Post-Race Rapper Preaches Tolerance

I first encountered Zuby on Twitter, where I was intrigued by his upbeat mini-prose. Zuby says that his race is the most uninteresting thing about himself. If I told you that Zuby currently lives on the southern coast of England, you probably wouldn’t guess that he spent much of his life in Saudi Arabia. If I told you that Zuby was an up and coming rap artist, you probably wouldn’t guess that also graduated from Oxford, with a degree in computer science or that he spent several years of his life as a business consultant. In addition to creating music, Zuby is now an author, podcaster, public speaker, fitness expert and life coach. Zuby refuses to allow his do not fall into any predictable silo. To make a political point that trans women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports, he posted a video in which he claimed to have broken the British Women's deadlift record of 238kg (528 pounds). Zuby claimed that he "identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight."

On July 24, 2020, Zuby joined Brett Weinstein on the DarkHorse podcast. I took the Youtube transcript, edited it for clarity and present it here as an introduction to Zuby.

Zuby - Min 74:53

There are certain games you win by just not playing. Just don't play that game. Don't get dragged into this thing. It's something I experience. I always feel like I've often got people, especially nowadays, trying to drag me into things that I don't want to get involved with. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it helps.

My worldview is really simple when it comes to stuff like this. It is the Martin Luther King, Jr. vision. The way I was raised from when I was a child growing up in Saudi Arabia . . . from the beginning I've been surrounded by all types of different people, different religions different colors, different ethnicities, different nationalities, whatever. That's just been the norm for me forever, so the whole idea of viewing people through this very narrow lens, from being a child I've always thought, it's silly and it's asinine. It makes me somewhat upset when I see that now day in and day out. It's white this and black that. Can we can we stop?

So much of this is just unnecessary and it's antagonizing and it forces people to keep viewing the world that way. That's the least interesting thing. It's such an uninteresting thing about someone. That's the thing. The fact that I'm a black male is one of the least interesting things about me. It certainly doesn't say anything about my personality or my character or my beliefs or my abilities or anything. Yeah, it's observable and, cool, okay. But if someone is talking to me, I don't want that to be the thing that's in their head and that they're obsessing over. I'd like them just to talk to me. I'm Zuby. Just talk to me and we'll be cool. We can be friends. All that stuff is details.

There is a growing tent of people who are politically sort of in the center left and center right who are sort of uniting and recognizing that they're tired of the extremism and they don't like cancel culture and they don't like this super identity politics thing on any side, and they don't want to destroy the whole system and they don't think the country is terrible. I think there's that there's that growing group of people Who I think are slowly gaining a bit more and more courage. I think that they're sort of seeing podcasts like this. What I'm doing with my podcast and you know whether it's Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin, etc. like all these guys, they're sort of saying okay, cool.

People are talking about this and there's a range of people here who are sensible and don't want to scream at each other and call each other racist every three seconds. There's that growing group, so I do hope that that swells and gains enough courage and momentum for people to eventually just be like, okay, look, like we're going to stop entertaining the crazies and we're going to stop letting them sort of determine everything and set all the rules and control everybody and cancel everybody. I think once enough once there's enough critical mass there, then you can get back to a sort of stage of normalcy where people are being reasonable again. And we can actually solve some of the problems because we can talk.

Zuby - Min 29:20

In the in the USA, you guys say Black American, African-American, Latino, American, white American etc. Here (in Great Britain) we just say “British.” Right! There you go. So it's not common to hear that this person is white British or this person is a Black Brit.

