A good article in The Atlantic about the protesters in Oregon:

Many progressives have become fluent in the arguments for police restraint, restraint about labeling terrorism, and reforming sentencing laws. The challenge now is for them to translate those arguments into a case where the subjects are not so sympathetic and don’t agree with them.

People are sticking up for their comrades, protesting the excessive criminalization of an old agricultural practice, standing together in solidarity against a formidable source of power, trying hopelessly to resist the rootlessness, atomization and the broken connection between people and land that characterize late capitalist societies.

Yes, they wear off-putting hats and many of them are fat and ugly. They are uncouth and say stupid things. They also tend to sound like major assholes. Is that why they get no support from progressives? Because of what they say? Even though they haven’t harmed anybody? Are words again more important than deeds? Or are spurious identity categories more important than anything else?

In the meanwhile, a bunch of rapists in Cologne gets endless “let’s not jump to conclusions”, “let’s not generalize.” Actual rapists who did horrible things to human beings.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel no compassion for the Oregon cowboys. I’m not a compassionate person by nature, and I prefer to be judgmental rather than empathetic. To me, if the cowboys are incapable of engaging with figures of authority in a more productive way, I say, screw them.

It’s the lack of logic and clear organizing principles that gets to me, not the plight of the unattractive cowboys. And here I see no logic.

This isn’t funny but I can’t stop laughing. Poor Echidne feels so terrified of her own timid reporting of the group sexual assault in Cologne that she’s issuing panicked disclaimers lest anybody suspect her of nor being multicultural enough.

You’ve got to love the mousy little feminists of today who are so scared of contradicting some pseudo-Liberal dogma that every nugget of feminist thought they allow themselves to entertain gets snowed under a mound of apologies and disclaimers.

The reason why I picked up Dreger’s new book is that I know her work on the intersex, and that’s a subject that interests me since the time I did research on it. So I wanted to give a brief overview of what’s happening in terms of intersex because this is a very important subject that doesn’t get discussed often enough.

Quite a few people (seriously, a lot more than you think) are born with genitals that don’t correspond to “the norm.” Of course, the question is who defines “the norm” and, more importantly, why it’s necessary to define it at all, but that question rarely gets asked.

When, for instance, a girl is born with a clitoris that is “too large”, the medical orthodoxy suggests that she might, as a result of this unusual characteristic, be too “masculine” and – oh, horror! – not want to play with dolls. And as a result of that horrible eventuality, she might not want to have babies when she grows up. And of course, this enormous tragedy needs to be prevented by operating on the poor newborn and slicing up her clitoris. I kid you not, this is the actual medical consensus.

Little boys with unusual genitals are subjected to the same shit, even though these operations often result in partial loss of  function and a sky-rocketing likelihood of constant infection.

Mind you, these kids are initially absolutely healthy. The only reason to subject them to these operations (that often damage their health for life) is the medieval belief that “imperfect” sex organs will somehow prevent them from adopting very traditional gender roles in adulthood. Because people with “perfectly normal” genitals always invariably adopt the most traditional gender roles. Obviously.

Just think about it. Actual genital mutilation. Happens every day. On this continent. And we barely ever hear about it.

[To be continued.  .  .]

In the midst of her struggle to restore the reputations of the persecuted scholars, Dreger came across an outrageous story about an 82-year-old researcher who’d been kicked out of Cornell for fraud and who was conducting weird and extremely harmful eugenics experiments on pregnant women.

The freak made hundreds of pregnant women take placenta-crossing steroids with the goal of modifying the genitals of the fetuses. And, of course, she never told them that the “treatment” was untested and very likely to cause birth defects. Instead, she lied to the women and completely misrepresented what she was doing.

One would think that if it’s so easy to ruin an academic for saying something that for some reason might disturb somebody, it should be real easy to shut down a bizarre experiment on unsuspecting pregnant women. Right?

Wrong.

Dreger discovered that the same politicians, journalists, academics, and online discussion board participants who pilloried an anthropologist for describing how indigenous Amazonians liked to get drunk had no interest in the harm that another academic was actually doing to actual women. Moreover, a friend of the crazed eugenicist was conducting experiments to establish if a vibrator would cause arousal in 5 – year-old girls*. Yes, seriously. But there was no act of Congress condemning this freak while there was one condemning a scholar who wrote that different victims of pedophiles sustained different degrees of harm.

