Making Nice Isn’t Good for Society

I visited Minneapolis once, many decades ago, the summer I graduated from college. It was hot and humid, new to me, having grown up in the desert. The “land of 10,000 lakes.” It was green and lovely. And the neighborhoods I observed were neat and tidy, the houses not large, but with basements, which you might as well have, since you had to dig that deep to keep plumbing from freezing. Quite similar to the neighborhood I grew up in.

The people were nice. It was my first encounter with the accent, which, as accents go, is a lot clearer to understand than many. The city was organized into “alphabets”; a set of streets would be named things going from A on through the alphabet, like, “Apple Tree Lane,” “Birch Tree Lane,” Cherry Tree Lane,” etc. Elsewhere the alphabet would be related to something else. It was a way of organizing neighborhoods.

example of Minneapolis alphabetical street names, found here

I didn’t observe any of the chaos we’ve seen there in recent years. You’d think just facing their extreme winter would be challenging enough that no one would want any more trouble than that. But here we are.

It may be that the niceness was a contributing factor to the decline. Nice means pleasing and agreeable. It can also mean kind, but it’s not an exact synonym. There are multiple more meanings for both nice and kind in the Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, probably not helpful here today. 

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 perceive the difference, in others or even from the inside.

Two Movies You Couldn't Make Again

This is going to be a bit of a movie review, or just commentary. Probably no spoilers. Both are documentaries. Both could probably not be made again.

 

What Is a Woman?

This documentary, by Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, is worth seeing. He’s dealing with the transgender question by asking the absolutely fundamental question, “What is a woman?” It ought to be simple enough. But in our day, the obviously simple answer is fraught with danger. If you say the basic truth, you’ll be labeled a heinous bigot.

So Matt Walsh covers the country, and the globe, asking this question. He asks it at the annual Woman’s March, wearing a sandwich board sign. He of course gets heckled and ousted, but doesn’t get an answer. He asks it on the streets; I think he’s in Hollywood. People on the street obviously know what a woman is but act like it’s a tough question they can’t answer.

Matt Walsh talking to people on the street in Hollywood
in the film What Is a Woman?

He asks a series of therapists and transgender people (some of the therapists are transgender people as well). They attempt answers, but these are circular. A woman is what a person says it is. But what is it they say they are? A woman. But what is that? It’s whatever they say it means.

You get the picture. Walsh goes through these interviews basically deadpan. He doesn’t indicate an agenda. And this interests me. I wondered how he got these people to talk to him. If they’re going to be angry at him just for asking basic questions, or indicating that he’s trying to get to a truthful definition, why would they submit to his questions?

During some of the interviews and podcasts he’s done since the movie came out last week, he has been giving some behind-the-scenes info. Here’s the thing: they didn’t know who he was.

I’ve been following his blog and podcast for over a decade, since before he was at The Blaze, and long before he joined The Daily Wire crew. He has a sizable following and is fairly well known. To our side. He’s a social conservative opining mainly on social issues. These opinions are essentially unknown to the people he interviewed. They’re aware there’s opposition. But as one therapist (a doctor who performs permanent mutilating surgery on minors) dismisses such opposition as “dinosaurs.” They’re relics of an ancient bone heap of some past generation.

It did not occur to them to look him up. If a person with film crew was coming to ask basic questions—and he submitted the questions to them ahead of time—then it must be an opportunity to declare their message, they seem to assume.

Matt Walsh's bestselling children's book
image found here

Their lack of awareness astounds me. Granted, Matt Walsh had gotten a significant amount of notoriety during the previous year of filming. So most of the interviews were done before he had an infamous encounter asking a trans person to define “what is a woman” on the Dr. Phil show this past February.  And it was before he published a best-selling children’s book, Johnny the Walrus, illustrating the absurdity of letting children decide what they are, with the story of a child who imagines himself to be a walrus. And I guess it is even before he temporarily moved to Loudon County, Virginia, to speak for one minute at a school board meeting. 

Still, like I said, I’ve been following him for over a decade. And his media footprint isn’t invisible for anyone with a search engine.

I think today he could no longer make the movie. He wouldn’t get those people to even respond to his requests, let alone sit in a room with him to answer questions.

A very fun part of the movie was when he goes to Kenya to ask the question of Masai tribesmen, through an interpreter. They thought he was crazy. Everyone knows what a woman is. And if you think you can change from man to woman, they think there’s something wrong with you both for thinking it’s possible and for wanting it to be possible.

Walsh has said in interviews that this part was most painful to his pride. He had to let them think maybe he agreed with these ideas, or at least that he thought they were questions to ask seriously, which meant he left them thinking he was such an idiot—and that people in the US were wacky, and that they’d never want to go there.

I can see he needed to not tell them beforehand, in order to get their honest answers. But I would have thought he’d disabuse them of these misconceptions after the interview. He says he didn’t. To this day they think he’s a crazy American who doesn’t know a man can’t become a woman.

