Rod Dreher's Blog, page 499
January 8, 2017
View From Your Table
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
What you see above is the remains of a maple bacon king cake, a speciality of the Baton Rouge bakery Tiger Deauxnuts. These things have become legendary among Baton Rouge foodies since the shop opened a couple of years ago. I had never tasted one before this morning. As I’m on a low-carb diet, I only had one (okay, two), small bites.
It nearly knocked me flat! I will be thinking about that taste all week. It’s king cake season in south Louisiana, which means, in our variation of the Epiphany tradition, we eat these cakes until Mardi Gras. You can get them in various flavors, but I’m a king cake purist, and prefer traditional. But this maple bacon variation is something exalted, and exalting. I don’t know if Tiger Deauxnuts ships these things, but if they do, YOU HAVE TO HAVE ONE! Follow the link to their Facebook page, and give it a shot. It may actually be a crime to sell pastries this rich and delicious and bacony.
If you’re unlucky, the New Orleans Pelicans basketball team will have King Cake Baby, it’s terrifying mascot, deliver it to your door. This is a thing:
When KCB shows up at your house in an @Uber_NOLA with a special delivery! #PelicansKCB pic.twitter.com/yCeJBUxn17
— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) January 6, 2017
Hey, I have a ton of VFYTs from the past two weeks to put up. I apologize for being a slacker. I’m on it…
January 7, 2017
The Cathedral Interprets The Chicago Attack
Driving back from New Orleans today, I caught the beginning of the Weekend All Things Considered’s newscast. Host Michel Martin said that the show was going to devote the entire program to “violence, especially gun violence.” The first story of the broadcast was a three-minute piece in which Martin interviewed Chicago-based NPR correspondent Cheryl Corley about the horrific racist attack on the mentally disabled young white man, who was kidnapped and tortured in racially abusive terms by four young black people, who broadcast the attack on Facebook. Here’s a link to the story:
“Is something different now? Is there a sense in Chicago that there is something unique happening?” Martin asked Corley, about the city’s violence. They quickly got into the Facebook attack, which Martin introduced with this line:
“Just this week, four young adults were charged with attacking an acquaintance in a vicious beating that they livestreamed on social media.”
She also described it like this, in a question to Corley:
“Four young adults allegedly abducted an acquaintance of theirs, abused him terribly, and broadcast this on Facebook live, what are people saying about this?”
Incredibly, in talking about it, including an update from the bond hearing, Corley not once mentioned the fact that anti-white hate, and anti-Trump hate, was a key part of the crime — so much so that the state has filed hate crime charges against the four. The only thing Corley said about race was that the four defendants are “all African-Americans” — leaving aside the fact that the victim was white, and that both race and politics were central to the torture and abuse. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on the bond hearing:
“The victim is tied up then gagged. A sock is placed in the victim’s mouth and then his mouth is taped shut. The victim is forced back in to a corner,” [Assistant State’s Attorney Erin] Antonietti said. “One of the male defendants in the background can be hear yelling “F— Donald Trump” and “f— white people.” Hill uses a knife to slice off a chunk of the victim’s hair, cutting his head, then slicing at the sleeves of the victim’s sweatshirt as the man stares, terrified, at Hill, as laughing is heard from behind the camera.
“A male voice is heard saying ‘I don’t give a f— if he’s schizophrenic,’” Antonietti said. “A male shoves the victim’s face into a toilet bowl and the victim is told to drink toilet water.”
At some point during the ordeal, Antonietti said, Hill demanded $300 from the victim’s mother for the victim’s safe return.
To be fair, in its report Friday on the bond hearing, NPR was upfront about the race-hate aspect of the crime. It was bizarre to listen to today’s report, though, and to see the race-hate angle not even mentioned in passing. It’s as if they wanted only to talk about violence outside of the racial and political context, which is simply impossible in this particular case.
Steve Sailer notes the shocking/not-shocking case of The New York Times, whose editors have found a way to frame the crime not as anti-white or anti-Trump, but an example of bigotry against the disabled. I could not bring myself to watch more than a few minutes of the video, but I am not aware that the alleged captors and torturers made mockery of the man’s schizophrenia part of their attack. The Times could have done a story on the phenomenon of violent attacks on Trump supporters — something that happened again and again during the campaign season. That would have been an obvious angle. Or the matter of black anti-white racism, which also exists. But no. Says Sailer, sardonically:
So, you have your marching orders, right? The video of blacks abusing a white kid has nothing to do with virulent prejudice against whites or Trump, it has to do with Society’s prejudice against the intellectually disabled minority.
Do you understand your mission?
As you know, it is a priori impossible for Victim-Americans to abuse American-Americans. So, the victim must have been a Victim-American.
Again, to be fair, the Times‘s report Thursday highlighted the racial and political angle. The Times today ran an AP story saying that anti-white hate crimes are a smaller percentage of overall hate crimes than anti-black hate crimes. Which I accept as true, but I am not aware that after alleged anti-black hate crimes, or even police shootings involving black victims, that the national media make a point of publishing stories downplaying the crime by pointing out their relative rarity among all violent crimes.
You expect lefty crackpot sites like Salon.com to come up with a ridiculous spin like this (that the Chicago crime was really about abuse against the disabled), but the Times?
(That’s a joke.)
Earlier today in New Orleans, I had been having lunch with some friends, both liberals and conservatives. The issue of how so many Americans now don’t have much interest in truth (as distinct from believing what they want to believe) came up. Of course there was the matter of Trump’s dishonesty, but also the matter of the media’s ethics. I said that I read and subscribe to the Times mostly for the same reason Soviets used to read Pravda back in the day: to know what the Official Story the ruling class wishes to tell itself is. That’s not to say that the Times doesn’t feature excellent reporting and good writing; it does. But I don’t trust it to tell me the truth. I trust it to reveal to me the narrative that the greater part of the ruling class (minus the Republican elites) tells itself. That’s a useful thing to know, as long as you know that you’re only getting a take.
What’s interesting is that elite journalists largely lack the epistemic humility to understand what they’re doing. Do you think Michel Martin, Cheryl Corly, or anybody in the NPR newsroom who worked on today’s Chicago report were genuinely aware how their report would sound to someone who was not liberal?
The alt-right movement promotes many ideas, some of them stupid (e.g., the idea that the Chicago Facebook torture was the fault of Black Lives Matter), many of them bad, some of them evil. But the most true and useful thing it (or, to be precise, neoreaction, which is not exactly the same thing as the alt-right) has come up with is the concept of the Cathedral, defined like this:
The Cathedral in a nutshell
The Cathedral (aka the Clerisy, the Megaphone) is basically the Western world’s intellectual fashion industry. It consists of almost all of the respectable or even semi-respectable parts of the news media, the entertainment industry, and the softer social science and humanities parts of the education industry.
Basic economic theory predicts that these industries should be diverse in their approaches to politically sensitive topics. Unlike the field of particle physics, political fashions are not significantly limited by reproducible scientific experiments. The market should be fragmented, and the various firms should specialize in appealing to different segments of the market.
But this does not seem to be the case. Instead, the Cathedral seems much more homogeneous in its coverage of politically sensitive topics than it is in coverage of food, art, sports, religion, etc.
