Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective.

And why is “Identity” the first item in the list? Why is it on the list at all?

Once you rule out the trivial meanings of “identity” (i.e. x=x, people are whatever they happen to be etc.), what’s left is practically synonymous with “ingroup vs. outgroup” or “us vs. them” thinking, the very things the old “Left” was trying to get away from. I’m under no illusion that “who I am” has not to a significant degree been shaped by growing up Norwegian, white, male (in the biological sex sense, not the “gender identity” sense) etc. But that’s a stupid and evil bug of the human brain, not a feature to be embraced, let alone something to define myself by.

Despite attempts by people like Yascha Mounk to salvage some positive meaning of “groupishness” and even nationalism, I don’t think there’s any baby in that bathwater. It’s all cancer and no healthy tissue. Even Mounk admits that the tendency to favor the ingroup can, under the wrong circumstances, lead to extraordinary levels of cruelty and indifference towards to those deemed “other”. Unless one is prepared to argue that, say, the Germans of the Nazi era just happened to be born worse than others on average, it seems to follow that the only thing that prevents most People of Identity from going down the same genocidal route, is that those wrong circumstances simply haven’t arisen. Yet.

We’re all familiar with the “ticking time bomb” metaphor. A better metaphor in my opinion would be the landmine. A time bomb is set to go off at a pre-determined time regardless of the environment. A landmine, on the other hand, will only go off if exposed to certain external influences. Some may have the dumb luck to live out their whole lives without ever having their triggering mechanisms activated, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. The world is full of people prepared to attack and vilify others, go out of their way to destroy their lives, even resort to violence, for bad reasons. If the only reason it hasn’t happened to you yet is that the right (i.e. wrong) kind of bad reasons simply haven’t presented themselves yet, we’re always going to have a reason to worry about you. Group identity may not be the only such bad reason (E.g. I don’t think Donald Trump identifies with anyone other than Donald Trump), but it’s a major one.

We hear a lot about Gaza, not so much about Khartoum.

The conflict between the [Rapid Support Forces] and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has now raged for eight months with no end in sight, killing thousands of people and creating what the United Nations says is the world’s largest human displacement crisis.

Beyond trapping civilians and destroying infrastructure in a country that already struggles with high rates of poverty, international observers have accused both sides of committing war crimes.

That is, international observers have accused both sides of committing war crimes along with trapping civilians and destroying infrastructure.

Evidence is also emerging that the RSF and their allies have massacred members of an African ethnic group in west Darfur, potentially repeating the genocide that took place there two decades ago.

…

Sudan has dealt with civil wars practically since independence in 1956, which led to its southern half splitting off to form South Sudan. But this war is unique in that one of its main battlegrounds is Khartoum, the capital and heart of a state that is home to an estimated 9.4 million people. The months of fighting have left bodies strewn in its streets, destroyed densely populated neighborhoods, damaged a crucial bridge over the Nile River and gutted the skyline, including a prominent oil company headquarters and the justice ministry.

…

Both diaspora and international humanitarian groups acknowledge Sudan’s needs are competing with the crises in Gaza and Ukraine, where Russia’s invasion will soon enter its third year.

It seems like a humanity-wide impulse to commit suicide rather than bake to death.

Originally a comment by VanitysFiend on Brave New World had the “feelies.”

@Bjarte Foshaug

Of course the creators of The Matrix both identify as women and supposedly meant the whole movie as a parable for transition in the first place (in case you wonder: the people who think Eddie Izzard is a woman are the ones who have taken the red pill, had their eyes opened, and see the world as it really is. It’s the rest of us who are living a lie).

The character of Switch was originally intended to be one sex in the matrix and a different sex out of the matrix, the result of a coding error by the machines. That’s as good an explanation for transgenderism as any I guess. It’s a side element though that was dropped in the actual movie. It’s bizarre from my perspective because the whole message of the movie was about choosing reality over fiction, even if reality sucks. The traitor among the crew chooses the fiction over reality and it’s not treated as a heroic decision. I doubt the Wachowskis see the Cypher in themselves.

