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“So, what is the takeaway from this analysis? The single biggest observation is that, contrary to what has been asserted by advocates of youth transition, most adolescents with a GD diagnosis will not have this diagnosis within as few as seven years, during the period of rapid identity development. The single most important implication is that there is no empirical basis for assuming that most adolescents presenting with GD are destined to live as gender-transitioned adults. This further suggests that the GD diagnosis presents a dubious basis for offering teens life-altering interventions with permanent impacts on health and functioning.”
One of the confounding aspects of trying to have a conversation with an activist is the staunch refusal to meaningfully engage.
This refusal comes in many forms but it usually breaks down like this:
1. Statement about a topic in society – for instance – School libraries should not carry age inappropriate materials on their shelves.
The activist reply usually goes down two familiar paths. The first is to attack the person making the statement – “Only people on the far right say such terribly bigoted and hateful things. Why are you so filled with hate?
Notice here they have selected the way of social coercion, in this gambit they are attempting to bring social pressure down on you for making a neutral innocuous statement. This hinges on the idea of guilt by association: Who wants to be labelled a far right ‘nazi’?
No one, of course. But does their name calling equal a meaningful answer to the assertion being put forward? Of course not.
The second method is formally called drawing a false equivalence/strawmanning, but in practice it can be thought of as comparing apples to oranges and attempting to make a judgement based on the the misapprehension of the facts of the matter. The activist apples to oranges tack looks something like this:
How could you be in favour of banning books? Don’t you believe in a free society and freedom of speech? What kind of authoritarian are you to want to ban books in a free society, you know Hitler banned books right (they often can’t resist a combination approach)?
Does the activist meaningfully address the claim? Nope. What happened is they took a false reading of what their interlocutor said, and then argued against what they added to the conversation. To reiterate, the claim was that age inappropriate materials should not be in school libraries. Our claim wasn’t about banning books outright, and never allowing children access. Our claim was based on child cognitive development and the need for having age appropriate materials that will best address the needs of the children.
Notice their (erroneous) argument is easy to make. “You are for banning books!” “You are a right-wing hateful bigot!”. It takes much more time to carefully sort out their accusations and clear up all the mud they’ve thrown into the waters.
It is a pain but it is always necessary to name the dynamic that is in play. This isn’t about ‘winning’ an argument or ‘owning the Libs’ and if it is you are engaged in the same sort of bad faith your opponent is employing. In a worthwhile conversation both parties should be looking to try and decipher what the truth of the matter actually is. It requires both parties to be willing to change their positions based on a set of agreed upon facts that comport with reality.
Name calling and arguing against your notion of what your opponent is saying is the opposite of a constructive conversation. Thus, it behooves you to show the argumentative dodges in play and ask your interlocutor to make a charitable assertion with regards to what you’ve asserted. It is perfectly acceptable to ignore the various slings and arrows (naming them as they happen) and continue to ask for a reasonable response to your assertion.
What you’ve done has placed the ball firmly in their court. They can continue to make baseless claims and continue to demonstrate their dishonesty, or they can choose to address what you’ve actually said.
The takeaway for this is to let your opponent demonstrate their honesty or dishonesty – it is their choice and their motivations will become clear depending on which path they choose.
Looking at everything through the oppressor/oppressed lens is dangerous.
“On these facts, it can be difficult to tell whether universities have been acting with willful indifference or just willfully. Time—and discovery—will tell. But every now and then we get a bracing glimpse of what the administrators who are responsible for implementing campus antidiscrimination policies really think about Jews. At Columbia, text messages exchanged by a group of deans during a panel discussion about the crisis of campus antisemitism offered some honest insight. While a Jewish panelist was speaking, one of the deans remarked that it was “hard to hear the woe is me” because it was coming “from such a place of privilege.” A second accused a Jewish speaker of “tak[ing] full advantage” of the crisis on campus for its “[h]uge fundraising potential.” A third was more concise, if less articulate. She reacted to the panel with a vomiting emoji.
