I got a email notification that the above was a response to something I posted. Since you deleted it without any other notification, I don't know/can't recall exactly what the comment was.
So, Bye Bye.
I read most of the article, which was at least 50% overthought tedium (something that is tolerable to some extent given that you are a genius, and Substack content is somewhat of a work-in-progress). I read the first sentence or two of the last 1/3 of the paragraphs and determined that the stuff at the end of the article was just marginally relevant to your main points. James Lindsay does the same thing, he goes on an on in ways that I'm guessing most of his audience doesn't care about or have time for.
Anyways, if you are going to be an asshole, I'll unsubscribe.
In parting, I'll make a simple suggestion: learn something from Rogan about how to appeal to a larger audience.
I literally laughed out loud at this. Really? You're reducing someone to a caricature and then using it to assign shallow insults to him based on your very obviously limited perception?
"His gaze is determined yet vacant, the steady certainty of a man with a limited range of thoughts." Stop. You sound like a struggling novelist and this goes beyond ad hominem. The guy invites on to his podcast - each episode of which consists of ~3 hour uninterrupted conversations - anyone and everyone with anything interesting to say, and you're accusing him of having a "limited range of thoughts."
Yeah, you're right. I was just contemplating a cool illustration and associating it with what I know of JR (which primarily comes from unflattering media coverage). But I obviously don't have the full picture since I don't listen to his podcast, so I shouldn't judge. Anyway, I'm sorry for a dumb comment and I'll delete it.
I applaud the ease with which you apologized for/acknowledged this. I can't recall ever seeing someone else do this on the internet and it gives me hope for humanity. I apologize if I came across as overly combative.
I think Rogan is best at giving someone space to spool out their stories and perspectives, not at analyzing or even debating ideas. Even when he's pushing back on someone he clearly disagrees with, he's not particularly good at it and doesn't seem to do research. But it's really valuable to hear someone expound on their views, right or wrong, for three hours and get past, if they can, the usual talking points.
I'd also note that the episode list is a little misleading in terms of his views, because he does talk about his fairly liberal political views on issues like police misconduct or UBI in the middle of conversations about a different topic, even with his "anti-woke" focused guests.
What I initially liked about JRE is that he is a legitimately curious interviewer. He is not waiting for his turn to talk. Some of the "anti-woke" spin of the show, including trans issues, has been pretty recent. He's been attacked in the press for his fairly mainstream views on Fallon Fox and he's just gotten more and more defensive. It shows up in the guests he picks. Whether this is an emotional reaction or he's trying to drive controversy for more press/visibility, the answer is probably some of both.
There is a clip of him pushing back on Dave Rubin about regulations that is perfect, and shows given time he will change his angle on certain guests. Think he did likewise with Candace Owens. And had a great moment on immigrants and being on team human as well. There are ups and downs.
Great article. I'm more of a fan than you but thats OK. (Because no need to be emotionally overinvested..right?)
I'm a JRE fan because there are a lot of cool guests and good topics. I revel in episodes with Duncan Trussel. Clearly, two men dressed up in space suits talking about various trips and the meaning of the universe isn't for everyone but I think it's great.
Kyle Kulinski gotten on there and reportedly is the one that got Bernie and Dore on there. And even got invited to cover the election with Joe.
It be great if you got on there. Ditto Brihana. I wish Michael Brooks got on their..he had a decent take on Rogan.
But back to me being a fan. My Dad is a bit of a legend in the family for staying up late and carrying on, but also having the kind of conversations you have late at night when there are only a few people left. Really good sessions..yes booze is involved but the conversations finally get beyond the weather, and sports. To me, long form podcasting with an interviewer like Rogan is a formalized version of this different level of conversing.
Now compare that to say Bill Maher. Who was on his show a year or so ago after inviting himself on, clearly frustrated that the buzz has moved on to YouTube and podcasts. Maher had a point. His show, and News has a job. Compress the information people want to hear about. But the counter of that is to do a deep dive into a topic..and that is what you get from JRE>
In general the main reason I casually listen to JRE is because Joe seems like a nice, authentic guy who has some interesting guests. But I like how Freddie shows how close-minded he can be. Another good example of this is UFC fighter pay. Google "Joe Rogan UFC Fighter Pay" and see how he basically parrots the Dana White company line about how the UFC cannot afford to pay its fighters properly despite constantly being confronted with evidence to the contrary. I also really dislike how a lot of media members have tried to turn him into a culture war avatar and wish they would just let him be a stoner podcaster who's good at interviewing with some funny & thoughtful guests .
While no one wants to get into trans issues a few thoughts: trans or gender ideology has not been particularly well scrutinized within the mainstream media. Looking at what the actual data is or doing research can land you in hot water quick (Singal, Herzog, Littman, etc.).
So it's not just that there is an ideological monoculture. It's that the ideological monoculture is required for the suppositions of the ideology because they couldn't stand to scrutiny within the framework of liberal discourse.
Rogan is beloved in part because he has a platform to puncture these ideas, because again they only need a small amount of scrutiny to be called into serious question. A trans woman MMA fighter will create doubts about core precepts of gender ideology. It's that simple.
This is stand in for (and easily illustration of the fact that) when you get into issues of social contagion, data on criteria for medical management and outcomes, and some other basic things, huge questions arise related to gender identity.
Rogan points in the right direction with easy to understand examples. The issue isn't that Rogan is 'platforming bigots,' it's that these ideas are so fragile that someone like Rogan can easily call them into question.
Regarding the vaccine/ivermectin stuff, there have been a number of public health missteps by elites that should have had more scrutiny and more discussion. Generally there should be robust open discussion about the vaccine that I think would have led to more people feeling comfortable getting it (examples include myocarditis signal for young/men teens and whether 2nd rna vaccine should be given - UK decided not to give 2nd dose, lack of meaningful clinical outcomes for a booster shot, overexaggerating risk to children from delta given we have good data from UK, etc. etc. etc.) The elision of evidence and institutional authority and experts and politics has not been a good thing.
OK, now regarding Marxism, I think only a tiny number of elites are truly interested in Marxism in 2021. What they are interested in is materialist critiques that have been transmogrified by the Frankfurt School and Gramsci and then given strange postmodern appendages by 90s critical theorists. So, you get a shorthand ('Marxists!') that's used by Rogan. But I think the popular explanation of this ideology by Pluckrose/Lindsay and how it has been translated into praxis in institutions and culture by Yang and Rufo is pretty good. In fact, these figures will give you a better account of these intellectual developments in an accessible way than anyone on the Left. So again, Rogan is pointing in the right direction.
I'm not a huge Rogan enthusiast (I listen to maybe 1/10 of his content and I don't follow MMA at all) but I do think some of it is pretty good: specifically I like deep interviews with rock climbers and extreme athletes and hunters et al. as well as some of the comedians.
But it's easy to understand why his political stuff is appealing - it's because he generally points in the direction of what are credible issues that other people are terrified to address and makes you feel sane in the process. This includes even technical issues where I am sure I know much more than he does.
Regarding Covid. I've been trying to wrap my head around the risk to children under the age of 10 and can't find a clear explanation of what the numbers tell us the risk is. What do the UK numbers say? I've seen NPR say < 2% of infections for children result in hospitalization but I think 2% is still scary. But is that the real number? Does that reflect Delta yet?
Been living pretty bubbled up and am beginning to want to let my kids be kids again, or at least reground my resolve with an understanding of the risks. Just had to chide my 5 year old for wrestling with his older cousin at an outside party where all adults were vaccinated.
From everything that I've read of the UK's data on delta, it is extremely not dangerous for kids. "Kids in hospitals with COVID" are often there for something else and just have a positive COVID test. RSV and the flu are far more dangerous for kids, and kids have been exposed to those for decades without restrictions.
One of the most deranging experiences of my life was that all the major media outlets were pushing hysteric takes on delta transmission with school openings.
'WHAT WILL HAPPEN???'
This was so deranging because the experiment had been run in the UK and the results were extremely reassuring and in 1200, 1500 word pieces they wouldn't mention any of this. They would just role out the same alarmist clinicians and public health experts culled from Twitter and prior pieces who they knew would validate their narrative.
It worked on us. We pulled the kids out of a summer camp and my hours went way down. Perhaps I'm slowly gaining back some sanity. We virtual schooled last year. It was rough. Kids did alright. But stressed us out.
understandable, the media has really been working overtime to scare people -- kids had the option of doing in-person school in roughly a third of American states in the 2020-2021 school year, and in-person students had lower infection rates than kids doing virtual/home learning (in every state where this was studied). this is why schools were effectively never closed in the EU -- the NYT editorial board doesn't control public health discourse there
That BBC article is the first time I even saw the stat of 1/50K being admitted to the ICU. It's all bout hospitalizations in the articles I've seen, which friggin doesn't tell you what you want to know.
There is a slightly "crazy" guy whose internet handle is ZDoggMD (Dr. Zubin Damania), that has some good material on public health, including COVID (he has kids in public school, SF bay area, iirc). Most of his subscribes are in the medical field, but he puts out information for the general public too.
He refers to himself as "Alt Middle", not "left" or "right".
Thanks. I may be getting some piece of mind back. Pretty sure we'll vaccinate our kids when we get the chance but in the meantime, it be nice not to be in a constant state of worry.
But I do think there is question if natural immunity is >= vaccinated immunity, and children can get it without that much risk...where is the cutoff for being paranoid bout infection vs. throwing infection parties.
it's up to the parent, of course -- imo I won't be throwing infection parties (I have five small children) but am also not worried about them contracting COVID, as all the adults in our life are vaccinated
I was exaggerating to an extent as there is no way my wife, daughter of a virologist, would allow for it. If she heard I said such a thing on comment board I'd be trouble :)
I love your transparency Dennis. I'm glad you can think aloud and ask all your "unacceptable" questions here. These are hard questions for anyone whose faith in MSM and the medical establishment has taken a hit.
one more thing though...between the immune system responding to the spoke protein in isolation...versus the immune system responding to the entire virus...the latter sounds like it would be better..more robust to me. This leaves me a bit unsure about vaccination for the kids when that day comes.
UK and other countries do not recommend vaccination for kids, which makes sense to me -- under age 12, I don't see the case for vaccination (apart from high-risk / obese children)
Hospitalization numbers can be difficult to parse because of issues related to sampling (what proportion of kids with symptoms get tested for COVID? what proportion of infections are asymptomatic? with universal screening on hospital admission, how many cases are incidental? Etc. etc. etc.)
While you can interpret the data in the most alarmist way possible, it is likely that hospitalization risk is well below 1%.
I am not dismissive of COVID and was very anxious for my parents before they were vaccinated. I am vaccinated myself. I have small children and am generally an anxious parent.
However, I have very little anxiety about COVID as far as my kids go - they are unmasked and unrestricted in terms of activities.
I am lucky enough to have stats/epi background and the fact is that common pathogens (RSV, flu, etc) are MUCH more dangerous to little children.
Quantitatively there just isn't major risk for kids unless they have a serious comorbidity and ANY social, athletic, or educational activity restriction is likely to be more harmful that population-based COVID risk.
With all that said I am sympathetic regarding the anxiety and have close friends and relatives who are very anxious and overestimate the risk for their kids.
Thanks for responding. There is a lack of straight-forward content that offers just an assessment of the numbers we got. Article after article will lead with a human interest story of a sick child, not numbers are up since Delta, but not really give you the numbers. Its been frustrating.
Shouldn't there be a clear breakdown of masked vs. unmasked schools out of Florida by now? Did I just miss it? Good to know about the UK
Yes - the epidemiology is very hard to make sense even for smart people who read a lot in part because of media obfuscation and hysteria.
At this point I think we can say what the overarching COVID public health failures are: the vulnerable weren't well protected and the safe and healthy were overly restricted.
Hopefully, the return to school will provide reassuring data to worried parents.
It's really odd to see how the trans rights movement has unfolded, with journalists and academics adopting certain positions (some mainstream, some extreme) and canceling anyone who disagrees, while a huge portion of the country isn't even on board with the basics. I think it's ultimately bad for the movement -- they're skipping the persuasion part, and the part where we wrestle with trade-offs and work out something reasonable.
If the gay rights movement had emerged at this particular point in time, we probably would have done the same thing (canceling anyone with reservations). But I don't think it would have helped in the end. The movement was incredibly successful at transforming public opinion in a short time, and I think it's because they thought about how to persuade people. They were very strategic in how they presented gay rights to the public ("we just want to be boring and traditional like you") in addition to the legal strategy. In a perfect world we wouldn't need to persuade conservatives, but I'm grateful that we did because those legal rights have been important for my family.
I strongly disagree with the assertion that the gay rights movement was about "be[ing] boring and traditional like you." Certainly that was a strain of it, but far from the dominant one, and same-sex marriage became the Thing to Get because of the radicalizing nature of the AIDS crisis.
The thing that helps the gay rights movement more than anything else was that we are everywhere. Everyone knows a gay person. You like Joan, don't you? She's gay! etc.
You're right -- I should have said the gay marriage movement. Although I do believe presenting it as traditional was the dominant strategy, especially for the part that had money.
I definitely agree that people coming out made a huge difference in acceptance, not just personal acquaintances but on television shows, etc.
It's more than that gay people are everywhere. They are everywhere and they are no different than straight people. They didn't expect an overnight seismic shift in the language and the culture when demanding their rights. They said "you see all these rights you have? We want the same." If gay people were everywhere, and meanwhile straight people had to adopt a new special language to know how to address them and were forced to speak words they didn't believe was true, had to shed their expectation of physical modesty and security in sex-segregated private places, had to pretend that physical difference between men and women didn't exist, had to accept macabre threats of "if you withhold hormones/blockers, your child will commit suicide," I guarantee there would have been far more resistance and Joan would not have been so liked.
