 2023

Sarah Hoyt objects to being an “imaginary creature”

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

Recent revisions to the quasi-official dictionary of the woke English language seem to have classified individuals like Sarah as “non-men”:

I was born female in a country that was profoundly patriarchal and, back then, patriarchal without guilt. So, it was acceptable to make jokes about women being dumber than men. And it was acceptable for teachers to assume you were dumb because female.

Most of these things amused me. It was always fun in mixed classes after the first test to watch the teacher look at my test and at the boys in the class trying to figure out what parent was so cruel as to name their son a girl’s name.

I enjoyed breaking people’s minds. And once I was known in a group or place, I was not treated as inferior. The only things that truly annoyed me were the ones I thought were arbitrary restrictions, like not going out after 8 pm alone. Took flaunting them a few times to find out they weren’t arbitrary. Or rather, they were arbitrary but since culture-wide flaunting was dangerous, and I was lucky not to pay for the flaunting with life or limb.

Yes, I went through a phase of screaming that I was just as good as any man. Then realized it was true and stopped screaming it.

Then got married and had kids, and realized I was just as good but different. I could do things men couldn’t do. Parenthood is different as a woman. And none of it mattered to my worth, just like being short and having brown hair doesn’t make me inferior to tall blonds. Just different.

And even though I’m a highly atypical woman, at the beginning of my sixth decade, I find myself completely at peace with the fact I am a woman and not apologetic at all for it.

Imagine my surprise when I found out women don’t exist. There’s only man and non-man.

This nonsense, from here, has got to stop. When you get so “inclusive” you’re excluding an entire biological sex (but curiously not the other) you might want to re-evaluate your principles. Also, your sanity.

Yes, I know, saying this makes me a TERF, which is nonsense. Maybe a TERNF, since I’ve not called myself a feminist since I was 18 and realized feminism aimed for making women “win” at men’s expense. It wasn’t aiming for equality but for “equity” and since I never needed a movement to outcompete males, I decided it was spinach and to h*ll with it.

Also I’m not trans-exclusionary. If women don’t exist, what the heck are men who are trans trans TO? Non-man? Uh … what? What are drag queens imitating? Is it just non-man?

June 14, 2023

Wednesday web-droppings

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Education, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 22:22

A few items that I didn’t feel required a full post of their own, but might be of interest:

June 4, 2023

The peasant consumers are threatening to storm the ESG castle

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

Jon Militmore on the threat to the corporate world of ESG-guided action posed by mere “consumers” with their “choices”:

The Wall Street Journal ran a deep dive article last month exploring “how Bud Light blew it”, but it somehow missed the most important part of the story.

As most people already know, the world’s most popular light lager has seen a collapse in sales following a boycott prompted by a March Madness ad campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The Journal‘s chart depicting the fall in Bud Light sales speaks for itself, and the company’s delayed and tepid response to the uproar only seemed to make matters worse.

This isn’t Anheuser-Busch’s first foray into controversial social issues.

The Journal‘s Jennifer Maloney points out that the company has been engaging in social equity-themed advertising for years, including a 2021 Michelob Ultra ad featuring transgender track star Cecé Telfer and a 2022 Bud Light Canada campaign for Pride Month displaying various pronouns.

What Maloney fails to mention in her article is why beer companies — not just Bud Light — are suddenly courting controversial social issues such as nonbinary gender, transgenderism, and third-wave feminism.

The answer is simple: The rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance as the dominant strain of “stakeholder capitalism” has incentivized corporations to curry favor with ESG rating firms, even if it means alienating their consumers.

Unlike traditional capitalism, which seeks to maximize profits by serving consumers, the ESG model seeks to “improve” capitalism by considering other stakeholders besides investors and consumers. Publicly traded corporations are graded on how well they achieve socially desirable metrics, such as combating climate change, advancing diversity and inclusion, and creating a more “equitable” society.

