You tell ’em, Joe

The New Neo Posted on by

Our brilliant leader has a July 4th weekend message:

Because oil prices are arbitrary. Because companies shouldn’t be able to charge more than what they’re paying for the product. Because the federal government should be able to tell companies how to set their prices.

Hey, I’ve got a better idea, Joe. Why don’t you nationalize the oil/gas industry? Then you can make it all better. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how ungreedy the oil and gas companies were during Trump’s time in office, and how their greed ramped up when you came to power?

By the way, it’s always a time of war somewhere on earth, but when last I looked the US was not at war – except maybe a cold civil war. And if the world is in global peril, you’ve certainly done your bit to add to the problem.

But never fear, China approves:

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Roger L. Simon on the SCOTUS decision that limits the power of the EPA.

(2) A Texas court says that the state’s 1925 abortion law can go into effect. The 1925 law criminalized abortion in that practitioners could be jailed, but the court blocked that aspect of the old law. Now it just opens practitioners to civil suits. This really has to do with the timing that applies to a new “trigger law” in Texas banning abortion from conception, to take effect 30 days after a SCOTUS decision. This is about what law is controlling in the meantime.

That Texas trigger law does allow exceptions “save the life of a pregnant patient or prevent ‘substantial impairment of major bodily function.'” I’m not sure how that will be interpreted, but it seems to me that its intent is to prevent psychological reasons from becoming an excuse to perpetuate abortion on demand. Neighboring New Mexico will almost certainly become a haven for Texas residents who want an abortion, and there will be agencies and charities that will be planning to help poorer women travel to New Mexico or other states for that purpose.

(3) Is it really the case that most people’s natural hand color is the same as their natural face color? See this for a discussion that seems to assume that this is generally so. My face and hands are not the same color, except in a very general sense. By the way, I don’t use foundation and never have except for the stage. I can’t stand the feel and the look of it.

(4) Here’s a very disturbing case of a mother convicted of first degree murder for allowing her child to starve on a mostly vegan diet (the father will be tried as well):

The O’Learys told police after Ezra’s death that the family followed a strict vegan diet, eating only raw fruits and vegetables, but that the toddler was also fed breast milk.

Closing arguments in Sheila O’Leary’s case began early Tuesday with jurors beginning deliberations shortly after noon.

“This child did not eat. He was starved to death over 18 months,” said Francine Donnorummo, Special Victims Unit chief at the State Attorney’s Office.

Earlier, the mother had been enrolled (with a previous husband) in parenting classes because her older children had failure to thrive.

[The prosecutor] added that O’Leary told detectives Ezra hadn’t eaten for a week and that he was having trouble sleeping the night prior to his death.

“She made choices that killed her child,” Donnorummo said.

She repeated that this took place over a prolonged period of time.

This is a very strange case, and I’d need more information to really understand what happened here. But it seems to me that the facts really support a criminal negligence and/or neglect verdict, perhaps some lesser manslaughter charge, but not murder. O’Leary said the child had been fed raw fruits and vegetables and also breast milk. Breast milk can sustain an 18-month-old in good health without supplemental feeding, if the child can get enough milk in the normal way. This definitely did not occur here.

(5) Talks with Iran are going swimmingly. Not.

Doctors, trans surgery, and language

The New Neo Posted on by

First, a bit of language clarification. When Jordan Peterson called the doctor who removed Ellen/Elliot Page’s breasts a “criminal doctor,” he wasn’t necessarily saying that the doctor was violating a law and should be tried and jailed. If a person wanted to say that, the word “criminal” would be used as a noun as in: this doctor is a criminal. Or, if it is used as an adjective, it would have to be something like: this doctor has violated the following criminal statute. Used the way Peterson used it, it could easily be interpreted as having the meaning deplorable or disgraceful. You can see that usage in definition number four here for the use of “criminal” as an adjective.

I believe that Peterson was calling this act of removing healthy breasts disgraceful and deplorable because it is an exception to the general rule of a doctor not removing a healthy organ or body part. Doctors remove diseased body parts all the time. But it’s not usually done for psychological reasons, except for things like sex change (or, as Twitter would prefer, sex affirmation) operations. Removing a bump in the nose, or sculpting a chin, or even breast reduction surgery (where a portion of healthy tissue is removed), is not the same as removing the thing in its entirety.