It seems like the logical contradictions began to eat away at gay radicalism, from the inside, like intellectual cancer.
For about 5 years before I retired I started noticing a weird pattern where young gays lied about stuff all the time, for no reason, even if it should have gotten them in trouble with management. I finally realized it was ritualistic, a way to assert "gay privilege" via passive aggression. Management ("PC" goons) almost always made excuses for the liars, and then covered up their actual fuck ups.
I knew radical gay activists in the mid 90s that constantly made jokes about being "boring and traditional" suburbanites.
They pivoted over about 10-15 years to being flaming, ILLIBERAL totalitarians on the cultural-left.
Around the time that that pivot took place, I started meeting slightly younger gays that were ideologically opposed to the totalitarian turn, but they were dissidents within larger gay culture at that point. Most are now more or less IDW-aligned.
I agree that was the decisive factor, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think the gay rights movement was highly conservative in its presentation. The two most high profile fights of the 1990-2013 era were the right to join the military and get married. Short of the right to vote for Ronald Reagan what's more conservative than military service and marriage?
I think the problems with trans rights discourse fall into two buckets:
1) There is the political issue of sex versus gender where rights are in conflict: see locker rooms, spas, prisons, rape crisis centers, sports. These are niche areas but someone's rights will be abrogated. This is the type of conflict that is political and should be addressed politically. It is not appropriate for elites to use administrative, legal, and social power to decide political issues outside of explicitly political venues and say 'Trans women are women,' and be done with it. We have institutions for politics - a healthier discourse would be openly political.
2) There are major underlying conceptual problems with trans as a concept. First, there is a question of whether reification of gender is a good thing. I personally think that having more expansive interpretations of gender is preferable. My generational upbringing was that having some personality/emotional traits more commonly associated with women if you are a man and vice versa does not make you of the opposite gender and interpretations as so are based on notions of gender that are overly restrictive. Along these lines reification of gender and associated tropes and stereotypes is not good. Second, the data on social contagion, how these concepts are transmitted through social media, and the new demographics are very concerning. The large number of young girls with psychiatric and developmental comorbidities is particularly disturbing. And this leads to the third point, which is that the older trans scenarios (it was primarily adult men or among the younger persistent gender dysphoria since birth) are now a minority of new diagnoses. This change in population means that often irreversible therapies that are being administered do not have an appropriate basis in evidence. My feeling is that this will all be litigated in the courts the next few years.
I'm not too interested in trans issues - there are a million things that are more important. But the inability to process and adjudicate trans issues in a functional way makes me concerned about our institutions, especially in medicine where there should be clear standards and evidence.
This is very well stated. Not to be too coldly utilitarian here, but the meta is far more interesting and consequential. There's just very, very, very few trans people. Parts of the debate are super important to the people it affects, but for society it just isn't a big deal.
But the way the debate has unfolded is really, really important. I am an educated professional living in a big, liberal city and I'm easily among the most progressive of my acquaintances on trans issues. That said, if I was open about those thoughts on the internet I'd be subject to banning. That's fucking absurd. This substitution of elite opinion for public opinion, paired with active banning of people from the digital public square, is pretty worrisome. You shouldn't have to be Dave Chappelle to have an opinion on this issue that isn't just whatever GLAAD has put in their latest press release.
Actual trans people are just pawns in some larger, sick power play. Trans activists are mostly kooks that are shooting themselves in the foot, big time.
I'm so fascinated by the continued insistence that issues regarding trans people haven't been scrutinized enough. Jesse Singal was given a cover story in the Atlantic, and he was just this week given space in the NYT to review an anti trans book written by en editor at the Economist. Nearly the entire UK based media is rabidly anti trans. Even the supposedly left wing Guardian has had a staff revolt because senior leadership continues to publish anti trans articles, and a couple weeks ago they edited out pro trans statements in an interview with Judith Butler after publication. The entire Murdoch empire, including the Wall St. Journal and the most popular cable television network, are also rabidly anti trans. This summer there was a wave of Republican governors introducing bills to limit minors ability to seek treatment for gender dysphoria and to play kids sports.
I'm genuinely curious: what level of scrutiny do you think is missing? Because when I hear this sentiment it sure sounds like you are just unhappy that there does exist a few outlets that are genuinely pro trans, even while there are vast numbers who are not.
Why should there be any "pro" or "anti" sites at all? What about just attempting to examine the issue is an objective fashion and letting the chips fall where they may?
Emotional reactions and groupthink are easy and encourage ideological bullshit (regressive tribalism).
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Humans are wired by evolution to be strongly tribalistic because crucial human survival adaptations are eusocial (altruism and social cooperation favor survival in kinship groups).
I think you inadvertently addressed exactly what’s missing: a context for discussing medical evidence that is not immediately coded as pro- or anti- trans. The problem with me even commenting such is that you will probably code me as anti trans. I became curious about this subject because I had a trans family member who had been living as the opposite gender for several years suddenly (to me) decided to detransition. This was a few months before Jesse Sinhal’s Atlantic story and that was the first time I’d ever even heard of people doing such a thing. I honestly thought it was unheard of. I found the story helpful in understanding a bit about my family member and many things in it we’re consistent with her experience (she was not a minor but a very young adult). I still believe trans people are real, valid and deserve to be free of discrimination and are for the most part unlikely to change their minds. But this experience happened to her and our family and the fallout after the Atlantic article was bizarre to me because it was basically saying that the thing that literally happened right in front of my face never happens and was anti trans propaganda. Maybe you are right that the discussion is happening but it’s happening in such an unhealthy way, and polarized in such left/right terms that it is almost worse than not happening at all. I do not think it’s evil or anti trans to talk about evidence based medical treatment, particularly if minors. I do not think it’s evil or bigoted to feel like there needs to be a way to talk about people with physiology and life cycles that fall pretty clearly into a coherent category that used to be called female. It does feel a bit like, to use a cringe buzzword, “gaslighting” to be told that things happening right in front of you aren’t real and that you are just imaging that your body fits into a category that actually doesn’t exists and that wanting a name for it is somehow hateful.
The people who I find are telling the truth are mostly (with very few exceptions like a 5 year old Atlantic article and a book review) not in mainstream right or left media. I’m uninterested in Abigail Shrier’s book because the title alone is a turn off. I’m not interested in bigoted right wing critiques. I’m not super interested in gender critical feminism which starts with the premise of believing gender doesn’t exist at all (when I do think it exists in a physiological - hormones etc - and psychological way).
I honestly don’t know who besides Singalong is writing about it in a fairly non ideological way. (Herzog I mostly like but think she’s definitely more gender critical ideologically).
I disagree that Jesse is non idealogical, although I think his ideology is based much more on self promotion and feigned victimization than anything else. There are plenty of people writing non ideologically that disagree with Jesse, but I'm guessing that you don't like their conclusions.
Well you’re right. I might be incorrect in saying he’s non ideological. Everyone has an ideology and his is like, milquetoast liberalism or something but overall it’s less “right wing coded” than most of the trans healthcare critique.
I’m genuinely interested in lots of perspectives. Who do you think is a good non ideological critic if the singal position?
OK let's put this in context: are Singal and Herzog media pariahs who were chased out of polite society after their well reported pieces? Was it surprising to you that Singal was given the book review in the NYT? What has Lisa Littman published since her ROGD paper?
This is billed as one the premier civil rights issues of our time. Who inside MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, NYT seems comfortable covering the actual data associated with these issues? Not pro vs anti but just critically looking at the data? Why does it take an Abigail Shrier to cover this topic well?
Regarding the Butler thing, didn't they take her comments out in the context of the spa incident not looking good from the trans-rights end of things? Wasn't that a pro-trans move? Perhaps I'm mistaken - not totally clear on that.
How can they be regarded as chased out of polite society when they have a popular podcast that hosts major mainstream figures, Jesse worked for years at NY Mag and left of his own accord, has been given cover stories at the Atlantic and is asked to review books for the NYT? It seems to me that you are just mad that any of us disagree or don't like Singal, Herzog, and Shrier. There are certainly npeople that disagree with them and mock them, as I think they should be, but it's delusional to pretend like these people have be deplatformed.
Again, just because not everyone agrees with you doesn't make it a free speech issue. I think Jesse Singal is pathetic and boring. I read Shrier's book. It's drivel. There's basically no data in it, it's all anecdotes that read like spooky stories. Me saying this is not "cancellation" it's me disagreeing with you. Get a grip.
You know who has been reviewing the data for years though? Doctors and mental health professionals! And they have come to various conclusions about how best to treat trans people, based in data. Abigail Shrier and Jesse Singal don't like those conclusions though.
They are only chased out of polite society in that mainstream media rarely hosts them and when they do it causes a huge uproar. I mean obviously that only makes them more financially successful in many ways. My concern isn’t at all for the effects on singal personally as he seems to be doing just fine. It’s for the health and future of our culture.
The goal was to have Singal and Herzog not work for anywhere respectable, and if possible, be chased out of journalism altogether.
Yeah, in retrospect things worked out. But here we are on Substack and Patreon where the thought criminals (Sullivan, Greenwald, de Boer, BRP, and Bari Weiss) are.
And we are here because the institutions (NYT, WaPo, NY Mag, etc. etc. etc.) can't support liberal discourse on a range of issues.
I take G Greenwald's position which is that legacy media is very weak. But still, an influential class still gets their information there, so legacy media is still important. Certainly the effect of these attempted cancellations has less to do with actual punishing the transgressors and more to do with enforcing internal conformity.
I think the NYT is finally realizing this and that capitulating to ideological conformity will hurt their brand and institution long term. When I saw the Singal book review I thought, 'holy shit.' That wasn't your reaction?
My general heuristic - and this is because I'm not particularly ideologically enthusiastic in either direction and have a stats training - is to look to see how coverage and argumentation maps on to what the data is. If there is punishment or attempted punishment for reasonable research or interpretation of research, it tells you that something is wrong.
I'm going to broadly disagree with you in your interpretation of what medical professionals are saying and doing. The evidence guiding treatment is often very poor quality and I expect that all of this will carefully reviewed as litigation makes its way through the courts.
Glenn reviewed Shrier's book and in his own review shared misinformation. He said there were "massive numbers of teens getting irreversible treatments", which isn't true for various reasons. But his article falls apart if that phenomenon doesn't exist because the whole thing is premised on the idea that the trans totalitarians have shut down debate on this important phenomenon.
Listen, you choose to believe that trans totalitarians are shutting down debate and I don't think I'm going to convince you otherwise. I would just suggest that any analysis of power or material conditions will show you something different. Try this: take a look at the wait times to get an appointment at a gender clinic in the UK: https://genderkit.org.uk/resources/wait-times/
Nearly every one of them has over a two year wait to just get in the door, it will be much longer to actually begin treatment. Does that look like a society that is dispensing irreversible treatments to people indiscriminately? A place where the trans totalitarian agenda is ascendant? Because to me it looks like a society where trans people have very little power, and their health is not taken seriously while people like Abigail Shrier tell people scary stories.
"Certainly the effect of these attempted cancellations has less to do with actual punishing the transgressors and more to do with enforcing internal conformity."
Exactly, and it has worked. I would hate to go through what Singal and Herzog went through as I would not have had the stomach to be so hated within my group and my professional world. I would rather just keep quiet, or whisper my true feelings to my partner. Most people don't want to deal with the sort of shunning that Herzog and Singal were both subjected to, for the crime of having written articles that are nuanced but certainly not transphobic. Yes, things have worked out for them in a roundabout way, to their surprise I'm sure!
Jonathan Chait wrote that the last PC movement died because the radicals fatally antagonized mainstream liberals, not conservatives. I fully expect this wave to suffer the same fate and we are probably witnessing the beginnings of that. The NY Times recognizing Singal may just be the beginning of the end versus the recent past where the woke were at their peak.
I viewed the Singal book review in the same way in terms of progressive Kremlinology. Also having Kevin Williamson and McWhorter write stuff has been encouraging.
I can’t speak for the other commenter, but to me the issue is lack of scrutiny among people I’d listen to in the first place, meaning people who share my values. I’m not interested in the opinions of conservatives who don’t think anyone should transition, or who fear-monger about trans women using the restroom. I’d like us to figure out solutions starting from the position that people have a right to transition and be accommodated. (For questions like when and how to treat kids, eligibility for women’s sports, what self-ID means in practice in different situations…)
In lefty queer spaces (that I’m aligned with generally) there’s little discussion of tradeoffs, or the existence of any bad actors ever, or any bad outcomes from medical treatment. I completely understand why activists are defensive and suspicious of people “just asking questions.” But it leaves a gap when the people asking the questions are the ones predisposed to arrive at conservative answers.
I don't disagree. I wouldn't be reading Freddie's blog if I didn't think there was some truth to the idea that left wing (or perhaps more narrowly "liberal") spaces can be hostile environments for having reasonable discussions on multiple issues, trans issues being one of them. There's lots of talk in the trans community that is anti medical, anti science because there is an objection to anything that could possibly be called "gatekeeping". I don't really fall there, but I avoid weighing in because I know I will get called an upper middle class white trans person that has never been medically gatekept or whatever (I came out at 18 years old in Texas fifteen years ago, I certainly have been gatekept, but that's not the point). Same goes for sports, I think there's reasonable questions about the male senior captain of the basketball team coming out as trans and playing in a women's game the next week (although do people really value high school sports results that much? idk). I certainly sympathize with parents of trans kids who just want to do the right thing for their child and not have them regret any irreversible decisions.