What was intended to be a kinder, gentler form of capitalism has morphed into a kind of economic fascism that places the arbitrary interests of a small cabal of people — asset managers, bureaucrats, global financiers — ahead of consumers.

As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, consumers are the true bosses in a capitalist system. They ultimately decide what products are created and purchased, who becomes wealthy, and who becomes poor.

As the Bud Light fiasco shows, ESG places consumers in the back seat. The social equity campaigns are not designed to appeal to Bud Light consumers, but to the ESG rating agencies, which have the power to downgrade companies that fail to dance to their tune.

June 2, 2023

A potential sign of resistance?

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

Severian on the odd phenomena of people who’ve begun to discover they didn’t need to accept the ever-more-woke products of the entertainment industry and, more recently, major retailers and brewers:

Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney

The Third Law of SJW — “SJWs always double down” — is really going to get tested with these things [woke reboots/remakes of popular TV shows, movies, etc.], but we need to hope they keep the faith. We want them to double, triple, quadruple down. The material basis of Clown World is the assumption that people simply can’t live without iCrap. As I noted, lots of people did indeed seem to enjoy the Covid lockdowns, and they weren’t all aspiring Laptop Class leftoids, either. Lots of moms found out that they rather enjoyed spending time with their kids, rather than putting in an extra twenty hours a week down at the law firm. Lots of suburban dads found a new sense of accomplishment doing little projects around the house.

In other words, people found out that not only could they just “make do”, they actually kinda enjoyed “making do”. Lots of them went right back to their old ways the minute they could, of course, but not all of them … and now, #Woke Capital is basically doing the job for us. They’re daring us to not go to the movies, the same way Fox News is daring us to cut the cord entirely (they figure that hey, we get $x a month from the cable subscription fee regardless of whether anyone watches or not, so why not give in to our natural inclinations and become MSNBC Lite?).

They’re daring us to cut the cord, throw the Pocket Moloch in the nearest lake, and get what we need from local sources — including entertainment. And who knows what might happen if we start actually talking to our neighbors? If, as with the lockdowns, the guy who lives down the street ceases to be “the dude with the green Honda” and becomes Bob, a real person?

Challenge accepted, motherfuckers.

May 5, 2023

JunkScientific American

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

Stephen Knight calls out the woke editors of once-proud publication Scientific American for their anti-scientific support of the gender warriors:

A dangerous strain of utopian thinking has taken hold of the “progressive” left. Many now share the delusion that if we pretend certain falsehoods are true, then various forms of oppression and bigotry will magically disappear. Worse still, the proponents of these falsehoods demand their unequivocal affirmation from the rest of us.

Today’s leftists rightly insist on the importance of scientific truth when it comes to questions like climate change, vaccine safety and evolution. But they will discard scientific facts the moment they become inconvenient to their own worldview. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more pronounced than on the issue of gender, where transgender ideology has almost entirely supplanted scientific truth among the left. More alarming still is the fact that many scientists and scientific institutions, which really should know better, are colluding in this deception.

The latest scientific institution to promote gender pseudoscience is the once-venerable Scientific American magazine, which this week published an article headlined “Here’s why human sex is not binary”.

Make no mistake, sex in human beings really is binary and immutable. There are few things more emphatically true in our scientific understanding of the world than the human sex binary. Human beings cannot change their sex – we are either male or female, as determined by which type of gametes our biology is organised to produce (sperm or eggs). These are observable, testable scientific facts. And this objective truth matters in very real and consequential ways – to our society, to law, to healthcare and to the safety of women and children.

Trans ideologues claim that the categories of male and female are on a “spectrum”, or that they represent nothing more than a subjective feeling. These ideas have already had disastrous consequences for society. It is thanks to these ideas that male rapists have been placed in women’s prisons in the UK. It is why, just this weekend, a biological man won an elite women’s cycling race in America – finishing 89 seconds ahead of the closest female competitor and netting $35,350 in prize money. We would simply recognise this as “cheating” were it not for the hold that gender ideology has over our institutions – and for the opprobrium that is visited on anyone who dissents.

