RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/01/evolution-hyper-novelty-and-cultural-noise-2/

EXCERPTS

“Science occurs along a spectrum, sound on one end, unsound on the other. We live in an age where facts are scientific if they serve the narrative of whatever ideology is currently hegemonic and unscientific if they do not. One of the delusions of our age is the belief that sex and gender are functionally independent, from each other and from evolutionary biology too. Scientists now reinforce this delusion, because it bankrolls their research, controls government and education, and drives public policy. This is the backstory of the AMA recommendation against recording sex on birth certificates.

In their book, Bret and Heather discuss a common misunderstanding of our age, that because men and women work side by side, and are equal under the law, they are the same. To ignore their differences, to demand they be the same, is sexism of another kind. We were sexual beings long before we were human, and our desire to reproduce is hard-wired. It is a fool’s game to pretend, as our culture now pretends, “that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary”. Sexual differences can be valued without embracing the naturalistic fallacy.

Men and women have three possible reproductive strategies to choose from: first, “partner up and invest long term, reproductively, socially, and emotionally”; second, “force reproduction on an unwilling partner”; third, “force nobody, but also invest little beyond short-term sexual activity”. The first is best for men, women, children and society. The second is morally reprehensible and, historically, available to men rather than women. The third is now widely embraced by women in an age of sexual liberation, birth control and abortion on demand.

Yet sexual liberation has consequences—emotional, societal and evolutionary—the cost of which must be borne, ultimately, by some individuals or groups. Cheap sex has not empowered women in their negotiations with men. The non-judgmental, value-free welfare state was established to protect women, but its benefits are mixed; many women are disempowered, and what results is a class of self-perpetuating social disadvantage. Without monogamy, Bret and Heather believe sexuality is reduced to “females burdened with the entire chore of reproduction, and undiscerning males always on the make”.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/11/20/sex-offenders-in-colorado-will-no-longer-be-called-sex-offenders-n1534915

The Colorado Sex Offender Management Board (SOMB) has determined that referring to people who commit sexual crimes as “sex offenders” isn’t “person-first” language.

Instead, rapists, flashers, peeping toms, and other perverts will be called an “Adult who commits sexual offenses.” According to Denver Post writer Alex Burness, “Those who supported this change feel the ‘sex offender’ label is not nuanced enough and can impede rehabilitation.”

Leaving aside the documented fact that most sex offenders will re-offend and rehabilitation is a waste of time, what could these people be thinking?

“This language in the committees I’ve been on seems to be the most supported of these options. … It highlights the active reason why someone is in treatment, and it doesn’t assume the behavior is over,” SOMB member Carl Blake said.

“Victims advocates, therapists, law enforcement that I’ve spoken with, along with all of the DAs I represent, are not in favor of replacing this term,” SOMB member Jessica Dotter said.

The changes are not final. There will be a 20-day comment period for the public to weigh in before the board meets again in December.

Apparently, sex offenders are offended about being referred to as an offender.

CBS4:

Derek Logue says he shouldn’t have to carry the label for life, “Referring to me by a label for something I did half my life ago is inappropriate and downright offensive.”

He argued “client” would be a better term.

Public Defender Kathy Heffron agreed, “It takes into consideration the uniqueness of individuals who are receiving treatment.”

How about changing it to “inhuman monster”? Would that do?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/leftists_continue_their_assaults_on_language_to_achieve_political_goals.html

People have been noticing lately that leftists are working hard to change the language to achieve their goals. Leftists are fully aware of the fact that, as George Orwell argued, when you change the available vocabulary, you also change people’s ability to think about things. If you erase from the English language any words tied to liberty (e.g., freedom, individuality, liberal, etc.), people will eventually lose entirely the whole concept of freedom. It’s with that thought in mind that some in the LGBTQ+ crowd are working to rebrand pedophilia. The latest euphemism is “Minor-Attracted Person” but it’s the same old sick idea.

Certain words decline with value over the years. The word beldam, or old hag, comes from the French belle dame, meaning beautiful lady. Once, young people respectfully called elderly women, especially grandmothers, belle dame, and then the word degraded.

Another word that degraded was spinster. Once, it meant a woman who would spin for a living. Eventually, it came to mean a repressed, desiccated, permanently unwed woman. Now, of course, the word is gone entirely because there’s no stigma attached to remaining unmarried.

And then there’s the word “pedophile.” It’s a neologism that psychiatrists created in the 1950s, from the Greek for “loving children,” something the ancient Greeks proudly did. Isn’t that sweet? Except, of course, there’s nothing sweet about it. Pedophiles are people who are sexually attracted to children and, in the worst cases, they act on that attraction. Since its inception, that word has had purely negative connotations.

Well, it turns out that, in today’s progressive world, pedophiles don’t feel that they should be stigmatized in that way. Allyn Walker, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University, in Virginia, is one such person, and Walker is willing to go on the record to make that point.

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/kevindowneyjr/2021/10/12/chicago-museum-goes-woke-fires-all-of-its-mostly-white-female-volunteers-n1523179

Thank you, ladies. You were kind enough to volunteer for years. Some for decades. Now get out.

The Art Institute of Chicago has canned all of its volunteer docents—well-trained, volunteer educators—almost 150 in total. Their crime? Most were retired white women. No diversity, no inclusiveness. I’m betting many were… ew… straight. And… “cisgender.” Bah.

The Docent Council complained about the decision in a letter to Art Institute President James Rondeau:

We believe we were dismissed (1) because the museum’s perspective is that the current docent corps’ demographics do not meet the need of the strategic plan (2) the museum concluded that reengineering the docent program was a step towards achieving the museum’s important goal of creating a culture of diversity and inclusion.