Fully on board with all that. I do think most of those are rare, edge cases though, and the way that someone like Jesse Singal endlessly uses his platform to make those edge cases the focal point of the debate is counterproductive. The state of most trans people's mental and medical care isn't getting a cover story at The Atlantic, only the edge case does (I don't know the healthcare politics of the Atlantic generally but I suspect they are not good).
I put someone like Shrier in a different category than Singal because she seems like an average right wing media product in that she is full of shit and an awful writer. I actually encourage people to read her book because it's embarrassingly bad.
I think "it leaves a gap when the people asking the questions are the ones predisposed to arrive at conservative answers." is a good way to put it.
I’m sorry I can no longer find the thread where you recommended Christa Peterson so I’ll put this comment here (I think it’s relevant to the overall discussion). I just searched her and read a blog post of hers critiquing Kathleen Stock which I found I very good illustration of the gaps in our polarized gender discourse. Her critique was one I mostly agree with: that gender critical feminists either pretend they don’t know what gender identity is or are not imaginative and curious enough to be open minded to the idea that gender and gender identity are a real thing. I believe that most people do have a pretty firm gender identity and it probably has physiological as well as cultural roots, meaning it can’t be completely obliterated in a culture that deconstructs gender completely. Or in simpler terms I don’t think gender is completely socially constructed. This is a dangerous thing to believe amongst feminists as it leads into a slippery slope of ideas like “women are nurturers and men can rotate objects in their minds and that’s why women aren’t represented in STEM!” And that’s not exactly what I mean. I mean it as more of an orientation in the world and often one’s body. What is it exactly? I don’t know! I wish we could talk about it in an open way so I could refine my opinion on this! All I know is that I don’t think it’s some sort of woo akin to a soul or just straight up liking dresses though.
Similarly, I get frustrated at the converse effort by some of the loudest voices on the other side insisting that physiological sex is undefinable, irrelevant, in no way defines us and is also largely a social construct. This is just…so obviously false and baffling to me. And I am open to the idea that sex is more complicated than penis vs vagina or what chromosomes or even gametes one has. I think that we can admit that there is a small middle spectrum to physiological sex that doesn’t fall neatly into “male” and female” categories, but this doesn’t take away from the fact that billions of people fall clearly into one or the other and much of their experience of themselves and the world is inseparable from that sex category, even for people of diverse gender identities. I want to talk about that too! I can’t be the only person out there who thinks sex and gender are both real, connected but distinct things. Who has no problem accepting trans women and men and non-binary people for who they are, respecting their rights, identities, pronouns and inclusion in all spaces where gender is the defining category but who also doesn’t want to have to go around pretending I don’t believe in physiological sex, that it’s just some kind of accident that the doctor who delivered me assigned me to the “female” sex.
that all seems fine to me. I’ll be honest I’m not even the most articulate on how exactly to orient trans experience philosophically. Much of that discourse has happened the past several years and I think it’s good but I’ve just been more interested in the politics of it.
But yes agree that pretending physiological sex doesn’t exist is ridiculous. I don’t want my medical providers not knowing what my body is actually like, I just want good healthcare.
Thanks for the response. I definitely agree that the problem isn't limited to trans issues. Liberals are hostile to open discussion on a wide variety of subjects.
I haven't read Shrier, but she lost me when I found out she interviewed parents to make judgments about their kids' transitions. I shudder to imagine what my parents would tell a journalist about my life choices.
i don’t think i finished her book but I read it recently and was sending screenshots to my friends in disbelief that this was the thing causing the whole shitstorm.
"... materialist critiques that have been transmogrified by the Frankfurt School and Gramsci and then given strange postmodern appendages by 90s critical theorists. "
Neomarxists = ILLIBERALS.
Driven by social fragmentation and atomization, such illiberalism is now becoming a faux religion, with witch hunts, smug inquisitors, etc., the goal of which is to destroy actual liberal institutions (based on systematic rationalism) and replace them with illiberal dystopia:
I was thinking about Marxism today and had the thought you could figure out how much someone understands by asking what they think about the 1905 revolution?
I was thinking along similar lines (re: Marxism) if I read your comment correctly. I would estimate that I listen to ~1/3 to half of new episodes and likewise cringe when I hear Rogan repeat the "equal outcomes!" mantra in relation to Marxism. But we have to remember that Marxism is effectively a fringe ideology at the moment. We can moan and complain about this all we want (or you can completely prove me wrong by pointing out the exciting, vital and mainstream Marxists who's names aren't Freddie deBoer! ;) ) but even in grad school (2016-18, PPP track) I couldn't find a fellow student who had a grasp on it, yet alone described themselves as an adherent.
Couldn't libertarians - a movement with what I assume to be far more members and an ideology that seems far more cohesive than the constant infighting among Marxists - bemoan their treatment with Rogan? Save for Dave Smith, who came on the podcast as a Comedian, more so than a libertarian, Rogan seems to have little patience for purely market-based outcomes.
Indoor kids who can't tell Santos from Silva, or Carlin from Chappelle watch an episode or two and are now experts on JRE. They really miss the point.
This was a refreshing take though. And the best thing is that it doesn't matter at all. The vast majority of guests are comics, fighters, or just interesting people. They have a drink or a smoke and talk shit for hours. Joe is the best in the world at making these people relaxed and talking freely.
I think the Cornel West episode was a pretty fair treatment of ideas that would be popular around here.
Joe Rogan reminds me of the guys I went to h.s. with.... I listen a good bit when I read online but not so much his sports. I have heard a few interviews that led me to new people to read. I don't expect him to shape the way I think about things.
I say the following while largely agreeing with your overall take that Rogan is overrated by both his defenders and critics: your critique of Rogan's position on "Marxism" is, to steal a line from Scott Alexander, an isolated demand for rigor.
I think when Rogan, or 98% of people in general, say "Marxism" they mean "communism". And when they talk about the goals of "Marxism" they aren't talking about what Marx said one way or the other, they're talking about the general goals of communists (some of whom may call themselves Marxists). This is a problem of precision for sure, but hardly one that only Rogan is guilty of in general or on this topic specifically.
Also there’s the dilemma of self-ID online. There are thousands upon thousands of mostly young people online who call themselves Marxists with no meaningful conversance on the tenets of the philosophy. All those well meaning kids who eagerly call themselves Marxists are generally just garden variety social justice adherents, using social media platforms to scold, fight, purify, sneer and undermine any hope for working class solidarity. Their poisonous discourse made believable the fatuous notion of “cultural Marxism.” The entire world needs Marxism 101, not just Joe.
This is right, I think—the use of terms like “marxist” “communist” or even “socialist” by people on the left in the online public square tends to just mean “Progressive… except MORE than the rest of you” more than anything else. And I think it’s this cultural group that the Joe Rogans of the world are reacting to more than whatever actual marxism may entail. It’s a shame that this kind of linguistic drift makes useful conversations so hard to have.
There are few more "I need to put down my phone and return to the real world" triggers more than the phrase "cultural Marxism." It's a phrase so asinine anyone with a passing understanding of Marxism would not think to use it. And yet....
You're also completely correct on the issue of Self ID. Most people weren't educated enough on the subject to make distinctions between socialists and Marxists, for example. The army of "centrist Democrats but we curse and are inclusive to demisexuals" going around calling themselves socialists and Marxists and such makes it pretty much impossible.
Astonishing that you don't seem to understand what "cultural marxism" means, it never had anything to do with actual marxism because it means something else.
Yes, I think that's my point. I can be a Christian who, disappointed the Second Coming has not occurred, decide to start preaching that we can only bring this about by glorifying Satan, and indulging in all manner of sin. Only then will our Lord return and be glorified!
That doesn't make me a Satanic Christian. That makes me fucking moron (like Marcuse and Gramsci!). You can't be something by being the negation of it. This is why academics are (rightly) disliked by most people.
Cultural Marxism is just shitty marketing enjoyed by both the left and the right.
"Astonishing that you don't seem to understand what 'defund the police' means, it never had anything to do with actually defunding the police because it means something else."
If a phrase's "real meaning" is wildly unrelated to the phrase itself, somebody has done a very poor job communicating.
I understand the meaning of the term. It’s just dumb and ineffective. If the people deploying that phrase (which seems designed for alarmism in a country where the right wing calls Joe Biden a communist, lol) want their concerns taken seriously they should not use a widely misunderstood philosophy as shorthand. You called it cultural-leftism, which makes a lot more sense. “Cultural Marxism” is like three different rhetorical fallacies in one confusing phrase.
Disagree, sorta. Many "leftists" abuse language all day long.
The article I linked in the my previous comment describes what "cultural marxism" means pretty crisply. A totalitarian, revolutionary ideology that seeks to destroy (depending on the variety) liberal societies, capitalism, or western civilization by creating internal divisions via cultural differences and hyper toxic, radical-extremist ideologies.
(in Robert Kegan's schema, stage 3 vs stage 4 values, low-social-trust vs high-social-trust social forms. Cultural marxism is regression to the low-social-trust social form: neo-feudal and pre-Enlightenment values, typically utopian-rationalism.)
In contrast would be more incremental or evolutionary reform paradigms that attempt to shift the cultural center of gravity from Kegan stage 4 to stage 5.
Stage 5 would be western civilization v2.0
Regression to stage 3 mythic tribalism (which is cultural marxism's goal) is western civilization v0.0
Yes, there is a lot of confusion of terms between "Marxism", "socialism", "Communism", "Leninism", "Stalinism", "Maoism", etc. I'm definitely not a believer in any of those, but I do understand they're not all the same, yet many people talk as if they were.
We have a bigger problem. My Fox viewing parents think Biden is a socialist. To correct them I called myself a socialist, and I'm not. I'm a milquetoast social democrat or democratic socialist. I just want single-payer but can be talked into nationalizing a social media company here, or an oil company there.
Why would I think anything about Bernie Sanders? He is a sell out that was so stupid that he could not see the D-party machine using the southern black political elites being set up to stab him in the back.
The bigger problem is that all of that stuff fits in the general category of class-conflict "leftist" ideology.
Rogan is describing "cultural marxism" or what I call ILLIBERALISM: totalitarianism on the cultural-left.
The cultural-left is a mash-up of "applied" postmodernism and neo-marxism (identity and victim narratives).
ILLIBERALISM and the cultural-left have deep historical roots in utopian romanticism (Rousseau) and the counter-reformation/counter-Enlightenment movements 100s of years ago.
The illiberalism of the cultural-left has now become a quasi-religion that disdains rational thought.
I was in a couple of communist countries in the 1970s (USSR), most of the "left" in the West has no idea what it actually was (a little good and mostly bad).
What I refer to as the "cultural left" is a combination of postmodernism and neo-marxism, they are not "liberals", they are ILLIBERALS and frequently totalitarians.
Real Marxists want class revolution.
Realizing that class revolution didn't happen, Neo-marxists gave up and pivoted to "cultural" revolution: PC, "identity politics", SJW, BLM, Antifa, CRT type stuff, which is little more than dystopian delusions and mental illness.
Such totalitarian cultural-leftism is as successful as it is because the legacy sense making system in liberal societies has been disrupted by techno-economic change and social atomization (the "crisis of meaning" that John Vervaeke discusses).
People need a sense of purpose that liberal, democratic capitalism can no longer satisfy in many cases, so the cultural-left attempts to satisfy, or exploit, that need with ideologically regressive tribalism.
I still say “cultural Marxism” is a muddled and goofy way to describe the phenomenon (cultural leftism is better) but I completely agree on the causes. Crisis of meaning, yes.
The article I linked in the my previous comment describes what "cultural marxism" means pretty crisply. A totalitarian, revolutionary ideology that seeks to destroy (depending on the variety) liberal societies, capitalism, or western civilization by creating internal divisions via cultural differences and hyper toxic, radical-extremist ideologies.
(in Robert Kegan's schema, stage 3 vs stage 4 values, low-social-trust vs high-social-trust social forms. Cultural marxism is regression to the low-social-trust social form: neo-feudal and pre-Enlightenment values, typically utopian-rationalism.)
In contrast would be more incremental or evolutionary reform paradigms that attempt to shift the cultural center of gravity from Kegan stage 4 to stage 5.
[stage 4 is classical modern-rationalism]
[stage 4.5 is postmodernism]
[stage 5 is construct-aware meta-rationalism] [post-postmodernism]
Stage 5 would be western civilization v2.0
Regression to stage 3 mythic tribalism (which is cultural marxism's goal/aim/intention) is western civilization v0.0
In what sense is it isolated? Where can you demonstrate that Freddie does not demand the same amount of rigor in other places? Marxism has a meaning. In fact, 'communism' generally taken to be almost synonymous with Marxism, or Marxist-Leninism, or Maoism, all of which are rooted in Marxism. I don't really understand your criticism here. It is a complete misuse of the word.
This relates to a thought I've had before about liberal political critiques. I think they give reactionary figures too much credit by labeling them dangerous, offensive, problematic, etc. Ultimately, conservative and right-wing positions are dumb, and don't have any compelling arguments in their favor. I think that's a much better approach to them than treating right-wing positions as so compelling that they're "dangerous." Liberals have conceded a lot of intellectual territory to the write by refusing to engage in certain discussions
Not to sound like a high schooler pretending they're too cool to have heard of the thing everybody else is into, but I find essays like this fascinating because I know nothing about Joe Rogan *except* as an abstract cultural phenomenon. I do listen to podcasts, but lacking Spotify, I've heard about him exclusively through other people - some talking about him favorably, some unfavorably, but all seeming to agree that he is, somehow, vitally important to some conversation, somewhere. I can't picture his voice but I know why he's controversial. It's weird.
