"How can seemingly intelligent people believe this utter pile of shite?"
Because it benefits them personally in the short run, financially, career-wise, emotionally and so on.
The psychoanalyst's question in the Larsson-cartoon admirably illustrates how you /do not/ deal with the woke. To understand and to have understanding of and to be understanding (of) are so close semantically and in how they are used as were they interchangable, that the analyst is drawn into the world of the insane, with only their own maddened self for guide. We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad. On the other hand, a quote from a british tabletop game serves admirably to illustrate the problem from the other side:
"Only the insane have strength enough to prosper; only those that prosper truly judge what is sane."
It is with postmodernism and wokeness as it is with the well-known and even more well-misunderstood writings of the german philospher with the dyslexia-inducing name, Nietzsche:
To understand, you must face your Last Man. You must plumb and dredge and trudge through your Abyss. You must enter the realms of madness and chaos and birth yourself into the world of order again.
but as this is a) not required for any other purpose than to understand, and b) painful, risky and possibly suicidal, most who even look that way settle for staying in the foyer, lodging at Gasthaus Nihilismus and spending their time in the kafé and beerhall of Relativismus Über Alles. They wield the words and they go through the motions, but they haven't passed through the bitter waters, finding out too late that it is a steel bath.
Because there's no guarantee that you like what you make yourself be. There's no promise of salvation. There's no security or certainty of return of investment. So they balk at this Kierkegaard:ian leap.
And produce stuff like people trying to debate whether forks are more male than femaleand how we gender cutlery.
The Woke are an existential threat to our lives, and our children. You do not negotiate or try to undertsand existential threats, excepting trying to find weapons against them/it.
It's hard to know what went wrong. We were, in my estimation, heading in a good direction with regards to things like racism, sexism, homophobia and acceptance of gender non-conformity (for those few rare individuals who had a real problem). Not in any 'perfect' place, certainly, but definitely on a better path.
Then, seemingly all of a sudden, we were told that thinking that was ignorant, evidence of 'privilege', and that, really, oppression was everywhere, in all things, at all times - and that, basically, 'Western' society was shit and irredeemably oppressive.
People used to freak out (and rightly so) about the terrible injustices and discrimination towards blacks, or gays, for example. It's why the Civil Rights Movement and early Pride was so important and necessary. Now, they freak out when someone gets a pronoun wrong.
I think it's simple really. Who would they be without a cause and an enemy to fight? Since the real enemy has been mostly vanquished, they need to expand the definition of "enemy" to create new targets.
To paraphrase an old saw I heard among anarchists 35 years ago:
"If I can't crack jokes, then F*ck your rebellion!"
Remember, these are people who have never been in a postion where they only have evil, wrong, hopeless and humiliating choices, yet must choose anyway. They pity Sophie for having to choose, but they do not understand, because to them given their class and backgrounds, unpleasant choice is ever only between things they desire with equal fervour.
All the proponents of feminism, postmodernism, decostructionism, and the rest are upper-middle class girls - the class of bourgeoisie that never used to have to work but would be married off to toffs and chinless wonders, spending their days in happy leisure and arranging charities all the while wondering why the poor just wouldn't bootstrap themselves.
The ones dominating these -isms today are simply those silly bints of the late 19th century all over again.
Then I guess I misunderstood "feminism." I thought that was about women's rights. I've never been part of the upper-middle class. But I'm older than some.
Women's liberation was one thing, and feminism another. From its inception as a distinct movement, feminism has been supremacist, marxist (hardly surprising as the women who blazed the trails were marxists) and misandrist, family-hating and so on, always talking on the more abstract and academic level.
Women's liberation was about real issues. To not get the sack due to getting pregnant. Removing any legal and arbitrary limits to women applying to certain jobs, police, military. Women's liberation was about equality before the law.
Feminism was always about letting daddy's little princess keep her privileges and keep playing Lady-of-the-mansion with other people's lifes.
Since the equality issue was more or less moot in the mid-1970s (as compared to when it started, around the 1870s), the very sensible women having worked for equality (not equity) sais 'Job's a good'un' metaphorically speaking and tried to focus on women's issues abroad.
The feminists just kept up the assault, picking more and more extreme figureheads and prophets. Dworkin, Solanas, Butler, Foucault, others. Eventually, as post-colonial theory sprang up as the reanimated corpse of 1960s-1970s Maoism influenced marxism (the USSR was out of fashion by then) it simply became impossible to reconcile all the conflicting issues. A bunch of bourgeois white well-paid academics fight gential mutliation among the non-white tribal peoples of Africa? Talk about "white woman's buden". Tacitly endorse genital mutliation by essentially saying that it's ok if the darkies do it to each other? Inconceivable.
And thus they instead ignored that and all other such issues, in favour of trying to emasculate and castrate the western man, the one target that won't hit back.
I don't think you or anyone else has misunderstood the term, really, it's just that it used to have a counterweight, which has been gone for 50 years now. Women's liberation groups didn't want have anything to do with the feminists back then, especially since feminists started preaching that heterosexual intercours and having children was treason in the genderwar. Do a search for "Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group" for one example.
Also, I'm sort of cheating here. My wife used to be in gender studies at university, and I've plowed through all her material, so I'm a victim of academia so to speak.
There was a movie on TV, clear back when, it was a comedy. I was maybe 12 or 13. The movie was, "The Feminist and the Fuzz." Not remembering the word "feminist," I was telling my parents the name of the movie was, "The Fascist and the Fuzz." I guess I was right. 😏
The disability discussion reminds me of the sports discussion (see, for instance, this article from 2016: https://sociologyinfocus.com/sex-is-a-social-construction-even-if-the-olympics-pretends-its-not-2/). Because-- and if you've never been a relatively strong, fit woman who was beaten up, or beaten by, a puny man half your size, you're going to have to trust me on this-- womanhood is a physical disability. (And in fact, all those people who argue for abortion rights are really arguing this: being in a body that can get pregnant is a disability that requires special medical accommodations. This is also why we need Title IX.) The history and development of every single human culture was not built on a coincidental social construct.
Ultimately, woke arguments take away our guns (literally and figuratively). They remove the rights of physical beings who suffer from relative, natural disadvantages. I imagine that correction for the woke would involve something akin to a Gulag-- not because I believe in retribution, but because these beliefs can only exist in the realm of the mind, in one's books and screens and cars with heated seats and air conditioned houses and indoor plumbing and sanitized supermarket shelves polite people on the street who don't randomly assault you and someone else to clean your toilets and empty your gutters and mow your lawn and make your $5 latte. (When I run for President, my campaign slogan will be "SAG" and I'll put it on hats. I know it's not as catchy as "MAGA," but I still insist Something Akin to a Gulag is a winning campaign promise.)
