Cultivating hatred for another human group ought to be no more acceptable when it issues from the mouths of women than when it comes from men, no more tolerable from feminists than from the Ku Klux Klan.
Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, 1998.
September 30, 2021
QotD: Hate speech
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June 27, 2021
“Apologies are just a subset of performance art for Trudeau, not actual admissions of failure and expressions of regret”
From The Line‘s weekend wrap-up post, a reminder that the top leadership of the Canadian Armed Forces and the government are still embroiled in scandal:
Canadian Defence Minister (at least for the moment) Harjit Sajjan during his pre-ministerial career.
In other news, your Line editors continue to think that not enough of you are tuned in to the sexual misconduct scandal still roiling the Canadian Armed Forces. Yes, yes, we know the military is this weird, complicated thing that no one really pays much attention to in this country. But you really ought to be.
You all know the basic outline already: sexual harassment and assault is a major problem in the armed forces. In 2015, former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps completed a major report into the issue, and recommended sweeping changes. A few of the changes were made, but the report was mostly immediately assigned dust-collector status and forgotten. That would be bad enough, but what really gave this life was that the Trudeau government — specifically, National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan — was given a heads-up that Gen. Jonathan Vance, the country’s top military officer, was himself accused of misconduct. And the PMO found a way to bend the nature of the space-time continuum as they contorted and twisted their way out of having to do anything about it.
It’s a horrific look for a government that considers itself feminist, especially when the guy at the top has some baggage of his own. The Liberals did what Liberals do — said they should have done better and circled the wagons. Accountability is for chumps, after all. This week, Gregory Lick, the ombudsman for the Canadian Armed Forces — a position that exists to give serving members of the armed forces a place to go with complaints within their chains of command — took aim at his own chain of command — Minister Sajjan, saying that his reporting structure has to be changed because Sajjan, frankly, ain’t interested in hearing about problems that the Liberals find awkward.
Here’s Lick:
The collective actions or, in some cases, the inaction of senior political, military and civilian leadership within the government have eroded trust within the defence community … When leaders turn a blind eye to our recommendations and concerns in order to advance political interests and their own self-preservation or career advancement, it is the members of the defence community that suffer the consequences … It is clear that inaction is rewarded far more than action. In the four months since the most recent outbreak of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, the actions of the minister of National Defence, senior government and military officials have bitterly proved this point. The erratic behaviour of leadership defies common sense or reason. The concept of ministerial accountability has been absent.
Folks, trust us when we tell you that by the standard of Ottawa bureaucratese, that statement is blistering. Lick is directly targeting Sajjan with that last sentence. Translated into normal Canadian English, Lick is accusing Sajjan of inaction in the face of obvious problems.
[…]
What was it that Lick said about ministerial accountability again? About inaction? Oh dear, it’s totally slipped our little ole minds. Probably nothing important!
More seriously: We don’t expect much to come from this. From any of it, or from all of it. Firing Sajjan would require Trudeau to admit he’d fell short, and, well, we all know this guy is way more comfortable apologizing for stuff that happened a century before he was born than he ever is admitting he himself screwed up. Apologies are just a subset of performance art for Trudeau, not actual admissions of failure and expressions of regret. But let’s not mistake what has happened here. A slew of senior military officers have quit or been removed. The PMO has been singed. Sajjan has been directly called out, and his own assistant implicated.
There is no mystery here. Canadians have been told there is rot in the government, and that our men and women in uniform are suffering for it while Trudeau looks the other way. And you’ll have to get used to that, too.