Zuby - Min 12:12

Last week I spent two days just getting attacked for the fact that I said that it's bad to be racist to white people. I was getting emails, DMs like, all kinds of horrible stuff, for me saying no, this is bad. This isn't good. I don't think we should judge people based on the color of their skin or call people inferior or do any of this and then I start getting attacked. What kind of what is this world that we're living in that that is considered? It's a strange thing.
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William Shatner: Not a Cisgendered Man or a Cis Man

In the past Facebook exchange, I was called a "cis" man.  I objected and indicated that I should be referred to as simply as a "man." Several people in that group refused, continuing to refer to me as a "cisgendered man." I found this insulting, not only because there is a perfectly good word already existing to describe me, but also because of the way "cis" and "cisgendered" are most often used. In my experience, "cis" and "cisgendered" are used as terms of disparagement.  I have found it odd that someone would claim that they need to relabel me in order to define themselves.

With that background, I noticed a recent series of Tweets by William Shatner (or Star Trek fame).  Shatner has drawn a line in the sand on this same issue. He does not want to be referred to as a "cis" or "cisgendered" man. Why? Because calling someone "cis" or cisgendered is a "slur." Shatner argues that it is debasing and often used as a term of hate.  This is my experience too.  Shatner spelled out his concerns in a long series of Tweets.  Here are some excerpts (in reverse chronological order):

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More About the Woke Version of 2 + 2

More on 2 + 2.   Whether you want to make it add up to 4 is, indeed, "a choice," as we are hearing from Woke-land. That choice, however, has the vast power Dan Dennett ascribed to his concept of "universal acid." That power can be either constructive or destructive. To the extent that we choose to teach (in classrooms and elsewhere) that 2 +2 ≠ 4, this creative choice would permeate everything. not only math. This fanciful and proudly rebellious choice would keep spreading to encompass everything else we believe too, because the explosive power of knowledge depends upon compounding. Our big impressive truths are exapted from our simplest of truths, even truths so simple that we verify them by counting fingers. This ability to compound our know-how from little grounded truths to much bigger truths allows us to discover vaccines and to design aircraft.

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Yes, it's a choice, but it's a choice with ramifications. We can fuck around, acting like we can individually conjure up entirely new inert mental axioms willy-nilly each day, intentionally oblivious to verifiability, and oblivious to what anyone else is doing. Or we can collaborate in a mentally disciplined way using principles hard-gained from Enlightenment thinkers and others, such that there are correct and incorrect answers to many things based on A) whether those things actually function in predictable and meaningful ways and B) whether they further human flourishing.

I tend to see morality in terms of a personal aesthetic deeply tied to my vision for human flourishing. What does your personal sense of aesthetics (or morality) demand? A world where 2 + 2 equals 4? Or a world unhinged from any ability to collaborate with other sentient beings, a world where we pass the time organizing under rival warlords and throwing rocks at each other?

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Science Re-Takes the Stage in the Gender Debate at NHS and BBC

From Julian Vigo's Aug 5, 2020 article at Quillette: "At the NHS and BBC, Important Steps Toward Restoring Balance in the Gender Debate." Politicians in the UK have regained their footing, relying upon the scientific method. They are moving forward based on the idea that they should "Do no harm.  Here is an excerpt:

BBC Woman’s Hour has reported that much of the language on the NHS website referring to gender dysphoria was removed or entirely reworded last week, so as to more accurately reflect science instead of ideology. Crucially, the NHS no longer repeats the fiction that puberty blockers such as Lupron are “reversible,” since there are few studies on the physical or psychological effects. (It has been known since 2017 that trials of peripubertal GnRHa-treatment, i.e., hormone blockers, in sheep reveal “permanent changes in brain development [and] raises particular concerns about the cognitive changes associated with the prolonged use of GnRHa-treatment in children and adolescents.”) Also removed from the NHS site: Emotionally loaded references to suicide, which had previously served to terrify parents into seeking rapid treatment, lest any delay lead a child to end their lives. The association of “gender identity” with regressive stereotypes also is gone. And the website no longer suggests that sex itself can be changed. Instead, we get more accurate language to the effect that “some people may decide to have surgery to permanently alter body parts associated with their biological sex.” That the NHS now uses the term “biological sex” at all is itself a huge win, even if such language is obviously appropriate on the level of science and medicine. . . .