I'm a woman, too! We are not "disabled," we are simply SMALLER and our musculature is quantitatively smaller... It's relativity, not disability, don't you think? If men had to endure the pain of childbirth, then they'd understand how strength is relative! Otherwise, yes, and yes. I agree. I posted a similar argument just now, and then saw yours. xo
Point well taken. Relativity is a good way of thinking about it-- and of course there are relative differences among women and among men. I suppose if I go back to the dictionary definition of disability, womanhood is not necessarily a "physical or mental condition that limits a person's movements, senses, or activities." Yet without human innovation and technology, for many centuries most humans on the planet-- male and female-- viewed it as such, did they not? Could women enter the workforce in significant numbers without pads and tampons and, for some of us, NSAIDs? Without firearms, could women serve as police officers and in the military? (And this is where I stubbornly dig in!)
I guess I see an advantage in the second dictionary definition most of all: "a disadvantage or handicap, especially one imposed or recognized by the law." If real gender differences are not recognized by the law, women lose. (Although that word "imposed" perhaps provides a key to why some would rightly worry about this claim.) I love being a woman; I do not feel disabled. But (as RR alluded to) I am deeply aware, on every trail run, that every single man who passes me could overpower me if he wanted to-- despite my fitness regimen. I am safe not because I'm their physical equal but because they are decent, moral, and law-abiding men living in a country where assaulting and raping women is considered deeply abhorrent (and women wearing shorts and tank tops and running solo are not thought of to be whores). While many of us blanch at the word "privilege," I experience so much privilege as a woman in contemporary America that I am able to forget that living in this female body, in many times and places, would significantly limit my movement-- not because of social constructs but because of realistic fears.
I'm the smallest and lightest man in my family, not counting my father who's closer to 80 than not. My male cousins are all taller and wider. My 12-year younger brother is 3" taller and 15 kilos heavier and used to do MMA for fun. My adult son is 195cm, what's that, 6'6"? Used to compete in judo on the national level.
And I'm 6'+, close to 100 kilos/220 pounds, not obese - I don't even get to have a nice pot belly.
So using that sample size and woke logic, I'm disabled?
I guess it depends on the definition of disabled, which is why I resorted to the dictionary-- but if there aren't significant general limits on women's ability, why shouldn't all professional and collegiate athletics be co-ed? Why are the qualification requirements for female soldiers and police less rigorous than for males? These aren't substantial disabilities; I would be happy to concede and use the term disadvantages. I don't think we actually have to name this or argue about this as most of us generally understand implicitly that some things are disadvantages (including the disabilities this post originally referred to, which may indeed be quite substantial regardless of social construction-- blindness, missing limbs, etc.) and they exist on a spectrum. But I do think the woke arguments-- both for eliminating the category formerly known as women and rethinking "disability"-- are eerily similar (and also very much related to the onslaught on children-- childhood according to their point of view presumably also being a social construct).
Requirements for womes applying for service/police/fireman et c are lower so as to meet quotas set by politicians pandering to the erroneous notion that equality means equal in the sense of being the same or interchangable, and also the equally erroneous notion that equality means equal outcome from different partcipants.
That something may "exist on a spectrum" is most often used as rethorical artifice, it's basically the modern version of "everything is relative". It doen't matter if it's on a spectrum, becaue anything and everything is, if you choose to measure it in such a way. Use different metrics and methods, and the spectrum goes away. The choice of tool for measuremets defines what s being measured after all - we could use a slide ruler to measure the taste of strawberries, not that it would yield useful data, but the results would certainly be on a scale or a spectrum.
Before the tests for swedish army and police were feminist-ified, about 30% of the male population would be able to qualify without any prep-time beforehand, and maybe 5% of the women. This was not due to discrimination but due to the tests being constructed so as to measure the skills and abilities needed in the field when under fire. As at least 40% women in uniform became a politically set goal defining equality, the test were made easier and easier until enough women applicants passed.
Leading to today's situation: women in police-uniforms who squint or avert their eyes when firing, and that's the ones who can exert enough pressure on the trigger. Also, when female police fire, they are likely to empty their gun in the general direction of the suspect, endangering anyone downfield due to their panic.
Or women finding out that one average man can quite easily handle a woman who works out regularly - she may put some pain to him, but he will lay her out, punch for punch.
I have no problem with saunas, showers, dorms, or services of any kind be co-ed, but I fully respect that most modern western women feel uncomfortable in such surroundings - but I do have a vested interest in a female fireman police officer or other being able to hoist my unconscous body and carry me at least half a mile, should the need arise.
As feminism argues that all differences between men and women are arbitrary social constructs, any and all differences in actual results due testing must be cause by sexism, and not that we're objectively different.
Me, I'm all about respecting that humans are different from eachother.
I would say that the point is, men tend to equate "bigger" with "better." Perhaps this is partly due to the oft-encouraged competition between men, and also partly due to the need to keep women feeling "lesser than." No, that is not paranoia, it is cultural subtlety, and sometimes outright, nothing subtle about it.
You impress me as a rational person, and one who seems to be quite fair-minded and without a lot of gender baggage, but even so, just as it is difficult for the most thoughtful and compassionate person to have a personal understanding of another person who is not "the same" kind of animal, be it male/female, American/Chinese, black/white, or whatever, it is almost impossible for men to understand fully what it is like to be a woman, in a physical, cultural, political, even economic sense.
Any woman will tell you there is bias against women by men, culturally, economically, politically, in most every realm, starting early and ending never. As long as women are defined and economically controlled by men, there will never be true equality. We have made strides, in Western countries, be we have not attained the goal. It is very clear to WOMEN that this is so, as there are many subtle ways that go un-noticed, or are disregarded, by men.
I'm not saying these things to be BITCHY, lol (woof! after all), but to be CLEAR, because I've had a fair number of men tell me quite clearly that I'm "imagining" this scenario! I assure you, I wish that were the case. Anyway, cheers, you do seem to understand this, so I'm saying it for the sake of the thread.
Men aren't just encouraged to compete - it's natural for us. As it is for women. Only, how we compete differ.
Like this:
Men wants to do things to talk about; women wants to talk about things to do.
We are complementary, like hydrogen and oxygen. Force them apart and all we get is conflagration or oxidation, and no water.
If you like, you could check out the recently departed Norah Vincent's work, when she lived undercover as a man for 18 months in 2006. She, being a lesbian feminist, had more than a few eye-opening moments with regards to men.
Thanks for bringing to light your continued investigations into the ongoing nonsense. Please be sure to get plenty of fresh air and sunshine and fun time with your kids as antidote. The stack needs Dr Rigger in robust rude health.
The scientific method is indeed simple and powerful. It's just the many people pretending to be doing science (actually fabricating The Science™) without recourse to The Method where the problems all arise.
