This Week In Doom — WMBriggs Podcast

Dall’Abaco concerto

The week of the worst that was, in aural form, featuring the music of Giuseppe Torelli and Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco.

Torelli trumpet concerto

Because they can, and because they want to be seen as glorified by their betters, the Obama administration mandated that the sexually insane be allowed into whatever shower facilities that pleases them in the nation’s public schools.

Incidentally, how many of you out there home school? Or send your kids to, say, a Catholic school because you know those schools are better? You’re excused from commenting.

This toilet ruling has the force of law, which only proves what everybody should have long known: that the storied “separation of powers” is dead. Long dead. Maybe it hasn’t been generally noticed because the corpse has been lying in public view for such an extended period? Who, after all, do you petition to have this law-which-is-not-a-law changed? Congress? The Supreme (hallelujah) Court?

Why is the government involving itself into that which is clearly not its business? Answer: because the majority now concede that everything is the government’s business. Come. Admit this to yourself. You heard the news that the man who coaches the boys track team can slip out of his slip and slip into the girls showers and thought to yourself either that’s the wrong law or that’s the right law. I’ll bet none or only a handful thought the government is granting itself a power it should not have.

It does have it. Now. Because even assuming a change of administration friendlier to Reality, it won’t say “Executive actions do not have the power of law and therefore the ruling is null and voice”. Instead, they’ll dictate another law-that-is-not-called-a-law to modify the old law.

The folks we send to Washington and its satellite bureaucracies must, at least occasionally, sit back and say to themselves: How are we getting away with this?

As proof, here’s the official voice of the conservative wing of the establishment “reacting” to the news: “The Transgender Straw Broke the Camel’s Back” by a fellow called French. His opening salvo:

You may not have realized it yet, but the Obama administration just destroyed the traditional American public school. Without an act of Congress, without a ruling from the Supreme Court, and without even going through the motions of the regulatory rule-making process, the administration issued a letter drafting every single public educational institution in the country to implement the extreme edge of the sexual revolution.

French is shocked at the departure from procedure. But how could he be? Is he hoping he’ll be a member of an upcoming, possibly Trump-led, elite who’ll do the same things to his enemies?

Everything has gone wrong. What if Congress had passed a law? What it then be just? Etc.

Schools are forbidden to inquire into a person’s “gender”. Why? Because there is no physical, empirical, verifiable test of “transgenderness”. You are who are say you are. This is why it does no good at all to ask for any kind of check. This is the point I made in the article “I Self Identify As A Yak“. Nobody noticed, but every argument I used to justify my yakhood was parallel to the arguments men use when claiming to be women.

Suppose, dear listener, you claim to be seven feet tall. It’s your identity! You are a tall man trapped inside the body of a short one! How dare anybody deny your tallness. Why, you might even kill yourself were you to hear enough people tell you that you are only a mere 5’10”. These Realists would have blood on their hands!

It does no good whatsoever to insist that a physical measuring tape “says” the you’re only 5’10”. You say you’re 7′. You self-identify as 7′. It is your choice. Therefore it becomes our duty, dear listeners, to follow you into insanity. Because if you admit that a physical or biological measure be allowed in this case, then you must allow a biological measure of sex, which leads to the denial of fantasies. Oh, you can claim a man’s “gender” is not his “sex”, but if you allow that you must allow his “stature” is not his “height.” We are all stature-fluid now.

And so on endlessly. God bless Texas for recognizing reality and telling the feds to “take their thirty pieces of silver” and stuff ’em. Texas is not bowing to the pressure. How long it will last, only God knows.

This is another reminder your federal government hates you. If you’re a Realist, I mean.

Oh! Did you not hear? The Pentagon is prepping for the entrance of the sexually insane. Yes: “Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Thursday reiterated his intention to allow transgender people to openly serve in the military, and said he’s confident any ‘practical issues’ can be resolved.”

Don’t forget Carter also mandated women to serve in all combat positions.

And—didn’t you know?—the government, through its Department of Health and Human Services, mandated even doctors have to now pretend men calling themselves women are women. As Ryan Anderson explains:

[T]hese [new] regulations will penalize medical professionals and health care organizations that, as a matter of faith, moral conviction, or professional medical judgment, believe that maleness and femaleness are biological realities to be respected and affirmed, not altered or treated as diseases.

Yes, this is allowed as part of Obamacare. Free health “insurance” for all!

Torelli concerto

Know what universities need more of? Right! Diversity! So says a Buddhist and Chinese philosopher in the New York Times. “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is“. And what it is, they say, is not Philosophy as Philosophy, in the same way that Mathematics is everywhere Mathematics and not Chinese Mathematics, Arabian Mathematics, and Western Mathematics, but Philosophy is like this: it should be called “Department of European and American Philosophy.”

There is some justice in this, because it is impossible to separate yourself entirely from the civilization in which you swim. And that means Mathematics should also, to be perfectly consistent, be called Department of European and American Mathematics. After all, not all cultures think of number in the same way. And that means that we in the West might not know as much as we could.

The change of name in Philosophy acknowledges, say our authors, that there are not enough philosophers taking an interest in Buddhism (which studies are usually placed in religion) or Chinese philosophy (and again this is often studied in religion or elsewhere).

But then they had to say this:

Philosophy as a discipline has a serious diversity problem, with women and minorities underrepresented at all levels among students and faculty, even while the percentage of these groups increases among college students. Part of the problem is the perception that philosophy departments are nothing but temples to the achievement of males of European descent.

Those ever-naughty males of European descent! You know they’re bad. Why, they even invented the university, those terrible havens of rape and racism! And home to malcontents such as our authors.

What about pluralism in philosophy?

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) recognized this [necessity] when he followed his Muslim colleagues in reading the work of the pagan philosopher Aristotle, thereby broadening the philosophical curriculum of universities in his own era.