Should people be allowed to make the more extreme decision of removing an entire body part that is not ailing, and have a doctor acquiesce and perform such a surgery? At present, they certainly have that right, but it didn’t used to be that way. When I was a kid I first learned about Christine Jorgenson, who had gone to Copenhagen in 1952 to get sex-change surgery because it wasn’t available in the US. And even when it became available in the US, for many years it was rare and only approved after a long period of time living as the opposite sex and all sorts of psychological screening. Those days are gone, gone, gone.

The analogy some people make is to those suffering from body integrity identity disorder. At present, physicians do not fulfill the desires of such people, and it might even be considered criminal of them to do so:

The term body integrity identity disorder (BIID) describes the extremely rare phenomenon of persons who desire the amputation of one or more healthy limbs or who desire a paralysis. Some of these persons mutilate themselves; others ask surgeons for an amputation or for the transection of their spinal cord. Psychologists and physicians explain this phenomenon in quite different ways; but a successful psychotherapeutic or pharmaceutical therapy is not known. Lobbies of persons suffering from BIID explain the desire for amputation in analogy to the desire of transsexuals for surgical sex reassignment. Medical ethicists discuss the controversy about elective amputations of healthy limbs: on the one hand the principle of autonomy is used to deduce the right for body modifications; on the other hand the autonomy of BIID patients is doubted. Neurological results suggest that BIID is a brain disorder producing a disruption of the body image, for which parallels for stroke patients are known. If BIID were a neuropsychological disturbance, which includes missing insight into the illness and a specific lack of autonomy, then amputations would be contraindicated and must be evaluated as bodily injuries of mentally disordered patients. Instead of only curing the symptom, a causal therapy should be developed to integrate the alien limb into the body image.

As far as I know, this term and illness has not been politicized, and so the prohibition against amputation is still in place.

I believe that the justification for removing healthy organs for doctors operating on trans people is that psychological health is involved, and in some cases refusal to remove would precipitate a suicide on the part of the person seeking such surgery. What of suicides afterwards, which also happen? Or is this merely a question of personal autonomy? Should people and doctors be allowed to do anything the person might want?

This might be as good a place as any to deal with the use of the term sex assigned at birth, used by trans activists and their supporters to mean the sex of the baby at birth. What is this word “assigned” about? It seems to indicate something arbitrary and perhaps temporary, which for the vast vast vast majority of human beings it is not.

I don’t know the history of the term as far as the activists go, but I suspect it comes from a different phenomenon in which it actually was quite appropriate. It used to be reserved for the rare situation in which a child was born with ambiguous genitals or hermaphroditic genitals. Sometimes the “assignment” was somewhat arbitrary and it emerged later on that the assignment had been the wrong one. There are a number of medical conditions that can cause such problems, and for some of them what seems to be the case at birth ends up being reversed at puberty when certain hormones kick in. One example of the latter phenomenon is Reductase 2 deficiency. There are others. In such cases, the word “assigned at birth” is appropriate. But as I said, they are rare.

The “genius” of the activists is the transfer of the concept to all births, or their attempt to do so. It is the classic leftist move of which Orwell was so acutely aware, the idea that changing language can help change thought.

Twitter suspends Jordan Peterson: why?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s what Peterson tweeted that got him suspended:

In the tweet prompting Twitter’s suspension, Peterson wrote, “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”

Twitter wrote that Peterson had violated its rules for “hateful conduct,” apparently because used Page’s given name; Page now goes by Elliott. He also referred to Page as “her,” thus implying Page is a woman.

One of Peterson’s aims has long been to resist compelled speech. That’s why he was bound to run into Twitter censorship sooner or later. I’m not sure it’s his first time, either, but I can’t imagine him retracting or changing what he wrote. I think one reason he wrote it may have been to purposely mount such a challenge to Twitter and see what would happen. If Twitter compels him to call the former Ellen Page “Elliott,” and to also refer to Page with the pronoun “he,” I would imagine Peterson would object for the obvious reasons. If he wanted to do it of his own free will, fine, but he does not want to be forced to say something he does not believe.

Peterson is a big fan of Solzhenitsyn, who wrote: “Live not by lies.” Here’s an excerpt from a book called The Solzhenitsyn Reader:

On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested, February, 12, 1974, he released the text of “Live Not by Lies.” The next day, he was exiled to the West, where he received a hero’s welcome. This moment marks the peak of his fame. Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urges Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies. Even the most timid can take this least demanding step toward spiritual independence. If many march together on this path of passive resistance, the whole inhuman system will totter and collapse.

