#radical orthodoxy

[salsa-and-light]

"See, this is EXACTLY what I knew would happen when I saw that “Read More” break at the bottom of a post with nothing below it. And this is why I was VERY careful in what I said and what words I used:"

Well I figure if that were true then he would have blocked me before I reminded him how buttons were used.

He blocked me so this is just for me and the audience.

I am sorry for how this variety of Christian acts, I'm tired of it too.

I'm going to add another page break here because not everyone has the patience to read this or scroll through all this, and I'm polite.

Not that it particularly matters when people add collages of photos and walls of text with no break but I try.

"I obviously know what a read more break is"

Oh REally>

Consider this enrichment.

Those definitely aren't the words of someone trying to cover their ass or anything.

I certainly block people when they do what I expect and not when I'm caught in a massive assholish blunder.

"(not to mention that I’ve probably been using the internet longer than this SJW has been alive)."

Ohhh, are you oooold?

What 30? 32?

Truly I am but a babe before you and the wisdom of the ages.

How old do you think I am?

"When they can’t beat the facts, they try to get away by claiming that they had some brilliant point that their opponent either didn’t understand or didn’t address because of a technical issue or some kind of cheating."

Listen, I'm more than willing to take the compliment; if you think I did all that research on Mister Gagnon and checked your sources and added pages of text in the two hours between my first and second post(can't see his post I'm blocked) well then go ahead, think I'm a brilliant speed demon all you want.

Why I would do that instead of just waiting two more hours to respond to an already old post is mystery to me but this imaginary version of me is clearly working on levels that I can't fathom, so who could say.

"And no, it isn’t “courtesy” to use read more breaks. It’s actualy super annoying, because it forces a person out of their own blog and dashboard to instead visit the other person’s blog to find out what they said"

Well I'm very sorry that it takes a second or two of inconvenience for you before you settle in to read a long post but the rest of the userbase still exists and they don't want to see pictures of the same uninspired book for six pages.

I don't know where you get the self importance to call me rude for not wanting to subject people to this when you yourself decided to move to a second blog that you made for arguments, presumably so that it wouldn't clog up your main argument blog.

Unless "argument side blog" is some ironic artistic choice, in which case.. far out man

"Suddenly there is something after the read more break, in the exact location which was empty when I checked it before. Funny that."

Yep I did all that work just for your tootsie pop, I dropped everything in the early afternoon just to write all that.

Maybe this is a cultural difference or maybe I'm just ~crazy~ but I don't actually care what you think of me. I'm on the internet to have fun.

"Since my arguments don’t need to rely on speculation, lies and petty insults"

Awww, someone thinks that because their insults are subtler they're more academically valid, so precious.

People were supposedly getting in fist-fights at the Council of Nicea, scholars have never been impartial, there is almost no correlation to being right and being nice.

I'm here to have fun, so if you want a polite discourse be polite and we can have a good time.

And if you want to dish it out, learn to take it.

I'm very fair😉.

Kisses

"I won’t hyper analyze how this happened."

-Negative self-awareness-

"“Monolignual American” = Assumption"

It was a hypothetical.

"...low-key racism"

Against whom?

Monolingual Americans‽

That's not a race.

It's a condition, a curable one at that. Get a duolingo, hire a rosetta stone, kiss the Blarney Stone if you're desperate.

Is it also "racism" to be biased against medical advice from people with no experience in medicine‽

Even then, I'm no going to trust a podiatrist over a cardiologist when it comes to heart health.

"& Ad hominem insult."

It was a warning darling, I don't trust people who don't know about what they're talking about, in this case translation and linguistics, if you chose to take that personally that's a reflection on you and sources you choose to believe.

"Firstly, it’s an admission of guilt that he has already made an a priori judgment"

Yeah, just like you made an "a priori" judgment that a lack of sources was uncompelling to you.

I was being nice by telling you the standards that would convince me, which I didn't have to do and perhaps shouldn't have.

Since you got'yer panties in a wad over it.

But if you can't meet the standard of expertise that I require then I don't know why you bothered anyways.

"and will refuse to be swayed by any argument, no matter how well researched or authoritative,"

Notice how I was specifically saying that I would only be convinced by arguments that were well-researched and authoritative. But way to admit that your standard for authoritative is so much lower than mine.

"This guy is using my status as an “American” against me,"

Oh yeah, the most oppressed minority, Anglophone Americans.

I didn't know you were an American, although it's a hardly surprising.

This particular brand of Christianity tends to only survive where people have limited contact with people with different religious ideas.

Everyone's a evil heretic except for you, or so you can convince yourself if you leave every church you disagree with and never talk about God with anyone you actually have to live with.

"as though he can simply dismiss all arguments from Americans on the basis of their place of birth,"

I learned linguistics in America, and some of the best universities for linguistics in the world are in Pennsylvania, notably a place in America. Some of the most renowned Linguists were American, Noam Chomsky, both Sapir & Whorf.

Cool it with the victim mentality, your sources were just bad.

"while simultaneously ignoring the fact that I actually have formal education"

You'd have to tell me that for me to ignore it, unless your "formal" education was supposed to be you reading books from your library.

"I’m citing the works of other well-respected experts"

Respect is useless currency when it comes to the truth.

People thought that Germ theory was crazy.

I warned you off the most blatantly wrong "experts"(people with limited linguistics training or knowledge) and that didn't seem to work so I'm not sure how I should explain to that I also want the research to be good.

Opinion pieces are not valid evidence.

"Insulting the design of a website rather than responding to the actual content of the site."

Yes, but you see, I'm here to have fun. So I'm going to share my personal opinion too.

It's one of the perks of being able to write whatever I want😘

I'm not positing his bad website design as the fundamental flaw of his argument.

I'm saying that It's an ugly website.

It's not that deep.

"Also, his objection to the “content” in this context simply reeks of the fact that he has already a priori eliminated any"

Blaah blabla.

I didn't even object to the content, though I would be within in my right to(my blog- doing this for fun remember) but I think we can all appreciate how unsurprising people are, the homophobe thinks that God has instituted complementarian gender ideals. What a non-shock that is.

Never mind that he also says that be believes in "gender stratification" but who needs to dwell on that little horror when the rest of him is exactly the same.

If you didn't want me to comment on his views or be amused that this is exactly what I expected then you really shouldn't have put the man in front of me and implicitly asked me to take him seriously.

Even you did the same thing as me with your "On brand so far!" because yes, Mister Gagnon is on-brand too; and I think that's funny.

It's about the only funny thing, but you know, I have to entertain myself somehow.

"It’s also worth noting that “homophobe” is a completely vapid and empty insult of no real weight."

Yeahhh.. kind of like calling the KKK racist.

It's True- yes, but it's a bit redundant

But hey, I was adding a dramatic flair.

Some Queer people are dramatic,

It's been known to happen.

"SJWs like this “part homosexual” use it at every possible opportunity to mindlessly slander anyone who even..."

It's called a read honey,

Like how you gonna dress like a gay man and be homophobic.

It's hilarious to me.

It'd be like if Miss Piggy were homophobic

I'm having fun, you sound miserable.

"quoting his comments would become redundant and needlessly stressful due to his bizarre formatting choices."

I like to call them artistic choice but I was actually pleasantly surprised by how much we're alike in our formatting: indented quotes.. elipses to switch topics between paragraphs..

All the hits, makes it a bit easier to sift through the silt.

You're a bit overzealous with the CAPS and the Bolds and the ITalics, but we all have flaws.

"he found a partial copy of Gsgnon’s book in PDF format, didn’t object to the obvious intellectual property theft issues"

Yeah, that doesn't sound like someone who "formally studied" much of anything; do you know how much textbooks cost‽

I, in fact, do not have any objection to pirating, of all things, the table of contents for a treatise on bigotry.

Take the whole book if you can stand to read it. I've read all those same ideas from the YouTube comment sections for free.

"and proceeds to hurl various additional ad hominem insults at sporadic areas of the book"

✨Correct✨.

I think complaining about the tribulations of being a homophobe is whiny, comparing that to coming out of the closet is gross and I think that trying to use scripture to justify sexism is shameful.

Bad behavior and bad ideas deserve criticism, and if I'm the one to dole it out today.. then baby hand me another tomato.

"The author isn’t wrong just because you were personally offended by what he had to say."

Bolds again, tsk tsk.

But I'd have to be surprised to be offended honey🚬

"I am not an arbitrary internet user, because: My blog is actually dedicated to discussing religious topics..."

Showing that you have a vested interest.

Some might say that you're too close to the issue, sunk cost fallacy being what it is.

Tell me, when was the last time you changed your mind on something more serious than your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Do you remember? If you can't it's probably been too long.

But in any case, your still just some guy, on the internet, you could be a Russian bisexual transvestite hooker for all anyone knows.

"This is the second such blog I’ve operated here on tumblr over the last decade."

Oh so you're Re-aLly invested, Okay "Dude" whatever.

"I’ve addressed this exact argument many times before."

And so have I, what of it Viceroy, do you think that repetition gives us legitimacy? -because I don't.

"I responded to and was involved in the original post back when it was first made in 2019."

Yeah, just another rando to me bud, just because you have the dates memorized doesn't mean that I care more.

"I have an actual Master’s Degree in this topic, therefore giving me legitimate credibility to discuss the topic."

And I also have a Master's what a super~crazy coincidence.

You're really building this up aren't you, it's kinda cute.

"I’m citing authoritative sources from other experts."

That's very good, that's very good sweetie.

..

..

I don't care, you're still just some guy, just like I'm just some guy.

And as I've made abundantly clear, I think your experts are speculating at best.

"And on top of all that, I provided actual arguments"

Ooh they're arguments, not good, not new, not based in the linguistic evidence that's relevant to translation,

But they're arguments

"...instead of just engaging in diversionary rhetoric and hurling insults at my opponents."

And what a good boy you are Jack Horner.

But the problem is that you're very impolite, and you arguments are bad and rage-fueled.

I don't owe a serious reply to bad ideas just because someone created a discipline out of discussing bigotry.

🎶A communist- with tenure is still just a communist🎶

And you don't get civility when you offer none

"who clearly does not have even rudimentary knowledge of the subject material"

That's very funny,

"and is running a generic blog of no particular theme,"

By Jove!, you're right.

Oh my gosh what can I be without a theme, does my whole life need a theme too‽

"opinion on a post he necromancered out of 2019."

You know for someone who's supposedly old enough to have been on the internet longer than I've been alive you seem to be wholly unfamiliar with the concept of things coming back.

Skinny jeans are back FYI.

Sorry that I'm late💎✨, if you wanted me sooner you could have tagged me back when you first tried to criticize me.

Besides, the color of the Sky post is from 2012, if it's still on tumblr, safe to assume it could pop back up.

Also the word is "necromanced", "necromancer" is a person who necromances. And why you're referencing a old website filled with socio-political caricatures I have no idea.

"This commentary is quite amusing to me, because I can just envision this SJW putting on his rainbow flag pins and heading out into the woods to get his hoe-down on with the Duck Dynasty characters. Yeah, that would pan out great, I’m sure."

I find this funny for two reasons, one because it's a tacit admission that Queer people are in far more danger than homophobic professors and two because he clearly doesn't understand how being in the closet works and imagines Queer people as something closer to a cartoon than real life.

I'm an expert with a bulldozer and I know how to build a chicken coop, I'm also Queer.

It happens,

Any illusions that you had about being far away from Queer people are a myth, they're there, if you don't know it's probably because your untrustworthy, or perhaps just unpleasant.

"tumblr users would refer to as a “weird flex.” Particularly when he immediately follows it up by trying to inflate his own association with intellectual society."

Hell yeah it's a flex.

Do you know how few people where I'm from even make it to College? Sorry if this is too complex for you but I can be happy about my achievements while also recognizing the power of class privilege to buoy unremarkable academics.

"Last time I checked, theological seminaries weren’t counted among the ranks of “Ivy League” schools. Of course, this really just means that this SJW has no idea what “Ivy League” means and uses these kinds of snappy comments with no knowledge of what he is implying."

Well apparently I'm the only one who does any research before I open my mouth.

Mister Gagnon works at Houston Christian University and so he has a faculty page detailing his education as is customary for universities. Predictably there was nothing in the study of ancient languages or linguistics but last I checked Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton were all Ivy League schools.

Didn't you say this man was your favorite author? Has he never mentioned his education? I'd find that odd; he seems the type.

Unless of course he's lying about being educated in Ivy League schools, which I highly doubt, but wouldn't it be funny?

A gal can dream can't she?

"Yeah, I bet! You all got together at those “Ivy League” schools to swap stories about how much you developed your racist hatred of “Monolingual Americans” during your “poor” upbringing in the “backwoods!”"

This is bad enough I don't think I need to say much, but just for the viewer they have these things called "conferences" where people in a given field come together to share ideas and the like.

Given how Mister Gagnon works in Texas and I've been to the rather informal affair of a theological conference in Texas before, I imagine that he was probably nearby.

But hey, maybe the expert theologian never attends theological conferences, who am I to say what he does in his semi-personal life.

In fairness I wouldn't invite him more than once if I were an event organizer.

Though I also appreciate that this man acknowledges the classism that's latent in academic circles.

"Every SJW always denies being an SJW, while in the same breath expressing the most far-left political views possible."

Let's just say that if the most far-left positions in America are being anti-communist and pro-gun that we're living in a very different world than I thought.

"Conceding one of the points of my argument. Good job."

I often do that when people are right.

I'm glad that you could experience it.