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April 16, 2021
The continued evolution of the Marxist class struggle – “Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class”
Arthur Chrenkoff provides some background on the evolution of Marxist thought as they abandon efforts to rouse the working classes of the west against their capitalist oppressors and switch to attempting to rouse the “wokeing class” against their deplorable racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist white male cisgendered oppressors:
In developing his philosophy, Karl Marx posited human history as a struggle of two sections of society: the minority who hold the all power and the powerless majority. In Marx’s time, the minority was termed the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, or simply The Capital, those controlling (owning and benefitting from) the means of production, while the majority was called the working class, or the proletariat, the masses who sell their labour, and whose collective toil makes the capitalists rich. The essential dynamic of a society is one of power: who has it and who doesn’t, and how it’s exercised (or as Lenin said, “who whom?”). It’s a zero sum equation: all or nothing, the one or the other, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. There is a moral dimension to this dichotomy: the former, by virtue of their position, are the villains, the latter the virtuous. It’s also absolutist: the individual doesn’t matter and individuality is an irrelevant illusion; you are the class to which you belong.
One of the most important aspects of this group dynamic is that the dominant class uses its position and power to shape the society in accordance with its needs. Thus, all the institutions, laws, traditions and phenomena reflect the interests of the ruling class; they are designed to benefit them and only them and keep their power entrenched. And what benefits one class invariably harms the other: the masses. You can thus say that in a capitalist society everything’s classist.
The twentieth century dashed the hopes of Marx’s disciples that the proletariat would revolt against and overthrow their capitalist oppressors. The working class was bought off with better working conditions and rising incomes: a house, a car, and a football game. While elsewhere communism triumphed through coups and foreign invasions, in the Western world genuine revolutions did not happen; capitalism is still around. While the working class might have disappointed and let down Marxists, the basic Marxist thinking has not changed: the society is divided into two mutually hostile groups, the oppressors and the oppressed. Now we just need to find the different oppressed and we’ll have another crack at destroying capitalism and creating our socialist utopia. Out with the purely economic divisions, in with racial, gender and sexual ones. Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class.
Fast forward to 2021, and the neo-Marxist struggle continues to gather wind in its sail. On the one side the power-holders: white, male, straight; on the other the powerless: women, people of colour, other sexualities. The actors might have been changed but the essential drama remains the same: the struggle of the virtuous but powerless oppressed majority against their dastardly rulers and the system created for their benefit and everyone else’s disadvantage. Just as in the past every aspect of society was biased against and harmful to the proletariat, so now it is against the proletariat 2.0: everything’s racist – and sexist, and homophobic and transphobic. This is also why the activists describe racism as “systemic”; not because there are still Jim Crow laws in existence, and legal segregation and discrimination, but because the system created by the “white” society by its very nature must be oppressive and hostile to anyone non-white. Piecemeal fixing problems and gradual reforms are useless; the only solution is a radical societal transformation that elevates the oppressed and casts down the oppressors.
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December 23, 2020
Our “systemically racist and patriarchal society” which oppresses “people of color, women, and LGBT”
To hear some people (especially on social media in these locked-down pandemic days), there has never been a human society that more greatly benefits white heterosexual men and oppresses everyone else like the modern west. Here are some stats from Rav Arora to challenge that claim:
We are frequently told by commentators and theorists on the progressive and liberal Left that we live in a systemically racist and patriarchal society. The belief that Western societies privilege white men and oppress people of color, women, and LGBT citizens is especially popular within academic institutions, legacy media, the entertainment industry, and even sports. However, newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 undermine this narrative. Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year — an unprecedented outcome. Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts. Furthermore, the income gap between both black and Latino men and Asian women is wider than it has ever been. The income gap between white and black women, meanwhile, is much narrower than the gap between their male counterparts.
These outcomes cannot exist in a society suffused with misogyny and racism. As confounding to conventional progressive wisdom as these new figures appear to be, copious research finds that ethnic minorities and women frequently eclipse their white and male counterparts, even when these identities intersect. Several ethnic minority groups consistently out-perform whites in a variety of categories — higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823). The report also finds substantial economic gains among minority groups. Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute reports that from 2018 to 2019, Asian and black households had the highest rate of median income growth (10.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively) of all main racial groups (although she cautions that overall disparities remain “largely unchanged”). On a longitudinal scale, Hispanics, not whites, had the highest income growth in 2019 relative to the start of the Great Recession in 2007 (although many of these gains have been reversed by the pandemic).
