Male and Female
All respectable conversations regarding gender ideology must necessarily begin with the following definitions of female and male, but must also recognize the need to treat all human beings with kindness.
The Lies that Destroy Institutions
Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from saying the simple, good-hearted and obvious statement: "All Lives Matter"? It's the modern version of woke totalitarianism. Through the use of lies and cancel culture, it is destroying most of America's institutions.
Michael Shellenberger, author of "Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions. It's time for counter-Wokeism."
Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. . . .
The first salient feature of the above episodes is the willingness of institutional leaders to lie about what they are doing. The first response from Harvard’s Board of Directors was to deny that President Gay had committed any instance plagiarism and to threaten the New York Post with a lawsuit if it reported the opposite of that. The New York Times similarly lied about the op-ed piece it had published and effectively asked the oped page editor to lie about his departure. And similarly, the AAA falsely claimed that the anthropologists who wanted to discuss biological sex on a conference panel had not accurately represented their topic.
In each case, the institutional leaders lied in order to cover up unethical behavior. Harvard was covering up both the plagiarism of its president and the unwillingness of Harvard to do anything about it. The New York Times misrepresented the substance of the op-ed in order to disavow it and, perhaps, to justify forcing out the op-ed page editor. And the AAA lied about what the dissident anthropologists did in order to justify its blatant censorship.
And those lies and unethical behaviors all rest upon a set of underlying lies. Harvard lied when it claimed that it had selected its president on the basis of her qualifications, even calling Gay a “scholar’s scholar” despite her having a below-average scholarly record. The New York Times and the Harvard president, when she was still the Dean of Arts and Sciences, had been misrepresenting Black Lives Matter protests as peaceful and driven by a genuine epidemic of police killings. And AAA’s cancelation of the panel was based on the organization’s claim that biological sex is a spectrum rather than dimorphic. All of this lying is characteristic of totalitarian regimes...
Woke totalitarianism advances values that are contrary to the ones it espouses. It claims to be opposed to racism and sexism and yet promotes them through perpetuating the idea that people, by dint of their race or sex, are either victims or oppressors. It claims to be liberatory and empowering of those individuals designated victims while promoting the idea that they cannot escape their victim identity. And Woke totalitarianism promotes the notion that it is wise and truthful despite promoting such monstrous lies."
What is the solution? It's not going to be pleasant or easy, but we need to confront those who are tearing down our institution with their corrupted language.
Once we understand Woke activists and leaders in elite institutions as being in the grip of an anti-social and dehumanizing dogma which uses dishonest esoteric language to manipulate emotions and people, we can know to take them seriously, but not literally. At an interpersonal level, the best way to deal with narcissists is to ignore them, thereby depriving them of the attention they seek; at an institutional level, they must be confronted in a public way.
Sasha Stone: How to Remake America
On a recent podcast, Sasha Stone condemned the Biden administration, offering some words of support for Donald Trump. Unlike Stone, I would never consider voting for Trump. Nor can I in good conscience vote for Biden, as I did three years ago. That said, I very much agree with Stone about the many ways the United States has gone off the rails during the Biden years. An excerpt:
Four words on a red hat. Make America Great Again.
Make America able to take a joke again.
Make America understand basic biology again.
Make America the land of the free and home of the brave again.
Make it okay to be white, a Christian, a male, a Jew, a woman, a mother and American again.
Make Thomas Jefferson a hero again.
Make movies watchable again.
Make America a country where we can still say what we think without fear of banishment, public humiliation or the loss of our jobs.
Make America tolerant again.
Make reality cool again, make it okay to reward merit.
Make it okay to be friends with people you don't agree with.
Lots of the hysteria is happening on both sides. It has to do with algorithms and their effects on our brains and our perception of reality.
Anthropologists in Denial about Biological Sex
At Public we learn that many anthropologists consider it impolite to acknowledge that there are two sexes. An excerpt:
In the field of anthropology, it’s difficult to avoid talking about sex. For physical anthropologists, much of the field’s focus is on skeletal remains where body size, bone mineral density, and other sex differences are of utmost importance. For forensic anthropologists, determining the sex of remains is a crucial element of identifying crime victims. Archaeologists, too, glean valuable insights into social structures by studying "grave goods" interred alongside individuals of each sex.
Thus, the distinction between males and females is crucial in the study of human beings and their cultures. So when a group of anthropologists organized a panel titled, ‘Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology,’ for the 2023 American Anthropological Association (AAA)/Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) conference, the only reasonable question that should arise is why this seemingly evident truth even needs stating at all.
However, we are not living in reasonable times. Despite having their panel approved by both the AAA and CASCA in July, a little over a month before the event, the panelists received notice that their session had been removed from the conference program. The rationale behind this decision was that the ideas to be discussed would "cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large." What’s more, the AAA explained that the decision to cancel the session about one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence was reached in the spirit of respect for the values of the AAA, the “safety and dignity of its members, and the scientific integrity” of the program.
Missouri Fossils from the Ordovician Period
I'm so glad I joined a Missouri fossil hunting group! A few weeks ago, we took a field trip to a highway crosscut near House Springs, Missouri, where we found lots of fossils from the Ordovician Period (400-450 million years ago). Finding real fossils really brings home our humble place in the much much larger scheme of things. On these photos, you'll see lots of brachiopods (they look like sea shells), crinoids (they look like plant stalks, but they were animals), bryozoans & coral.
These animals existed twice as long ago as the earliest dinosaurs. Back then, Missouri was almost entirely covered by ocean. These fossil creatures lived LONG before the existence of Pangea, the time (200-300 MYA) when the continent we now know as North America was contiguous with Africa, South America, and Europe all existed as a single continent. During the Ordivician, most of the world's land was collected in the southern hemisphere as a supercontinent scientists now refer to as Gondwana. Most creatures from this era were not fossilized, but occasionally they were suddenly covered by a mud slide under the ocean, preserving the fossils. In selected highway crosscuts, these fossils can be found.
Hint: click on the photos and then enlarge them to see a lot more detail.