Archive for the ‘Gender & Race’ Category.

Social Justice Virtue Signaling Has Become a Form of Tourette's -- It's A Tic People Can't Seem To Stop Themselves From Doing

I was reading the USA Today story about a local guy who reported a local restaurant to the newspaper because it had a picture of guys in blackface they wouldn't take down -- what turns out to be a picture of Welsh coal miners covered in coal dust.  Personally, I am sorry the guy has faced so much vulgar hostility and apparent outright racism in the letters he has received.  But I still can't get past a judgement that his concern was historically ignorant, clueless virtue signalling.  His concern failed even on the level of his own stated principles in that it tried to deny a voice to folks who were a lot more downtrodden and lacking in privilege (including a near certainty of early death from a variety of respiratory diseases) than are modern African-Americans.

The silver lining from all this is that I had forgotten that Phoenix had a Cornish pasty restaurant and I have since eaten there twice (well, one was delivered) and it is awesome.

All this is preface to an event that happened a week or two ago.  My wife and I were at a small, ticketed event watching a preview of an upcoming Ballet Arizona performance of the Firebird.  These take place in a small rehearsal theater and give ballet supporters a chance to see a preview and then hear from our artistic director (and in this case also the costume designer).

I have to give a bit of background on the ballet.  We were previewing the opening scene, in which a prince and a group of his friends are hunting in the forest and discover a secret magical place where they encounter the firebird -- a sort of fantasy non-human creature played by a ballerina.  They try to capture her, she nearly dies, she pleads for her life, and the prince revives her (which then leads to a sort of reward that leads to the rest of the story).

Anyway, in this performance the ballet tried to do something different.  The artistic director Ib Anderson reimagined the scene as a sci fi scene from his childhood -- think of the prince being Captain Kirk on an away mission on a new planet and discovering an alien. All the new costumes are sci fi / alien themed.

OK, so we see this opening scene.  I am only a middling ballet fan but the scene is beautifully done.  Afterwards we had Q&A.  Even I was thinking about asking about the idea, but geek that I am my mind had wandered from the ballet of an away team visiting a planet to imagining the original cast of Star Trek dancing ballet on a new planet to trying to figure out what Star Trek episode had the main characters dancing and playing air instruments ("I Mudd" by the way).

A hand goes up in the first row.  Rather than a question, the guy goes into a monologue about how he really didn't like the fact that all the men attacked a defenseless woman and that the only way she got her powers back was because the man chose to give them to her.  Now, I said that in about 20 seconds but this went one for a minute or two.  It was excruciating.  An enormous WTF moment.

First, it's a freaking alien that is being played by a woman.  Second, to the extent it is a reflection of stereotyped gender roles by the original author, does this person monologuing to us really think the rest of the audience is unaware that writers 100 years ago had different visions of women's roles in society than we have today?  Is his goal to whitewash the past by pretending authors never wrote this kind of thing, or is his goal merely to make sure that we all know that he knows?  Even weirder, to be at this event the guy was presumably a ballet aficionado at some level -- has he never seen, say, any 19th century story ballet?  Or better yet 19th century opera, where the main role of women seems to be to die of some sort of wasting disease in the third act?  And finally, is he really concerned that the community of ballet choreographers and dancers is somehow a secret den of anti-wokeness that needs to be exposed?

I compare this need to publicly virtue signal like this to Tourette's because I don't think the guy could help himself.  Had you carefully explained all of the above to him in advance, he still likely would have had to make his speech (just like the guy with the miner photo above still insists he did the right thing even now that it has been explained that its a freaking photo of downtrodden, soon to be dead of respiratory diseases, miners).  By the way, it was sort of funny to see the reaction of the ballet folks on stage to this -- they tend to be way out there on social justice causes themselves and were clearly unused to being outflanked on these issues.

I got to thinking, what is the solution if this were really a problem?  I suppose we could gender swap the whole thing, with a male in the lead of Swan Lake, say.  But that does not really work, because in general in all these unwoke story ballets the females get all the best roles.  Most of the men are just props.  So gender swapping them would just take all the best roles away from women and hand them to men.  Eek, what is a good SJW to do?

When #metoo and #blacklivesmatter Collide









Hunting Through The Jungle to Eliminate the Last Surviving Soldier in the Culture War

Those of you as old as I am may remember in the 1970's when a few last surviving Japanese soldiers from WWII were discovered or coaxed to surrender after hiding for decades in some Pacific jungle.  No one was looking to punish these guys -- the war was won and over -- we were just trying to get them to come out and try to live a normal life.

I am reminded of these stories upon reading that Colorado is yet again going after the same baker for not baking someone a cake:

On the same day the high court agreed to review the Masterpiece case, an attorney named Autumn Scardina called Phillips’ shop and asked him to create a cake celebrating a sex transition. The caller asked that the cake include a blue exterior and a pink interior, a reflection of Scardina’s transgender identity. Phillips declined to create the cake, given his religious conviction that sex is immutable, while offering to sell the caller other pre-made baked goods.

In the months that followed, the bakery received requests for cakes featuring marijuana use, sexually explicit messages, and Satanic symbols. One solicitation submitted by email asked the cake shop to create a three-tiered white cake depicting Satan licking a functional 9 inch dildo. Phillips believes Scardina made all these requests.

Scardina filed a complaint with the civil rights commission, alleging discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The matter was held in abeyance while the Supreme Court adjudicated the Masterpiece case.

