Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Category: Social Justice

  • Texas “Boy” Wins Texas Girls Wrestling Tournament – Largest Media Sports Outlet Reports On Story With Comments Turned Off

    Mack Beggs, a female transitioning to be a male by using massive amounts of steroids completed an undefeated season Saturday by winning a controversial Texas state girls wrestling title in an event clouded by criticism from those who believe the testosterone he’s taking as he transitions from female to male created an unfair advantage.

    Beggs, who reached the state tournament after two opponents forfeited, was dogged throughout the tournament by questions about whether his testosterone treatments made him too strong to wrestle fairly against girls.

    The University Interscholastic League, which oversees athletics in Texas public schools, enacted the birth certificate policy Aug. 1, 2016. And while Beggs’ family has said he wanted to compete against boys, UIL deputy director Jamey Harrison, who refused to address Beggs directly, said the UIL had not received a request to change divisions from any athlete at this competition.

    "I must break you." -Mack Beggs
    Girls Wrestling Champion

    In a twist of irony, The above story was reported on the ESPN W outlet rather than the main site.  ESPN W, which ostensibly caters to women, does not have commenting in its articles.  ESPN’s main site permits it. To my recollection, it’s the first article about an athlete referred to as male throughout to appear on the “W” site.  I’m sure its a coincidence

    Meanwhile, the Washington Post article had commenting on and the responses largely derided Beggs being able to compete against athletes who are banned from taking the same performance-enhancing drugs Beggs is mega-dosing on in order to deliberately change body structure.

    USAToday had the comments turned off for their story, which said there were “a smattering of boos”  amid mostly cheers.  Which is a departure from the WaPo pice which hilariously led with the words “booed and bloody”.  Now perhaps Kent Babb had some insight into Beggs’s monthlies (if he’s still having them while taking mega-dowses of male hormones, I don’t know) that gives him license to use “bloody” in a description of someone that looks like they barely broke a sweat while competing against a series of opponents that are physically inferior to him in every way. Perhaps his editor added it in for color. And perhaps Babb is just full of it.  Either way, no blood was visible and there were more cheers than boos.

    But WaPo and other outlets have gotta fight for Team Trans rather than report honestly.  After all, if just the fact were reported here: “a person taking doses of steroids that nobody else in a competition designed for females is able to take under the rules, wins the competition without breaking much of a sweat”, I’d imagine the reactions would be quite consistent.

    Of course, the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports” doesn’t want your reaction to be heard anyway.

    BONUS CONTENT: These people say their seven year old is trans and would change Trump’s mind on access to trans bathrooms.  Seven.  Their kid is seven. And this fostering of a delusion so they can get street cred with their idiot progressive friends is child abuse.

  • Millennials and Socialism

    Joel Kotkin at the Daily Beast has a new article up about Millennials: The Screwed Generation Turns Socialist.  And they appear to be the most leftward since the Great Generation.

    In this past election, those over 45 strongly favored Trump, while those younger than that cast their ballots for Clinton. Trump’s improbable victory, and the more significant GOP sweep across the country, demonstrated that the much-ballyhooed Millennials simply are not yet sufficiently numerous or united enough to overcome the votes of the older generations.

    Yet over time, the millennials —arguably the most progressive generation since the ’30s—could drive our politics not only leftward, but towards an increasingly socialist reality, overturning many of the very things that long have defined American life. This could presage a war of generations over everything from social mores to economics and could well define our politics for the next decade.

    And some broad political generalizations ensue about the voting patterns of the existing generations.  For the sake of brevity we will skip this and get right to the meat of the article:

    Millennials’ defining political trait is their embrace of activist government. Some 54 percent of millennials, notes Pew, favor a larger government, compared to only 39 percent of older generations. One reason: Millennials face the worst economic circumstances of any generation since the Depression, including daunting challenges to home ownership. More than other generations, they have less reason to be enamored with capitalism.

    These economic realities, along with the progressive social views, has affected their voting behavior. Millennials have voted decisively Democratic since they started going to the polls, with 60 percent leaning that direction in 2012 and 55 percent last year. They helped push President Obama over the top, and Hillary Clinton got the bulk of their votes last year. But their clear favorite last year was self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, who drew more far millennial votes in the primaries than Clinton and Trump combined.

    And Socialism – everyone’s favorite zombie ideology lives on:

    Roughly half of Millennials  have positive feelings about socialist, twice the rate of the previous generation. Indeed, despite talk about a dictatorial Trump and his deplorables, the Democratic-leaning Millennials are more likely to embrace limits on free speech and are far less committed to constitutional democracy than their elders. Some 40 percent, notes Pew, favor limiting speech deemed offensive to minorities, well above the 27 percent among the Xers, 24 among the boomers, and only 12 percent among silents. They are also far more likely to be dismissive about basic constitutional civil rights, and are even more accepting of a military coup than previous generations.