"The examples he cites are still between one man and multiple women,"

Yes, which is not "1 man + 1 woman".

Which means you were wrong, that's not a rule; tell me where I'm losing you.

"The claim that people can have multiple wives is a very commonly asked about issue in scripture and there are many readily available sources that explain why marriage is limited to one man and one woman in spite of the limited Old Testament examples of men taking more than one wife."

I mean I could give a nuanced breakdown of the arguments made by this opinion piece article.. but I think it would be wasted effort, (if someone else has a question LMK) but for our purposes here I'll simply say that a lot of the claim are editorializing at best and it doesn't matter regardless.

Even if you were able to prove that marriages that aren't heterosexual, monogamous and outside the household of the patriarch are inferior in some capacity it doesn't change the fact that scripture still calls them marriages.

Which means that scripture does not also claim that non-monogamous marriages can't exist.

"He also makes the error of proof texting in this argument."

And yet.. you try to imply that the Bible does say that non-monogamous marriages can't exist.

Tell me what context was missing from the verses explicitly stating that these people were married to multiple people

Was there some super secret verse right after that said "just kidding"?

Making abstract accusations of being "out of context" for verses whose meanings don't change in context is bottom of the barrel snottiness; pre-teens at Wednesday church do that.

" “Nowhere in the Bible does it say [sex outside of marriage is a sin]” Yes, it does. Many times. Over and over and over."

Not one of those passages ever mentions pre-marital sex, we've been over this.

Proverbs 6:32

This passage is talking about adultery, not premarital sex.

Matthew 15:19, Acts 15:20, 1 Corinthians 5:1, 1 Corinthians 6:13, 1 Corinthians 6:18, 1 Corinthians 10:8, 2 Corinthians 12:21, Galatians 5:19, Ephesians 5:3, Colossians 3:5, 1 Thessalonians 4:3,  Jude 1:7(this one alludes to attempted rape), Revelation 21:8

These passages are talking about sexual immorality, not premarital sex.

 Hebrews 13:4

This passage is just talking about how marriage should be respected.

1 Corinthians 7:2

This passage is explicitly telling already married couples that they should have sex, they incorrectly believed that sex was dirty. Imagine that.

Romans 1:29

This passage doesn't mention sex or marriage at all.

Song of Solomon 4

This passage is used as evidence that God likes sex "as long as it's in marriage", even though this passage is about a man(Solomon) who has hundreds of wives and hundreds of concubines and we actually have no idea if he and this woman are married. The ESV translation that the site links to uses the word "Bride" but they could be married, engaged, betrothed or it could be poetic language just like is used in the rest of the chapter.

Needless to say though it's highly unlikely that this was his first wife.

It's also worth mentioning that these blogs(mostly the first link) repeat verses multiple times to give the impression that there's more evidence than there is and that they know what they're talking about.

I've done it too, I needed to hit those page counts on those academic papers, but it's a little sleazy when you're doing it to convince people to make major life decisions.

....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... .......

Now the viewer might have noticed that most of the verses mention sexual immorality but don't mention premarital sex, the blogger foresaw that rather glaring issue and adds this line:

"Sex before marriage, or premarital sex, is not addressed in that exact term, but it does fall within the scope of sexual immorality."

What is immoral about pre-marital sex⸮ Why is pre-marital sex in the category of sexual immorality at all⸮

Because they say so.

And isn't that just rich.. rich and morally repulsive.

It's like saying "👆🤓 actually the Bible never said you had to share your stuff with me but the Bible said not to be greedy and not giving your stuff to me is greedy"

It's quite stunning the boldness that people have to just say things knowing that there's no proof.

"he then goes into an angry rant about the “purity movement” and how it has “fallen apart” as if this is proof of anything."

I'm sorry that you don't think it's important that Christian doctrine works in application and not just in theory.

Meanwhile the damage is done and people like you seem to content to ignore and repeat it.

But for those interested there is a fantastic documentary which follows Joshua Harris the Author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye(one of the most popular Purity Culture advocacy books) where he follows up to see what damage his book, and by extension the purity movement has done. He diplomatically rejects the ideas of his previous book and the culture it fostered.

Quite admirable given the circumstances really.

"this is another example of him using the bandwagon fallacy by appealing to what the majority of secular society believes"

No.

I was talking about the Purity Movement, and almost entirely Christian movement which decades later has been revealed to be a damaging social liability that gives adults permission to control the clothing and behavior of women, demonize the human body and poison gender relations.

Unsurprisingly, sexual ethics were the vehicle for enhanced social control and a culture of shame and degradation.

I don't personally find that trivial.

But where have I seen that before.

It's not as if people's "moral objection to homosexuality" has ever been used as premise to punish anything else right?

Oh wait, it's always been used for that.

Men can't have sex with other men and suddenly Susan and Sally can't hold hands.

He can't walk like that, she can't have that haircut, they can't play that music, he'll never be taken seriously with that voice, she shouldn't stand that way, men shouldn't dress like that, women shouldn't live alone and on and on it goes.

It's never been just about the sex, it's always been about a whole host of other issues, sexual ethics is just the prelued to justify their pre-existing prejudices so that people don't realize how it looks to say "oh this man is too pretty" and "this woman wearing shorts looks like a man".

"And since I proved that the premises in question are accurate, he effectively concedes another of my major bullet points."

Do you want a cookie for understanding a hypothetical?

It's like watching a rat in a maze be satisfied by imagining the cheese at the end.

"He then follows this up with some more angry ranting about how I’m being mean to “queer” people. I’m going to classify that as a very feeble appeal to emotion fallacy, not worthy of further response."

Oh.. you would say that darling.

The angry ranting in Question:

"But way to reduce Queer people to sex, that’s real cute of you."

Yeah I seem pretty incensed, just boiling really. That's not a casual comment at all.

In any case I that was a footnote, and he spent longer talking about how ridiculous it was than the actual statement.

The oversexualization of Queer people is a real issue, I didn't expect this person to care about that. I expected him to ignore it, not blow it out into some unjust crusade that I'm inflicting upon him.

I'm being dramatic on purpose; but him, I don't know what his deal is.

It's probably because, even if the previous hypothetical were correct it doesn't even remotely touch Queer Love, Queer relationships or any non-sexual form of physical affection.

"Lie. I provided sources that explain in detail how the statements of Jesus and his citation of the Genesis narrative are in opposition to homosexuality."

Ehh, writer's privilege, I'm ignoring that.

To quote myself, because I'm brilliant and fun at parties:

"As I have said previously, the idea that Genesis 2:24 and its requotes are “definitions” contradicts scripture. 

But even so affirming heterosexual marriage does not condemn all other relationships or statuses."

"His only rebuttal against my sources and Gagnon’s arguments is to engage in shallow and meaningless insults against our character,"

Not in that section. Though I'm sure your character merits it.

But if you wanna' kvetch I'm not your friend, find someone else.

"Another lie. Once again, I provided ample sources which validate the translation as condemning homosexuality beyond any doubt."

And yet I remain here chancellor, with plenty of doubt. I don't suppose any of your "ample sources" address why the English translations of Leviticus 18:22 translated the noun "מִשְׁכְּבֵ֣י" as a verb?

I thought not.

"He brings up some variant of this claim several times during his rant,"

No, no darling.

You're ranting, I'm stirring the pot.

I usually know that people who archive their arguments aren't that willing to hear any new opinions.

I'll admit that you're incensed beyond what I expected but I don't usually aspire to lay my sorrows at the feet of prickly personalities anyways.

I'll admit there are some things that a person could say to hurt my feelings, I'm only human after all, but I don't think I'd trust any criticism coming from you about my appearance so better luck next time.

"For example, I addressed this type of argument on my old blog as Ignorant SJW Arguments #1, #14, #23 and several others,"

I think it's fun that you've spent so much time arguing on the internet that you have to catalogue it. Like a hidden library of obscure sorrows..

Or obscene sorrows, take your pick.

You know most people aren't as gracious as me, most people aren't receptive to new ideas and they don't take an attitude sparingly.

You're just lucky that I find the attempts to insult me funny otherwise I might have blocked you first.

Aww, we could have done a little couple thing, "block me, no you block me, block me first XXOO😋"

I did poke around on your defunct little archive though, some of your links were broken but I managed to find a few of the people you got into spats with.

Includding a horse blog.

What did the ponies ever do to you John?

I follow them now.

But I did find this old line

"Now normally, I wouldn’t resort to a “call out” post like this, except..."

different times eh.

Oh well.

"You can also find simple explanations on mainstream Christian websites and apologetics sites."

Yeah sure, only trust the good Christians that believe what we believe, don't want to check in with the bad Christians, what we believe is objectively true so you shouldn't check in with any other viewpoints otherwise you might not believe what is objectively true because objective truth can't be found anywhere else.

Anyways, I encourage everyone to check a variety of viewpoints, I don't care if you've never set foot in a church, the priest, the preacher and the pastor are all just some guy(including the women) just be curious and critical, the culty ones tend to tell on themselves.

This man moved cross-country to escape people he disagreed with, that's usually a red flag: not playing well with others.

There are Christians all over the world who live in majority non-Christian spaces, many in more hostile places than "secular America".

"To briefly summarize, there is a difference between ceremonial laws given explicitly to the nation of Israel (such as Orthodox Jewish practices of not cutting their sideburns) and moral laws (such as the prohibition against sexual immorality) that still applies to us today."

Does the Bible say anything about this?

No it's doesn't this is arbitrary distinction so that people can ignore some parts and enforce others.

The blogs you linked says as much

"The division of the Jewish law into different categories is a human construct designed to better understand the nature of God and define which laws church-age Christians are still required to follow. Many believe the ceremonial law is not applicable, but we are bound by the Ten Commandments."

Meanwhile the actual scriptures say this:

"Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian." - Galatians 3:28

"For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it." - James 2:10

So it appears that you're breaking the Law too. Shame.

But then again, we're not bound by the law, so it doesn't seem to matter.

And of course:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” - Matthew 22:36–40

Love God, Love one another, I can manage that, doesn't that just put things in perspective?

Isn't that better?

Looks like I'm done worrying about ethics, at least at this level of bad-faith minutiae.

And considering the quite literally millions dead from Christian homophobic propaganda and violence over the past several decades.. Let's just say that if being Queer were a sin Christians are still in a far worse state.

And I'm not willing to follow that trend -thank you very-much.

"So wrong again, SJW."

Does that term bring you joy?

Does it spark Joy?

I hope so, I imagine that being homophobic isn't getting any easier so I hope you can find some joy.

Maybe a healthier hobby too.

I liked therapy but I wouldn't call it a hobby🤔

-though I definitely recommend it if you're on the fence

You've implied that you're like.. ~totally ancient~ so.. maybe golf?

Put-put is the better type for the environment and urban planning..

I knew this one guy who was just- insanely good at ping-pong, you'd surprised how easy it is to make friends when you have a good bit.

I steal most of my bits from drag queens on the internet so I don't think that's your thing but.. hey, I'm not a miracle worker. Someone you're age can think of a good bit if you redirect your efforts.

One of my favorites is to go up behind someone when I'm about to start drinking something and I say in a lackadasical voice:

"I don't think there's anything wrong with having a cool-refreshing-drink after a long-hard-day"

The earlier in the morning you can say it the better.

"Not even going to let him finish that sentence, because he is about to tell another lie that has been denbunked for a long time. Gagnon specifically refutes this argument in detail on his website and in his book. I have also refuted the argument in the past."

I like how he writes like we're speaking in real time or if he's playing some recording of me talking, it's not quite camp but it may be picnic,

Remember how I said I've heard most of his arguments before, that's true, I've actually read this exact article before, bad formatting and all; but boy when I tell you that it hits every time,, uy/

"not only that but attempted same-sex sexual intercourse that dishonors the visitors by treating their maleness as if it were femaleness? After all, Jones has already acknowledged that the Levitical prohibitions have as their implicit motive clause the putting of a male in the position of a female sexually."

The man-

kggghhh

The man thinks that certain sexual positions are demeaning-

Ahhh, talk about being a product of the fifties.

A pallete cleanser, isn't he cute, and well-cared for judging by the look of is eyes.

"I’ll give him some minor credit"

"that this is a variant of the argument I haven’t heard before, but it’s also incredibly stupid,"

Oh well, can’t win’em all.

"The rapists in Sodom didn’t know the angles had supernatural powers. They were asking for “the strangers” who they assumed were just ordinary men from another town"

Okay..

Well Gagnon certainly rejects the notion that appearance carries an affect on gender, I assume he thinks that there's some nebulous transcendant quality of gender that belies appearance.

If you think anything remotely similar it's hard to argue that the appearance is all that relavant.

In any case it's clear that if the rape attempt had been successful it wouldn't be gay.

But props for understanding the basics of gender performativity theory 👍🏻.

"If the Sodomites had even remotely suspected the “men” were actually supernatural beings with no gender, then they obviously wouldn’t have been trying to rape them in the first place."

You don't know that, you don't know what they're into🫦-

"If the Jews who wrote the bible and other associated religious scriptures considered homosexuality a sin, then that obviously supports the conclusion that their scriptures would be correctly interpreted to confirm their opposition to homosexuality."

That would true if A) homosexuality was an extant concept and B) these anti-gay sentiments were contemporaneous to the period where the passages were actually written.

Neither of which we can confirm, so we're dealing entirely in the realm of speculation.

There's a reason I put “the period” in quotes, because the reference point for this claim(made without source) was "before Paul" which very much sounds like in the period immediately preceding Paul's use of the term. I don't usual to refer to something as "Before 9/11" and then talk about the Medieval period.

