📘 2+2=4 Vol. 11: Anti-women, anti-men, anti-children, anti-human
The scientific definition of sex has gone down the toilet, having children is now frowned upon, and modern dating has become a minefield.
One of the things that trouble me most about the current zeitgeist is the sentiment of deep-seated antipathy towards absolutely everything and everyone that differs from oneself. Politics, with the media in tow, have cunningly managed to pit everybody against each other and this kind of antagonism has become about much more than just the simple Left vs. Right opposition: We are talking about women against men, children against their parents, white against non-white, local citizens against immigrants, gender ideologues against defenders of natural sciences, anti-vax against pro-vax, rich against poor, young against old, climate apocalypticists against climate deniers… to say nothing of the wars currently raging around the globe. Even a neutral position has become impossible. You are not with us, so you must be with them.
It is a long, seemingly endless list of antagonisms, designed to tear nations, societies, families and friends apart. It is both maddening and saddening to see how easily people are being manipulated into thinking one way or the other and how any leeway for a more nuanced perspective is being purposefully destroyed by the media, social media algorithms and the general lack of critical thinking skills. Divide and conquer, as they say.
This week focuses on many such polarities that reflect this destructive mindset: Firstly, the anti-women zeitgeist as a woman in Australia is embroiled in a lawsuit for defending the biological definition of sex and Scottish female convicts have to face a male convict in their prison just because he identifies as a woman. Secondly, the anti-scientific (and thereby anti-reality) zeitgeist as a “scientific” journal is now claiming that sex is not biologically determined. Thirdly, the both anti-women and anti-men zeitgeist that manifests itself in a dating culture fostering distrust and selfishness between the sexes. Fourthly, the anti-children and anti-human zeitgeist of a society that devalues the creation of new human life. And lastly, the anti-democratic zeitgeist of an alleged democracy that frowns upon the democratic act of creating a new political party.
#1 Are Women Just D*ckless Men? | Peter Boghossian & Sall Grover
by Peter Boghossian (Conversations with Peter Boghossian, published on October 11, 2023)
Sall Grover is a screenwriter-turned-entrepreneur and founder of Giggle, a female-only app connecting women who want to find roommates, promote their businesses or make friends. Sounds like a nice idea. However, it’s 2023, and so of course anything “female-only” has become a slighty problematic endeavour. In what is one of the most bizarre lawsuits of 2023, Ms. Grover is currently facing legal action from a trans-identified man called Roxanne Tickle because he was shunned from the platform for not being a woman (despite identifying as one). Mr. Boghossian’s conversation with Ms. Grover is a delight, a great interplay between thought-provoking questions from Boghossian’s part and sharp and witty answers from Grover’s. I especially enjoyed listening to a woman who is frank and unapologetic about the trans issue (as we should all be) and the vital necessity of female-only spaces.
#2 Why is this crazed male criminal being treated as a woman?
by Jo Bartosch (spiked online, published on October 18, 2023)
Talking about female-only spaces, it cannot be stressed enough how important it is to make people aware of the dire situation of female inmates in countries that have passed self-ID laws. With men being able to “identify” as women, cases of male sex offenders being transferred to female prisons under the pretense of being “transwomen” have become quite common. In her newest column for spiked online, Ms. Bartosch dissects the media coverage of one of the most notorious of those cases, namely Andrew Burns aka “Tiffany Scott”. She points out how mainstream media outlets uniformly refer to Burns as “she”, thereby completely distorting reality and discarding any notion of the truth. By playing along with the language games of “preferred pronouns” and the idea that people can actually switch sexes (which they cannot), the media are complicit in the deconstruction of truth and they must be called out for it.
#3 The Fall of Scientific American
by James Esses (spiked online, published on October 24, 2023)
The latest nonsense to be published by the Scientific American – a once prestigious and renowned scientific journal that used to be interested in doing actual Science – is that “context determines how many different sexes exist”. Forget about biology and basic common sense. As Mr. Esses points out in his op-ed article, the Scientific American has “abandoned objective facts entirely, in favour of trans-activist pseudoscience.” A scientific journal that denies physical differences between males and females cannot be taken seriously on anything that it says. And the worst part is that the majority of the scientific community has decided to stay silent on the matter, either out of fear or careerism or both. Were it not for their collective cowardice, we wouldn’t need to waste time arguing about how many sexes there are. But alas, we are in the era of Post-Truth and Post-Science.
