I very much enjoyed this spontaneous free flowing conversation between Joe Rogan and Bill Maher. It's such a change of pace from the orchestrated filtered corporate bullshit we get in many other places these days.
At Common Sense, Zoe Strimpel has written an article titled "How Feminism Got Hijacked. The movement that once declared “I am woman, hear me roar” can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?"
In this article, Strimpel refers to this March 31 2022 Headline in The Washington Post:
What follows is an excerpt from Strimpel's excellent article:
Post-Feminist Feminism has morphed into a dark, strange Anti-Feminism. Anti-Feminism borrows from the language of liberation, but it’s not about liberating women. It’s about pushing women out of college sports. It’s about telling girls they aren’t lesbians or tomboys, but in fact men struggling to find themselves.
It is the madness that led a storied American newspaper to run an anti-woman (or de-woman-ed) headline—garnering roughly 1,400 comments (almost all negative) before shutting down the comments section. It is the trap that ensnared a Supreme Court nominee, who had acquitted herself with great aplomb and suddenly found herself at the end of an ideological cul de sac. To attempt an answer, any answer, to the question—Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?—would be to re-center women, biological sex, the concrete, mundane experience of ordinary, boring, bourgeois and working-class and very poor women the world over. It would be to attempt to undo the hijacking of the feminist cause and to return it to the people for whom that cause was created so many decades ago.
Returning the cause to the people for whom it was created is the only way to save it, and to stop the many discriminations that girls and women still face: domestic violence; the economic and psychological penalty of having babies; the manifold hurts and crimes visited upon countless women in non-Western countries simply for being women. For now, doing anything about all of that is a fantasy. First, we have to honor the actual meaning of words, like woman. We have to insist that those meanings are important. We have to go back, again, to first principles. That is the only way forward.
I will never stop using the word "woman" to refer to the women in my life, whether they be my mom, my daughters, my sisters and my friends. I do so proudly and publicly. I will speak out strongly against those people who use the word "women" only in private (especially liberals who agree with me but who are too cowardly to speak out). In the meantime, we see headlines like this: "Two inmates at all-women's New Jersey jail are PREGNANT after both had sex with transgender prisoners: ACLU won battle to house 27 trans inmates there."
Historically speaking, free speech has primarily served as a shield against oppression. Jacob Mchangama, who has written Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, also wrote an article at the Heterodox Academy blog. Here is an excerpt that I will have ready the next time I hear the free speech is a "problem" or that it is a tool of "oppression" or "violence."
A global look at the history of free speech suggests that free speech is in fact a shield against oppression. White supremacy, whether in the shape of American slavery and segregation, British colonialism, or South African apartheid, relied heavily on censorship and repression. Conversely, advocates of human equality like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed the principle and practice of free speech to great effect and at huge personal cost. In the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.” Tragically, several countries, not least India, still use hate speech laws, with roots stretching back to the era of British colonialism, to silence dissenters as well as the minorities these laws were supposed to protect. Moreover, the current tsunami of Republican-sponsored bills aimed at censoring “divisive” teachings on issues such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and even American history, are often uncomfortably close to their anti-racist speech code counterparts when it comes to wording and the underlying philosophy that words constitute, or are comparable with, tangible physical harms. Far from serving as a remedy against “cancel culture,” such bills are likely to increase partisan and ideological policing of nonconformist speech to the detriment of free and open discourse without which higher education becomes stale and ultimately meaningless.
I first heard of this phrase, adversarial collaboration, from this presentation by Daniel Kahneman at Edge.org.
This seems like an excellent idea with broad application in many fields.
I see that the University of Pennsylvania has an Adversarial Collaboration Project. Here is an excerpt from its description page:
As originally conceived by Economics Nobel Prize Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, adversarial collaborations call on scholars to: (1) make good faith efforts to articulate each other’s positions (so that each side feels fairly characterized, not caricatured); (2) work together to design methods that both sides agree constitute a fair test and that they agree, ex ante, have the potential to change their minds; (3) jointly publish the results, regardless of “who wins, loses or draws” on which topics. Each collaborator serves as a check on their adversary to confirm that the hypotheses are falsifiable, the scientific tests are fair, and the interpretations accurately characterize the findings. Because adversarial collaborations restrict scholars’ abilities to rig methods in favor of their own hypothesis and to dismiss unexpected results, adversarial collaborations are likely to advance debates faster and generate more reliable knowledge than traditional approaches.
Through this initiative, we hope to discover best practices for participating in adversarial collaborations and to normalize such practices in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the social sciences and its reputation among policy makers and the public.
Heather Heying offers this precise definition of woman in her article, I am a Woman and a Biologist. Here's an excerpt:
Women are adult human females.
Adults are individuals who have attained the average age of first reproduction for their species. They have reached the age of maturity. The term adult applies across many species, and is used to distinguish them from juveniles, who are not yet capable of reproduction.
Humans are members of the genus Homo. Our relatives in the genus Australopithecus, now extinct, are sometimes categorized as human as well. Every individual Homo sapiens is a human.
Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Eggs are large, sessile gametes. Gametes are sex cells. In plants and animals, and most other sexually reproducing organisms, there are two sexes: female and male. Like “adult,” the term female applies across many species. Female is used to distinguish such people from males, who produce small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm, pollen).
It’s the definition of that last word—female—that will be difficult for some to accept.
Some people imagine that, because words are a social construct, so too, inherently, are the concepts that they describe. Some words do describe social constructs: offended, justified and controversy, for instance. These things have no reality in the physical universe, or if they do, that reality can be negotiated by social means.
Many words, however, do describe an underlying reality. Words like bulldozer, grasshopper, and woman.
