Our friend here again. As we previoulsy noted, a Morganucodon, our great, great, great. . . . . grandmother or grandfather. Really. You'll have to read below to get the point. By FunkMonk (Michael B. H.) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15356075
I'm not going to post names, as that is what really go this thing rolling in the first place, in some ways. What I will note is that when I say "minister", I am referring to a protestant minister and, as will become clear, what used to sometimes be called a "fundamentalist" protestant minister.
Centuries ago, when I went to the University of Wyoming, there were no tables for people advocating things in the Student Union. The Union was smaller than, and frankly we mostly just passed through it on the way to somewhere else. The bookstore was in the Union, but it was actually diagonally across from the enormous book store that is now in the Union. Current students would be shocked to see how small the union was.
On rare occasions something might happen in the union, but it would actually have to be held somewhere else in one of the various rooms in the building. I recall going to an international students bake sale there, for instance. And I saw the film Risky Business with a girlfriend in the ballroom once, so they obviously showed movies there on occasion.
But mostly we just passed through it on the way from the lower campus to the upper campus.
Now the much expanded union has tables in it, and various organizations will set up a display. The times I've been in there, and I still get down to UW on occasion, it's been student organizations of one kind or another. Most people seem to pass through ignoring them, which is predictable.
Apparently, however, groups from outside the university are allowed to set up there as well.
I frankly don't know what I think about it, but I don't think I like it in general. This post, however, isn't really about that, but about one person whose been maintaining a booth there.
That person is the minister of a certain protestant church in Laramie. I know where the church is, as I once had a friend who lived near there. Oddly enough, it's not a church that I've ever posted a photo of at our Churches of the West blog.
This has hit the press as the minister put up, amongst other things, a large at a booth he maintains in the Student Union which stated:
God created male and female
"_________________" is a Man.
Now, obviously, the "________________" had the name of a student on it.
So, apparently, the minister sought to point out that a student who apparently is in some aspect of the current "transgender" spectrum, for lack of a better way to put it, is a man, as he was born male.
Which brings us to this. Rev. Schmidt (okay, I named him) is correct, "___________" is in fact a man. And, yes, God created us male and female.
And this is just about the worst way to go about arguing in opposition to the transgender trend there is. Schmidt is hurting himself, his cause, science, and Christianity in general.
Regarding science and Christianity, I'll note right away that Rev. Schmidt's table makes it clear that he's from that non-Apostolic branch of Christianity which is oddly opposed to science to start with. Apostolic Christians endorse science, and take the position that science and Faith can always be reconciled, and science serves to illuminate the grandeur of God's creation. We don't oppose, for example, the theory (and at this point it's a theory in name only, it's actually a fact) of evolution. Schmidt does, based on one of the books on his table.
Schmidt's table was adorned with books taking on all sorts of things in the photos, including taking on Anthony Fauci and, as noted, evolution. I'm pretty sure, based on that, that Schmidt would be one of the protestants who regard Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which make up the overwhelming number of Christians on Earth, in horror or at least disdain.
I'll get back to that in a moment, but I mention it here as having a booth in a hall that tells people that something is contrary to a religious tenant works fine if you are engaging in a debate with fellow Christians. So, for example, if this Reformed Baptists minister seeks to take on American Episcopalians, that argument makes sense, although it certainly could be done in a more articulate fashion. But if you are engaging the public at large, and not knowing who your audience is, that argument is going to fall flat and with quite a few, actually push them away from Christianity, to the extent that objecting to the reality of the fossil record and feeling that Anthony Fauci is a bad guy isn't already achieving that.
So all it really serves to do is to make a guy who is tainting Christianity feel like he's advancing it when he's not.
Which takes us to St. Paul.
Chances are that Rev. Schmidt like St. Paul and thinks St. Paul would be in his corner here. St. Paul was a tough guy, and he had a lot to say about improper sexual conduct, including homosexuality and men dressing like women. St. Paul makes people today squirm and they avoid him. One lesbian minister here in Casper actually dismissed St. Paul entirely on these matters in a radio interview, saying "well that's just St. Paul's opinion".
That's not the way that Paul presented it. No, not at all.
But consider this:
Paul’s Speech at the Areopagus.
Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said:
“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.
He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.
God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.”
When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, “We should like to hear you on this some other time.”
And so Paul left them.
But some did join him, and became believers. Among them were Dionysius, a member of the Court of the Areopagus, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
Ch. 17, Acts of the Apostles.
Now, that's interesting. Paul entered a new area, full of non-believers who had never even heard of Christ, and what did he say:
“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
Well, he didn't do what Rev. Schmidt is doing. He didn't go in and insult the unbelievers and assume they knew the entirety of the Christian message and point fingers at individuals ones of them, a la John Calvin. No, he engaged them on common ground.
