Even the Canadian humanists! Here’s a conversation between two old cis guys about what to do about the trans folk, featuring Carey Linde, a divorce lawyer and activist for men’s rights (I say it that way to avoid implying that he is an outright MRA freak) and Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, a psychologist and member of Humanist Canada. I don’t know why they’re even talking about trans rights, but they had to stake out their claim. I’ll just post a few excerpts to let you get the flavor.

First, Linde explains the source of the problem. It’s those darned trans people becoming conspicuous!

If you mean for the trans community, it was the developing collectivity of community. This increasing conspicuous collectivity in the public eye caused the very phobia from which the community wished to escape. As with acceptance of blacks and gays over time, gender identity issues and people are ubiquitous in the media. It is all less sensitive to a growing progressive set of the population. At the same time, the faith based right is rallying and dangerous. Gender radical feminists are under literal attack by the trans warriors.

There’s the usual bafflement about allowing trans women to compete in athletics, and the usual expectation that this is all a ploy to allow rapists with penises into women’s locker rooms, from Robertson.

Relying on recent federal legislation, the Ontario courts have forced the Ontario Minor Hockey Association to allow adolescents with female bodies to change in male change rooms. This is the kind of social experiment no university ethics committee would ever approve. One of two outcomes is possible. Either a number of people with girl’s bodies will be sexually assaulted by adolescent boys, or they will not. If we don’t see sexual assaults flowing from this experiment then we may reasonably decide that we do not need separate facilities for males and females at least for safety reasons. We are beginning to see this change with respect to the washroom issue. If, on the other hand, we see a number of sexual assaults, the logical conclusion would be to end the experiment; however, I don’t think that will happen. I think politically, the politicians behind the experiment will refuse to accept its failure. They will double down with increasing expensive measures to protect the genetically female while engaging in male-blaming, perhaps with references to “toxic masculinity.” But we as a society do not need to follow them down this hole.

He has another rationale for why the trans folk are getting more riled up.

One of the new phenomena fueling the panic is the increasing number of young girls and women deciding that being a boy in this world is a safer bet than being a girl. And the medical profession and big pharma is right their to enable this delusion.

Uh, what? Is there a single trans man on the planet who made their decision because being trans was safer than being a woman?

Then we get some ad hoc evidence-free evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology.

We have the situation of men being more accepting of transmen than women are of transwomen. The hypothesis that men are more accepting of diversity would require more study across different groups; however such an explanation would be more acceptable to feminists than the obvious alternative, that biological women are protecting their privileges from competition while men have no such privileges to protect.

If men are more accepting of diversity, it would have to be a function of socialization. The testosterone that gives men their sexuality also translates into stronger bones, more muscle mass, and increased aggression and competitiveness. These latter two traits were necessary in traditional hunter gathering societies to fearlessly challenge competitors, both predatory and human, to protect bands that were essentially extended families. But aggression and competitiveness needs to be controlled or channelled if civilization is to work. Religion played a pivotal role in controlling and channelling male aggressive instincts in the formative years of our human civilizations. We have largely transcended religion by secularizing our ethics and expanding their application to all humanity, as for example, with the establishment of universal human rights. And we have been incredibly successful. Steven Pinker has meticulously documented how we now have fewer homicides, fewer deaths due to war, more gender equality and lower poverty than ever before in human history.

The argument would be then that the history of civilization is, at least in part, a history of controlling and channelling male testosterone. That aggression has been channelled into business, sports, politics and protection of the nation-state. Men have been conditioned to increasingly ignore minor or insubstantive difference, but of course there are numerous variables that also influence behaviour in particular contexts. Of concern to me is that tribalism has been increasing with a recent focus on ideological, cultural and racial identities and that this will result in breaking down the more universal humanist ethic. To take the argument full circle then, if the process of civilization included the aspect of controlling and channelling male testosterone-linked behaviours, then we would expect that women would have been less affected by this aspect of socialization. This would have left women more susceptible to ancient xenophobic fears including fear of “the other.”

Men more accepting of diversity. Yeah, right; men’s locker rooms and clubs are such hotbeds of sensitivity. Men, conditioned to ignore minor differences…I guess it’s true that there are no Republicans in Canada. It’s a bizarre set of evidence-free rationalizations to simultaneously suggest that men are roiling cauldrons of fierce hormones (to protect us from bears, don’t you know) and that men are therefore better socialized to be accepting and less xenophobic. That’s all nonsense, including their belief that humans needed big muscley aggressive warriors in their evolution — if that were really the case, how ever did gracile Homo sapiens ever succeed where Neanderthals died off? It’s almost as if there were more complex factors beyond the usual cartoon caveman trope.

Atheists have been embarrassing me for years. Don’t you humanists start!

I’ve been living in Academyville most of my life, which means I’ve met some of the villainous ogres the right-wingers hate: Marxists and Post-Modernists. I’ve never met two of them at the same time, though. I’ve also met Fanatical Capitalists. It’s a real slumgullion in here, but that’s part of the charm.