I very much appreciate the sentence: "[L]ife has taught me that curiosity and incuriosity can live very comfortably together, that in fact often the former fuels the latter, as one’s voracious desire to learn everything new keeps them too busy to invite complications into what they already know." I don't know enough about Joe Rogan to know how true it is of him; but it's put a more personal flaw into words for me.
...And, for the record, I don't know how good any of his other guests are, but I heard Megan Murphy on a different podcast more recently and was disappointed. Like you, I both disagree with her on almost every point and would defend her right to her position and its expression; but I was sold a bold truth-teller silenced by the woke surveillance state, and instead got a litany of the most boring, reductive, obvious gender-critical arguments filtered through a pointed provocation that has turned into outright meanness. It felt to me like even the gender-critical argument has moved far past her at this point. Mileage may vary, of course, but I wonder the extent to which her alleged censorship is her greatest selling point at this point--if there's anything at all about her actual position that made her attractive as a Rogan guest.
Rogan's appeal is exactly that he is more of an intuitive and informal learner and personality, and not an academic.
Rogan's lack of "academic" curiosity, which apparently is pretty authentic, is inherently appealing because "academic" type curiosity is associated with intellectual corruption in the establishment.
See Eric Weinstein's "Glitch in the Matrix", the intellectual establishment has "DISC", a distributed idea suppression complex, and "GIN", gated institutional narratives.
Thus, Freddie, one of the most brilliant writers in the country as far as I can tell, is lucky to even have a relatively obscure, if loyal, audience on Substack, whose popularity and economic viability resulted from the IDW!
I lean gender critical and I thought that Megan Murphy, in her recent Blocked & Reported interview, seemed like kind of a vapid contrarian mean girl (like Anna Khachiyan for ex-feminists). I am interested in a more nuanced philosophical debate about the nature of sex and gender, not in being intentionally mean to trans people just to own the libfems. Murphy seemed to me like someone who needs to retire from her ideological crusade and take some time to reconnect with her own humanity.
most moderates are too spineless to do what she is willing to do. they have a reasonable fear of being set upon by lunatics on the far left. she does not have that fear, thus she becomes an object of fascination for both "sides".
Willing to do what, talk openly and bravely about how to turn any meaningful discussion of transgender identity and culture into a pointless yelling match about semantics? She clearly thinks her ability to hurt people’s feelings gives her an ideological leg up on them - like no one can genuinely hold any position that they have some personal investment in. And I’m saying this as someone who is certainly far from the twitter-orthodox on “trans issues.”
I enjoy Joe Rogan although I only listen to maybe 1 episode a month if that. I did happen to listen to the Megan Murphy one and I think the thing that needs to be addressed is that Murphy is not a serious person, clearly could not make a serious defense of Marxism even if she was still dressed in her leftist costume, and that Joe Rogan was completely aware of that. If I remember correctly, the brief discussion about Marxism wasn’t even really about Marxism it was more about making fun of college kids, particularly Megan Murphy’s former self (which lets face it, is entirely deserving of mockery). I found the Murphy episode a perfect illustration of the “give people a mic and let them show you who they are” principle completely destroying any mystique or power they had in the haziness if your mind. The woman is an idiot, with an annoyingly affected “cool girl” persona who does seems to genuinely dislike and have bigotry toward trans people in a way someone like Rogan does not.
More broadly I think Rogan is both a curious and open minded person and a human who has predisposed interests and opinions and all that seems…fine to me?
I just heard an interview with her on another podcast (Blocked and Reported) and I came away from it thinking she seems like a bit of a dullard. And this didn't have anything to do with her trans positions. She just doesn't seem like a strong thinker.
This may offend some people but I felt the same way about Jordan Peterson. I heard an interview with him once and came away thinking he's the guy you meet at the bar, listen to politely, then make up some excuse to leave.
I listened to that one too, and I agree. I think the argument for mis-gendering on the basis of "biology" is pretty dumb. We don't know people's chromosomes, gentials, or gamete production unless we're really close with them. We base pronounces on people's outward appearance, so it's be pretty confusing to refer to say, Buck Angel, as "she."
She also said she couldn't think of any patriarchal aspects of the US. I'm like... every corporation? The courts? The legislature?
Like, I'm pretty anti-woke but those takes seemed pretty dumb.
Yes, the patriarchy discussion was worse than the Marxism one in my opinion. You seriously spent two decades of your life immersed in feminism and you can’t define patriarchy? Even if you are critical of the concept of patriarchy, it’s not hard to give a basic definition for.
Yeah I think you nailed it. I also find it annoying because - and this goes for all the obsession with pronouns - it seems to defeat their very point. They're just linguistic shorthand. People should not be fighting this much over something that exists just so I don't have to say someone's name each time.
I liked Helen Joyce’s framing of pronouns…happy to oblige as a matter of courtesy as long as it doesn’t extend into a “truth claim” and also lead to absurd situations around safe spaces
There are women in all of those institutions. Patriarchal would be something like the Catholic Church, which does not allow women in positions of authority.
It sounds like you're saying you'll gender people based on how they look like. What if a bearded 6'2 man asked to be called she? What if the same man was wearing a dress? Does it make a difference if they shave or not? I understand your point, but it seems like the controversy really only comes up in cases where outward appearance *doesn't* correspond with the pronouns they are asking for. What should people do in those cases? She brought up Buck Angel, who apparently she has spoken to before--she said she wouldn't misgender him. The disagreement seems to lie somewhere else.
Ditto re: Murphy's B&R interview. There was something bitterly gleeful in her purposeful misgendering - it didn't feel thought-through or principled, it felt like provocation for the sake of provocation, with the added thrill of knowing it hurt or angered a class of people she openly looks down on. At this point in the discussion I think even a lot of gender-critical people know it's more nuanced than chromosomes-- or at least, anyone really interested in the ideas for their own sake doesn't find "nyah nyah I'll call you 'he' regardless of what you wear! cry more!" germane to the discussion anymore. It revealed her disinterest in thinking, to me.
An example I like to think of is Data from Star Trek. Pretty much everyone refers to him as "he," but he's not biologically male in any sense. I think it's pretty clear that we use pronouns to refer to outward appearance. I'm not sure if that's a gender-critical take or not, I really don't understand the battle lines on this one.
Good example. I think the question of when someone "reads" as one gender or another to us is quite personal and involves a lot of subliminal cues we don't even notice - I've noticed, for example, that there are people I have to really fight to remember to gender correctly, and people for whom it never seems like an issue to my mind. This only has so much to do with how well anyone "passes" (it goes for people who use they/them pronouns, too). Knowing my own internal inconsistency on the point, it seems silly to me to interrogate someone's "biological reality" or to treat someone's presentation as trying to "trick" me. That's not to say someone's birth sex isn't relevant in some circumstances, but so long as there's something I don't understand going on behind my own eyeballs re: gendering people, I'm happy to let individuals act as the authority for how I refer to them in pretty much all cases.
"I'm happy to let individuals act as the authority for how I refer to them in pretty much all cases."
Right. The whole mis-gendering thing is another case of "owning the libs" that doesn't really accomplish anything.
I could play Murphy's own game and demand to refer to her as "they" or even "it" until she can prove to me her biological female-ness, through a DNA test or something. But, I won't do that because I'm not an asshole.
I’m sure no one has ever considered or even actually done the whole “calling Meghan Murphy an it” thing before! Brilliant idea. But considering you believe that “misgendering” is this uniquely horrific thing, why would you do it to others?
From my perspective that's a Western inflected cultural choice and it makes sense from a milieu that privileges the individual over society. In Asia for example think it's the exact opposite.
I'm pretty curious as to what evidence we're basing "ivermectin should absolutely not be taken to treat COVID-19" on. I'm not a medical doctor, but my understanding is that if this said "should absolutely not be seen as a cure for" it would be correct. It also seems to me like this is a ludicrous statement for someone who isn't a medical doctor to make. There's lots of doctors, particularly outside the US, who do prescribe it, and although I'm suspicious of being too deferential to expertise I'd trust them more than I would a professor of rhetoric and composition, said with no offense intended.
This just seems like a bizarrely culture warrior statement I'm not used to seeing here. One tribe has decided Ivermectin is an awful horse dewormer. One side has decided it's a secret cure They don't want you to know about. Claiming it's not a dewormer but still should not be taken seems like the same problem: an evidence free assertion designed only to signal. With the added benefit of being more exciting than the bland reality of it being likely useless but unharmful with no real evidence in any direction.
As an aside, the fact that some random medicine no one had heard of before is now a culture war signifier is probably a sign we need to reboot all this shit.
There's nothing approaching a medical consensus here, except, as mentioned below, that it probably isn't effective. There's certainly no evidence that it's harmful, and there's "many medical doctors" making the case that it should be prescribed. This is precisely the type of thing where logic would dictate not taking a strong stand.
I'm not trying to be a dick here. But that sentence felt like it was completely alien, there purely for culture war signaling purposes.
I think the most accurate way of putting it is that we don’t have enough evidence to make a determination yet but what we have seen does not look favorable.
With multiple trials you're almost guaranteed to see some trials that show a positive effect and others that don't. For that reason a single trial is far less valuable compared to being able to examine a corpus of such tests.
I agree. I don’t think that people should take veterinary ivermectin obviously, and I I don’t believe that ivermectin will show any efficacy when all the trials are done. I’m also vaccinated so I’m pretty uninterested in all these alternative treatments. But I haven’t seen anything that shows that ivermectin in human doses is like harmful and should never be taken. It just seems like a fairly safe drug that’s been used for decades that showed some antiviral properties and initial promos that fizzled but then got caught up in our interminable culture wars. I mean obviously veterinary ivermectin should never be taken for covid and maybe that’s what Freddie meant. If Rohan’s doctor prescribed it to him my irritation is more that the rich have the ability to access treatments that aren’t available to regular people, not the drug itself.
Maybe we're splitting hairs a bit? I mean, if it isn't effective in treating Covid, then it shouldn't be taken to treat Covid. Apples are safe to eat, but I don't think they should be eaten to treat Covid.
We actually don’t have enough evidence to make a determination of effectiveness (though it doesn’t look promising). I think that the hysteria of the conversation is out of proportion to the reality. A long-used and very safe drug showed initial possibility of having an effect. It doesn’t seem that crazy to try it on people since we already know the basic safety record of the drug.
If you want to use the apple example, we actually do many things that are the equivalent of eating apples to beat covid, such as masking outside and doing thermal temperature checks at the door. Safe to do but completely useless.
"If you want to use the apple example, we actually do many things that are the equivalent of eating apples to beat covid, such as masking outside and doing thermal temperature checks at the door. Safe to do but completely useless."
My current favorite is the "clean pens" and "dirty pens" bins.
I also remember a medical place giving me a pen and saying I couldn't return it because of COVID. I'm way ahead I guess. I've been keeping the pens for years!
I happen to think it will prove to be an ok adjunctive treatment. It should never have been considered an alternative to being vaccinated. I believe this because I caught a Doctor on TMBS last November, https://twitter.com/EdoajoEric, who was interested in its potential and just wanted more studies done. He at one point joined the FLCCC, then quit because they didn't emphasize, or even mention, the vaccine in their prevention protocol. When he joined there were no vaccines.
It at the least can help with inflammation. And has been shown to bind to the virus in silico. So it may slow down replication. (Your body would still need to learn how to fight it) I at one point was touting observational studies in Africa but a Ivermectin skeptic pointed out several flaws in it. Still think there may be something to glean from the data from a continent that has it widely prescribed for parasites. If I didn't have the vaccine I'd take some upon first symptoms or testing positive. Becuase why not. Its safety profile is impeccable.
The following email notification was timestamped:
Wed 9/22/2021 8:19 PM
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Autochrome 9 [said]
No. I suppose I'd be in a bad mood too if Freddie deleted my comment for showing him such massive disrespect.
Vika S is the illustrator
Yes, this is my bollocks, I'm afraid
"Hi Freddie, I didn't read your shit but here's MY important essay."
LOL!
Fuck off asshole.
Comments that admit they didn't read what they're commenting on will be summarily deleted. Just FYI.
I got a email notification that the above was a response to something I posted. Since you deleted it without any other notification, I don't know/can't recall exactly what the comment was.
So, Bye Bye.
I read most of the article, which was at least 50% overthought tedium (something that is tolerable to some extent given that you are a genius, and Substack content is somewhat of a work-in-progress). I read the first sentence or two of the last 1/3 of the paragraphs and determined that the stuff at the end of the article was just marginally relevant to your main points. James Lindsay does the same thing, he goes on an on in ways that I'm guessing most of his audience doesn't care about or have time for.
Anyways, if you are going to be an asshole, I'll unsubscribe.
In parting, I'll make a simple suggestion: learn something from Rogan about how to appeal to a larger audience.
I literally laughed out loud at this. Really? You're reducing someone to a caricature and then using it to assign shallow insults to him based on your very obviously limited perception?
"His gaze is determined yet vacant, the steady certainty of a man with a limited range of thoughts." Stop. You sound like a struggling novelist and this goes beyond ad hominem. The guy invites on to his podcast - each episode of which consists of ~3 hour uninterrupted conversations - anyone and everyone with anything interesting to say, and you're accusing him of having a "limited range of thoughts."
Yeah, you're right. I was just contemplating a cool illustration and associating it with what I know of JR (which primarily comes from unflattering media coverage). But I obviously don't have the full picture since I don't listen to his podcast, so I shouldn't judge. Anyway, I'm sorry for a dumb comment and I'll delete it.
I applaud the ease with which you apologized for/acknowledged this. I can't recall ever seeing someone else do this on the internet and it gives me hope for humanity. I apologize if I came across as overly combative.
