Berkeley commencement speech delivered by President Theodore Roosvelt in 1903. The speech resulted in a "mighty cheer".
A person should not hold back on their deeply held opinions, but a person ought to remember where they are.
Lummis forgets where she is.
Cynthia Lummis, United States Senator, R-Wyoming, was the graduation keynote speaker at the University of Wyoming's general graduation ceremony last Friday.
The first question to ask there is, frankly, why?
Now, I ought to not that I'm pretty cynical about graduation speakers, and I've become highly cynical about politicians.[1]. My cynicism about politicians is more recently earned, but my cynicism about graduation speakers goes way, way, back.
The first graduation speaker I ever heard speak, I'll note, was Governor Ed Herschlar, who spoke at my mother's Casper College graduation in the 1970s. I can only vaguely recall that, and I don't know if it was a good speech or not. Ed Herschler was a blunt man whom, prior to being Governor, was a lawyer in far western Wyoming who practiced real courtroom law. Prior to that, he was a World War Two Marine Raider. He likely gave a good speech, or perhaps I just recall that my parents liked the Democratic Governor.
The first graduation speech I somewhat remember, however, was my own high school graduation. The speaker was the new University of Wyoming football coach.
Now, right there, that inspired cynicism. It's not like we, the graduating class of that year from central Wyoming, really were in love or admired the football coach at the university. Some of us probably did, but for that matter the local community college basketball coach, Swede Erickson, was probably a lot better known to most of us. Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure we hadn't chosen him to speak. He'd been chosen for us.
Evidence of that, to some degree, comes in the form of the class song. I don't remember what it was. I remember which song won the pole to become the class song, however, which was the Ramone's Teenage Lobotomy.
Now, clearly you can't have that song, which one of our extremely smart classmates was boosting. My friends and I boosted Turning Japanese by the Vapors, which came in second.
Somebody picked the class song for us. And the speaker too. A more mature person who was not a student, probably.
I don't know who the speaker was when I graduated from Casper College in 1983 as I didn't go to the ceremony. As I was graduating with an AS in geology, which had no marketable value whatsoever, and had to go no to a BS, I figured there was no point. Indeed, I actually started UW that summer after I was done working, taking a short geomorphology class offered through UW/CC
I also would not know who was the speaker when I graduated with that BS. The last class I had to take as a geology student was Summer Field Camp, which I took that summer. As I couldn't graduate until I had the class, I didn't think going to a graduation ceremony made sense, or for that matter was even a possibility. One of my lifelong good friends did, however. He actually had a class to take that following fall, but he went through the spring graduation ceremony. He later received permission to take the one class from his home in Casper, but he never did. I've always felt bad about that. He should have done it. To go so far, and then let it go, is a type of tragedy.
Anyhow, I don't know who the speaker was that year either.
I do know who the speaker was, or rather I can recall the speaker, from when I graduated law school. Law school is a smaller school, so you know everyone graduating to at least some degree, and so its natural that you wouldn't miss that one. High school graduations are enormous by comparison. Anyhow, there was a committee whose job it was to invite speakers.
Whomeever was invited, the actual speaker was an ancient lawyer from a really big firm in Denver whose firm was under investigation at the time. He was a UW graduate, I guess, and at least one of my colleagues suggested he'd been a major donor, and that's why he was the speaker.
He was awful. Basically, his speech was "I'm a lawyer and I love me, so you should love everything about the law too" except that it went on for an extended time.
An effective speaker could have delivered an effective speech about loving the law, but it wasn't him.[2].
I don't know who chose Cynthia Lummis to deliver a commencement speech this year at UW, but it was a bad idea.
And I'm saying that perhaps not for the reason a person might suspect, but rather for a variety of reasons. I'll criticize Lummis speech too, but not for the reason that you might suspect.
There may be politicians who could deliver great and meaningful graduation speeches this year. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, provides a good example and for obvious reasons. Maybe Sanna Marin, the 34-year-old Prime Minister of Finland, would be another, in no small part due to her youth. And, frankly, Liz Cheney, as controversial as she would be, who had taken steps which must be regarded as principled and brave, although many Wyomingites would disagree with that. Lynettte Grey Bull would have sparked controversy as well, but she provides another example. This year, maybe Cale Case also does.
That's frankly about it right now.
In this polarized atmosphere, any other politician of any stripe is going to be a bad choice, and anyone inviting them should know that. This would have been particularly obvious, you'd think, of Lummis, who was immediately associated with an effort to question the election which returned her to office.
A lot of UW students, we should note, are not Wyomingites, and many who are, are pretty liberal, if only briefly. I went to UW for most of the 1980s, and it wasn't a conservative town then. It was particularly liberal when I was an undergrad, during which Ronald Reagan was President. Reagan may be admired by many now, but at that time he was hated by the left, and that included much of the UW student body. If you admired Reagan, you kept it to yourself. And this was in an era in which the right wing of the politics wasn't nearly as far left as it is now, and for that matter, the left wasn't nearly as far left.
Inviting Lummis to speak, therefore, was a bad idea, if it was going to be assumed that politics of any fashion was going to creep into her speech.
And that it would, should have been assumed.
Lummis isn't a great speaker, we'd note. She isn't horrific, but she's not great, and she read her speech. No really good speaker ever does that, and quite frankly its a rare great speaker who even sticks to any text they've written. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech" was largely extemporaneous, for example. Lincoln's Gettysburg address departed from his prepared notes. Good speakers do that, and therefore have a natural delivery. Bad speakers don't, and therefore do not.