After some silly and irrelevant trivia about the biology of lizards and fish (humans are neither fish nor lizards), the Scientific American article concludes by claiming that anyone who upholds the human sex binary is “trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society”. This single claim inadvertently reveals a great deal about what is wrong with the trans movement. Unable to refute the truth of the human sex binary, gender ideologues resort to demonising those who notice it as having ulterior, sinister motives.

This isn’t the first time Scientific American has lent its (now waning) credibility to gender nonsense. Back in 2018, it published an article titled “Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic”. To this day, this piece is gleefully shared around by gender activists, emboldened by this apparent vindication of their ideology from a credible, scientific publication. However, the author of the piece has since clarified that reality actually is as simplistic as humans having only “two sexes”.

The kinder, gentler US Naval War College

Filed under: Education, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander on a recent symposium at the U.S. Naval War College, showing just how much the American military has adapted itself to the Current Year:

Let’s take a look around the planet with a maritime national security lens, shall we?

  • The largest land war in Europe since WWII is raging on the north shore of the Black Sea.
  • The People’s Republic of China surpassed the United States of America as the world’s largest navy.
  • The Iranians are hijacking oil tankers willy-nilly.
  • The Western economy relies on undersea cables & pipelines we have allowed to go undefended and are now the subject of attention by mal-actors on the world stage.
  • The Navy is experiencing readiness and recruiting problems not seen since the 1970s.

There’s my top-5 off the top of my head this AM, yours may differ.

It sure seems to differ in Newport.

So, in the last week of April there was a 2-day symposium at the U.S. Naval War College, an opportune time to examine the most critically important challenges in 2023 — hopefully from a maritime perspective — wouldn’t you think?

Any conference, especially a 2-day affair with both on and off campus event locations, sure cost a lot of money and even more stacked manhours to plan, attend, participate, and manage.

We sure want to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze, right?

If you’re a regular here, you know where this is going. I warned everyone about this back in 2017. If you’re a new reader not fully up to speed on the broader portfolio we manage here at CDRSalamander, well, take a red pill and a seat.

Our war colleges are not what you think they are.

With each passing year there is less focus on war, and more on college. At the Naval War College, just getting additional time, money, faculty, and leadership focus on the “naval” portion has become a challenge with all the other ancillary agendas trying to keep pace with the cool kids cross-town at Salve Regina University.

Here’s a perfect example.

    The Naval War College (NWC) will host its 9th annual Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Symposium, 26-28 April 2023, in Newport, Rhode Island. This year’s theme is “Women, Peace, and Security in a Fragile World: Perspectives on Warfighting, Crisis Management, and Post-Conflict Transitions“.

Well, let’s go in with an open mind. Perhaps there’s something here. Hope isn’t a plan, but when the Party demands things of you, hope is often all you have.

If you voluntarily attended (I am reliably told that Party cadre informed the proles that attendance was required for staff, at least online), what kind of panel discussions would you be able to listen to? Let’s browse over the agenda.

In totally unrelated news, Brent Ramsey updates the odds on who will be promoted to be the US Navy’s next Chief of Naval Operations:

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Vice-Chief of Naval Operations, US Navy.

Last September, the Navy promoted and installed a new Vice Chief of Naval Operations. Then Vice Admiral Lisa Franchetti got her 4th star and was appointed to the second-highest position in the Navy. Now after a scant seven months, the betting line going around D.C. is that she will likely be the next CNO based on the identity politics track record of President Biden. When President Biden had an opportunity to appoint to the Supreme Court, before assessing anyone’s qualifications, he announced that a black woman would get that seat, and he followed up on that promise. Would an identity-based selection for the Navy’s top leader be in the best interest of the Navy and the Nation? No, the nation needs and deserves the very best warrior to lead the Navy into our threatened future.