But despite the lack of source I already knew that 1st century Jews were anti-gay, a rarity for the period, but I can also do math and happen to know that 1st century Jews were not contemporaries of the Levitical writings. In fact the most recent piece of scripture accepted by Protestant Cannon was written in the 5th century BC.

With Leviticus and the rest of the Pentateuch being written a Thousand Years before That.

So congratulations, yes; I understand and acknowledge that Jews of the first century were homophobic but I also understand that 16th century Christians believed that the Bible supported racial hierarchy.

I don't consider the opinions of people a millennia and a half after a text was written to be authoritative, so pardon me if I don't give a damn.

"Secondly, he claims that the Jewish authors of scripture don’t have “authority”"

Well random Jews a millennium later don't have any authority, you're damn right I said that and I'll say it again.

No person outside of the living memory of a work's author has any special claim to understanding their text, and even then.. eugf who knows who to trust besides the author.

Poor Ray Bradbury has been fighting with people about the meaning of his own book for decades so people are very stubborn.

"One of the most important rules of hermeneutics is to understand the culture and intent of the original authors of scripture"

No, there are no hermeneutical rules, there are only hermeneutical norms, I don't even disagree with them most of the time but they're still not rules.

Regardless what you're trying to talk about is semantics, because you(like me) value the authorial intent of the writers.

Meanwhile you don't seem to consider any distinction between Jews of the first century and their ancestors a millennium and a half prior.

Which is rather important context-

"Again, this amazingly ignorant argument is just further proof that this guy knows nothing about Christianity, the bible or how to interpret scripture."

Just wait it's about to get Good.

"I won’t bother to quote individual points from this section, because he totally fails to address the fact that I already debunked this: Because “Arsenokoitai” is a combination of two HEBREW words,"

Oh boy, oh boy!

Christmas came early, this is delicious.

You remember This Page you linked when you were arguing about the etymology of "Arsenokoitai"?

Quote: "‘Arsenokoitai’ is a combination of the words ‘ársenos’ and ‘koitōn’ to form a word that the audience would clearly understand"

First of all, how would the Greeks understand a Hebrew word and second of did you even Look at that page‽

I would have figured that Mr. “Formally educated” and “Master’s degree in 'Christian Apologetics'” would be able to recognize Greek lettering.

And if that wasn't clear the URL has "greek" written right in it.

If that's not enough, feel free to look at the Wiktionary pages for "arsen" and "koiten" the word roots.

An while you're at it look up what the Septuagint is.

It's Greek, this should be the easiest part of this discussion but you've turned into some epic battle of truth and lies.

It's comically tired.

"this explains why it doesn’t follow normal rules of Greek “gendered” language."

Gendered languages adopt words from non-gendered languages all the time, often it is impossible to incorporate them into the language without gendering them.

I used the word "kleenex" as an example. It's a word from English, a language without gramatical gender, but in Spanish it has a gramatical gender so when the word "kleenex" was incorporated, it gained a grammatical gender(it's masculine if you care).

But I'm not even sure you understand the concept of gramatical gender soo.. eh unless you wanna' suck up your pride and read Wikipedia to figure out what a noun class is, you're just gonna' have to trust me.

" “have you ignored every other scholar who disagrees?” The problem with the other so-called “scholars” who support the pro-homosexual agenda is that they use the exact arguments we are seeing here in this debate. They lie, they obfuscate, they..."

So yes, you do ignore them, because you don't like their methods and their conclusions. Similar to how I also disregard shoddy evidence from bad scholars and academics.

But if I were to say that all the experts agreed, then I'd be lying; you see how that works

Just like you were lying when you repeatedly claimed that there was universal agreement.

"Again, I cite the fact that Gagnon and myself are both legitimately educated experts on this topic,"

Says the person who doesn't recognize Greek and doesn't understand the concept of a loan word.

Your claims of expertise were shoddy to begin with, but now your credibility is a pile of dust.

Dust honey,

~hhweewh~ gone. Gone gone.

Showcasing, in real time, why linguistics is basic to understanding language and translation.

That's such a basic and self-obvious statement that I never would have believed I'd have to say it, but here we are.

"we have read the “literature” on the other side of the debate"

Have you?

Or did you just sample them to argue with.

Apologetics is not usually interested in alternative views just destroying them.

The knowledge to conserve an animal is far more complex and nuanced than the limited knowledge required to hunt it.

And what?

"...and we have debunked all of those shallow arguments.."

Goodness you do love the word "debunked"

Does it inspire similar feelings as "vanquished" or "conquered"?

If you're arguing this much there must be something in it for you.

I'm getting the impression that "debunking" the "SJW" is kind of like "slaying" the "dragon" for you.

But I suppose we all have to tell ourselves some sort of narrative about ourselves.

"how Paul supposedly didn’t mean what his words obviously say"

I don't think that anyone has ever seriously argued that Paul didn't mean what he meant; just that we(in particular you) don't know what he meant.

"Obvious" is one of those words babe, like "clear" or "self-evident", you can't ever really use them during a disagreement.

Because if it really were "obvious", if it were really "self-evident" then no one would be arguing.

Chalk it up to a lack of empathy or depth of thought.

"or that Sodom was some some of allegory about bad hospitality."

Such passion, such rage or should I say such such rage?

But no, I think the rape was a pretty significant part, you would misrepresent the situation though.

"But to once again repeat the obvious, the SJW is lying and I provided sources which debunk his claims. What more can I be expected to say here?"

"Obvious", "SJW", "lying", "debunk"- maybe what should be expected is for you to say less not more; or at least be a bit more choosy.

Although I've already said what I expect, linguistic evidence, not the opinion pieces of monolingual theologians with a pedigree.

I know that I'm asking a lot, considering how someone doesn't even know what Greek looks like but what can I say?

Crazy claims require crazy evidence, and life's not always fair.

One of the many lessons you learn as a Queer person.

"Again, I’ve already addressed this. Claiming the bible was translated wrong and/or that the word “homosexual” was translated incorrectly is a common SJW talking point"'

That's the whole conversation buddy, welcome back.

"I’ve cited the sources and provided rational fact-based arguments."

This kind of person loooves being rationalll.

be rational harder daddy

"The SJW has lied and insulted everyone in sight."

Oh darling, not everybody just the people who desserve it

Do you think you've been polite‽

Although, while we're on the subject I would like to rescind one minor criticism I made of Gagnon, he is married, presumably to a real human woman.

So I would like to change my previous criticism of his ignorance of sexuality to the much worse crime of being a sexist man married to a wife.

I hope and pray she's doing okay, in fact I'd love it if God could give all the women married to sexist men a break.

"Gagnon IS an expert in the linguistics of biblical scripture specifically."

The only time language is mentioned in the first link is in the Wikipedia language options. I don't know why you would cite things that don't support your claims. Citation inflation? Citation kink? Inflation kink? I think I've heard of that one.

I am well aware of the fact that some theology courses have a rudimentary curriculum on ancient language, but I'm also aware that I have more linguistics education than he does, if by no other evidence than his casual disregard for connotative semantics.

It takes ~44 weeks of continuous full-time study to even gain basic reading and speaking proficiency for Modern Greek, let alone Ancient Greek, let alone ancient Hebrew a semitic language with no relationship to English.

These people are not becoming fluent in two ancient languages in the course of 2-4 years. Let alone learning words that have been lost to the historical record.

Learning words from a dictionary is different than learning words from context.

There is no dictionary for untranslated terms, you have to figure it out the old fashioned way.

"But the guy who doesn’t even know what “Ivy League” means wants to question that? No thanks."

Says the guy who didn't research the man he's defending and doesn't know what Greek looks like?

"And remember that picture I posted earlier of my bookshelf? That Interlinear Bible with Greek and Hebrew language isn’t just there for show."

It's not there for show but you can't tell the difference between Hebrew and Greek..

Why not?

I've always wanted to visit the state of delusion, I hear it has nice weather.

"This is called a “New Knowledge” argument. Already debunked. Nice try."

It's not "New Knowledge" it's a new concept that is anachronistic to the period.

Paul did not have a concept of atoms, of germs or of homosexuality, these were all ideas which either were created long after him or which have entirely different meanings from their historical counterparts.

Yes obviously Paul's statements might have implications for atoms, but it would be a lie to say he addressed them, this is relevant if you care about authorial intent.

"You have repeated all the same sorry arguments that leftist homosexual activists have been using for years, pretty much verbatim with only a few variances."

Hmm, lots of people from different groups and with different backgrounds coming to the same conclusion.. hmm..

"But these arguments have all been debunked by the actual facts and authoritative sources."

Goodness you love that word, how many times have you used it?

50

That's too many, you're mother and I are worried about you.

"And you did a worse job of presenting the homosexual agenda than most have done in the past,"

What can I say?

I'm bad, I'm a bad bad girl.

"since you immediately degraded to childish insults"

But baby, you started it, I thought you liked it dirty

"In between your petty insults and fallacies"

Boy, it's really gettin' to you huh

Sorry if your feelings are hurt, I don't owe people who peddle the work of sexist homophobes a calm and serious response.

Clowns might be good for teachable moments but you don't have a serious wrestling match with one either, you put a banana cream pie in his face.

"In between your petty insults and fallacies, you even managed to concede that the majority of my arguments are factually accurate."

I don't think you know what "majority" means. Or concede.

"All you really did was angrily rail against the fact that my position and the position of the experts was too “homophobic”"

I mean that's a problem but I've spoken to a rare few reasonable homophobes in my time. You're just not one of them.

"Also, before I conclude this debate by blocking you,"

Ahhh, there it is, this makes me think of the time I had a very nice date with this beautiful male model with hair like a Digimon character, we had a great time, he was a good kisser, I had him wrapped around my finger.

Then I didn't hear from him.

About four months later I find out from the guy I was dating at the time that the model was his Ex's Ex. and at the time of our date they had been together for two years.

Although they did break up less than two weeks after our date, so I take credit for that.

And like this situation, by the time an explanation has rolled around, it doesn't really make a difference.

Boo hoo, oh well.

"let me also point out that you failed to address my arguments in my earlier response to this post or when I tagged you on the Anti-Catholic Master Post."

Yeah, didn't feel like it.

I like to be involved, but eh, this wasn't that intriguing to me. You don't believe I'm a country boy, you don't believe I'm a Christian, You don't believe I'm not an SJW, is it really anything more than wasted air to say I'm not a Catholic either?

Besides, this is a fun little treat, but it's a bit like sugar, the time commitment is too much to bury yourself in it.

"So you effectively concede those points in the debate as well. Good job."

That's how it works, Silence is agreement.

That is sarcasm, which you seem to hate so I'll also say that actually silence is not agreement and in your normal life you should get explicit consent.

Although if you support Gagnon's views of "gender strttification" maybe you should just stay away from women altogether.

"I’m not asking you to agree with my morality, follow my religion or worship my God."

Yeah you are, you're falling into something called

🌈The Narcissism of Small Differences☁️⭐

You'd rather me be some pagan druid than be a Christian who doesn't agree with you.

Because you want to be in charge of your own special little camp.

You want the backing of millions of anonymous drones who you can use as source of validation and authority for whatever other wacky thing you wanna' say next; but dissenting voices shatter the illusion.

Guess what daisy-do a lot of people want the uncompromised backing of entire religious institutions, there's a reason the church is pushed into the crossfire of every political divide,

You're pretending to be gracious but what you're really saying is that you want to excommunicate me from the community of believers so that you can maintain ideological purity.

But I'm sorry to say, that there never was nor will there ever be ideological singularity in the church, barring divine intervention.

But from what Romans 14 says I get the impression that God's not overly fussy with the details.

"(In fact, talking to you really makes me feel a lot like Jonah when he was asked to preach to the Ninevites. Not that you will have any idea what that means.)"

Oh so it issss a holier-than-thou, crusader mentality thing.

I'm the big bad dragon, and your the little prince, come-to-tell-me how big and evil I am. You selfless soul, driving the dagger into the heart of evil.

Heyyy-

no judgment self-aware fantasy can be a healthy method to deal with unprocessed emotions, and I do mean that sincerely.

Though if I'm being sincere I don't think that you're self-aware enough for this to be healthy.

Like I said, I'm a much better because of therapy, and I highly recommend it, maybe the kids should go to therapy too, I can say from experience that homeschoolers usually need a little help after being isolated.

Especially if their parents are radical fundamentalists, the real world can be a shock so it's good to prep them for the emotional toll.

"But I am unequivocally not going to stand by and allow people to blatantly LIE about what the bible clearly says."

Well, you can sit down if you like- I'm not here to police anyone's body.

"If you don’t like what the bible says, go find some other religion that will put up with your sexual perversion."

You make it sound so much more provocative than it really is. Sex is just sex.

Of course, I'm more of a "whore in theory but not in practice" type of person.

I'm not sure if you've heard about the whole "written by a man", "written by a child" comments that are floating around on Tik-Tok but I think my life is written by a teenage girl who's a little too into Yaoi but still has a shaky grasp on what gay sex is.

But listen to me going on about myself.

"But don’t lie about my religion or what my God teaches in His scriptures."

Oh no bestie, Our religion😁🫶

...

This has been fun but we shouldn't do this again, I don't know if it's ethically responsible to try reasoning with someone who has "Anon hate encouraged, but be specific!" in their bio.

So I'm cutting you off, get help.