Rapidly rising female economic success is partly a product of higher academic representation. 2019 was the 11th consecutive year in which women earned the majority of doctoral degrees. Women accounted for 57 percent of all students across American colleges in 2018 according to the latest US Department of Education figures and earned the majority of associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees. According to University of Michigan economist Mark J. Perry, “By overall enrollment in higher education men have been an under-represented minority for the last 40 years.” Sex differences in cognition can help to explain differential performance along gender lines — although men typically perform better on quantitative and visuospatial tasks, several studies have found that on average women perform better in verbal and memory tasks and on reading and writing tests.
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December 11, 2020
“Politically correct language … seemed like a nice, polite, and Canadian sort of thing to do”
Meaghie Champion discusses politically correct language in The Line:
Source: https://www.deviantart.com/blamethe1st/art/Statist-And-Anarchist-063-Political-Correctness-589944623
I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. I have never lived in a world without what we now call “political correctness” — typically understood to mean using a kind of stilted and artificial language in order to atone for the disadvantages and slights suffered by marginalized groups and avoid inflicting new ones. Politically correct language required more effort to communicate, but it seemed like that effort was worth it to not offend people. It seemed like a nice, polite, and Canadian sort of thing to do.
I went along with political correctness out of a sincere desire to be accommodating to disadvantaged and dis-enfranchised groups. This became especially true after I learned about the “Sapir Whorf theory of psycho neurolinguistics.” The theory suggests that language shapes our perception of reality; that by altering the way we talk, we can shift the way we think — and, thus, collectively, we can shape reality itself. From this, it seemed logical to “de-gender” language or stop using stereotypes. It seemed like a small ask. Maybe I personally couldn’t solve big problems that concerned me as a good liberal … i.e. things like poverty or world hunger, but I could be nice in how I expressed myself and try to use language that everybody was using to be equitable and more fair.
What I didn’t understand, then, was that this precedent set a trap in which many good, well-intentioned liberals are finding themselves stuck. It’s no longer about ameliorating past sins: there is a project afoot to re-make the English language. The purpose of this project is to re-engineer how people think about certain subjects like gender, sex, and race, while skipping the necessary prerequisites of persuasion and logic. Conservative positions are declared off limits, even bigoted, simply by shaping the way we are allowed to talk about them.
Right now, even as I type this, there is a veritable army of academics hard at work on what they call “de-colonizing” and “de-gendering” language at many universities and colleges. There are tens of thousands of activists and academics in universities and online organizing and pushing for ever-changing rules to be enforced as it relates to the English language. It’s a multi-million-dollar industry in academia and woke corporatism. And it’s already starting to spill over into government regulations and enforcement.
I love the English language. I have been a voracious reader since childhood. I thrill at well-spoken and written prose and poetry. A finely turned witticism or fantastic mot juste can break my heart with its perfection. Further, I’m First Nations, and that love of the English language has also carried me into a love of the study of my tribal cradle tongue “Hul’qumi’num.” Shouldn’t I, as a First Nations person, be in favour of de-colonizing the English language? No. No, I do not think so. I have little patience or regard for any effort that makes language a less workable and functional tool of human endeavour. I identify strongly as a writer, and I take this assault upon the tool with which I conduct my craft very personally.
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December 3, 2020
QotD: Presidential droit du seigneur
Let’s look at some of the Dem dudes who do it, starting with the aptly named Bill Clinton. Mr. Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit was all too happy to use women as his personal playthings with varying degrees of consent, ranging from none to “I always wanted to do it in the Oval Office!” And the feminists, the media and the rest of the Democrat Party adjuncts gave him a pass. Some were willing to give him even more. The message was simple: if you are called upon to be a Clinton sex toy, kneel down then shut up for the cause.
This is a Democrat tradition. JFK, when he wasn’t tapping the help he was pimping them out to his buddies in the White House pool. His dalliance with Marilyn Monroe was one thing – she was a consenting adult who could have told him to pound sand (or something else). It’s his serial preying upon the interns and secretaries and other assorted Dem doxies in his orbit that really demonstrates the essential contempt for women that drove his satyriasis – and that (which along with its traditional racism) still drives the Democrat Party.