What Lummis stated that's gotten her so much negative attention, is here:
Text wise, what she said was, "even fundamental scientific truths, such as the existence of two sexes, male and female, are subject to challenge these days.”
Now, I'll be frank that I’m not a Lummis fan, and that's due to January 6. But she's absolutely correct here. Scientifically, there are only two sexes beyond a shadow of a doubt. And it's worth noting that. But you also have to know your audience.
A person shouldn't shield their opinions, but to be effective you have to have effective delivery and know your audience. Lummis clearly didn't know her audience, which shows, perhaps, that she's been too isolated in Wyoming Republican politics recently, or that she wanted to spark a controversy. She didn't seem, however, to want the latter. Rather, it strikes a person as if she thought she was speaking to an audience that wasn't liberal in any sense.
A person shouldn't shield their opinions, but to be effective you have to have effective delivery and know your audience. Lummis clearly didn't know her audience, which shows, perhaps, that she's been too isolated in Wyoming Republican politics recently, or that she wanted to spark a controversy. She didn't seem, however, to want the latter. Rather, it strikes a person as if she thought she was speaking to an audience that wasn't liberal in any sense.
The same statement could have been made, although making it in a commencement speech is questionable, in a much more different fashion if the object of a person's statement was to persuade. Again, doing that in a commencement speech would be a curious choice. If, however, a person wished to deliver a point about the seemingly constant shifting of long held opinions, a person could have delivered it in yet another fashion, and then have made a point about the value of education, or the uncertain nature of the times. If that was the goal, it was badly delivered.
A bad delivery, and not knowing your audience, and not being a great speaker in the first place, is just a recipe for spoken disaster.
It ought to also serve as a lesson in actually inviting somebody who matters to the audience, or somebody who can deliver a really meaningful speech.
Freed from the official line.
Speaking of politicians, and indeed one already mentioned, one thing the state GOP's attack on Liz Cheney seems to have done is to set her free to say things she really thinks, to wit:
May 17, 2022
It seems that getting attacked by the Republican Party has freed Liz Cheney to say things that we normally wouldn't have expected, to wit:
The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse.
leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.
That was a bold thing to say, concerning the Buffalo, New York shooting that occurred over the weekend. It also puts squarely in issue the factor of the more extreme elements of the GOP (which is not to say that the Democrats don't have their own far left members), and certain conspiracy theories that have been circulated in recent years. Now Hageman, who likely doesn't share those extreme views internally, but who is extreme enough on a state policy level, is placed in the position of either denying they exist, endorsing them (which she will not do), ignoring the matter entirely, or trying to deflect the issue, the latter being the most likely approach for her.
Wow.
I would never have thought I'd hear Liz Cheney going after the GOP that way, although she's long had a streak of independence. She's right, however. The House GOP leadership has gone down a path that has encouraged such views. It's not 100% responsible for it, but there hasn't been a time since the 1850s that one entire political party was either endorsing such views, or silent on them, to a large degree. Now we're there again.
No renunciations so far, I'd note.
Don't know much history.
NPR's Politics touched on this, and the guest, Odette Yousef, made an excellent point. Part of the reason we're in this cycle of weird violence in the US is because we don't study history. An historically educated person wouldn't have acted this way.
We need to.
Any student of American history would know that African Americans are the second-oldest non-native demographic in the country, with a history nearly as long as what in inaccurately referred to as "whites". The first non-native immigrant group would be English, of course, which actually isn't the same demographic group as, say, Irish, or Italians, or other "white" groups. That aside, the shooter was apparently an 18-year-old adherent of a certain theory proceeding in ignorance that African Americans share the same culture as the oldest demographics in the country, and indeed share the same Anglo Celtic culture, due to the legacy of slavery, that white Southerners do. Lashing out at them as some sort of non-European culture due to their skin is blisteringly historically ignorant for that reason, as well as boatloads of other, besides being evil in general.
There are a lot of reasons to study history besides that, and there are a lot of additional reasons our society needs its citizens to be historically educated, but this provides one tragic example. People are believing a lot of made up facts these days, including historical ones.
Cultural Colonialism and the Woke
Back to the point, sort of, that Lummis was trying to make, I guess, and on the topic of making things up, one of the ironies of the modern gender definition saga is that there's fairly good reason to believe that the classifications that people are now arguing about, other than male and female, are cultural and not much more. People hate that idea.
It comes up, however, in the context of, ironically enough, cultural colonialism. And ironically enough, it comes up in the context of an entity long accused of cultural colonialism, the National Geographic.
While these debates have been going on in the West, it's hardly been noticed that in quite a few cultures around the globe the cultural classifications regarding same sex attraction aren't the same as in the West. In much of the Orient, for example, homosexuality is regarded as purely a Western thing and something absent in their own cultures. Other cultures have other treatments of the topic. The cultural colonialism thing comes up, however, as certain cultures have long-established examples of men who dress as women. Apparently they're being cited as examples of transgenderism in other cultures of a long-lasting nature.
It turns out that these individuals don't view their status this way at all, and it really pisses them off. In at least one Asian culture that exhibits this, the men who dress as women turn out to very definitely regard themselves as men, but with a different attitude. They have no desire to switch genders and regard it as abhorrent, and a recent citation to them as transgender examples by the National Geographic makes them angry. They make, moreover, the excellent point that Westerners have no business pigeonholing them into a category that they feel they don't belong in, thereby placing them into a Western model they don't really recognize.
