Transanity: Michelle Goldberg, "What Is A Woman?"
There's a whole buncha crazy in this article.
First, of course, there's the fact that the title question is so incredibly easy to answer: a woman is an adult, female human being.
Second, there's the fact that the extremely simply nature of the argument has been so easily obscured with a few sketchy gestures at incredibly shitty, pseudophilosophical arguments--arguments that any competent undergraduate--or, in fact, anybody with the sense that God gave a goose--should be able to see through.
Third: the real work has been done with shrieking, whining, false accusations of prejudice, appeals to feelz, and the rest of the PC repertoire. Basically, the popular kids in the cultural superstructure have been able--just by calling dissenters names--to get them to say and even, apparently, believe, something roughly equivalent to 'war is peace' or 'night is day' or 'your dog becomes a cat if you want it to.' I thought Americans were smarter and more intellectually independent that this. And I thought they were supposed to have a respectable amount of common sense.
Fourth: The top tiers of the fourth estate leaped on the 'Night is day'--and you're a bigot if you disagree bandwagon so uncritically and enthusiastically that we now get stories like this breathlessly wondering at how anyone can be so evilly retrograde as to think that 'he' refers to males and 'she' to females. Dictionaries and books on English usage are, of course useless--useless! Who but a transmisogynist would ever even consider looking to actual scientific knowledge of word meanings! The left is so firmly in control of the top-tier of the commentariat and the media that they just more-or-less automatically adopt the left's point of view, attitudes, and ways of speaking. And if they can be made to accept this ludicrous nonsense, then they can be made to accept anything.
Fifth, the only people daring to mention that the emperor has no clothes are radical feminists--basically the second-craziest group in existence. And their arguments are terrible, too. WTF? No sane, ordinary people are willing to stand up and say "Hey, you do realize that to be a woman you have to at least be female...right?"
Sixth, and finally, and on a more personal note: after decades of making fun of conservatives' complaints about liberal bias in the media...damn. When that shit finally breaks through your intellectual defenses and comes into focus...it's like getting smacked with a 2x4. But, then, I'm a person who maintained that academia had no leftist bias even after two decades of living in it... So I'm not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed...
First, of course, there's the fact that the title question is so incredibly easy to answer: a woman is an adult, female human being.
Second, there's the fact that the extremely simply nature of the argument has been so easily obscured with a few sketchy gestures at incredibly shitty, pseudophilosophical arguments--arguments that any competent undergraduate--or, in fact, anybody with the sense that God gave a goose--should be able to see through.
Third: the real work has been done with shrieking, whining, false accusations of prejudice, appeals to feelz, and the rest of the PC repertoire. Basically, the popular kids in the cultural superstructure have been able--just by calling dissenters names--to get them to say and even, apparently, believe, something roughly equivalent to 'war is peace' or 'night is day' or 'your dog becomes a cat if you want it to.' I thought Americans were smarter and more intellectually independent that this. And I thought they were supposed to have a respectable amount of common sense.
Fourth: The top tiers of the fourth estate leaped on the 'Night is day'--and you're a bigot if you disagree bandwagon so uncritically and enthusiastically that we now get stories like this breathlessly wondering at how anyone can be so evilly retrograde as to think that 'he' refers to males and 'she' to females. Dictionaries and books on English usage are, of course useless--useless! Who but a transmisogynist would ever even consider looking to actual scientific knowledge of word meanings! The left is so firmly in control of the top-tier of the commentariat and the media that they just more-or-less automatically adopt the left's point of view, attitudes, and ways of speaking. And if they can be made to accept this ludicrous nonsense, then they can be made to accept anything.
Fifth, the only people daring to mention that the emperor has no clothes are radical feminists--basically the second-craziest group in existence. And their arguments are terrible, too. WTF? No sane, ordinary people are willing to stand up and say "Hey, you do realize that to be a woman you have to at least be female...right?"
Sixth, and finally, and on a more personal note: after decades of making fun of conservatives' complaints about liberal bias in the media...damn. When that shit finally breaks through your intellectual defenses and comes into focus...it's like getting smacked with a 2x4. But, then, I'm a person who maintained that academia had no leftist bias even after two decades of living in it... So I'm not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed...
posted by Winston Smith at
9:51 PM
3 Comments:
Fifth, the only people daring to mention that the emperor has no clothes are radical feminists--basically the second-craziest group in existence. And their arguments are terrible, too. WTF? No sane, ordinary people are willing to stand up and say "Hey, you do realize that to be a woman you have to at least be female...right?"
With the obvious provision that the people we are considering are on the Left. Virtually every single conservative saw through this BS and has been saying the gender theory left is full of it for decades.
The second obvious provision is the dynamics of the commentariat tend to equilibriate differently than the overall population. If you're a member of the intelligentsia (intelligent said with tongue firmly in cheek), and by that I'm including academia, you're generally optimizing on increasing reputation. There are some saints who genuinely want to understand the world, but they are rare. So these sorts of games of reputation demolition are disastrous in that atmosphere. Eventually when the reputation destroyers leave too much intellectual cash on the table, someone will get bold enough to rush in and take it (Jordan Peterson maybe?), but we should be much more aware of how easy it is for elite opinion to dislodge itself from anything resembling sanity going forward.
One of the more important features of a good investment is incentive alignment. Ideally you want to find a company where management is incentivized to do right by both their shareholders and customers (and of course themselves). That yields a stable ecosystem where they don't cannibalize their own business in support of bigger payouts, customers remain bought in because the product serves their interests, and shareholders keep providing capital because they get the appropriate return.
Reputation just doesn't do that, because it fails when society fragments (all of a sudden you only care about your reputation among elites or urbanites or coreligionists or whatever). All of a sudden the interests of the intelligentsia diverges from those downstream of it (who want a reliable source of information and interpretation of that information). Whoever figures out how to put the pieces back together deserves a freaking Nobel, but until that happens, we should be very skeptical of anything they produce.
That is really damn interesting, Anon. Thanks for it.
But also: right, the right saw through it...or, better: refused to enthusiastically jump on the crazy train.
Though even many of them are going all wobbly and starting to give in to calling men 'she'.
Kinda reminds me of when paleo-PC insisted that 'black' was a racist way to refer to blacks. Many of us derided it...but when the whole cultural superstructure had finally adopted it, even I, after many years, gave in...just a year or two before everybody started coming back to their senses and saying 'black' again (though, of course, people do also still say 'African-American.')
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