    But fear not there is some hope:

    Other factors could slow the lurch to the left. There is a growing interest in third party politics, not so much Green but libertarian; 8 percent of Millennials voted for Third Party candidates, twice the overall rate. Overall, Tufts finds that moderates slightly outpace liberals, although conservatives remain well behind. Millennials, note Winograd and Hais, also dislike “top down” solutions and may favor radical action primarily at the local level and more akin to Scandinavia than Stalinism.

    As Millennials grow up, start families, look to buy houses, and, worst of all, start paying taxes, they may shift to the center, much as the Boomers did before them. Redistribution, notes a recent Reason survey, becomes less attractive as incomes grow to $60,000 annually and beyond. This process could push them somewhat right-ward, particularly as they move from the leftist hothouses of the urban core to the more contestable suburbs.

    As the old saying goes, read the article for yourself to get all of the details.  There is also a warning to the Republican Party, suggesting they abandon socially conservative ideas that offend Millennials.

     

    My analysis: Political generalization are often broad, and many writers assume that the parties are static and will only become fossilized as the next generational wave comes roaring in.  And maybe there is a lag in time before the voters trust an ostracized party again, one that I believe the Democrats are going through now, and the Republicans went through after Bush the Second.  Of course, Trump’s election may be a political outlier; we shall see how much he upsets the DC apple cart.  Based on past history I don’t give him much chance against the Bureaucratic State.

    Regarding Millennials – I see some of them drifting rightward as time and their incomes rise.  Some may keep their idealism, but reality has a funny way of destroying that.  Perhaps this is a chance for libertarians or even the Big-L Libertarian Party?  I have little trust in the latter, but some distant hope for the former.  We have to find ways to educate, and dare I say, gain some political leverage during this strange Trump intermezzo.  It remains to be seen whether that means the slow take-over of the Republican Party, or splitting off on our own.  Based on the current two-party dynamic, I’m guessing the first.  But if that brand image is forever tainted, then maybe a strong Libertarian party is the way to go.

     

  • Psychopathic Exhibition On the Menu

     

    Making the rounds on the outrage circuit is this latest update into the continuing saga of Trump – Oh, What An Ass.

    ‘‘This is what it’s like to be with Trump,’’ Christie said. ‘‘He says, ‘There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want.’ And then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.’’’

    The big take-away we’re supposed to have is that Trump is such dickhead. How Dare He. The choice of supper entree for an enormous fat man already the subject of one failed lap banding is none of your business, sir – he has agency, you know!

    Pardon me if I hesitated to clutch my pearls. As many times as this story has been passed from shocked ear to shocked ear, people missed what I found to be the pertinent lede to the story, which defined a damning study in character itself.

    Trump and Christie discussed the nation’s opioid epidemic during the lunch.

    Christie on Wednesday signed a series of bills he requested to address the crisis, including a five-day limit on initial prescriptions for opioids and mandating state-regulated insurance plans cover treatment.

    I’m sorry, were we discussing agency here? The agency of someone afflicted with a self-inflicted morbidity known to cause early death, disorder and severe limitations on quality of life?

    Oh yes. I went there.

     

     

    Chris Christie believes there is an opioid epidemic. Is he correct? Possibly. To what ends? His own. If the opioid epidemic were a problem for the consumers of opioids, they’d be proposing their own solutions. They might even be doing so – we don’t know, since Top Men and the mainstream media do not appear to have invited them to the discussion. But the real problem here is that Christie ate meatloaf when he might have chosen something else. Sure.

    As detailed in my earlier article, Finding the Why, humans have a talent for spotting malfunction as defined through their own worldview. We apply self-serving corrections, and then when our best-laid plans end up tattered wrecks, we blame everyone else for the failure.

    I, personally, believe Chris Christie needs to put the snacks down and take the stairs more often. I am fully confident that if he does not do so, his life will be needlessly shortened and suffer a loss of quality. I might even be right. So, tell me, America – at what point do I get to override Governor Christie’s agency in order to apply my corrections to his choices?

    In my opinion, I don’t.

     

    If he wants to be a great big fat bastard, that’s his problem. Nothing to do with me. But what about his elevated healthcare costs, due specifically to his bad lifestyle choices and now foisted onto the backs of taxpayers? Who, exactly, paid for Governor Christie’s surgery; the one that didn’t work?