Here the common ground is science. But chances are that Rev. Schmidt can't engage there.
The science of transgenderism is that its not supported by the science. A person's gender is actually present in the DNA of every single cell of their body. Humans, like all mammals, are male and female, and nothing else, right down to every single cell in your body. Surgery and drugs aside, that remains the case. It cannot be changed.
And hence our great grandmother and grandfather to the nth degree, the Morganucodon again. Yes, male and female we were created, but not 4,000 years ago, but millions of years ago. As we noted when we brought our cute little dinosaur egg eating progenitor up before:
So there's the reality of it, which can be brought up in a scientific way to students who, at the end of the day, are just that. Scientifically, the gender is baked in the cake and beyond actual changability. All the genetic behavior that goes along with that is baked in too. Therefore, the current transgender trend and story, which is largely confined to adolescent females who are in the ADHD scale, and who are white and from affluent families, is a sociology and psychological trend, not a biological one. A person need not bring up God at all in this discussion.
Indeed, the evidence there is distressing in the extreme. As noted, transgenderism is most female, not male. It's mostly white, not black or Hispanic. It's mostly in well-to-do sections of society, and it exhibits itself mostly amongst those female adolescents who have ADHD or something on "the spectrum". It's appeared suddenly in White Europeans and European Americans as once one member of a clique claims it, it tends to rapidly spread in that clique. Most of the members of the demographic cohort, moreover, have tended to have been exposed to a fair amount of pornography
And hence the most logical explanation of its spread. It's spreading in a wealthy European culture. Starting in the 1960s, we started to jettison the culture itself, leaving it without moorings, as we became wealthier. Pornographers, including Hugh Hefner, were prosecuted for their actions as late as the 1970s, but that's now stopped completely, save below the age line of 18. We've steeped children in it, and earlier this past week, a news story broke of a school official somewhere exposing grade school children to implements of what would have been regarded as deviant behaviors not long ago. Indeed, the recent series on Playboy magazine revealed that when the young women working for Playboy clubs were exposed to the same behavior as part of after work gatherings, they were traumatized, so rare and so disgusting was it regarded as being.
In short, what the young females in the category are doing, psychologically, is fleeing from the role of female in regard to sex. They're not seeking to really change gender, they're seeking to opt out of what they think is the universal adult norm. They don't want to engage in endless sex as an object, they don't want things shoved up their butt, and the like.
Who can blame them?
This doesn't cover all of this, of course, and it doesn't explain sexual dysmorphia as to males, . . exactly. But what it does do is this. Scientifically, transgenderism isn't a thing. So what we're seeing is something else that's not of biological origin.
And not once did we have to mention religion in order to engage in that discussion, now, did we?
Of course, what we did have to do is to reference evolution and biology, and in doing that we're referencing a genetic evolution that's 210,000,000 years old, long before our species, which is at least 250,000 years old, and probably twice that old, came about. And that isn't going to be something a fellow who probably thinks the world is 5,000 years old and that evolution is some conspiracy by scientists is going to be keen on. So instead, he's taken to the campus and is reading from the Bible.
St. Paul, in his letters, wrote a lot about Christian conduct and what barred a person from the doors of Heaven. But he was writing to Christians when he did. Going into Areopagus, he complimented them on their religious faith, non Christians and even non Jews that they were.
You students, I see that in every respect you are very scientific.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your buildings, I even discovered an some dedicated to biology.
Of course, you have to grasp that you aren't speaking to your own audience in the first place. And you can't reject vast tracks of reality in order to proclaim other aspects of it either, and be convincing. And in an era in which resources are so freely available, you might have to go back and take a look at what those early Christians were doing, including St. Paul, a Bishop in the Catholic Church.
Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is busy making changes to it internally. This, in turn, has resulted in a lots of righteous anger about his behavior.
Here's the real question.
Who cares?
We have a Twitter Feed. You can see it on the bottom right-hand corner of this page. That doesn't stop the fact that Twitter is basically stupid.
A person can't say anything worth saying in as few of words as Twitter restricts you to. All Twitter really is for us is redirection to this blog. Does it work? Who knows. But as far as weighty conversation, not happening.
Indeed, the fact that people seem to think its weighty shows how dim the American intellect has become, as if there wasn't plenty of proof for that otherwise.
Now, I have some feeds that I follow I really like. Some do nothing other than what this one does, direct you to other things Some are basically photo feeds, much like Instagram.
But as far as news or anything worth reading, not going to happen.
Some people seem to think that Musk shouldn't be allowed to own Twitter or, if he does, he shouldn't be allowed to wreck it. Well, why not? He owns it. If you are uncomfortable with that, as many are, the real argument is that a person shouldn't be allowed to amass the size of fortune that Musk has. Musk was born into a wealthy South African family, and he's made more money, showing I suppose that being born to a wealthy family is a good way to get richer.