The mechanism for this homogenization is not obvious. Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathedral has no pope (although I read recently that Warren Buffet owns 71 newspapers, and the New York Times is owned in part by Carlos Slim, whose vast fortune has a lot to do with his special relationship with the Mexican government). One factor is that the credibility of a set of information sources depends on their being able to agree on a story (coordination games, the peloton effect, the parliament of clocks). Another factor is self-dealing: people with high verbal skills tend to support a system of government that is controlled by people with high verbal skills, and once they control it, they tend to want it to be unlimited in scope. Another factor is self-selection: once an institution becomes dominated by members of a political movement, it tends to become unpleasant and career-limiting for anyone else to work there. Another factor is that the easiest way to write a newspaper story is to copy it from a politician’s press handout. To a considerable extent, these institutions are deliberately manipulated by politicians (broadcast licensing, educational and research funding, journalistic access, selective leaking of secrets, etc., aka Gleichschaltung; in many cases, journalists are literally married to political operatives or are involved in “revolving door” relationships with the political institutions they write about, such as Jeff Immelt of GE, MSNBC and the Obama administration). But the two biggest factors are probably that (1) intellectuals are seduced by political power (the Boromir effect), and (2) these institutions are quasi-religious, and have taken on the peculiar characteristics of the dominant quasi-religion of the day.
Three things make an intellectual movement quasi-religious: (1) the outputs that they produce are credence goods, (2) they provide a framework for competition for social status, and (3) this basis is insecure. The fact that credence goods are involved means that conflict about them will tend to be irrational. The fact that social status is involved, and that the basis for social status is insecure, means that this conflict will be relatively vicious, and will carry a strong odor of a witch hunt.
The Cathedral is powerful partly because its relative homogeneity allows it to serve as a gatekeeper of politically relevant mass-market information and interpretation. But its real power comes from control of what ideas are associated with high status. Everyone thinks, “I’m my own man. I think for myself.” But unconsciously, people tend to copy the opinions of people who are one step above them on the social ladder. This was explained in the Cerulean Top scene in The Devil Wears Prada.
It seems that the high-status thing to believe about the Chicago torture attack is that it was really about bias against disabled people. And by the way, on Sunday, the Times published a short interview with Michael Eric Dyson, the Georgetown sociology professor and black commentator, who advocates separate fees for equal service, based on race. Excerpt:
At the end of your sermon, you do a “benediction” section, in which you talk about making reparations on the local and individual level: donating to groups like the United Negro College Fund or a scholarship program, but also, to cite your example from the book, paying “the black person who cuts your grass double what you might ordinarily pay.” That gave me pause!
Good! I used to say in church, “If the sermon ain’t making you a little bit uncomfortable, it ain’t effective.” Look, if it doesn’t cost you anything, you’re not really engaging in change; you’re engaging in convenience. You’re engaged in the overflow. I’m asking you to do stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily do. I’m asking you to think more seriously and strategically about why you possess what you possess.
I agree with reparations, but maybe this is my white privilege speaking: I can’t imagine actually doing that.
That is what I meant by an I.R.A.: an individual reparations account. You ain’t got to ask the government, you don’t have to ask your local politician — this is what you, an individual, conscientious, “woke” citizen can do.
Indulgences in our time, right there in the Cathedral’s parish bulletin.
January 6, 2017
Sorry, Baig Family! Love Wins Again
Albert Buchatskyy/Shutterstock
A 57-year-old convicted killer serving a life sentence in California became the first U.S. inmate to receive state-funded sex-reassignment surgery, the prisoner’s attorneys confirmed Friday to The Associated Press.
California prison officials agreed in August 2015 to pay for the surgery for Shiloh Heavenly Quine, who was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping and robbery for ransom and has no possibility of parole.
Quine’s case led the state to become the first to set standards that will allow other transgender inmates to apply to receive state-funded sex-reassignment surgery.
It also prompted a federal magistrate to require California to provide transgender female inmates housed in men’s facilities with more female-oriented items such as nightgowns, scarves and necklaces.
More:
The daughter of Quine’s victim said she objects to inmates getting taxpayer-funded surgery that is not readily available to non-criminals, regardless of the cost.
“My dad begged for his life,” said Farida Baig, who tried unsuccessfully to block Quine’s surgery through the courts. “It just made me dizzy and sick. I’m helping pay for his surgery; I live in California. It’s kind of like a slap in the face.”
Quine and an accomplice kidnapped and fatally shot 33-year-old Shahid Ali Baig, a father of three, in downtown Los Angeles in February 1980, stealing $80 and his car during a drug- and alcohol-fueled rampage.
Delightful. California taxpayers paid for Rodney Quine to get a fake vagina. And for his kind to get necklaces and scarves. This, because federal judge Jon Tigar said so.
Here’s what a hot mess Rodney Shiloh Quine is:
Quine, who turned 56 on Friday, has been incarcerated since her Los Angeles County conviction in 1980 on first-degree murder, kidnapping and robbery. During that time, her legal filings show, she has repeatedly attempted suicide. In April 2014, a prison psychologist assessing Quine wrote that he believed sex reassignment was “reasonable and necessary to alleviate severe pain.” When prison officials again denied the surgery, Quine in June 2014 tried once more to kill herself.
“I’m in severe pain,” she wrote in a prison appeal after a state board recommended moving Quine to a maximum security unit. “I feel tortured and now being placed in future substantial risk of harm.”
She has lived openly as a woman since 2008 and in 2009 began hormone treatment prescribed by her prison physicians. However, the prison system has denied her attempts to legally change her name, and she has filed numerous legal challenges seeking to require “sensitivity training” for prison officers and for officers to address her with feminine pronouns.
Plainly Rodney Quine is suffering. But come on!
So, who is Judge Jon Tigar?:
The issue of whether transgender inmates have a constitutional right to sex reassignment surgery was taken up by a federal judge in San Francisco, Jon Tigar, an appointee of President Obama.
Tigar had been on the bench less than two years last fall when he assigned himself to Quine’s complaint and appointed a team of lawyers at a San Francisco firm and at the Transgender Law Center to represent her.
Activist judge appointed by Barack Obama. That may be the only natural thing about this story.
Miss Ernestine Says: Don’t Drive, Fool
It’s cold, and we might be getting ice on the roads. Naturally, this being the subtropics, we’re freaking out. A Baton Rouge TV station dispatched a reporter to St. Francisville, where Ernestine James, one of our local librarians, tells him the God’s honest truth about how ill-prepared we Southerners are for even the slightest bit of winter precipitation.
I, however, am snug in my house with hot tea and lots of books. Miss Ernestine speaks truth: stay at home, fool.
UPDATE: The Facebook clip is not embedding, so watch the news report here. Miss Ernestine tells you like it is around :45.
Reaction, Conservatism, The Ben Op
From an interview with Mark Lilla:
HUMANITIES: You draw an important distinction between the conservative and the reactionary. What is the difference?
LILLA: Conservatives and liberals argue about politics in terms of human nature, and their dispute is about the proper relationship between individuals and societies. Traditionally, liberals begin with individuals who are endowed with certain rights, and think of the legitimacy of political institutions in terms of consent and the protection of those rights. Conservatives begin with societies and the observation that we all come into them as dependents, incurring obligations as we are protected and nurtured by them. Our rights are conventional, not natural, and are not the essence of politics. Traditions and norms are.
The dispute between revolutionaries and reactionaries is not over human nature. It is, as I’ve been suggesting, over the nature and course of history. And so, in many ways, conservatives and reactionaries are adversaries. The conservative believes that change should happen slowly, but that it is inevitable. He might regret what has happened in history, but he is under no illusion that the past can be recovered or recreated; neither does he believe that society should be reconstructed according to some rational plan inspired by the past. The conservative thinks that while societies differ, human nature stays pretty much the same over time and that the problems of politics are perennial. The reactionary thinks that history has changed human nature and that action in history can restore it to what it should be.
HUMANITIES: You describe political Islamism as a reactionary movement. What makes it so?