Matt Walsh speaks with Masai tribesmen to ask them,
"What is a woman?" screenshot from here

The point of that adventure was to see if, as is claimed, sex is just a Western social construct. The Masai are about as non-Western as he could find. So, if they know how a man and woman are different, it is not because they have been fed this “social construct” by Western traditions.

The documentary is well done. And Matt Walsh is perhaps the singular person who could ask the question in the way he does.

There’s more to the movie, including the ramifications of society going the way of this war against basic truth. The attempts to hack and prevent this successful film from being seen is evidence the opposition knows the power this movie might have.

You can stream the movie at https://www.dailywire.com/videos/what-is-a-woman and probably some other streaming sources.

Here are some of the movie premiere discussions:

·        “Daily Wire Backstage: What is a Woman? PREMIERE” June 1, 2022. 

·        “What surprised Matt Walsh the most when filming 'What is a Woman' | Will Cain Podcast” June 8, 2022. 

·        “Matt Walsh Revisits His What Is A Woman Interview With Dr. Forcier” June 3, 2022. 

·        “Trans YouTuber Responds To What Is A Woman Trailer” Matt Walsh, May 23, 2022. 

 

2000 Mules

I’ve talked about this movie by Dinesh D’Souza a bit already (here and here). One description of the theater experience was, there was a smattering of clapping afterward, but mostly there was stunned silence. People didn’t immediately get up and leave. They were thinking something like, “Wow! It really happened. What do we do now?” That's still an open questions.

There was an interesting interview Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips did with Roman Balmakov on Facts Matter, for EpochTV. Phillips, who does not seem inclined to overstatement, says what they revealed in the movie is just the beginning. There is game changing information coming out soon. In an interview Phillips did with Patriot Patel, he places the release of this information at about six weeks out, or around mid-July.

Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips talk about 2000 Mules
screenshot from here

I’ve been trying to imagine what this bombshell might be. I’m assuming it’s something that can be shown through data analysis, since that’s what he specializes in. He says it isn’t something that can be turned into a movie. It’s something he can clearly explain in a couple of minutes. But there’s six more weeks of getting ready to lay that out? I don’t know what details have to be checked and rechecked. Some of it has to do with getting the information out. He said he’d be bringing news outlets, such as Patriot Patel, together to lay out the explanation. I presume those outlets won’t include the various censoring media.

So I’m curious.

This is another movie that might not be made at another time. The perpetrators know how they were tracked this time. So will they use burner phones? Will they avoid the multiple drop boxes per mule that they encouraged this time? That was to avoid the sudden overload in a single drop box, which would cause suspicion. If all the nearby drop boxes got, say, around 100 ballots in a day, and this one drop box got 1300, that would be an anomaly.

There’s also the fact that, while video surveillance of the drop boxes is required by law, most did not do it. Video coinciding with geotracking is enough evidence for an indictment. So—do you just “accidentally” fail to provide video? Seems likely.

True the Vote noticed mules during the Georgia runoff using latex gloves—after a case where the perpetrators were caught because of fingerprints on the ballots. So they change their method based on what was done to catch them in the past.

Back in May, I had something weird happen on my phone. I asked this question in a group, but didn’t find anyone who had experienced something similar. Anyway, here’s what I posted:

Sincere question, not sure who to ask: This past Friday I went to the internet on my phone, which I do less frequently than most. A notification popped up—which disappeared before I could figure out how to get a screenshot—telling me, as I recall, that my security agreement was changing. Companies I go to online would no longer be able to track me or purchase my tracking data.

Normally I’d say that’s a good thing. I already opt out of tracking wherever I notice that I can. But this was the week 2000 Mules came out. In that documentary, True the Vote (from here in Houston) used tracking data, available for purchase by companies, and/or used by law enforcement, to identify phone tracking data showing people who went from one mail-in ballot drop box to another, when it is illegal to drop off another person’s ballot.

So, was this announcement a normal phone update? Or was it a response to the knowledge that tracking data can locate illegal voting? And if it’s the latter, does that mean we won’t have the same means of tracking this form of illegal voting in November?

Maybe it was normal, and I’m being a bit paranoid. But the timing of it, just days after the movie premiered, seems odd. And I wonder if it could mean there’s movement to stop mules from being tracked the next time around.

You can find the movie and ways to stream it at https://2000mules.com/.

Here are a few extra videos related to this movie:

·        “EXCLUSIVE: Ballot Mules Funded by Obama-Linked NGOs Pouring Billions Into ‘Local Insurgencies’” June 3, 2022. 

o   Watch the full version on EpochTV May 13, 2022

·        “Patel Patriot Interviews Gregg Phillips” May 28, 2022. 