#4 Why Is Modern Dating Such A Mess? - Sadia Khan | Modern Wisdom 694
by Chris Williamson (Modern Wisdom, published on October 16, 2023)
Chris Williamson, aka the host of the Modern Wisdom podcast, has really been stepping up his game this year with new long-format episodes and a list of very interesting and diverse guests. In one of his most recent conversations he sits down with Dubai-based psychologist Sadia Khan to talk about men, women and the dating world, a topic that he loves to talk about and is quite versed in (the incel and the red/blue/black pill movement seems to be one of his favorite subjects). Ms. Khan makes for an excellent discussion partner and I thoroughly enjoyed her no-nonsense approach to topics such as male-female dynamics, femininity and masculinity, boundaries, sex, mutual respect, infidelity, divorce and choosing the right person to date. Both well-spoken and smart, she gives ample food for thought and it is clear why many deem her opinions “controversial”.
#5 On Having Children
by Martin Gurri (Discourse, published on October 11, 2023)
As lowering birth rates and chosen childlessness continue to be an alarming trend in most of the West and wealthy parts of East Asia, we need to ask ourselves why people are less and less inclined to have children. Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst whose writing is not only logical and precise but also possesses the philosophical and emotional undertone such a delicate topic requires, has provided a fantastic piece on the current state of parenthood, the economical and societal consequences of a world without children and how we are already failing our youngest generation to come of age, the so-called Zoomers. What they are confronted with right now is a world that is proactively antihuman and constantly apocalpytic: “[A]s a form of cultural negation, in the aggregate, the spirit of the age that inspires childlessness feels antihuman in a very literal sense: fewer humans are being produced, suggesting a slump in the value of new human life,” he writes. While Mr. Gurri admits that having children is, of course, a personal choice, he makes his own opinion on the matter unequivocally clear and gives a heartwarming and hopeful conclusion: “[W]atching my children strive and struggle, succeed and fail, love and bicker, what I felt made the word ‘happiness’ seem shallow and lame.”
#6 Exklusiv-Interview: Die Wagenknecht Partei ist da!
by Marc Friedrich (Finanzielle Intelligenz mit Marc Friedrich, published on October 23, 2023)
German and German-speaking readers of this Substack might be aware that this week has seen the launch of a new political party in the Federal Republic: Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) was founded by the politician of the same name, a former member of the German leftist party Die Linke who has regularly come under fire for criticizing the woke turn of her own party towards identity politics. After months of deliberation, Wagenknecht has now founded her own party and has taken some of her former Linke colleagues with her, thereby causing the Linke parliamentary group of the German Bundestag to dissolve as they won’t have enough MPs anymore to fill the seats. While I have always remained skeptical of Wagenknecht’s communist/socialist background, she has at the same time struck me as one of the few politicians left who possess common sense, integrity and competence, and she proves those qualities once again in this interview with podcaster and bestselling author Marc Friedrich. Of course, German mainstream media giants such as Der Spiegel could not refrain themselves from immediately calling the launch of BSW “antidemocratic”, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the state of politics in Germany.
Lots of good reading there, if some rather depressing fare. Moot as to the roots of the general problem you refer to, although many have argued that most of us aren't really listening to each other, are too narrow-minded, scientifically illiterate, and dogmatic to do so. Something of a systemic problem that may well be the death of us all.
Something of a case in point, if not where the rubber meets the road, is summarized by your "the scientific definition of sex has gone down the toilet". But the problem there is that most people haven't got a flaming clue about that "scientific definition" in the first place and are subscribing to if not peddling what is no more than folk biology. For example, you link to the Spiked Online article that takes a well-deserved shot or two at "Scientific" American. However, Spiked proves their scientific illiteracy and pigheadedness by stating that, "... [Scientific American] asserts that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth when it is not – it is observed and recorded". The ONLY thing that is observed at birth is genitalia which is NOT what it takes to qualify as male or female.
More particularly -- by the standard biological definitions promulgated in reputable biological journals, dictionaries, and encyclopedias -- to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither -- i.e., newborn babies and the prepubescent -- are sexless. As some corroboration for that view, see this recent article in Wiley Online Library and this passage in particular:
WOL: "Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it may be a life-history stage. For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, yet."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bies.202200173
From zygote, to embryo, to fetus, to the onset of puberty, none of us are or were "reproductively competent" -- we are not or were not yet male or female; we are or were sexless.
ALL that the words "male" and "female" denote, at least by those standard biological definitions, is quite transitory reproductive abilities. Too many people have turned the sexes into "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essences". And too many get quite "offended" when one tries to point out those facts. Not to give you (too much of) a hard time, but I wonder how willing you are to listen to that argument ...
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-still-dont-understand-the-point/comment/42433491
https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/my-first-space-how-did-it-go/comment/39281981