As with so many other things, the campaign for trans rights began with good intentions. For some people, dysphoria is very real—the feeling of being in the wrong body. It’s a problem that has to be managed, and people who suffer from this condition should get the help they need. But rather than urge that dysphoria be treated in a humane and realistic way, many activists prefer to cast it as a vestige of an invented inner spirit called “gender identity,” which universally suffuses us all, like a spark of the divine.

Such fantasies are the basis of religion, and it is fine for people to believe in them. But over the last decade, this particular fantasy has been encoded into law—which is very much not fine. And it was only a matter of time before ordinary people realized that a fraud had been perpetrated on them under cover of human rights. . .

Of course, it’s taken too long, and much damage has been done in the interim. But for the sake of the many women and children who remain at risk, better late than never.

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Bad Math: The Story of 2 + 2 = 4

I have two questions about the many recently vocal people who are questioning that 2 + 2 = 4:

A) Are they insincere? If they are pranksters or math anarchists, why are they spending all of this time and effort digging in? Thus, it seems unlikely that they are consciously being disruptive for the hell of it.

B) If they are sincere, the analysis becomes far more interesting, but also dangerous to society at large.  2 + 2 = 5 is not the sort of math that cures viruses or puts sophisticated robotic probes on the surface of Mars. Consider this overwhelming push back to the claim that "2+2 = 4," where many of these by people pushing back claim to be mathematicians or math teachers:

If they are sincerely concerned that 2 + 2 =  4, they might be A) Consciously motivated to pull down math standards in order that low performing students pass even though these students lack math proficiency. If that is the case, they should confess up that this is their motive and we can then have an open debate about whether this is a good idea. But consider option B) Their motives might be unconscious, which means that they are infected by social conflagration (the power of which was demonstrated in 1956 by Soloman Asch), and their math gymnastics are being driven by what Jonathan Haidt terms social intuitionism:

Haidt distrusts the reasons people give for their moral decisions. See, for example, his article: “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.”

Intuitionism in philosophy refers to the view that there are moral truths, and that when people grasp these truths they do so not by a process of ratiocination and reflection, but rather by a process more akin to perception, in which one just sees without argument that they are and must be true . . . Moral reasoning is usually an ex-post facto process used to influence the intuitions (and hence judgments) of other people . . . [In sum], 1) the reasoning process has been overemphasized; 2) reasoning is often motivated; 3) the reasoning process constructs post-hoc justifications, yet we experience the illusion of objective reasoning.

Does 2 + 2 = 4? It's too bad that we distrust each other so much that we need to meticulously lock down the parameters before proceeding. Apparently we need to argue about whether "2" = 2, and whether "+" means simple addition and then we need to decide whether "=" means equals exactly, more or less or "in some worlds." And the real shame is that these math protesters are clearly hypocritical. When they stand up and walk away from their toxic keyboards, they might walk into a grocery store where they put two apples on the counter, then go back and get two more apples. Then, when they are charged for FIVE apples (by a math-challenged store clerk or, perhaps, a mathematically Woke clerk), they will speak up with moral-mathematical clarity that they should be charged for only FOUR apples, because 2 + 2 = [drum roll . . . ] 4.

If you think this explanation is tedious or self-evident or time-wasting, I highly recommend that you review the already-too-long sad story of this math dispute published recently at New Discourses by Anti-Woke Warrior (and Ph.D mathematician), James Lindsay: "2+2 Never Equals 5." The intensity of this "math" dispute leads to one other possibility that loops back to top of this paragraph. Perhaps the anti 2 + 2 = 4 mob is digging in so deeply because they hate James Lindsay because Lindsay, co-founder of New Discourses, is actively decimating the claims of the Woke. For more on Lindsay, check out his new book (co-authored with Helen Pluckrose), Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. Also see his recent discussion with Joe Rogan:

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