Back in October, a report from the BBC caught the attention of the trans movement because it conveyed the experience of lesbians who’d felt pressured into straight sex with trans-women (i.e., men presenting themselves as women):
One woman described her dates with trans-women as conversion therapy: “I knew I wasn’t attracted to them but internalised the idea that it was because of my ‘transmisogyny’ and that if I dated them for long enough I could start to be attracted to them. It was DIY conversion therapy.”
A trans woman raped a lesbian after a date: “[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them],” she wrote. “I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me.”
Manipulating women into having sex is a very male thing to do, making this feel like a continuation of a sexual revolution that ostensibly freed women but ultimately shifted sexual dynamics in the direction preferred by the least responsible of men.
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Is it just me or do the people who support mask mandates seem deliberately to be avoiding the points that those in opposition are actually making?
At some point after my post responding to his call for a statewide mask mandate, Boston Globe reporter and columnist Dan McGowan tweeted a link to the CDC’s (incredibly one-sided) “science brief” on masking. Admittedly as somebody who is more apt to distrust information from the federal government than to trust it, the document reads to me as advocacy, not as a fair-minded attempt to balance positives and negatives.
At a minimum, each of the bullet-points supposedly summarizing various studies should include reference to some of the short-comings or confounding results. This is especially true of the section purporting to find mask wearing safe for children. Most of the studies seem barely relevant to the massive mandates that our children have been enduring. Frankly, I’m surprised at how pitiful a case the CDC was able to make on this point.
Here’s a good example: The first finding is that a “study of 60 elementary school children reported no adverse cardiovascular (e.g., heart rate) or pulmonary (e.g., peripheral oxygen saturation) effects among children while wearing a cloth face covering in a classroom for 30 consecutive minutes of instructional time.” But the very first study on the effectiveness of mask wearing against COVID found no benefit to cloth masks, only surgical masks (although the CDC declined to point this out)… let alone the difference between a 30 minute span and a whole day, every day, with only periodic breaks.
Even worse is the paragraph on my greatest concern as a parent: “The potential impact of masks on language and emotional development” in school-aged children. The only study that comes close to being relevant tested the ability of 81 children from 7 to 13 years old to tell whether people were sad, angry, or afraid while those people were wearing masks. Even here, the researchers found that masks cut children’s ability to recognize these three emotions in half. The CDC doesn’t convey this information, however, reporting only that “the decrement in emotional inference observed when the lower half of a photographed face was covered with a mask was equivalent to that associated with covering the eyes with sunglasses, leading the authors to conclude that in combination with other contextual cues, masks are unlikely to produce serious impairments of children’s social interactions.”
From a group of researchers, this finding is insulting to the reader’s intelligence, but from a government agency, it’s enraging. Not only is this single study extremely limited in scope, but it makes a huge inference from only three emotions, and of all the emotions children in classrooms need to be able to infer, sadness, anger, and fear are not high on the list. In their introduction, the researchers mention in passing that people “tend to fixate on specific facial features that characterize specific emotion stereotypes, such as the mouth for happiness.” This never comes up again, even though being able to affirm children with a show of happiness is arguably the most key emotion to teaching.
Reading these studies, I’ll make an inference of my own: the people who want government to force you to cover your face in public are not really concerned about whether studies can prove that doing so helps more than it hurts, overall. Rather, they have faith that wearing masks must do something and, further, that it couldn’t possibly be harmful. Moreover, it makes them feel comfortable to see you and your children submitting to authority.
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Back when Democrats and members of the media who once had credibility were insisting that President Donald Trump was a foreign asset (that is, doing the bidding of another country’s rulers), wiser people looked at what he was doing. Like him or not, he was strengthening the United States as a country and limiting the ambitions of our adversaries (or competition, depending how you want to look at it)
Rowan Scarborough details how Joe Biden is doing the opposite, particularly when it comes to energy.
Biden may be stupid, ideologically driven, acting out of greed, or many other things without directly taking orders from a foreign power, but the results have been much more in keeping with what a foreign asset would do than Trump’s were. Yet, oddly, the mainstream media seems unconcerned.