     

    Red herring. If we all eat enough of them, we’ll be thin as rails. The problem isn’t that Christie has a sweetheart Cadillac healthcare plan exempted from Obamacare’s onerous health-damaging idiocies, at the expense of people who lack such privilege. The problem isn’t even that he uses this sweet privilege to rectify the self-inflicted abuse of his body. The problem is that government picks my pocket to enrich people who think lunch should be not merely free, but an all-you-can-eat buffet. Those who rob Peter to pay Paul, will always have the support of Paul.

    Is the analogy too subtle? Perhaps it is. In the abundance of articles about poor, poor Christie’s stolen agency, not one thus far to mine eyes has pointed out these astonishing parallels. Christie is upset at the loss of his own agency, while taking others’ agency away with both hands and the expectation of applause.

    Governor Christie is the very thing against which he rails. He merely has trouble seeing this clearly, since he is as convinced of his own narrative rightness as every other human on the planet. He is the good guy, because that’s what his head tells him is so.

    Being the good guy isn’t a side, a team. It doesn’t come with the proper hand-waving to paper over what you did with a thin veneer of respectability and concern. It’s an action. Those who do bad things are not the good guys. Everything from there is rationalization.

    Prediction: If an opioid epidemic exists, it will not be cured by talking at opioid consumers coupled with the proper removal of just exactly the right set of agencies from the correct people, handing that power over to some bureaucrat whose claim to fame is a bachelors degree in fine arts and a cushy job divorced from the requirement for functional results. What we’ll get then is another set of dysfunctions, and more people insistent that more money and and more power to the people who caused the new problems are the next sole best solution.

    If there is an opioid epidemic, we’d be best served to start with finding the why.

    Why are more people consuming more opioids? If consumption has reached levels causing individual health concerns, why has that individual come to the conclusion that this was the most effective cure for their pain despite the risk-reward calculation? Lest anyone labor under the delusion that only people making good and proper social normie choices make risk-reward calculations, allow me to disabuse them of that notion. Everyone makes risk-reward calculations. The man drinking himself to death knows it. This choice nevertheless appears, to his mind, to be the most effective option available. If this calculation fails to make sense, I’d suggest asking him to explain it rather than assuming we know everything about the matter and can solve that problem for him.

    Chris Christie post-surgery is still grossly obese. If you want to know why, don’t ask his surgeon; ask Christie.

    Therein lies our real solutions. Taking away the proper agencies and handing more power and money to people ill-equipped to use them will solve nothing. Such actions have, in fact, gotten us to this state of disorder and chaotic whack-a-mole with accompanying enormous and rising costs; both fiscal and societal.

    We need to start involving those who we purport to assist. Not at them and to them, but with them, will these problems be solved. Every individual has agency, and re-labeling people as sub-human and otherwise lesser-than to excuse our actions in taking away their individuality does not make us the good guys.

    It makes us psychopaths.

    The… characteristics referred to as antisocial personality in the FBI report were as follows: sense of entitlement, unremorseful, apathetic to others, unconscionable, blameful of others, manipulative and conning, affectively cold, disparate understanding of behavior and socially acceptable behavior, disregardful of social obligations, nonconforming to social norms, irresponsible. These… were not simply persistently antisocial individuals who met DSM-IV criteria for ASPD; they were psychopaths- remorseless predators who use charm, intimidation and, if necessary, impulsive and cold-blooded violence to attain their ends.

    We are eating the very people we claim to help because it feeds our narrative and increases power and money in one direction only. The stated goals are never reached, and the subjects loathe us for our efforts; this is natural, since we are not helping them, that’s just our rationalization of our bad choices. This is tribal monkey behavior with evolved vocabulary, not civilized humanity.

    Civilization is a choice. Let’s choose it.

  • Georgetown Professor Jonathan Brown Responds

    Jonathan Brown has struck back at his critics and issued a lengthy release addressing many of the complaints people have levied against his purported positions on slavery and rape.

    Professor Jonathan Brown

    He begins by admitting to his tone-deafness on the issue and how he perhaps needed to have more understanding of a broad audience when speaking in a scholarly manner.  He then puts out a claim that he has received many death and rape threats on him as well as his family, although he doesn’t substantiate the claim in any way, shape or form.

    He then continues to spin interesting stories about what he means and that the context was completely misrepresented.  He continues to explain how Muslims were actually some of the greatest abolitionists in the history of mankind and that a lot of the latter slavery in the Muslim world was misunderstood, especially much of that from the Ottoman Empire.

    Read it for yourself, but I personally have a hard time taking someone seriously that says rape can actually be punished under Sharia as assault with only two witnesses as opposed to the four necessary to prove the charge of Hudud (fornication/adultery).  It diminishes the rule of law in a civil society and still essentially makes women second-class citizens.