So many credentialed charlatans simply add the "science" tag onto their every excretion in safe knowledge that in a world increasingly innumerate and dumbed-down, they can simply get away with it. If challenged, their only response is to have the challenger eliminated and silenced - science denier!
I often wonder how many of the professional white coat on brigades, spanning healthcare, academia and big business, and all of them so beloved of tyrants and media alike, actually understand the scientific method. Far worse I suspect, most may not have even heard of it.
Thanks Drew - I certainly do need to take better care of myself. I located my weights, but still haven't summoned the inner motivation to actually lift them on a regular basis!
I've been deeply disappointed in "science" over the last couple of years. But scientists don't live in a vacuum, and many have families and careers, like everyone else. In a climate when one can be cancelled, or lose a licence, simply for questioning things, there aren't going to be very many who will be in a good enough position to be able to speak out. We might think of this as a kind of 'cowardice', and in some respects that's true, but I can't judge too harshly because I understand some of the pressures that were applied.
I've been lucky - I'm basically just about good enough to have had a career in physics - but I'm pretty much useless at almost anything else. I have no idea what I would have done had I lost my position and deemed to be 'unemployable' because of my views. I'm not sure I'd have made a good shelf-stacker being a bit lacking in the practical common sense department (my DIY mistakes and gaffes are legendary).
Science has been monopolized over the past 20 years or so by... you guessed it... Money.
AGAIN, it keeps coming back to MONEY. I think we should GET RID OF MONEY. That will take some serious thinking!!! But it would solve soooo many problems!
I am sorry to disagree with you Mr Herder. The problem is not money. The problem is that money has become the exclusive domain of the state, and the state creates its money without cost to itself. Thus politicians who are themselves for sale can use the levers of state to buy up everything and everyone useful to them, to foment and campaign endless wars and so forth. The history of the world and the decline of peoples is more or less the history of sound money being inconvenient as the ultimate constraint on the ambitions and evil of politicians and rulers, to be replaced by fiat money that removes all constraints. Sorry to be so disagreeable. I'll get back on my rowing machine now.
I don't mind if you disagree with me, but I'm not a "mister."
And I think actually, you've made a pretty good case for my side of this argument, lol. I don't say that to be rude, but... read it again with my statement in mind! Cheers.
Science has been under attack for decades... All this recent explosion of insanity has been building for a long time... What's surprising to me is how long it took for us to notice it very much, and how quickly it has "blossomed"-- Most likely due to our depleted state of normal emotional strength, after over two and a half years of abuse, terrorism, and mindfuckery...
Sep 23, 2022·edited Sep 23, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger
You know I love you Riggery, i love everyone, but I was wondering if you could do a peice examining how the scientific method has been applied to prove the existence of viruses. I say this, not facetiously, but as an innocent bystander who thinks the "no evidence of viruses" guys have a bloody good argument. I'd be delighted of someone of your level of intellectual greatness could cover this.
I could certainly give my perspective on why I think the virus 'model' is a good fit for the facts - but I'm not sure how useful it would be. I'm not really all that well acquainted with the alternative models and I'm definitely not anything like an 'expert' on the virus model either.
Thanks for your reply. The reasons you state for it not being useful are the very reasons why it would be useful. I am sure you are a busy man, but I would recommend getting more acquainted with the opposing argument, I really feel that the methodology that you apply to everything else is the perfect approach when doing so. Personally, having come from the same 'virus is a good fit' way of thinking myself, i can say that, upon closer inspection, the virus model appears to be more of an 'ugly sisters foot' in a dainty glass slipper. I'll be honest, I've seen enough to convince me that virology is a pseudoscience, so im not looking for any reassurance, i guess im just looking for more allies in those that I respect. Thanks again.
Good post, I salute your attempt to be fair and reasonable.
That said, all this "woke" -ness is a deliberate ploy, in my opinion, along with other rather nefarious means, to divide and conquer, confuse, obfuscate, annoy, and otherwise diddle our brains in a sociopolitical fashion because we won't allow them (at least, not yet) to put their technology actually, physically, into our actual, physical brains.
I quote you from above, "We all know that a transwoman is not a woman in the fullest sense of the word..."
As a full-fledged woman I submit that anyone not born female is NOT a woman in ANY sense of the word. It's like putting horns on a pig and saying it's now a cow. Women are female from way before puberty, and before birth, and the same is true for males. It's not just a matter of what you LOOK like, it's MUCH, MUCH more than that. Even if a man could have a way to grow a baby inside his abdomen, he's never going to be a woman. Never.
If a person does not feel okay in their own skin, then why not work on helping them feel okay in their own skin? This idea that surgery and re-imagining the physical will change ALL THE THINGS that make us the gender we are; the thinking that surgery can change nature is utterly bizarre to me, and it feels like trickery, like a twisted joke... If that is not cool enough, then okay.
Do gender roles have to be so rigid that some people are strangers to themselves? Is our society so unwilling to bend a bit and allow for men to, say, wear makeup and dresses? Be more feminine, or whatever it is that is apparently being denied? Why does anyone have to be so stifled that they cannot be themselves in society? Can we not allow for some loosening of these kinds of physical, and even ornamental, visible indicators? I would go so far as to say that what anyone does with their own body (once they are OF AGE) is their choice, but to then join the women's sports teams and so on, is yet another means of encroaching on women's rights to equality and autonomy. I am happy to include, be kind to, and be as reasonable about these folks as I would anyone else, but I cannot call a man a woman, regardless of what he looks like.
And the same on the other side of the field... women are never going to be men. They may be able to POSE as a man, be called a man, marry a woman, etc. These things are already reality, and I don't see the harm, so far. But I have not seen woman-to-man individuals playing mens' sports and WINNING. Some things are either fair, or they're not fair.
There has LONG been a faction of men who wish to keep women down, and that's how this mostly feels to me, couched in the disguise of pity and "fairness." Simply put, it's not fair to women to allow for men to be called women simply because of a physical resemblance. I think of the photo of the swimmers, with the three winners on the blocks, and the First Place winner, dwarfing the second and third-place winners is clearly a MAN, head and shoulders taller, with obviously more muscular strength, lung capacity, etc... Congratulations, Jack, you've outdone two other people with NO possibility of fairness. If I'm not being reasonable, convince me, anyone.
It's a tough one WH. I agree that the whole program is about divide and conquer (it's the 'deconstruction' program in operation). It has to be stopped - and soon.
As for the 'trans' issue I can't find it in my heart to be so definitive. I've read some accounts, spoken to trans individuals, and their stories are heart-breaking and harrowing. If for no other reason than compassion, and not wanting to add extra heart-break, I'm OK with going along the "woman for all practical purposes" route for those who are genuinely afflicted with this awful mismatch between external and internal.