In a contest for public attention, “said something people weren’t prepared to hear” won over “did something very dangerous to people” every single time. The online outrage machine reacts very well to soundbites that people can get mortally offended about. Nothing is easier than misrepresenting somebody’s scholarship in order to sink them. When the maligned scholar tries to explain what was actually said, the outraged consumers will have moved on to a fresh cause for shared anger.

Maybe it makes more sense for us all collectively to allow more space for people to say unexpected, maybe even disturbing things and censor harmful actions a lot more than we censor words.

* In the next post, I will explain what the declared purpose of these experiments was. Prepare to be floored.

The municipal leadership of Cologne responded to the gang sexual assault of over 80 women with a predictably victim-blaming suggestion:

The crisis management team said prevention measures should include a code of conduct for young women and girls, and Mayor Reker said the existing code of conduct will be updated online.
The suggested code of conduct includes maintaining an arm’s length distance from strangers, to stick within your own group, to ask bystanders for help or to intervene as a witness, or to inform the police if you are the victim of such an assault.

Yes, those stupid broads. Instead of observing a code of conduct, they went and provoked the rapists by their lewd running around unaccompanied and their obnoxious getting into the personal space of the innocent attackers. Of course, the rapists were forced to defend themselves from these scary women by extending their arms and trying to maintain distance. It’s not their fault if the stupid women ran into their hands with their nasty orifices!

I think it’s time to give out awards to Cologne rapists who valiantly beat back an assault of the terrifying women who can’t even observe a simple code of conduct.

This is why I’m so ambivalent about Bernie: when he talks about postal-banking, he addresses people like me. I know what it’s like to have a bank take your last $200 and pile an overdraft on top of an overdraft until you have no idea what’s happening and how to get out of the hole. And at such times, I dig Bernie.

But when he begins to rant about the r-r-revolution, he doesn’t speak to me any longer. Instead, he addresses those spoiled little brats who never had their checking account application denied and never saw a column of $-125 marked in red on their statement.

I want some real change, something concrete, not a bunch of silly fantasies that get a bunch of sated rich kids all hot and bothered but do nothing else.

A really brilliant idea is Bernie Sanders’ plan for a postal-banking system. It would help so many people in crucial ways, and it’s not like anybody can reasonably object to it. Except for the owners of those horrible, shady payday loan places.

Finally, a European feminist has woken up and noticed the horrifying story of the gang sexual assault over a thousand men committed against several dozen of women in Cologne.

Of course, the feminist in question dedicates more space to “a dilemma for those who support both women’s rights and refugee rights”, “anti-immigrant parties”, “anti-refugee sentiment”, and Germany being “a patriarchal country” than to analyzing what made this horrible crime possible. But at least women get a mention. That’s already enormous progress given how bored today’s feminists are with everything that has to do with women.

The times when scholars were persecuted for doing research, advancing the cause of knowledge and contradicting all kinds of ignorant orthodoxy are far from over, as Alice Dreger demonstrates in her brilliant book Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science.

Dreger investigated some of the most notorious controversies surrounding dissident academics in recent years and discovered that a scholar who happens to publish research that departs, even by half an inch, from the rigid formulations that the ignorant public is comfortable with should prepare for the most vicious persecution imaginable.

The scholars Dreger met in the course of writing the book received death threats, saw their minor children persecuted and abused, were accused of the most egregious crimes (including child rape and genocide) without a shred of proof, and saw their relatives viciously harassed and their careers destroyed for no other reason than publishing (or trying to publish) their academic research.

The saddest part of this story of persecution are the kinds of research that merited this horrible backlash. When you look at what the dissident scholars tried to argue, the most striking thing is how bland and I’d even say vapid their ideas are. Some examples of these supposedly scary controversial ideas are under the fold.

Continue reading “Alice Dreger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger: A Review, Part I” →

I’ve always despised the American Anthropological Association (AAA) but I’m only now discovering what a cesspool of pathetic, stupid, vicious little creatures it is. I now have a new-found admiration for the MLA because, for all our faults, we don’t stoop to the lows of the AAA.

The field of anthropology is dying not only because the small communities it used to study no longer exist in the kind of isolation that makes studying them of value to anthropology but also because the field stopped doing scholarship and started doing ideology. And that never works.