An example of this is in Samoa, in regard to the categories of fa’afafine and fa’afatamas, which literally mean "men who dress as women" and "women who dress as men". All sorts of Western press have discovered them and declared that Somoans recognize four genders, or maybe three.
Not so at all. Samoans in fact recognize only two genders, men and women, and fa’afafine and fa’afatamas are miffed that people misrepresent them. They know that they're men and women. Indeed, it turns out that their view on sex doesn'st involved same sex attraction at all, but is more in the nature of asexual. They just don't want the traditional male and female roles that would otherwise be expected of them.
This is very close, I'd note, to another island culture in the Pacific in which young men basically drop out, as boys, of the male society. They don't dress as women, but they join a social class in which leadership and being a warrior are just not expected of them.
Indeed, such examples show up in Native American cultures as well, with an example occurring in the Dene people (whom we usually call the Navajo) of the nádleehi. Nádleehi means "effeminate man", and they tended to be treated in the same way by Western commenters, but in their own culture their position is much more complex and may not involve same sex attraction at all, although it might. It has more to do with their societal role, however, and it is expressed in the way that they dress.
And, indeed, there's no reason to suspect that their own concept of this situation isn't at least as accurate, if not more so perhaps, than the current Western one, which is of much, much shorter duration.
It doesn't every seem that such categories existed in the West, and where there's sometimes an attempt to force that conclusion it's often based on very bad historical analysis. Modern Western campaigners have liked to cite all sorts of past examples that are often hugely misconstrued, particularly in regard to post Reformation Western society. The often cited example of the ancient Greeks, for example, is probably way off.
That some same sex attraction was occurring is of course well known. St. Paul roundly condemns homosexual sex, along with all sex outside of marriage, as a mortal sin. He also uses a word, however, that would seem to apply to men who make their appearance effeminate. This cannot, of course, be ignored.
All of this, however, brings us to this point that in the West, and indeed everywhere, seems largely to be missed, except by a few astute students like Fr. Hugh Barbour, which is this.
There are, in fact, only two genders. That's a biological scientific fact. Same sex attraction does exist, but so does asexualism and near asexualism. People who are asexual, or nearly so, are not necessarily homosexual by any means. And these impulses, for lack of a better way to put them, are psychological in nature, not biological. Their expression, however, is cultural in nature.
In other words, while same sex attraction, and nearly no sexual attraction at all, have always existed in a small minority of people, how that expresses itself is not uniform. Indeed, as Barbour notes, and as Samoans are complaining about, current Western concepts force people into cultural categories, and then into behavior, that they'd not really want to otherwise engage in, just as the Sexual Revolution forced huge numbers of Westerners into heterosexual sexual libertinism that was both destructive and unwanted.
Barbour does an excellent job of noting that in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century this often expressed itself entirely differently. Women, for example, who would fit into the sexual active, or presumed sexually active, "lesbian" role today were in many cases attracted to what was then called a Boston Marriage, which was something quite different. And many men who were effeminate were instead just regarded as very gentle, meek men, and lived conventional lives.
At least in the 20th Century there has long been, particularly in regard to female homosexuality, some who were aggressively so, although indeed even here at one point that may have had a very political feature to it. The difference now, however, many be that a fairly large percentage of the very small demographic that we're discussing, is now subject to a massive cultural campaign, largely dominated by the remnant WASP class, that insists on the most radical definitions.
The left rediscovers the female gender.
Interestingly, at the same time, some debates have been going on that go right back to the existential nature of being a woman.
One of these has been coming up on the now revived debate on abortion.
As recently as the recent Judiciary Committee hearing, the nominee hesitated to define what a woman was, even though we all know that she knows what women are, she being one herself. What she was seeking to avoid was a trap on the "legal definition" of a woman, which is the odd territory we now find ourselves in. I.e, can a person whose DNA defines the subject as male make himself have the external appearance of being female, with the help of surgery and pharmaceuticals, and then have the legal status of being a woman? That's part of the very debate which Lummis was referencing.
We can leave that for some other day, but the irony here is that the very left that says you can do that, now suddenly really knows what women are as they don't want "men" telling "women" what they can do with their "wombs" or "ovaries". It would seem that, as a society, if we can't tell what's a woman and what's a man, at law, we don't know what's a human at all, and obvious protecting the rights of everyone would preclude abortion. Nope, says the left, in this are we're dead certain what a woman is, as they're the ones that can get pregnant.
Part of that, we all know, is that women are equipped to feed infants through their own bodies, and men are not, which seemingly we all know, and which is now also the subject of its own odd debate, which is reflected in this item:
Moms seeking formula tired of those who say, just breastfeed
So says a headline that's ran across the country in newspapers and on the net.
As we don't have kids that age anymore, and haven't for, well, a couple of decades, this is a story that caught me off guard and I still haven't researched it. Suffice it to say, this is a genuine crisis.
And it's also a crisis where some really tone-deaf comments have been made, and some pretty stupid ones at that, from the left and probably the right. "Just breastfeed" is one of those.
To back up a yet again, we have people like Bernie Sanders who, pretty much every day, says something about the government funding the warehousing of kids à la Tyson Chickens, at government expense, as a social kindness as it means mothers can get off their lazy asses and get back to work.
No, he doesn't say it in that fashion, but that's probably how it's largely received. Mothers would rather stay home with their children to a large extent, save if they're from the post 1970s Cosmo feminist generation which wanted all women, tall, skinny, flat, and childless in the office. Things didn't really turn out that way, and in spite of what people may socially advocate for, as already noted in this post, people continue to be people.