LILLA: The reactionary who believes that history has gone wildly off course and that the present is unbearable faces a choice when it comes to political action. One option, call it the Ulysses one, is to try to return home, which the reactionary believes is still possible. There are many currents of Islamism, some political and others not, but the most radical ones claim in their literature that Islam ceased to exist after the rule of Muhammad and the four “rightly guided caliphs.” To become Muslim therefore means to become Muslim again, which means overthrowing the current rulers of ostensibly Muslim nations and reimposing sharia law, in the best circumstances under a new caliph.
Another option, call it the Aeneas one, is to recognize that the past is past and cannot be reconstituted—no more than Troy could be after the Trojan War. And so, the essence of the past must be planted in the future, where it will give rise to a new, magnificent, and conquering force that will overcome the corrupt present and create a future as radiant as what once was. That is the spirit of fascism.
I read Lilla’s recent collection of essays about reaction, and it made me think about where the Benedict Option project fits on the spectrum. Is it conservative, or reactionary? I don’t mind the term “reactionary” attributed to it, but I am not sure it fits.
Let’s work with the definitions Lilla gives above. I certainly believe that human nature pretty much stays the same. I don’t believe that there ever was a postlapsarian paradise, or that we will ever be able to reproduce paradise on earth. By Lilla’s reckoning, this makes me a conservative, not a reactionary.
On the other hand, I agree that we have reached a decisive point in Western history. Conservatism, as it is presently practiced, conserves too little necessary for human thriving according to Christian teaching. The catastrophe that has overtaken the West requires a more or less radical response. We can’t go home again, so to speak, but repentance is central to the Christian story. What I call on is emulating not Ulysses, but the Prodigal Son. And, it is true that the past is past and cannot be reconstituted, but ancient Christianity (or at least pre-modern Christianity) offers us Christians ways to preserve the living truths that have been given to us — ways that are particularly suited to combating the currents of our time. I want to plant the “essence of the past” in the present, so that it can help build (rebuild) a better future.
Is that fascist? I don’t see it. If I believed in restoring some sort of paradise, I suppose it might be. But I don’t, any more than monks believe that their monastic communities are heaven on earth. The best we can realistically hope for is to create conditions in which we can live more peaceful, charitable, Christ-like lives, individually and in community. Again: that’s fascist? I don’t think Lilla would say that it was, but I don’t really know how this fits into his paradigm.
I suppose that the Benedict Option has one foot in conservatism and one foot in reaction, while maintaining Christian skepticism about the difference between the City of God and the City of Man (and therefore strictly limited confidence in politics). That, plus this big dollop of Russell Kirk:
“I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”
What do you think? Political scientists and historians, help me out here.
The Tyranny Of Transgender Ideology
A transgender man sued a Roman Catholic hospital on Thursday, saying it cited religion in refusing to allow his surgeon to perform a hysterectomy as part of his sex transition.
Jionni Conforti’s sex and gender discrimination lawsuit comes as new regulations hailed as groundbreaking anti-discrimination protections for transgender people are under legal attack from religious groups.
Conforti had scheduled the surgery at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson in 2015. He says a hospital administrator told him the procedure to remove his uterus couldn’t be done because it was a “Catholic hospital.
“I felt completely disrespected,” said Conforti, whose transition began in 2004. “That’s not how any hospital should treat any person regardless of who they are.”
The hospital said Thursday it follows ethical and religious directives from the U.S. Conference of Bishops in making decisions about care and treatment. The directives say procedures judged “morally wrong” by the church don’t have to be performed.
Madness. You cannot dissent from what they want; you’ve got to give them everything, or they’ll do what they can to destroy you.
You’ve probably heard by now about National Geographic‘s celebratory “everything’s coming up trans!” issue. Writing in The Public Discourse today, Andrew T. Walker and Denny Burk eviscerate author Robin Marantz Henig’s report from the magazine Excerpts:
First (and most problematic): Henig offers no substantive argument for why one’s internal, self-perception of his or her “gender identity” ought to determine one’s gender or have authority greater than one’s biological sex. The essay offers testimonies of people who say that their gender identity is at odds with their biological sex. But testimony is not sufficient. Asserting a claim does not demonstrate the authenticity of that claim. Readers are given no explanation for why we ought to regard the claims of one’s gender identity as reality rather than a subjective feeling or self-perception.
Indeed, this is the crux of the matter that plagues the transgender movement. It is based not on evidence, but on the ideology of expressive individualism—the idea that one’s identity is self-determined, that one should live out that identity, and that everyone else must respect and affirm that identity, no matter what it is. Expressive individualism requires no moral argument or empirical justification for its claims, no matter how absurd or controverted they may be. Transgenderism is not a scientific discovery but a prior ideological commitment about the pliability of gender.
More:
The final page of Henig’s article celebrates the mutilation of minor children with a full-page picture of a shirtless 17-year old girl who recently underwent a double mastectomy in order to “transition” to being a boy. Why do transgender ideologues consider it harmful to attempt to change such a child’s mind but consider it progress to display her bare, mutilated chest for a cover story? Transgender ideologues like Henig never address this ethical contradiction at the heart of their paradigm. Why is it acceptable to surgically alter a child’s body to match his sense of self but bigoted to try to change his sense of self to match his body? If it is wrong to attempt to change a child’s gender identity (because it is fixed and meddling with it is harmful), then why is it morally acceptable to alter something as fixed as the reproductive anatomy of a minor? The moral inconsistency here is plain.
And:
Henig makes a surprising and startling admission near the end of her essay: “Biology has a habit of declaring itself eventually.” On this, Henig is right. Humanity cannot escape the limits inscribed upon it. It is impossible to transgress biological boundaries stamped on human nature without the basic categories of human existence unraveling. If the National Geographic story tells anything, it tells of a society going down a path of self-willed experimentation that will lead to misery and a denial of human telos. In truth, this movement born of effete academics and progressive mythology is nothing more than dressed-up barbarism.
Read the whole thing. It is a detailed and systematic demolition of Henig’s piece.
On a number of occasions over the past few years, I’ve cited a lecture I once attended in Cambridge, delivered by the literary critic Dame Gillian Beer. She spoke about the way various elements within Victorian society seized upon Darwin’s findings and claimed them as scientific evidence for various ideologies to which they had a prior commitment. Abolitionists claimed that Darwin clearly showed why slavery was wrong, because deep down, we’re all the same. Imperialists claimed that Darwin clearly showed why it was the destiny of Europeans to rule over “lesser” races in the colonies, because survival of the fittest. And so on. Dame Gillian’s point was that the findings of science are always received within a particular cultural milieu that bends our interpretation of them, and that we must take great care to make ourselves aware of the difference between what is true scientifically, and what is a non-scientific conclusion to which we wish to make the facts conform.
Last February, New York magazine’s Jesse Singal wrote a frankly terrifying piece about how militant transgender advocates bullied a cowardly Canadian clinic into firing Dr. Ken Zucker, one of the world’s top researchers in the transgender field, because he, though a public advocate of accepting transgenders, did not believe that the science justified some of the more radical claims trans activists were making. If you missed it back then, read it now. This actually happened, and it’s going to keep happening, until people push back hard.
The stakes for all of us could hardly be higher. From an important interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychiatrist clinical psychologist who is being persecuted for his refusal to use the new panoply of Orwellian pronouns:
We’re teaching university students lies, and pandering to them, and I see that as counterproductive.