Admiral Franchetti is a journalism graduate of Northwestern University NROTC, a non-STEM degree which itself is unusual, as the Navy strongly favors STEM degrees for officers. She has a Master’s Degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, an online university. Her biography does not mention any war college credential. In contrast, her predecessor Admiral William Lescher had multiple commands in combat zones, was a test pilot, had multiple advanced degrees in naval technical fields and his commands won multiple combat zone merit awards. To naval professionals, for someone to have been promoted to the Navy’s highest rank and second highest position based on a NROTC commissioning source with a liberal arts degree, an online masters, no war college or combat zone credentials, would be considered inconceivable. Perhaps her success is based on a particularly spectacular service record?

Admiral Franchetti’s career path reveals sea tours on a tender, oiler, and three destroyers including command of the USS Ross (DDG-71) and command of a destroyer squadron. Her biography does not mention any of her commands received awards while she was in command.

I’m not a betting man, but if I was, I think I’d be putting down a few jellybeans on Admiral Franchetti’s next posting …

April 24, 2023

Even fighter pilots and gunners have love lives

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, John Sturgis reviews a new book by Luke Turner titled Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, which considers the myths and reality of wartime relationships during the Second World War:

Spitfire pilot Ian Gleed shot down five enemy aircraft in just a week in May 1940 — the fastest time in which this had ever been done, making him an official “ace” who would be quickly promoted to Wing Commander.

Gleed had become a poster boy for “the few”, the hero pilots of the Battle of Britain to whom so many would owe so much. He lived up to the popular image with his talk of “a bloody good show” and shooting down “damned Huns”, after which he’d sink a few warm beers and spend some “wizard” free time recuperating with his girlfriend Pam, whom he “loved now more than ever”.

Gleed’s luck finally ran out over Tunisia in April 1943 when his plane was hit by a German fighter and crashed into dunes. Gleed was killed. He was just 26.

It would only emerge decades later that much of the popular image he had cultivated simply wasn’t true. Gleed was gay. Pam was an imaginary character he had invented as a cover to keep his double life as a sexually active homosexual firmly secret.

Gleed’s story is one of many similar vignettes in this alternative history of the Second World War. Its author Luke Turner’s previous book was a memoir about his own grappling with issues around his identity as a bisexual. Here he takes up the question of how this would have played out for him and other sexual non-conformists in 1939–45.

Turner grew up obsessed with the war — everything from Airfix kits and Dad’s Army to Stalingrad and the Berlin bunker — and here he examines what it was to live through that period as a sexually active person of whatever hue. It proves a particularly rich subject matter as sex seems to have been everywhere in war time: everyone was sleeping with everyone else, apparently. It’s a perennial truth that you or I might be hit by a bus tomorrow — but make that bus a bomb, and suddenly this seems to create a sense of urgency which frequently manifests itself sexually, lending daily life what Turner calls “an aphrodisiac quality”. As Quentin Crisp put it when describing the shenanigans in blacked-out, Blitz London: “As soon as the bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed.”

Whilst war may see an explosion of sex of all kinds, the establishment was not always comfortable with this. A Home Office report on public behaviour in London during the Blitz noted, “In several districts cases of blatant immorality in shelters are reported; this upsets other occupants of the shelters.”

One contemporary account suggests, “In wartime a uniform, whether of the Army, Navy or Air Force, to the average girl ranks as a fetish.” This had consequences in the field: Dear John letters from home could be a real problem in this regard. As an Army report in 1942 put it, morale is often damaged by “the suspicion, very frequently justified, of fickleness on behalf of wives and girls”.

Amongst all this sex was, of course, sex with Americans. Turner cites George Formby who captured this mood in the song “Our Fanny’s Gone All Yankee”: “She don’t wait for the dark when she wants to have a lark/In a bus or train she does her hanky panky.”

