The Lancet Goes Full Woke in its Claim that Asian-Americans are Unfairly Succeeding in Medical Schools and in the Health Care Field

The medical journal Lancet is an unrepentant convert to Wokeness, as recently pointed out by James Lindsay on Twitter:

In this January 2020 article, “Race as a Dynamic State: Triangulation in Health Care,” The Lancet has turned its Woke-powered spotlight toward “Asian-Americans.” According to this article, in a prestigious medical journal, all “Asians” are the same. Therefore, we can put all of them under one group heading and treat all of them inter-changeably, regardless of their country of origin, and regardless of how hard each “Asian-American” individual has studied in order to be successful in the health care field. And that is merely the first of the many shocking assertions of this article.

This Lancet article scolds “Asian-Americans” for their “privilege,” as if they unfairly achieved excellence merely by being born “Asian.” This article swipes at Asian American are racist in the most basic sense; it judges the characteristics, history and achievement of individuals by irrelevant immutable characteristics. Unfortunately, this sordid tactic passes as “social justice” in ever-increasing numbers of institutions, most notably in our sense-making institutions such as universities and in the conference rooms at publishers such as Lancet. I prefer to call this increasingly popular tactic “neo-racism” because it is the modern heavily-jargoned repackaging of good old-fashioned racism. It's the same despicable idea over which we fought a bloody Civil War. In the year 2021, then, Lancet is proudly promoting a completely discredited destructive approach for interacting with one another.

This Lancet article is preaching, not teaching. No open-minded person could have written this Lancet article. Tt presents a long string of obviously wrong-headed and highly controversial concepts as gospel, evidence-free. These issues raised by this article would have been discussed by any good-faith consideration of this topic of “racial” disparities in the healthcare field. Instead, the authors of this Lancet article intentionally avoided these many issues.

Back at Twitter, commenters had no problem spotting these many glaring problems instantly. I have selected and pasted in some of these comments below. The following comments below allow us to use the above Lancet article as a Wokeness case study:

According to this, Asians attending medical schools, are the "wrong" kind of diversity...

This is so incredibly racist. How does anyone stand for this degradation?

What happened? I thought we were NOT supposed to pick people . . . based on their color.. now that’s the top consideration!

This is their way of minimizing the data that shows Asian achievement being better than white people because they know that collapses their unifying white supremacy equation.

Essentially, they are telling them to recognize they are a “privileged” minority class because it makes other minorities (i.e. blacks) look bad... They mean because it destroys their narrative!!!

The tone and lack of self-awareness on part of writers is what shocks me, even more than the twisted content. They are simply telling people what to do. Extraordinarily patronising and controlling.

Didn't they put Asians in the "white" category recently? All to perpetuate their systematic racism myth.

“And what shall we do when we run out of enemies to destroy?” “Simple, we shall make more”

Yeah, but how did they become privileged? Was it magic?

Attacking the competent has always been a hallmark of Marxism. They won't stop until the starving are attacking the almost-starving.

I like the sentence just after your highlight. "They can consider what it feels like to be the non-model minority" So they are a minority, but a non-model one! "They can refuse to be used in statistics that flaunt “diversity” gains" Oh my... The best science for better lives. WTF!

“Model minority” Asians are a “model minority” and therefore outside of CRT models and therefore part of the problem bc they don’t fit the narrative of overcoming obstacles of oppression. Jews also defy CRT- as if their oppression doesn’t count.

Just wait until they start turning against Nigerian immigrants who are among the hardest working out there...

So “model minority” is a myth but “non-model minority” is not?

Mind you, this is entirely within the western world and not actually in Asia, for the most part. It's so unbelievably stupid.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingThe Lancet Goes Full Woke in its Claim that Asian-Americans are Unfairly Succeeding in Medical Schools and in the Health Care Field

Race Conscious “Solution” to the Limited Supply of COVID Vaccines

I've often argued that we need to refocus, to consciously move back toward the central mission of Martin Luther King:

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

~From MLK's “I have a dream” speech

It's distressing to see so many loud voices arguing for the opposite, demanding that we need to become ever more conscious of "race" and claiming that we have made no meaningful progress since the Civil War or since the early 1960s.

Basing anything on "race" is always a massively erroneous and ultimately destructive miscategorization.  It will lead to endless strife and mistrust because "race" tells us nothing meaningful about any of the people with whom we share this planet. There is only one way to get to know each other: Taking the time to learn about each other, one at a time. Using "race" as a proxy as a shortcut for this hard work is inevitably destructive. In its simplistic detachment from real-world facts, sorting people based on "color" is akin to basing public policy on phrenology or astrology.

