📘 2+2=4 Vol. 9: The continuous erosion of common sense

Porn and puberty blockers for all children! Of course men should play in women's sports! All wildfires are caused by climate change! Wait... what?

(Photo by Karina Vorozheeva on Unsplash)

Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Consider this week’s selection of articles: They talk about teenagers accessing hardcore pornography online, men participating in women’s sports, adults fighting for the right of children to take sterilizing hormone cocktails and cut off healthy body parts, a blue-collar folk musician who is accused by the elite of not knowing anything about blue-collar workers, a scientist admitting to tampering with his own research to get published, and a global sexuality curriculum teaching children they can switch sex.

If you had told me five years ago that we would have contentious debates about these kinds of issues, I would have probably laughed at you. “Come on”, I would have said. “What are you talking about? Everyone agrees: No porn for kids. No men in women’s sports. What the hell are puberty blockers? Let the man sing! Universities are places of academic rigor. A global sex-ed plan to indoctrinate children? You crazy?!”

But well, here we are in 2023 and common sense has seen better days. But if you feel like me, if you feel like Winston from Orwell’s 1984, don’t forget that it isn’t you who’s crazy. Two plus two still equals four. And you are not alone.

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#1 I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway.

by Isabel Hogben (The Free Press, published on August 29, 2023)

The pornography epidemic is arguably the most dramatically overlooked and underestimated issue in the upbringing and education of our children. Parents and educators need to be better informed about how pervasive online porn culture is, how easy it is for young kids to access hardcore pornography and how severe the damages are to their ability to form healthy relationships. Reading this essay from 16-year-old Isabel Hogben, who won second place with this text in The Free Press’ high school essay contest, will open your eyes to the ubiquitousness and destructiveness of online porn, as explained – perversely enough – by a teenager. Long gone are the days of sneaking a peek of a naked lady in a Playboy magazine – most children nowadays have seen the most gruesome, disgusting and violent sexual acts on Pornhub by the time they are 12 years old. And this needs to stop.

Addendum: If you have the time, make sure to read the other runner-up, Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax, and the contest winner, A Constitution for Teenage Happiness.

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#2 Five Years Later: What I’ve Learned About Women and Men in Sports

by Martina Navratilova (Genspect, published on August 30, 2023)

A powerful voice for women’s sports, tennis icon Martina Navratilova continues to speak up against the madness of letting “transwomen” (read: males) compete in female sports. Recounting her journey since that fateful tweet in 2018 where she stated that “[y]ou can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women”, she doubles down on her stance that men and women must have their own separate categories to guarantee athletic fairness. As she recalls tennis superstar Serena Williams’ famous refusal to play against Andy Murray because she “would lose 6:0 6:0 in 5 to 6 minutes”, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many (SO many) female athletes stand in silence while their female colleagues are being ridiculed in their own sports categories by trans-identifying males. Where are all the Serenas, Venuses, Steffis, Monicas and Chrises of female sports? If more athletic superstars united to fight against this injustice, the trans movement would quickly lose its foothold in this particular domain.

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#3 Children need protection from adult madness

by Lionel Shriver (The Spectator, published on September 9, 2023)

Like Martina Navratilova, writer Lionel Shriver is one of very few of her kind to publicly oppose the transgender craze and actually fight for and exert her freedom of speech, thereby risking her reputation and potential career opportunities. But Shriver is not one to back down. Having read some of her previous articles about the transgender phenomenon, I knew to expect another razor-sharp and sarcasm-filled takedown of the current political movement to fight for the “rights of trans kids” (read: right to chop off healthy body parts) – and I wasn’t disappointed.

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#4 Oliver Anthony and the woke hatred for the working class

by Brendan O’Neill (spiked online, published on September 2, 2023)

In yet another brilliant column, spiked online chief political writer Brendan O’Neill dissects the media’s dissection of Oliver Anthony, the man from the woods who unexpectedly went viral overnight with a folksy anti-establishment anthem called “Rich Men North of Richmond”. In his wonderfully ironic manner, O’Neill exposes the blatant elitism of the current political Left, which has no clue (nor does it care) about the common folk it once used to represent. Instead, for some reason, they have nothing better to do than to badmouth a blue-collar singer from Farmville, Virginia, who has battled depression and found solace in the Bible. But then of course, that’s exactly what the establishment hates about him.

Addendum: Oliver Anthony has made precisely two podcast appearances: He has been on The Joe Rogan Experience and The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (another reason why the establishment does not like him). I found him to be incredibly likeable, but just make up your own mind about this guy.

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#5 I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

by Patrick T Brown (The Free Press, published on September 5, 2023)

The Free Press continues to be a beacon of light in the current media landscape. By publishing Patrick T Brown’s unembellished account of how he managed to get his climate change paper published in Nature by suppressing certain data and catering to the editors’ opinions, The Free Press has proven once again that they do not shy away from stirring up the hornet’s nest – which is exactly what journalism is supposed to do. Brown’s article lays out how utterly broken academia is, where personal biases and political alignments have become much more important than actual scientific research. Numbers are being adjusted and unwanted findings swept under the rug until a result fits the dominating narrative. While Nature’s response to Brown’s article has, unsurprisingly, been rather embarrassing, the important lesson to take away from this is that we cannot trust “Science” anymore, as long as it serves political and economic goals.

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#6 The Last Taboo

by Tom-Oliver Regenauer (regenauer.blog, published on September 3, 2023)

Mr. Regenauer does a tremendous job laying out the foundations of the theorems of gender ideology currently en vogue (spoiler alert: eugenics and pedophilia play an important part in this) and connecting the dots between powerful NGOs, financial giants such as BlackRock, state institutions such as Planned Parenthood and its German counterpart pro familia, SIECUS, the Kinsey Institute and, of course, UNESCO. The latter is very keen on pushing its “Comprehensive Sexuality Education” (CSE) curriculum worldwide which happily promotes teaching gender ideology in schools. Everyone who has been wondering how the hell we have gotten to this point where all common sense seems to have been destroyed, down to the most basic concept of the sexual binary of the human species, will have a lightbulb moment while reading this. The connections between private and public, national and supranational players are just astounding: The gender hydra has been growing in the dark for decades and is now ready to devour our children and families if we don’t manage to stab it in the heart. (For the automated English translation of the article, click here.)