There’s even an anti-psychology program at OISE [Ontario Institute for Studies in Education]. It started when they got rid of [Ken] Zucker, and you don’t stop with one person. Zucker was a more than credible psychologist. He ran a very good program for people who had gender dysphoria, and he was conservative. Zucker’s attitude was that if you’ve got a kid who is complaining about their gender, you follow them up, and you see what happens, and you derive your conclusions from the research. Eighty percent of them declare themselves as homosexual, ninety percent settle into their biological identity as adults. His logical conclusion is to keep the goddamned surgical knife sheathed, and don’t bring out the hormones too soon. Well that’s all gone – it’s illegal now for doctors to question the decision of a three-year old child that he is a she. And if the parents want to start biological transformation, it is illegal for the doctor to reject that.
Did you see that Lauren Southern got identity as a man from the Ontario government? That shows you what the law has done to the physicians. That physician couldn’t question her because it’s illegal. So now Lauren Southern has government identification as a man. She went to the Service Ontario kiosk in high heels and makeup. She didn’t expect to get the god damned ID. That also means that the government is so tangled up in this mess that they’ll actually sacrifice their own ID. Think about that – think about what will happen to our society if people’s identification became unstable.
January 5, 2017
What Does Solidarity Mean In 2017?
Just now, I posted the following update to the “Race And Torture In Chicago” post:
UPDATE: A reader comments:
The incredibly frustrating thing about this incident is how it plays into the theory of “white flight”. Any sane, reasonable white person that watches this video will want to move out of a neighborhood that has a large young, black population, and fast. I know I would. It has nothing to do with bigotry and everything to do with self-preservation and the urge to protect one’s family. You cannot fault someone for wanting to escape an area where they are likely to be tortured and left for dead because of their skin color. As incidents like this drive away white people fearing for their lives, you can bet your lunch that (mostly wealthy, white) academics and pundits will call out this “white flight” and cite it as evidence of on-going “white supremacy”.
I think this is obviously true, but not at all obvious to liberals, especially in the media, who cannot seem to understand this dynamic except in terms of racial prejudice. The city where I live is highly segregated in terms of neighborhoods. Crime is high in the black neighborhoods, but only there. There is also, obviously, a lot of poverty in those neighborhoods, and widespread, multigenerational family breakdown. How bad is the family breakdown? According to official statistics, East Baton Rouge Parish, which takes in nearly the entire city of Baton Rouge, is 54 percent black. About 70 percent of the births to unwed mothers in the city are to black mothers. Forty-six percent of unwed mothers are below the poverty level, with 32 percent at the poverty level or no more than twice the poverty level. The connection among unwed motherhood, poverty, and crime has been very well established in academic literature over the years (for example).
If you want to live in a safer neighborhood in Baton Rouge, you don’t want to live in a neighborhood that’s majority black. Almost all the violent crime in Baton Rouge is committed by young black men, against other black people. The top five most violent zip codes in the city, accounting for 40 percent of all the violent crime, are predominantly black.
Is historical racism implicated in all this? Oh, come on, do you really have to ask? Of course it is! But if you are a homeowner and a parent in Baton Rouge, whether you are black, white, Asian, or Hispanic, your first concern isn’t going to be historical analysis. It’s going to be, “Where can I live safely? Where are the safe schools for my kids?” The answer in this city is sadly clear.
It made me recall a long phone conversation I had yesterday with a journalist friend, about what our news media should be doing better regarding coverage. I told him that it’s my impression that the country is fragmenting badly, but that nobody really has a clear idea why. Everybody seems to have a piece of the picture, but naturally we all default to explanations that come out of our own biases. In the case of the news media, its liberalism often leads it to boil many problems involving race down to a simplistic black and white narrative.
As I mentioned, Greater Baton Rouge is about 54 percent black, with non-Hispanic whites making up about 38 percent of the population. The white number is down from 70 percent in 1970, owing largely to white flight to the suburbs to escape forced busing ordered by a federal judge. Recently, residents of much of the predominantly white southern part of the city led a hard-fought effort to secede, in effect, from the city and incorporate as the City of St. George. (Technically, the proposed St. George would have taken in an unincorporated area, but its effect on the city-parish’s tax base would have been like a secession.)
The reason was that they wanted to gain control of neighborhood public schools, and remove them from the predominantly black parish school system, and its overall poor performance. But the St. George campaign was fought bitterly by north Baton Rougeans, who saw it as racist, and many whites in the city’s political and business establishment, who did not want to see Louisiana’s capital city break up. If the proposed City of St. George were to become a reality, the impoverished northern half of the city would have lost tremendous funding for its schools, and the sense of community cohesion in Baton Rouge, already tenuous, and divided racially, would have been greatly diminished.
The Guardian had a pretty informative piece about the controversy back in 2015. Excerpt:
The city of Baton Rouge fought back hard. They had a lot to lose financially, with 40% of the city’s sales tax revenue flowing out from the Mall of Louisiana and Perkins Rowe. According to most estimates, funding for Baton Rouge’s already beleaguered schools would also drop.
Underlying everything, also, is the issue of race. St George is predominantly white and relatively wealthy, while the rest of Baton Rouge is poorer and has a much stronger African American presence. While it would be too simple to frame everything in racial terms, there’s no doubt it has become a particularly contentious part of the debate.
St George supporters furiously deny racial separation as a motivating factor. “Playing the race card, it’s an intellectually dishonest point of view,” Rainey says. “It’s a lazy point of view. We get it. It plays well, it’s sensational. But there’s nothing any of us can do about what happened 20 or 30 years ago. I don’t carry that burden because there’s nothing I can do about that, but what I can do is affect what’s going to happen today and what’s going to happen tomorrow. Race has unequivocally nothing to do with what we’re looking at.”
Others, though, aren’t so sure. “They’re trying to, I guess, get back to the situation before Brown v Board of Education,” Mary Olive Pierson, a lawyer representing the city of Baton Rouge, says. “And that is in effect what it would do. The area they want to incorporate is over 80% white, so maybe that’s what they want. They deny that. They say, ‘It ain’t that’. But what is it?”
“You can’t really separate class issues from that narrative,” St George resident Carrie Patterson adds. “They bristle when you talk about white flight but what it effectively is, is middle-class flight.”
St. George’s opponents played the race card often and effectively. And St. George’s proponents downplayed it, of course, less effectively. There was simply no way to excise race from the controversy. But Carrie Patterson is absolutely right: the St. George movement was a middle-class attempt at Brexit.
As I said, it failed, but it was close. Last fall, the city-parish had a mayoral election, with State Sen. Bodi White, a white male Republican who led the St. George effort, facing off against State Sen. Sharon Weston Broome, a black female Democrat who opposed it. Broome won, and was sworn in this week as the mayor-president.
I don’t live in the St. George part of the parish, so I wouldn’t have had a vote even if it had come to that. But I wonder how I would have voted. I generally favor decentralization and local control, and it is hard to blame the St. George backers for wanting to regain control of their own schools, especially given how bad the overall parish school system is.
On the other hand, St. George’s exit from the city would have been a catastrophe for the large number of poor and working class black people who live in Baton Rouge, would have caused unappeasable civic resentment, and had unpredictable, and certainly deleterious, consequences for the state’s capital city, especially given that Louisiana State University and the area around it would have been outside the bounds of St. George.