I think the way a lot of people in geek spaces conceive of the authentic self makes them vulnerable to the teachings of the trans movement. If you’re shy, or a bit of a misfit like a lot of geeks are then the “real you” is often the person you wish you were, more confident, more suave, rather than the person most people see you as. If you’re a Walter Mitty type who works a boring job but has an fantastical imaginary life then which you is the real you? To a lot of geeky people the “real you” is the imaginary you, after all it’s who you are on the inside that counts. So transgenderism makes sense on an intuitive level for a lot of geeks imo.

I think authenticity and honesty go hand in hand, but being honest with the world about ones opinions has no bearing on whether ones opinions are objectively true. A gay person who is open about their homosexuality is being honest with themselves and the world, but what about a trans person or an otherkin/therian? No amount of honesty can override raw biology.

Trump being all festive n shit.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

2024 WILL GO DOWN AS THE YEAR OF GREAT AND FULLY COORDINATED ILLEGAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE BY CROOKED JOE BIDEN, THE WORST AND MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, THE DOJ, FBI, A.G.’s, & D.A.’s THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY, BUT DESPITE IT ALL, IN THE END, THERE WILL BE A BIG AND GLORIOUS VICTORY FOR THOSE BRAVE AND VALIANT PATRIOTS WHO WANT TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!!!

Also, less than an hour later:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

It’s hard to have a truly great Christmas when you have a Crooked and Incompetent President who wants to put his Political Opponent in jail, and who has been working hard (for a change!), illegally using all of the levers of Law Enforcement, to do so. We are in the fight of our lives to save our Country from MADNESS & DOOM. MAGA 2024!!!

Too sophisticated for me.

And now a feel-good story in honor of the solstice.

If you were strolling by a lake in the dead of winter and saw a duck trapped under the ice, you might search for a stick to poke a hole, or maybe throw a heavy rock, to create a break in the surface.

That is one very trapped duck!

But a fella named Langøien Karl didn’t mess around with rocks, he threw himself in.

The 36-year-old Norwegian native was already dressed for swimming, as he takes part in a (somewhat insane) hobby of “ice bathing,” which involves going for winter dips. When he spotted the duck, he dropped his towel and wasted no time jumping to the rescue.

Karl went the extra distance on shore, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the stunned duck, breathing life back into its feathered body.

Don’t try this at home.

Here is Chief Sealth School’s guide to social studies courses including the one that teaches women can have penises.

Ethnic Studies World History 3
Credits: 0.5 credit
Grade(s): 10
Length of Course: One Semester
Prerequisite: World History I, II
Graduation Requirement Satisfied: World History 3

This course provides the opportunity for students to examine current world problems and their historical and systemic causes.  The course is taught from an Ethnic Studies perspective and includes the structure of the 5 themes including Identity, Power and Oppression, Resistance and Liberation, reflection and Acton and Indigeneity. Students come to understand themselves in relation to systems of power and develop a sense of themselves as potential changemakers. The specific content varies from year to year based on student interest and input. There are bi-weekly class meetings to build community and provide a platform for student input into the class content and function. Students can expect a variety of instructional approaches, including the use of various types of texts, primary and secondary source documents, 21st century technologies, collaborative projects, and class discussion with an emphasis on writing and critical thinking, independently and in groups.

It sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it. I don’t object to teaching about power and oppression, certainly, and in fact it would be hard to teach history at all without those two aspects. But the “Students come to understand themselves in relation to systems of power” bit looks like a road right back into self-obsession, when education should be a road out of that. And why is “Identity” the first item in the list? Why is it on the list at all? And why didn’t they fix the typo on “Acton” which is clearly not the historian but a typo for “Action”?

Over all it doesn’t inspire confidence.

The source is conservative talk radio, but if the facts are true as reported then that’s what they are.

An activist history teacher failed a Seattle student on a quiz for saying only women can get pregnant and that only men have penises.

A 10th grade Ethnic Studies World History teacher at Chief Sealth International High School in Seattle gave students a quiz titled, “Understanding Gender vs. Sex.” The quiz provided a series of statements to label true or false, or questions with multiple choices.