I think Rogan is best at giving someone space to spool out their stories and perspectives, not at analyzing or even debating ideas. Even when he's pushing back on someone he clearly disagrees with, he's not particularly good at it and doesn't seem to do research. But it's really valuable to hear someone expound on their views, right or wrong, for three hours and get past, if they can, the usual talking points.
I'd also note that the episode list is a little misleading in terms of his views, because he does talk about his fairly liberal political views on issues like police misconduct or UBI in the middle of conversations about a different topic, even with his "anti-woke" focused guests.
What I initially liked about JRE is that he is a legitimately curious interviewer. He is not waiting for his turn to talk. Some of the "anti-woke" spin of the show, including trans issues, has been pretty recent. He's been attacked in the press for his fairly mainstream views on Fallon Fox and he's just gotten more and more defensive. It shows up in the guests he picks. Whether this is an emotional reaction or he's trying to drive controversy for more press/visibility, the answer is probably some of both.
There is a clip of him pushing back on Dave Rubin about regulations that is perfect, and shows given time he will change his angle on certain guests. Think he did likewise with Candace Owens. And had a great moment on immigrants and being on team human as well. There are ups and downs.
Great article. I'm more of a fan than you but thats OK. (Because no need to be emotionally overinvested..right?)
I'm a JRE fan because there are a lot of cool guests and good topics. I revel in episodes with Duncan Trussel. Clearly, two men dressed up in space suits talking about various trips and the meaning of the universe isn't for everyone but I think it's great.
Kyle Kulinski gotten on there and reportedly is the one that got Bernie and Dore on there. And even got invited to cover the election with Joe.
It be great if you got on there. Ditto Brihana. I wish Michael Brooks got on their..he had a decent take on Rogan.
But back to me being a fan. My Dad is a bit of a legend in the family for staying up late and carrying on, but also having the kind of conversations you have late at night when there are only a few people left. Really good sessions..yes booze is involved but the conversations finally get beyond the weather, and sports. To me, long form podcasting with an interviewer like Rogan is a formalized version of this different level of conversing.
Now compare that to say Bill Maher. Who was on his show a year or so ago after inviting himself on, clearly frustrated that the buzz has moved on to YouTube and podcasts. Maher had a point. His show, and News has a job. Compress the information people want to hear about. But the counter of that is to do a deep dive into a topic..and that is what you get from JRE>
In general the main reason I casually listen to JRE is because Joe seems like a nice, authentic guy who has some interesting guests. But I like how Freddie shows how close-minded he can be. Another good example of this is UFC fighter pay. Google "Joe Rogan UFC Fighter Pay" and see how he basically parrots the Dana White company line about how the UFC cannot afford to pay its fighters properly despite constantly being confronted with evidence to the contrary. I also really dislike how a lot of media members have tried to turn him into a culture war avatar and wish they would just let him be a stoner podcaster who's good at interviewing with some funny & thoughtful guests .
Good article but a couple quibbles.
While no one wants to get into trans issues a few thoughts: trans or gender ideology has not been particularly well scrutinized within the mainstream media. Looking at what the actual data is or doing research can land you in hot water quick (Singal, Herzog, Littman, etc.).
So it's not just that there is an ideological monoculture. It's that the ideological monoculture is required for the suppositions of the ideology because they couldn't stand to scrutiny within the framework of liberal discourse.
Rogan is beloved in part because he has a platform to puncture these ideas, because again they only need a small amount of scrutiny to be called into serious question. A trans woman MMA fighter will create doubts about core precepts of gender ideology. It's that simple.
This is stand in for (and easily illustration of the fact that) when you get into issues of social contagion, data on criteria for medical management and outcomes, and some other basic things, huge questions arise related to gender identity.
Rogan points in the right direction with easy to understand examples. The issue isn't that Rogan is 'platforming bigots,' it's that these ideas are so fragile that someone like Rogan can easily call them into question.
Regarding the vaccine/ivermectin stuff, there have been a number of public health missteps by elites that should have had more scrutiny and more discussion. Generally there should be robust open discussion about the vaccine that I think would have led to more people feeling comfortable getting it (examples include myocarditis signal for young/men teens and whether 2nd rna vaccine should be given - UK decided not to give 2nd dose, lack of meaningful clinical outcomes for a booster shot, overexaggerating risk to children from delta given we have good data from UK, etc. etc. etc.) The elision of evidence and institutional authority and experts and politics has not been a good thing.
OK, now regarding Marxism, I think only a tiny number of elites are truly interested in Marxism in 2021. What they are interested in is materialist critiques that have been transmogrified by the Frankfurt School and Gramsci and then given strange postmodern appendages by 90s critical theorists. So, you get a shorthand ('Marxists!') that's used by Rogan. But I think the popular explanation of this ideology by Pluckrose/Lindsay and how it has been translated into praxis in institutions and culture by Yang and Rufo is pretty good. In fact, these figures will give you a better account of these intellectual developments in an accessible way than anyone on the Left. So again, Rogan is pointing in the right direction.
I'm not a huge Rogan enthusiast (I listen to maybe 1/10 of his content and I don't follow MMA at all) but I do think some of it is pretty good: specifically I like deep interviews with rock climbers and extreme athletes and hunters et al. as well as some of the comedians.
But it's easy to understand why his political stuff is appealing - it's because he generally points in the direction of what are credible issues that other people are terrified to address and makes you feel sane in the process. This includes even technical issues where I am sure I know much more than he does.
Regarding Covid. I've been trying to wrap my head around the risk to children under the age of 10 and can't find a clear explanation of what the numbers tell us the risk is. What do the UK numbers say? I've seen NPR say < 2% of infections for children result in hospitalization but I think 2% is still scary. But is that the real number? Does that reflect Delta yet?
Been living pretty bubbled up and am beginning to want to let my kids be kids again, or at least reground my resolve with an understanding of the risks. Just had to chide my 5 year old for wrestling with his older cousin at an outside party where all adults were vaccinated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717
From everything that I've read of the UK's data on delta, it is extremely not dangerous for kids. "Kids in hospitals with COVID" are often there for something else and just have a positive COVID test. RSV and the flu are far more dangerous for kids, and kids have been exposed to those for decades without restrictions.
One of the most deranging experiences of my life was that all the major media outlets were pushing hysteric takes on delta transmission with school openings.
'WHAT WILL HAPPEN???'
This was so deranging because the experiment had been run in the UK and the results were extremely reassuring and in 1200, 1500 word pieces they wouldn't mention any of this. They would just role out the same alarmist clinicians and public health experts culled from Twitter and prior pieces who they knew would validate their narrative.
It worked on us. We pulled the kids out of a summer camp and my hours went way down. Perhaps I'm slowly gaining back some sanity. We virtual schooled last year. It was rough. Kids did alright. But stressed us out.
understandable, the media has really been working overtime to scare people -- kids had the option of doing in-person school in roughly a third of American states in the 2020-2021 school year, and in-person students had lower infection rates than kids doing virtual/home learning (in every state where this was studied). this is why schools were effectively never closed in the EU -- the NYT editorial board doesn't control public health discourse there
That BBC article is the first time I even saw the stat of 1/50K being admitted to the ICU. It's all bout hospitalizations in the articles I've seen, which friggin doesn't tell you what you want to know.
There is a slightly "crazy" guy whose internet handle is ZDoggMD (Dr. Zubin Damania), that has some good material on public health, including COVID (he has kids in public school, SF bay area, iirc). Most of his subscribes are in the medical field, but he puts out information for the general public too.
He refers to himself as "Alt Middle", not "left" or "right".
that is correct. the MSM's fear-mongering on COVID has radicalized me, honestly
Thanks. I may be getting some piece of mind back. Pretty sure we'll vaccinate our kids when we get the chance but in the meantime, it be nice not to be in a constant state of worry.
But I do think there is question if natural immunity is >= vaccinated immunity, and children can get it without that much risk...where is the cutoff for being paranoid bout infection vs. throwing infection parties.
it's up to the parent, of course -- imo I won't be throwing infection parties (I have five small children) but am also not worried about them contracting COVID, as all the adults in our life are vaccinated
I was exaggerating to an extent as there is no way my wife, daughter of a virologist, would allow for it. If she heard I said such a thing on comment board I'd be trouble :)
I love your transparency Dennis. I'm glad you can think aloud and ask all your "unacceptable" questions here. These are hard questions for anyone whose faith in MSM and the medical establishment has taken a hit.
one more thing though...between the immune system responding to the spoke protein in isolation...versus the immune system responding to the entire virus...the latter sounds like it would be better..more robust to me. This leaves me a bit unsure about vaccination for the kids when that day comes.
UK and other countries do not recommend vaccination for kids, which makes sense to me -- under age 12, I don't see the case for vaccination (apart from high-risk / obese children)
I am a rando on the internet but here is my take:
Hospitalization numbers can be difficult to parse because of issues related to sampling (what proportion of kids with symptoms get tested for COVID? what proportion of infections are asymptomatic? with universal screening on hospital admission, how many cases are incidental? Etc. etc. etc.)
While you can interpret the data in the most alarmist way possible, it is likely that hospitalization risk is well below 1%.
I am not dismissive of COVID and was very anxious for my parents before they were vaccinated. I am vaccinated myself. I have small children and am generally an anxious parent.
However, I have very little anxiety about COVID as far as my kids go - they are unmasked and unrestricted in terms of activities.
I am lucky enough to have stats/epi background and the fact is that common pathogens (RSV, flu, etc) are MUCH more dangerous to little children.
Quantitatively there just isn't major risk for kids unless they have a serious comorbidity and ANY social, athletic, or educational activity restriction is likely to be more harmful that population-based COVID risk.
With all that said I am sympathetic regarding the anxiety and have close friends and relatives who are very anxious and overestimate the risk for their kids.
Thanks for responding. There is a lack of straight-forward content that offers just an assessment of the numbers we got. Article after article will lead with a human interest story of a sick child, not numbers are up since Delta, but not really give you the numbers. Its been frustrating.
Shouldn't there be a clear breakdown of masked vs. unmasked schools out of Florida by now? Did I just miss it? Good to know about the UK
Yes - the epidemiology is very hard to make sense even for smart people who read a lot in part because of media obfuscation and hysteria.
At this point I think we can say what the overarching COVID public health failures are: the vulnerable weren't well protected and the safe and healthy were overly restricted.
Hopefully, the return to school will provide reassuring data to worried parents.
The illiberals (totalitarians on the cultural left) do not see TDS as a public health threat, but they should.
(slight sarcasm)
It's really odd to see how the trans rights movement has unfolded, with journalists and academics adopting certain positions (some mainstream, some extreme) and canceling anyone who disagrees, while a huge portion of the country isn't even on board with the basics. I think it's ultimately bad for the movement -- they're skipping the persuasion part, and the part where we wrestle with trade-offs and work out something reasonable.
If the gay rights movement had emerged at this particular point in time, we probably would have done the same thing (canceling anyone with reservations). But I don't think it would have helped in the end. The movement was incredibly successful at transforming public opinion in a short time, and I think it's because they thought about how to persuade people. They were very strategic in how they presented gay rights to the public ("we just want to be boring and traditional like you") in addition to the legal strategy. In a perfect world we wouldn't need to persuade conservatives, but I'm grateful that we did because those legal rights have been important for my family.
I strongly disagree with the assertion that the gay rights movement was about "be[ing] boring and traditional like you." Certainly that was a strain of it, but far from the dominant one, and same-sex marriage became the Thing to Get because of the radicalizing nature of the AIDS crisis.
The thing that helps the gay rights movement more than anything else was that we are everywhere. Everyone knows a gay person. You like Joan, don't you? She's gay! etc.
You're right -- I should have said the gay marriage movement. Although I do believe presenting it as traditional was the dominant strategy, especially for the part that had money.
I definitely agree that people coming out made a huge difference in acceptance, not just personal acquaintances but on television shows, etc.
Radical movements are like magnets for mentally ill, dysfunctional people.
Pivoting away from that was probably crucial for success.
It's more than that gay people are everywhere. They are everywhere and they are no different than straight people. They didn't expect an overnight seismic shift in the language and the culture when demanding their rights. They said "you see all these rights you have? We want the same." If gay people were everywhere, and meanwhile straight people had to adopt a new special language to know how to address them and were forced to speak words they didn't believe was true, had to shed their expectation of physical modesty and security in sex-segregated private places, had to pretend that physical difference between men and women didn't exist, had to accept macabre threats of "if you withhold hormones/blockers, your child will commit suicide," I guarantee there would have been far more resistance and Joan would not have been so liked.
Oh. Okay.
Thank you, very well said, I completely agree.
It seems like the logical contradictions began to eat away at gay radicalism, from the inside, like intellectual cancer.
For about 5 years before I retired I started noticing a weird pattern where young gays lied about stuff all the time, for no reason, even if it should have gotten them in trouble with management. I finally realized it was ritualistic, a way to assert "gay privilege" via passive aggression. Management ("PC" goons) almost always made excuses for the liars, and then covered up their actual fuck ups.
The SJW/CRT/BLM thing follows the same pattern.
I knew radical gay activists in the mid 90s that constantly made jokes about being "boring and traditional" suburbanites.
They pivoted over about 10-15 years to being flaming, ILLIBERAL totalitarians on the cultural-left.
Around the time that that pivot took place, I started meeting slightly younger gays that were ideologically opposed to the totalitarian turn, but they were dissidents within larger gay culture at that point. Most are now more or less IDW-aligned.
I agree that was the decisive factor, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think the gay rights movement was highly conservative in its presentation. The two most high profile fights of the 1990-2013 era were the right to join the military and get married. Short of the right to vote for Ronald Reagan what's more conservative than military service and marriage?