Part of that being people means that people still have babies, but the joint project between the left and the right means that the economy has become less efficient so that now women must work, to a large degree, irrespective of whether they have children or not. And that means, in part, that formula isn't really an elective food for a lot of them.
For that matter, it's always been the case that not all women could successfully really breastfeed their children. It's one of the aspect of our biology that not every woman is able to efficiently do this. In times long gone, women who could, would end up serving as wet nurses for those who couldn't. Once other options came in, that tended to go away, albeit very, very slowly. There's been, for example, an early vessel discovered in Europe that was obviously designed to provide cow's milk to an infant, so substitutes have been going on for an extremely long time.
Nonetheless, you have folks like Bette Midler, who later apologized for the comments, saying things like:
"TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand,"
That didn't go over well, hence the apology, but the entire topic is irritating women who are now being told what to do.
Things being what they are, it wasn't long until the political left recovered to make one of its repeated and bogus stalking horse arguments, that being "if men. . . then", in this form:
That item was brought to our attention via the Twitter feed of Kasie Hunt, who obviously is close to the issue. I wasn't able to read the article, but as breastmilk obviously isn't an invention, the story might relate to what she otherwise noted here.
“Donated” breast milk kept babies alive for generations, in one form or another, for generations before formula. Now our experts advise against it. But our modern formula system is failing moms who need it. What to do??
She was referring to this:
Why pediatricians don't recommend sharing breast milk
Amid the ongoing baby formula shortage, some parents are relying on donated breast milk from other moms. CNN's Elizabeth Cohen reports on why the American Academy of Pediatrics says this isn't a good idea
I think "donated" breastmilk would be milk from a wet nurse. We certainly have managed to make it a complicated world.
The return of female chattel slavery.
Staying in the same neighborhood, in a way, something quite notable and really disturbing is a leap backwards into the pre-Christian presentation of women. This is expressed, interestingly enough, by this headline:
Ariana Grande Wore A Bra Top To Her Brother's Wedding.
Now, this tells us a few interesting things, some deeper than others. In the shallow end of the pool, what it tells us is that Ariana Grande is an exhibitionist.
But she's not alone by any means. Just a few days after that headline ran, a photo ran on Twitter of two women in Los Angeles going to the grocery store wearing high boots, underwear, and long coats, unfastened.
In the book They Never Surrendered: Bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madres 1890-1935, there's a really good description of young Apache women who recently lost their husbands in battle collectively dancing in an evening ceremonial dance nude, around a fire. The reason is a simple, straight forward economic one. These women were now in a bad situation due to the death of a provider in a resource tight society, and the traditional way in which they'd become wives had been disrupted by early death. The Apache were largely monogamous, but polygamy was tolerated, particularly sororal polygamy, but warfare no doubt disrupted that too. Essentially, therefore, they were putting themselves on display, as they were on the market.
This sounds shocking, but it isn't meant to be. The reason that it shocks at all is that the modern concept of male/female relationships is largely Christian in the first place. The adoption of Christianity pushed marriage ages way up when it was adopted, as the Church required consent by both parties. Arranged and forced marriages, of any kind, were out. Families couldn't sell or give away daughters. And the lower your economic class, the more this was true. Medieval courting, if you will, was much like what it's been for most of modern history at the village level.
The Sexual Revolution, and the ongoing left wing attack on the Christian inspired advances in society, is really reversing this, to the detriment of women in particular.
The advance of Christianity freed women from being chattel and ultimately that lead to a co equal, if not identical, role in society, reflected best perhaps by the granting of the franchise to women. That didn't make society perfect overnight by any means, and indeed society hasn't ever become perfect. But starting with the onset of the Sexual Revolution, and disguised as advances in women's rights, we've gone retrograde.
Women are now back dancing around the fire, on display.
Footnotes
1. Not all politicians by any means, but events running now for over a decade have been particularly dispiriting in this area. Lummis it might be noted contributed to this by being openly disdainful of Trump when he first ran for President, and then figuring as a central character in the effort to deny Pennsylvanian of its electors when truly she must know better. Acts like this, in liberal Laramie, probably made her a poor speaker choice from the onset.
2. One slight thing I'd note here is that a 120 year old speaker whose only known claim to fame is that he occupies the same occupation you are about to is not really that intersting to a group of people in their 20s.
Why the teenage waitress from a century ago on that thread? Read it, and it'll become plain.
Anyhow, if you follow the show, you'll learn how Hugh Hefner was totally debased, and how those around him, if male, became debased, and those subject to him who were female, had their lives destroyed. He treated women like toys and there's good reason to believe he didn't like women, really. Not as human beings.
Playboy magazine was part of the Sexual Revolution, that culturally failed and destructive movement that we're still suffering from and living with. Hefner's place in that was something like Goebbles place in the Nazi revolution, if we want to look at the Nazi movement in that fashion, in the Third Reich. If you take his own claims seriously, which there is some reason to reduce, he had a place akin, perhaps, to Hitler in that movement, or Lenin in the Communist Revolution in Russia.
And yes, the comparison to those evil men is intentional. He was an evil person, albeit one, who like those earlier evil people, attracted followers.
The record is far to clear to ignore. The impact of the Sexual Revolution was wholly and entirely destructive, and women in particular, and society in general, have suffered enormously because of it, and they still do.
All of which relates, oddly enough to a series of things in the Zeitgeist in recent days.