Arsenokoitai isn’t a mysterious word

“Arsenokoitai” is the Greek word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 to describe men who have sex with men. Anyone who maintains homosexuality isn’t a sin would tell you that this is a word that is difficult to know Paul’s intention in writing it. Except it’s pretty easy to know exactly what he meant.

This word is a word coined by Paul, that much is true, but it is made up of two words that already exist in Paul’s Greek Old Testament. Paul wants this word to act basically as a hyperlink to Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. He achieves this by essentially quoting those passages. Here’s a handy guide I put together:

‘Arsenokoitai’ is a combination of the words ‘ársenos’ and ‘koitōn’ which are literally placed next to each other in 20:13.

It’s that easy, folks.

[liberashen]

“Radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. They do not get to float freely down the mainstream; they must swim against the current. They cannot rest on the orthodox power to foreclose dissent, and they are not supported by the unanimity of bias that passes for objectivity.”

— Michael Parenti

[anokha-swad]

[guardr0ck]

I have this one chatgroup related to a section of the entertainment industry that I sometimes professionally freelance in. I used to love that it was always a little on the wacky side, but not to an intolerable degree. Recently, this has changed, and that has me so bummed.

I find some oddball/peculiar behavior very fun/harmlessly tolerable when it's still grounded in reality and common sense (think most standard fandom goofiness and unorthodox hobbies), and for a while that's exactly what that place was and I loved it. Even the TIPs there were chill because most were just old-school HSTS gay guys with a concrete understanding of reality and sexuality. It was like my own little pocket of 00's old internet weirdness & fun.

But recently we are getting so many annoying as fuck "non-binary" people participating who use full-on nouns or "it" as pronouns because they (and I quote) "identify as partially non-human".

Even some of the trans folk have questioned this behavior for reasons that are obvious. I assumed that mods wouldn't allow this sort of thing, or would at least explain to these folks why their "bun/bunself" pronouns are absolutely, unequivocally, mind-numbingly narcissistic and unnecessary (not to mention cruel to folks who are ESL or neurodivergent), but nah -- when a man identifying as a dragon bullied an autistic member of the group for daring to state that "dra/draself" pronouns don't make sense and are difficult for his brain to use, Dragon Boy accused said autistic man of "actually wanting [Dragon Boy] dead" and of "having no empathy" (lol). Mods allowed this, and praised the autistic member of the group for eventually backing down due to obvious fright. Dragon Boy was truly cruel and belligerent in his attacks. Mods told the young autistic man they were "proud he could be open minded". Dude wasn't being "open minded", dude was being actively bullied into silence by a raging lunatic.

I'm sorry, but you are not a fucking lesbian fairy dragon girl -- you are Joe Blow from California, a wretched heterosexual man who lives in his parent's basement, and you are bullying an autistic person for not understanding something that is objectively nonsensical. You are a piece of shit.

[transmutationisms]

do you have any reading recs (books, ~scholarly articles, whatever) in the same vein as this post? (doesn't need to be a super long list, i'm content to branch off with the works cited of whatever you come up with...) as always, love your blog!! :-)

yes :3 split roughly by subtopic, bolded some favs

Evolution in England prior to (Charles) Darwin

Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organisation of Consent in Nineteenth Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1985).

Desmond, Adrian. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1989).

Elliott, Paul. “Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origin of the Evolutionary Worldview in British Provincial Scientific Culture, 1770–1850.” Isis 94 (1): 1–29 (2003).

Finchman, Martin. “Biology and Politics: Defining the Boundaries.” In: Lightman, Bernard (Ed.). Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1997), 94–118.

Fyfe, Aileen. Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2012).

Harrison, James. “Erasmus Darwin’s View of Evolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (2): 247–64 (1971).

McNeil, Maureen. Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and his Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press (1987).

Ospovat, Dov. “The Influence of Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryology 1828–1859: A Reappraisal in Light of Richard Owen’s and William Benjamin Carpenter’s ‘Palaeontological Application of Von Baer’s Law.’” Journal of the History of Biology 9 (1): 1–28 (1976).

Rehbock, Philip F. The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press (1983).

Richards, Robert J. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1987).

Rupke, Nicolaas. Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2009 [ 1994]).

Secord, James. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2001).

van Wyhe, John. Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. London: Ashgate (2004).

Winter, Alison. “The Construction of Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in the Early Life Sciences.” In: Lightman, Bernard (Ed.). Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1997), 24–50.

Yeo, Richard. “Science and Intellectual Authority in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Robert Chambers and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” Victorian Studies 28 (1): 5–31 (1984).

Edinburgh Lamarckians and Scottish transmutationism

Desmond, Adrian. “Robert E. Grant: The Social Predicament of a Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist.” Journal of the History of Biology 17 (2): 189–223 (1984).

Jenkins, Bill. Evolution Before Darwin. Theories of the Transmutation of Species in Edinburgh, 1804–1834. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2019).

Secord, James. “The Edinburgh Lamarckians: Robert Jameson and Robert E. Grant.” Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1): 1–18 (1991).

Corsi, Pietro. ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians? The Authorship of Three Anonymous Papers (1826–1829)’, Journal of the History of Biology 54 (2021), pp. 345–374.

Darwin and Darwinism

Desmond, Adrian and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company (1994).

van Wyhe, John. “Mind the Gap. Did Darwin Avoid Publishing his Theory for many years?” Notes & Records of the Royal Society 61 (2007), 177–205.

Sloan, Philip R. “Darwin, Vital Matter, and the Transformation of Species.” Journal of the History of Biology 19 (3): 369–445 (1986).

Phillip R. Sloan, “The Making of a Philosophical Naturalist.” In: Hodge, Jonathan and Gregory Radick (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2009), 17–39.

Sponsel, Alistair. Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2018).

Young, Robert M. “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory.” Past & Present 43 (1969): 109–45.

Young, Robert M. “Darwin’s Metaphor: Does Nature Select?” The Monist 55 (3): 442–503 (1971).

Bowler, Peter J. The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1988).

Bowler, Peter J. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1983).

Hale, Piers J. “Rejecting the Myth of the Non-Darwinian Revolution.” Victorian Review 41 (2): 13–18 (Fall 2015).

Lightman, Bernard. “Darwin and the popularisation of evolution.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64: 5–24 (2010).

Richards, Robert J. The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1992).

Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1979).

Lamarck and Lamarckism

Barthélemy-Madaule, Madeleine. 1982. Lamarck, the Mythical Precursor: A Study of the Relations between Science and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Burkhardt, Richard. 1970. Lamarck, Evolution, and the Politics of Science. Journal of the History of Biology 3 (2): 275–298.

Burkhardt, Richard. 1977. The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Corsi, Pietro. 1988. The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790–1830. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Corsi, Pietro. 2005. Before Darwin: Transformist Concepts in European Natural History. Journal of the History of Biology 38 (1): 67-83.

Corsi, Pietro. 2011. The Revolutions of Evolution: Geoffroy and Lamarck, 1825–1840. Bulletin du Musée D’Anthropologie Préhistorique de Monaco 51: 113–134.

Jordanova, Ludmilla. 1984. Lamarck. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Spary, Emma C. 2000. Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Many of the women in Heterodoxy moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or physicians, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform. Gatherings were considered a safe space for women to talk, exchange ideas and take action.”

In the early 20th century, New York City’s Greenwich Village earned a reputation as America’s bohemia, a neighborhood where everyone from artists and poets to activists and organizers came to pursue their dreams.

“In the Village, it was so easy to bump into great minds, to go from one restaurant to another, to a meeting house, to work for a meeting or to a gallery,” says Joanna Scutts, author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism. Here was a community where rents were still affordable, creative individuality thrived, urban diversity and radical experiments were the norm, and bohemian dissenters could come and go as they pleased.

Such a neighborhood was the ideal breeding ground for Heterodoxy, a secret society that paved the way for modern feminism. The female debating club’s name referred to the many unorthodox women among its members. These individuals “questioned forms of orthodoxy in culture, in politics, in philosophy—and in sexuality,” noted ThoughtCo. in 2017.

Born as part of the initial wave of modern feminism that emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries with suffrage at its center, the radical ideologies debated at Heterodoxy gatherings extended well beyond the scope of a women’s right to vote. In fact, Heterodoxy had only one requirement for membership: that a woman “not be orthodox in her opinion.”

“The Heterodoxy club and the work that it did was very much interconnected with what was going on in the neighborhood,” says Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and preserving the distinct heritage of Greenwich Village. “With the suffrage movement already beginning to crest, women had started considering how they could free themselves from the generations and generations of structures that had been placed upon them.”

Unitarian minister Marie Jenney Howe founded Heterodoxy in 1912, two years after she and her husband, progressive reformer Frederic C. Howe, moved to the Village. “Howe was already in her 40s,” says Scutts, “and just got to know people through her husband’s professional connections, and during meetings and networks where progressive groups were very active at the time.”

Howe’s mindset on feminism was clear: “We intend simply to be ourselves,” she once said, “not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.”

Many of the women in Heterodoxy moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or physicians, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform. Gatherings were considered a safe space for women to talk, exchange ideas and take action. Jessica Campbell, a visual artist whose exhibition on Heterodoxy is currently on display at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, says, “Their meetings were taking place without any kind of recording or public record. It was this privacy that allowed the women to speak freely.”

Scutts adds, “The freedom to disagree was very important to them.”

With 25 charter members, Heterodoxy included individuals of diverse backgrounds, including lesbian and bisexual women, labor radicals and socialites, and artists and nurses. Meetings were often held in the basement of Polly’s, a MacDougal Street hangout established by anarchist Polly Holladay. Here, at what Berman calls a “sort of nexus for progressive, artistic, intellectual and political thought,” the women would gather at wooden tables to discuss issues like fair employment and fair wages, reproductive rights, and the antiwar movement. The meetings often went on for hours, with each typically revolving around a specific subject determined in advance.

Reflecting on these get-togethers later in life, memoirist Mabel Dodge Luhan described them as gatherings of “fine, daring, rather joyous and independent women, … women who did things and did them openly.”

Occasionally, Heterodoxy hosted guest speakers, like modern birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, who later became president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and anarchist Emma Goldman, known for championing everything from free love to the right of labor to organize.

While the topics discussed at each meeting remained confidential, many of Heterodoxy’s members were quite open about their involvement with the club. “Before I’d even heard of Heterodoxy,” says Scutts, “I had been working in the New-York Historical Society, researching for an [exhibition on] how radical politics had influenced a branch of the suffrage movement. That’s when I began noticing many of the same women’s names in overlapping causes. I then realized that they were all associated with this particular club.”

These women included labor lawyer, suffragist, socialist and journalist Crystal Eastman, who in 1920 co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union to defend the rights of all people nationwide, and playwright Susan Glaspell, a key player in the development of modern American theater.

Other notable alumni were feminist icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” illustrates the mental and physical struggles associated with postpartum depression, and feminist psychoanalyst Beatrice M. Hinkle, the first woman physician in the United States to hold a public health position. Lou Rogers, the suffrage cartoonist whose work was used as a basis for the design of Wonder Woman, was a member of Heterodoxy, as was Jewish socialist activist Rose Pastor Stokes.

Grace Nail Johnson, an advocate for civil rights and an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was Heterodoxy’s only Black member. Howe “had personally written to and invited her,” says Scutts, “as sort of a representation of her race. It’s an unusual case, because racial integration was quite uncommon at the time.”

While exceptions did exist, the majority of Heterodoxy’s members were middle class or wealthy, and the bulk of them had obtained undergraduate degrees—still very much a rarity for women in the early 20th century. Some even held graduate degrees in fields like medicine, law and the social sciences. These were women with the leisure time to participate in political causes, says Scutts, and who could afford to take risks, both literally and figuratively. But while political activism and the ability to discuss topics overtly were both part of Heterodoxy’s overall ethos, most of its members were decidedly left-leaning, and almost all were radical in their ideologies. “Even if the meetings promoted an openness to disagree,” says Scutts, “it wasn’t like these were women from across the political spectrum.”

Rather, they were women who inspired and spurred each other on. For example, about one-third of the club’s members were divorced—a process that was still “incredibly difficult, expensive and even scandalous” at the time, says Scutts. The club acted as somewhat of a support network for them, “just by the virtue of having people around you that are saying, ‘I’ve gone through the process. You can, too, and survive.’”

According to Campbell, Heterodoxy’s new inductees were often asked to share a story about their upbringing with the club’s other members. This approach “helped to break down barriers that might otherwise be there due to their ranging political views and professional allegiances,” the artist says.

The Heterodoxy club usually went on hiatus during the summer months, when members relocated to places like Provincetown, Massachusetts, a seasonal outpost for Greenwich Village residents. As the years progressed, meetings eventually moved to Tuesdays, and the club began changing shape, becoming less radical in tandem with the Village’s own shifting energy. Women secured the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, displacing the momentum that fueled the suffrage movement; around this same time, the Red Scare saw the arrests and deportations of unionists and immigrants. Rent prices in the neighborhood also increased dramatically, driving out the Village’s bohemian spirit. As the club’s core members continued aging, Heterodoxy became more about continuing friendships than debating radical ideologies.

“These women were not all young when they started to meet,” says Scutts in the “Lost Ladies of Lit” podcast. “You know, it’s 20, 30 years later, and so they stayed in touch, but they never really found the second generation or third generation to keep it going in a new form.”

By the early 1940s, the biweekly meetings of Heterodoxy were no more. Still, the club’s legacy lives on, even beyond the scope of modern feminism.

“These days, it’s so easy to dehumanize people when you’re only hearing one facet of their belief system,” says Campbell. “But the ability to change your mind and debate freely like the women of Heterodoxy, without any public record? It’s an interesting model for rethinking the way we talk about problems and interact with other people today.”