I think the problems with trans rights discourse fall into two buckets:
1) There is the political issue of sex versus gender where rights are in conflict: see locker rooms, spas, prisons, rape crisis centers, sports. These are niche areas but someone's rights will be abrogated. This is the type of conflict that is political and should be addressed politically. It is not appropriate for elites to use administrative, legal, and social power to decide political issues outside of explicitly political venues and say 'Trans women are women,' and be done with it. We have institutions for politics - a healthier discourse would be openly political.
2) There are major underlying conceptual problems with trans as a concept. First, there is a question of whether reification of gender is a good thing. I personally think that having more expansive interpretations of gender is preferable. My generational upbringing was that having some personality/emotional traits more commonly associated with women if you are a man and vice versa does not make you of the opposite gender and interpretations as so are based on notions of gender that are overly restrictive. Along these lines reification of gender and associated tropes and stereotypes is not good. Second, the data on social contagion, how these concepts are transmitted through social media, and the new demographics are very concerning. The large number of young girls with psychiatric and developmental comorbidities is particularly disturbing. And this leads to the third point, which is that the older trans scenarios (it was primarily adult men or among the younger persistent gender dysphoria since birth) are now a minority of new diagnoses. This change in population means that often irreversible therapies that are being administered do not have an appropriate basis in evidence. My feeling is that this will all be litigated in the courts the next few years.
I'm not too interested in trans issues - there are a million things that are more important. But the inability to process and adjudicate trans issues in a functional way makes me concerned about our institutions, especially in medicine where there should be clear standards and evidence.
Very well stated.
This is very well stated. Not to be too coldly utilitarian here, but the meta is far more interesting and consequential. There's just very, very, very few trans people. Parts of the debate are super important to the people it affects, but for society it just isn't a big deal.
But the way the debate has unfolded is really, really important. I am an educated professional living in a big, liberal city and I'm easily among the most progressive of my acquaintances on trans issues. That said, if I was open about those thoughts on the internet I'd be subject to banning. That's fucking absurd. This substitution of elite opinion for public opinion, paired with active banning of people from the digital public square, is pretty worrisome. You shouldn't have to be Dave Chappelle to have an opinion on this issue that isn't just whatever GLAAD has put in their latest press release.
Actual trans people are just pawns in some larger, sick power play. Trans activists are mostly kooks that are shooting themselves in the foot, big time.
I'm so fascinated by the continued insistence that issues regarding trans people haven't been scrutinized enough. Jesse Singal was given a cover story in the Atlantic, and he was just this week given space in the NYT to review an anti trans book written by en editor at the Economist. Nearly the entire UK based media is rabidly anti trans. Even the supposedly left wing Guardian has had a staff revolt because senior leadership continues to publish anti trans articles, and a couple weeks ago they edited out pro trans statements in an interview with Judith Butler after publication. The entire Murdoch empire, including the Wall St. Journal and the most popular cable television network, are also rabidly anti trans. This summer there was a wave of Republican governors introducing bills to limit minors ability to seek treatment for gender dysphoria and to play kids sports.
I'm genuinely curious: what level of scrutiny do you think is missing? Because when I hear this sentiment it sure sounds like you are just unhappy that there does exist a few outlets that are genuinely pro trans, even while there are vast numbers who are not.
Why should there be any "pro" or "anti" sites at all? What about just attempting to examine the issue is an objective fashion and letting the chips fall where they may?
Because the issue has been so politicized that objectivity is now impossible.
Impossible at the institutional level? Or the personal?
Objectivity is difficult.
Objectivity tends to resist ideological bullshit.
Emotional reactions and groupthink are easy and encourage ideological bullshit (regressive tribalism).
---
Humans are wired by evolution to be strongly tribalistic because crucial human survival adaptations are eusocial (altruism and social cooperation favor survival in kinship groups).
I think you inadvertently addressed exactly what’s missing: a context for discussing medical evidence that is not immediately coded as pro- or anti- trans. The problem with me even commenting such is that you will probably code me as anti trans. I became curious about this subject because I had a trans family member who had been living as the opposite gender for several years suddenly (to me) decided to detransition. This was a few months before Jesse Sinhal’s Atlantic story and that was the first time I’d ever even heard of people doing such a thing. I honestly thought it was unheard of. I found the story helpful in understanding a bit about my family member and many things in it we’re consistent with her experience (she was not a minor but a very young adult). I still believe trans people are real, valid and deserve to be free of discrimination and are for the most part unlikely to change their minds. But this experience happened to her and our family and the fallout after the Atlantic article was bizarre to me because it was basically saying that the thing that literally happened right in front of my face never happens and was anti trans propaganda. Maybe you are right that the discussion is happening but it’s happening in such an unhealthy way, and polarized in such left/right terms that it is almost worse than not happening at all. I do not think it’s evil or anti trans to talk about evidence based medical treatment, particularly if minors. I do not think it’s evil or bigoted to feel like there needs to be a way to talk about people with physiology and life cycles that fall pretty clearly into a coherent category that used to be called female. It does feel a bit like, to use a cringe buzzword, “gaslighting” to be told that things happening right in front of you aren’t real and that you are just imaging that your body fits into a category that actually doesn’t exists and that wanting a name for it is somehow hateful.
both sides will tell you are that they are discussing the medical evidence objectively. It's up to you to decode which side is telling the truth.
The people who I find are telling the truth are mostly (with very few exceptions like a 5 year old Atlantic article and a book review) not in mainstream right or left media. I’m uninterested in Abigail Shrier’s book because the title alone is a turn off. I’m not interested in bigoted right wing critiques. I’m not super interested in gender critical feminism which starts with the premise of believing gender doesn’t exist at all (when I do think it exists in a physiological - hormones etc - and psychological way).
I honestly don’t know who besides Singalong is writing about it in a fairly non ideological way. (Herzog I mostly like but think she’s definitely more gender critical ideologically).
Haha at the Sigalong autocorrect.
Thanks for clarifying because I was like WTF?
I disagree that Jesse is non idealogical, although I think his ideology is based much more on self promotion and feigned victimization than anything else. There are plenty of people writing non ideologically that disagree with Jesse, but I'm guessing that you don't like their conclusions.
Well you’re right. I might be incorrect in saying he’s non ideological. Everyone has an ideology and his is like, milquetoast liberalism or something but overall it’s less “right wing coded” than most of the trans healthcare critique.
I’m genuinely interested in lots of perspectives. Who do you think is a good non ideological critic if the singal position?
You might like this article by a detransitioner telling her own story: https://www.persuasion.community/p/keira-bell-my-story-4f5?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo2NjE2NjQzLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozOTg1NDU2OSwiXyI6IlducGdUIiwiaWF0IjoxNjMyMTc1OTc0LCJleHAiOjE2MzIxNzk1NzQsImlzcyI6InB1Yi02MTU3OSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.4-EtOMkOEBeKen8ExpasRASCjkLKiwlPu2CQc26ZLQs
OK let's put this in context: are Singal and Herzog media pariahs who were chased out of polite society after their well reported pieces? Was it surprising to you that Singal was given the book review in the NYT? What has Lisa Littman published since her ROGD paper?
This is billed as one the premier civil rights issues of our time. Who inside MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, NYT seems comfortable covering the actual data associated with these issues? Not pro vs anti but just critically looking at the data? Why does it take an Abigail Shrier to cover this topic well?
Regarding the Butler thing, didn't they take her comments out in the context of the spa incident not looking good from the trans-rights end of things? Wasn't that a pro-trans move? Perhaps I'm mistaken - not totally clear on that.
How can they be regarded as chased out of polite society when they have a popular podcast that hosts major mainstream figures, Jesse worked for years at NY Mag and left of his own accord, has been given cover stories at the Atlantic and is asked to review books for the NYT? It seems to me that you are just mad that any of us disagree or don't like Singal, Herzog, and Shrier. There are certainly npeople that disagree with them and mock them, as I think they should be, but it's delusional to pretend like these people have be deplatformed.
Again, just because not everyone agrees with you doesn't make it a free speech issue. I think Jesse Singal is pathetic and boring. I read Shrier's book. It's drivel. There's basically no data in it, it's all anecdotes that read like spooky stories. Me saying this is not "cancellation" it's me disagreeing with you. Get a grip.
You know who has been reviewing the data for years though? Doctors and mental health professionals! And they have come to various conclusions about how best to treat trans people, based in data. Abigail Shrier and Jesse Singal don't like those conclusions though.
They are only chased out of polite society in that mainstream media rarely hosts them and when they do it causes a huge uproar. I mean obviously that only makes them more financially successful in many ways. My concern isn’t at all for the effects on singal personally as he seems to be doing just fine. It’s for the health and future of our culture.
did you miss the part where the NYT invited Jesse to review a book about trans people last week? What on earth are you talking about?
No I specifically mentioned the book review in a comment above.
The goal was to have Singal and Herzog not work for anywhere respectable, and if possible, be chased out of journalism altogether.
Yeah, in retrospect things worked out. But here we are on Substack and Patreon where the thought criminals (Sullivan, Greenwald, de Boer, BRP, and Bari Weiss) are.
And we are here because the institutions (NYT, WaPo, NY Mag, etc. etc. etc.) can't support liberal discourse on a range of issues.
I take G Greenwald's position which is that legacy media is very weak. But still, an influential class still gets their information there, so legacy media is still important. Certainly the effect of these attempted cancellations has less to do with actual punishing the transgressors and more to do with enforcing internal conformity.
I think the NYT is finally realizing this and that capitulating to ideological conformity will hurt their brand and institution long term. When I saw the Singal book review I thought, 'holy shit.' That wasn't your reaction?
My general heuristic - and this is because I'm not particularly ideologically enthusiastic in either direction and have a stats training - is to look to see how coverage and argumentation maps on to what the data is. If there is punishment or attempted punishment for reasonable research or interpretation of research, it tells you that something is wrong.
I'm going to broadly disagree with you in your interpretation of what medical professionals are saying and doing. The evidence guiding treatment is often very poor quality and I expect that all of this will carefully reviewed as litigation makes its way through the courts.
Glenn reviewed Shrier's book and in his own review shared misinformation. He said there were "massive numbers of teens getting irreversible treatments", which isn't true for various reasons. But his article falls apart if that phenomenon doesn't exist because the whole thing is premised on the idea that the trans totalitarians have shut down debate on this important phenomenon.
Listen, you choose to believe that trans totalitarians are shutting down debate and I don't think I'm going to convince you otherwise. I would just suggest that any analysis of power or material conditions will show you something different. Try this: take a look at the wait times to get an appointment at a gender clinic in the UK: https://genderkit.org.uk/resources/wait-times/
Nearly every one of them has over a two year wait to just get in the door, it will be much longer to actually begin treatment. Does that look like a society that is dispensing irreversible treatments to people indiscriminately? A place where the trans totalitarian agenda is ascendant? Because to me it looks like a society where trans people have very little power, and their health is not taken seriously while people like Abigail Shrier tell people scary stories.
Sorry: aren't there 5 million people on waitlists in the NIH? In a country of 70 million people?
"Certainly the effect of these attempted cancellations has less to do with actual punishing the transgressors and more to do with enforcing internal conformity."
Exactly, and it has worked. I would hate to go through what Singal and Herzog went through as I would not have had the stomach to be so hated within my group and my professional world. I would rather just keep quiet, or whisper my true feelings to my partner. Most people don't want to deal with the sort of shunning that Herzog and Singal were both subjected to, for the crime of having written articles that are nuanced but certainly not transphobic. Yes, things have worked out for them in a roundabout way, to their surprise I'm sure!
It was left up to Andy Ngo to actually do some journalism and track down the guy who the cops charged with indecent exposure in the spa debacle.
Jonathan Chait wrote that the last PC movement died because the radicals fatally antagonized mainstream liberals, not conservatives. I fully expect this wave to suffer the same fate and we are probably witnessing the beginnings of that. The NY Times recognizing Singal may just be the beginning of the end versus the recent past where the woke were at their peak.
I viewed the Singal book review in the same way in terms of progressive Kremlinology. Also having Kevin Williamson and McWhorter write stuff has been encouraging.
I can’t speak for the other commenter, but to me the issue is lack of scrutiny among people I’d listen to in the first place, meaning people who share my values. I’m not interested in the opinions of conservatives who don’t think anyone should transition, or who fear-monger about trans women using the restroom. I’d like us to figure out solutions starting from the position that people have a right to transition and be accommodated. (For questions like when and how to treat kids, eligibility for women’s sports, what self-ID means in practice in different situations…)
In lefty queer spaces (that I’m aligned with generally) there’s little discussion of tradeoffs, or the existence of any bad actors ever, or any bad outcomes from medical treatment. I completely understand why activists are defensive and suspicious of people “just asking questions.” But it leaves a gap when the people asking the questions are the ones predisposed to arrive at conservative answers.
I don't disagree. I wouldn't be reading Freddie's blog if I didn't think there was some truth to the idea that left wing (or perhaps more narrowly "liberal") spaces can be hostile environments for having reasonable discussions on multiple issues, trans issues being one of them. There's lots of talk in the trans community that is anti medical, anti science because there is an objection to anything that could possibly be called "gatekeeping". I don't really fall there, but I avoid weighing in because I know I will get called an upper middle class white trans person that has never been medically gatekept or whatever (I came out at 18 years old in Texas fifteen years ago, I certainly have been gatekept, but that's not the point). Same goes for sports, I think there's reasonable questions about the male senior captain of the basketball team coming out as trans and playing in a women's game the next week (although do people really value high school sports results that much? idk). I certainly sympathize with parents of trans kids who just want to do the right thing for their child and not have them regret any irreversible decisions.