Oh, and speaking of driving, no discussion of the chronic Democrat abuse of women would be complete without observing that the Lion of the Senate left his booty call du jour to drown in an Oldsmobile at the bottom of a pond. And the same message we hear over and over again to protect Democrat exploiters protected Teddy Kennedy – hey Mary Jo, take one for the team.
She didn’t have much choice about taking one for the team since, in those last agonizing minutes, she couldn’t take a breath.
But hey, Teddy saved abortion, and his ceaseless campaign for a perpetual open season on troublesome fetuses makes it all worthwhile. Abortion is another of those Democrat policies that women get to pay for. The idea that it is somehow empowering or liberating for women is so much garbage. It’s empowering and liberating for men who don’t want to reap the result of their sowing.
Kurt Schlichter, “Women Always Have To Pick Up The Check For Democrats”, Townhall.com, 2020-08-30.
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November 17, 2020
QotD: Prejudice
Or just think about how much ink has been spilled arguing that it is unfair and unjust to assume that one black youth is a criminal or a threat just because he resembles in some way a negative stereotype. I’m not mocking this argument; I am agreeing with it.
As I’ve been saying until I’m blue in the face on my book tour, one of the greatest things about this country is the ideal — always in tension with the lesser devils of our natures — that says we should take people as we find them. My objection to identity politics is that it reduces millions of people to a single attribute or grievance. It assumes that, simply by accident of birth, some people are more noble or more evil than others.
If you think that all you need to know about an African-American person to size up his character or humanity is his skin color, then you’re a racist. […]
You can run similar thought experiments about virtually any group. If all you need to know about Oscar Wilde is that he was a gay dude, just like Richard Simmons or Milo what’s-his-name, you’re a bigot. If Meyer Lansky and Albert Einstein are merely two Jews to you, you’re an anti-Semite. If Margaret Thatcher, Joan of Arc, and Lizzie Borden are just three chicks, you’re a sexist.
And again, historically, this is mostly a left-wing or liberal (both in the classical and modern senses of the word) insight. But for some bizarre reason, for many people, this idea evaporates like water off a hot skillet when you replace any of these categories with “white” or, very often, “male.”
Suddenly fancy words and phrases fly like sawdust from a wood chipper: “structures of oppression!” “decontextualized!” “ahistoricized!” etc. It’s all so clever and complicated. The same people who take to the streets at the slightest suggestion that Muslims can be judged by the evil deeds of other Muslims will lecture and harangue you for hours, mob you on Twitter, or condescendingly dismiss you for not understanding that all white people have it coming.
I am not denying the history of white racism in America. I’m more than eager to acknowledge it. But what these people are basically saying is that you can say bigoted things about all white people based on things other white people have done. And spare me the argument that some 70-hour-a-week truck driver in Appalachia has it coming because he’s a grand beneficiary of white supremacy.
Jonah Goldberg, “The G-File”, National Review, 2018-08-03.
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October 17, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on the pervasiveness of Critical Race Theory in academia
In his latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan discusses how deeply embedded Critical Race Theory has become in the academic, journalistic and cultural realms controlled by the left:
… the CRT advocates have brilliantly managed to construct a crude moral binary to pressure liberals into submission. Where liberalism allows neutrality or doubt or indifference, CRT demands an absolute and immediate choice between racism and anti-racism (defined by CRT) — and no one wants to be a racist, do they? Legitimate anguish about racial inequality and the sheer terror of being publicly labeled a bigot have led liberals to surrender their core values to the far left.
The second reason for CRT’s triumph is that it’s super-easy. Social inequalities are extremely complicated things. A huge variety of factors may be in play: class, family structure, education, neighborhood, sex, biology, genetics and culture are some of them. Untangling this empirically in order to figure out what might actually work to improve things is hard work. But when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite “structural racism” as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you’re home-free. Those who raise objections or complications or cite nuances can be dismissed by the same easy method.