Let's start with this headline:
Maren Morris is celebrating the way she shows off "country female sexuality" ahead of her next album release.
What Morris had in mind? Probably not.
I didn't know until I saw the headline who Maren Morris is, and I still basically don't. I don't like country music, which is generally bad music and often has not much to do with actual country things. I learned, however, that Morris appeared topless (at least) in Playboy.
"Country female sexuality"?
Well, given what Playboy is, we could ask if she meant the Frontier brothel variant of female sexuality, as all her photos do is serve to have men check out and her naked boobs and imagine her in bed.
Her photos apparently appeared several years ago, so this revived controversy actually recalls the brothel analogy unfortunately well. It's been in the news as she revived the story, posting, apparently, one of her topless photos on the net somewhere.
This doesn't advance the cause for women in any sense, and certainly not in the bold independent women fashion. It's not a strike for, for example, female farmers, of which there are a lot. No, rather, its a strike for the objectification of women, and through a vehicle associated with their destruction and violence perpetuated upon them.
It can be argued, of course, that that has something to do with "female sexuality", but not in a good way.
We've long held that every time one woman does something like this, it sets things back for all.
Shame.
And then there's a name that's been in the news:
Deporting Alina Kabaeva?
The flag of Switzerland, where Kabaeva resides with her children at least part of the year.
Who?
Alina Kabaeva is a former Uzbek gymnast and Olympian. By all accounts, she was an excellent one. She's also the mother of three children.
Well, so what?
There's a campaign going on to deport her from Switzerland to Russia, along with her children.
Why?
Well, it's consistently rumored that one Vladimir Putin is the father of the children of the 38-year-old Kabaeva, who is a resident, currently, of Switzerland, but who is a Russian citizen (although not an ethnic Russian) who has, in the past, gone back and forth. Indeed, the rumors were so strong that at one time a Russian newspaper reported that they were engaged, which resulted in the newspaper being shut down.
Putin was married to Lyudmila from 1983 to 2014, but they divorced that year. Not a lot, really, is actually known about Putin's private life. The parentage of Kabaeva's children is routinely reported to be Putin, but if he is the father, it's certainly knot acknowledged publicly.
Well, again, so what.
Well, for one thing it brings up, maybe, the odd elements of power and hypocrisy. Part of the reason that Putin claims to have invaded Ukraine has to do with the Orthodox Church.
Now, the largest of the Orthodox Churches is the Russian Orthodox Church. But it's a fundamental element of every single branch of Christianity, Will Smith's apparent views aside, that extramarital sex is a mortal sin, no exceptions (are you listening to that Will?). If Putin has, and maybe he hasn't, fathered three children with Kabaeva, he's acting oddly for a man whose has cited Orthodoxy even as recently as a couple of weeks ago.
Which assumes that he has been acting badly in this area, which maybe he hasn't been. Maybe he and Kabaeva, who was a Muslim but who has converted to Christianity, are actually married. We might very well not know, and we do know that while Orthodoxy frowns on divorce, it allows it under some circumstances.
Or maybe Putin is like some monarchs of old who felt that their positions of power gave them some sort of personal pass in this area. Even Czar Nicholas II, who lived an exemplary married life, and who has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, had a mistress when he was young.
Or maybe Putin is just as Orthodox as his position as a would be Czar requires him to be. It is known that his mother was a devout Orthodox Christian. Putin observes Russian Orthodox Holy Days, so maybe he is an observant member, although former advisor Sergei Pugacheve claims he is not.
At any rate, Kabaeva is a convert, and maybe she's straightened out. Should she be deported from Switzerland?
Well, at first blush that seems silly and cruel. It's not as if she invaded Ukraine, and her children certainly didn't.
On the other hand, such is the fickle fate of courtesans, if that's what she is, or the spouses of monarchs, if we want to assume a marital union. Marie Antoinette didn't retire to Paris, after all.
Choices do have implications.
Blows In Defense of Honor?
Speaking of spouses, and ones with a bit of an odd relationship to each other, the news this past week has been filled with the story of Will Smith striking a blow upon Chris Rock, in defense of the honor of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
While everyone now knows the story, in spite of the low level of Oscar ceremony viewing, what occurred is this. Rock, who has a sort of rough sense of humor, but who is funny, made fun of Mrs. Smith's baldness, which is due to a medical condition. In this era of intentionally bald women, I don't know that female baldness is the big deal it once was, but it is a medical condition in her case and making fun of somebody's medical condition is rude, no doubt about it.
Having said that, the joke wasn't really all that aggressive, and related her condition to the movie G. I. Jane, which I havne't seen and I'm not going to. FWIW, that movie featured Demi Moore as a woman going through Navy SEAL training, and she had a shaved head.
Anyhow, Smith laughed, but Mrs. Smith cringed. Then, in reaction, Will Smith went up and violently struck Rock, who reeled from the blow. Rock actually recovered his humor, at first, quickly, making a joke of it, but it then ended up in a yelling match between the two, with Rock on the defensive.
Frankly, Smith was lucky. The slap was in the nature of what is sometimes called a "sucker punch", in that it was unexpected. Lots of men in other situations would have hit back, which Rock did not do, to his credit.
There was actually an ovation for Smith's violence at the time, although some were horrified immediately. Denzel Washington took Smith aside. Washington is the son of a Pentecostal minister, and is quite religious, warning Smith that at a person's height is when the Devil comes for them. Smith later, after winning an Oscar, gave a teary speech in which he apologized, but not to Rock (who has been silent on the matter), attributing his actions to having just appeared in The King about the father of the Williams tennis sisters. Mr. Williams condemned the violence later. At any rate, he went on about how he had been influenced by the role and felt God was calling him to protect those he loved at this stage in his life.
