The New York Times Has Finally Acknowledged the Problem with Women

The NYT has finally crawled out of its cave to acknowledge a festering problem: The Political Left is shitting on women. Members of the Political Left are doing this through their words but also though their silence.

Why now, NYT? Is it because there are more and more of us creeping out into public to ask obvious questions and to state the problems we are seeing and hearing? Is it because Matt Walsh recently released his hard-hitting documentary (with which I find much merit, though I have my disagreements too): "What is a Woman?" Is it because one of the main missions of the NYT is to elect democrats and they have decided that NOW is the time to save the democrats from themselves by calling out bullshit on gender ideology? Maybe all of the above? Whatever the reason, an article like this was long overdue. I'm glad the NYT has published Pamela Paul's article. Maybe we can now have more real conversations on this topic of the mistreatment of women by the Political Left.

Here's an excerpt from "The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.":

[T]he far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.

The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. . . .

Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. . . .But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”

Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.” It left out those threatened most of all: women.

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Noam Chomsky on the Power of Propaganda

Noam Chomsky:

We should not underestimate the capacity of well-run propaganda systems to drive people to irrational, murderous, and suicidal behavior. Take an example … World War I … on both sides, the soldiers marched off to mutual slaughter with enormous exuberance, fortified by the cheers of the intellectual classes and those who they helped mobilize across the political spectrum, from left to right including the most powerful left political force in the world, in Germany. Exceptions are so few that we can practically list them, and some of the most prominent among them ended up in jail for questioning the nobility of the enterprise: among them Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russell, and Eugene Debs. With the help of Wilson’s propaganda agencies and the enthusiastic support of liberal intellectuals, a pacifist country was turned in a few months into raving anti-German hysterics, ready to take revenge on those who had perpetrated savage crimes, many of them invented by the British Ministry of Information. But that’s by no means inevitable, and we should not underestimate the civilizing effects of the popular struggles of recent years. We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe merely because those are the marching orders.

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CRT Related Censorship and Tribalism Make Inroads into the American Legal System

Detailed article by Aaron Sibarium, writing at Common Sense, the Substack of Bari Weiss.  The title to the article is "The Takeover of America's Legal System: The kids didn't grow out of it." Here are a couple excerpts:

The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.

Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.

One more . . .

Trial verdicts that do not jibe with the new politics are seen as signs of an inextricable hate—and an illegitimate legal order. At the Santa Clara University School of Law, administrators emailed students that the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse—the 17-year-old who killed two men and wounded another during a riot, in Kenosha, Wisconsin—was “further evidence of the persistent racial injustice and systemic racism within our criminal justice system.” At UC Irvine, the university’s chief diversity officer emailed students that the acquittal “conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies’ matter.” (He later apologized for having “appeared to call into question a lawful trial verdict.”)

Professors say it is harder to lecture about cases in which accused rapists are acquitted, or a police officer is found not guilty of abusing his authority. One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he’s even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism—the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.

“I got into this job because I liked to play devil’s advocate,” said the tenured professor, who identifies as a liberal. “I can’t do that anymore. I have a family.”

Other law professors—several of whom asked me not to identify their institution, their area of expertise, or even their state of residence—were similarly terrified.

Nadine Strossen, the first woman to head the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York Law School, told me: “I massively self-censor."

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Matt Taibbi: Moral Panics Erase Memories

In "Orwell Was Right: From free speech to "spheres of influence" to our passion for endless war, we've become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted," Matt Taibbi points out how our hair-trigger rage makes us fickle. We are consumed with one thing after the other and we no longer have time to consider nuances or our own contradictions.I have read Taibbi's brilliant analysis three times. I can't stop worrying. Not only about the war, but about the willingness of Americans to enthusiastically embrace double-standards. And then, when they no longer work, we ignore them and embrace new double-standards.

Moral panics erase memories. It’s their primary function. 9/11 wiped the national hard drive of everything from the third degree to My Lai to Operations Phoenix and Condor to the Church Committee to the School of the Americas to countless other shameful episodes, and the lessons learned from them. The Trump-Russia scandal blotted out Snowden, made the spooks the good guys again. 2016 rehabilitated neoconservatives, now reinvented as never-Trumpers, cleaning away the shame of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, etc.

The “misinformation” panic wiped out the WMD fiasco, restoring honor to credentialed press. The DNC leak erased “Collateral Murder.” After George Floyd we hated cops, after January 6th we loved them. Ukraine now is openly being sold as a blue-pill cure for everything that went wrong during the War on Terror, including the recent defeat in Afghanistan. “Realism” is in disgrace, and “leadership,” “regime change,” and the “universal appeal of freedom” are back, only this time their primary backers are the upper-class cosmopolitan Democrats who marched against the simplistic “freedom against evil” plot neoconservatives tried to sell them twenty years ago.

We’re at the end of a twenty-year cycle that has taken what was once the oppositional-skeptic portion of the American population and seen them rallied behind the people they once hated the most. This has been accomplished by keeping us in a rage that always escalates and is never watered down by contradictions, thanks to mastery of “reality control” via “an unending series of victories over your own memory.”

The relentless parade of panics listed above (just a small sample; we’ve had dozens just in the last few years) makes those victories easy, and every time we switch targets, from Russians to neo-Nazis to cops to transphobes to insurrectionists to the unvaccinated to truckers and back to Russians again, the Church of Forgetting picks up new converts.

I know plenty of people, many of them friends and many of them quite well educated, who now seem to be determining their heartfelt opinions by checking to see what way the wind blows around their social network. It has become extremely disappointing over the past couple of years. It's like their self-critical modules have somehow been flipped to the off position en masse.  For the most part, these are very smart people who have lost their ability to be curious and to make sense of the world around them on their own terms. It's like they've all been dusted with intellectual-coward dust. They no longer have time time or interest to listen to different thinking others. They listen to their own news sources, because other news sources are evil.

