Namecalling
I don’t even know this guy.
I don’t even know him. Have never talked to him before – but he marches right up and calls me a bigot. For saying that women get pregnant.
Then he calls me idiotic…while he pretends that “only women get pregnant” is “all women get pregnant” and then says it’s “simple observational fact” that men get pregnant.
Loudly? Wishes? Bigoted?
I don’t even know this guy.
Updating to add: I guess it’s all over between us. I still have no idea who he is or why he’s so specifically furious at me though.
Does he provide an example of a biological male (a “man” in rational common sense language) who got pregnant? Any documented biological fact of a new subspecies of human being in which the males get pregnant, too? Or is he talking only about “women who identify as men” getting pregnant, which means his only argument is the specious one that “what one feelzzzz is what one izzzzzzzzz” and said female is really a male so checkmate, TERF bigots111!!!!!/sarc?
He doesn’t provide anything – just shouty abuse. Only he doesn’t look like your basic Twitter shouty abusive guy, he looks middle-aged and like an insurance agency manager or similar. It’s weird.
He just proves that secular leftists can be as unthinkingly, dogmatically, counterfactually adamant as an snake handler or televangelist. The Woke are the left’s fundamentalists. The same purity policing, the same acceptance of dogma as fact. From his photo, he could easily be a Youth Minister at the freeway interchange “worship center” in some prosperous exurb,
He only has 640 followers. I think this is maybe some disgruntled nobody who’s only power is to abuse women on the interwebs. Embrace the trans cult, ye powerless creatures! Just put pronouns in your bio and voila! You’re in!
Probably bullied all his life by the bigger kids, or his ex wife… :P
He’s a “bioethicist” with pronouns, who understands neither biology nor ethics.
If ever a twit called for the “A man! A man has arrived! To share his manly views” GIF, surely this is the twit.
That last tweet in the screenshot, though. This guy is projecting like an IMAX here … complaining that *Ophelia* is “spewing” about a women’s issue as if *she* has no skin in this game. (And exactly what is beardybro’s relation to this issue, other than to come and “spew” at women?)
I guess “actively avoid learning better” translated means I point out how stupid his claims are. Learning better would be taking his word for everything. Wull, why is he avoiding learning from me then? Fair’s fair!
He also seems to have somehow skipped the courses on basic logic. And math, too, I suppose.
OK, technically … female cats get pregnant, and they are not women. Also: wolves, foxes, sheep, cows…
“Fuck you” appears to be a bioethicist’s way of saying “Peace”….
I’m going to hazard a guess that he believes it’s a way for him to drum up traffic on his Twitter feed and blog and get kudos from the youth, because hasn’t read the room and thinks it’s still 2019.
He’s aping the FTB crowd, methinks.
And when I mused that he skipped the course on logic, I might have been too charitable, judging by his absurdly over-the-top reaction to my reply.
Maybe we should start off by defining ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Here’s my contribution:
A woman is a human being with two X chromosomes.
A man is a human being with 1 X chromosome and 1 Y chromosome.
This would save a lot of argument — if all sides accepted it. Of course, one side won’t, but that’s another matter.
Sheesh. He says ‘bigot’ but I’ve got a strong feeling that’s not the B word he wants to use.
@14 great line.
@13–interestingly, Maya Forstater’s letter to the Fawcett Society does a really great job of clarifying definitions, and asking them to pick one.
https://sex-matters.org/posts/the-workplace/a-letter-to-fawcett/
@Brian M
“The Woke are the left’s fundamentalists.”
What’s left about them?
Their ‘anti-racism’ is racist because they advocate treating people differently (including with hostility) according to their race.
Their ‘feminism’ is sexist because they want to roll back on protections for women as a sex class.
They are intensely comfortable with capitalism and the commodification of everything including access to human bodies being sold in the sex trade.
They are individualists and identitarians, and therefore have little in common with socialists or Marxists.
They don’t support workers rights, freedom of expression or democratic accountability for those in power: they think people can just be driven out of their jobs by a righteous mob.
Calling them ‘left’ is what they want us to do and what the right want us to do.
On the other hand, comparing wokeness to religious fundamentalism does seem appropriate.