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Now that she’s been confirmed as the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, interest has surged in a video of her berating journalists outside her house while she was still a county district attorney back in January. The bullying and defensiveness are noteworthy, of course. It takes a certain personality type to tell a reporter she’s going to get your children “f***ing killed” by filming her outside near her car rather than, I don’t know, nicely ask that the cameras be put down and an interview be scheduled for the next day.
Of more general interest, though, is the reaction. The chance is virtually nil that most of the folks coming to her defense would be doing so if she were a Republican. Attempting to get comments from public figures wherever comments can be gotten is how television journalism has been done as long as I can remember. Where this news team erred was in not understanding that they’re supposed to treat preferred groups differently.
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Charter schools offer a prime example of how the easy access to data enabled by Anchor Rising’s People’s Data Armory can shed light on public debate.
Listening to public debate about charter schools and how they take money from regular district schools, one gets the impression of advantaged families drawing resources away from disadvantaged ones, as if the state is forcing districts to fund private schools. Some of us believe that is actually how things should work, but that’s not what charter schools are.
Who is actually attending charter schools is therefore a very important question, and these two charts from our Rhode Island Public Schools October Enrollment application sheds some light on the question.
Most of the students enrolled in Rhode Island charter school are minority students, and the majority of them are involved with the free or reduced lunch program, which is an indication of low income. That isn’t true for the state as a whole or even (at least on the racial front) of the Northern Rhode Island districts that supply most charter school students. (Working from the state’s list of charter schools, you can compare individual charter schools or groups of schools with the districts that they serve.)
So, when you see the all (or at least mostly) white leaders of the teachers unions going after charter schools, the students whose opportunities they wish to take away are mostly poor minority children. Does that count as “white supremacy”?
Data notes:
- If you hover over the chart by race, you will see the option to change the layout to percentages to quickly find the percentages for each group.
- NEL/CPS Construction & Career Academy and Times2 Academy are on the state’s charter list, but not listed separately in the enrollment data.
- Other independent (non-district) public schools listed in the enrollment data have differing structures and are not included in the chart above, although they don’t change the picture much.
Featured image by Vahid Moeini Jazani on Unsplash.
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Activist-paid-as-academic Timmons Roberts of Brown University rends his garments in the Boston Globe that the Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI; i.e., another layer of gas tax) never managed to ignite. The question of his headline is, “Who killed the TCI?,” which I’ve already answered. In a word, it was Biden, who quickly drove up the cost of fuel and energy such that, because opposition from the right had delayed implementation of TCI, politicians could not get away with adding even more pain.
That formulation points to a bit of double-talk on which activists like Roberts typically rely. Here is the lede of his essay, which comes directly from the text (emphasis added):
The Transportation Climate Initiative was held up as a crucial part of driving down emissions and raising revenue each year to pay for key programs to address climate change.
“Driving down emissions” means raising the cost of driving so people do less of it. Our economy relies on a lot of driving — of workers, of deliverers, of transporters — so it’s disingenuous of Roberts to then turn around and complain:
… the TCI experience shows that opposition will come, regardless of how modest a proposal is. A nickel-a-gallon fee with huge benefits still leaves proponents open to being labeled as economy-wreckers by snipers from the right. Trying to accommodate the snipers is folly.
Either TCI will hinder the economy or it won’t drive down emissions. One has to be the case. Sitting comfortably on the faculty of Brown University, Roberts is free to conclude that the harm of the program is worthwhile, but he shouldn’t pretend it’s a made-up issue.
He also shouldn’t pretend that the five-cent tax (which he acknowledges elsewhere could actually be nearly twice as much) is happening in isolation. Indeed, his phrase should be “another nickel-a-gallon fee,” because the taxes, fees, and hidden costs pile high. Each may be a minor adjustment for some asserted benefit, but costs are always higher and the benefits lower than promised.
It has to stop somewhere.
Featured image by Jp Valery on Unsplash.
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Without making too much of it, I thought this was interesting. NPR host Sam Sanders received a letter from listener saying he (Sanders) is distracting in the amount that he “grunts and murmurs (‘Uh!’, ‘Mmm…’, ‘Ahhh…’) when a guest is speaking.” Perhaps because the letter writer went a bit far in likening it to the behavior of somebody who’s constipated, Sanders felt it necessary to respond and then to publish his response for public approval.