In other words, Philosophy as Philosophy is comfortable taking ideas wherever they arise and incorporating them into the curriculum. Or was, before the bureaucratic cancer turned malignant.

Meaning, as our authors, both academic philosophers, did not recognize, we have reached contradiction. More evidence most universities ought to be burnt to the ground.

Torelli trumpet concerto

Unlicensed Armenian Phrenologist

This line was at the end of one of the Pink Panther movies. It came to mind that phrenologists, I mean the science of Phrenology, a one-time Consensus, at least made predictions no worse than do people in global warming “science.” There’s not only the serially failed physical models of the atmosphere, but the plethora of global-warming-causes-this nonsense statistical studies.

Here’s a guy. He’s giving the speech at MIT’s “Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies And Languages” forum. “Is ISLAMOPHOBIA accelerating global warming?” MIT has, like most universities, sold its soul. According to the notes, “Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne.”

There must already have been papers written about global warming causing Islamophobia, though I refuse to look, but this is the first I’ve heard that Science™ has shown Islamophobia causes global warming. Here’s portions of the Abstract:

This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis—

Stop! If I had a live audience, this would be the place where we’d get the big laugh. Muslims aren’t a race, and if you thought a real live Future Generation Professor would know that, you’d’ve been wrong. The extent to which academics are besotted by racism cannot be over-estimated. Race on the brain. Lunacy.

More: Hage’s “most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000)” By “white supremacist”, Hage means a white who refuses to acknowledge he (the white) is an inveterate racist because he is white.

This definition is both brilliant and fecund, because it provides endless work for scholars like Hage in unmasking racism.

Book has chapters like “Evil White Nationalists 2: The ‘White Nation’ Fallacy”, “Good White Nationalists: The Tolerant Society as a ‘White Nation’ Fantasy.”

He, himself a migrant to a welcoming Australia, says, “I, and many people like me, am sick of ‘worried’ White Australians…[who say] look at crime, look at ghettos…” What Hage apparently wants is these whites to go away, or go live among themselves.

Which is, what, white nationalism? Never mind.

Torelli trumpet concerto

Speaking of race, as we must, though the topic is dreary, here’s something from the Heterodox Academy: “The amazing 1969 prophecy that racial preferences would cause the exact grievances of protesters today“.

Gist: college policies to promote Diversity cause the racism they seek to eliminate.

In the Wall Street Journal, the authors wrote, on average “Asian students enter with combined math/verbal SAT scores on the order of 80 points higher than white students and 200 points higher than black students. A similar pattern occurs for high-school grades.”

Well, and this means, roughly, and depending on the field of study, Asians on any campus will on average be smarter than whites, and whites will on average be smarter than the blacks, Asians much smarter than the blacks. And—worst of all—everybody will notice this. And it will get worse as colleges lust after blacks to push up enrollment figures because, of course, standards must and will be lowered for blacks, and raised for whites and Asians.

It will get worse still when everybody is forbidden to mention these trivial truths.

Point of the article was that all this was foreseen: well, it wasn’t that difficult to foresee. In 1969 a Judge wrote about Yale:

…the admission policy adopted by the Law School faculty will serve to perpetuate the very ideas and prejudices it is designed to combat. If in a given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of intellectual inferiority among the black students…The faculty can talk around the clock about disadvantaged background, and it can excuse inferior performance because of poverty, environment, inadequate cultural tradition, lack of educational opportunity, etc. The fact remains that black and white students will be exposed to each other under circumstances in which demonstrated intellectual superiority rests with the whites…

No one can be expected to accept an inferior status willingly. The black students, unable to compete on even terms in the study of law, inevitably will seek other means to achieve recognition and self-expression…

Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit of sociological activities…

Since the common denominator of the group of students with lower qualifications is one of race this aggressive expression will undoubtedly take the form of racial demands—the employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to satisfy minimum academic standards.

Remember what we said about good theories making good predictions?

Update The material below never made the broadcast, but I leave here for your edification.

Torelli trumpet concerto

What is it about times medieval that has so many people worked up about Christianity? The documents which eventually comprised the New Testament of the Christian Bible were not medieval, of course, but ancient. Yet Christians are always accused of being medieval. Given the flee from Reality we’re witnessing, they’re must have been something uniquely good about the Medieval period, else it wouldn’t be as hated. What might that be? I’ll let you answer.

Meanwhile, here’s one example among a multitude. A guy is re-translating the Bible to make it “queer”. He doesn’t mean odd; he means as a celebration of sodomy. One commenter said:

[R]e-translating the Bible to deliberately elide its medieval edges doesn’t grapple with its flaws so much as seek to evade them, and this doesn’t queer the Bible — it just offers an alternative, which devout believers of The Word would undoubtedly reject, and which hurts efforts to undermine those who cite “religious liberty” to justify their prejudices.

There’s the medieval derision. Anyway, the new work will be called The Queer Bible, which bills itself as “A radical translation of the Bible that is inclusive, celebratory, and personal”. Guy named Whitehead—ex-Catholic: does that surprise anybody?—ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund it, and got three grand. Here’s a link for his “translation”, by which he means his imaginative reconstruction. All about nakedness and insufficient non-procreative same-sex sex, which isn’t sex at all, of course, but masturbation.

Torelli trumpet concerto

https://twitter.com/mattstat/status/731478723984130048

“Would it be O.K., for example, to sequence and then synthesize Einstein’s genome?” Drew Endy, a bioengineer at Stanford, and Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University, wrote in an essay criticizing the proposed project. “If so how many Einstein genomes should be made and installed in cells, and who would get to make them?”

Einstein’s and not, say, Obama’s? Well, that’s some sort of improvement I suppose.