Fully on board with all that. I do think most of those are rare, edge cases though, and the way that someone like Jesse Singal endlessly uses his platform to make those edge cases the focal point of the debate is counterproductive. The state of most trans people's mental and medical care isn't getting a cover story at The Atlantic, only the edge case does (I don't know the healthcare politics of the Atlantic generally but I suspect they are not good).
I put someone like Shrier in a different category than Singal because she seems like an average right wing media product in that she is full of shit and an awful writer. I actually encourage people to read her book because it's embarrassingly bad.
I think "it leaves a gap when the people asking the questions are the ones predisposed to arrive at conservative answers." is a good way to put it.
I’m sorry I can no longer find the thread where you recommended Christa Peterson so I’ll put this comment here (I think it’s relevant to the overall discussion). I just searched her and read a blog post of hers critiquing Kathleen Stock which I found I very good illustration of the gaps in our polarized gender discourse. Her critique was one I mostly agree with: that gender critical feminists either pretend they don’t know what gender identity is or are not imaginative and curious enough to be open minded to the idea that gender and gender identity are a real thing. I believe that most people do have a pretty firm gender identity and it probably has physiological as well as cultural roots, meaning it can’t be completely obliterated in a culture that deconstructs gender completely. Or in simpler terms I don’t think gender is completely socially constructed. This is a dangerous thing to believe amongst feminists as it leads into a slippery slope of ideas like “women are nurturers and men can rotate objects in their minds and that’s why women aren’t represented in STEM!” And that’s not exactly what I mean. I mean it as more of an orientation in the world and often one’s body. What is it exactly? I don’t know! I wish we could talk about it in an open way so I could refine my opinion on this! All I know is that I don’t think it’s some sort of woo akin to a soul or just straight up liking dresses though.
Similarly, I get frustrated at the converse effort by some of the loudest voices on the other side insisting that physiological sex is undefinable, irrelevant, in no way defines us and is also largely a social construct. This is just…so obviously false and baffling to me. And I am open to the idea that sex is more complicated than penis vs vagina or what chromosomes or even gametes one has. I think that we can admit that there is a small middle spectrum to physiological sex that doesn’t fall neatly into “male” and female” categories, but this doesn’t take away from the fact that billions of people fall clearly into one or the other and much of their experience of themselves and the world is inseparable from that sex category, even for people of diverse gender identities. I want to talk about that too! I can’t be the only person out there who thinks sex and gender are both real, connected but distinct things. Who has no problem accepting trans women and men and non-binary people for who they are, respecting their rights, identities, pronouns and inclusion in all spaces where gender is the defining category but who also doesn’t want to have to go around pretending I don’t believe in physiological sex, that it’s just some kind of accident that the doctor who delivered me assigned me to the “female” sex.
that all seems fine to me. I’ll be honest I’m not even the most articulate on how exactly to orient trans experience philosophically. Much of that discourse has happened the past several years and I think it’s good but I’ve just been more interested in the politics of it.
But yes agree that pretending physiological sex doesn’t exist is ridiculous. I don’t want my medical providers not knowing what my body is actually like, I just want good healthcare.
Thanks for the response. I definitely agree that the problem isn't limited to trans issues. Liberals are hostile to open discussion on a wide variety of subjects.
I haven't read Shrier, but she lost me when I found out she interviewed parents to make judgments about their kids' transitions. I shudder to imagine what my parents would tell a journalist about my life choices.
i don’t think i finished her book but I read it recently and was sending screenshots to my friends in disbelief that this was the thing causing the whole shitstorm.
Bingo!
"... materialist critiques that have been transmogrified by the Frankfurt School and Gramsci and then given strange postmodern appendages by 90s critical theorists. "
Neomarxists = ILLIBERALS.
Driven by social fragmentation and atomization, such illiberalism is now becoming a faux religion, with witch hunts, smug inquisitors, etc., the goal of which is to destroy actual liberal institutions (based on systematic rationalism) and replace them with illiberal dystopia:
Telletubbies + Idiocracy + Mad Max
I was thinking about Marxism today and had the thought you could figure out how much someone understands by asking what they think about the 1905 revolution?
I was thinking along similar lines (re: Marxism) if I read your comment correctly. I would estimate that I listen to ~1/3 to half of new episodes and likewise cringe when I hear Rogan repeat the "equal outcomes!" mantra in relation to Marxism. But we have to remember that Marxism is effectively a fringe ideology at the moment. We can moan and complain about this all we want (or you can completely prove me wrong by pointing out the exciting, vital and mainstream Marxists who's names aren't Freddie deBoer! ;) ) but even in grad school (2016-18, PPP track) I couldn't find a fellow student who had a grasp on it, yet alone described themselves as an adherent.
Couldn't libertarians - a movement with what I assume to be far more members and an ideology that seems far more cohesive than the constant infighting among Marxists - bemoan their treatment with Rogan? Save for Dave Smith, who came on the podcast as a Comedian, more so than a libertarian, Rogan seems to have little patience for purely market-based outcomes.
Indoor kids who can't tell Santos from Silva, or Carlin from Chappelle watch an episode or two and are now experts on JRE. They really miss the point.
This was a refreshing take though. And the best thing is that it doesn't matter at all. The vast majority of guests are comics, fighters, or just interesting people. They have a drink or a smoke and talk shit for hours. Joe is the best in the world at making these people relaxed and talking freely.
I think the Cornel West episode was a pretty fair treatment of ideas that would be popular around here.
The fact that Adolph Reed and Cornel West were "cancelled" by the "woke" (ILLIBERAL) totalitarians says it all.
Joe Rogan reminds me of the guys I went to h.s. with.... I listen a good bit when I read online but not so much his sports. I have heard a few interviews that led me to new people to read. I don't expect him to shape the way I think about things.
I say the following while largely agreeing with your overall take that Rogan is overrated by both his defenders and critics: your critique of Rogan's position on "Marxism" is, to steal a line from Scott Alexander, an isolated demand for rigor.
I think when Rogan, or 98% of people in general, say "Marxism" they mean "communism". And when they talk about the goals of "Marxism" they aren't talking about what Marx said one way or the other, they're talking about the general goals of communists (some of whom may call themselves Marxists). This is a problem of precision for sure, but hardly one that only Rogan is guilty of in general or on this topic specifically.
'an isolated demand for rigor'. Ii like that line a lot. Going to have to remember it.
Also there’s the dilemma of self-ID online. There are thousands upon thousands of mostly young people online who call themselves Marxists with no meaningful conversance on the tenets of the philosophy. All those well meaning kids who eagerly call themselves Marxists are generally just garden variety social justice adherents, using social media platforms to scold, fight, purify, sneer and undermine any hope for working class solidarity. Their poisonous discourse made believable the fatuous notion of “cultural Marxism.” The entire world needs Marxism 101, not just Joe.
This is right, I think—the use of terms like “marxist” “communist” or even “socialist” by people on the left in the online public square tends to just mean “Progressive… except MORE than the rest of you” more than anything else. And I think it’s this cultural group that the Joe Rogans of the world are reacting to more than whatever actual marxism may entail. It’s a shame that this kind of linguistic drift makes useful conversations so hard to have.
There are few more "I need to put down my phone and return to the real world" triggers more than the phrase "cultural Marxism." It's a phrase so asinine anyone with a passing understanding of Marxism would not think to use it. And yet....
You're also completely correct on the issue of Self ID. Most people weren't educated enough on the subject to make distinctions between socialists and Marxists, for example. The army of "centrist Democrats but we curse and are inclusive to demisexuals" going around calling themselves socialists and Marxists and such makes it pretty much impossible.
Astonishing that you don't seem to understand what "cultural marxism" means, it never had anything to do with actual marxism because it means something else.
This is a fairly good summary:
https://thepolicy.us/cultural-marxism-the-origins-of-the-present-day-social-justice-movement-and-political-correctness-ffb89c6ef4f1
Yes, I think that's my point. I can be a Christian who, disappointed the Second Coming has not occurred, decide to start preaching that we can only bring this about by glorifying Satan, and indulging in all manner of sin. Only then will our Lord return and be glorified!
That doesn't make me a Satanic Christian. That makes me fucking moron (like Marcuse and Gramsci!). You can't be something by being the negation of it. This is why academics are (rightly) disliked by most people.
Cultural Marxism is just shitty marketing enjoyed by both the left and the right.
"Cultural marxism" was the result of the failings of "real marxism".
There is a historical connection.
Both have the goal of destroying western civilization ("liberalism").
Two different victim narratives. They are both victim narratives.
Whose goal?
"Astonishing that you don't seem to understand what 'defund the police' means, it never had anything to do with actually defunding the police because it means something else."
If a phrase's "real meaning" is wildly unrelated to the phrase itself, somebody has done a very poor job communicating.
WTF are you "quoting"?
I understand the meaning of the term. It’s just dumb and ineffective. If the people deploying that phrase (which seems designed for alarmism in a country where the right wing calls Joe Biden a communist, lol) want their concerns taken seriously they should not use a widely misunderstood philosophy as shorthand. You called it cultural-leftism, which makes a lot more sense. “Cultural Marxism” is like three different rhetorical fallacies in one confusing phrase.
Disagree, sorta. Many "leftists" abuse language all day long.
The article I linked in the my previous comment describes what "cultural marxism" means pretty crisply. A totalitarian, revolutionary ideology that seeks to destroy (depending on the variety) liberal societies, capitalism, or western civilization by creating internal divisions via cultural differences and hyper toxic, radical-extremist ideologies.
(in Robert Kegan's schema, stage 3 vs stage 4 values, low-social-trust vs high-social-trust social forms. Cultural marxism is regression to the low-social-trust social form: neo-feudal and pre-Enlightenment values, typically utopian-rationalism.)
In contrast would be more incremental or evolutionary reform paradigms that attempt to shift the cultural center of gravity from Kegan stage 4 to stage 5.
Stage 5 would be western civilization v2.0
Regression to stage 3 mythic tribalism (which is cultural marxism's goal) is western civilization v0.0
Yes, there is a lot of confusion of terms between "Marxism", "socialism", "Communism", "Leninism", "Stalinism", "Maoism", etc. I'm definitely not a believer in any of those, but I do understand they're not all the same, yet many people talk as if they were.
We have a bigger problem. My Fox viewing parents think Biden is a socialist. To correct them I called myself a socialist, and I'm not. I'm a milquetoast social democrat or democratic socialist. I just want single-payer but can be talked into nationalizing a social media company here, or an oil company there.
To gain power, Biden allied himself with cultural-marxists and TDS.
So we now have a political party that is suffering from leadership dementia, with a radicalized wing of people that are mostly mentally dysfunctional.
A good case can be made that actual socialists, of the classic kind, would be far more rational than the totalitarians on the cultural-left.
Lol @ “leadership dementia.” What did you think about Bernie Sanders?
Why would I think anything about Bernie Sanders? He is a sell out that was so stupid that he could not see the D-party machine using the southern black political elites being set up to stab him in the back.
Very dumb.
The bigger problem is that all of that stuff fits in the general category of class-conflict "leftist" ideology.
Rogan is describing "cultural marxism" or what I call ILLIBERALISM: totalitarianism on the cultural-left.
The cultural-left is a mash-up of "applied" postmodernism and neo-marxism (identity and victim narratives).
ILLIBERALISM and the cultural-left have deep historical roots in utopian romanticism (Rousseau) and the counter-reformation/counter-Enlightenment movements 100s of years ago.
The illiberalism of the cultural-left has now become a quasi-religion that disdains rational thought.
I was in a couple of communist countries in the 1970s (USSR), most of the "left" in the West has no idea what it actually was (a little good and mostly bad).
What I refer to as the "cultural left" is a combination of postmodernism and neo-marxism, they are not "liberals", they are ILLIBERALS and frequently totalitarians.
Real Marxists want class revolution.
Realizing that class revolution didn't happen, Neo-marxists gave up and pivoted to "cultural" revolution: PC, "identity politics", SJW, BLM, Antifa, CRT type stuff, which is little more than dystopian delusions and mental illness.
Such totalitarian cultural-leftism is as successful as it is because the legacy sense making system in liberal societies has been disrupted by techno-economic change and social atomization (the "crisis of meaning" that John Vervaeke discusses).
People need a sense of purpose that liberal, democratic capitalism can no longer satisfy in many cases, so the cultural-left attempts to satisfy, or exploit, that need with ideologically regressive tribalism.
I still say “cultural Marxism” is a muddled and goofy way to describe the phenomenon (cultural leftism is better) but I completely agree on the causes. Crisis of meaning, yes.
Don't care.
As I said in another comment:
The article I linked in the my previous comment describes what "cultural marxism" means pretty crisply. A totalitarian, revolutionary ideology that seeks to destroy (depending on the variety) liberal societies, capitalism, or western civilization by creating internal divisions via cultural differences and hyper toxic, radical-extremist ideologies.
(in Robert Kegan's schema, stage 3 vs stage 4 values, low-social-trust vs high-social-trust social forms. Cultural marxism is regression to the low-social-trust social form: neo-feudal and pre-Enlightenment values, typically utopian-rationalism.)
In contrast would be more incremental or evolutionary reform paradigms that attempt to shift the cultural center of gravity from Kegan stage 4 to stage 5.
[stage 4 is classical modern-rationalism]
[stage 4.5 is postmodernism]
[stage 5 is construct-aware meta-rationalism] [post-postmodernism]
Stage 5 would be western civilization v2.0
Regression to stage 3 mythic tribalism (which is cultural marxism's goal/aim/intention) is western civilization v0.0
Yet another definition, from James Lindsay:
applied postmodernism mashed up with neo-marxism
Yes! Nailed it.But easy to see why....if they said "Marxist-Leninism" that would be more clear.