Not surprisingly, the response focuses on how “cooperative overlapping” is “a linguistic tradition very prominent in Black culture and the Black church.” This is reasonable to point out, of course, and the listener must be pretty disconnected from popular culture not to have picked up on this style of communication before, but still…
The cultural context does not change the fact that this listener (and perhaps many others) are used to a different approach and find Sanders’ makes conversations difficult to follow. Holding such folks up for ridicule and shaming doesn’t feel like the appropriate reaction.
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Just about every hot topic these days has something surreal about it — something that’s obviously not true or at least certain, that is affecting how hundreds of millions of people are having to live their lives.
An early revelation for me, when I first moved from creative writing toward essay writing, was that an accurate explanation for the operation of the material universe has to take human nature into account. We do things — move objects around, harness energy, and so on — that affect the world, and while it really doesn’t matter to those materials why we move them, our beliefs obviously become a force in the world through us.
This relates in an interesting way to debates on the so-called separation of church and state. Progressives and even some old-school liberals sometimes insist that religious beliefs should be inadmissible as justification for laws. Actually, what this demand does is to establish a religion in violation of the First Amendment. Even if the reason a majority of constituents want government to take a particular action is that some religious figure told them that’s what the policy should be, a self-governing people must have the ability to conform the law with their beliefs within the boundaries set by other people’s rights. As long as the religious figure must convince that majority and cannot directly set policies, this is how representative democracy works.
With wokism, those on the left have flipped their position. Their false and disturbing beliefs of course must be admissible as justification for mandates, even to the point of eliminating those boundaries of other people’s rights.
For a partial explanation of how these beliefs are taking over public and private organizations, I recommend a brief article in City Journal by Gabriel Rossman, who concludes:
This is the essence of the social construction of reality: objective facts can matter less than intersubjective consensus. Since other people’s perceptions are an objective fact, you had best conform to their expectations—no matter how radical or irrational they might be.
In summary, Rossman writes that institutional isomorphism (or convergence toward a common pattern) happens by three means:
- Coercive isomorphism is when the government or another authority requires conformity, whether by imposing a restriction or limiting a benefit to make it so.
- Normative isomorphism is when members of an organization shape it toward what they believe to be appropriate, as when new employees bring radical beliefs of how the world should work from collegiate indoctrination into their workplaces.
- Mimetic isomorphism is when the elites establish a standard of behavior and everybody else receives the signal and copies them.
With these mechanisms, it doesn’t matter how foolish the underlying beliefs may be. People are increasingly pressured to behave as if they are true, even if they’re not. How we can combat the trend, I’m not sure. Mocking the elites can help, as can conspicuously refusing to contribute to the developing norm, but we’re pretty far along, so resisting the coercion is the battlefield of the day.
Ultimately, when people are living in a different reality, we must strive to draw them into our own. That is the existential nature of this challenge.
Featured image by Arno Senoner on Unsplash.
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Canceling the remaining classes among a group of presumably very fit police candidates because one person with symptoms and six people without symptoms tested positive for COVID shows how crazy and weak we’ve become.
We’re going to be paying for this recent shift in attitudes for decades, and one suspects the people pushing it expect exactly that.
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I’m torn between assuming that chickens must have really strong lobbyists and thinking voters need to begin questioning the priorities of the people they’re putting in office:
Neighboring states soon could see an influx of shoppers in search of eggs if Massachusetts lawmakers don’t come to an agreement on a new animal welfare law.
New England Brown Egg Council General Manager Bill Bell said once the new law takes effect in January, the majority of eggs currently being sold in Massachusetts won’t be in compliance.
“There will be the high price, or higher priced, organic eggs that are for sale, but that’s not going to dent that need for 90% more eggs if the law doesn’t change,” he explained.
At issue is a requirement for 50% more space per chicken than the national standard. While I’m not sure how that compares, in practical terms, with the change in Rhode Island’s law that goes into effect July 2026, be aware that the chicken lobby is active in our state, too.
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