·        “2000 Mules: Why I Changed My Mind About the2020 Election | Dinesh D’Souza | POLITICS" The Rubin Report, June 5, 2022

·        “FILM REVIEW 2000 Donkeys by Delish” Mr. Reagan podcast, May 9, 2022. 

Which Is It?

Is it really a matter of what is is? Some things are factual and obvious—and yet denied with defiance.

graphic from here

I’m talking about gender—or rather, sex. Gender is mainly “the formal classification by which nouns and pronouns (and often accompanying modifiers) are grouped and inflected, or changed in form, so as to control certain syntactic relationships,” as my vintage Webster explains. English doesn’t bother with gender so much, but it’s common in Spanish, French, and other languages. The two options are masculine and feminine, unless a word is neutral. These terms don’t necessarily relate to sex. For example, la mesa doesn’t imply that a table relates to women, nor does el cuarto imply that a room relates to men.

If you keep reading, Webster explains that gender also can be used as a transitive verb (a verb with an object)—really a shortened version of engender—used in genetics, to refer to “units occurring at specific points on the chromosomes, by which hereditary characters are transmitted and determined.” It doesn’t even necessarily relate to whether it’s on an X or Y chromosome.

Hidden at the end of the main noun entry, Webster mentions that gender is a colloquial term for sex.

So I looked up sex: “either of the two divisions, male or female, into which persons, animals, or plants are divided, with reference to their reproductive functions.” Plus, of course, the obvious other meanings of the word sex.

Controllers of language have a lot of power. Someone invented the relatively new meaning of gender to be something completely apart from language gender, and also different from human biology, related to something internal in the mind.

The phrase “It’s all in your head” used to mean something different and rather condescending. Now it’s considered something of so much overarching importance that it requires the world to bow to it as a new reality.

That’s a problem for people who value truth. (For people who value family and a number of other things as well, but we have to limit a blog post to some reasonable length.)

There’s a contradiction going on. There’s a claim that a person can be born biologically one kind of human and not actually be that kind of human—but that understanding is an inborn, immutable characteristic that the person discovers about him/herself. And therefore we need to be open to a person’s choice about which kind of human to be. But if it’s a choice, it’s not an inborn immutable characteristic. Right?

Earlier this month Jordan Peterson—who came to fame by refusing to use invented unnatural pronouns being imposed by the Canadian government in the first instance of compelled speech since the invention of British Common Law—was asked to deal with this contradiction in a Q&A in The Netherlands.

Jordan Peterson, left
screen shot from here

He starts out giving Canada’s Bill C 16 as an example of needing to look deeper when deciding your stance on an issue. The host, in The Netherlands, used this as a springboard for further discussion, not on compelled speech, but on transgender rights (at around 14-21 minutes):

Host: I don’t know if you know, but in The Netherlands, three weeks ago the first official non-gender passport was given to a Dutch citizen. At the same time, in the US, of course, the new Trump bill, which considers to narrowly define gender as something that’s immutable and that’s totally based on genitalia at birth, is now the potential law. So, if you had to choose between these two laws, which one would you pick?

We’ll forgive someone from another country for not knowing how our laws work. President Trump does not put forth bills; the legislative branch does that. What he’s referring to is a definition to be used by the executive branch pertaining to already existing laws. The Department of Health and Human Services sent out a memo, which was passed on to news outlets, directing that government agencies adopt a definition of gender that is determined "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable." 

OK, back to the discussion:

JP: Well, if you’re transgendered, is it immutable?

Host: (long pause) I don’t know.

JP: Right. Neither does anyone else. And so there’s tremendous incoherencies in the theory. So, at the moment, for example, it’s perfectly reasonable to formulate the proposition—and this is very characteristic of, let’s say, the ideological types who drove Bill C 16—to say you can be a man born in a woman’s body, which is a biologically determinist argument, and to say that gender is socially constructed, and to say that it’s a personal choice. It’s like, sorry, all three of those things cannot simultaneously be true. So, there’s going to be a variety of legislative responses to that, but mostly it’s just incoherent.

And I also think that it’s driven by something deeper. It’s driven at least in part by the desire to destabilize traditional perceptual and cognitive categories. And I see that as part of an assault on the idea of categorization itself. It’s been undertaken with a fair bit of success in the universities since the 1970s. And so, generally speaking, I’m opposed to such things. I don’t believe that introducing confusion about gender identity into the lives of young people at an early age is going to have a net positive consequence. We’ll see. But I doubt it.

He sidesteps the proposed choice between the two bills—the question designed to put him on record as either opposing or supporting Trump.

Host: But wouldn’t you also be against the Trump bill, because, as you said, it’s also a way in which the law compels a certain identity upon you, which is the reason you opposed Bill C 16? So, how would you go about—what is your position on this?

JP: I opposed Bill C 16 because it compelled my speech in a particular manner.