Many of the questions focused on personal pronoun use (When someone uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, what does that mean about their gender identity?”) or assumptions one may make around gender identity (“True/false: Transgender people are gay”). Two questions, however, are objectively false, but students are taught the opposite.

Question 4 was a true or false question with the statement, “All men have penises.” The student labeled the statement “true” since it is, in fact, true. But the teacher penalized the answer, marking it incorrect. The teacher claims women can have a penis.

Well, wait. The question is badly worded. It should be “Only men have penises.” If you say all you get questions about amputations and industrial accidents and so on. But if the teacher says women can have a penis the teacher should be in another line of work.

Similarly, Question 7 was a true or false question with the statement, “Only women can get pregnant.” Again, the student marked the statement “true” because only women can get pregnant. Again, the teacher penalized the student, insisting the answer is false. The teacher believes men can get pregnant.

There you go: “only,” not “all.” Some women of course can’t get pregnant, but zero men can get pregnant.

And what the hell is a school doing teaching this trendy garbage? And what’s it got to do with history? Unless it’s a class on the history of bonkers ideas and ludicrous fads, which is a very interesting subject.

Seattle Public Schools, through a spokesperson, defended the quiz as “inclusive,” arguing it was appropriate for an Ethnic Studies course.

Oh I see. So Ethnic People have different biologies from normal people. They’re really going with that?

“Seattle Public Schools is dedicated to establishing inclusive environments that allow exploration of contemporary issues, specifically examining the impacts of power systems such as racism and patriarchy,” the spokesperson said to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “This commitment extends to fostering welcoming and inclusive settings where students, staff, and families have the freedom to express their authentic selves.”

Oh ffs. If that’s true it’s both shocking and embarrassing.

Dude get over it.

Originally a comment by Vanitys Fiend on The disembodied avatar worlds of the internet.

One thing that gets me about this is that Science Fiction, and probably a fair number of fairy tales and myths, have been exploring and warning about this kind of disembodiment from reality for decades now. The original pilot for Star Trek featured a race that became so detached from reality over time that they no longer knew how to maintain the advanced technology of their ancestors. Neuromancer has “The Matrix” before The Matrix did and even that film has time to explore the idea of whether it matters if you’re living in an illusion or reality, and it come down on the side of harsh reality over a comfortable unreality*. Brave New World had the “feelies” which allow people to escape from reality if only for a few hours at a time.

To go back to Star Trek, The Next Generation had an early episode called “Holo Pursuits” about a socially anxious crewmember who was using VR as a way of coping with his isolation and as a way to live out his fantasies. The ep didn’t treat this as a terribly valid lifestyle choice. Helping the crewmember overcome his anxiety was seen as the correct solution. Honestly I can’t think of many Sf stories where living in VR was treated as the best way forward for individuals or humanity as a species and yet there are so many people in geek spaces who seem reality enamoured with the idea**.

*The unreality in this case is an eternal 1999 in a generic American city (filmed in Oz though) with a green filter.

**Being pro VR plus genetic and cybernetic enhancement are three of the things that baffle me about a lot of Star Trek fans. It’s doubly weird when they ask question like “Why do conservatives like Star Trek” and I’m like, “you’re a pro eugenics, porn addled furry who wants to live a life of debauchery in a holodeck banging a Vulcan Love Slave with your cybernetically enhanced penis, you don’t get Star Trek either”.

Merry krissmiss!!

This is GLORIOUS.

Well at least one lawyer agrees that it’s grotesque to claim that presidents can crime with impunity because they were in theWhiteHouse at the time of the criming.

A pre-Christmas filing by Donald Trump‘s lawyers asking a federal appeals court to throw out the election subversion case against him is “ridiculous,” according to a Florida state attorney.

State Attorney for Palm Beach County Dave Aronberg said the filing arguing that Trump is immune from prosecution for actions that fell within his official presidential duties was about “delay.”

