Kathleen Stock Dissects “The Family Sex Show” and its Enablers

Kathleen Stock does a deep dive here. What is driving this behavior? Fascinating and disturbing on many levels. And yes, I also wondered whether any of these people have children. An excerpt:

This week a story broke in the UK about a forthcoming theatre production, to be aimed at five-year-olds and older. The somewhat surprising title of this venture was The Family Sex Show. The theatre company responsible had impeccable-looking credentials, with breathless reviews and several awards for earlier productions. This new project, originally commissioned under the auspices of a Leverhulme Arts Scholarship, had been funded to the tune of £82,784 via two separate project grants from Arts Council England, and was developed in a number of prestigious venues including Battersea Arts Centre, the National Theatre, the Southbank Centre, and Theatre Royal Bath. The show’s mission, as described on the associated website, was to provide:
a fun and silly performance about the painfully AWKWARD subject of sex, exploring names and functions, boundaries, consent, pleasure, queerness, sex, gender and relationships.

. . .

Back in reality, there’s only so long that progressives can carry on pretending that the only possible objections to things like The Family Sex Show must come from prudes who don’t like sex, or bigots who don’t like queer people. Supercharged by the internet, contemporary sexual culture is spiralling off a cliff and taking a lot of young people with it, and increasingly large numbers of ordinary parents and teachers are finding this objectionable for very good reason. Some of these even vote Labour - or would do, if they could get a clear sign from their party that it’s prepared to make a distinction in public between its own position and “what Owen Jones thinks is OK”. If it can’t do this, it faces problems at the ballot box. Meanwhile, since nobody votes Arts Council members in or out, for theatre-goers there are still many long evenings ahead, sitting on uncomfortable chairs and watching white people with interesting haircuts talk earnestly about squirting.

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British Authorities Pushing Back Against “Affirmation” as Appropriate Care in Transgender Claims

Meanwhile, in England, experts and authorities are pushing back at the prevailing gender ideology, arguing that children should receive real medical care, not "affirmation." When a child thinks she has an appendectomy (because many of her friends think she should get an appendectomy), doctors don't automatically operate. They do (and should) ask questions and conduct test to determine whether an appendectomy is really needed. Excerpt from the article, "Sajid Javid inquiry into gender treatment for children":

"Vulnerable children are wrongly being given gender hormone treatment by the NHS, Sajid Javid believes, as he prepares to launch an urgent inquiry. The health secretary thinks the system is “failing children” and is planning an overhaul of how health service staff deal with under-18s who question their gender identity . . .

Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, has been leading a review into NHS gender identity services for children. In interim findings last month, she said children were being affected by a lack of expert agreement about the nature of gender identity problems, a “lottery” of care and long waiting lists.

Javid is said to be particularly alarmed by her finding that some non-specialist staff felt “under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach” to transitioning and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised.

“This has been a growing issue for years and it’s clear we’re not taking this seriously enough,” an ally of the health secretary said. “If you look at Hilary Cass’s interim report, the findings are deeply concerning and it’s clear from that report that we’re failing children.”

The ally said services should have a holistic view of what might be causing problems for that child: a mental health issue, bullying or sexual abuse.

“That overly affirmative approach where people just accept what a child says, almost automatically, and then start talking about things like puberty blockers — that’s not in the interest of the child at all,” the ally said."

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Train Your Brain to be Disciplined by Telling Yourself “No” Many Times per Day

Dr. Andrew Huberman is a Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University. In this video conversation with Shane Parrish, he suggests an exercise for controlling your impulses and keeping yourself focused. He describes two directional pathways that are triggered off of circuitry in the basal ganglia.  One is the "Go" or action-oriented pathways the includes thought and the other is "No-Go."  As kids, we are forced to engage in a lot of "No-Go" behaviors, including sitting still and not interrupting.

Our phones and other aspects of our environment cause us to shift our attention repeatedly. We are no longer children, so we don't have parents telling us "no" "no" "no." We tend to be action-oriented, "Go-Oriented," and we need to exercise our ability to resist impulses (to NOT check our phones and emails, for instance) in order to do deep focus for periods of 90-minutes with "tunnel-vision," resisting all distractions to get up and get away from the target of your focus. Huberman suggests several ninety-minute tunnel-vision sessions each day for productivity.  How do we get better at this?

Hubeman suggests practicing "No-Go" moments:

One thing that I've done over the years to try and reinforce these circuits in myself based on my understanding of how they work is every day I try and have somewhere between 20 and 30 No-Goes and the No-Goes can be trivial like i'm ready to pick up my phone --NO!--and I force myself to not pick it up.  All i'm doing is trying to reinforce that circuit, because the thing to understand about neural circuitry is that it's generic. It's not designed so that you have a strong No-Go response--just to picking up your phone--it actually carries over to multiple other things. At any moment we can be back on our heels flat-footed or forward center of mass. That's the way I try and visualize the waking portions of my life.

Most of our life is Go Go Go, starting at the moment we wake up.