There’s no point in re-arguing the failed St. George initiative here. I raise it in this context, though, to make a couple of points that we need to start talking about in this country:
Race does not explain everything, even when race is a major factor. Because so many in the media cannot seem to understand social and political clashes involving race in any way other than through the lens of white racism, they miss other important factors. If all the poor black people in Baton Rouge were white, we probably would have seen something like the St. George initiative arise. The people of south Baton Rouge have watched the public school system deteriorate for a generation, in large part driven by busing and the federal judge’s desegregation plan. They’re frustrated, and don’t understand why they and their children should have to pay the price for the sins of their fathers and mothers in the segregation era. Plus, the white flight phenomenon is as much a class phenomenon as it is a racial one. I seem to recall that TAC‘s own Wick Allison, in a D Magazine essay a decade or so ago reflecting on Dallas County’s unhappy experience with desegregation, pointed out that white flight to the suburbs was quickly followed by the flight of the black middle class to the suburbs. Middle-class people of all races don’t want to live around poor people, with their violence, their chaotic families, and all their problems. Which brings us to
Who are “we”? That is, what constitutes “us” and “them”? It was unthinkable a generation ago that a place like St. George would exist in anybody’s imagination. Yes, Baton Rouge had its problems, many of them having to do with race and class, but it was one city, at least in the imagination of its people. I don’t know how true that is today, but the St. George controversy suggests that it’s a much weaker concept than it ever was. In that, Baton Rouge is not alone. Questions of identity and place are being challenged now all over. The immigration issue propelling the Trump campaign has as much to do with deep anxiety over who “we” are as it does with foreigners living among us.
You may recall that one of the frequent commenters on this blog, a reader who comments as “Jesse,” and who lives in the Pacific Northwest, said that he considers that he has more in common with people in Tokyo than he does with people in Topeka. Whether he genuinely does, or whether (as I suspect) he only imagines that it’s true, is beside the point. The point is that he feels that his interests lie more with people in a foreign city than with his own countrymen. You may criticize that if you like — I don’t intend to criticize it in this place — but it’s a big deal. Many Trump voters believe that their fellow Americans in positions of power and influence in coastal centers of power have no particular loyalty to them, and do not consider the interests of non-elite Americans in their deliberations.
That’s certainly a big part of the problem facing us, but not all of it. In Baton Rouge, it is true that the city’s business and governmental elites were against St. George’s “Brexit” move, but it is also true that no small number of non-elite whites were also against it, as was the black population. As Carrie Patterson put it, St. George was an attempt by white middle class people who live in a certain part of town to gain more control over their own destiny. What I find to be most interesting about the St. George thing — and, note well, about the broad issue of place and identity — is what changed to make the people who live in the St. George area decide that they had no responsibility to the people on the north side of town.
If you ask the media, they will say, “Racism, end of story.” But that is far too easy. I want to hypothesize that one part of it — one part — is ceasing to believe that they are all part of the same story, the American story. Whether it’s been largely true or a noble lie, I think it’s fair to say that most people in this country have believed that most other people in this country want the same thing: a family, a steady job, a safe place to live, a sense of real community, and the hope that your kids will do better than you did. In north Baton Rouge, community standards are such that having an intact traditional family is no longer a norm, nor is the traditional work ethic (which includes faith in education as a way out of poverty). The neighborhoods have become more antisocial and unsafe as familial disorder has grown.
This is happening to poor white and white working class neighborhoods too, as Charles Murray and others have demonstrated — and for similar reasons. You simply cannot maintain a strong community with widespread family breakdown, no matter what your race. In the City of Baton Rouge, social disorder is heavily associated with poor black people (if you want to find larger concentrations of dysfunctional poor white people, you have to look elsewhere in the broader region). What I want to highlight is the likelihood that the same lack of social solidarity (“We’re all in this together, despite everything”) that we have seen emerge between American business, academic, media, and political elites and those below them also exists between the middle class and the lower classes — and for similar reasons.
How could we test this hypothesis? Some suggested questions for media coverage:
What does the black middle class think about the black lower class? Does the black middle class feel that it has more in common with people of other races — whites, Asians, Latinos, et al. — who share middle class values and disciplines, than with other black Americans? Why or why not?
If middle-class people had to choose, would they rather live around poor or working-class people of their own race or ethnicity, or around middle-class people of a different race or ethnicity? Why or why not?
Similarly, if a middle-class person affirms “diversity” and “inclusivity” as important values, what does he mean by that? Where does he draw the line between an expression of “diversity” that should be affirmed and one that should be denied? Who should be excluded, and why?
What is the American dream? What is the American story? Whom do you believe shares that story in 2017, and who does not — and why?
An academic friend of mine, a European immigrant, told me last week that he and his wife, who is also an immigrant, resolved to give up trying to understand how Americans think and behave regarding race. These are very intelligent people, but very little of it makes sense to them as outsiders. I want to suggest that using race and race alone as an explanatory framework for what’s happening in American life, and where our fault lines are in 2017, obscures as much as it illuminates. I’m interested to hear from you readers about the questions you think journalists and academics might ask to help us understand America as it is in 2017.
I’m also eager to hear what you think might return a sense of national solidarity. Today, Terry Teachout, on his excellent blog, cited the following quote from the late cultural historian Kenneth Clark:
“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.”
What gives you confidence that the United States can reverse the fragmentation, and recover a since of solidarity? I ask because I honestly have no idea.
Race And Torture In Chicago
Chicago is a city where almost 800 people were murdered in 2016. If you look at this statistics page, you will see that four out of five victims were black, and as far as police know, four out of five of the murderers were black. For the sake of diversity, perhaps, four blacks took captive a white mentally disabled man the other day, held him for 24 hours, bound him, tortured him, and broadcast the whole thing on social media, on the Facebook account of one of the group, a Miss Brittany Herring.
On the video — which you can watch here (NSFW) — the thugs (two men, two women) cut the terrified man’s clothes off with a knife. You can hear one of the men off-camera barking, “F–k Donald Trump, boy! F**k white people, boy!” The young woman who seems to filming these sounds like she’s drunk or high.
“I [will] cut his motherf**king head off!” one of the men says, after he has already sliced into the bound man’s skull with a knife.
You can hear them just off camera yelling threats at the man, striking him, and hearing him scream.
“This sh*t is hilarious,” the woman says.
“Smack his ass!” You hear a slap against skin. “Slap him again!”
“You shoulda suck Donald Trump d**k and told him not to be president!”
That’s just in the first five minutes. I couldn’t take any more than that. The video goes on for half an hour. Watch the whole thing, if you can stand it. A Chicago TV station reports that later in the video, the captors force the man to drink toilet water.
Chicago police found the disabled man wandering the streets in the harsh Chicago winter, wearing nothing but shorts. They ended up arresting the four alleged torturers. In a press conference about the crime, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who is black, and Commander Kevin Duffin (the local authority in charge of the investigation), who is white, indicated a belief that this horrifying event, though disgusting, might not be such a big racial or political deal after all:
“Kids make stupid mistakes, I shouldn’t call them kids, they are legally adults, but they are young adults and the make stupid decisions,” Duffin said of the vulgar remarks about Trump and white people. “That certainly will be part of whether or not we seek a hate crime, determine whether or not this is sincere or stupid ranting and raving.”
The suspects are 18, Duffin said.
“It’s sickening,” Johnson said of the video. “It makes you wonder what would make individuals treat somebody like that. I’ve been a cop for 28 years and I’ve seen things you shouldn’t see in a lifetime, but it still amazes me how you still things you just shouldn’t. I’m not going to say it shocked me, but it was sickening.”
Johnson said the incident doesn’t appear to be politically motivated.
“I think part of it is just stupidity,” Johnson said. “People ranting about something they think might make a headline. At this point we don’t have anything concrete to point (toward a hate crime) but we’ll keep investigating and let the facts guide us on how this concludes.”
Wait … what?! In what sense can what we see on this video — the beating, the cutting, the anti-white racist abuse — be taken as insincere? Is it less racist torture and brutality if the black brutalizers didn’t really mean it? How, exactly, does that work?