It also shows how screwed up American immigration laws are, as Musk apparently lives in Texas. Why was he allowed to immigrate here? No good reason at all, and in a society whose immigration laws made sense he'd be back in South Africa, or perhaps someplace in what's left of the British Commonwealth.
His personal life also shows how Western morality has declined. Musk has ten children by three women, the first six by his former wife Justine Musk, then two by Claire Elise Boucher, the Canadian singer who goes by the absurd stage name Grimes, and finally twins via Shivon Zilis. If nothing else, this proves that vast amounts of money will get the male holder of the same money and sex, but it's not admirable and that this sort of conduct is no longer the type that is regarded as scandalous, although it should be.
None of which is a reason to get all in a twitter about Twitter. If he wrecks it, well, he bought it.
I used to like Robert Reich, the economist, but after following him for a while on Twitter, that's less and less the case every day.
For one thing, Mr. Reich draws some economic conclusions that are extremely strained. He blames inflation nearly 100% on high corporate profits. Whatever you think of high corporate profits, that thesis is demonstrable BS.
Additionally, Mr. Reich is so hardcore left wing that there's no left wing position he doesn't agree with adamantly. Anyone who agrees 100% with the left or right isn't really giving much analysis to anything.
And then there's stuff like this.
Robert Reich
@RBReich
·
In 1951, I was cast as Baby Jesus in my school's Christmas show. As a 5-year-old boy from Jewish family, I felt lost and vulnerable.
Today, after SCOTUS' ruling in favor of the football coach who led his players in prayer, I feel it all over again.
robertreich.substack.com
When I was Baby Jesus
Listen now (3 min) | Today's Supreme Court's decision
I read that opinion, and what the case dealt with is the coach praying on the field after games by himself. Not leading his players in prayer during games. I didn't give it a really in depth read, I'll confess, as I just wanted to see the holding, but basically it dealt with an individual's right to pray wherever he wanted, not with a teacher or coach leading anyone in prayer.
Whatever Reich experienced in 1951 isn't the issue here.
is overwrought extreme examples being presented as the norm.
If you listen to abortion proponents, every single abortion in the United States is an example of a 13-year-old who is the victim of incest and who will die for certain if the pregnancy progresses.
If you listen to the gun debate, the Battle of Stalingrad is about to bust out in your neighborhood.
Neither of these are even ballpark close to true.
Most abortions in this country are post conception birth control infanticides. And that's because for the most part responsibility has flown out the window with the Sexual Revolution, which at the end of the day was mostly about men being able to have sex without consequences. That altered women back to chattel status, which they bought into, and still are, feeling they have to put out upon demand, as its natural and weird, they believe, not to, and there are no consequences.
You've never seen a pregnant centerfold now, have you. And those girls on the cover of Cosmo. . . stick thin.
And in spite of a recent, probably pandemic induced uptick in crime, this is the least violent era, and most crime free era, in American history.
My goodness, a lot of Supreme Court news coverage is just downright ignorant.
Some more comments.
1. No, the recent Second Amendment decision and the abortion decision are not inconsistent.
Yes, the abortion decision means states will have to vote on what they'll restrict by way of baby killing, and yes the same states are restricted in what they can ban in terms of firearms carrying.
One is in the constitution, the other is not. D'uh.
2. No, the Wyoming ban doesn't offend a State constitution provision precluding a person from their own healthcare choices. Abortion isn't health care, and everybody actually knows that. Save for some rarer arguments, which are carved out in the Wyoming law, it's a form of post conception after the fact birth control by stopping the birth by killing the infant. This we also all know.
3. No, the abortion issue isn't going to help the Democrats in the 2022 or 2024 election. It'll help the Republicans.
Wavering Republicans who can't stand the Trump wing are being pushed right back in by being reminded in a major way what the culture wars are about, particularly by boneheaded suggestions from people like AoC that the Federal government open abortion clinics on Federal lands.
the United States Supreme Court's in depth and richly historical opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Health Clinic, overruling the inept Roe v. Wade decision;
Does not make anything illegal, but returns the issue to the states.
This means that people are supposed to address this issue democratically.
Women are the majority of voters everywhere, and in states that propose to outlaw abortion, that's what the majority of polled women want.
Some additional observations.
Roe was doomed from the start, as it never made any sense. The justices writing it made up the results out of thin air and seemed to presume that science had reached a permanent pinnacle in 1973.
If people want to be mad at a court, be mad at that one.
The "they're going to reverse everything" cry is misplaced. That comes from Justice Thomas' dissent, which is based on his view that "substantive due process" isn't a real thing. That is his view, but it's only really his view. His suggestion that the court should review all substantive due process cases held for the last 60 years isn't going to happen (even though at least one of the cases he mentions that was handed down in the last ten years should definitely be revisited).