[grubloved]

But the most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this country is, quite simply, liberals. Butler, in their survey of the political landscape, misses the liberal faction altogether. I suspect this is because the anti-trans liberal sees himself as a concerned citizen, not an ideologue. He is neither radical nor a feminist; he is not so much trans-exclusionary as he is broadly skeptical of all social-justice movements. He is a trans- agnostic reactionary liberal - a TARL. The TARL's primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left, which, by forcing the orthodoxy of gender down the public's throat and viciously attacking anyone who dares to ask questions, is trafficking in censorship, intimidation, and quasi-religious fanaticism. On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.

(...)

Now, to be clear, the TARL will typically acknowledge the existence of a group of fully developed adults whose medically verified gender dysphoria is so persistent and distressing that the argument for compassionate care outweighs the Hippocratic prohibition on harming a perfectly healthy body. The basic strategy here is to create a kind of intake form with exactly two boxes on it. Every trans-identified person is either a participant in a craze or certifiably crazy. (Checking both boxes is permitted.) There is a touch of genius to this approach. It draws a bright line between the kids who say they are trans and the kids who really are while pathologizing all of them as either delusional or dysphoric. This line is as old as gender medicine itself, which for decades was careful to distinguish impersonators and fetishists from the "true transsexual." So in most cases of gender variance, the TARL informs parents that it is perfectly healthy for boys to wear dresses and for girls to climb trees regardless of their biological sex, which need not be altered after all. He reassures them that the risk of suicide among trans-identified youth has been inflated by cynical activists trying to blackmail the public; what he means by this is that he does not think most kids are suicidal enough to be trans. In those rare instances of true misery, he advises the practice of "watchful waiting," preferring to see the patient through the often- irreversible changes of puberty to adulthood, when her childhood experience of gender incongruence will finally acquire the weight of medical evidence. If only she had said something sooner!

Andrea Long Chu, "Freedom of Sex: The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies." Mar. 11, 2024, for New York Magazine

[apilgrimpassingby]

Views of Christ and Culture

So, this morning I was watching a video on Reinhold Niebuhr's typology of five views of Christ and culture. They are:

Christ against culture: the culture is seen as something bad that Christians are to avoid interaction with as much as possible. The most obvious form of this is Anabaptist groups like the Amish, but less extreme versions of it can be found among most Baptists (and related groups like Pentecostals and Evangelicals) and form the basis for monasticism.

Christ of culture: the culture is seen to be basically good, if flawed, and working for the same things as Christ. This is most associated with liberal theology, although I'd argue that the prosperity gospel is the most prevalent form of this.

Christ above culture: the culture is seen to be good, but its natural, temporary good must not be confused with or used as a substitute for the supernatural, eternal good of Christ. This is the view of Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

Christ and culture in paradox: Culture and the church are two separate institutions that, though Christians have duties in both of them, are not to be confused or allowed to dominate the other. This is the traditional stance of Lutheranism and Radical Two Kingdoms theology among the Reformed.

Christ as the redeemer of culture: the culture is seen as basically bad, but Christians are to put it under Christ's dominion for Him to redeem. This is the view of the Theonomist and Kuyperian theologies among the Reformed.

Everyone who'd like to, respond with which one you support and why! Tagging @sapphosremains and @idylls-of-the-divine-romance to see if the "progressives support Christ of culture" is accurate to the ones I know.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Christopher Mathias, Igor Bobic, and Liz Skalka at HuffPost:

MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Eight years after warning that Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance on Wednesday night nevertheless officially accepted the offer to serve as his right-hand man. But the man who addressed thousands of delegates on day three of the GOP convention couldn’t have sounded more different from the MAGA die-hard who has made a name for himself defending Trump, in a radical transformation that catapulted him from political novice to possibly a heartbeat from the presidency.

Vance, 39, delivered a relatively conventional prime-time acceptance speech, introducing himself to the country and leaning into the GOP’s stated themes of unity following an attempt on Trump’s life by a shooter in Pennsylvania. “This evening could’ve been so much different,” Vance said, referring to Saturday’s shooting. “Instead of a day of celebration, it could’ve been a day of heartache and mourning. For the last eight years, President Trump has given everything to the people of this country. He didn’t need politics, but the country needed him.” “I want all Americans to go and watch the video of the would-be assassin coming within a quarter of an inch of taking his life,” Vance added. “Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump, and then look at that photo of him defiant, fist in the air. When Donald Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field, all of America stood with him.” He also drew on his blue-collar roots to call for more supply chain in-sourcing, for beefing up manufacturing in America and for pro-labor policies — an area in which he has sometimes has challenged GOP orthodoxy.

Vance, who was introduced onstage by his wife, Usha Vance, an attorney he met as a student at Yale Law School. The vice presidential nominee leaned heavily into his life story, which was adapted into a best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and a Netflix movie of the same name. Vance’s family is from Appalachian Kentucky and Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio. He was raised mostly by his grandmother, or “mamaw,” who came up several times during his remarks. [...] But in his speech on Wednesday, Vance sought to downplay the intraparty GOP debate on that topic or his role in fueling it. “Our disagreements actually make us stronger, like my time in the U.S. Senate,” Vance said. “Sometimes I persuade my colleagues, and sometimes they persuade me. Shouldn’t we be governed by a party that isn’t afraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?”

In his first public speech since being selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) gave a speech at the RNC last night in Milwaukee that purportedly subdued his extremism.

Vance hit on the same MAGA notes as many of the speakers have done: worship Trump and claim to support “unity.”

See Also:

The Guardian: JD Vance fires salvos at Democrats in first speech as Trump’s running mate

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.3.5 What is Anarcha-Feminism?

Although opposition to the state and all forms of authority had a strong voice among the early feminists of the 19th century, the more recent feminist movement which began in the 1960’s was founded upon anarchist practice. This is where the term anarcha-feminism came from, referring to women anarchists who act within the larger feminist and anarchist movements to remind them of their principles.

The modern anarcha-feminists built upon the feminist ideas of previous anarchists, both male and female. Indeed, anarchism and feminism have always been closely linked. Many outstanding feminists have also been anarchists, including the pioneering Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), the Communard Louise Michel, and the American anarchists (and tireless champions of women’s freedom) Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman (for the former, see her essays “Sex Slavery”, “Gates of Freedom”, “The Case of Woman vs. Orthodoxy”, “Those Who Marry Do Ill”; for the latter see “The Traffic in Women”, “Woman Suffrage”, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation”, “Marriage and Love” and “Victims of Morality”, for example). Freedom, the world’s oldest anarchist newspaper, was founded by Charlotte Wilson in 1886. Anarchist women like Virgilia D’Andrea and Rose Pesota played important roles in both the libertarian and labour movements. The “Mujeres Libres” (“Free Women”) movement in Spain during the Spanish revolution is a classic example of women anarchists organising themselves to defend their basic freedoms and create a society based on women’s freedom and equality (see Free Women of Spain by Martha Ackelsberg for more details on this important organisation). In addition, all the male major anarchist thinkers (bar Proudhon) were firm supporters of women’s equality. For example, Bakunin opposed patriarchy and how the law “subjects [women] to the absolute domination of the man.” He argued that ”[e]qual rights must belong to men and women” so that women can “become independent and be free to forge their own way of life.” He looked forward to the end of “the authoritarian juridical family” and “the full sexual freedom of women.” [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 396 and p. 397]

Thus anarchism has since the 1860s combined a radical critique of capitalism and the state with an equally powerful critique of patriarchy (rule by men). Anarchists, particularly female ones, recognised that modern society was dominated by men. As Ana Maria Mozzoni (an Italian anarchist immigrant in Buenos Aires) put it, women “will find that the priest who damns you is a man; that the legislator who oppresses you is a man, that the husband who reduces you to an object is a man; that the libertine who harasses you is a man; that the capitalist who enriches himself with your ill-paid work and the speculator who calmly pockets the price of your body, are men.” Little has changed since then. Patriarchy still exists and, to quote the anarchist paper La Questione Sociale, it is still usually the case that women “are slaves both in social and private life. If you are a proletarian, you have two tyrants: the man and the boss. If bourgeois, the only sovereignty left to you is that of frivolity and coquetry.” [quoted by Jose Moya, Italians in Buenos Aires’s Anarchist Movement, pp. 197–8 and p. 200]

Anarchism, therefore, is based on an awareness that fighting patriarchy is as important as fighting against the state or capitalism. For ”[y]ou can have no free, or just, or equal society, nor anything approaching it, so long as womanhood is bought, sold, housed, clothed, fed, and protected, as a chattel.” [Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Gates of Freedom”, pp. 235–250, Eugenia C. Delamotte, Gates of Freedom, p. 242] To quote Louise Michel:

“The first thing that must change is the relationship between the sexes. Humanity has two parts, men and women, and we ought to be walking hand in hand; instead there is antagonism, and it will last as long as the ‘stronger’ half controls, or think its controls, the ‘weaker’ half.” [The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, p. 139]

Thus anarchism, like feminism, fights patriarchy and for women’s equality. Both share much common history and a concern about individual freedom, equality and dignity for members of the female sex (although, as we will explain in more depth below, anarchists have always been very critical of mainstream/liberal feminism as not going far enough). Therefore, it is unsurprising that the new wave of feminism of the sixties expressed itself in an anarchistic manner and drew much inspiration from anarchist figures such as Emma Goldman. Cathy Levine points out that, during this time, “independent groups of women began functioning without the structure, leaders, and other factotums of the male left, creating, independently and simultaneously, organisations similar to those of anarchists of many decades and regions. No accident, either.” [“The Tyranny of Tyranny,” Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, p. 66] It is no accident because, as feminist scholars have noted, women were among the first victims of hierarchical society, which is thought to have begun with the rise of patriarchy and ideologies of domination during the late Neolithic era. Marilyn French argues (in Beyond Power) that the first major social stratification of the human race occurred when men began dominating women, with women becoming in effect a “lower” and “inferior” social class.

The links between anarchism and modern feminism exist in both ideas and action. Leading feminist thinker Carole Pateman notes that her “discussion [on contract theory and its authoritarian and patriarchal basis] owes something to” libertarian ideas, that is the “anarchist wing of the socialist movement.” [The Sexual Contract, p. 14] Moreover, she noted in the 1980s how the “major locus of criticism of authoritarian, hierarchical, undemocratic forms of organisation for the last twenty years has been the women’s movement … After Marx defeated Bakunin in the First International, the prevailing form of organisation in the labour movement, the nationalised industries and in the left sects has mimicked the hierarchy of the state … The women’s movement has rescued and put into practice the long-submerged idea [of anarchists like Bakunin] that movements for, and experiments in, social change must ‘prefigure’ the future form of social organisation.” [The Disorder of Women, p. 201]

Peggy Kornegger has drawn attention to these strong connections between feminism and anarchism, both in theory and practice. “The radical feminist perspective is almost pure anarchism,” she writes. “The basic theory postulates the nuclear family as the basis of all authoritarian systems. The lesson the child learns, from father to teacher to boss to god, is to obey the great anonymous voice of Authority. To graduate from childhood to adulthood is to become a full-fledged automaton, incapable of questioning or even of thinking clearly.” [“Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, p. 26] Similarly, the Zero Collective argues that Anarcha-feminism “consists in recognising the anarchism of feminism and consciously developing it.” [“Anarchism/Feminism,” pp. 3–7, The Raven, no. 21, p. 6]

Anarcha-feminists point out that authoritarian traits and values, for example, domination, exploitation, aggressiveness, competitiveness, desensitisation etc., are highly valued in hierarchical civilisations and are traditionally referred to as “masculine.” In contrast, non-authoritarian traits and values such as co-operation, sharing, compassion, sensitivity, warmth, etc., are traditionally regarded as “feminine” and are devalued. Feminist scholars have traced this phenomenon back to the growth of patriarchal societies during the early Bronze Age and their conquest of co-operatively based “organic” societies in which “feminine” traits and values were prevalent and respected. Following these conquests, however, such values came to be regarded as “inferior,” especially for a man, since men were in charge of domination and exploitation under patriarchy. (See e.g. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade; Elise Boulding, The Underside of History). Hence anarcha-feminists have referred to the creation of a non-authoritarian, anarchist society based on co-operation, sharing, mutual aid, etc. as the “feminisation of society.”

Anarcha-feminists have noted that “feminising” society cannot be achieved without both self-management and decentralisation. This is because the patriarchal-authoritarian values and traditions they wish to overthrow are embodied and reproduced in hierarchies. Thus feminism implies decentralisation, which in turn implies self-management. Many feminists have recognised this, as reflected in their experiments with collective forms of feminist organisations that eliminate hierarchical structure and competitive forms of decision making. Some feminists have even argued that directly democratic organisations are specifically female political forms. [see e.g. Nancy Hartsock “Feminist Theory and the Development of Revolutionary Strategy,” in Zeila Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, pp. 56–77] Like all anarchists, anarcha-feminists recognise that self-liberation is the key to women’s equality and thus, freedom. Thus Emma Goldman:

“Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right of anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them, by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities; by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation.” [Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 211]

Anarcha-feminism tries to keep feminism from becoming influenced and dominated by authoritarian ideologies of either the right or left. It proposes direct action and self-help instead of the mass reformist campaigns favoured by the “official” feminist movement, with its creation of hierarchical and centralist organisations and its illusion that having more women bosses, politicians, and soldiers is a move towards “equality.” Anarcha-feminists would point out that the so-called “management science” which women have to learn in order to become mangers in capitalist companies is essentially a set of techniques for controlling and exploiting wage workers in corporate hierarchies, whereas “feminising” society requires the elimination of capitalist wage-slavery and managerial domination altogether. Anarcha-feminists realise that learning how to become an effective exploiter or oppressor is not the path to equality (as one member of the Mujeres Libres put it, ”[w]e did not want to substitute a feminist hierarchy for a masculine one” [quoted by Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain, pp. 22–3] — also see section B.1.4 for a further discussion on patriarchy and hierarchy).