The above is a short prelude for a recent proposal regarding prioritizing people for the COVID vaccine, pointed out by Andrew Sullivan:

Continue ReadingRace Conscious “Solution” to the Limited Supply of COVID Vaccines

Helen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Earlier this year, British author Helen Pluckrose, also the Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine, co-authored a new book, Cynical Threories, with James Lindsay, who is the creator of the anti-woke website New Discourses.  The long title to their book is also their compact thesis: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.  

Pluckrose was recently interviewed by Jason Hill of Quillette. The topic was the brand of postmodernism embraced by modern Critical Social Justice activists. In recent years CSJ's version of postmodernism has been increasingly employed as a political strategy by the Woke Left.  What is "postmodernism"?  Pluckrose offers these four characteristics:

  1. Objective knowledge is inaccessible and what we consider knowledge is actually just a cultural construct that operates in the service of power.
  2. Dominant groups in society—wealthy, white, heterosexual, western men—get to decide what is and isn’t legitimate knowledge and this becomes dominant discourses which are then accepted by the general population who perpetuate oppressive power dynamics like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.
  3. The critical theorists exist to deconstruct these discourses and make their oppressive nature visible. This results in the breakdown of boundaries and categories through which we understand things like emotion and reason, fact and fiction, male and female.
  4. [Critical theorists] also produce a profound cultural relativism and a neurotic focus on language and language policing as well as a rejection of individuality and humanism in favor of identity politics. This is a problem because of the resulting threats to freedom of belief and speech, the divisive tribalism and the rejection of science, reason and liberalism.

Hill asked Pluckrose why it was necessary for Lindsay and Pluckrose to write Cynical Theories at this time? Pluckrose offered this response:

Continue ReadingHelen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Intersex Conditions Are Not Nearly as Common as Red Hair

I subscribe to evolutionary biologist Colin Wright's new Substack Newsletter, Reality's Last Stand. In his most recent article, "Intersex Is Not as Common as Red Hair," Wright deals with a claim commonly heard from LGBTQ+ activists, the claim that 1.7% of people have intersex conditions, supposedly making it as common as having red hair. Most activists make this claim without any ill-intent. They want to show that intersex conditions are common and the people with these conditions should not be seen as abnormal. The "facts" touted by the activists, however, don't add up.

Many LGBTQ+ activists get their information from a book titled Sexing the Body, by Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), who got her number from a study asking people to physically describe "idea" males and "ideal" females.  For example,

Their “ideal female” has two X chromosomes, functional ovaries that result in normal feminizing puberty, intact oviducts attached to a functional uterus, cervix, and vaginal canal. This ideal female must also have labia minora and majora present, and a clitoris that ranges between 0.20 and 0.85 cm in length at birth.

These "ideal" definitions fails because they include "many conditions that cannot be considered intersex in any clinically relevant sense." The central error was to equate “differences of sexual development” (DSDs) with “intersex.”  To illustrate Wright referred to a chart of Fausto-Sterling's data (that was created by Twitter user @zeno001):

Using this data, Wright points out how misleading the 1.7% claim is.

. . . 88% of Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7% figure is taken up by one condition: late-onset adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH). These individuals have completely normal male or female genitalia at birth that align with their sex chromosomes. The sex of these individuals is not ambiguous, so to label LOCAH as an intersex condition is a far cry from what most people and clinicians conceptually envision the term to capture.

The next most prevalent DSD on Fausto-Sterling’s list iclude any chromosomal deviations from classical XX and XY (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, etc.). However, these conditions do not result in ambiguous genitalia and therefore cannot be considered intersex in any clinically relevant sense. . . . .

Lastly, vaginal agenesis, the next most common DSD on the list, is not generally considered an intersex condition, as girls with this condition are genotypically XX, possess perfectly normal ovaries, and can even become pregnant and birth their own children following vaginoplasty. They are unambiguously female.

When these common DSDs are removed, and intersex conditions are more precisely defined as “conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7% figure drops dramatically. According to Sax, “Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling's estimate of 1.7%.”

With Wright's facts-first approach, the 1.7% claim commonly touted by activists bears no resemblance to reality.  As Wright reassures readers, this overstated statistic has no bearing on our duty to treat all intersex people as fully human. They are due the same kindness and respect as any other person. That should never be an issue for anyone, of course.

Continue ReadingIntersex Conditions Are Not Nearly as Common as Red Hair

The Woke Alternative to the Scientific Method

The Science Femme poses a simple question. The many comments are worth a careful read. Some of them might keep you up at night in that the humor is laced with deep concern.

The Woke Temple provides an illustration of the Woke alternative to the scientific method using a real-life problem. This type of "reasoning" is ubiquitous these days:

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