Then there’s the deep relationship between CRT and one of the most powerful human drives: tribalism. What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue. You don’t have to correct yourself when your tribal psyche makes you more cognizant of someone’s visible racial differences, and pre-judges them. You don’t have to resist this any more. You can give in to your core nature, and feel pride, rather than shame. You get to have all the feels of judging people entirely by their involuntary characteristics, while actually dismantling racism and sexism! What’s not to like?
Social aspiration also plays a part. The etiquette of wokery is increasingly indispensable for high society. They mark you as someone high up in the American social hierarchy. The right words and phrases signal your ease in this elite; the wrong ones — “sexual preference”! — expose you as a rube, a bigot or, worse, a middle class provincial. Rob Henderson argues that this aspiration to be in the upper classes helps explain why Asian-Americans, who are targeted for direct race discrimination under CRT, nonetheless often support it: “While money and education are tickets to the middle class, prizing diversity is a requirement to join the upper class. It’s part of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as cultural capital — tastes, vocabulary, awareness and mannerisms which give social advantages to those higher in the social hierarchy.” Reihan Salam has also written brilliantly about this.
There’s little doubt, either, it seems to me that there is a religious component to wokeness. A generation of nones can feel bereft of transcendence and meaning, and “becoming woke”, like being “born again,” fills that spiritual hole. In an atomized and lonely age, feeling as if you are on “the right side of history”, banishing doubt, joining with countless of your fellow converts in marches and seminars, can abate the isolation and emptiness of it all. Many moderns want the experience of religion without God. With CRT, as in the past with communism, they can have it.
But what also make CRT so successful is ruthlessness. Those who hold a view of the world in which only power, and the struggle for power, matters, have few qualms in exercising it. After all, under CRT, power is always on the side of the white cis-heteropatriarchy, so payback is always fair play. Discriminating against the unwoke or whites or males or the cis-gendered or Asian-American, is not just fair, but vital. Shutting down speech protects the oppressed; bullying on social media and in the workplace becomes a form of virtue; mercy and forgiveness are mere buttresses for white supremacy; HR departments diligently identify dissidents, and discipline them. Once you set up this system of censorship and fear, persecute a few prominent sinners pour décourager les autres, and encourage snitches, dissidents will increasingly self-censor, and dissent peter out, until the new orthodoxy is the only one.
In the past, a new set of ideas could be engaged in a clash of argument and debate. But you’ll notice that the advocates of what Wes Yang has called “the successor ideology” never debate any serious opponents of their position. This is because debate in a liberal society implies equal standing for both sides, and uses reason to determine who’s right or wrong. But there can be no “both sides” within CRT, no equation of “racists” and “antiracists”, and debates are inherently oppressive. Logic, evidence, and reason are, in this worldview, mere products of white supremacy, forms of violence against the oppressed. In CRT, remember, there is no truth or objectivity; there are merely narratives. So, yes, 2 + 2 = 5, and math is inherently a function of whiteness. And what racist is going to deny this?
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October 5, 2020
QotD: Language changes to accord with critical studies theory
Leading progressive maternity and doula organizations now deploy and encourage a whole array of “gender-neutral language” with respect to sex, birth, labor, and parenting. And so we now have the terms “chest-feeding,” “persons who menstruate,” “persons who produce sperm,” and “birthing person” for breastfeeding, women, men, and mothers, respectively. And instead of a butthole, we have a “back-hole”; instead of a vagina, we have a “front hole.” “Ovaries” and “uterus” are now rendered as “internal organs,” which may strike you as somewhat vague. These may sound completely absurd now, but given the choke hold critical gender theory has on almost all elite organizations, you can be sure you’ll hear them soon enough. They’ll likely be mandatory if you want to prove you’re not a transphobe. It was an objection to one of these terms — “people who menstruate” — that got J.K. Rowling tarred again as a bigot.