…

The former president has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review [whether] he is immune from allegations [that] he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because he was president when the offenses occurred. District Judge Tanya Chutkan had ruled at the beginning of December that Trump was not immune from the charges against him.

…

In a filing late on December 23, Trump’s lawyers argued that a “president’s acts are not examinable by a judicial branch,” that proceedings against the former president are unconstitutional and that there is no set precedent.

Again, if it’s true that a president’s acts are not examinable by a judicial branch then presidents can commit any crimes they like and nobody can do anything about it. Presidents can all be Henry VIIIs and have their wives executed when they get tiresome.

“In his brief, [Trump] said that this is the only time in history a president has been charged for official acts,” Aronberg, a Democrat, argued. “He’s not being charged for official acts. He’s been charged for allegedly criminal acts… it’s a big difference. If he thinks he has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, the answer is no.”

He doesn’t think at all, he just throws stuff until someone stops him.

Here again is that weird circularity.

He took the actions in the White House, therefore you can’t touch him, therefore he gets to try to return to the White House, despite having done his best to force his way in with violent sedition last time. Which you can’t touch him for doing, because he was in the White House at the time. It’s so very heads we win tails you lose it makes my head swim.

It’s like saying you’re immune from prosecution for robbing a bank because you were in the bank when you robbed it.

This is so progressive.

“Hahaha you can’t get abortions any more and you’re miserable old hags.”

I just can’t figure out why feminist women say no to this glorious revolution.

How to help kids be healthy:

Iowa will not participate this summer in a federal program that gives $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out, state officials have announced.

The state has notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it will not participate in the 2024 Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children — or Summer EBT — program, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education said in a Friday news release.

“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds said in the news release.

Some children are overweight, therefore no low-income children will get help with food costs while school is out. How kind and compassionate and helpful.

Some state lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Izaah Knox of Des Moines, quickly voiced their opposition to the decision.

“It’s extremely disappointing that the Reynolds administration is planning to reject federal money that could put food on the table for hungry Iowa kids,” Knox said in a statement. “This cruel and short-sighted decision will have real impacts on children and families in my district and communities all across Iowa.”

Nonsense, those kids should be out there learning how to play the stock market.

Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to set up a system in which the top boss can never be held to account because the top boss is the top boss. Why? Because even the top boss is just another human, and humans can do bad things. We need to be able to hold them to account, for our own protection. We can’t just assume they won’t exploit the top job to rob us blind and get away with it.

Lawyers for former President Donald Trump have asked a federal appeals court to throw out a case alleging interference in the 2020 election, arguing that he is immune from prosecution.

Like that. There shouldn’t be such a thing. People shouldn’t be immune from prosecution just because they were once top boss. Trump is a good illustration of that because he did all kinds of bad shit to get elected and then lots more bad shit in office and then even more bad shit after he was thrown out of office. He’s one of the last people on the planet who should be immune from prosecution.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Let us be clear about the difference.

YNNB #7 wrote:

Too many of us are under the illusion that we’re a self-made species.

The deceptive comforts of modernity responsible for this would not be complete I think without what appears to have ratcheted the illusion up to 11: the disembodied avatar worlds of the internet. While the theories of postmodernism and post colonialism formed before the average person had at least one personal computer, the plausibility of a human nature detached from its evolved biological origins no doubt got a major boost from a large part of the population—especially the younger part of the population — getting comfortable with entire worlds where we could be a magical elf.

On our computers we have created species, we’ve re-created ourselves, and we’ve lived in intellectual spaces where the sex binary didn’t exist unless you asked Ziggybottom34 whether they were male or female.

I don’t know if this has affected Judith Butler and her academic acolytes, but I’ll bet it’s a reason fewer people are laughing at the more unbelievable parts.

Honestly legislators should not be this stupid. It’s an important job; they should not be this lost in the fog.

Thundering herds of bison that’s dumb. Of course people of any kind are not a theory or an ideology or a contested belief, and nobody says they are. The ideology/contested belief is that people can change sex, that people literally are the sex they are not, that people are what they say they are, that sex is determined by feelings and thoughts and not by the reality of the body.