    Enjoy the read and share your thoughts on the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and the Director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding.

    Hat tip to The Fusionist

  • Deconstructing the ‘Liberal Campus’ Cliche?

    (Image from Google Image Search)

    From The Atlantic: Deconstructing the ‘Liberal Campus’ Cliche

    The author, Jason Blakely, start with admitting that yes, there might be a problem:

    Are American universities now spaces where democratic free expression is in decline, where insecurity, fear, and an obsessive, self-preening political correctness make open dialogue impossible? This was a view voiced by many at the start of the month, after the University of California, Berkeley, canceled a speech by the right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, when a demonstration against his appearance spun out of control. Yiannopoulos had been invited to speak by campus Republicans, but headlines the next morning were dominated by images of 100 to 150 protesters wearing black masks, hurling rocks, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails en route to doing $100,000 dollars of damage to a student center named after the great icon of pacifist civil disobedience, Martin Luther King, Jr.

    But you see it’s all just part of a false narrative:

    Such reports have in turn reinforced a longstanding political narrative, which seeks to demean America’s universities as ideologically narrow, morally slack, hypersensitive, and out of touch. For example, commentators like the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have argued that America’s “university system” is “genuinely corrupt” in relying on “rote appeals to … left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.”

    But does this widespread portrait of universities as morally weak and anti-democratic—circulating at least since the time of Allan Bloom—really hold true? This vision of American universities is largely inadequate in at least two ways. First, it incorrectly blames increased fragility exclusively on the university system itself and, second, it relies on a reductive caricature of America’s institutions of higher learning.

    And then starts with numerous hand-waving and deflections.  And leaves the question unanswered: is the “conservative-identity” group merely responding in kind because of the left?

    Identity politics places individual and group notions of selfhood at the center of politics. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued at length, the main goal of identity politics is “recognition” or validation of a given identity by others in society. I have written elsewhere about how identity politics (normally associated with American liberalism) is actually a major engine fueling the rise of Trump. The categories of left and right often distort the ways in which cultural trends, like those associated with identity politics, are far more widely shared across American life. While some left-wing groups on campus are guilty of retreating from open dialogue, a conservative-identity movement has likewise tried to buffer students from having to hear ideas that upset them.

    And a summation:

    Any society that routinely attacks and undermines the institutions that support its greatest minds is caught up in an act of either extravagantly naïve or profoundly sinister self-sabotage. America’s college campuses remain places of astounding diversity in which democratic exchange of the highest kind still routinely takes place. The country’s university system remains, with all its imperfections, the best school for American democracy.

    If the United States is to flourish in the coming generation in the way it did in the prior century, it will need to embrace and even learn from the diversity and dialogue of its universities—not destroy them through simplistic grabs for popular power.

    It’s been over two decades since I’ve been in college, and yes, there were both liberal and conservative groups on campus.  But neither were rioting; that was for after the homecoming game when the student body burned sofas and overturned cars.  Now that was a honored tradition!

    Today one doesn’t see right-wing or moderates shaking their fists, chanting, or throwing stones in response to someone from the left visiting campus.  Instead we have a “progressive” movement that not only riots when someone they don’t like visits, but also expects the universities to enforce their limited belief system.  And very often they do.

    Mr. Blakely fails to address the First Amendment issues and also the growing concern that higher education are hardening into leftist enclaves.  If we truly want the country to flourish, then free inquiry and freedom of speech are a necessity, not an option.

  • The SJW Went Down To Georgia

    Here’s an interesting article by noted American musician Charlie Daniels which is warning of the possibility for a second Civil War, over the protesting & rioting we’ve seen in recent weeks.

    I find this an interesting thing to ponder. There certainly seems to be more civil unrest than there has been in my lifetime (I’m 34 years old, to give that statement some context). That’s obviously alarming, particularly with the emergence of the SJW contingent on college campuses, the bizarre radicalization of the BLM movement into some sort of neo-marxist drivel, and the recent wave of leftists who openly make the argument that freedom cannot be afforded to those who disagree with them.

    On the other hand, things have been much worse in this country before, without a total societal breakdown of the type which Mr. Daniels is alluding to. In the late 60s and early 70s, a number of American cities burned. There were actual full-on race riots, anti-Vietnam War riots, anti-hippie riots, leftist bombings, all of which dwarfed the recent Berkeley fiasco. And yet, no civil war.

    So my question to you, intrepid readers, is this: are we really headed towards an abyss, or is this a product of recency bias? Were the 80s & 90s actually so good, so stable, so peaceful, and so generally awesome (outside of a few well-known events, such as Waco & the Oklahoma City bombing) that it lulled us into a false sense of complacency, where any street level unrest looks far more alarming than it actually should be, given the historical context?