Well, to be blunt, he ought to get his own icky house in order in that case, assuming that he hasn't. If he has, given his public declarations on the topic, he ought to clear that situation up.
Smith was raised in a Christian household, but he's actually attended therapy in order to overcome its influences so that marital infidelity, introduced by Jada Pickett Smith to some degree, and in an unapologetic fashion, can flow along in his marriage. Neither of them has been faithful to the other, and it's an "open" marriage, and publicly so. Smith felt guilty about that at first, which apparently didn't stop him, but with counselling he was able to overcome a central feature of being married and a central tenant of his Christian faith.
What that means in terms of his current faith, I don't know, but there isn't any monotheistic religion that looks up infidelity kindly. Apostolic Christianity certainly holds it to be a mortal sin, and the tenants of any other Christian religion does as well, in so far as I know. Even those few monotheistic religions that allow polygamy don't look on infidelity kindly, and the entire "open marriage" thing is an example of the modern disease of thinking every standard of the past doesn't really apply to us as we're so modern, even though they do, and our transgression in that regard have led to untold misery.
None of which means that you can't defend the honor of somebody who isn't really that honorable in general, but this application of The Old Law is really interesting. It's the sort of thing that led to fisticuffs and even duels over the honor of women at some times. An interesting revival of a standard that once was widespread, probably still is, but hasn't been publicly acknowledged for a while.
Of course, the thing about the Old Law is that it brings up the Old Standards. The Old Standards travel together, not by themselves.
The Reappearance of the Old Order
Speaking of the men, women, and old standards, something interesting has been constantly reported on regarding the war in Ukraine, and with admiration by the press.
And what that is, is the that at the borders, most of the refugees are women and children, as "their men have returned to fight".
And nobody thinks that odd or unusual.
It's a roaring example of our Eleventh Rule of Human Behavior, and it's not the only one.
In the Russo Ukrainian tragedy, the Ukrainian men are fighting, and fighting heroically. Women are being heroic as well, taking their children where they can and fleeing, and suffering enormously. The tragic photograph of the pregnant woman being carried on a structure, whom we know lost her baby and died herself as the result of a Russian strike, will likely go down as the most famous photograph of the war.
The old order roaring back.
Now, some Ukrainian women are bearing arms. The other day, a young woman (very young, probably a teen) was interviewed in a village where she was serving as a Ukrainian militiaman. And she isn't the only example. Be that as it may, however, this is a male fight for the most part. Some women will fight in it, as wars involving partisan action have always included.
So far nobody has really remarked, however, how remarkable this really is, in our modern world where we pretend the distinction between men and women in relation to combat doesn't really exist. Not only does it exist, it's very evident here. Almost everyone in the Ukrainian service, regular and irregular, is male. All the Russian troops are male. Almost all of the Ukrainian volunteers are male. Almost all (but not quite all, I saw a photo of an Italian female pilot the other day) of the foreign volunteers are male, probably well over 90%.
Indeed, that latter fact is telling. NATO's public press likes to feature photographs of striking braided women in uniform (it's common enough that it can't be a repeated coincidence, and frankly its slightly weird). Military press photos from the US military seem to omit the secret "look at the cute girl in the beret" feature that NATO photos do, and are genuinely simply more in the nature of a certain type of news photo, which is much more businesslike.
From NATO Twitter feed, typical US non cheesecake photo of a woman soldier, in this case of the Third Infantry Division.
But the concept in the West of women in combat is completely untested and the historical examples grossly exaggerated. The most commonly cited one is the Soviet example from World War Two, which was actually much more constrained than those who cite it would like to admit. Indeed, the Soviets apparently didn't regard it as hugely successful, as limited as it was, as after the war, they eliminated that role for their female citizens. The heir to the Red Army, the Russian Army, is pretty much a male deal, just like the Ukrainian Army. The same is true of the Israeli Army, in spite of the occasional citations to it.
Wars are a cultural test of massive proportions, and the old rules and orders tend to come roaring back during them.
Struggling with the New and Biological Order
Pity poor Judge Blackburn, caught in a confirmation hearing and presented with questions that pit her between the spirit of the age as seen by those who are supporting her and the spirit of the age from those who oppose them, with biology in the middle.
BLACKBURN: I’d love to get your opinion on that, and you can submit that. Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of men and women as male and female? JACKSON: Again, because I don’t know the case, I do not know how I’d interpret it. I’d need to read the whole thing. BLACKBURN: Ok. And can you provide a definition for the word “woman”? JACKSON: Can I provide a definition? BLACKBURN: Mmhm. JACKSON: No. I can’t. BLACKBURN: You can’t? JACKSON: Not in this context. I’m not a biologist. BLACKBURN: So, you believe the meaning of the word “woman” is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition? JACKSON: Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law and I decide. BLACKBURN: The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about.
Okay, the way she's been quoted, we note, is unfair. She did not say that only a biologist could define what a woman is, but rather she stated, albeit you have to know the context, that the legal definition of a woman in the context of any one case had to be understood from the law of the case. The way that American law is currently interpreted, her answer is quite correct.
But that raises a larger, indeed, an existential, question.
