Tag Archives: culture

This, Too, Is a Start

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To paraphrase an old trope, transgenders are people, too. Whether gender dysphoria is truly the case in particular individuals, or it’s a sham claim by some boys and young men in order to gain access to girls’ and women’s sports competition (or just their locker rooms), or it’s the manufacture of woke “schooling,” transgenders, those victimized by that pseudo-schooling, even the cheaters, need a place to compete.

Just not a place where males transgendered into women compete against women. Nor should women transgendered into men be competing against men, but given the nature of transgendering, that’s not a problem.

Men and women, boys and girls, start out with the facts of biology: an XX set of chromosomes or an XY set. That beginning, at the egg-sperm uniting stage and throughout subsequent development, confers on the male stronger, heavier bones, and stronger and heavier muscles. The different origin and development paths also impart permanently different hormone sets and bodily outcomes from those differing hormones. And that’s just the start. No amount of hormone therapy, no amount of testosterone withholding—or adding, in the case of girls transgendering into boys—changes those inherent physical advantages that born-boys have over born-girls. Not even the differing hip and shoulder structures change post-transgendering. The physical advantage is permanent.

Lia Thomas, via the recently concluded season of NCAA swimming, provides a canonical example. Her performance advantage was heavily illustrated both by her margins of victory in the women’s competitions and by the level of his performance when competing as a man the prior years.

And so we have the Utah legislature enacting, over Governor Spencer Cox’ (R) veto, a bill banning transgender competition in Utah’s schools. Cox had said he’d tried to do what I feel is the right thing regardless of the consequences. His veto letter centered on his concern that ensuing lawsuits

will likely bankrupt the Utah High School Athletic Association and result in millions of dollars in legal fees for local school districts with no state protection….

His four-page veto letter listed other concerns centered mostly on the process by which the bill was amended (several times) and then enacted.

Cox’ fiscal concern is valid, if somewhat overblown—a firmly zealous early defense would forestall further lawsuits and mitigate their total costs.

Still, the legislature’s move is—can be—only a start. Transgenders do need a place, a means, by which they can participate in sports. Now it’s time to set up a Title IX athletics program for transgender athletes so they can compete against their peers, and women can go back to competing against their peers.

Deaths from Wuhan Virus Vaccine Side Effects?

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Lancet claims so. Leave aside that the magazine long ago went political and abandoned serious medical paper publication, having already had to publicly retract one paper that was shown (not by the magazine’s putative peer reviewers) to be badly flawed and written from a predetermined political conclusion.

This paper is just as badly flawed, in its own right.

The paper begins by depending in part on the CDC and FDA jointly maintained Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System database. VAERS is a badly flawed database, being a collection of claims voluntarily reported by anyone who felt like interacting with it—and lacking who knows what other information that others didn’t feel like reporting.

The Lancet paper writers also depend in part on v-safe, a smart phone app(!) through which users can self-select their own reported symptom claims (or choose not to report them).

With those flaws at the center of the writing—which in an objective medical journal would have gotten the paper rejected—the paper’s writers claimed that 1.3% of the reported Wuhan Virus mRNA vaccinations resulted in deaths, and that 6.6% of the reports resulted in inpatient hospitalization [sic], prolongation of hospitalisation [sic], permanent disability, life-threatening illness, congenital anomaly, or birth defect.

Nonsense like this badly dilutes serious reporting and the public’s perception of serious reporting of the vaccines’ effectiveness and side effects. There may well be serious, but sub-lethal, and lethal outcomes to getting an mRNA vaccine against the virus. But sloppily done papers like this shed no light on the rates of those outcomes and sully legitimate reports that accurately estimate those rates.

Stepping Up

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Former Presidential Advisor Kellyanne Conway thinks President Joe Biden (D) needs to stop blaming us Americans for our nation’s problems and instead to step up and actually work on our problems, actually acknowledge who we are.

You cannot have an American president that has an America-last policy and blames Americans and America for what’s going wrong. He needs to step up and reflect the best of who we are.

But that’s hard to do for a President who openly thinks 15% of us are just no good. It’s hard to do for the head of a party that pushes its own racist identity politics while insisting, through Party’s enthusiasm for CRT, that we as a nation are fundamentally racist.

Cheering

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Russia has invaded Ukraine and is deliberately butchering women and children, bombing hospitals, schools, residential neighborhoods, even shooting at nuclear reactors in civilian power plants, and a Progressive-Democrat pollster for President Joe Biden (D) is cheering them on. Lake Research Partners’ Celinda Lake:

The good news is we now have a very specific reason for rising gas prices and a specific villain[.]

This Progressive-Democrat is happy to sit in the coliseum cheering for the mayhem below—because that’s good for the Progressive-Democratic Party. She’s not the least bit interested in the butchery beyond the fact of its existence and its perceived Party benefits.

Disingenuous and Insulting

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Congress is putting together a bill, the Social Media NUDGE Act, that Congressmen pretend is to combat “misinformation” in our social media.  Misinformation, mind you—mistakes. Not disinformation, deliberate lies.

The legislation applies to commercial enterprises specializing in user-generated content with more than 20 million monthly active users for most of a 12-month period. They must devise plans for “content-agnostic interventions” and submit them to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for approval.
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While [the bill] never refers to misinformation or false information, it also never defines the “harmful content” it seeks to prevent….

Notice, too, that false equivalence. All misinformation is false information. Not all false information, though, is misinformation. Much of false information is disinformation—wrong information put out deliberately to mislead, or to hide truth.

This bill is disingenuous because it assumes “misinformation” must be blocked and Government/Big Tech are to be the ones to define “misinformation.” That’ll be whatever is politically inconvenient to those in power. And those in power will leave their disinformation alone.

This bill is insulting because it assumes us average Americans are too grindingly stupid to understand what is misinformation, what is disinformation, what is uncomfortable information, or the distinctions among the three. We must, instead, be “advised” by our Betters.