One final note. Much of the on the streets, "we're shocked" protests is simply pure liberal theater, and nothing else. Most of the protesters have never read Roe, and most of them will move on to the next left wing cause de jour.
Roe' stank, as Constitutional law, for fifty years. It was time for it to go to the dumpster.
Oh, and on Dobbs, well a person can always read it for themselves.
This year in baseball every team is revealing a "Connect" uniform which is supposed to display something about the nature of their location. Here's the Rockies:
I can't see any court giving six weeks of trial time for darned near anything, no matter how serious, in most instances. Somehow, if it involves celebrities, there seems to be piles of trial time.
Some liberal pundits, including Robert Reich the economist, whose really misguided comments on inflation are causing me to respect him less and less, are using the oddly illogical argument that those outraged by the leaking of the Supreme Court opinion which, in draft form, reverses Roe v. Wade have misplaced outrage and its merely camouflage for not being properly outraged about the opinion.
We'll comment more on the opinion in the future, but this is a very badly illogical argument that people like Reich and Kasie Hunt (whom I do like) are making.
Here's why the leak matters in regard to this opinion in particular.
In spite of what people may think, there's no real basis to believe that this is the final opinion. Draft opinions famously don't end up as final opinions fairly frequently.
Now, if that happens, the final opinion will receive no respect at all. In a highly polarized environment in which about 1/3d of the country already believes, wrongly, that Democrats conspired to steal the last election, if this doesn't go the way it seems to be headed in the draft, the argument will be "well, there you go again, they conspired to leak the opinion to pressure the justices".
We don't need that.
Additionally, if the opinion does change, it'll forever be presumed that whomever change their view, and however it changed, was a result of the public protest. Courts should be immune to protest. Politicians, who depend on the voters' votes, can react to protest, but courts should not.
Indeed, courts shouldn't be persuaded by trends either, which has been part of the problem here in the first instance. We'll get to it later, but the draft assertion that Roe was always wrong isn't wrong itself. But that brings up other issues, better addressed elsewhere.
For those who hope that the leak will pressure somebody to change their mind, the justices have shown an inclination to go the opposite direction of where they are pushed, just like mules. Earlier this year, there was a leak that suggested that two of the justices were on the outs about something. In reaction, they pulled together. This is a 5 to 4 decision, apparently, but we really don't know what the remaining four think, yet. If somebody hasn't penned their dissent, they might not, choosing instead to issue a concurring opinion on different grounds, or a partially concurring opinion. In other words, while we know what the presumed majority thinks, we don't know what the presumed minority thinks, and they can move in secret.
Indeed, the presumed majority might already have done so. If one of the five is pondering changing his opinion, perhaps to align more with Chief Justice Roberts, and indeed if one may already have done so, the desire not to appear subject to public protest may push them right back. The intent of the leaker, therefore, which is presumably to torpedo the opinion, may result in the polar opposite.
And then there are the implications to the system. We don't know who the leaker is, but its probably not a Justice. If it were, and of course there's the chance that it is, that person will be discovered, probably, and will be sidelined to irrelevance forever. They won't resign, Supreme Court justices don't do that, but they'll not much matter after this. They won't be assigned opinions, they won't really be consulted much, by anyone.
Of course, it's pretty unlikely a Justice is the leaker. Somebody in the loop is, and it's probably a clerk. That person's clerking days are over, if discovered. They'll go on, however, to a position in some left wing cause type of law firm, but the damage they will have done will be significant. The habit of hiring clerks and how it is done will be reassessed. Clerks will remain, but they'll be vetted to the n'th degree. Perhaps the lock on clerkships by the Ivy Leagues will end, which will be welcome. Perhaps it'll become the job of established lawyers, professionals who can be relied on not to be swayed by their political views and emotions, which in states courts has been the trend for many years.
And then there's the press. This is a press coup, to be sure, but the press taking a role that's ultimately destructive, really. A draft opinion isn't the Pentagon Papers.
And that leads to the political process. Right now, this is being used as fodder by politicians, some of whom know better and some who do not. Vice President Harris was heard to say yesterday:
How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can do and not do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her in determining her own future?
Harris is a lawyer, and she knows this is a falsehood. What the draft opinion would do is to send this issue back to the state legislatures, or potentially to the national legislature, so that the legislators have to vote on the issue. That's it. A rational response by somebody with her views would be to state "well, here's a difference between us and the GOP and this is a reason to vote for Democrats.". That's not my view, but that would be a rational response. Instead, it's going to result in months of more false arguments before we needed to be hearing them, inserted into a political era in which boatloads of false arguments are already in circulation. The entire country didn't need that.
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.