Then in a dark reversal of this two-nations-colliding-sexually motif, we get the horror of the Red Army’s organised rape of as many as 1.4 milllion German women during the Russian advance on Berlin, whose residents would later refer to the city’s grandiose monument to Soviet war dead as “the tomb of the unknown rapist”.

April 23, 2023

Dylan Mulvaney’s “triumph of performance and marketing”

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

Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon:

Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney

I’ve largely ignored the entire Bud Light tempest in a toxic teacup because social media outrages and brand boycotts come and go and tend to leave little trace behind. But the fuss over the beer brand’s brief commercial dalliance with trans newbie Dylan Mulvaney — with her 10.8 million TikTok followers — nonetheless fascinates. It shows, it seems to me, just how much everyone is projecting, and how (almost) everyone is getting it wrong.

There are, it seems, many layers to Dylan. To countless straight people, left and right, Dylan is a transgender star — because she is biologically male, and yet has been saying she is a girl now for more than a year, wears women’s clothes and is pretty and charming and full of manic energy. (I’m mostly using her preferred pronouns here, the least clumsy option). The woke left therefore loves her, and the Matt Walsh right has had a collective aneurysm. But for many gay men, including yours truly, Dylan’s latest, year-long performance as a “girl” looks and sounds like something much more familiar.

Dylan, to us at least, is a pretty classic, child-actor, musical theater queen — an effeminate gay man who finds great joy and relief in Broadway camp and drama, and is liable to burst into song at any moment. (I used to wonder if this very specific manifestation would die out as gays integrated more. But no! It seems to be in our collective DNA. Every generation mints a new variety.) And she’s managed to bait both the woke left and the anti-woke right into making her very famous and a lot richer than a year ago.

It’s a triumph of performance and marketing. It can be frustrating for a young actor among so many. You can do your best, become a finalist in Campus Superstar in 2018, wear only briefs for a performance at Joe’s Pub, perform, however well, in the cast of Book Of Mormon, camp it up for Ellen, or do the exact same ditzy-girl act on The Price Is Right as a man (Dylan’s previous attempts at fame). But become a parody of a “girl” and provide breathless, daily updates on your transition — and nearly 11 million people on TikTok will follow. At the same time brand yourself as a pioneer for greater understanding, love, and civil rights … and you can get an extended interview on The Today Show and an audience at the White House.

The gimmick was simple: a TikTok clip for every day of “becoming a girl.” As Dylan explained:

    When the pandemic hit, I was doing the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. I found myself jobless and without the creative means to do what I loved. I downloaded TikTok, assuming it was a kids’ app. … [R]ight before I started creating content with “Days of Girlhood”, I thought, “What am I going to do to afford my rent this month?”

Well, she no longer has to worry about that. Dylan has brand partnerships with Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Crest, Instacart, Ulta Beauty, Kate Spade and many more. And here is what Dylan means by “becoming a girl” in his/her own words. Trigger warning for feminists:

    Day One of being a girl and I’ve already cried three times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then, uh, when someone asked me how I was, I said I’m fine — when I wasn’t fine [applies lip gloss]. How’d I do, ladies? Good? Girl power!

If you think this has to be a joke, a parody making fun of sexist ideas about women, you’re not the only one. (Trans YouTuber Blaire White also assumed it was a spoof at first, and her video on Dylan’s “womanface” is well worth a watch.) But no! Here’s more:

    “Hangin with the girlieeees, woohoo! [The camera pans across a series of dolls sitting in chairs] … I almost bought this Audrey [Hepburn] portrait. I just love her, she’s everything I want to be.”

    “Day Three of being a girl and I’ve already become a bimbo. … I think it’s a good fit for me. What do you think, ladies?”

    “Day Four of being a girl and I’m exhausted — the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the high heels. It’s a lot to keep up with!”
    “Day 12 of being a girl and I just picked up some tampons.”