There are numerous difficulties here, though. The trans people I've spoken to are in no doubt about their chosen sex. It's not some 'costume' they put on - and the being 'trans' bit is something that is unwanted. They would not have chosen to be 'trans', because trans is the horrible and traumatic method they have to go through to achieve some measure of peace. Trans is not their 'identity'. There's no doubt in my mind that these individuals have a genuine problem that was, to quite a large extent, helped by their transition.
But how can we be certain, particularly when it comes to children, that we're dealing with a "genuine" case? How can we be certain that, in fact, transition is the "best" solution even then? It's a horrible, complicated, mess that isn't helped one bit by current gender ideology - in fact I would suggest that things have been made significantly worse by this current obsession with gender and the promotion of the gender woo woo.
I've wondered about a kind of 'Turing test' here. If I meet someone, in a shop say, and I can't tell if they are not 'presenting' as their 'original' sex, then maybe as far as everyday social interaction is concerned what's the issue?
The issue comes about when this gender shite is rammed down our fucking throats and we have to pay some sort of excessive homage to it, or when the rights and safety of other groups, like women, are impacted. That's when the battle lines get drawn and attitudes harden - and that helps no one sort anything out.
One crucially important thing is the need for more genuine, objective, RESEARCH - but because of the insane attitudes of the woke, and their capture of the institutions, we can't even get this sort of research funded. Doctors have to 'affirm' - OR ELSE. And that's an unbelievably stupid and anti-scientific requirement. The 'woke' believe they know best, they believe they have THE TRUTH, but prevent anyone from doing the actual research to discover whether they do indeed possess that 'truth'.
They are Grade A morons - but very dangerous ones.
Sep 25, 2022·edited Sep 26, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger
Thanks for your continued interesting articles on this topic. And I appreciate not seeing another picture of the huge synthetic boobs. Let's just talk about the huge whale dicks and call it a day. 😄
This is the first time I'm thinking this through in response to your post, so I'm not sure if it's going to make sense, but I'll give it a go.
There are some interesting things going on regarding more objective biological science and the more subjective cultural norms. It seems to me that human excess/ extremism/ fundamentalism can emerge in any area. I think that extremism is a human psychological condition that will reliably show up in segments of society, and in frameworks of understanding. For example, the biological differences between men and women are taken to extremes in Muslim religious fundamentalism, when women need to wear hijabs in public in part to control men's natural hormonal sexual arousal. Since women are more hormonally equipped to care for others, their place is in the home and thus out of the home they must be invisible. There is always a group of people that will take their understanding to extremes, and sometimes these extremes gain power in a society. As you say and I agree, there's been some good things that the woke movement has brought to our cultural and social understanding. And a small part of that movement are woke extremists/ fundamentalists, taking their beliefs to extreme nonsensical ends.
People turn towards fundamentalism for order; the mind and emotions know exactly what to expect, and we don't have to tolerate uncertainty.
Now let's take science. You have pointed out that the scientific method has the ability to self correct, and keeps pointing it's needle towards material, physical truth. Some take this to an extreme of science fundamentalism, breaking down the world into only the material. People are only material beings, their consciousness reduced to brainwave activity, and once the body dies, the person no longer exists. This is where we get bioethics that state it's okay to then merge technology with biology, and hack human beings, human nature, and human behavior. This physical - material extremism does not take into account the evidence that consciousness can interact beyond the physical body; spooky action at a distance, people's ability to affect a machine via their thoughts (an MIT study), and evidence for past lives (where people remember historical events that they couldn't have learned any other way). There are branches of science study consciousness and quantum theory, but scientific material fundamentalism may gain widespread power. I'd say this would happen if we, without properly studying the harm to people, continue to put chips in two people's bodies and at some point into their brains, and create an internet of bodies, and expand 5G electromagnetic waves.
Over history and into the future, we are constantly dealing with extremism of different kinds, so maybe it shouldn't surprise us that there is a woke extremism. People turn to extremism in unstable times, and/or extremism is used to gain power over people, and/or people are born into or recruited into extremism.
For some reason this view of extremism as a natural consistent expected human social emergence helps me see it as part of society as a whole. We can draw from how we've related to other types of extremism to help people out of this movement, and keep a lid on how much power it gains (like we've done with the KKK in this country for example).
I've often wondered about extremism and its roots. It's not something I properly understand - mostly because the very idea of "forcing" someone to believe in something is dumb. It is, perhaps, rooted in a kind of megalomaniacal narcissism. I have an almost instinctive recoil mechanism which kicks in whenever I see someone pretending to have all the answers.
And it is only a pretence, even if the individual has convinced themselves. It's a self-delusion.
Science, clearly, does not have all the answers. It's the only way to properly investigate the material world but, as you say, I'm not personally convinced the 'material' world, as we currently understand it, is all there is. Maybe that, too, is amenable to 'science', but it will be a science very far from what we understand it to be today, I think. Borrowing from Arthur C Clarke I suspect the science of tomorrow will look like some kind of 'magic' to us.
I've been wanting to write about some of the implications of quantum mechanics as it pertains to 'reality' for some time - but it's difficult to explain it in a way that wouldn't send most people off into a coma.
Thank you for another great read. As an aside, I ashamedly admit I live in the region of Halton. Please read Rex Murphy’s column in today’s National Post, in which he pleads that schools return to actual teaching of basics- that our schools must place our children at the centre of their mandate. I would like to say that most Canadians do not buy this Woke guff but I am no longer sure. Look at our PM and his government.
I'm a big, big supporter of the philosophy "let kids be kids"
Introducing 'sophisticated' and *adult* thinking about sex, gender and sexuality into classrooms is disgraceful. Same for the promotion of any particular political philosophy.
Perfectly OK to say something along the lines of "some people are different, and we don't hate people because they are different". Not OK to get kids to think about what 'gender' they are or whether they are homosexual (or heterosexual). It might be appropriate for older kids to have some *limited* and neutral discussion about these kinds of things in a classroom - not sure on that - but definitely keep this shit a million miles away from younger kids.
I have an invisible disability. Therefore, people see me as "normal" and no "external oppression" exists. How do they explain that? Thanks. I will use your article as fodder for my own follow-up on this disability issue. Will try to write it up in the next week or so.
"How can seemingly intelligent people believe this utter pile of shite?"
Because it benefits them personally in the short run, financially, career-wise, emotionally and so on.
The psychoanalyst's question in the Larsson-cartoon admirably illustrates how you /do not/ deal with the woke. To understand and to have understanding of and to be understanding (of) are so close semantically and in how they are used as were they interchangable, that the analyst is drawn into the world of the insane, with only their own maddened self for guide. We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad. On the other hand, a quote from a british tabletop game serves admirably to illustrate the problem from the other side:
"Only the insane have strength enough to prosper; only those that prosper truly judge what is sane."