Is there any doubt in the world that had this been whites doing this to a kidnapped, bound, mentally disabled black man, that the media would not be in crisis mode? Anderson Cooper would have had to have been pulled out of a fetal position and put on a plane to Chicago for days of live broadcasting. Would the Chicago police have had the cheek to speculate that the brutal crimes recorded on the video might not be “sincere,” and might not be a “hate crime,” even though the abusive language directed towards the victim is heavily racialized (and politicized)?
Of course not. There is a double standard at work here.
Media: “Ignore the tape. There’s no racism in that Chicago kidnapping/torture. Trust us.”
Same Media: “Why don’t Americans trust us?”
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) January 5, 2017
And liberals in the media and elsewhere wonder why Trump got elected.
Chicago, governed by Democrat Rahm Emanuel, is plainly a city out of control. This incident, and the police reaction to it, gives some insight into why.
UPDATE: A reader comments:
The incredibly frustrating thing about this incident is how it plays into the theory of “white flight”. Any sane, reasonable white person that watches this video will want to move out of a neighborhood that has a large young, black population, and fast. I know I would. It has nothing to do with bigotry and everything to do with self-preservation and the urge to protect one’s family. You cannot fault someone for wanting to escape an area where they are likely to be tortured and left for dead because of their skin color. As incidents like this drive away white people fearing for their lives, you can bet your lunch that (mostly wealthy, white) academics and pundits will call out this “white flight” and cite it as evidence of on-going “white supremacy”.
I think this is obviously true, but not at all obvious to liberals, especially in the media, who cannot seem to understand this dynamic except in terms of racial prejudice. The city where I live is highly segregated in terms of neighborhoods. Crime is high in the black neighborhoods, but only there. There is also, obviously, a lot of poverty in those neighborhoods, and widespread, multigenerational family breakdown. How bad is the family breakdown? According to official statistics, East Baton Rouge Parish, which takes in nearly the entire city of Baton Rouge, is 54 percent black. About 70 percent of the births to unwed mothers in the city are to black mothers. Forty-six percent of unwed mothers are below the poverty level, with 32 percent at the poverty level or no more than twice the poverty level. The connection among unwed motherhood, poverty, and crime has been very well established in academic literature over the years (for example).
If you want to live in a safer neighborhood in Baton Rouge, you don’t want to live in a neighborhood that’s majority black. Almost all the violent crime in Baton Rouge is committed by young black men, against other black people. The top five most violent zip codes in the city, accounting for 40 percent of all the violent crime, are predominantly black.
Is historical racism implicated in all this? Oh, come on, do you really have to ask? Of course it is! But if you are a homeowner and a parent in Baton Rouge, whether you are black, white, Asian, or Hispanic, your first concern isn’t going to be historical analysis. It’s going to be, “Where can I live safely? Where are the safe schools for my kids?” The answer in this city is sadly clear.
January 4, 2017
Sugar For Dope Fiends
After the post-Nativity indulgence, I realized that it was time to get serious about losing weight. It probably came on the morning I was eating a fistful of rum cake for breakfast, but if it wasn’t then, it ought to have been. I weigh more now than I ever have, and exercise less. I had started working out again late last fall, but my early December car accident has put that initiative on hold until my back improves. The only diet I’ve ever used that did a bit of good was going on a low-sugar/low carb regimen. In fact, the only time in my life that I weighed almost as much as I do now was the fall of 2001. I lost thirty pounds in three months on that diet, and felt better than I ever had before or since.
Back then, I was living in New York, and walking everywhere. Plus, I was about to turn 35. Now I’m living in Baton Rouge, and walking nowhere. And I’m about to turn 50. It’s never going to get any easier to lose this weight, and my woebegone lower back is not helped by my walking around with all this weight on my belly.
So, I’m off of sugar now, and carbs too. When I went for our splurgey anniversary dinner on December 30, I ate steak and salad and mushrooms like a boss, but I didn’t mess with potatoes. I did eat a few spoonfuls of cheesecake, but I wouldn’t do that now. I’ve managed to make it through the messy detox period in which you crave carbs and sugar like mad (and for me, it’s more about carbs than sugar; I’m not a big fan of sweets, but I love me some bread, rice, and pasta). Last night we went out for my wife’s birthday dinner. Mexican food is her favorite (it’s an ancestral Texas thing), and it just about killed me not to order enchiladas or to eat the chips and salsa. But I made it through, and indulged by eating three spoonfuls of whipped cream from the dessert she and the kids shared.
By the time I made it home, it felt like I had been drugged. Just from three bites of whipped cream! But you know, this is what it was like before for me, on this diet. Once you’ve gotten your body more or less past the massive craving for carbs and/or sugar, when you eat a serving of rice, potatoes, or something sweet, it feels like you’ve drunk a shot of something. Let me correct that: it feels like you’re as logy as you would be had you had a shot, but you get none of the pleasant feeling.
It turns out that I’m doing the right thing, and not just for vanity aesthetic reasons. Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal‘s rave review of Gary Taubes’s new book The Case Against Sugar:
One wonders whether the debate might have been different if everyone involved had been able to read Gary Taubes’s blitz of a book, “The Case Against Sugar.” In his 2010 best seller, “Why We Get Fat,” Mr. Taubes argued that carbohydrates like grains and starchy vegetables were behind the obesity epidemic. “In a world without cigarettes, lung cancer would be a rare disease, as it once was,” he wrote. “In a world without carbohydrate-rich diets, obesity would be a rare condition as well.” This time around, he focuses on the “unique physiological, metabolic, and endocrinological effects” that sugars have on the human body, how they trigger obesity and diabetes, and the role that the food industry has played in covering up sugar’s contributions to our national health crisis.
Mr. Taubes’s argument is so persuasive that, after reading “The Case Against Sugar,” this functioning chocoholic cut out the Snacking Bark and stopped eating cakes and white bread. It was easier than I expected: Within a week, I was so sensitive to sugar that I could taste it in the weirdest places; in a restaurant salad, for instance, and in my organic yogurt. When I ate a piece of Thanksgiving squash pie, it made my head buzz. I felt like I’d just taken a hit off a tank of nitrous oxide.
That’s so true! Honestly, there is nothing like experiencing this to understand how powerfully our moods and sense of well being is controlled by sugar (including refined carbohydrates, which turn into sugar inside the body). The review says that Taubes, a well known science writer, meticulously explains why it’s simply not true that all calories are the same. A calorie consumed in the form of sugar affects the body differently, metabolically speaking, than a calorie consumed in the form of, say, spinach. And the fact that people assume that all calories are created equal is no accident, according to Taubes. from the review:
“The Case Against Sugar” is a history of the food industry and the medical science that has both supported and denied the role of sugar in disease. It explores the addictive aspect of sugar (which anyone with a toddler is familiar with); the “peculiar evil” of marketing sweets and sweetened cereals to children; and the industry’s 60-year effort to shift the blame for obesity and diabetes to saturated fats and behavior. In the 1960s, for example, the Sugar Association, a trade group, became concerned about the emerging evidence linking sugar to diabetes and heart disease. It worked hard, Mr. Taubes claims, to “combat the accumulating evidence from researchers,” by financing industry-friendly research and besmirching the credibility of scientists whose research suggested that sugar was unhealthy. These efforts were successful enough to influence the language of FDA reports on sugar in 1977 and 1986, as well as the first government-compiled Dietary Guidelines, released in 1980, which unsurprisingly declared that fat caused disease.
Opinions began to change in 2007 when the “Sugar Papers,” a trove of internal documents detailing the relationship between the sugar industry and medical researchers in the 1960s and 1970s, was discovered by Cristin Kearns, the general manager of a large group of dental practices. The trove—which she found by (wait for it . . . ) googling—revealed that the sugar industry had worked with the National Institutes of Health to create a federal program to combat tooth decay in kids that did not recommend limiting sugar consumption. Mr. Taubes convinced me that these food companies deliberately set out to manipulate research on American health to their favor and to the detriment of the American public.