The fact that there are children who say they are trans is indeed a fact. What’s not a fact is that “people [invariably] are who they say they are.” If that were the case there would never be long queues at airports while hundreds of people go through passport control. If that were the case people could empty other people’s bank accounts. If that were the case we could never be sure our doctor has any medical training.

Children who think they’re trans are a reality. Children who say they are trans are a reality. Children who are the opposite sex are a fiction.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Gender itself is a colonial introduction”.

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the entire genderist enterprise seems to be entirely dependent upon a combination of exactly that conflation, bait and switch (where a genderist will switch gears and meanings from one to the other mid-argument), and what Bjarte Foshaug has characterized as “bad puns,” such as TWAW. All heavily fortified with a generous heaping of “because SHUT UP!”

So much of this stems from questions about just how much of a window (if any) our limited, fallible senses offer on what we might call “the real world” external to our selves, and by extension, if there is any such “real world” at all. Maybe we’re just making stuff up as we go along, with various competing narratives vying for dominance, with an arbitrary, jury-rigged, threadbare, patchwork “reality” imposed by fiat on the rest of the universe by the most recent victor in the constant power-struggle for momentary, provisional, epistemic hegemony, and that any thoughts of a real world somehow underpinning anything are naive, mawkish, wishful thinking.

We are indeed fortunate that we live at a stage in our cultural and intellectual development that we can entertain such debates at all; for the vast majority of our lineage’s time on this Earth, an individual indulging in such esoteric cogitation for any length of time would have been soon eaten by a hungry lion unburdened by any such immobilizing doubts or second thoughts.

Onward!

Lugones describes the process this way, and I quote: “Sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call [hand goes up for an air quote] ‘the light side’ of the colonial modern gender system. Those on the ‘dark’ side were not necessarily understood dimorphically. Sexual views of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites, or intersex, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk.”

The claim seems to be that colonizers saw themselves as sexually dimorphic and indigenous people as not.

But as Paula Gunn Allen and others made clear, intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization, without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and Eurocentered [sic] global capitalism.

In other words there was confusion about intersex people, therefore indigenous people knew all about trans people while the stupid Europeans were still droning on about the sexual binary.

Persuasive stuff!

If the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females, it certainly does not follow that such a sexual division is based on biology. End quote.

Aw yeah, who would be stupid enough to think sexual dimorphism is based on biology?

Similarly, scholarship on East Africa and Uganda has demonstrated that gender inequality was introduced through Christian missionaries, suggesting that traditional social relations were in some ways more variable and free than those introduced through civilizational missions.

[skipping ahead a bit]

Let us be clear about the difference. The anti-gender position argues that gender is the colonizing force, and that getting rid of gender will reverse the course of colonization that it represents and enacts. De-colonial and anti-colonial perspectives [pause to stifle a bit of gas] argue that colonization imposed oppressive gender norms and new forms of identity classifications that intensified the subordination of women and the pathologization of non-gender-conforming queer and intersex people who had previously had a form of belonging in their communities.

So we mustn’t get rid of gender, we must cling to gender like grim death; what we need to do is get rid of oppressive gender norms.

Ok then my question becomes: what’s the difference between gender and gender norms?

I don’t think there is one; I think Butler is trying to sneak a trick past us. When we gender skeptics talk about getting rid of gender it’s the gender norms we mean. (Without the norms what even is gender?) We don’t think there’s some ghostly or Platonic essence called “gender” wandering around, separate from its norms. We think gender is the system that says men have to play football and women have to get their nails done.

She’s trying to grab the credit for resisting gender without actually doing it.

So who is Maria Lugones and who is Anibal Quijano and what do they say? Have a JSTOR preview:

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West.

That could all be about gender as the rules for how people of each sex are supposed to act, look, talk and all the rest of it. There certainly are such rules, and it’s highly likely that colonizers considered the rules of the colonized to be all wrong and in need of correction by the enlightened Europeans who wanted to exploit and enslave them. (Lugones seems to be saying the very idea of rules of any kind was a European invention, which seems highly unlikely.)

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

Stay tuned.