“Once you cut through the blather, the letter basically said the museum had looked critically at its corps of docents, a group dominated by mostly (but not entirely) white, retired women with some time to spare, and found them wanting as a demographic,” stated the Chicago Tribune.

And if you think that’s ugly, here is the real punchline: Their “diverse” replacements will be paid $25 an hour.

Yes, you read that correctly, a volunteer crew of mostly white older women is out and a diverse, well-paid crew is coming in.

This is the work of the museum’s new Woman’s Board Executive Director, Learning and Public Engagement, Victoria Stein. Stein, who is black, was hired earlier this year.

https://www.city-journal.org/ripping-off-the-veil-on-diversity-regimes?wallit_nosession=1

Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.

Now a British classical music organization has inadvertently ripped the veil off the diversity arithmetic, and the consequences may be far-reaching. Earlier this month, the English Touring Opera told nearly half its orchestral musicians that it would not be renewing their contracts for the 2022 season because it has “prioritised increased diversity in the orchestra.” In other words, as a bunch of white guys you must be cleared out so that we can boost the collective melanin levels among our musicians. Your talent does not matter; your skin color does.

Here, at last, were concrete, publicly identified victims of a preference regime. The reaction was swift. Since the Sunday Times broke the story, the English Touring Opera has been thrown on the defensive. Arts Council England, a government arts funder and the opera company’s main patron, is backpedaling on its aggressive promotion of diversity after the company claimed that it was only following the Council’s mandates in terminating the white musicians. It turns out that the public has little stomach for watching the diversity sausage be made.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/20/the-lefts-war-on-comedy-is-no-joking-matter/

A curious characteristic of totalitarian communist regimes is the dearth, if not the total absence, of comedy. No comedy films were ever made in the Soviet Union or in any of the other Communist countries. In fact, cinemas in communist countries were almost always empty, the films being so mind-numbingly abysmal. (One time in Havana, the government allowed American films to be shown in a theater and the lines stretched around the block, whereupon the government arrested the attendees inside the theater.)

In the Soviet Union, circuses were a major source of popular entertainment, devoid of the usual crude propaganda. The favorite aspect of Soviet circuses were the clowns, when the otherwise unsmiling Russians could let loose with belly laughs.

Yoani Sánchez stated that one of the things that first helped her to break through the indoctrination received at school of the cult of personality of Fidel Castro was her observation that Castro never joked, highly unusual for a Cuban.

We are in the midst of a Marxist upheaval going full throttle towards turning America into a Communist utopia. The symptoms are all there: self-censorship, censorship (aka “cancel culture”), political indoctrination of the military, indoctrination in the schools, network news deliberately becoming propaganda outlets, Balkanizing the population, etc.

Another symptom is the slow strangulation of comics and comedy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/opinion/woke-politically-correct.html

If you’re subscribing to my newsletter, you likely already know that I am a linguist who writes books and articles about the joys and mysteries of language. Others likely know that I write about race in America. Some of you know that I switch hit between both and sometimes combine the two. In my newsletter I’ll also be pitching in about music and other things that occupy me from week to week.

But for this first edition, I have chosen a subject that brings together the two things I get to write about most: language and race. Namely, just what has happened to “woke” lately?

It seems it was 10 minutes ago that it was the hot new badge of enlightenment, shared warmly as a kind of lexical bonding ritual, usually in the expression “stay woke.” To be woke was to be in on a leftist take on how American society operates, especially in reference to the condition of Black America and the role of systemic racism within it.

In 2012, people were using “stay woke” on Twitter with unalloyed pride. As late as 2016, you could find rosy-cheeked teens and 20-somethings all but chirping “woke,” such as in this earnest little guide to the latest slang.

No more. These days, “woke” is said with a sneer. It’s a prisoner in scare quotes as often as not (“Why ‘wokeness’ is the biggest threat to Democrats in the 2022 election”) and typically uttered with a note of condescension somewhere between the way comedians used to talk about hippies and the way anybody talks about, well, rather than a word beginning with “a” you’ll find discussed, among other places, here, I will sub in “jerks.”

The first thing that happened to “woke” was that it was borrowed from Black slang. It first appeared in neither a BuzzFeed article nor a rap but a jolly piece on Black vernacular expressions in 1962 in this newspaper called “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.” Many will be surprised that “salty,” as in “irritable,” another Black expression that white people have taken on of late, also occurs in this piece.

By the time something hits the page, we can be sure it had been around long before, and it’s a good guess that Black people had been using “woke” for at least a couple of decades before this. Lead Belly gives us a look at its likely origins when he urges people to “stay woke” in an afterpiece remark on a 1938 recording. He is referring to Black people being alert to actual physical danger; it would have been a natural evolution to start using “stay woke” to refer to more, as we say, systemic matters.

It was after 2010 that “woke” jumped the fence into mainstream parlance. Erykah Badu’s “Master Teacher” seems to have at least planted a seed, and then those “stay woke” salutes on Twitter in 2012 were in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing, upon which the expression was truly set in stone.

There are those who will see the story of “woke,” therefore, as one of cultural appropriation. But that’s a narrow take. To refer to its uptake by whites as a kind of theft is one way to see it. But another way is to marvel at how bizarre it would have been as recently as the 1980s for white progressives to warmly embrace a term from the Black street as a sign of empathy with Black America’s problems — and as for the theft, Black English is mighty enough that legions of its slang words and expressions stay quite unappropriated, thank you very much. Clearly we can spare one or two now and then? In the meantime, while racism’s persistence is clear, people who like and at least halfway understand one another will talk like one another.