Enter Andrew Sullivan. Or rather, exit Andrew Sullivan, who has left his comfortable paying job slinging dull resentment of things he doesn’t understand to put on rusty armor, climb aboard a tired donkey, and begin a crusade against…critical theory? Which again, he doesn’t understand, but is absolutely sure it is about destroying the very fabric of society.

I’m no expert in this stuff — I tinker with spiders — so I tend to defer to the experts on the other side of campus, you know, the social scientists and humanities people. Unlike the Sullivans of the world, I’ve mingled enough with them to respect their intelligence and knowledge, and to know that they are as sincere in their use of intellectual tools as I am in trying to understand the genes and processes behind spider development and behavior.

So I listen when someone like Asad Haider analyzes Sullivan’s claims.

After a grandiose announcement that he was leaving New York Magazine due to a stifling political atmosphere, Andrew Sullivan has now launched a comedy career. In a post of his new “non-conformist” newsletter, Sullivan announces that he will present an analysis of contemporary “social justice” politics. This politics, he says, is the development of “an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades.” Critical theory, he says with what can only be dry sarcasm, is so powerful and omnipresent that it is “changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.”

Sullivan’s account is full of falsehoods and misinterpretations so drastic that they could only be the product of a refined wit. The neologisms he attributes to the tradition founded by thinkers like Theodor Adorno are: “non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining.” One can only hope that Sullivan branches into sketch comedy, so we might see a dramatization of Adorno’s reaction to such terms. “The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest,” reads Sullivan’s deadpan conclusion. “Let’s do this.”

To appreciate this joke you have to understand that there’s a second, “meta” level to it, which is that Sullivan claims to be defending principles of ethical journalism, rationality, objective truth, and informed debate, but he never refers to a single primary text of what he calls critical theory. Twice as funny.

That’s what gets me. These bozos are dead set on the idea that critical theory is evil, but over and over again they reveal that they haven’t actually read anything in the field, and don’t even have a grasp of critical theory 101. I say “they” because it’s not just Sullivan — he has a whole clown car of buffoons joining him in the same futile enterprise.

In the midst of this comic tour de force we’re introduced to other characters, who give Sullivan a run for his money: James Lindsay, better known on Twitter as Conceptual James, and Helen Pluckrose, authors of Cynical Theories. Lindsay should be recognized for one of the most audacious comic bits of this whole contemporary discourse: in an ornate blog post which claims to clarify the distinctions between categories while actually muddling them beyond recognition, he writes that postmodernists “drew heavily off the successes of Mao in his Cultural Revolution and used them to inspire Pol-Pot, who studied alongside them at the Sorbonne in Paris at the time, to go after a deconstructive Year-Zero campaign of his own.”

He links to a blog post by Lindsay which is amazing. Lindsay throws out a dense cloud of terms that he misuses, revealing that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but apparently thinks vomiting up noise makes him sound informed. The closest thing I’ve seen to it are creationist posts that spew out a chaff of molecular biology to totally misrepresent what the papers actually say. Maybe he ought to read Haider’s article to clear up some of his misunderstandings.

It’s quite a long and thorough article that summarizes many of the terms they mess up. I’ll just quote the relevant bit about critical theory.

According to Sullivan, “postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture,” for which “the entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and ‘problematized’ reason [sic] whenever possible.”

But as Foucault clearly explains, critique is not a destruction of every form of reason but a putting into question of who we are, what we think, and what we do, by studying the histories that have produced us. It doesn’t simply mean finding fault with things, “criticizing” things. Though it may certainly involve that, this isn’t what the “critical” in critical theory or any kind of critical thinking refers to. The critical attitude continues, in fact, a certain attitude of the Enlightenment, while also situating the Enlightenment in the history which is to be approached with the critical attitude.

As Foucault traces in his 1978 lecture “What is Critique,” in Europe the critical attitude arises in the context of societies in which people and their thoughts are governed by religion, and it reflects the desire not to be governed — or at least, not to be governed quite like that. Critique is “the art of not being governed quite so much.” Hence the critical attitude of the Enlightenment is to not simply accept what an authority tells you is true, but to independently determine its validity; not to follow laws because they are dictated by power, but because you have determined them to be just. Critique, contrary to Sullivan’s paranoia, is an Enlightenment attitude.

That’s precisely what I don’t get. Skeptics ought to be enthusiastically embracing critical theory, and even post-modernism, because it does all the stuff skeptics claim to appreciate. Read that last paragraph again. Only a Status Quo Warrior would think that is undesirable. But instead they’ve only embraced the fringe abuses of theory, and have happily adopted only the practice of the worst writers to string gibberish into bad essays and books.

It must be nice to be filthy rich, so that you can say any idiotic thing and automatically get lots of attention, a good part of it your defenders rushing to make excuses for your idiocy. Witness Elon Musk.

Aliens built the pyramids obv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 31, 2020

He’s been proving himself a fool over and over again, yet still there are people who still insist that he’s a genius, rather than a walking, talking demonstration that incompetence can easily float to the top in a capitalist society.

I notice that Egyptians have responded to that stupid remark with deference and respectful disagreement. Politeness doesn’t work any more, and maybe it never worked. How about if we start changing that, beginning with a wealthy capitalist exploiter?