Because people constantly lie, shit is often confusing. American schools, for example, are actually pretty good, yet people constantly complain about them. Why?
Once you understand the real reasons for things, you can dispense with a lot of confusion. But our culture of taboos around various subjects leads to a lot of lying.
If something doesn’t make sense to you, chances are, you’ve heard a lot of lies about it. Look for the truth–even if that truth violates some taboo.
The idea that people chose their religion is obviously false, at least when looking at non-Western religions. If people chose their religions, we would expect religious beliefs to be basically randomly distributed across the face of the planet. There’d be tons of Neo-Pagans running around in Pakistan, and Hindus in Bogota. There’d be essentially no correlation between parents’ religion and their childrens’ religions, and we could not speak of wide swathes of the planet united into cultural zones with single religious beliefs.
In reality, religion is transmitted so reliably from parent to child and within cultural zones that, outside of parts of the west, it is nearly as reliable as genetic inheritance. You no more expect to find Neo-Pagans in Pakistan than blue eyes, and if you do find a Neo-Pagan in Pakistan, there’s a good chance they *do* have blue eyes, or are otherwise not ethnically Pakistani.
It is of course useful to be able to critique religious beliefs, and I believe that people should critique religious beliefs, but the idea that the average person chooses their relion is nonsense.
I know this is a sign that I am incredibly dumb, but I am always vaguely surprised by neoreactionaries/Dark Enlightenment types who claim to understand human genetics but are openly hostile to transsexuals, transgender, and otherwise trans- folks.
Look, guys. Every trans person I have met has something medically wrong with them–some sort of genetic or hormonal condition interfering with the production/development of normal sex hormones/characteristics. Don’t get distracted by the “gender is a social construct,” nonsense–it’s totally irrelevant. (More on that later.)
So you now how boys are genetically XY, and girls are XY? I have met trans people who are literally XXY. Like Down’s Syndrome, only your genitalia don’t quite develop right due to your body trying to produce male genitalia with way too many female hormones.
Another condition that appears to affect quite a large % of trans people is exposure to massive levels of artificial sex hormones while still in the womb, due to certain medications pregnant women have taken.
Diethylstilbestrol, (or DES,) is a synthetic nonsteroidal estrogen, synthesized way back in 1938. Between 1940 and 1971, DES was given in large quantities to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately, it turns out that pumping babies full of unnaturally high levels of estrogen might be bad for them–DES was discontinued as a medication for pregnant women because it gave their daughters cancer, and the sons appear to have high rates of trans and intersex conditions, which is exactly what you’d expect.
And then there are the people I have met whose health histories I am not privy to, but who quite obviously have something hormonal going on–girls who grow up and sprout beards, for example.
Alas, I don’t have data on what is going on with 100% of trans people, but from everything I’ve seen, it looks like we’re really just talking about a few people with rare medical conditions, prenatal hormonal or toxin exposure, etc., not weirdo degenerates who are trying to destroy civilization.
In fact, every trans person I’ve ever met just wanted to live their life without being harassed and be a contributing member of society, like almost everyone else I know.
In a nation with 320 million people, and a world with even more, and the technology to find people with <1/million conditions and put them on TV or find each other on an online forum, it is easy to overestimate the commonness of extremely rare conditions. (Homosexuality comes immediately to mind–gay folks number around 3% of the country, but IIRC, people estimate that about 30% of people are gay.)
Trans people are an even smaller % of the population–even on LGBTetc forums, they complain about being left out and forgotten–because there are just so few of them. 0.3% of the population to be exact, according to Wikipedia. (This number seems consistent with “caused by a variety of rare medical conditions.”)
There are more prisoners in this country than trans people, but I don’t hear people complaining that a convicted criminal might use a public bathroom while they’re in there, even though criminals are way more likely to rape, assault, or kill you than some “chick with a beard.”
So even if I can’t convince you not to hate them, remember that trans people are such a tiny % of the overall population that worrying about them is a total waste of your time.
But what about all of this business about gender being a social construct?
Look, people throw around a lot of words without knowing what they really mean. Trans people are really the embodiment of the opposite of this principle. If gender were just a social construct, a woman with a beard could just say, “Well, society is wrong to say that beards are a man-thing; I’m going to declare that beards are a woman thing, too!” instead of feeling like there was something really wrong with her. Trans people would not bother with sex-reassignment-surgery (which is expensive, painful, and a pain in the butt;) they would just declare themselves to be whatever they want.