Earlier this week (at the time that I was posting this) there was something called the International Day of Transgender Visibility. Anyone day in the year is now designated for something, and indeed typically a lot of somethings. March 31 was also, for example, Anesthesia Tech Day, Cesar Chavez Day, Dance Marathon Day, Eiffel Tower Day, International Hug a Medievalist Day, National Bunsen Burner Day, National Clams on the Half Shell Day, National Crayon Day, National Farm Workers Day National Prom Day, National She's Funny That Way, Tater Day,Transfer Day (U.S. Virgin Islands) and World Backup Day. Some of these are obviously a lot more serious than others. Transgender Visibility Day, however, got a shout out from the President, who issued a statement recognizing, in essence, their cause and taking a position on bills that have been in this area.
Wyoming was one of the states with such a bill, and like most such efforts in this conservative but not as conservative as people think state, it didn't go anywhere in our legislature. Our bill concerned transgendered athletes, restricting sport participation to your biologically assigned gender. Utah had a similar bill which passed, was vetoed by their Governor, and then overridden by their legislature following that so that it has become law. South Dakota passed one which was signed into law by their right wing controversial governor, Kristi Noem.
Just after all of that occurred, the reason for the entire debate in athletics came into sharp focus as a genetically male swimmer who has undergone medial gender reassignment won a NCAA Division 1 swimming championship in the 500 yard freestyle event.
This does bring into focus the biological nature of the debate, and the peculiar nature of contemporary western liberalism. The swimmer is genetically a man, and he's built, and frankly looks, like one. He has a powerful male swimmers build, although if he was competing as a man, he would not have taken the title. Competing as a woman, which he can only due to surgery and pharmaceuticals, he took the championship, thereby beating out the nearest genetically female swimmer.
In some very odd way, although nobody has noted it, this actually answers the question that the Billy Jean King v. Bobby Riggs match supposed was supposed to years ago. Taking away the circus like nature of that tennis event, males will in fact beat women at sports every time for the most part, save for sports that women are uniquely biologically adapted to. There will be exceptions, to be sure, but if sports were not separated by gender, women would be so rare in most sports as to fade to nonexistent, something nobody wants.
That's what not addressing this in some fashion, however, actually argues for. The unfairness could be eliminated in sports overnight by just not having male and female sports.
Which would operate a larger, and massive, societal unfairness to women.
All of which begs the larger question, which is the one used as a "gotcha" on Judge Jackson. That is, what is trangenderism.
Nobody really knows, no matter what people may wish to claim.
The basic nature of the problem is that it's based on individual perception. That is, people who are "transgendered" have a strong feeling that they should be members of the opposite sex in spite of their DNA. That doesn't make them a member of the opposite sex, however, it only makes them desire to be. They can't achieve that goal without surgery and ongoing pharmaceuticals.
But should surgery and pharmaceuticals be used to defeat our genes? It's clear in the case of addressing a defect that few people would object. I.e., if a person can correct something like bad eyesight, or a defective organ, and return to the established obvious baseline, that's one thing. But what about things that go beyond that and fundamentally alter us in some way.
This isn't the only example, but the curious thing about this that, so far, most of the things that fit into this category involve sex in some fashion. Cosmetic surgery exists to repair all sorts of things, from birth defects to the impact of terrible injuries, but the thing that receives the most attention, and advertising, is expanding the size of boobs. That's one such example, and it's purely cosmetic, but unquestionably related to one single thing, sex appeal. Surgery and drugs to defeat natural sex assignment goes far beyond that.
But to what extent should a person do this, or be allowed to do this, on perception alone, and even if they are fully allowed, to what extent does the rest of society have to recognize the medical defeat of nature in this instance? The following stories in this area don't provide much comfort for the individuals who embark on this path.
Topics Where You Least Expect Them
This entire debate came up not only the Supreme Court nomination hearings, but also on Twitter in the form of a ban on the Babylon Bee.
For those who aren't familiar with the Babylon Bee, it's a satire site that originally was light Christian satire. I.e., the authors of the Bee are Christians, but it poked fun at things that come up in Christian circles and debates.
Early on it was quite funny, but there's probably only so much satire you can really do in this area before it becomes truly offensive or just ceases being funny and, at least in my view, the latter is the case for the Bee. And recently the Bee has crossed over from its original focus into outright satire, something that's actually quite an art to accomplish well (the best online satire entity in my view is The Beaverton, a Canadian focused website).
The Bee was banned on Twitter for its satirical post naming U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Levine as "Man of the Year". It flew in the face of woke convention by referring to Levine, born in 1957 as Richard and gender reassigned in 2011, at which point changed names to Rachel, as "he".
The Bee's satire was really not very funny, which is perhpas because effective satire is difficult, or perhaps because it was genuinely an attack and was fairly mean spirited, no matter what your view is on this. It ended up getting the Bee banned from Twitter, which hasn't caused it to back down one bit. Indeed, they're seeking paying subscribers by noting that they've been attacked by liberals. And on April 1, April Foods Day, it doubled down by issuing a false apology, which was also quite mean spirited.
Adding to a show on how this is all part of a raging culture war, political figures of the stoke the fires class immediately picked up on it, including such figures as Lauren Boebert, all of which raises a distressing question that was raised without reference to this in another forum, which we'll get to in a moment.
Before we do, however, we'll note that a similiar, but much less pronounced, Twitter storm broke out on the left due to a statement by former Trump spokesman Kayleigh McEnany, who, of course, is now on Fox News, where they all seem to go. That follows here:
The anecdote (sic, antidote) to darkness is light. And the anecdote (sic, antidote) to a really grim future is filling the world with a lot of Christian babies.