@13:
Iknklast can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that in order to account for chromosomal abnormalities, we would need to state the rule thus: “A woman is a human being with no Y chromosomes. A man is a human being with at least one Y chromosome.” This would then cover XXX women, and XXY, XYY, XXYY males (and maybe some others that I don’t know about).
(And yes, this was a mansplaining “well, actually” comment.)
GW, that is correct. An XXY individual has two X chromosomes, but is defined as a man. An XXX individual would still be a woman. These are rare, but not non-existent. As I teach in my Biology class (until they tell me I cannot, and I retire because I won’t teach that woman is a feeling in your head), we define male and female chromosomally by the presence or absence of Y chromosome. There are, of course, secondary sexual features that go along with that, and the extra X can make those ambiguous, but that doesn’t support the contention of the TAs.
conqueringchicken: Now there’s an evocative username. Anyway …
Left and Liberal are not the same. Unconstrained, unadulterated Leftism and Rightism are equally incompatible with Liberalism.
The Woke are Left in the same way that Soviet Russia was Left. Racism and sexism are not antithetical to a Leftist paradigm; the only motivation required is that power be theorized as held along race and sex lines. Such is why we see Karens crying white women’s tears at being forced to share facilities with trans folx of color.
While the Woke may venerate some conception of individuality, they reject individualism both implicitly and explicitly in favor of group-based identitarianism. For the Woke, one’s group memberships are the most important factors in determining the course of one’s life. Nota bene: determining. Structural determinism genuinely means determinism.
Freedom of expression, of conscience, of assembly are all liberal values, not Leftist ones. Remember, it’s IngSoc not IngFac. Leftism advocates extreme censorship of the sort that the Party hopes to implement by universal and exclusive adoption of Newspeak. For example, here’s Herbert Marcuse:
Commodification of everything is pretty Woke, but such commodification is necessary for achieving equity, because wokeness aims at a command economy. How else can we assure the eradication of outcome differences if not by reducing all human existence to mere fungible widgets to be shifted around as determined necessary by the State?
NiV: Interesting summary! Thank you.
Isn’t there also the possibility of XX males (de la Chapelle syndrome)?
(Agreed, though, that this has nothing at all to do with what TRAs yammer on about…)
@19
You’ve given an unflattering description of the Left from a Liberal perspective, which is fine but we won’t agree about it.
But the Left is, if nothing else, critical of Capitalism. Wokeness is not. They embrace it in their consumerist approach to ‘identity’, their support for commodification and free markets in pornography, sex, plastic surgery, etc.
Can we agree there is a conflict there?
“Left” can mean so many things, of course, depending on the culture, the time, the economic system. “Critical of capitalism” does seem to be a fundamental point? Which brings back our heroic poultry’s original question: Are the woke really left?
conqueringchicken: The Left is most definitely critical of capitalism. Where I disagree is on whether support for commodification entails support for capitalism and whether the Woke have a coherent, consistent view on economics.
Commodification can occur in the context of pure capitalism. It can also occur in the context of pure socialism. The only difference is in who controls the means of production and thus who exploits and exchanges commodities. In the former, private entities exploit and exchange; in the latter, the State.
What I see from wokies is tension between their espoused ideology, which is explicitly redistributive toward achieving equity, and their own desires, which exist within the context of a capitalist system in which they can participate. It’s like the disconnect between what devout Christians (claim to) believe and how they actually act. If one actually believes that someone who just died is going to heaven, then one should celebrate, not mourn. If one actually believes that a newly baptized infant is completely free of sin and would go to heaven if killed right now, then one should go around killing newly baptized infants so as to prevent free will from damning them to eternal torment. After all, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” [John 15:13 NKJV] But they don’t, and neither do wokies. I suspect that this dissonance between espoused ideological commitments and real actions leads to the same shame-repentance-intensification-transgression cycle in both.
@24
I think there’s something in your religious analogy.
But I think where we disagree is that what you are calling Leftism is what I would call State Capitalism.
This 3min clip from Chomsky explains what I’m getting at:
https://youtu.be/06-XcAiswY4
Basically, calling what the USSR did ‘socialism’ benefitted both sides in the Cold War but didn’t actually describe what was being done. (When is this time that Stalin handed over the means of production to the workers?)
