In English-speaking countries, intensity is a sign of being low-class. People who speak loudly, excitedly, wave their hands around a lot, make a lot of ruckus, exhibit a lot of public emotion are more likely to be found in a trailer park than at an expensive restaurant or a social gathering of academics.

People of higher social classes, on the other hand, speak monotonously, don’t gesticulate very actively, and exhibit muted affect in public.

In Russian-speaking societies, it’s the other way round. Unless they get violently drunk, the humble classes speak quietly and monotonously, their public affect is flat, their speech is uninflected, their movements are constricted. One of the reasons they get drunk is to allow themselves to step outside of these boundaries.

Members of intelligentsia, on the other hand, speak loudly, excitedly, their emotions effervesce, they easily become overwrought. They make more noise discussing Silver Age poetry than an episode of Maury. Emoting in a public space is an entitlement of their social status.

This is a result of a very different philosophy of social class. English speakers value self-control and self-discipline so much that it becomes its own reward. Russian-speakers impose self-control as punishment on the less deserving.

Surgical interventions aimed at correcting “weird looking” genitals of infants are not even the worst method of “normalizing” the intersex. There are doctors who believe in starting treatment early in gestation to ensure that babies are born without any funky and unconventional sex organs. For this purpose, they give pregnant women steroids that are supposed to prevent their future babies from being intersex.

“But wait,” you will say. “How can anybody know if a fetus will turn into an intersex baby?”

And you’ll be right. Nobody can know. The absolute majority of fetuses that get doused with these steroids run no risk of being intersex. They are subjected to this drug for no reason at all. But they do run the risk of serious health consequences, including mental retardation and all kinds of disorders.

And as for those fetus receptacles that are not even human we call “pregnant women”, nobody cares about the danger of pumping them full of entirely unnecessary drugs for the dubious benefit of maybe catching a fetus that might have a slightly differently shaped genital area.

The only place where the long-term effects of this methodology were actually studied is Sweden. The results were so disturbing that the whole thing was banned immediately. In the US, however, the FDA keeps approving the treatment and the NIH keeps funding it in spite of overwhelming evidence that the pregnant women to whom this shit is administered are never warned about the dangers and are actually lied to egregiously.

Here is a link to the website where people who are fighting this insanity gather relevant information.

Russian Liberals are also making excuses for the Cologne rapists. But at least there is a clear logic behind their position: anything bad that can be attributed to immigrants in Europe makes Putin happy. And their job as Liberals is to contradict Putin. Not that this excuses the woman-hating assholery of their position.

The only actual difference I’m noticing is that in Russian-speaking media, only men justify these sexual assaults. And in English-speaking media it’s mostly women.

I’m wondering in how many languages I will hear the narrative of “This is just their culture, we have to be understanding. And it’s not them, anyways. It was all a setup by neo-Nazis. And if it wasn’t, then this is the behavior they picked up from Germans.”

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.