It is with postmodernism and wokeness as it is with the well-known and even more well-misunderstood writings of the german philospher with the dyslexia-inducing name, Nietzsche:
To understand, you must face your Last Man. You must plumb and dredge and trudge through your Abyss. You must enter the realms of madness and chaos and birth yourself into the world of order again.
but as this is a) not required for any other purpose than to understand, and b) painful, risky and possibly suicidal, most who even look that way settle for staying in the foyer, lodging at Gasthaus Nihilismus and spending their time in the kafé and beerhall of Relativismus Über Alles. They wield the words and they go through the motions, but they haven't passed through the bitter waters, finding out too late that it is a steel bath.
Because there's no guarantee that you like what you make yourself be. There's no promise of salvation. There's no security or certainty of return of investment. So they balk at this Kierkegaard:ian leap.
And produce stuff like people trying to debate whether forks are more male than femaleand how we gender cutlery.
The Woke are an existential threat to our lives, and our children. You do not negotiate or try to undertsand existential threats, excepting trying to find weapons against them/it.
It's hard to know what went wrong. We were, in my estimation, heading in a good direction with regards to things like racism, sexism, homophobia and acceptance of gender non-conformity (for those few rare individuals who had a real problem). Not in any 'perfect' place, certainly, but definitely on a better path.
Then, seemingly all of a sudden, we were told that thinking that was ignorant, evidence of 'privilege', and that, really, oppression was everywhere, in all things, at all times - and that, basically, 'Western' society was shit and irredeemably oppressive.
People used to freak out (and rightly so) about the terrible injustices and discrimination towards blacks, or gays, for example. It's why the Civil Rights Movement and early Pride was so important and necessary. Now, they freak out when someone gets a pronoun wrong.
I think it's simple really. Who would they be without a cause and an enemy to fight? Since the real enemy has been mostly vanquished, they need to expand the definition of "enemy" to create new targets.
I don't know about existential threat, but I'd say a definite threat to our SANITY...
I wonder if mocking them would be a terrible sin...
I'd almost call it a duty.
To paraphrase an old saw I heard among anarchists 35 years ago:
"If I can't crack jokes, then F*ck your rebellion!"
Remember, these are people who have never been in a postion where they only have evil, wrong, hopeless and humiliating choices, yet must choose anyway. They pity Sophie for having to choose, but they do not understand, because to them given their class and backgrounds, unpleasant choice is ever only between things they desire with equal fervour.
All the proponents of feminism, postmodernism, decostructionism, and the rest are upper-middle class girls - the class of bourgeoisie that never used to have to work but would be married off to toffs and chinless wonders, spending their days in happy leisure and arranging charities all the while wondering why the poor just wouldn't bootstrap themselves.
The ones dominating these -isms today are simply those silly bints of the late 19th century all over again.
Then I guess I misunderstood "feminism." I thought that was about women's rights. I've never been part of the upper-middle class. But I'm older than some.
Women's liberation was one thing, and feminism another. From its inception as a distinct movement, feminism has been supremacist, marxist (hardly surprising as the women who blazed the trails were marxists) and misandrist, family-hating and so on, always talking on the more abstract and academic level.
Women's liberation was about real issues. To not get the sack due to getting pregnant. Removing any legal and arbitrary limits to women applying to certain jobs, police, military. Women's liberation was about equality before the law.
Feminism was always about letting daddy's little princess keep her privileges and keep playing Lady-of-the-mansion with other people's lifes.
Since the equality issue was more or less moot in the mid-1970s (as compared to when it started, around the 1870s), the very sensible women having worked for equality (not equity) sais 'Job's a good'un' metaphorically speaking and tried to focus on women's issues abroad.
The feminists just kept up the assault, picking more and more extreme figureheads and prophets. Dworkin, Solanas, Butler, Foucault, others. Eventually, as post-colonial theory sprang up as the reanimated corpse of 1960s-1970s Maoism influenced marxism (the USSR was out of fashion by then) it simply became impossible to reconcile all the conflicting issues. A bunch of bourgeois white well-paid academics fight gential mutliation among the non-white tribal peoples of Africa? Talk about "white woman's buden". Tacitly endorse genital mutliation by essentially saying that it's ok if the darkies do it to each other? Inconceivable.
And thus they instead ignored that and all other such issues, in favour of trying to emasculate and castrate the western man, the one target that won't hit back.
I don't think you or anyone else has misunderstood the term, really, it's just that it used to have a counterweight, which has been gone for 50 years now. Women's liberation groups didn't want have anything to do with the feminists back then, especially since feminists started preaching that heterosexual intercours and having children was treason in the genderwar. Do a search for "Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group" for one example.
Also, I'm sort of cheating here. My wife used to be in gender studies at university, and I've plowed through all her material, so I'm a victim of academia so to speak.
Well, fuckin' A. Color me woah.
There was a movie on TV, clear back when, it was a comedy. I was maybe 12 or 13. The movie was, "The Feminist and the Fuzz." Not remembering the word "feminist," I was telling my parents the name of the movie was, "The Fascist and the Fuzz." I guess I was right. 😏
The disability discussion reminds me of the sports discussion (see, for instance, this article from 2016: https://sociologyinfocus.com/sex-is-a-social-construction-even-if-the-olympics-pretends-its-not-2/). Because-- and if you've never been a relatively strong, fit woman who was beaten up, or beaten by, a puny man half your size, you're going to have to trust me on this-- womanhood is a physical disability. (And in fact, all those people who argue for abortion rights are really arguing this: being in a body that can get pregnant is a disability that requires special medical accommodations. This is also why we need Title IX.) The history and development of every single human culture was not built on a coincidental social construct.
Ultimately, woke arguments take away our guns (literally and figuratively). They remove the rights of physical beings who suffer from relative, natural disadvantages. I imagine that correction for the woke would involve something akin to a Gulag-- not because I believe in retribution, but because these beliefs can only exist in the realm of the mind, in one's books and screens and cars with heated seats and air conditioned houses and indoor plumbing and sanitized supermarket shelves polite people on the street who don't randomly assault you and someone else to clean your toilets and empty your gutters and mow your lawn and make your $5 latte. (When I run for President, my campaign slogan will be "SAG" and I'll put it on hats. I know it's not as catchy as "MAGA," but I still insist Something Akin to a Gulag is a winning campaign promise.)
I get your point, but I'm not sure I'd describe the relative strength difference between men and women as a "disability" for women.
This difference is certainly important, though - especially when considering gendered violence and things like sexual assault.
But it's an interesting perspective to think of it in terms of a "disability" in some situations. Will have to ponder that one.