Similarly, and I think you agree, the Woke are probably economically illiterate but they participate in capitalism (we all do, but they go as far as defending the free trade of human bodies for sex, for example ). So not very socialist, and yet they and the Right want them to be called ‘Left’. This makes the Woke feel radical and good, but it makes the Left look bad to the general public. So everybody wins except actual socialists who want people to be liberated from the authoritarian control of corporations and the State.
Nullius, this is something I’ve been saying for years, in explaining to my friends and colleagues why communism is not better for the environment than capitalism (which uses the environment as both a pantry and a toilet). Communism is sort of like capitalism upside down; still focused on production, etc, but the ownership is turned over.
I do think calling the Woke left is somewhat misleading, though. They appear to have totalitarian instincts that would run them closer to the fascist right than the socialist left. I know that communism led to totalitarianism, but I don’t think that is implicit within socialism; I think it was a function of the messed up economies where communism took hold.
I think of it more like this: the political spectrum as a circle, not a line, and the Woke have moved further to the left, around the circle, and connected with the right. They try to link us (TERFs) to the right, but the arc doesn’t bend that way, it bends the other way.
… I’m writing a reply, but (1) I’m sleepy, (2) I’ve had a couple glasses of a very nice red blend, and (3) talking about Communism without sounding condescending is difficult, especially for someone with tendencies that might be characterized as “pedantic jerk”.
To me the defining feature of “leftism” is that leftists tend to side with the (perceived*) underdog whereas the people on the right tend to side with the elite (or, as they see it, the “deserving”). Left-wingers tend to see the (western) world as inherently unjust and systematically rigged in favor of certain groups at the expense of others, while right-wingers tend to see the world as a place where the cream rises to the top while the residue sinks to the bottom, and people pretty much get what they deserve.
As I have often said, it also seems to me like there’s always been a tension on the “left” between a mindset that said “we’re all the same on the inside”, emphasized equal treatment and universal rights, and sought to get away from boxes and labels on the one hand and a mindset that said “it’s ok to be different”, emphasized diversity and tolerance, and sought to de-stigmatize marginalized identities on the other. I think both mindsets come in both healthy and pathological versions. E.g. Are certain jobs considered “women’s work” because they’re seen as low status (the first mindset), or are they considered low status because they’re seen as “women’s work” (the second mindset)? I’m pretty sure the answer is some combination of both.
From such a point of view I would classify “alt-leftism”, or “identity politics”, or “wokism” as part of the pathological version of the second mindset, but definitely leftist. On the other hand it’s hard to see how Soviet-style communism** qualifies as “leftist” at all, since the the Soviet union and its allies were never even meant to become classless societies where everyone was equal and no group held dominance over another. They were always meant to be permanent dictatorships with the party elite as a permanent new upper class.
* At least that’s their self-image. In practice this can – and often does – lead to some very paradoxical results, especially when two groups of underdogs are making competing claims of oppression. Still it remains the case that leftists side with the underdog as they see it, even if the way they see it often needs to be taken with an ocean of salt.
** Marxism, for all its significant flaws, is another matter, but I very much doubt that Marx and Engels themselves would have recognized the policies of the Soviet union and its allies as an example of their ideas put into practice.
Chromosomes don’t tell the whole story. There are XY women who have given birth. There are XX men with testicles.
Anomalies happen when the SRY gene, which is usually present on the Y, is inactivated, or moves to the X. (Don’t ask me how that happens, I am not a biologist.)
Sexual development is very complex, and biological processes are imperfect.
IMO the simplest and most accurate, and therefore best, way to define “female” and “male” is by gametes. The sex with the small gametes is male. The one with large gametes is female.
Here’s one of my favorite articles on the subject, by Zach Elliot. As the title says, it’s a response to a Scientific American article, one genderists often appeal to:
https://theparadoxinstitute.com/blog/2020/07/24/a-response-to-stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/
Very clear. For a less complicated, briefer, and more fun look at females as the-sex-with-large-gametes, here’s biologist Emma Hilton, aka fondofbeetles:
https://fondofbeetles.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/from-humans-to-asparagus-females-are-females/