Flattened and Ossified World Views

Chimamanda Adichie is one of the thoughtful writers who has dared to touch the third rail of transgender activists.

I gave an interview in March 2017 in which I said that a trans woman is a trans woman, (the larger point of which was to say that we should be able to acknowledge difference while being fully inclusive, that in fact the whole premise of inclusiveness is difference.)

In her article, "IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS," she describes the fallout. I admire her honesty and courage, her willingness to say what needs to be said, but also her kind-heartedness. Here is an excerpt:

I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

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Rejecting the Racial Framework. Refusing to Divide People into Colors

I have often taken the position that Christopher Rufo takes during this interview. For me, a person's color tells me next to nothing (and usually nothing at all) about that person's history, experience, intelligence, passions, morality and admirability. It is my hope that, someday, we will all recognize that a person's "race" will be one of the least interesting things about them, except, perhaps when I am taking portrait photos, were a person's skin tone sometimes requires me to make adjustments to the lighting I use (see many of my portrait photos here for examples).

In this interview, Rufo refuses to by into any sort of racial ontology and insists that he wants to be evaluated as an individual. He disagrees that there are "black" versa "white" traits, qualities and aptitudes. I agree. And further, I would agree with Rufo (who writes often about these issues) that categorizing people by appearance divides us socially and breeds mistrust of each other. We are hurting each and disrupting our abilities to work efficiently to promote the general social welfare whenever we pretend that we are internally different based on external immutable characteristics. To do this is to invoke the logic of astrology and phrenology, with far far greater capacity to hurt innocent people.

Continue ReadingRejecting the Racial Framework. Refusing to Divide People into Colors

Looking Back at the Censorship of the NY Post Story about Hunter Biden’s Laptop

I repeatedly encounter people who identify on the political left who insist that the Laptop found at a computer shop in October, 2020 was not Hunter Biden's laptop and that it was a Russian ploy to interfere with the U.S. Presidential election.  The fact that these beliefs persist tells a sad story about the power the news media has to defraud its trusting audience.

This CBS Report from April 3, 2021 is recent confirmation of my belief that the laptop really was Hunter Biden's laptop. April 2021, long after the election was decided, was a politically convenient time and place for Hunter to deny that the laptop was his, but he didn't deny it. October, 2020, when the NY Post initially  reported on the laptop, prior to the election, was also the perfect time for Hunter Biden to deny that it was his laptop, but he didn't deny it then either. He has never denied that it was his laptop. In fact, in the above CBS interview Hunter Biden stated that it is possible that it might have been his laptop. Watch the CBS video excerpt and observe Hunter Biden's demeanor. Is this the sort of person who would use his father's name to cut lucrative self-serving deals with foreign powers? Is that the sort of person who would write the emails found on the laptop. Seems apparent to me.

If this laptop and payoff had been about any of Trump's degenerate children, the media would have been all over it. The failure to cover this story is stunning jour - - - I almost wrote "journalistic malpractice," but it was far worse. It was an intentional and deliberate ongoing muti--news-outlet conspiracy to keep citizens from knowing something important that might affect their views on an upcoming election. Full disclosure: I voted for Biden and I was horrified by the thought that Trump might win a second term. There are more important principles at play, however, than the result of any one election. See Russell Brand's interview with Glenn Greenwald on this topic:

Glenn Greenwald has focused laserlike on this topic from the beginning. His felt need to tell the truth cost him his job at The Intercept, a news organization he founded. See "Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept: An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept." See also, Greenwald's article on the alleged Russian disinformation: "With News of Hunter Biden's Criminal Probe, Recall the Media Outlets That Peddled the "Russian Disinformation" Lie."

Were the materials on Hunter Biden's laptop the sorts of things the media should report on? The NY Post described some of the materials here:

In the final months of the heated 2020 presidential race, The Post revealed a trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop that raised questions about his then-candidate father’s ties to his son’s foreign business ventures, including Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company linked to corruption.

The emails revealed that the younger Biden introduced a top Burisma executive to his father, then vice president, less than a year before the elder Biden admittedly pressured Ukrainian officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma board adviser, sent Hunter on April 17, 2015.

An image of Hunter Biden found on the laptop at the center of The Post exposé The water-damaged MacBook Pro — which bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation — was dropped off for repair at a Delaware computer shop in April 2019, but the individual who dropped it off never returned to pick it up.

. . .

In addition to his Ukrainian connections, other emails on the computer showed Hunter discussing potential business deals with China’s largest private energy company. One deal seemed to spark considerable interest with the younger Biden, who called it “interesting for me and my family.”

. ..

Hunter Biden’s position with the reportedly corrupt energy company — which paid him “as much as $50,000 per month” — “created an immediate potential conflict of interest” because his father was involved in US policy toward Ukraine, the report stated.

This is a complex story with fails in many directions, including Twitter's stunning decision to shut down the Twitter account of the NY Post so that it could not promote its blockbuster story.

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Transgender Ideology Successfully Unravels Decades of Hard-Fought Feminism

For decades, we (rightfully) fought hard so that a person who is biologically female could conceive of herself as fully a woman no matter what her interests, career aspirations, dress style, personality or hobbies were.  Then our sense-making institutions (and sexual-medical-industrial-complex, in the name of "liberty" and "freedom" started promoting the the idea that vaginas and breasts were no long compatible with a person who liked to climb trees, take charge of organizations or do mechanical work on cars. And with it comes a 4000% increase in the number of teenagers who claim they were born in the wrong body. And the consequent felt need to alter their body medically and surgically.

Continue ReadingTransgender Ideology Successfully Unravels Decades of Hard-Fought Feminism