Read the entire review, written by Eugenia Bone. Here’s a link to an essay in Aeon by Taubes himself, adapted from the Case Against Sugar book. In this excerpt, Taubes summarizes the alternative hypothesis to the “a calorie is just a calorie” view (the energy-balance hypothesis):
So here’s another way to frame what is now the imperative question: is the energy-balance hypothesis of obesity correct? Is it the right paradigm to understand the disorder? The competing hypothesis has existed for over a century: in this paradigm, obesity is not an energy-balance disorder but a disorder of excess fat accumulation and so, clearly, a hormonal and metabolic disorder – the result of an ‘endocrine disturbance’, as it was phrased in the 1930s by Eugene Du Bois, then the leading American authority on metabolism. By this logic, the foods we eat influence fat accumulation not because of their caloric content but because of their macronutrient content, the proteins, fats and carbohydrates they contain. This paradigm attends to how organisms (humans, of course, in particular) orchestrate the careful ‘partitioning’ of the macronutrient fuels they consume, determining whether they will be burned for energy or stored or used to rebuild tissues and organs. It proposes that dysregulation of this exquisitely-evolved, finely-tuned homeostatic system (a system that is biologically balanced) is the necessary component to explain both the excessive storage of calories of fat – obesity – and the diabetes that accompanies it.
This alternate hypothesis implies that sugar has unique effects in the human body leading directly to both diabetes and obesity, independent of the calories consumed. By this way of thinking, refined sugars are indeed toxic, albeit over the course of years or decades. We get fat and diabetic not because we eat too much of them – although that is implied tautologically merely by the terms ‘overconsumption’ and ‘overeating’ – but because they have unique physiological, metabolic and hormonal effects that directly trigger these disorders. If all this is right, then thinking of obesity as an energy-balance disorder is as meaningless as calling poverty a money-balance problem (caused, of course, by earning too little or spending too much, or both). By conceiving of obesity as a problem caused by the behaviours of excessive consumption and physical inactivity, researchers not only took a physiological defect – the excess accumulation of fat, often to a massive extent – and turned it into a behavioural problem. But they made a critical error, one that has grown over the course of decades into an idea that seems too big to fail.
The history of this scientific debate is fascinating. Conclusion:
If we accept von Bergmann and Bauer’s thinking that obesity is a hormonal/regulatory disorder and combine it with the revelations of the 1960s about the hormonal regulation of fat accumulation and the insulin resistance that is associated with obesity and diabetes, then the result is a very simple hypothesis that explains not just obesity but also the current epidemics and our failures to curb them. The sugars and refined grains that make up such a high proportion of the foods we consume in modern Westernised diets trigger the dysregulation of a homeostatic system that has evolved to depend on insulin to regulate both fat accumulation and blood sugar. Hence, the same dietary factors – sugars and refined grains – trigger both obesity and diabetes. By focusing on the problems of eating too much and exercising too little, public health authorities have simply failed to target the correct causes.
If you like, buy the book.
I would love to read of you readers’ experiences with low carbohydrate/no sugar dieting. In my past experience, once you make it through the detox period (about a week to 10 days), it’s not a difficult diet to follow in terms of controlling cravings. The hard thing is that sugar and carbohydrates are everywhere, and they taste so very, very delicious. Inevitably I have fallen off the wagon, usually with bread. You slide back into it very easily. So, what has worked for you, and what has not?
Weimar Americana
When my partner Charlie got pregnant, we were awash in excitement, but there was one thing we weren’t looking forward to: shopping for maternity clothes. As a genderqueer butch, Charlie is not excited about struggling to hunt down the closest approximation of menswear on racks of belly-paneled leggings and empire-waist dresses.
Around the time Charlie gets pregnant, we hear about a Kickstarter for this awesome new company called Butchbaby & Co, which is going to make clothing for pregnant butch and masculine-presenting people. There is a moment of elation before we get to the part about how you can’t actually buy their clothes yet. It’s kind of worse than if they didn’t exist at all.
I know a lot of people still aren’t hip to the concept that genitals don’t determine gender, and men and non-binary people can get pregnant, but even if only women ever had babies, do we really have to assume that every one of them is so freaking femme? There’s only one maternity store at the mall near us, and it is a festival of pastels, florals, and unnecessary ruffles. I wouldn’t even wear some of this stuff, and I wear pink cowboy boots.
So they go shopping for Charlie — a woman who presents as a man — can find some duds. The mall is a vale of tears:
The next step is maternity jeans. We spend an afternoon at the mall trying them on, but Charlie hates every single pair. “Why are the pockets so small?” he fumes.
“All women’s pants pockets are unreasonably small,” I explain.
“But why?”
“Because the patriarchy wants us to depend on men to carry our keys for us so we’ll never be truly independent. Or everyone just assumes women will have purses.”
The patriarchy isn’t quite finished inflicting its satanic sartorialism on this couple:
Then there’s the formal wear problem. We have three weddings to attend while Charlie is pregnant, each about six weeks apart, so they’ll occur when Charlie is three totally different sizes. If anyone is considering a contemporary rewrite of Dante’s Inferno, I really recommend “shopping for butch maternity formalwear” as a new circle of hell.
You laugh at this stuff, but it’s getting mainstreamed bigtime. I talked the other day with a friend who teaches at a Catholic high school, and who said that the parents of his students have no idea how normal all of this is to their kids. When you get to the point at which as staid an establishment institution as National Geographic is promoting an ideology that declares male and female to be obsolete categories, you know the culture is deeply disordered. Nat Geo writes in its current cover story:
But people today—especially young people—are questioning not just the gender they were assigned at birth but also the gender binary itself. “I don’t relate to what people would say defines a girl or a boy,” Miley Cyrus told Out magazine in 2015, when she was 22, “and I think that’s what I had to understand: Being a girl isn’t what I hate; it’s the box that I get put into.”
Members of Cyrus’s generation are more likely than their parents to think of gender as nonbinary. A recent survey of a thousand millennials ages 18 to 34 found that half of them think “gender is a spectrum, and some people fall outside conventional categories.” And a healthy subset of that half would consider themselves to be nonbinary, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In 2012 the advocacy group polled 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teens ages 13 to 17 and found that 6 percent categorized themselves as “genderfluid,” “androgynous,” or some other term outside the binary box.
There’s a photo in the long piece of a 17 year old female who identifies as male, and who sports chest scars from where her breasts were surgically removed. We are permanently mutilating our children before they are even old enough to have the right to vote.
Canadian gay rights activist Fred Litwin is not on board with all of it. Excerpt:
The federal government, many provinces, and some municipalities and school boards in Canada are introducing or strengthening regulations and legal protections for gender identities. The Ontario Human Rights Code, for one, protects “people from discrimination and harassment because of gender identity and gender expression.” It further decrees that “trans people should be recognized and treated as the gender they live,” and that “organizations should design or change their rules, practices and facilities to avoid negative effects on trans people.”
This includes the trans demand for everyone to use their invented pronouns. A Q&A on the OHRC site says that “refusing to refer to trans people by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity, or purposely misgendering, will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social arena covered by the Code, including employment, housing and services like education.”
And, just what are these pronouns? Well, to start: There is ne (nominative) /nem (objective) /nir (possessive determinant) /nirs (possessive pronoun) /nemself (reflexive). For instance, you could say that Ne laughed and that I called nem. Other sets include Ve/ver/vis/vis/verself; ey/em/eir/eirs/eirself; ze/zir/zir/zirs/zirself; Xe/xem/xyr/xyrs/xemself; tey/ter/tem/ters/terself.