In fact, experiments have been done in which babies with indeterminate genitalia were just assigned a gender, surgically altered, (usually to female, because it is easier to subtract from working tissue than to add to it,) and then raised as their assigned gender, on the assumption that since gender is just a social construct, you can do this.
These experiments went badly. A lot of these kids grew up confused, hit puberty, and realized that they were in fact not the gender they’d been raised as (and that their parents had removed a good chunk of their genitalia.) Gender, in short, has so far resisted our best efforts to make it malleable.
In short, trans people aren’t your enemies. They just want to pee in peace.
I’ve gotten to the point where I just tune out people’s criticisms of the president. Not necessarily because I think those particular people are annoying, nor because I have any affection for the president, but because “politics” has involved ceaseless presidential criticizing for about as long as I can remember. By now, it’s just buzzing white noise. After all, the internet is full of people just blowing off steam and signalling social membership, not making rational arguments.
But when confronted with an actual, live human being, seemingly rational, who insists that “liberals”–by which he means “Obama and maybe some guys in Congress/the Senate”–are motivated 100% by lust for power and 0% by morals, I admit that even I stared in shock.
No, I responded, liberals really believe their rhetoric. They actually think the things they are doing are moral. They think they are good.
He did not believe me. I think he also did not believe me that there are “liberals” outside of elected politicians. Ordinary mortal humans just vote for these totally evil guys because they have been deceived, I guess.
No, I said, ordinary humans vote for these guys because they actually agree with them. They agree on moral issues. Liberals have morals, they are just different from conservative morals.
Conservatives aren’t the only people with this issue. I know plenty of liberals who also believe that “anyone who believes X is a deeply immoral and horrible human being.” Feminists who insist that anyone who disagrees with them “hates women” come immediately to mind.
Honestly, people, how hard is it to just listen to each other?
They aren’t talking to each other; they aren’t even talking about the same stuff anymore.
I normally hang out with liberals, but this past weekend I spent around some of the more traditionally conservative members of my extended family. Since I spend a fair amount of time critiquing liberal ideas, you might think we’d have a ton to discuss, but no. The things I’m concerned about and the things they’re concerned about are totally different things.
Think about it: how often do you hear liberals make an impassioned defense of Obama’s actions in Benghazi?
Personally, never. I’ve never heard liberals discuss Benghazi at all. The only time I’ve heard the word cross their lips, (or keyboards,) is in the context of, “Oh god, my conservative relatives ae going to rattle on endlessly about Benghazi at Thanksgiving dinner.” It might as well be a hemorrhoid treatment for all liberals want to talk about it.
Now take the conservative side. When’s the last time you heard your conservative relatives talking about “white privilege”?
Probably never.
Some stuff makes it into both communities–riots, for example–but a ton of political debate, discussion, philosophy, development, etc., is going on in total isolation from the other side.
The reason, quite simply, is the internet.
Once upon a time, there was no internet. Everyone watched TV and/or read newspapers, and even if you hated Fox News or MSNBC, you probably still encountered it occasionally or knew people who watched it. In other words, there were only a few news sources, and chances were good that you were watching/reading them.
Then came the internet. Many young people today get most of their news/political discussion from internet sources like Tumblr and Facebook. Many of them do not take a newspaper or watch the evening news, and neither do the majority of people they know.
Older people still get their news primarily from TV and newspapers. (One older relative claimed to spend $190 a month just so he could watch Fox News–a news source he very adamantly vowed to never give up.)
So young people progress ever leftward, largely oblivious to what old people are thinking and talking about. And old people, in their own information-bubble, have no idea what young people are thinking and talking about.
Conservatism tends to be pretty bad at making coherent counter-arguments to liberalism, (mostly, I think, because conservatives tend to operate on an emotional basis of “I like it like this because I’m used to it,” rather than on rational arguments,) but if the two sides aren’t even talking, the chances of getting the two sides to agree on anything or debate their way to a rational consensus seems even less likely than usual.
I think it likely that some new form of conservatism may spawn from the depths of the internet.
Is having a loving family an unfair advantage? from ABC Radio National–the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Or is it just philosophers?
Western moral philosophy is completely broken because “academics” do not understand the basics of how morality works.
Normal people understand morality. People who were dropped on their heads as infants generally understand morality. Philosopher Adam Smith, however, thinks,
‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’.
The test they devised was based on what they term ‘familial relationship goods’; those unique and identifiable things that arise within the family unit and contribute to the flourishing of family members.
For Swift, there’s one particular choice that fails the test.
‘Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realise these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.’
…
“I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,”
Jesus effin’ Christ, this guy is an idiot.