The texts are bad, but the reality they reflect is even worse. They illustrate the moral and intellectual rot that has been gnawing away at our institutions of higher learning for decades. Our universities have long nurtured—and have by now been largely captured by—an ideology that divides the world into victim classes and oppressor classes, and views our legal and judicial institutions as systems of subordination masquerading as neutral arbiters of justice. Under this worldview, Jews occupy a position of unique “privilege” as the apex oppressors on a social pyramid of power and subordination. They cannot—by definition—be victims because they are oppressors. As such, they are unworthy of the same protections afforded to groups at the bottom of the pyramid of social oppression.
If you buy into this worldview, hatred against Jews is justifiable and violence against them is defensible as a legitimate act of resistance—or, at the very least, not worthy of sympathy. That is why it was “hard” for a Columbia dean to hear what she derided as “the woe is me” from a Jewish speaker. It’s why another was quick to accuse a Jewish speaker of using his power to exploit the moment for its “fundraising potential.”
The current crisis of campus antisemitism has laid bare for all Americans just how dangerous a cultural moment we are living in. The same ideological forces that have unleashed virulent antisemitism on our campuses have also unleashed some of the worst atrocities in modern history. They are antithetical to our nation’s core values. Individual liberty and individual responsibility have no home in a system obsessed with allocating collective guilt. And when the rule of law is seen as a racialized system of subordination, equality under the law is a delusion. We’ve seen this revolution before. It doesn’t end well.”
Trying to find video evidence of this… event was a bit challenging. If the video does not start at 6:24 please navigate to that timestamp to witness a PHd demonstrate her craft in ‘breaking’.
Let’s look at some samples of her “scholarship”.
“We argue that breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized and gendered hierarchies.”
This intentional word salad is endemic across all of the Grievance Study fields – for those not in the know – any course that ends in “Studies” usually qualifies as a Grievance Study. Essentially these are ‘fields’ that have been set up to give employment to ‘scholars’ that otherwise would not be able to find a job anywhere in society.
Thus the only vocation available is one of indoctrinating others into the bullshit and churning out vacuous papers that cite other bullshit papers (citation laundering) in attempt to look like a credible academic subject.
Let’s see what the good Dr.Gunn says on ‘breaking’.
And finally the best for last:
So to put things in perspective – the video of Gunn ‘breaking’ is the prefect illustration of her grasp of the subject, and really her connection to reality.
Because the IOC can’t seem to bring itself to administer a simple cheek swab test we have to continue to put up with this rolling travesty against women.
The pendulum may be starting to swing back toward a more moderate incremental embrace of change within the school systems of North America. We, thankfully, are starting to move away from ‘tearing down the old ways’ to acknowledging that the old ways were put in place for a reason and perhaps a more nuanced pace of change would benefit everyone in the school system.
“For decades, there was a general push and pull in the education world between progressives and traditionalists. The math wars stretch back at least to debates over California’s state curriculum in the 1990s. The phonics versus whole language debate began in the 1950s, and traditionalists have many times declared that phonics won. John Dewey first theorized a progressive education built on rationalist grounds in the early twentieth century, building on Jean Jacques Rousseau before him. As with old truths rediscovered, these are old debates as well.
Most recently, school systems embraced deconstructionism under pressure from anti-racist activists during Covid, imploring them to tear down old structures of discipline, instruction, testing, and curriculum. Traditionalists retreated while progressives advanced. Alas, an education system that forwent the basic truths of human nature was bound to fail, and schools are relearning old lessons.
In their renunciation of admissions tests, universities stumbled on the wisdom of the thought experiment “Chesterton’s Fence.” The purchaser of a new property, the idea goes, shouldn’t tear down a fence simply because they are unaware of its use. If they do, they may find snow drifts blocking their windows or wolves among the sheep. It is a call to respect the wisdom in existing institutions, but also a plea for intellectual humility. We may not know what’s best, so it is wise to respect those who came before.
What we need instead is a rediscovery of fundamentals, an acknowledgment that the old ways work, and a realization that if we sweep away everything old and try to reimagine something better, we will have swept away everything of value.”
I recommend going to Law & Liberty and reading the entire essay, as it advocates a reasonable way forward for Education in North America.
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