I'm a woman, too! We are not "disabled," we are simply SMALLER and our musculature is quantitatively smaller... It's relativity, not disability, don't you think? If men had to endure the pain of childbirth, then they'd understand how strength is relative! Otherwise, yes, and yes. I agree. I posted a similar argument just now, and then saw yours. xo
Point well taken. Relativity is a good way of thinking about it-- and of course there are relative differences among women and among men. I suppose if I go back to the dictionary definition of disability, womanhood is not necessarily a "physical or mental condition that limits a person's movements, senses, or activities." Yet without human innovation and technology, for many centuries most humans on the planet-- male and female-- viewed it as such, did they not? Could women enter the workforce in significant numbers without pads and tampons and, for some of us, NSAIDs? Without firearms, could women serve as police officers and in the military? (And this is where I stubbornly dig in!)
I guess I see an advantage in the second dictionary definition most of all: "a disadvantage or handicap, especially one imposed or recognized by the law." If real gender differences are not recognized by the law, women lose. (Although that word "imposed" perhaps provides a key to why some would rightly worry about this claim.) I love being a woman; I do not feel disabled. But (as RR alluded to) I am deeply aware, on every trail run, that every single man who passes me could overpower me if he wanted to-- despite my fitness regimen. I am safe not because I'm their physical equal but because they are decent, moral, and law-abiding men living in a country where assaulting and raping women is considered deeply abhorrent (and women wearing shorts and tank tops and running solo are not thought of to be whores). While many of us blanch at the word "privilege," I experience so much privilege as a woman in contemporary America that I am able to forget that living in this female body, in many times and places, would significantly limit my movement-- not because of social constructs but because of realistic fears.
The fact that women can overpower women in a fist fight scenario is exactly why Dog Almighty invented martial arts...
I'm the smallest and lightest man in my family, not counting my father who's closer to 80 than not. My male cousins are all taller and wider. My 12-year younger brother is 3" taller and 15 kilos heavier and used to do MMA for fun. My adult son is 195cm, what's that, 6'6"? Used to compete in judo on the national level.
And I'm 6'+, close to 100 kilos/220 pounds, not obese - I don't even get to have a nice pot belly.
So using that sample size and woke logic, I'm disabled?
Nah, I'm with Yoda on this one.
I guess it depends on the definition of disabled, which is why I resorted to the dictionary-- but if there aren't significant general limits on women's ability, why shouldn't all professional and collegiate athletics be co-ed? Why are the qualification requirements for female soldiers and police less rigorous than for males? These aren't substantial disabilities; I would be happy to concede and use the term disadvantages. I don't think we actually have to name this or argue about this as most of us generally understand implicitly that some things are disadvantages (including the disabilities this post originally referred to, which may indeed be quite substantial regardless of social construction-- blindness, missing limbs, etc.) and they exist on a spectrum. But I do think the woke arguments-- both for eliminating the category formerly known as women and rethinking "disability"-- are eerily similar (and also very much related to the onslaught on children-- childhood according to their point of view presumably also being a social construct).
Requirements for womes applying for service/police/fireman et c are lower so as to meet quotas set by politicians pandering to the erroneous notion that equality means equal in the sense of being the same or interchangable, and also the equally erroneous notion that equality means equal outcome from different partcipants.
That something may "exist on a spectrum" is most often used as rethorical artifice, it's basically the modern version of "everything is relative". It doen't matter if it's on a spectrum, becaue anything and everything is, if you choose to measure it in such a way. Use different metrics and methods, and the spectrum goes away. The choice of tool for measuremets defines what s being measured after all - we could use a slide ruler to measure the taste of strawberries, not that it would yield useful data, but the results would certainly be on a scale or a spectrum.
Before the tests for swedish army and police were feminist-ified, about 30% of the male population would be able to qualify without any prep-time beforehand, and maybe 5% of the women. This was not due to discrimination but due to the tests being constructed so as to measure the skills and abilities needed in the field when under fire. As at least 40% women in uniform became a politically set goal defining equality, the test were made easier and easier until enough women applicants passed.
Leading to today's situation: women in police-uniforms who squint or avert their eyes when firing, and that's the ones who can exert enough pressure on the trigger. Also, when female police fire, they are likely to empty their gun in the general direction of the suspect, endangering anyone downfield due to their panic.
Or women finding out that one average man can quite easily handle a woman who works out regularly - she may put some pain to him, but he will lay her out, punch for punch.
I have no problem with saunas, showers, dorms, or services of any kind be co-ed, but I fully respect that most modern western women feel uncomfortable in such surroundings - but I do have a vested interest in a female fireman police officer or other being able to hoist my unconscous body and carry me at least half a mile, should the need arise.
As feminism argues that all differences between men and women are arbitrary social constructs, any and all differences in actual results due testing must be cause by sexism, and not that we're objectively different.
Me, I'm all about respecting that humans are different from eachother.
I would say that the point is, men tend to equate "bigger" with "better." Perhaps this is partly due to the oft-encouraged competition between men, and also partly due to the need to keep women feeling "lesser than." No, that is not paranoia, it is cultural subtlety, and sometimes outright, nothing subtle about it.
You impress me as a rational person, and one who seems to be quite fair-minded and without a lot of gender baggage, but even so, just as it is difficult for the most thoughtful and compassionate person to have a personal understanding of another person who is not "the same" kind of animal, be it male/female, American/Chinese, black/white, or whatever, it is almost impossible for men to understand fully what it is like to be a woman, in a physical, cultural, political, even economic sense.
Any woman will tell you there is bias against women by men, culturally, economically, politically, in most every realm, starting early and ending never. As long as women are defined and economically controlled by men, there will never be true equality. We have made strides, in Western countries, be we have not attained the goal. It is very clear to WOMEN that this is so, as there are many subtle ways that go un-noticed, or are disregarded, by men.
I'm not saying these things to be BITCHY, lol (woof! after all), but to be CLEAR, because I've had a fair number of men tell me quite clearly that I'm "imagining" this scenario! I assure you, I wish that were the case. Anyway, cheers, you do seem to understand this, so I'm saying it for the sake of the thread.
Men aren't just encouraged to compete - it's natural for us. As it is for women. Only, how we compete differ.
Like this:
Men wants to do things to talk about; women wants to talk about things to do.
We are complementary, like hydrogen and oxygen. Force them apart and all we get is conflagration or oxidation, and no water.
If you like, you could check out the recently departed Norah Vincent's work, when she lived undercover as a man for 18 months in 2006. She, being a lesbian feminist, had more than a few eye-opening moments with regards to men.
I got this notification, but I think you're responding to Diana, no?
Besides, are you not comparing a man (yourself) to other men?
Women have a different physiology, so maybe something more like comparing a crow to an eagle?