Of course, anyone who studies inequality and sets themselves up as an expert on the issue and says things like, “I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families,” is an idiot. We have studies on these nifty people called “identical twins” and what happens when they are adopted by two different families and raised in different environments.
What happens is not very much. Within the normal range of parenting (like, not beating your children and locking them in the closet,) measurable life outcomes like criminality, IQ, income, etc., have more to do with the kids’ genes than with their adoptive parents’ parenting.
(Where parenting probably does matter is how much your kids like you. If you’re a jerk to them, they probably won’t call you very often.)
So, no, inequality is not caused by people reading bedtime books to their kids. It’s not caused by sending them to private school, and parents sure as hell don’t need philosophers to come up with complicated theories to justify being nice to their kids, because normal people don’t suffer these delusions.
“According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.
‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’”
Riiiight. Remember, you pay actual money to send your kids to university so they can be taught by these people.
“‘When we talk about parents’ rights, we’re talking about the person who is parenting the child. How you got to be parenting the child is another issue. One implication of our theory is that it’s not one’s biological relation that does much work in justifying your rights with respect to how the child is parented.’
For Swift and Brighouse, our society is curiously stuck in a time warp of proprietorial rights: if you biologically produce a child you own it.”
This is because most humans would knife you before letting you take their children away from them, because the instinct to take care of our children is a basic biological drive honed by thousands of years of evolution. Morality is an evolved instinct for taking care of our children. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand morality, though you might get by simply by listening to the collective wisdom of thousands of generations of your ancestors who managed to successfully raise children.
“Then, does the child have a right to be parented by her biological parents? Swift has a ready answer.
‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’”
I am normally a peaceful person, but this guy actually inspires a deep, burning hatred, but that might just be my fear that this guy is going to try to kidnap my children speaking.
Rights are a social construct. Ethnicity is kind of a construct, and kind of a biological reality. Identifying with and getting along with one’s parents is based entirely in reality. It has to do with things like “are my parents jerks?” and “Do my parents understand me?”
So let me tell you a little secret of some relevance: I was adopted. My adoptive family was very loving and very kind. I am now, as an adult, in contact with my biological family, from whom I was, shall we say, unjustly removed. My biological family is also very loving and kind. No one here was jerkfaces; I am grateful to everyone.
I have a much, much stronger connection with the biological family I only met as an adult than I have with the adoptive family that actually raised me. I can’t help it. These people are like me in deep, fundamental ways. They have the same or similar hobbies as I do. They struggle with similar problems. They reason about the world in the same ways. We have instant shortcuts to understanding each other.
So, even though my adoptive family was super-loving and awesome and I love them and so on, the idea of trying to run a whole society like this, the idea of depriving everyone in society of that basic instinctual connection with the people around them that you non-adopted people don’t even realize you have, is kind of horrifying.
The Motte and Bailey technique of argumentation basically involves defining a term or concept in a positive way intended to inspire agreement, and then actually using the term in a much less agreed-upon way. A commonly given example is, “Feminism is the belief that men and women are equal,” a statement that probably most Americans (and Westerners) agree with, while actual feminist argue for a great many things that are not covered in the original supposition, like, “Abortion should be legal and easily available for all women, at all points in pregnancy.” Since the vast majority of men don’t even have wombs, abortion legality isn’t exactly something that can fall under the doctrine of “full equality” (whether you like it or not.)
In the Inverse Motte and Bailey, instead of defining the term as something good that everyone likes, you define it as something bad, and then very carefully note that the thing that you are doing does not technically count as this bad thing. Racism is a good example of the Inverse M & B. No one wants to be called a racist–racism is generally regarded as extremely evil, and therefore anything that is racist is extremely evil. So when someone says, “Hey, you’re being really racist,” the general response is, “No, look, see, racism is clearly defined as XYZ, and this thing I am doing is clearly not XYZ, and therefore not racism.”
In the regular motte, the more-difficult to defend position, (say, abortion,) is effectively shielded from some amount of criticism by the easily defended position (“femism = equality”). In the Inverse Motte, the person has to argue that their position doesn’t fall under the easily defeated position.
An argument along these lines that comes up frequently is, “Is hating Islam (or Muslims) racist?”
One side argues that racism is the irrational hatred of races of people based on belief in inherited, racial characteristics, and that Islam is not a race or an inherited characteristic, but just a bunch of beliefs that people freely choose to believe and act on. There is no biological reason compelling Muslim women to wear headscarves–it’s just something people believe they should do. And things people believe are completely up for criticism, just as we criticize people who believe in UFO abductions or like books we think are dumb.