Hence anarchism’s traditional hostility to liberal (or mainstream) feminism, while supporting women’s liberation and equality. Federica Montseny (a leading figure in the Spanish Anarchist movement) argued that such feminism advocated equality for women, but did not challenge existing institutions. She argued that (mainstream) feminism’s only ambition is to give to women of a particular class the opportunity to participate more fully in the existing system of privilege and if these institutions “are unjust when men take advantage of them, they will still be unjust if women take advantage of them.” [quoted by Martha A. Ackelsberg, Op. Cit., p. 119] Thus, for anarchists, women’s freedom did not mean an equal chance to become a boss or a wage slave, a voter or a politician, but rather to be a free and equal individual co-operating as equals in free associations. “Feminism,” stressed Peggy Kornegger, “doesn’t mean female corporate power or a woman President; it means no corporate power and no Presidents. The Equal Rights Amendment will not transform society; it only gives women the ‘right’ to plug into a hierarchical economy. Challenging sexism means challenging all hierarchy — economic, political, and personal. And that means an anarcha-feminist revolution.” [Op. Cit., p. 27]

Anarchism, as can be seen, included a class and economic analysis which is missing from mainstream feminism while, at the same time, showing an awareness to domestic and sex-based power relations which eluded the mainstream socialist movement. This flows from our hatred of hierarchy. As Mozzoni put it, “Anarchy defends the cause of all the oppressed, and because of this, and in a special way, it defends your [women’s] cause, oh! women, doubly oppressed by present society in both the social and private spheres.” [quoted by Moya, Op. Cit., p. 203] This means that, to quote a Chinese anarchist, what anarchists “mean by equality between the sexes is not just that the men will no longer oppress women. We also want men to no longer to be oppressed by other men, and women no longer to be oppressed by other women.” Thus women should “completely overthrow rulership, force men to abandon all their special privileges and become equal to women, and make a world with neither the oppression of women nor the oppression of men.” [He Zhen, quoted by Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, p. 147]

So, in the historic anarchist movement, as Martha Ackelsberg notes, liberal/mainstream feminism was considered as being “too narrowly focused as a strategy for women’s emancipation; sexual struggle could not be separated from class struggle or from the anarchist project as a whole.” [Op. Cit., p. 119] Anarcha-feminism continues this tradition by arguing that all forms of hierarchy are wrong, not just patriarchy, and that feminism is in conflict with its own ideals if it desires simply to allow women to have the same chance of being a boss as a man does. They simply state the obvious, namely that they “do not believe that power in the hands of women could possibly lead to a non-coercive society” nor do they “believe that anything good can come out of a mass movement with a leadership elite.” The “central issues are always power and social hierarchy” and so people “are free only when they have power over their own lives.” [Carole Ehrlich, “Socialism, Anarchism and Feminism”, Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, p. 44] For if, as Louise Michel put it, “a proletarian is a slave; the wife of a proletarian is even more a slave” ensuring that the wife experiences an equal level of oppression as the husband misses the point. [Op. Cit., p. 141]

Anarcha-feminists, therefore, like all anarchists oppose capitalism as a denial of liberty. Their critique of hierarchy in the society does not start and end with patriarchy. It is a case of wanting freedom everywhere, of wanting to ”[b]reak up … every home that rests in slavery! Every marriage that represents the sale and transfer of the individuality of one of its parties to the other! Every institution, social or civil, that stands between man and his right; every tie that renders one a master, another a serf.” [Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Economic Tendency of Freethought”, The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader, p. 72] The ideal that an “equal opportunity” capitalism would free women ignores the fact that any such system would still see working class women oppressed by bosses (be they male or female). For anarcha-feminists, the struggle for women’s liberation cannot be separated from the struggle against hierarchy as such. As L. Susan Brown puts it:

“Anarchist-feminism, as an expression of the anarchist sensibility applied to feminist concerns, takes the individual as its starting point and, in opposition to relations of domination and subordination, argues for non-instrumental economic forms that preserve individual existential freedom, for both men and women.” [The Politics of Individualism, p. 144]

Anarcha-feminists have much to contribute to our understanding of the origins of the ecological crisis in the authoritarian values of hierarchical civilisation. For example, a number of feminist scholars have argued that the domination of nature has paralleled the domination of women, who have been identified with nature throughout history (See, for example, Caroline Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1980). Both women and nature are victims of the obsession with control that characterises the authoritarian personality. For this reason, a growing number of both radical ecologists and feminists are recognising that hierarchies must be dismantled in order to achieve their respective goals.

In addition, anarcha-feminism reminds us of the importance of treating women equally with men while, at the same time, respecting women’s differences from men. In other words, that recognising and respecting diversity includes women as well as men. Too often many male anarchists assume that, because they are (in theory) opposed to sexism, they are not sexist in practice. Such an assumption is false. Anarcha-feminism brings the question of consistency between theory and practice to the front of social activism and reminds us all that we must fight not only external constraints but also internal ones.

This means that anarcha-feminism urges us to practice what we preach. As Voltairine de Cleyre argued, “I never expect men to give us liberty. No, Women, we are not worth it, until we take it.” This involves “insisting on a new code of ethics founded on the law of equal freedom: a code recognising the complete individuality of woman. By making rebels wherever we can. By ourselves living our beliefs . … We are revolutionists. And we shall use propaganda by speech, deed, and most of all life — being what we teach.” Thus anarcha-feminists, like all anarchists, see the struggle against patriarchy as being a struggle of the oppressed for their own self-liberation, for ”as a class I have nothing to hope from men . .. No tyrant ever renounced his tyranny until he had to. If history ever teaches us anything it teaches this. Therefore my hope lies in creating rebellion in the breasts of women.” [“The Gates of Freedom”, pp. 235–250, Eugenia C. Delamotte, Gates of Freedom, p. 249 and p. 239] This was sadly as applicable within the anarchist movement as it was outside it in patriarchal society.

Faced with the sexism of male anarchists who spoke of sexual equality, women anarchists in Spain organised themselves into the Mujeres Libres organisation to combat it. They did not believe in leaving their liberation to some day after the revolution. Their liberation was a integral part of that revolution and had to be started today. In this they repeated the conclusions of anarchist women in Illinois Coal towns who grew tried of hearing their male comrades “shout in favour” of sexual equality “in the future society” while doing nothing about it in the here and now. They used a particularly insulting analogy, comparing their male comrades to priests who “make false promises to the starving masses … [that] there will be rewards in paradise.” The argued that mothers should make their daughters “understand that the difference in sex does not imply inequality in rights” and that as well as being “rebels against the social system of today,” they “should fight especially against the oppression of men who would like to retain women as their moral and material inferior.” [Ersilia Grandi, quoted by Caroline Waldron Merithew, Anarchist Motherhood, p. 227] They formed the “Luisa Michel” group to fight against capitalism and patriarchy in the upper Illinois valley coal towns over three decades before their Spanish comrades organised themselves.

For anarcha-feminists, combating sexism is a key aspect of the struggle for freedom. It is not, as many Marxist socialists argued before the rise of feminism, a diversion from the “real” struggle against capitalism which would somehow be automatically solved after the revolution. It is an essential part of the struggle:

“We do not need any of your titles … We want none of them. What we do want is knowledge and education and liberty. We know what our rights are and we demand them. Are we not standing next to you fighting the supreme fight? Are you not strong enough, men, to make part of that supreme fight a struggle for the rights of women? And then men and women together will gain the rights of all humanity.” [Louise Michel, Op. Cit., p. 142]

A key part of this revolutionising modern society is the transformation of the current relationship between the sexes. Marriage is a particular evil for “the old form of marriage, based on the Bible, ‘till death doth part,’ … [is] an institution that stands for the sovereignty of the man over the women, of her complete submission to his whims and commands.” Women are reduced “to the function of man’s servant and bearer of his children.” [Goldman, Op. Cit., pp. 220–1] Instead of this, anarchists proposed “free love,” that is couples and families based on free agreement between equals than one partner being in authority and the other simply obeying. Such unions would be without sanction of church or state for “two beings who love each other do not need permission from a third to go to bed.” [Mozzoni, quoted by Moya, Op. Cit., p. 200]

Equality and freedom apply to more than just relationships. For “if social progress consists in a constant tendency towards the equalisation of the liberties of social units, then the demands of progress are not satisfied so long as half society, Women, is in subjection… . Woman … is beginning to feel her servitude; that there is a requisite acknowledgement to be won from her master before he is put down and she exalted to — Equality. This acknowledgement is, the freedom to control her own person. “ [Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Gates of Freedom”, Op. Cit., p. 242] Neither men nor state nor church should say what a woman does with her body. A logical extension of this is that women must have control over their own reproductive organs. Thus anarcha-feminists, like anarchists in general, are pro-choice and pro-reproductive rights (i.e. the right of a woman to control her own reproductive decisions). This is a long standing position. Emma Goldman was persecuted and incarcerated because of her public advocacy of birth control methods and the extremist notion that women should decide when they become pregnant (as feminist writer Margaret Anderson put it, “In 1916, Emma Goldman was sent to prison for advocating that ‘women need not always keep their mouth shut and their wombs open.’”).

Anarcha-feminism does not stop there. Like anarchism in general, it aims at changing all aspects of society not just what happens in the home. For, as Goldman asked, “how much independence is gained if the narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the factory, sweat-shop, department store, or office?” Thus women’s equality and freedom had to be fought everywhere and defended against all forms of hierarchy. Nor can they be achieved by voting. Real liberation, argue anarcha-feminists, is only possible by direct action and anarcha-feminism is based on women’s self-activity and self-liberation for while the “right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands … true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in woman’s soul … her freedom will reach as far as her power to achieve freedom reaches.” [Goldman, Op. Cit., p. 216 and p. 224]

The history of the women’s movement proves this. Every gain has come from below, by the action of women themselves. As Louise Michel put it, ”[w]e women are not bad revolutionaries. Without begging anyone, we are taking our place in the struggles; otherwise, we could go ahead and pass motions until the world ends and gain nothing.” [Op. Cit., p. 139] If women waited for others to act for them their social position would never have changed. This includes getting the vote in the first place. Faced with the militant suffrage movement for women’s votes, British anarchist Rose Witcop recognised that it was “true that this movement shows us that women who so far have been so submissive to their masters, the men, are beginning to wake up at last to the fact they are not inferior to those masters.” Yet she argued that women would not be freed by votes but “by their own strength.” [quoted by Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History, pp. 100–1 and p. 101] The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s showed the truth of that analysis. In spite of equal voting rights, women’s social place had remained unchanged since the 1920s.

Ultimately, as Anarchist Lily Gair Wilkinson stressed, the “call for ‘votes’ can never be a call to freedom. For what is it to vote? To vote is to register assent to being ruled by one legislator or another?” [quoted by Sheila Rowbotham, Op. Cit., p. 102] It does not get to the heart of the problem, namely hierarchy and the authoritarian social relationships it creates of which patriarchy is only a subset of. Only by getting rid of all bosses, political, economic, social and sexual can genuine freedom for women be achieved and “make it possible for women to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery.” [Emma Goldman, Op. Cit., p. 214]

[pineapplerightsideupcake]

“If you hate every woman that doesn’t agree with you 100% that’s not radical feminism it’s radical narcissism”

Thoughts on cis women who support trans people?

The same thing I think of trad women.

Under patriarchy women see how badly feminists are treated and that the best way to survive is to align themselves with whatever flavor of male is most palatable to them. They will then defend their choice and their males at their own expense.

I don’t hate them. It’s self destructive, it’s foolish, it’s frustrating to see. But I don’t hate them for trying to survive. I don’t know that I hate men either. I hate Men as a social class. But if you imagine me seething when I see a man minding his own business at the grocery store, I don’t. That’s no way to live.

I don’t hate trans people either. I hate the current political orthodoxy surrounding them. It’s why it amuses me when I get asks like this. You hate me so you assume it’s mutual. You sent this as a gotcha shortly after calling me a rapist. You hoped I’d sputter and scramble to justify why me hating these women is different.

But I don’t hate them. I save hatred for rapists and pedos and billionaires.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: James B. Meigs

Published: Spring 2024

Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country’s leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics. In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn’t be questioned.

“I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there,” Shermer told me. “I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics.” One month, he submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern. In the story, Shermer debunked the myth of the “horror-film curse,” which asserts that bad luck tends to haunt actors who appear in scary movies. (The actors in most horror films survive unscathed, he noted, while bad luck sometimes strikes the casts of non-scary movies as well.) Shermer also wanted to include a serious example: the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer’s editor at the magazine wasn’t having it. To the editor, Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to “problematize” notions of objective truth. Critical race theory, which sees structural racism as the grand organizing principle of our society, is one branch. Queer studies, which seeks to “deconstruct” traditional norms of family, sex, and gender, is another. Critics of this worldview sometimes call it “identity politics”; supporters prefer the term “intersectionality.” In managerial settings, the doctrine lives under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI: a set of policies that sound anodyne—but in practice, are anything but.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

The DEI worldview took over our institutions slowly, then all at once. Many on the left, especially journalists, saw Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as an existential threat that necessitated dropping the guardrails of balance and objectivity. Then, in early 2020, Covid lockdowns put American society under unbearable pressure. Finally, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provided the spark. Protesters exploded onto the streets. Every institution, from coffeehouses to Fortune 500 companies, felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment to the new “antiracist” ethos. In an already polarized environment, most media outlets lunged further left. Centrists—including New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and science writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr.—were forced out, while radical progressive voices were elevated.