They have become hyper-vigilant to identity and difference. They write others off for the tiniest differences of opinion. Nothing less than moral purity will work if you want to be their friend in public. In private, it's somewhat different. In private you'll sometimes hear a different tune, a more measured perspective. I grew up Catholic. It reminds me of Catholics who chant in public that dead people can be alive again and that a virgin can have a baby. In private, they don't bring this stuff up because the chants served their purpose in public as cheap signaling so that they could bask in the social warmth of their group, not as meaningful information.

Productive political conversations are harder to find these days. I'm increasingly hearing the crowd-pleasing emotion-laden bluster leak into private conversations too.  I'm hearing this from people who had been staunch pacifists all their life, people who despised George W. Bush for the deaths he caused with his discretionary and deceitful war. From these same lifelong peace-niks, I am hearing calls to directly confront the Russian military. These are people who were terrified that when Trump did his bravado schtick regarding North Korea, a country that might have had a nuclear bomb or two and might have had a missile or two.  A couple years later, no problem! Ukraine is somehow worth it, even though we are cornering a man who they admit is a megalomanic nihilistic, arrogant hothead with thousands of nuclear bombs and thousands of missiles. Somehow, there is no need to do a cost-benefit analysis regarding Ukraine. And their getting lots of this aggressive talk from news media that leans to the political Left, media that hosts an unending stream of military generals and cheerleaders for the surveillance apparatus. Go figure.

Taibbi's article makes many excellent points. I encourage readers to sit down in a quiet place and to take it in line by line. One of Taibbi's points is that (for complex reasons I don't claim to fully understand) people are becoming much more willing to live only in the present. They are much more willing to seek out the outrage de jure.  "News" media is happy to feed them the newest outrage-of-the-day in order to sell advertisements. I suspect that the willingness to glue one's self to the outrage machine is exacerbated by increasing amounts of mortality salience in the air (Terror Management Theory), which induces people to "circle the wagons," further enabled by the polarizing influences of social media and our bifurcated "news media." We can't ignore COVID, COVID Denialism and COVID hysteria as other contributors to the current climate of mortality salience.

In times of mortality salience, people are looking for a "rock," something upon which they can rely. They are increasingly looking to acceptance by a group or a "group identity" rather than embracing consistent principles (e.g. free speech, the rule of law and Enlightenment principles). Contentment to live in the present is what animals such as dogs excel at. They have no language, thus no need to critique their former positions with their current positions.  Their world is their bowl of food and a someone to pet them on the head. For those who are willing to think fast, refusing to slow down to activate slower analytical thought, what is in front of you at this particular moment is always the only thing.  As Daniel Kahneman described, What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI).  In recent times, I'm seeing increasing numbers of people who  are not willing to go back to check the hard work of slower, methodical and self-critical thinking. They see slower thinking as an impediment to their preference: impulsive action. Perhaps they have been trained for too many years of watching TV actions shows where heroes tend to be reactive (whereas villians seem to willing to sit down and plan out their diabolical plans).

It's easy to find your tribe these days. For most people it is left versus right wing politics, A versus B.  For increasing numbers of people (many that I personally know), their go-to reaction to danger is increasingly to seek the fast and easy safety of joining a group and parroting its talking points, despite the disastrous track record of this strategy.  For them, the alternative strategy of engaging in heterodox free speech, inviting dissent, seeking out nuances and doing cost-benefit analyses has become heretical. It takes too damned long, despite its excellent track. In fact, for many people, engaging in the free speech that they ostensibly celebrate on the Fourth of July has become treasonous. 

Back to Orwell's double-think. I struggled with this term until I translated it to double standards. There are two types of double-standards: A) my current actions versus my opponent's actions and B) my actions versus my own actions in the past.  A key point by Orwell is that people in a state of crisis become oblivious to their own double-standards. We don't have time for the exquisite thought tools, including skepticism math and the need for evidence, that we learned during the Enlightenment!  Many of the same people who clearly saw the their government lied to them about "weapons of mass destruction" and the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident have become some of the most fervent "believe the government" advocates. This, is despite decades of government lying about wars and decades of media outlets willingly amplifying the drumbeats of war.  They know that they should slow down and be less gullible, but there is not time for that because fear is in the air and you and people who disagree with you are miniature versions of Hitler who you being instructed to hate!  See this podcast where Taibbi discusses his book, Hate, Inc. with Joe Rogan.  All of this makes me wonder . . . are we really changing or is this the way we have always been? I suspect that social media is changing us, causing us to engage in more catastrophic thinking and all of the other things that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is designed to prevent. Whatever the cause, increasing numbers of us seem to be wearing out cognitive dysfunctions as a fashion style, our way of showing each other that we care, even though we don't care enough to get or facts right. That pit in my stomach is trying to tell me that I have already seen (or read about) America's best moments. It appears that all of them are in the rear-view mirror now.  I hope I'm wrong, but it's getting harder and harder to convince me.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: Moral Panics Erase Memories

Dozens of Things the Mainstream News Won’t Tell You About Ukraine

Fascinating thread by Glenn Greenwald. Many topics related to the situation in Ukraine, including Google's decision to take down Oliver Stone's documentary, which discusses the history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine (you can now view it on Rumble).

Many people on the political left would rather feed their brains with DNC-aligned "news." You'll know who they are, because they size up this complex conflict by walking around zombie-eyed uttering things like "Putin is worse than Hitler."  They are getting this "information" from "news" outlets parading out endless streams of retired military generals, all of them beating the war drums to crank up sagging ad revenue in the post-Trump era.  You would think that we would have learned some important and expensive lessons after our Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" post-mortem, but no.

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