     

    Related image

  • Education Rorschach

    Fredrick Hess, former social studies teacher, asked on EducationNext this morning whether educational scholars are afflicted with a bias. He ponders that the movers and shakers of our nation’s schools may have an anti-conservative bent which leaves masses of the ruralvolk and their ilk cold, if not blocking them out of the conversation entirely.

    This is what inclusion looks like. No, really. See how diverse?

    He would like you to judge for yourself.

    CALL FOR PROPOSALS

    The College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA), an Affiliated Group of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), invites proposals for its Annual Conference, which will be held on November 15-17, 2016, in San Francisco, CA. The theme of this year’s NCSS conference is Expanding Visions/Bridging Traditions. In the spirit of this year’s theme, the CUFA 2017 program will challenge presenters and attendees to (re)envision the future of social studies while also responding to the present conditions of the field. CUFA 2017 will look at what social studies can make possible in turbulent times when settler colonialism, systemic and systematic racism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, free speech and voter suppression, socioeconomic disparities, sexism, environmental destruction, and the corporatization of PK-12 and teacher education (to name a few) continue to threaten each and every one of us, both personally and professionally, in the United States and around the world. Social studies education must be(come) a driving force for social change.

    As Program Chair, I challenge you to disrupt status quo discourses, practices, and methods in your paper and session proposals. I ask you to consider the following question: How does your research and/or teaching work to transform social studies education in our local, state, national, and global communities?

    As you prepare your proposals, please consider the following areas of relevance for social studies in PK-12 and higher education settings:

    Intersectionality
    Decolonization
    Anti-Oppressive, Anti-Racist, and Critical Pedagogies
    Subversive Social Studies Teaching Methods
    Indigenous Studies
    Gender Studies
    LGBTQ+ Studies
    Critical Race Studies
    Critical Media Literacy
    Environmental Justice
    Technology
    Economics Education
    Geography Education
    Global Education
    Politics, Power, and Policy in Social Studies Education
    Research Methodologies (Qualitative, Post-Qualitative, Quantitative, Mixed Methods)
    Social Studies Advocacy and Outreach
    Citizenship Education
    History Education

    This year’s program will include individual papers and roundtables, symposia, contemporary issue dialogues (CIDs), invited speakers, and CUFA/NCSS co-sponsored Research into Practice (RIP) sessions. I am also working closely with NCSS event staff to offer CUFA pre-conference workshops on the morning of Wednesday, November 15. CUFA 2017 will continue to also feature an unconference space and the Java Networks lunch.

    I encourage colleagues preparing symposia and CID proposals to explicitly create space(s) that talk across theories, methodologies, and practices where everyone is seen, heard, and can contribute to new visions for social studies. I urge colleagues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to submit their work. Accepted proposals will be linked to presentations through the open conference system. Authors will have the option of uploading their completed papers to replace the proposal after the program is finalized.

    The submission deadline is 11:59 pm PST, Tuesday, February 28, 2017: http://www.socialstudies.org/cufa2017/openconf.php. No submissions will be accepted after that time and date.

    For those of you on Twitter, please tweet about the conference using the official conference hashtag: #CUFA17. I will also post regular updates about the conference on CUFA’s Facebook groups.

    If you have any questions about the call, proposal submission process, or reviewer sign-up process, please contact me at [email redacted]. Thank you for your hard work and commitment to the social studies education community.

    In Solidarity,
    Sarah

    Sarah B. Shear, Ph.D.
    CUFA Program Chair, 2017 San Francisco
    Assistant Professor, Social Studies Education, Penn State Altoona
    Faculty, The Graduate School, The Pennsylvania State University

    Mr. Hess made efforts to discuss this with his fellow educators and colleagues, and the response was, in part, to ask whether any possible bias was a “product of his imagination”.

  • Geraldo Rivera Causes Meltdown On Social Media Over Yale Step-down

    Who wants a mustache ride?
    Geraldo Rivera

    In a move against political correctness run amok, Geraldo Rivera, who made his name unlocking the secrets of the Al Capone vault and giving away US troop positions in Iraq has decided to step down as an Associate Fellow at Yale University’s (soon to be renamed) Calhoun College.

    As anticipated by anybody with a pulse, his twitter feed went completely insane with people calling him everything under the sun.

     

    I wonder how many of those accusing him of everything from slavery apologia to outright hatred of blacks realizes that Yale will remain named after an actual slave trader even after the name of the slave-owning seventh Vice President of the United States is removed from campus buildings.