If you are unsure of usage, there are many websites to guide the uninitiated through this minefield. And, if you won’t or can’t learn all the pronominal permutations, your may be accused of using oppressive language, which in turn could lead to an appearance in front of a human rights tribunal or a criminal charge under the hate crime law.
If you doubt it could go that far, consider this:
– Trans activists at the University of Massachusetts organized a ‘Sh*t In’ last month to protest lack of gender neutral bathrooms. They occupied bathrooms around the campus and vowed to stay until their demands were met. UMass already has over 200 single-stall gender neutral bathrooms and is currently building an additional 50. It’s not enough for activists who also want the hiring of a professor “who is an expert in the study of critical transmisogyny from an intersectional perspective.”
– Dawson College in Montreal opened their first two gender-neutral bathrooms in 2015 and the Dawson Student Union gave out #IllGoWithYou buttons. “The wearer of a I’ll Go With You button is a public volunteer, a buddy who can be counted upon to give peaceful support, act as a buffer, or speak up to any harassers in defense of the trans person’s right to use the restroom in peace,” the DSU explained, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “bathroom buddies”.
– Continuing and Professional Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto put on a webinar on “an introduction to gender-neutral pronouns for educators.” The seminar, taught by Lee Airton, a lecturer in the Masters of Teaching Program and the founder of They Is My Pronoun or TIMP, a blog about gender-neutral pronoun use. In an article for the Globe & Mail, Airton said that “I’ll be the first to admit that my pronoun can be silly sometimes, that it can cause confusion, prompting the need for clarification.”
– In November 2016, Jillian Bearden, a 36-year-old biological male (who now identifies as a transgender woman) won the women’s division of the El Tour de Tucson bike race in Arizona. In June 2016, a teenage male won a girls’ track meet in Alaska. And the International Olympic Committee ruled this year that transgender athletes can compete in their preferred gender category without having undergone sex reassignment surgery. (Men will have to be on female hormones though.)
– The Teacher Education for All! (TEFA) initiative at the University of British Columbia (UBC) will incorporate LGB/T2/Q inclusion into teacher education in the province. This will include workshops on Trans Literacies for faculty, staff and teacher candidates. Here is the bio of one of the workshop facilitators: “K, who uses the pronouns they/them, is a queer, non-binary second-generation Chinese settler raised in unceded Coast Salish territories, they put energies into QTBIPOC communities, writings, and activisms. They most recently facilitated a student directed seminar titled “Voices from the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Race, Sexuality, and Settler Colonialism” (GRSJ 425A), focusing on WOC and Indigenous feminisms, queer of colour and Two-Spirit critiques, and art-based activisms. Outside of school, K is a photographer whose work is framed in community representation, accessibility, and social justice.”
More Litwin:
Here are some other questions we should be asking. Will a small group of post-modern activists force us all to change our language? Will doctors be forced to treat gender dysphoric kids with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Will the public go along with people using the change room of their choice? Will women accept more and more boys and men in their athletic competitions? Are we really going to give trans activists full control over all issues related to sex identity? Is ‘misgendering’ really a crime?
And what’s next on the activist agenda? In this world of identity politics on steroids, more and more victim groups are popping up – and all of them “intersect” together. There are people who classify themselves as “transabled”. Alexander Baril of Dalhousie University told the National Post that “we define transability as the desire or the need for a person identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or her body to obtain physical impairment. The person could want to become deaf, blind, amputee, paraplegic.” Seriously? Self-mutilation to obtain a new identity? Will this be the next group added to the protected human rights list? Don’t bet against it.
Here’s the website for the author, Fred Litwin, an openly gay Canadian conservative.
Dr. Jordan Peterson is the Canadian clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor under siege for refusing to use these made-up, fake pronouns that the SJWs demand. From a must-read interview with him:
My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief. Partly religious belief, and ideology as a sub-category of religious belief. One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify. I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief. The motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is “we must never forget.” I’ve learned that you cannot remember what you don’t understand. People don’t understand the Holocaust, and they don’t understand what happened in Russia. I have this course called “Maps of Meaning,” which is based on a book I wrote by the same name, and it outlines these ideas. One of the things that I’m trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks “Not me,” and that’s not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like ‘xe’ and ‘xer’ that are the construction of authoritarians. There isn’t a hope in hell that I’m going to use their language, because I know where that leads.
More:
I was also quite profoundly influenced by [Alexsandr] Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. People say that real Marxism has never been tried – not in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in Korea, that wasn’t real Marxism. I find that argument specious, appalling, ignorant, and maybe also malevolent all at the same time. Specious because Solzhenitsyn demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the horrors [of the Soviet system] were a logical consequence of the doctrines embedded within Marxist thinking. I think Dostoyevsky saw what was coming and Nietzsche wrote about it extensively in the 1880s, laying out the propositions that are encapsulated in Marxist doctrine, and warning that millions of people would die in the 20th century because of it.
You’ve painted a pretty bleak picture for the future.
There are bleak things going on. To start with, Bill C-16 writes social constructionism into the fabric of the law. Social constructionism is the doctrine that all human roles are socially constructed. They’re detached from the underlying biology and from the underlying objective world. So Bill C-16 contains an assault on biology and an implicit assault on the idea of objective reality. It’s also blatant in the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies and the Ontario Human Rights Act. It says identity is nothing but subjective. So a person can be male one day and female the next, or male one hour and female the next.
How do you see the future of public discourse in this country if we don’t reverse course on things like C-16?
I have no idea. I think that we’re in a time of chaos and anything can happen in a time of chaos….
Read the whole thing. I am going to quote more of it in a separate post. It’s a stunning document.
If you think you are going to avoid this ideologically-driven chaos in your kids’ school, you are dreaming. It is widely disseminated in the popular culture. We laugh at the idiocy of the fringes, like the travails of a pregnant woman angry that she can’t find men’s clothes to accommodate her swelling belly, but as Dr. Peterson can attest, this is no laughing matter. He knows where that leads.
UPDATE: Reader “matthew” just posted this:
As a teacher in a public school system I have already witnessed the first gestational growths of this radical biological thinking. But the reality is that most of my administrators are simply too ignorant of the ideology behind these movements to even be able to clearly articulate why they would be in opposition of any mandates being forced on the district. And so they either will capitulate, or already have caved to the pressure to accept that this is the new normal. And their ignorance or lack of will for fear of losing their career makes it all that much easier for the outspoken activist(s) in the district to continue pushing their own agenda.
But what concerns me even more is how blasé about all of this most of my christian friends are in regards to having their own children in the public school system. I have talked to one friend recently who assured me that he knows many good christian teachers in his kids nice affluent suburban school system, as if this will somehow shield his kids from the effects of all the other teachers he doesn’t know and students who his kids will be surrounded by for 7 hours a day, not to mention whatever ideologies those kids parents are either pushing or succumbing to out of a fear of being labeled as bigots. I know that he thinks his kids will somehow miraculously emerge unscathed because they go to church and whatever other fanciful ideas he has that somehow his kids being raised in a christian home will shield them from all of this.
Christian parents outside of some pretty small circles are blindly walking their children into a firing line that they will have almost zero chance of emerging from unscathed. And the church from what I can gather seems to be just as ignorant. The one institution that should be doing everything in its power to wake these parents from their comas is just as naively trusting in some sort of “godly cultural protection bubble” to shield what will most likely become a lost generation of christians.
The Benedict Option is nine weeks away from publication, and I’m already wishing I could add to it.
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