Thanks for bringing to light your continued investigations into the ongoing nonsense. Please be sure to get plenty of fresh air and sunshine and fun time with your kids as antidote. The stack needs Dr Rigger in robust rude health.
The scientific method is indeed simple and powerful. It's just the many people pretending to be doing science (actually fabricating The Science™) without recourse to The Method where the problems all arise.
So many credentialed charlatans simply add the "science" tag onto their every excretion in safe knowledge that in a world increasingly innumerate and dumbed-down, they can simply get away with it. If challenged, their only response is to have the challenger eliminated and silenced - science denier!
I often wonder how many of the professional white coat on brigades, spanning healthcare, academia and big business, and all of them so beloved of tyrants and media alike, actually understand the scientific method. Far worse I suspect, most may not have even heard of it.
Thanks Drew - I certainly do need to take better care of myself. I located my weights, but still haven't summoned the inner motivation to actually lift them on a regular basis!
I've been deeply disappointed in "science" over the last couple of years. But scientists don't live in a vacuum, and many have families and careers, like everyone else. In a climate when one can be cancelled, or lose a licence, simply for questioning things, there aren't going to be very many who will be in a good enough position to be able to speak out. We might think of this as a kind of 'cowardice', and in some respects that's true, but I can't judge too harshly because I understand some of the pressures that were applied.
I've been lucky - I'm basically just about good enough to have had a career in physics - but I'm pretty much useless at almost anything else. I have no idea what I would have done had I lost my position and deemed to be 'unemployable' because of my views. I'm not sure I'd have made a good shelf-stacker being a bit lacking in the practical common sense department (my DIY mistakes and gaffes are legendary).
I lowered my rowing machine into position yesterday. Then stood it back up. It’s effectively weight training without the weights. Highly recommended!
LOL
Science has been monopolized over the past 20 years or so by... you guessed it... Money.
AGAIN, it keeps coming back to MONEY. I think we should GET RID OF MONEY. That will take some serious thinking!!! But it would solve soooo many problems!
I am sorry to disagree with you Mr Herder. The problem is not money. The problem is that money has become the exclusive domain of the state, and the state creates its money without cost to itself. Thus politicians who are themselves for sale can use the levers of state to buy up everything and everyone useful to them, to foment and campaign endless wars and so forth. The history of the world and the decline of peoples is more or less the history of sound money being inconvenient as the ultimate constraint on the ambitions and evil of politicians and rulers, to be replaced by fiat money that removes all constraints. Sorry to be so disagreeable. I'll get back on my rowing machine now.
I don't mind if you disagree with me, but I'm not a "mister."
And I think actually, you've made a pretty good case for my side of this argument, lol. I don't say that to be rude, but... read it again with my statement in mind! Cheers.
I'm going to go row some strokes myself... ^_^
Woof woof!
Science has been under attack for decades... All this recent explosion of insanity has been building for a long time... What's surprising to me is how long it took for us to notice it very much, and how quickly it has "blossomed"-- Most likely due to our depleted state of normal emotional strength, after over two and a half years of abuse, terrorism, and mindfuckery...
What interesting times!
You know I love you Riggery, i love everyone, but I was wondering if you could do a peice examining how the scientific method has been applied to prove the existence of viruses. I say this, not facetiously, but as an innocent bystander who thinks the "no evidence of viruses" guys have a bloody good argument. I'd be delighted of someone of your level of intellectual greatness could cover this.
That's an interesting suggestion Rob.
I could certainly give my perspective on why I think the virus 'model' is a good fit for the facts - but I'm not sure how useful it would be. I'm not really all that well acquainted with the alternative models and I'm definitely not anything like an 'expert' on the virus model either.
Thanks for your reply. The reasons you state for it not being useful are the very reasons why it would be useful. I am sure you are a busy man, but I would recommend getting more acquainted with the opposing argument, I really feel that the methodology that you apply to everything else is the perfect approach when doing so. Personally, having come from the same 'virus is a good fit' way of thinking myself, i can say that, upon closer inspection, the virus model appears to be more of an 'ugly sisters foot' in a dainty glass slipper. I'll be honest, I've seen enough to convince me that virology is a pseudoscience, so im not looking for any reassurance, i guess im just looking for more allies in those that I respect. Thanks again.
Good post, I salute your attempt to be fair and reasonable.
That said, all this "woke" -ness is a deliberate ploy, in my opinion, along with other rather nefarious means, to divide and conquer, confuse, obfuscate, annoy, and otherwise diddle our brains in a sociopolitical fashion because we won't allow them (at least, not yet) to put their technology actually, physically, into our actual, physical brains.
I quote you from above, "We all know that a transwoman is not a woman in the fullest sense of the word..."
As a full-fledged woman I submit that anyone not born female is NOT a woman in ANY sense of the word. It's like putting horns on a pig and saying it's now a cow. Women are female from way before puberty, and before birth, and the same is true for males. It's not just a matter of what you LOOK like, it's MUCH, MUCH more than that. Even if a man could have a way to grow a baby inside his abdomen, he's never going to be a woman. Never.
If a person does not feel okay in their own skin, then why not work on helping them feel okay in their own skin? This idea that surgery and re-imagining the physical will change ALL THE THINGS that make us the gender we are; the thinking that surgery can change nature is utterly bizarre to me, and it feels like trickery, like a twisted joke... If that is not cool enough, then okay.
Do gender roles have to be so rigid that some people are strangers to themselves? Is our society so unwilling to bend a bit and allow for men to, say, wear makeup and dresses? Be more feminine, or whatever it is that is apparently being denied? Why does anyone have to be so stifled that they cannot be themselves in society? Can we not allow for some loosening of these kinds of physical, and even ornamental, visible indicators? I would go so far as to say that what anyone does with their own body (once they are OF AGE) is their choice, but to then join the women's sports teams and so on, is yet another means of encroaching on women's rights to equality and autonomy. I am happy to include, be kind to, and be as reasonable about these folks as I would anyone else, but I cannot call a man a woman, regardless of what he looks like.
And the same on the other side of the field... women are never going to be men. They may be able to POSE as a man, be called a man, marry a woman, etc. These things are already reality, and I don't see the harm, so far. But I have not seen woman-to-man individuals playing mens' sports and WINNING. Some things are either fair, or they're not fair.
There has LONG been a faction of men who wish to keep women down, and that's how this mostly feels to me, couched in the disguise of pity and "fairness." Simply put, it's not fair to women to allow for men to be called women simply because of a physical resemblance. I think of the photo of the swimmers, with the three winners on the blocks, and the First Place winner, dwarfing the second and third-place winners is clearly a MAN, head and shoulders taller, with obviously more muscular strength, lung capacity, etc... Congratulations, Jack, you've outdone two other people with NO possibility of fairness. If I'm not being reasonable, convince me, anyone.