For Peterson – if I understand him correctly, having watched a fair number of his videos – the important thing here is not what he calls Page. It’s why. We all are being required to acquiesce in what Peterson considers the fiction that Page is a man and always was. Certainly the latter – that Page was born a man and has always been a man – is something manifestly untrue except in woke circles and I suppose in Page’s mind. But everyone is now required to agree with the narrative, and Peterson thinks there’s a big cost in agreeing.

There is a cost, indeed.

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s I noticed this new (to me, anyway) tendency to insist that subjective beliefs should hold sway over objective ones, and that in fact there was no such thing as objective truth. Sorry, I don’t buy that. Maybe there isn’t absolute and definitive truth, but some things are a lot truthier than others and someone like Peterson should be allowed to say so without being thrown off Twitter.

Would it have been better for him to have written a sentence that went this way, “Elliott Page just had his breasts removed by a criminal physician”? Peterson doesn’t want to write seeming nonsense (that Peterson does not believe) in order to please the left and Page, but that’s exactly what the left wants him to do.

When did the transgender movement lose a lot of people who were pretty okay with it prior to that? When advocates began moving the medical treatment ages further and further downward, and when they began insisting that a change of sexual identity (including surgery to remove sexual organs) was a change to affirm a sexual identity that had always been the case – that bodies and chromosomes have no reality, even as patients go to great surgical length to change their bodies in an attempt to fit a standard of sexual identity.

Orwell understood:

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

No, you can’t alter the past. You can only pretend, and try to force other people to pretend with you.

By my profile I should be the most liberal of liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

In a Jordan Peterson video I saw something about this personality test, and I decided to spring for it to the tune of ten dollars. Taking it is kind of fun, and it gives you your assessment immediately. The scores are percentiles on five dimensions, and each of those are broken down into two parts as well:

The Understand Myself assessment and report is based on the Big Five Aspects Scale, the scientific model that describes your personality through the (Big Five) factors and each of their two aspects.

Individual Report
The assessment only takes 15-20 minutes. Your resulting report will give you a comprehensive description of the factors and aspects of your own personality.

You will, for example, learn how agreeable you are relative to others, and how your Agreeableness breaks down into the aspects of Compassion and Politeness (deference to authority and social norms). You will also learn how these aspects of your personality influence how you act towards and react against the various people and situations you find yourself dealing with every day.

As an example of some of my results, I’m apparently way more compassionate than most people but way less polite. That’s no surprise. In person I’m actually quite polite in the conventional sense – I say “please” and “thank you” and “nice to have met you” and all that, but that’s not really what the test measures.

But on certain other dimensions – such as a subcategory called “orderliness,” I score in the basement. “Orderliness” on this test isn’t about being a hoarder or not – in my case it actually has to do with a deficit in planning skills and a dislike of predictable routine. And it also says this:

Those who are who are very low in orderliness are remarkably much less likely to be political conservatives.

I’m about as low on the “orderliness” scale as a person can get, and yet I’m a political conservative. Go figure.

One trait in which I score in the 98% percentile is “openness to experience.” For that trait it says: “Those who are liberal, politically, are very much more likely to be high in openness to experience than conservatives.” There we go again; I’m the opposite politically of what my personality scores would indicate.

Here’s an excerpt from the description of “openness to experience” [my emphasis]:

People with exceptionally high levels of openness to experience are almost always characterized by others as extremely smart, creative, exploratory, intelligent and visionary. They are extremely interested in learning, and are constantly acquiring new abilities and skills. They are extremely curious and exploratory. They are exceptionally interested in abstract thinking, philosophy, and the meaning of belief systems and ideologies. They live for cultural events such as movies, concerts, dance recitals, plays, poetry readings, gallery openings and art shows. They are very likely to enjoy writing (or even to be driven to write). They enjoy complex, abstract ideas and deeply love to confront and solve complex, abstract and multi-dimensional problems.

One intriguing thing the site offers is that if two people each take the test, you can ask it to analyze the type of relationship or marriage you will tend to have if you get romantically involved with each other.

Another white arbiter of Blackness is heard from

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently, the proper metric of Blackness is attendance at NBA games. Who knew?

And Clarence Thomas has been tested and found wanting on that dimension by Rex Chapman, who also writes: “Clarence Thomas would last 20-30 seconds in an NBA locker room.” What is Chapman suggesting would happen in that locker room? Would Thomas be beaten up? Ridiculed? Flee in fear at his lack of authentic Blackness? What?

In other breaking news, “wise latina” Sotomayor has never been photographed eating a tortilla, at least as far as I can tell. Therefore her bona fides must be suspect.

However, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cultural Jewish identity is safe:

The visits included a stop at the New York deli Russ & Daughters at 179 East Houston St. Apart from appreciating the pickled herring, bagels, and lox, young Ruth could see something she’d never seen anywhere else—a business that proudly proclaimed in its name and its signage that it would be passed on to daughters and not sons. The notion, which might not seem revolutionary today, was novel for a girl growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. Before she ever heard the word “feminist,” Russ & Daughters helped shape Ginsburg’s idea of what’s possible for women.

That’s actually rather interesting. However, “Russ & Daughters” was indicating a present reality, not an intention to pass a business on to daughters in the future. And it turns out that Russ was not making a feminist statement:

n 1920, Russ opened his store at the current location of 179 East Houston Street. In 1933, he renamed the business “Russ and Daughters” after making his three daughters, Hattie, Anne, and Ida, partners in the store. Historically, businesses typically took on the name “and sons”, but since Russ and his wife Bella had only daughters, his business became Russ & Daughters. However, Russ was not a feminist ahead of his time. For him, getting his daughters into the business was not a matter of women’s rights, but a matter of parnosa, or surviving to make a business. As he put it, he was concerned with Vi nempt men parnosa, meaning ‘From where do we take our living.’ According to Hattie, she and the other daughters had all worked in the store “since they were 8 years old” on weekends, fishing out the herring fillets from the pickle barrels. Once each one of them finished high school, they all worked full-time. Moreover, Russ kept the store open seven days a week…

In 2008 The Jews of New York documentary premiered on PBS, featuring three generations of the Russ & Daughters family (Anne Russ Federman and Hattie Russ Gold, the two surviving Russ daughters; Mark Russ Federman, then the proprietor; Niki Russ Federman; and Josh Russ Tupper). The documentary tells, among other things, the story of Russ & Daughters from the early 1900s to the (then) present. The third daughter, Ida, had died.

Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built, by Mark Russ Federman (grandson of Joel Russ), with an introduction by Calvin Trillin, was published in 2013.

[ADDENDUM: See this for more on Clarence Thomas and blackness.]

Those smart folks at Good Morning America…

The New Neo Posted on by

…put up a tweet – now finally removed – that said that Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Black Supreme Court justice in US history.

Various explanations:

(1) We all know Clarence Thomas isn’t really black, being a conservative and all.

(2) But what of trailblazer Thurgood Marshall, the actual first black justice on SCOTUS? Ancient history, I say. He was on the Court from 1967 to 1991. That retirement came thirty years ago, and my guess is that whoever is in charge of tweeting at Good Morning America probably was either not born back then or was walking around in diapers. So why bother to look something up?

(3) The word “woman” is missing, of course, because Ketanji Brown Jackson is actually the first black woman justice on the Court. But she herself said we need to ask a biologist before we can define what a woman is, so the tweeter probably left out the word “woman” in deference to that.

Good Morning America is a show on ABC that debuted in 1975, close to 50 years ago. The level of ignorance they display is stunning.

Biden, abortion, and the filibuster

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden’s new devotion to abortion is heartwarming [/sarc] to behold:

So he’s saying that the filibuster should be suspended in order to “codify” abortion. He doesn’t mention what the details of that law would actually be, so the tweet that says Biden is advocating legalizing it up to the moment of birth isn’t necessarily the case, although it could be the case. But the main point is that Biden thinks this is a big enough deal that it should be passed by an act of Congress and that of course the filibuster would have to be suspended in order to do that.

A couple of points: “codify” is a code word for “pass a federal law about something that in this case may not be in the federal government’s power to do.” SCOTUS has just handed down several rulings that involve which branch of government has the power to do what, and one of those rulings seems to be saying that abortion laws are not under federal control. So would SCOTUS invalidate such a “codification” of abortion if it was passed by the US Congress? I don’t know, but I certainly think they should. I’ve been saying for quite some time that the proper avenue for such a change would be a constitutional amendment. But they won’t do that because they don’t have the votes.

It’s not clear they have the votes for this ploy Biden is suggesting, either. I don’t think either Manchin or Sinema, the keepers of the filibuster keys, cares what Joe Biden thinks. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I don’t see why they’d relent in their filibuster stand for this particular issue when they haven’t given in for previous ones. Biden can’t dictate what Congress does.

In addition, if the Democrats really do end the filibuster even if it’s just in this one instance, it opens quite a door that the GOP could walk through if they win control of Congress in 2022.