Those of us who oppose this abuse of the English language, who try to abide by Orwell’s dictum to use the simplest, clearest Anglo-Saxon words to describe reality, are now instantly suspect. Given the fear of losing your job for resisting this madness, most people will submit to this linguistic distortion. As you can see everywhere, the stigma of being called a bigot sweeps away all objects before it. But the further this goes — and there is no limiting principle in critical theory at all — the less able we are to describe reality. Which is, of course, the point. Narratives, only narratives, exist. And power, only power, matters.
Andrew Sullivan, “China Is a Genocidal Menace”, New York, 2020-07-03.
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August 22, 2020
QotD: Sex-differentiated status hierarchies
Girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy — by being good at what girls value, as girls. They can add to this victory by winning in the boys’ hierarchy. Boys, however, can only win by winning in the male hierarchy. They will lose status, among girls and boys, by being good at what girls value. It costs them in reputation among the boys, and in attractiveness among the girls. Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.
“whatever that means”. Heh. Shivvy way to say, “which means nothing”.
When JP discusses sex differences, he could be reading CH posts. Whatever one thinks of the criticisms leveled against him (some are valid), he does have a decent grasp of the sexual market and how men and women navigate divergent routes through an ocean of mate prospects to get what they want.
However, this is one of the rare instances when I disagree with his premise. He’s generally correct that, at least within the bounds of our current cultural arrangement, women have two status hierarchies available to them while men only have one. Our gynarcho-tyranny not only encourages but aggressively impresses upon women the urgency and even moral duty of succeeding in male domains (leaning in), while simultaneously encouraging men to sacrifice their status within their own male domains to make way for more women (and consequently rendering themselves less sexually attractive to women who are now their equal or higher in social status).
Women who do succeed in the man’s world can expect to ascend the intrafemale status ladder (more precisely, the intra-feminist status ladder), but where JP is wrong is assuming these women don’t also suffer an SMV status loss the near-equivalent of the SMV status loss suffered by men who succeed at girlie games of one-uppance.
Just as girls aren’t attracted to effeminate males, and other men are repulsed by nancyboys, the inverse is as true: men aren’t attracted to masculine, status-striving girls, and other women don’t subconsciously look up to mouthy careerist shrikes with the same mix of envy and admiration that they look up to physically beautiful women.
CH, “Sex-Based Status”, Chateau Heartiste, 2018-06-04.
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July 26, 2020
J.K. Rowling receives an apology
In his first Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan reports on the retraction and apology by The Day to J.K. Rowling:
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been pivotal for many Millennials in encouraging them to move away from traditional religious beliefs.
We’re used to public apologies by now, but this one is a little different. It comes from a magazine for schoolchildren in England, called The Day. It reads:
We accept that our article implied that … JK Rowling … had attacked and harmed trans people. The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour … We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted. We accept that our comparisons of JK Rowling to people such as Picasso, who celebrated sexual violence, and Wagner, who was praised by the Nazis for his antisemitic and racist views, were clumsy, offensive and wrong … We unreservedly apologise to JK Rowling for the offence caused, and are happy to retract these false allegations and to set the record straight.
The Day had been referring to JK Rowling’s open letter on trans issues, which you can read in its entirety here and judge for yourself.
I have to say it’s good to see this apology in print. It remains simply amazing to me that the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture.” It is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people. Her now infamous letter is elegant, calm, reasonable and open-hearted. Among other things, Rowling wrote: “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.”
She became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.
This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.
[…]
It pains me to see where this debate has gone. There’s so much common ground. And I do not doubt that taking into account the lived experiences of trans people is important. But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as JK Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.
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July 24, 2020
Orchestras encouraged to ditch blind auditions for reasons of diversity
Tal Bachman responds to a recent New York Times article by Tony Tommasini demanding that musical organizations ignore the relative quality of a potential musician’s play in order to ensure more visible minority players get hired:
The New York Philharmonic Orchestra, detail from a group portrait in 2018.
Photo from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra website.