This caused a mini tempest in Cybersphere, predictably, no doubt in part because it came up in such a truly odd venue and way. But this also taps into a bunch of stuff in the culture wars.
Right away, some organs on the left went on the extreme opposite. Salon, for example, ran an article that stated "Kayleigh McEnany wants more "Christian babies": It's an overt call-out to racist paranoia". Salon goes on to claim that McEnany is espousing the "great replacement" theory.
That statement only makes sense, if it makes sense at all, from an American or at least an ethnic European prospective and a left wing one at that. Indeed, the statement itself is paranoid. Those familiar with the history of the Church would realize that while Christianity spread extraordinarily rapidly following the Resurrection, one of its claims to truth (it was amazingly fast), the first adherents were of course Jewish and the faith was (and the Apostolic Christians remain) amazingly color-blind, with one of the most important early saints, St. Augustine of Hippo, being a North African of at least half Berber descent (his mother, St. Monica, was a Berber). In the United States, the "black church" remains one of the most culturally influential Christian denominations. Therefore, "lots of Christian babies" doesn't mean a "lot of white babies" by any means. Of course, to those at Salon, chances are that they view a Christian world view as somehow racist, as it isn't an Islamic or Buddhist, or whatever, worldview.
The interesting thing about this overall, however, is how it shows a change in views over time and context, which is part of what this blog tracks.
Traditionally, large families were regarded as a blessing from God, with this view going back into antiquity. Efforts to limit family size are in fact quite recently, having really come in during the early 20th Century. An interesting part of that, however, is that it was part of what was openly discussed as part of the "Battle of the Cradle" in cultural terms, with those discussing it not regarding themselves as racist.
This depended upon the person expressing the views, of course. But in European and European American upper classes it was common to express concern that foreign overseas, non-European, cultures would pose a threat to Europeans due to their perceived high birth rate (which probably wasn't, in reality, much higher at the time, if higher at all, than the European one). None other than Theodore Roosevelt, who was an advocate of Americanism, noted in correspondence that he "had done his duty" in this regard, by having several children.
Whatever a person thinks of that view, it's also the case that birth control of the Margaret Sanger type originally came in, as people like Sanger had noticed the dropping birth rates in the upper class and worried that higher birthrates among African Americans posed a societal threat. Part, but not all, of her early birth control efforts were focused on the hope of dropping the African American birthrate based on that obviously very racist reason.
In the over century long time that's passed since then, the same demographic that Roosevelt and Sanger were part of have had their birth rates drop below the replacement level by a fairly substantial margin. Whether McEnany was expressing a variant of that fear, I don't know, but I doubt it.
I don't know what branch of Christianity she hails from or is a member of. Looking her up, she went to a Catholic high school, but that is not a reliable indicator of a person's religion really, as many non-Catholics attend those. She always refers to herself as a "Christian", but not by denomination, which suggests that she's probably a Protestant, as Protestant's are more likely to self identify in that fashion. Catholics usually identify as Catholics, which is a common way members of a minority self identify. I.e., the US is a Protestant country culturally which is obvious if you are a Catholic, and for that reason Catholics tend to identify themselves as Catholics.
Depending upon the answer to this, there would be different paths which a person might go to dive deeper into her opinion, assuming that needs to be done, or that the opinion has any additional depth to it. Given as we're not really doing that, but looking at other things, as we're inclined to do, we'll keep going down the road a bit.
One way that people can interpret it is the way the Duggers have. I.e., they're part of a "quiver full" movement. I don't know a lot about that other than it emphasizes, apparently, having a lot of children. The other way, however, is more of the traditional Apostolic Christian way, which really doesn't, even though some Apostolic Christians families do not. It might be best expressed by the statements of Fr. Hugh Babour, who is a Catholic intellectual and who often has surprisingly nuanced views on topics that a person wouldn't expect. On this topic, however, Fr. Barbour just always states that the purpose of marriage is to welcome children "and raise them up for the worship of God".
Anyhow, it's interesting how in a century or less we've gone as a culture to a point where the left wing of the culture assumes that making a statement that would have been simply regarded as an expression of faith, that most people probably held, and which the left itself held in a fashion, has gone to being one that's assumed to be racist and can only be stated on the right.
Slow Ride
Okay, onto something else.
Recently, a "trucker's convoy" was in the news, but only briefly.
Their timing was remarkably bad.
The entire concept, of course, came up due to the Canadian "Freedom Convoy" which had its origins in some truck drivers protesting being made to be tested and quarantined if they were unvaccinated and crossed from the US into Canada. It ballooned into a general Canadian right wing protest over . . . well everything. Ultimately, it got so bad in Ottawa that the Canadian government had to declare a state of emergency.
This all got a lot of press.
Then somebody got the idea of doing an American variant.
Well, no sooner had they started putting that together than the Biden Administration essentially gave upon mask requirements for most things and all sorts of states, including Democratically run ones did too. There really wasn't anything left to protest, but nonetheless the convoy got rolling.
And then Putin attacked Ukraine.
At that point, nobody was interested in this story anymore. Indeed, it had become a complete anachronism, and at a point in time in the nation where there's a trucking shortage, and the price of fuel is going up, what the heck?
Well, in Washington D. C. a biker, who may have had enough, got his revenge.
A bicyclist, that is.
He got in front of the convoy, and in spite of the trucks honking their horns and the like, he just peddled along at a crawl, and they had to crawl too.
A video of his actions was viewed 4,200,000,000,000 times.