I have supported gay rights for as long as I can remember and briefly ran an Arizona campaign to legalize gay marriage.  But this looks to me like sending an entire army into the jungle to try to hunt down and kill that last Japanese soldier.  Isn't it enough that we have complete legal tolerance of homosexuality, de facto tolerance by the majority of Americans, and commercial tolerance in that 99+% of all businesses gratefully accept business from gays?  There can't be that many businesses denying accommodation to gays and trans-gendered when they have to keep harping on the same one example of non-conformity.  One of the features Hannah Arendt used to distinguish totalitarianism from run-of-the-mill authoritarianism was that in the latter, authorities need everyone to act in accordance with their wishes, in totalitarian governments they require people to believe in accordance with their wishes.  This need to seek out and harshly punish tiny infractions against social justice strikes me as totalitarian.

As an aside, I would challenge anyone to say that there is no message they would refuse to put on a cake.  I can think of a number I would say no to, starting with this one.

Mandated accommodation laws are a tough thing.  Libertarians tend to be suspicious of them because they tend to tread on several first amendment rights (speech, association).  But I could envision cases where I would support them, for example in the 1960's South during the dismantling of Jim Crow.  I really do not think we are there for gay wedding cakes.


The Wrong Way To Educate: How I Would Have Handled the Pictures of White Dudes at Harvard Medical School

Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, the teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, is going to remove pictures of medical luminaries from the walls of its auditorium because they are mostly all white guys.  Now, I don't really get freaked out about this the way some folks seem to.  I can totally understand why a University might not want to give the message to an incoming class that they somehow need to look like those pictures to be successful.  But I am exhausted with the notion that the way to handle uncomfortable things in society or in history is to hide them from students.  This seems the opposite of education.  I have had several great teachers in my life who would use uncomfortable facts as a springboard for learning.

I can't necessarily match the teaching greats, but here is how I might handle it.  Imagine a speech to an incoming group of Harvard Medical Students in this auditorium.

Welcome!  And congratulations!  All of you have followed very different paths to get here, but the one common denominator is that every one of you has the demonstrated intellectual and personal excellence required to meet the rigorous standards of this institution.  As I look around today, I see an incredible diversity of people -- a diversity of genders and ethnicities and home countries and family incomes but who all share in common the desire to help mankind through medicine.

If you look around the room you will see a bunch of paintings of medical luminaries who all made great contributions to medicine and this institution, and in the process helped save lives and make the world a better place.  But the odds are that you will also notice that the men -- and they are all men -- may not look like you.  There is a reason for that.

The issue is not that these 30 men should not be on this wall -- they all made important contributions to the study of medicine and everything you study over the next 4 years will build in part on their work.  The issue is not with these pictures, but the ones that are missing.  For every one of these pictures there should be at least one more of a woman or a person of color.  But those pictures are missing.  Even worse, the contributions of those people are missing.  They are missing because our world, our country, and even this institution made it difficult or impossible for brilliant people who were not white and male to reach the place where you are all sitting.  Medicine -- and our society -- are far poorer for this loss.

There are those who have suggested that we take down these pictures and hide this legacy from you.  These people have good intentions and want to avoid demotivating people who might look at these paintings and assume success will be impossible for them because they look different.  But I say that these pictures-- and all the ones that are missing -- should be your motivation.  All of you who might have been left out of this institution in the past are here now.  Look around the room, the world is truly changing!  This is your chance to make those advances in medicine that we lost in the past because we so short-sightedly excluded so many outstanding people.

Imagine you are back at this school 50 years from now with your grandchild.  You have spent the day dodging Harvard's frequent entreaties to donate money and you duck into this auditorium for shelter.  You point up to the walls and tell your grandchild, "do you see, about halfway along that wall where all the faces go from looking the same to being quite varied -- that was when your grandma was here at school."

The Problem With Social Justice Today -- Dividing Rather than Unifying





It Turns Out We Introverts Are Racist

I am, depending on the day, a moderate to strong introvert.  Nowadays, basically no one understands what this means, because they use it as a synonym of social awkwardness or occasional social discomfort, and everyone will answer "I am introverted too" even when it clearly is not the case.   I can interact socially but only with a great expenditure of energy -- the few people I call my friends are the ones whom I can hang out with without it costing me energy.  I cross streets to avoid interacting with neighbors, and frequently avoid eye contact with most everyone because every instance of eye contact could potentially lead to a social interaction I am trying to avoid.   Like a manic depressive, I go through times that are better and worse -- in times of extreme introversion I will hide in the bathroom for hours rather than even attempt to make conversation with people at some function.   If I am not in the bathroom, I sometimes go on talking jags, which is another way not to interact if you think about it.  Also like many introverts, I love public speaking, the larger venue the better.  Despite it being the #1 reported fear in the general population, I have never feared public speaking -- in fact, I often seek it out.

I don't avoid social contact because I hate people.  I like people, and I am not a misanthrope (except maybe when I watch MSNBC too long).  I don't avoid social contact because I dislike myself or lack confidence -- folks around me can tell you I have an over-abundance of self-confidence.  If this does not make much sense, neither do a lot of phobias to folks who do not have them.  The closest I can equate it is that I can get a feeling similar to claustrophobia when interacting with people.

I don't really discuss this much in the blog because a) it is largely irrelevant to blogging and I am unlikely every to meet 99.9% of you face to face; b) I have learned to function pretty well in most situations; and c) I have no particular desire to be a victim.  In fact, to the latter, it is impossible to escape feelings of guilt about it, particularly for my wife who has to put up with embarrassing things like seeing me stand alone in a corner at some function.

I bring this all up only to warn you that apparently, this all means that I am a racist:

Students who avoid making eye contact with their peers could be guilty of racism, according to Oxford University’s latest guidance.

The university’s Equality and Diversity Unit has advised students that “not speaking directly to people” could be deemed a “racial microaggression” which can lead to “mental ill-health”.







This was an interesting side bit:






The Left and Original Sin








A few other thoughts:


I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means
