Tommasini begins his piece, entitled “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions”, by decrying the racism and sexism which, he claims, kept the orchestras of yesteryear predominantly white and male. He then pays tribute to the simple practice that helped erase that racism and sexism from orchestra hiring procedures: the blind audition. Starting in the late 1960s, orchestras began ditching traditional face-to-face auditions in favour of auditions that took place behind screens. With orchestra administrators no longer able to see the race or sex of the orchestra applicant, conscious and unconscious bias in hiring choices became impossible. Musical skill became the sole criterion for winning one of those prized professional playing positions.
This meritocratic turn, Tommasini argues, proved especially beneficial to female players. Whereas in 1970, women made up only 6% of orchestras, they now make up somewhere between a third and half of an average orchestra.
I add that audiences also benefited from meritocratic hiring processes as orchestras played increasingly brilliant renditions of the classics. Those improved performances also showed greater reverence for the original composers themselves. In short, the blind audition was a big win for all lovers of musical excellence – players, living composers, and fans alike.
So why on earth would anyone now call for their abolition?
Tommasini answers this way:
Blind auditions changed the face of American orchestras. But not enough. American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to black and Latino artists … Ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.
In other words, the low number of black and Latino classical musicians means orchestras need to re-institute the old-time racial discrimination Tommasini began his article by decrying. Orchestras need to know which applicants are white and Asian precisely so they can refuse to hire them on that basis, no matter how skilled they are. Blind auditions make racial discrimination impossible, so they must be scrapped. American orchestras, writes Tommasini, should stop “passively waiting for representation to emerge from behind the audition screen”. Instead, they must realize that “removing the screen is a crucial step”.
To summarize: For Tommasini, it’s not just that justice requires injustice. It’s that justice is injustice (injustice in the form of racial discrimination). And if that reminds you of the official slogan of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984 – war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – you’re not alone.
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July 19, 2020
QotD: How to raise a God-Emperor son
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018.
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July 4, 2020
QotD: Interpreting what men say
1. “Exactly what I said” — 75% of the time.
2. “Apparently I have not said the right thing yet, because your panties are still on” — 15%.
3. “My God, you’re still talking. You make me wish I had a tranquilizer gun. Doesn’t it ever stop? Jesus, I hope you didn’t say anything important, because all I hear is a buzzing sound. Did I say ‘okay’ or ‘mm-hmm’ or just grunt last time? I better mix it up, or you’ll realize I’m watching the game” — 10%
That covers it.
Steve H., “Traitor in Your Midst: She Must be Dealt With”, Hog On Ice, 2005-02-17.
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May 10, 2020
QotD: “Shirtstorm” and other forms of systematic patriarchal oppression of women
Which totally justified making a rocket scientist cry on the day of his greatest triumph. After all, people like him had ruined her life, right?
But it gets worse than that – there was an entire campus filled with supposedly educated (ah!) women terrorized by the statue of a sleep walking man.
And then there’s the ever-elastic definition of “sexual assault” which – I’m not making this up – can now be ratcheted down to “Looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable” or, for that matter “failed to sexually assault me.” Oh, sorry, that last was the definition of racism. Some Palestinian woman looked at rape statistics and found that Israeli women are raped by Palestinian men in much higher numbers than Palestinian women are raped by Israeli men, and immediately concluded this is because Israelis are racist. It beggars the mind.
Another thing that beggars the mind is the progressive image of women as great warriors. You know, in all the movies and half the books (often without supernatural explanation) a 90 lb chick can beat 300 lb men. And women were always great fighters throughout the ages. And, and, and …
And yet, women are peaceful – peaceful, d*mn it. This is why “peaceful planet of women” is a trope on TV tropes. Not just a trope, but a dead horse one.
Attempts to square that circle have included the explanation that women are only violent because patriarchy. There needs be nothing else said because in this context, and with apologies to the ponies, Patriarchy Is Magic. Honorable mention on trying to square the circle must go to Law and Order‘s attempted episode on Gamer Gate where the game the woman designer had written was about Peaceful Amazon Warriors.
Sarah Hoyt, “Give Me My Smelling Salts, Ho! A Blast From The Past From April 2015”, According to Hoyt, 2020-01-22.
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