She never subsequently seems to put them down. At one point, we see Dylan hiking in high heels, and running hysterically away from a flying bug. In another clip, she dresses up in a skimpy evening gown and fantasizes about her future husband:

    I want them to know I’ll be their cheerleader on and off the field. So they can picture me walking down the aisle to be their trophy bride, or trophy wife. I would totally be good at that, don’t you think? “Dinner’s ready! Yoo-hoo!”

Call me a transphobe, but I just don’t think that someone who has been struggling with gender identity her whole life and found a pathway to womanhood … would ever celebrate it quite like that. Yet this firehose of misogynistic tropes was one of a handful of people who were invited to the White House to interview Biden personally.

The only thing more absurd than this was the far right falling for the whole schtick as well. After the Bud Light ad, Kid Rock filmed himself shooting cases of beer with a semi-automatic rifle; a businessman opted for a baseball bat in an ad to promote his new “Ultra Right” beer; bomb threats rattled some Bud factories; countless tweets popped up alleging a collapse in sales of Bud Light; then the Trumps went to war with Matt Walsh because Anheuser-Busch is a major GOP donor; then the former cover-girl, current Fox News star Caitlyn Jenner called Dylan’s act an “absurdity“; and so on. Good times.

April 22, 2023

“I’d stock every preschool classroom with The Anarchist’s Cookbook if I could”

Filed under: Books, Education, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

I’m also a libertarian, but I might not go quite as far as Freddie deBoer in the quote in the headline:

Julian Sanchez makes good sense here on recent bills in Florida designed to regulate and censor LGBTQ content in schools:

Yes, indeed. Kids will learn about LGBTQ issues sooner or later. It’s pointless to try and keep them from finding out about the existence of homosexuality, of gay love, of gay marriage, of trans people and gender nonconformity. They’re gonna find out. They have smartphones, usually much younger than they should. They’re curious and the world is always a click away. It’s foolish to try and prevent them from learning about this stuff. And, in fact, the more that you try to restrict what they learn, the more likely they are to explore this world in a way that openly defies your efforts. LGBTQ people, politics, art, and culture exist. You’re entitled to object to LGBTQ rights, in a free society, but you’re not entitled to (or able to) create a bubble in which others are kept hidden from knowledge of the existence of LGBTQ people. People love that I’m forever tweaking liberals about their attachment to various forms of unreality, to thinking that they can wish away facts of life that they’re uncomfortable with. But it’s the same deal here.

Look, I will acknowledge that some of the reporting on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has distorted and exaggerated what the bill calls for, and I also think there’s a lot of motivated dismissal about the nature of some of the content that’s being debated. For example, some people have gone to the ramparts to defend access to the book This Book is Gay, which explicitly advertises itself as a guide to sex, despite the fact that the author herself says it’s not for children. (Pictures of the book that are routinely circulated are typically dismissed as conservative fabrications, but you just have to look at the book to know that isn’t true.) Probably that particular example is a matter of some groups being lazy when putting together reading lists, but of course there are always going to be debates and edge cases.

Would I ban that book? Of course not. Personally, I’m completely libertarian about this stuff; I’d stock every preschool classroom with The Anarchist’s Cookbook if I could. But there’s a difference between holding that position and believing it’s credible to pretend that there’s literally nothing to debate there. It’s pointless to pretend that books in a public school classroom are going to remain untouched by these disagreements. The views of parents will inevitably be expressed through the democratic apparatus that presides over those schools. Of course people are going to debate this stuff. Vociferously.

Still, the objections are ultimately misguided for the reasons Sanchez says. Plenty of kids in extremely repressive conservative environments dreamed of a future as an openly gay person in a liberal city, before the internet. I’ve always had qualms about the “born this way” framing — if being gay was a choice, would society have any legitimate right to refuse people from making it? — but the simple reality is that gay people and trans people etc have always transcended restrictive social and religious environments in their interior life, even if it was too dangerous for them to express it. If a kid is gay, they’re gonna figure that out. You don’t have to speed along the process, but trying to artificially impede their progress won’t work. That’s an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement.

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