The other side argues that this is all just rationalization, because obviously most humans on earth do not freely choose their religious beliefs (otherwise religions would be randomly distributed and few people would practice the same religion as their parents,) not to mention that apostasy is illegal in many Muslim countries. Religion is an important part of most peoples’ cultural/ethnic identity, so attacking their religion may have the same effect as any other form of attacking peoples’ ethnic identities.
Ah, says the first side, but many anti-Muslim people are themselves ex-Muslims who love Muslim people but hate the religion.
Yes, says side two, but you are not one of these people. You are a white guy from America, so I think you are racist.
In short, Side Two wants to define racism broadly, in order to cover, “That thing you are saying.” Side One wants wants to define racism narrowly, in order to say, “This thing I am saying is definitely not racism.”
Of course, in reality, people are extremely bad at advocating their own positions, so what you actually get is “You’re racist!” “No i’m not, i hate all religions equally!” “Muslims Americans face all kinds of discrimination and it’s horrible!” “Yeah, well, ISIS kills tons of Muslims, don’t you care about all of the Muslims being murdered by other Muslims? I THOUGHT NOT. Clearly you are just posturing and don’t actually care about the evils being perpetrated against Muslims.” “Israel is a Nazi state committing genocide against Palestine and the UN should nuke it!”
Anyway, I feel like I still need a conclusion, but I’m getting really tired and can’t really think of one.
Supply your own!
Khazar Theory o hai there, anti-semites.
Have you heard of the Khazar Theory of Ashkenazic origins? I like to read blogs on human genetics, which seem to attract the occasional Neo-Nazi, and have Facebook friends who think bombing Palestine is a bad idea, which also attracts Neo-Nazis, so I’ve heard all about the Khazar Theory.
The one fact behind this theory: There was once a central Asian country (Khazaria) that converted to Judaism. It later converted to Islam.
The Theory: Modern Ashkenazim are descended from Khazar converts, rather than from the Jews of Judea. The Jews of Judea stuck around Judea and became Palestinians. The Khazar-converts, now the majority of “Jews”, moved to Germany and then decided to go steal the “Jewish homeland” from the “actual ethnic Jews,” the Palestinians.
Thus, (according to the theory,) “Jews” are sneaky thieving conniving evil bastards, (and Palestinians, of course, are totally innocent lambs who would never hurt a fly.)
The reality: Genetic testing is a thing we have, and we can pinpoint pretty darn accurately where someone’s ancestors came from.
Genetically, Ashkenazim are about half Italian and half Middle Eastern, with no admixture from the Khazar region of Asia.
Even if Jews had significant Khazar ancestry, it wouldn’t actually make any difference, but it happens that they don’t. Ashkenazim are less than half the population of Israel and about 75% of the world’s Jews, according to Wikipedia. The most controversial thing you can say about this is that the Italian half is on their mothers’ side, which appears to be true for virtually all diasporic Jewish groups. Men moved to new places and took new wives.
Additionally, we have a fair amount of documentary evidence of where the Ashkenazim came from, since they were often explicitly invited into newly-founded German cities by bishops and princes who thought a Jewish community would make their new cities more economically productive. (Eastern German cities are very recent, on a European scale.)
In short, the theory is just completely false.
“In Foucault’s 1971 televised debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued against the possibility of any fixed human nature, as posited by Chomsky’s concept of innate human faculties. Chomsky argued that concepts of justice were rooted in human reason, whereas Foucault rejected the universal basis for a concept of justice. Following the debate, Chomsky was stricken with Foucault’s total rejection of the possibility of a universal morality, stating “He struck my as completely amoral, I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral” … “I mean, I liked him personally, it’s just that I couldn’t make sense of him. It’s as if he was from a different species, or something”” (from the Wikipedia page on Foucault)
Morality is an evolved sense; different societies have evolved different moral structures. In this sense Chomsky and Foucault are each half-right.
The point, though, is less about what morality is, as about how humans think of morality in other humans; Foucalt is particularly distant from anything most people (especially most Americans) would recognize as moral.
“Cats win at Evolution,” (from Cave People and Stuff,) is a great article about the evolution of cats from primate-predator to primate-parasite.
A quote:
“The domestic cat – aka Felis catus or Felis silvestris catus – is the same size as a human infant. Its mew sounds very similar to the cry of a newborn human baby. It has a round face with big eyes, like a human infant. The domestic cat has gone down the same evolutionary route as the cuckoo, only much further. Its entire life-cycle involves imitating baby humans and being coddled, fed and protected as though it were a human infant.”
Fabulous post. Go read it all.