Host: Yeah.

JP: It wasn’t that it compelled an identity on me. It was very specific, in that, in the entire history of English common law, there has never been legislation that required people to utter particular phrases.

And he simply goes on with the explanation about compelled speech that he has been making for a solid couple of years.

The contradiction he points out interests me. He divides it into three possibilities:

·         A man being born into a woman’s body, for example, is biologically determined.

·         Gender is socially constructed.

·         Gender is a choice.

They are mutually exclusive. If it’s biologically determined, there’s no choice about it; there is simply discovering whatever evidence overwhelms the obvious reproductive biology. If it’s socially constructed, there’s no choice about it—unless you invent some way to deconstruct whatever social construct there was. (And do you do that individually or societally as a whole?) So we’re supposed to let a person choose that choice that they don’t really have, and then respect their choice?

And if you don’t do exactly that, you can be prosecuted in Canada, bounced from Twitter, silenced on Facebook or YouTube, fired from your job, and blacklisted from future employment.

Or lose custody of your child.

James
image from here

For example, there’s a father whose six-year-old son, James, insists he is a boy when he is with his father, but allows himself to be dressed and presented as a girl, Luna, when with his mother. She is trying to both take away visitation from the father and force him to pay for the transgender-affirming doctor she has chosen. So the boy does not consistently express gender dysphoria symptoms, nor consistently assert that he is the opposite gender from his biology; rather, he displays symptoms of tragically sad attempts to try and please a misguided mother. And if the mother isn’t stopped, within two years the boy could be started on hormonal therapy that will alter his life forever. (Another story on this case here.)

Matt Walsh responded to Twitter’s banning of anything transgenders disagree with by asking a question—in violation of Twitter’s rules, but so far without getting banned:

Rather than simply arguing my case, as I’ve argued a million times, that men are men and women are women—which is, again, a banned statement on Twitter—I figured that, rather than simply do that, I figured that I’d give the other side of this debate a chance to explain themselves….

So, this is the tweet that I sent last night. I said, “I invite anyone on Twitter to explain in clear and specific detail how precisely a biological male can come to know that he is really a woman? How does he arrive at this conclusion? On what basis? With what evidence to support it? Again, I invite anyone to explain. Thank you.”

Now, this really is the fundamental question, isn’t it? You have biological men who have at some point come to realize, or know, or understand or whatever, that they are really women. OK? So, how does that work exactly? I would think that this question should be really easy to answer, if you believe that transgenderism is an actual thing, like it’s really possible for a man to, in some sense, be a woman and to come to that realization. Then I would think it would be really easy to explain. Shouldn’t it?

And if, in fact, this point of view is not anti-science, then, again, you should be able to explain it scientifically.

And I posed this question. It’s a fair question, not a trick question. And hours went by without anyone even trying to answer it. Instead you had liberals just telling me that I was a bigot for even asking the question to begin with.

That’s the biology question, really. Is there evidence? Can you produce it? There is overwhelming evidence the other way, which Jordan Peterson provides:

So, here’s the argument: biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual preference are independent. OK. They’re not. The definition of dependent is there’s a strong statistical relationship between them. Could be correlational. Could be causal. It is in fact causal. It’s also correlational. There’s an unbelievably tight linkage, so that the overwhelming majority of people who are a particular biological sex identify with that sex. It’s 99.97%. OK.

The overwhelming majority of people who are of a given biological sex and an isomorphic gender identity express their gender in accordance with those two fundamental elements of their identity. And that would be more, something in the range of 95%, assuming that one in twenty is playing with fashion in self-presentation in a gender bending manner—which is not uncommon; that’s been going on for a very long time.

And then, of the people who are of a given biological sex, the isomorphic gender identity, and who present themselves that way, the overwhelming majority are heterosexual. That is not independent. It’s the very opposite of independent, even though that’s not now the law.

As he sums it up,

The idea that biology doesn’t play a strong role in influencing phenomena at every one of those levels of analysis is absolutely preposterous. And that’s pushed very hard by the social constructionists. And I think that’s reprehensible. It flies in the face of anything reasonably defined as fact. And it does no one any favors—not least because you can’t say, “Well, you’re a man born in a woman’s body.” It’s like, well, is that a biologically determinist argument? Yes or no? So what are we saying? “You can be a man born in a woman’s body, and that’s biological, but if you’re a woman born in a woman’s body, that’s socially constructed?” Really? That’s supposed to be an argument? It’s beyond preposterous.

What do people who look these facts in the face and lie about them have to gain? I have my suspicions. Especially when they align, as Dr. Peterson has pointed out, with cultural Marxists. Those people are about gaining power over others. We must resist them, even as we find ways to both coexist with and be kind to the tiny cohort of people who have gender dysphoria. Neither they nor those using them should we allow to control our thoughts, our speech, or our recognition of truth.