This was the national climate when Laura Helmuth took the helm of Scientific American in April 2020. Helmuth boasted a sterling résumé: a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California–Berkeley and a string of impressive editorial jobs at outlets including Science, National Geographic, and the Washington Post. Taking over a large print and online media operation during the early weeks of the Covid pandemic couldn’t have been easy. On the other hand, those difficult times represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an ambitious science editor. Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

Scientific American’s increasing engagement in politics drew national attention in late 2020, when the magazine, for the first time in its 175-year history, endorsed a presidential candidate. “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people,” the editors wrote. “That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden.” In an e-mail exchange, Scientific American editor-in-chief Helmuth said that the decision to endorse Biden was made unanimously by the magazine’s staff. “Overall, the response was very positive,” she said. Helmuth also pushed back on the idea that getting involved in political battles represented a new direction for SciAm. “We have a long and proud history of covering the social and political angles of science,” she said, noting that the magazine “has advocated for teaching evolution and not creationism since we covered the Scopes Monkey Trial.”

Scientific American wasn’t alone in endorsing a presidential candidate in 2020. Nature also endorsed Biden in that election cycle. The New England Journal of Medicine indirectly did the same, writing that “our current leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent” and should not “keep their jobs.” Vinay Prasad, the prominent oncologist and public-health expert, recently lampooned the endorsement trend on his Substack, asking whether science journals will tell him who to vote for again in 2024. “Here is an idea! Call it crazy,” he wrote: “Why don’t scientists focus on science, and let politics decide the election?” When scientists insert themselves into politics, he added, “the only result is we are forfeiting our credibility.”

But what does it mean to “focus on science”? Many of us learned the standard model of the scientific method in high school. We understand that science attempts—not always perfectly—to shield the search for truth from political interference, religious dogmas, or personal emotions and biases. But that model of science has been under attack for half a century. The French theorist Michel Foucault argued that scientific objectivity is an illusion produced and shaped by society’s “systems of power.” Today’s woke activists challenge the legitimacy of science on various grounds: the predominance of white males in its history, the racist attitudes held by some of its pioneers, its inferiority to indigenous “ways of knowing,” and so on. Ironically, as Christopher Rufo points out in his book America’s Cultural Revolution, this postmodern ideology—which began as a critique of oppressive power structures—today empowers the most illiberal, repressive voices within academic and other institutions.

Shermer believes that the new style of science journalism “is being defined by this postmodern worldview, the idea that all facts are relative or culturally determined.” Of course, if scientific facts are just products of a particular cultural milieu, he says, “then everything is a narrative that has to reflect some political side.” Without an agreed-upon framework to separate valid from invalid claims—without science, in other words—people fall back on their hunches and in-group biases, the “my-side bias.”

Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.

“Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,” Shermer says, “marshaling evidence in favor of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.” This isn’t just the case in science journalism, of course. Even before the Trump era, the mainstream press boosted stories that support left-leaning viewpoints and carefully avoided topics that might offer ammunition to the Right. Most readers understand, of course, that stories about politics are likely to be shaped by a media outlet’s ideological slant. But science is theoretically supposed to be insulated from political influence. Sadly, the new woke style of science journalism reframes factual scientific debates as ideological battles, with one side presumed to be morally superior. Not surprisingly, the crisis in science journalism is most obvious in the fields where public opinion is most polarized.

The Covid pandemic was a crisis not just for public health but for the public’s trust in our leading institutions. From Anthony Fauci on down, key public-health officials issued unsupported policy prescriptions, fudged facts, and suppressed awkward questions about the origin of the virus. A skeptical, vigorous science press could have done a lot to keep these officials honest—and the public informed. Instead, even elite science publications mostly ran cover for the establishment consensus. For example, when Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and two other public-health experts proposed an alternative to lockdowns in their Great Barrington Declaration, media outlets joined in Fauci’s effort to discredit and silence them.

Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, is a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, which can make naturally occurring viruses deadlier. From the early weeks of the pandemic, he suspected that the virus had leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence increasingly suggests that he was correct. I asked Ebright how he thought that the media had handled the lab-leak debate. He responded:

Science writers at most major news outlets and science news outlets have spent the last four years obfuscating and misrepresenting facts about the origin of the pandemic. They have done this to protect the scientists, science administrators, and the field of science—gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens—that likely caused the pandemic. They have done this in part because those scientists and science administrators are their sources, . . . in part because they believe that public trust in science would be damaged by reporting the facts, and in part because the origin of the pandemic acquired a partisan political valance after early public statements by Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, and Donald Trump.

During the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream media outlets barely mentioned the lab-leak debate. And when they did, they generally savaged both the idea and anyone who took it seriously. In March 2021, long after credible evidence emerged hinting at a laboratory origin for the virus, Scientific American published an article, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” The piece compared the theory to the KGB’s disinformation campaign about the origin of HIV/AIDS and blamed lab-leak advocates for creating a poisonous climate around the issue: “The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. It has also led to a vilification of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research (such as ‘gain of function’ research).” Today we know that the poisonous atmosphere around the lab-leak question was deliberately created by Anthony Fauci and a handful of scientists involved in dangerous research at the Wuhan lab. And the case for banning gain-of-function research has never been stronger.

One of the few science journalists who did take the lab-leak question seriously was Donald McNeil, Jr., the veteran New York Times reporter forced out of the paper in an absurd DEI panic. After leaving the Times—and like several other writers pursuing the lab-leak question—McNeil published his reporting on his own Medium blog. It is telling that, at a time when leading science publications were averse to exploring the greatest scientific mystery of our time, some of the most honest reporting on the topic was published in independent, reader-funded outlets. It’s also instructive to note that the journalist who replaced McNeil on the Covid beat at the Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, showed open hostility to investigating Covid’s origins. In 2021, she famously tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” It would be hard to compose a better epitaph to the credibility of mainstream science journalism.

As Shermer observed, many science journalists see their role not as neutral reporters but as advocates for noble causes. This is especially true in reporting about the climate. Many publications now have reporters on a permanent “climate beat,” and several nonprofit organizations offer grants to help fund climate coverage. Climate science is an important field, worthy of thoughtful, balanced coverage. Unfortunately, too many climate reporters seem especially prone to common fallacies, including base-rate neglect, and to hyping tenuous data.

The mainstream science press never misses an opportunity to ratchet up climate angst. No hurricane passes without articles warning of “climate disasters.” And every major wildfire seemingly generates a “climate apocalypse” headline. For example, when a cluster of Quebec wildfires smothered the eastern U.S. in smoke last summer, the New York Times called it “a season of climate extremes.” It’s likely that a warming planet will result in more wildfires and stronger hurricanes. But eager to convince the public that climate-linked disasters are rapidly trending upward, journalists tend to neglect the base rate. In the case of Quebec wildfires, for example, 2023 was a fluky outlier. During the previous eight years, Quebec wildfires burned fewer acres than average; then, there was no upward trend—and no articles discussing the paucity of fires. By the same token, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, a lower-than-average number of major hurricanes struck the U.S. between 2011 and 2020. But there were no headlines suggesting, say, “Calm Hurricane Seasons Cast Doubt on Climate Predictions.”

Most climate journalists wouldn’t dream of drawing attention to data that challenge the climate consensus. They see their role as alerting the public to an urgent problem that will be solved only through political change.

Similar logic applies to social issues. The social-justice paradigm rests on the notion that racism, sexism, transphobia, and other biases are so deeply embedded in our society that they can be eradicated only through constant focus on the problem. Any people or institutions that don’t participate in this process need to be singled out for criticism. In such an atmosphere, it takes a particularly brave journalist to note exceptions to the reigning orthodoxy.

This dynamic is especially intense in the debates over transgender medicine. The last decade has seen a huge surge in children claiming dissatisfaction with their gender. According to one survey, the number of children aged six to 17 diagnosed with gender dysphoria surged from roughly 15,000 to 42,000 in the years between 2017 and 2021 alone. The number of kids prescribed hormones to block puberty more than doubled. Puberty blockers and other treatments for gender dysphoria have enormous potential lifelong consequences, including sterility, sexual dysfunction, and interference with brain development. Families facing treatment decisions for youth gender dysphoria desperately need clear, objective guidance. They’re not getting it.

Instead, medical organizations and media outlets typically describe experimental hormone treatments and surgeries as routine, and even “lifesaving,” when, in fact, their benefits remain contested, while their risks are enormous. In a series of articles, the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir has documented how trans advocates enforce this appearance of consensus among U.S. scientists, medical experts, and many journalists. Through social-media campaigns and other tools, these activists have forced conferences to drop leading scientists, gotten journals to withdraw scientific papers after publication, and interfered with the distribution of Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage, which challenges the wisdom of “gender-affirming care” for adolescent girls. While skeptics are cowed into silence, Sapir concludes, those who advocate fast-tracking children for radical gender therapy “will go down in history as responsible for one of the worst medical scandals in U.S. history.”

In such an overheated environment, it would be helpful to have a journalistic outlet advocating a sober, evidence-based approach. In an earlier era, Scientific American might have been that voice. Unfortunately, SciAm today downplays messy debates about gender therapies, while offering sunny platitudes about the “safety and efficacy” of hormone treatments for prepubescent patients. For example, in a 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?,” the magazine repeats the unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children. “These medications are well studied and have been used safely since the late 1980s to pause puberty in adolescents with gender dysphoria,” SciAm states.

The independent journalist Jesse Singal, a longtime critic of slipshod science reporting, demolishes these misleading claims in a Substack post. In fact, the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria is a new and barely researched phenomenon, he notes: “[W]e have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time to see how they have fared.” Singal finds it especially alarming to see a leading science magazine obscure the uncertainty surrounding these treatments. “I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret,” he writes.

Fortunately, glimmers of light are shining through on the gender-care controversy. The New York Times has lately begun publishing more balanced articles on the matter, much to the anger of activists. And various European countries have started reassessing and limiting youth hormone treatments. England’s National Health Service recently commissioned the respected pediatrician Hilary Cass to conduct a sweeping review of the evidence supporting youth gender medicine. Her nearly 400-page report is a bombshell, finding that evidence supporting hormone interventions for children is “weak,” while the long-term risks of such treatments have been inadequately studied. “For most young people,” the report concludes, “a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” In April, the NHS announced that it will no longer routinely prescribe puberty blocking drugs to children.

Scientific American has yet to offer an even-handed review of the new scientific skepticism toward aggressive gender medicine. Instead, in February, the magazine published an opinion column, “Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People.” Shockingly, it argues for even less medical caution in dispensing radical treatments. The authors approvingly note that “many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care,” arguing that patients should have “access to hormones and surgery on demand.” And, in an implicit warning to anyone who might question these claims and goals, the article compares today’s skeptics of aggressive gender medicine to Nazi eugenicists and book burners. Shortly after the Cass report’s release, SciAm published an interview with two activists who argue that scientists questioning trans orthodoxy are conducting “epistemological violence.”

There’s nothing wrong with vigorous debate over scientific questions. In fact, in both science and journalism, adversarial argumentation is a vital tool in testing claims and getting to the truth. “A bad idea can hover in the ether of a culture if there is no norm for speaking out,” Shermer says. Where some trans activists cross the line is in trying to derail debate by shaming and excluding anyone who challenges the activists’ manufactured consensus.

Such intimidation has helped enforce other scientific taboos. Anthony Fauci called the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and successfully lobbied to censor their arguments on social media. Climate scientists who diverge from the mainstream consensus struggle to get their research funded or published. The claim that implicit racial bias unconsciously influences our minds has been debunked time and again—but leading science magazines keep asserting it.

Scientists and journalists aren’t known for being shrinking violets. What makes them tolerate this enforced conformity? The intimidation described above is one factor. Academia and journalism are both notoriously insecure fields; a single accusation of racism or anti-trans bias can be a career ender. In many organizations, this gives the youngest, most radical members of the community disproportionate power to set ideological agendas.

“Scientists, science publishers, and science journalists simply haven’t learned how to say no to emotionally unhinged activists,” evolutionary psychologist Miller says. “They’re prone to emotional blackmail, and they tend to be very naive about the political goals of activists who claim that scientific finding X or Y will ‘impose harm’ on some group.”

But scientists may also have what they perceive to be positive motives to self-censor. A fascinating recent paper concludes: “Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists.” The authors include a who’s who of heterodox thinkers, including Miller, Manhattan Institute fellow Glenn Loury, Pamela Paresky, John McWhorter, Steven Pinker, and Wilfred Reilly. “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups,” they write.

Whether motivated by good intentions, conformity, or fear of ostracization, scientific censorship undermines both the scientific process and public trust. The authors of the “prosocial motives” paper point to “at least one obvious cost of scientific censorship: the suppression of accurate information.” When scientists claim to represent a consensus about ideas that remain in dispute—or avoid certain topics entirely—those decisions filter down through the journalistic food chain. Findings that support the social-justice worldview get amplified in the media, while disapproved topics are excoriated as disinformation. Not only do scientists lose the opportunity to form a clearer picture of the world; the public does, too. At the same time, the public notices when claims made by health officials and other experts prove to be based more on politics than on science. A new Pew Research poll finds that the percentage of Americans who say that they have a “great deal” of trust in scientists has fallen from 39 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today.