In what sense is it isolated? Where can you demonstrate that Freddie does not demand the same amount of rigor in other places? Marxism has a meaning. In fact, 'communism' generally taken to be almost synonymous with Marxism, or Marxist-Leninism, or Maoism, all of which are rooted in Marxism. I don't really understand your criticism here. It is a complete misuse of the word.
This relates to a thought I've had before about liberal political critiques. I think they give reactionary figures too much credit by labeling them dangerous, offensive, problematic, etc. Ultimately, conservative and right-wing positions are dumb, and don't have any compelling arguments in their favor. I think that's a much better approach to them than treating right-wing positions as so compelling that they're "dangerous." Liberals have conceded a lot of intellectual territory to the write by refusing to engage in certain discussions
Not to sound like a high schooler pretending they're too cool to have heard of the thing everybody else is into, but I find essays like this fascinating because I know nothing about Joe Rogan *except* as an abstract cultural phenomenon. I do listen to podcasts, but lacking Spotify, I've heard about him exclusively through other people - some talking about him favorably, some unfavorably, but all seeming to agree that he is, somehow, vitally important to some conversation, somewhere. I can't picture his voice but I know why he's controversial. It's weird.
I very much appreciate the sentence: "[L]ife has taught me that curiosity and incuriosity can live very comfortably together, that in fact often the former fuels the latter, as one’s voracious desire to learn everything new keeps them too busy to invite complications into what they already know." I don't know enough about Joe Rogan to know how true it is of him; but it's put a more personal flaw into words for me.
...And, for the record, I don't know how good any of his other guests are, but I heard Megan Murphy on a different podcast more recently and was disappointed. Like you, I both disagree with her on almost every point and would defend her right to her position and its expression; but I was sold a bold truth-teller silenced by the woke surveillance state, and instead got a litany of the most boring, reductive, obvious gender-critical arguments filtered through a pointed provocation that has turned into outright meanness. It felt to me like even the gender-critical argument has moved far past her at this point. Mileage may vary, of course, but I wonder the extent to which her alleged censorship is her greatest selling point at this point--if there's anything at all about her actual position that made her attractive as a Rogan guest.
Rogan's appeal is exactly that he is more of an intuitive and informal learner and personality, and not an academic.
Rogan's lack of "academic" curiosity, which apparently is pretty authentic, is inherently appealing because "academic" type curiosity is associated with intellectual corruption in the establishment.
See Eric Weinstein's "Glitch in the Matrix", the intellectual establishment has "DISC", a distributed idea suppression complex, and "GIN", gated institutional narratives.
Thus, Freddie, one of the most brilliant writers in the country as far as I can tell, is lucky to even have a relatively obscure, if loyal, audience on Substack, whose popularity and economic viability resulted from the IDW!
I lean gender critical and I thought that Megan Murphy, in her recent Blocked & Reported interview, seemed like kind of a vapid contrarian mean girl (like Anna Khachiyan for ex-feminists). I am interested in a more nuanced philosophical debate about the nature of sex and gender, not in being intentionally mean to trans people just to own the libfems. Murphy seemed to me like someone who needs to retire from her ideological crusade and take some time to reconnect with her own humanity.
most moderates are too spineless to do what she is willing to do. they have a reasonable fear of being set upon by lunatics on the far left. she does not have that fear, thus she becomes an object of fascination for both "sides".
Willing to do what, talk openly and bravely about how to turn any meaningful discussion of transgender identity and culture into a pointless yelling match about semantics? She clearly thinks her ability to hurt people’s feelings gives her an ideological leg up on them - like no one can genuinely hold any position that they have some personal investment in. And I’m saying this as someone who is certainly far from the twitter-orthodox on “trans issues.”
you seem to have a reading comprehension problem.
she is standing up to the totalitarians on the cultural left.
I enjoy Joe Rogan although I only listen to maybe 1 episode a month if that. I did happen to listen to the Megan Murphy one and I think the thing that needs to be addressed is that Murphy is not a serious person, clearly could not make a serious defense of Marxism even if she was still dressed in her leftist costume, and that Joe Rogan was completely aware of that. If I remember correctly, the brief discussion about Marxism wasn’t even really about Marxism it was more about making fun of college kids, particularly Megan Murphy’s former self (which lets face it, is entirely deserving of mockery). I found the Murphy episode a perfect illustration of the “give people a mic and let them show you who they are” principle completely destroying any mystique or power they had in the haziness if your mind. The woman is an idiot, with an annoyingly affected “cool girl” persona who does seems to genuinely dislike and have bigotry toward trans people in a way someone like Rogan does not.
More broadly I think Rogan is both a curious and open minded person and a human who has predisposed interests and opinions and all that seems…fine to me?
I just heard an interview with her on another podcast (Blocked and Reported) and I came away from it thinking she seems like a bit of a dullard. And this didn't have anything to do with her trans positions. She just doesn't seem like a strong thinker.
This may offend some people but I felt the same way about Jordan Peterson. I heard an interview with him once and came away thinking he's the guy you meet at the bar, listen to politely, then make up some excuse to leave.
I listened to that one too, and I agree. I think the argument for mis-gendering on the basis of "biology" is pretty dumb. We don't know people's chromosomes, gentials, or gamete production unless we're really close with them. We base pronounces on people's outward appearance, so it's be pretty confusing to refer to say, Buck Angel, as "she."
She also said she couldn't think of any patriarchal aspects of the US. I'm like... every corporation? The courts? The legislature?
Like, I'm pretty anti-woke but those takes seemed pretty dumb.
Yes, the patriarchy discussion was worse than the Marxism one in my opinion. You seriously spent two decades of your life immersed in feminism and you can’t define patriarchy? Even if you are critical of the concept of patriarchy, it’s not hard to give a basic definition for.
Yeah I think you nailed it. I also find it annoying because - and this goes for all the obsession with pronouns - it seems to defeat their very point. They're just linguistic shorthand. People should not be fighting this much over something that exists just so I don't have to say someone's name each time.
I liked Helen Joyce’s framing of pronouns…happy to oblige as a matter of courtesy as long as it doesn’t extend into a “truth claim” and also lead to absurd situations around safe spaces
Courtesy is a matter of personal preference. Mandating it is a step down a slippery slope.
There are women in all of those institutions. Patriarchal would be something like the Catholic Church, which does not allow women in positions of authority.
It sounds like you're saying you'll gender people based on how they look like. What if a bearded 6'2 man asked to be called she? What if the same man was wearing a dress? Does it make a difference if they shave or not? I understand your point, but it seems like the controversy really only comes up in cases where outward appearance *doesn't* correspond with the pronouns they are asking for. What should people do in those cases? She brought up Buck Angel, who apparently she has spoken to before--she said she wouldn't misgender him. The disagreement seems to lie somewhere else.
Ditto re: Murphy's B&R interview. There was something bitterly gleeful in her purposeful misgendering - it didn't feel thought-through or principled, it felt like provocation for the sake of provocation, with the added thrill of knowing it hurt or angered a class of people she openly looks down on. At this point in the discussion I think even a lot of gender-critical people know it's more nuanced than chromosomes-- or at least, anyone really interested in the ideas for their own sake doesn't find "nyah nyah I'll call you 'he' regardless of what you wear! cry more!" germane to the discussion anymore. It revealed her disinterest in thinking, to me.
An example I like to think of is Data from Star Trek. Pretty much everyone refers to him as "he," but he's not biologically male in any sense. I think it's pretty clear that we use pronouns to refer to outward appearance. I'm not sure if that's a gender-critical take or not, I really don't understand the battle lines on this one.
Good example. I think the question of when someone "reads" as one gender or another to us is quite personal and involves a lot of subliminal cues we don't even notice - I've noticed, for example, that there are people I have to really fight to remember to gender correctly, and people for whom it never seems like an issue to my mind. This only has so much to do with how well anyone "passes" (it goes for people who use they/them pronouns, too). Knowing my own internal inconsistency on the point, it seems silly to me to interrogate someone's "biological reality" or to treat someone's presentation as trying to "trick" me. That's not to say someone's birth sex isn't relevant in some circumstances, but so long as there's something I don't understand going on behind my own eyeballs re: gendering people, I'm happy to let individuals act as the authority for how I refer to them in pretty much all cases.
"I'm happy to let individuals act as the authority for how I refer to them in pretty much all cases."
Right. The whole mis-gendering thing is another case of "owning the libs" that doesn't really accomplish anything.
I could play Murphy's own game and demand to refer to her as "they" or even "it" until she can prove to me her biological female-ness, through a DNA test or something. But, I won't do that because I'm not an asshole.
I’m sure no one has ever considered or even actually done the whole “calling Meghan Murphy an it” thing before! Brilliant idea. But considering you believe that “misgendering” is this uniquely horrific thing, why would you do it to others?
From my perspective that's a Western inflected cultural choice and it makes sense from a milieu that privileges the individual over society. In Asia for example think it's the exact opposite.
Data is anatomically... ahem... correct. ;)
Oh God don't remind me...
Are they still trying to tilt-up the sex robot industry, or did that idea go flaccid?
Just ask Tasha Yar.
And the Borg Queen.
I'm pretty curious as to what evidence we're basing "ivermectin should absolutely not be taken to treat COVID-19" on. I'm not a medical doctor, but my understanding is that if this said "should absolutely not be seen as a cure for" it would be correct. It also seems to me like this is a ludicrous statement for someone who isn't a medical doctor to make. There's lots of doctors, particularly outside the US, who do prescribe it, and although I'm suspicious of being too deferential to expertise I'd trust them more than I would a professor of rhetoric and composition, said with no offense intended.
This just seems like a bizarrely culture warrior statement I'm not used to seeing here. One tribe has decided Ivermectin is an awful horse dewormer. One side has decided it's a secret cure They don't want you to know about. Claiming it's not a dewormer but still should not be taken seems like the same problem: an evidence free assertion designed only to signal. With the added benefit of being more exciting than the bland reality of it being likely useless but unharmful with no real evidence in any direction.
As an aside, the fact that some random medicine no one had heard of before is now a culture war signifier is probably a sign we need to reboot all this shit.
"is a ludicrous statement for someone who isn't a medical doctor to make"
This is precisely the deference to authority Rogan and his admirers mock, and of course there are many medical doctors who makes precisely that case.
Okay, but, I'm not a Joe Rogan listener.
There's nothing approaching a medical consensus here, except, as mentioned below, that it probably isn't effective. There's certainly no evidence that it's harmful, and there's "many medical doctors" making the case that it should be prescribed. This is precisely the type of thing where logic would dictate not taking a strong stand.
I'm not trying to be a dick here. But that sentence felt like it was completely alien, there purely for culture war signaling purposes.
Here's an RCT on ivermectin: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389
Maybe there's other evidence I'm not aware of it, but it seems like it doesn't meet the basic standards for drug effectiveness wrt to Covid
I think the most accurate way of putting it is that we don’t have enough evidence to make a determination yet but what we have seen does not look favorable.
With multiple trials you're almost guaranteed to see some trials that show a positive effect and others that don't. For that reason a single trial is far less valuable compared to being able to examine a corpus of such tests.
I agree. I don’t think that people should take veterinary ivermectin obviously, and I I don’t believe that ivermectin will show any efficacy when all the trials are done. I’m also vaccinated so I’m pretty uninterested in all these alternative treatments. But I haven’t seen anything that shows that ivermectin in human doses is like harmful and should never be taken. It just seems like a fairly safe drug that’s been used for decades that showed some antiviral properties and initial promos that fizzled but then got caught up in our interminable culture wars. I mean obviously veterinary ivermectin should never be taken for covid and maybe that’s what Freddie meant. If Rohan’s doctor prescribed it to him my irritation is more that the rich have the ability to access treatments that aren’t available to regular people, not the drug itself.
Maybe we're splitting hairs a bit? I mean, if it isn't effective in treating Covid, then it shouldn't be taken to treat Covid. Apples are safe to eat, but I don't think they should be eaten to treat Covid.
We actually don’t have enough evidence to make a determination of effectiveness (though it doesn’t look promising). I think that the hysteria of the conversation is out of proportion to the reality. A long-used and very safe drug showed initial possibility of having an effect. It doesn’t seem that crazy to try it on people since we already know the basic safety record of the drug.
If you want to use the apple example, we actually do many things that are the equivalent of eating apples to beat covid, such as masking outside and doing thermal temperature checks at the door. Safe to do but completely useless.
"If you want to use the apple example, we actually do many things that are the equivalent of eating apples to beat covid, such as masking outside and doing thermal temperature checks at the door. Safe to do but completely useless."
My current favorite is the "clean pens" and "dirty pens" bins.
I also remember a medical place giving me a pen and saying I couldn't return it because of COVID. I'm way ahead I guess. I've been keeping the pens for years!
I happen to think it will prove to be an ok adjunctive treatment. It should never have been considered an alternative to being vaccinated. I believe this because I caught a Doctor on TMBS last November, https://twitter.com/EdoajoEric, who was interested in its potential and just wanted more studies done. He at one point joined the FLCCC, then quit because they didn't emphasize, or even mention, the vaccine in their prevention protocol. When he joined there were no vaccines.
It at the least can help with inflammation. And has been shown to bind to the virus in silico. So it may slow down replication. (Your body would still need to learn how to fight it) I at one point was touting observational studies in Africa but a Ivermectin skeptic pointed out several flaws in it. Still think there may be something to glean from the data from a continent that has it widely prescribed for parasites. If I didn't have the vaccine I'd take some upon first symptoms or testing positive. Becuase why not. Its safety profile is impeccable.
"The spaces without that constant fear of sitting at the wrong table feel refreshing"
I really liked this line. "Constant fear of sitting at the wrong table" is very much the Twitter vibe nowadays, at least in certain areas.