We rarely rehearse our No-Go functions. No-Go functions are simply about suppressing behavior. So if you have a meditative practice there's a little bit of that, where you think i don't want to do it but i'm going to force myself to sit still even though I want to get up. That's a no-go, but think about it: If you get better at meditating, you actually have less of an opportunity to get into this No-Go mode to trigger the circuitry. So what I try and do is introduce 20 or so No-Go's throughout the day that I deliberately impose on myself as I'm about to get into reflexive action. It could be delaying a bite of food for a couple of minutes. I realize it sounds almost like an eating disorder, people with eating disorders probably want to stay away from that one--but there are all sorts of ways that we can do this. We find ways that we are are short-circuiting this process. I think we need to keep these No-Go circuits trained up. I think nowadays there's so much opportunity and so much reward for Go that we don't train the No-Go pathways.

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Reason as a Social Tool More than an Intellectual Tool

I've been trying to collect information on the idea that we over-estimate the ability of human reason to tell us what is true, and that is because reason highest function is social, not intellectual. Here are a few things I have found:

Douglas Murray:

When people with an incorrect view were introduced to the correct view, a vast proportion doubled down on their wrong opinion and thenceforth refused to budge. I am slightly haunted by this study because of how much it says about us human beings. We like to think of ourselves as reasonable, rational types. After all, you rarely meet someone who confesses to being unreasonable and irrational. But we do not really know ourselves, and if reason and rationalism alone drove us then we would be something else entirely. While we are sometimes motivated by reason, we are also fueled by pride, jealousy and much more.

In describing Enigma of Reason, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this webpage indicates:

[R]eason is an adaptive mechanism designed to help humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment – and that it has nothing to do with facts at all.

Reason, say Mercier and Sperber, evolved to help us justify ourselves and to convince others, which is essential for cooperation and communication. According to the two scientists, “the normal conditions for the use of reason are social, and more specifically dialogic. Outside of this environment, there is no guarantee that reasoning acts for the benefits of the reasoner.”

According Mercier and Sperber, habits of mind that seem irrational from an “intellectualist” point of view, prove shrewd when seen from a social “inter-actionist” perspective.

From Goodreads, which offers excerpts from The Enigma of Reason:

“The fact that people are good at evaluating others’ reasons is the nail in the coffin of the intellectualist approach. It means that people have the ability to reason objectively, rejecting weak arguments and accepting strong ones, but that they do not use these skills on the reasons they produce. The apparent weaknesses of reason production are not cognitive failures; they are cognitive features.”

“[T]wo major features of the production of reasons: it is biased— people overwhelmingly find reasons that support their previous beliefs— and it is lazy— people do not carefully scrutinize their own reasons. Combined, these two traits spell disaster for the lone reasoner. As she reasons, she finds more and more arguments for her views, most of them judged to be good enough. These reasons increase her confidence and lead her to extreme positions.”

“It is based, however, on a convenient fiction: most reasons are after-the-fact rationalizations. Still, this fictional use of reasons plays a central role in human interactions, from the most trivial to the most dramatic.”

“As Popper put it, “In searching for the truth, it may be our best plan to start by criticizing our most cherished beliefs.”

Whereas reason is commonly viewed as the use of logic, or at least some system of rules to expand and improve our knowledge and our decisions, we argue that reason is much more opportunistic and eclectic and is not bound to formal norms. The main role of logic in reasoning, we suggest, may well be a rhetorical one: logic helps simplify and schematize intuitive arguments, highlighting and often exaggerating their force. So, why did reason evolve? What does it provide, over and above what is provided by more ordinary forms of inference, that could have been of special value to humans and to humans alone? To answer, we adopt a much broader perspective. Reason, we argue, has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others. These two functions rely on the same kinds of reasons and are closely related.”

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate

Descartes was the most forceful of reason’s many advocates. Reason has also had many, often passionate, detractors. Its efficacy has been questioned. Its arrogance has been denounced. The religious reformer Martin Luther was particularly scathing: “Reason is by nature a harmful whore. But she shall not harm me, if only I resist her. Ah, but she is so comely and glittering.… See to it that you hold reason in check and do not follow her beautiful cogitations. Throw dirt in her face and make her ugly.”

We began this book with a double enigma, the second part of which was: How come humans are not better at reasoning, not able to come, through reasoning, to nearly universal agreement among themselves? It looks like now we might have overexplained why different people’s reasons should fail to converge on the same conclusion and ended up with the opposite problem: If the reason module is geared to the retrospective use of reasons for justification, how can it be used prospectively to reason? How come humans are capable of reasoning at all, and, at times, quite well?”

A speaker typically wants not only to be understood but also to be believed (or obeyed), to have, in other terms, some influence on her audience. A hearer typically wants not just to understand what the speaker means but, in so doing, to learn something about the world.”

Humans reason when they are trying to convince others or when others are trying to convince them. Solitary reasoning occurs, it seems, in anticipation or rehashing of discussions with others and perhaps also when one finds oneself holding incompatible ideas and engages in a kind of discussion with oneself.”

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”

Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, who suggest that people are generally content with the first reason they stumble upon,5 or David Perkins, who asserts that many arguments make only “superficial sense.

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