“Whenever research can help inform policy decisions, it’s important for scientists and science publications to share what we know and how we know it,” Scientific American editor Helmuth says. “This is especially true as misinformation and disinformation are spreading so widely.” That would be an excellent mission statement for a serious science publication. We live in an era when scientific claims underpin huge swaths of public policy, from Covid to climate to health care for vulnerable youths. It has never been more vital to subject those claims to rigorous debate.

Unfortunately, progressive activists today begin with their preferred policy outcomes or ideological conclusions and then try to force scientists and journalists to fall in line. Their worldview insists that, rather than challenging the progressive orthodoxy, science must serve as its handmaiden. This pre-Enlightenment style of thinking used to hold sway only in radical political subcultures and arcane corners of academia. Today it is reflected even in our leading institutions and science publications. Without a return to the core principles of science—and the broader tradition of fact-based discourse and debate—our society risks drifting onto the rocks of irrationality.

[ Via: https://archive.today/j03w3 ]

==

Scientific American now embodies the worst of far-left anti-science nonsense.

[melandrops]

"Progressive orthodoxy has taught all of us...that particulars rule. You know, listen to gay people about gay issues, or- only this identity or that identity understands this struggle, or- only this identity or that identity should have a voice. The online left often fetishizes oppression as if it were a commodity. Because that's what it's become. Something that conveys where you lie on a particular market. But that needs to end. Or not end, but change. We can't build a truth on particulars. We need a truth that isn't totalizing, a universalism that isn't centrist, and a politics that seeks to eliminate the illusion of essential difference without denying the importance of difference.

Liberalism killed history. It declared itself the end of history . . . History is back on the table. The people are back on the table . . . Why have we let conservatives, racists and ethnonationalists take ownership over the meaning of this country? They certainly aren't the ones that built it.

I understand why we want to give up on America. Just open an American history book and you'll find a million reasons to give up on the American project. I know what America has stood for. What it stands for. Death and occupation in Gaza. Racial injustice, settler colonialism, global capitalist exploitation. I could go on. But this also means that we are uniquely positioned as Americans to expose and reject this version of America. Instead of giving up on America, instead of calling for its destruction and waiting to see what rises from the ashes, what if we denounce America then and fight for an America now that is truly just? What if we had the audacity to hope?

As liberals or leftists, it might feel awkward to universalize struggles that we've been told are only effective when we highlight the experiences of marginalized particulars. But universal popular politics don't deny that certain groups are hurt disproportionately more than other groups, nor does it deny that particular groups have unique knowledge about their own oppression. But in the end, the job of radical politics is not to fight for the particular. Instead, look to the truth of the particularity . . . How does this particular exclusion implicate all of us? What does the trans experience illuminate about the way gender works for everyone? How does systemic racism work to turn groups away from systemic change? . . . Systemic oppression reveals systemic problems. And we're all living in it. Systemic change requires us to understand that we all live in it.

-Hamilton and the Death of the Obama Era by Alexander Avila, August 9 2024

[orthodoxadventure]

But it is the Christian gospel that God did not leave man in his exile, in the predicament of confused longing. He had created man "after his own heart" and for Himself, and man has struggled in his freedom to find the answer to the mysterious hunger in him. In this scene of radical unfulfillment God acted decisively; into the darkness where man was groping toward Paradise, He sent light. He did so not as a rescue operation, to recover lost man: it was rather for the completing of what He had undertaken from the beginning. God acted so that man might understand who He really was and where his hunger had been driving him. The light God sent was His Son: the same light that had been shining unextinguished in the world's darkness all along, seen now in full brightness.

--Rev. Dr. Alexander Schmemann: For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

[self-loving-vampire]

Historically, at the core of the modern conservative movement’s agenda have been its efforts to impose a particular family structure, one with a working father and dependent mother who plays the role of primary caregiver for her children. Through social and economic policies – namely, the erosion of the social safety net – conservatives aspired to make this patriarchal unit into the primary source of economic security and, in the process, sought to winnow the viable life and career paths available to women. They required the “protection” of the family, the right argued, which was one of the many reasons it opposed the Equal Rights Amendment that would have made men and women equal in the eyes of the law. The amendment, they insisted, would “strike at the heart” of what conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in 1978 called “women’s family support rights.”

The right’s goals remain much the same today, but its hard-right faction has doubled down on their moral orthodoxy while rejecting many traditional conservative economic strategies. For this growing segment of the right, the primary problem facing the country is the supposed assault on what it sees as “traditional” American culture and family, led by the Democratic Party, the broader political left, feminists, LGBTQ+ people, and others who fail to fit their rigid views of gender. They want to impose, through the power of the state, stringent gender roles and social hierarchies, and to punish those who deviate from them.

...

Despite their exclusion from many of today’s most prominent hate groups, women are active participants in the hard right’s campaign to uphold male supremacy and create restrictive gender distinctions. One clear example is the so-called tradwife (or “traditional wife”) movement, which proclaims that women can achieve personal happiness and contribute to a healthier national culture by embracing subservience to men.

Women’s interest in the tradwife movement is, in some ways, a response to modern economic realities. The movement is “rooted in many young women’s sense of discontent with mainstream society and capitalist systems that – in the U.S., in any case – make balancing motherhood and work a near-impossible task, with virtually no childcare support, limited sick leave, and few protections for women who need time away from work for childcare or eldercare responsibilities,” Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a scholar of extremism and radicalization, has noted. Some women have responded by looking backward to a romanticized version of domesticity captured by the 1950s propaganda that forms the backbone of the tradwife aesthetic.

The tradwife movement exists largely online, led by influencers whose content depicts stylized domestic bliss – their homes, cooking, clothing and children – alongside captions that encourage chastity and, often, homeschooling, homesteading and fundamentalist Christianity. Tradwives present submission as freedom and a return to the natural order, before feminism deceived women into thinking they could achieve fulfillment outside family life and heterosexual relationships.

[mariacallous]

In 2007 I published what was probably my most-read book What’s Left. It asked novel questions.

"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal-left is against come from the liberal-left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don…Why, even in the case of Palestine, can’t those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see?

“After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?”

In short, I asked why was the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic right-wing ideas. In the early 2000s, overwhelmingly and everywhere, liberals and leftists were more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists were white, they had no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognizable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that was anti-Western and they treated it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

I say my questions were novel because, although socialism was one of the great political movements of the 20th century, few discussed the consequences of its collapse in the 1980s. The decline of the socialist religion had as profound and as perverse consequences as the collapse of Christianity in the late 19th century. But no one, or next to no one, wanted to think about them.

As a good atheist I hated to paraphrase GK Chesterton, but there’s no escaping the old Catholic apologist.  My argument boiled down to saying that what Chesterton said about God applies just as well to socialism.  When men stop believing in it, “they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

After dreams of socialism and communism vanished in the 1980s, large sections of the radical left preferred any enemy of the West to the West having no enemies at all: radical Islam, insane Sunni and Shia dictators, Putin’s Russia, violent misogynists and homophobes. As long as they were anti-western, and in particular the enemies of the US and Israel, the radical left was happy to form alliances.

Or as Judith Butler explained the new orthodoxy in 2006, “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”That by any normal standard Hamas and Hezbollah were tyrannical, inquisitorial, and misogynist was irrelevant. They were anti-western and that alone made them “progressive”.

Not everything I wrote in 2007 stands up well today. In the 2010s we began to see Conservatives fawning over trash like Viktor Orban, and from 2016 on we have seen the wholesale abasement of the US right before Donald Trump. The lure of authoritarianism was by no means confined to the left

But overall, what I said remains true. And just to be clear, I did not then and do not now believe in the horseshoe theory. The far left is not the same as the far right. There is a huge difference between living in a country ruled by Donald Trump and a country ruled by Nicolas Maduro or between Iran and North Korea. The far left and far right target different people, and serve different interests.

It is better to think of radical Islam seducing elements of an exhausted radical left. The white western working class would no longer die for the revolution (truth be told, it was never that keen on dying for the revolution even at the best of times for the left). But young Muslim men would fight and kill Americans and Israelis. And if you could forget about the obscurantist religious tyranny, the hatred of every human right, the persecution and murder of Arab and Iranian leftists, they might in a certain light appear to be a replacement for the western working class that had let the far left down so badly.

When What’s Left came out respectable critics said words to the effect of “come on, Nick, you are just talking about tiny groups of post-Stalinists and post-Trotskyists. The real left was in the then Labour government, trade unions and charities and campaign groups.”

I replied with words to the effect of politics is downstream of culture. Look at academia, the comment pages of the Guardian, the organisers of demonstrations, the left trade unions and many of those supposedly respectable campaign groups and charities. They are getting drunk on a weird mixture of far-leftism, far-rightism and postmodernism. They will embrace medieval levels of superstition and regimes they would have no hesitation in describing as fascist if they were white.

I asked where this was leading. The far left provided an answer when, to the astonishment of my respectable critics, it took over the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Now the Gaza war has led to another pact being formed between the western far left and radical Islam. Over at Quillette,  an American academic, Susie Linfield, has gone through the whole hideous detail of how leftist thought leaders and academics celebrated the murderers. Some of those she indicted are so predictable you would miss them if they were not there.

Linfield notes that in the New Left Review, Britain’s leading Marxist journal, Tariq Ali praised the terrorists for “rising up against the colonizers” and implied, bizarrely, that the murders resulted from Palestinian frustration with Israel’s recent enormous pro-democracy demonstrations against the Netanyahu government.

Elsewhere depression replaces tedium. Anyone who remembers the scrupulous work of Michael Waltzer on what constituted just war will be appalled about what has happened to Dissent, the journal he edited.  Dissent used to believe that the deliberate targeting of civilians was a war crime. Not so now when the civilians are Jews. In its pages, one writer  described Israel as a ‘genocide machine’ and argued that Israeli victims should not be grieved.

“It is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.” So grief is impermissible. Indeed, it’s worse than that: grief is colonialist.

 Elsewhere tenured academics were unable to contain their enthusiasm: the attacks were “innovative,” “astonishing,” a “major achievement,”  “awesome,” “incredible,” and “a stunning victory,’’ one wrote.

Ah professors. They write in ink and dream of blood.

The essential point to bear in mind is that these expressions of joy at the death of Jews on 7 October was almost instantaneous. It came before a single Israeli bomb fell on Gaza. It was not a condemnation of Israel’s disproportionately violent response. That was still to come. Instead of rational protest there was a celebration of the mass murder of Jews by Hamas, a terrorist group inspired not only by Islamism but by European fascism.  As if to confirm my argument in What’s Left the far left was cheering the far right because it has no one else to cheer.

The same question I asked in the early 2000s can be asked now: where is this heading?

I do not go along with the view among conservatives that all who march with Islamists and their leftist allies are antisemites by definition. From the start of this war, I have said that Israel’s aim of destroying Hamas is impossible. I was going to say that it is impossible without unacceptable civilian casualties. But in truth it is impossible in all circumstances. The Israeli forces simply cannot find Hamas fighters as they melt into a population of two million disorientated people. This is not simply my view. Military specialists are noting the low level of Israeli casualties and the small number of Hamas kills the Israeli Defence Forces are claiming to have made.  The odds are that Hamas is refusing to opt for a direct confrontation, and allowing civilians to pay the price. It is always reasonable to protest against futile wars and needless suffering, and this war is no exception to the rule.

And yet before I turn too accommodating, let me say there is no other area of progressive life where liberals and leftists ally with racists and don’t show even the smallest embarrassment about their behaviour.

Here’s a thought experiment. There is a growing concern on the western far right about low birth rates. Rather than allow immigration, Viktor Orban in Hungary is offering tax exemptions to women who have four or more children. The left naturally wants higher welfare payments for mothers, too, and in the case of the UK wants to end a nasty Conservative policy which penalises families on benefits if they have more than two children.

For all that, no progressive would join a demonstration of neo-Nazis or alt-right supporters in favour of encouraging British mothers to have more children. They would think that there was a serious flaw in a campaign that attracted ultra-right white support. They would worry about inciting prejudice against ethnic minorities in the UK.  And yet they see nothing wrong in going along with campaigns that attract ultra-right Islamist support or in worrying too much about the UK's Jewish minority.

If the grim absurdities of the left of the early 2000s presaged Corbynism and the collapse of the Labour party, what do the 2020s have in store? I am trying to be objective and so won’t go off into long laments about the moral health of the sacred “Left”. I long-ago gave up worrying about that in any case.

First and most obviously the failure of the white left for more than a generation to oppose Israel while also opposing antisemitism has mainstreamed racial prejudices. The explosion in anti-Jewish attacks since 7 October is an inevitable consequence. I have never seen Jewish people feel so isolated. It’s not simply the far left and Muslim agitators who scare them. BBC presenters and others in the mainstream, who make their indifference to the massacre of Jews plain, foretell a future where Israel is a pariah state and Jews are damned by association and must pay the price. Perhaps that future is already here, and we will be permanently in a Corbynista world where Jews are seen as sinister agents in a Zionist conspiracy manipulating western policy.

Second, the uncritical treatment of Hamas naturally reinforces the most bigoted and reactionary elements in British Muslim communities. The consequences we can only guess at, but I think we can say by looking back at the last time the British left ran off with radical Islamists, they will lead us down new spirals of extremism.