It's a tough one WH. I agree that the whole program is about divide and conquer (it's the 'deconstruction' program in operation). It has to be stopped - and soon.
As for the 'trans' issue I can't find it in my heart to be so definitive. I've read some accounts, spoken to trans individuals, and their stories are heart-breaking and harrowing. If for no other reason than compassion, and not wanting to add extra heart-break, I'm OK with going along the "woman for all practical purposes" route for those who are genuinely afflicted with this awful mismatch between external and internal.
There are numerous difficulties here, though. The trans people I've spoken to are in no doubt about their chosen sex. It's not some 'costume' they put on - and the being 'trans' bit is something that is unwanted. They would not have chosen to be 'trans', because trans is the horrible and traumatic method they have to go through to achieve some measure of peace. Trans is not their 'identity'. There's no doubt in my mind that these individuals have a genuine problem that was, to quite a large extent, helped by their transition.
But how can we be certain, particularly when it comes to children, that we're dealing with a "genuine" case? How can we be certain that, in fact, transition is the "best" solution even then? It's a horrible, complicated, mess that isn't helped one bit by current gender ideology - in fact I would suggest that things have been made significantly worse by this current obsession with gender and the promotion of the gender woo woo.
I've wondered about a kind of 'Turing test' here. If I meet someone, in a shop say, and I can't tell if they are not 'presenting' as their 'original' sex, then maybe as far as everyday social interaction is concerned what's the issue?
The issue comes about when this gender shite is rammed down our fucking throats and we have to pay some sort of excessive homage to it, or when the rights and safety of other groups, like women, are impacted. That's when the battle lines get drawn and attitudes harden - and that helps no one sort anything out.
One crucially important thing is the need for more genuine, objective, RESEARCH - but because of the insane attitudes of the woke, and their capture of the institutions, we can't even get this sort of research funded. Doctors have to 'affirm' - OR ELSE. And that's an unbelievably stupid and anti-scientific requirement. The 'woke' believe they know best, they believe they have THE TRUTH, but prevent anyone from doing the actual research to discover whether they do indeed possess that 'truth'.
They are Grade A morons - but very dangerous ones.
Thanks for your continued interesting articles on this topic. And I appreciate not seeing another picture of the huge synthetic boobs. Let's just talk about the huge whale dicks and call it a day. 😄
This is the first time I'm thinking this through in response to your post, so I'm not sure if it's going to make sense, but I'll give it a go.
There are some interesting things going on regarding more objective biological science and the more subjective cultural norms. It seems to me that human excess/ extremism/ fundamentalism can emerge in any area. I think that extremism is a human psychological condition that will reliably show up in segments of society, and in frameworks of understanding. For example, the biological differences between men and women are taken to extremes in Muslim religious fundamentalism, when women need to wear hijabs in public in part to control men's natural hormonal sexual arousal. Since women are more hormonally equipped to care for others, their place is in the home and thus out of the home they must be invisible. There is always a group of people that will take their understanding to extremes, and sometimes these extremes gain power in a society. As you say and I agree, there's been some good things that the woke movement has brought to our cultural and social understanding. And a small part of that movement are woke extremists/ fundamentalists, taking their beliefs to extreme nonsensical ends.
People turn towards fundamentalism for order; the mind and emotions know exactly what to expect, and we don't have to tolerate uncertainty.
Now let's take science. You have pointed out that the scientific method has the ability to self correct, and keeps pointing it's needle towards material, physical truth. Some take this to an extreme of science fundamentalism, breaking down the world into only the material. People are only material beings, their consciousness reduced to brainwave activity, and once the body dies, the person no longer exists. This is where we get bioethics that state it's okay to then merge technology with biology, and hack human beings, human nature, and human behavior. This physical - material extremism does not take into account the evidence that consciousness can interact beyond the physical body; spooky action at a distance, people's ability to affect a machine via their thoughts (an MIT study), and evidence for past lives (where people remember historical events that they couldn't have learned any other way). There are branches of science study consciousness and quantum theory, but scientific material fundamentalism may gain widespread power. I'd say this would happen if we, without properly studying the harm to people, continue to put chips in two people's bodies and at some point into their brains, and create an internet of bodies, and expand 5G electromagnetic waves.
Over history and into the future, we are constantly dealing with extremism of different kinds, so maybe it shouldn't surprise us that there is a woke extremism. People turn to extremism in unstable times, and/or extremism is used to gain power over people, and/or people are born into or recruited into extremism.
For some reason this view of extremism as a natural consistent expected human social emergence helps me see it as part of society as a whole. We can draw from how we've related to other types of extremism to help people out of this movement, and keep a lid on how much power it gains (like we've done with the KKK in this country for example).
I've often wondered about extremism and its roots. It's not something I properly understand - mostly because the very idea of "forcing" someone to believe in something is dumb. It is, perhaps, rooted in a kind of megalomaniacal narcissism. I have an almost instinctive recoil mechanism which kicks in whenever I see someone pretending to have all the answers.
And it is only a pretence, even if the individual has convinced themselves. It's a self-delusion.
Science, clearly, does not have all the answers. It's the only way to properly investigate the material world but, as you say, I'm not personally convinced the 'material' world, as we currently understand it, is all there is. Maybe that, too, is amenable to 'science', but it will be a science very far from what we understand it to be today, I think. Borrowing from Arthur C Clarke I suspect the science of tomorrow will look like some kind of 'magic' to us.
I've been wanting to write about some of the implications of quantum mechanics as it pertains to 'reality' for some time - but it's difficult to explain it in a way that wouldn't send most people off into a coma.
Thank you for another great read. As an aside, I ashamedly admit I live in the region of Halton. Please read Rex Murphy’s column in today’s National Post, in which he pleads that schools return to actual teaching of basics- that our schools must place our children at the centre of their mandate. I would like to say that most Canadians do not buy this Woke guff but I am no longer sure. Look at our PM and his government.
I'm a big, big supporter of the philosophy "let kids be kids"
Introducing 'sophisticated' and *adult* thinking about sex, gender and sexuality into classrooms is disgraceful. Same for the promotion of any particular political philosophy.
Perfectly OK to say something along the lines of "some people are different, and we don't hate people because they are different". Not OK to get kids to think about what 'gender' they are or whether they are homosexual (or heterosexual). It might be appropriate for older kids to have some *limited* and neutral discussion about these kinds of things in a classroom - not sure on that - but definitely keep this shit a million miles away from younger kids.
I have an invisible disability. Therefore, people see me as "normal" and no "external oppression" exists. How do they explain that? Thanks. I will use your article as fodder for my own follow-up on this disability issue. Will try to write it up in the next week or so.
I look forward to that. Very interesting point indeed that you make here.