In this 154th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss the new Newspeak, as promoted by Stanford and its list of very bad words. While recognizing that, in a few rare cases, they have a point, overall this list and its enforcers are batshit crazy. And what it leads to is worse: we discuss title IX compliance officers, the dude who thinks it’s fine to...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number one-fifth-x.
Wow.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Yeah, those last digits of numbers get kind of uppity.
They're a little bit reactionary.
You better just replace them all with X. Yeah, X. It's equal in its treatment of genders and binary and analog.
Odd numbers and even numbers.
Yeah, the whole thing.
It's egalitarian and very forward thinking, I think.
You ever feel like the entire planet has jumped the shark?
Yeah, and it's got to have been a big shark, is my feeling.
Space shark.
Giant space shark, for example.
I think so.
Well, it has been weird here, right?
The storm that is now beginning to wreak havoc on the Midwest and is going to hit the East Coast smacked us here in the Pacific Northwest.
We had a ton of snow.
It hasn't been... just this morning it got over freezing for the first time in four or five days.
And, you know, very, very unusual for here.
And then our para went out, so we are A little less prepared than we might be, but it's... Solstice two days ago, Christmas two days from now, here we are in the middle of it.
We're gonna talk at you guys for a bit.
We are hyper-prepared rather than ultra-prepared, is my feeling.
No, it's not.
No, it's really not my feeling.
But I thought I'd try it out.
We've now explored it.
We don't have to go down that road again.
Cool.
It didn't work.
Nope.
Slipping and sliding the whole way.
Yep, with no traction control of any kind.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay, well we're going to talk about the Stanford bad word list and some trans stuff and the like today.
Excellent.
And before that, let's do some logistics, shall we?
Let's do that, and I will very subtly disarm my phone, which I realize I have left live.
Nobody's even going to know that this is what I'm doing.
All right, now nobody can tell.
So we follow these live streams with a Q&A, as our regular viewers and listeners will know.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And we take about a 15-minute break between the end of this and the beginning of the Q&A.
We are live on Odyssey as well as YouTube.
The chat is live on Odyssey, not active on YouTube.
You are always encouraged to find more of our thinking at A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, our book that came out last year, and despite a lot of people's hard work, made it to the New York Times Best Sellers list!
Despite a lot of people's hard work, that is Pretty much how it looked.
Yeah, it really felt that way.
So a lot of people have bought it.
I hope a lot of people have read it.
And we certainly get a lot of really cool feedback, too.
And there's time to have it delivered before the final days of Hanukkah or Christmas if you get the audio version.
Yes, or the Kindle version.
Yeah, the Kindle version, presumably, as well.
Because it's very thin, it arrives very quickly.
Doesn't make as good a weapon against a home intruder if you're just reaching around for something.
No, but it's easy to wrap.
All right, start wrapping.
I'm not going to.
I was thinking, yeah, I was spelling it both ways in my head.
You can also find my writing weekly at naturalselections.substack.com.
This week I wrote in part about some of what we were talking about last week with regard to that ridiculous piece of pseudoresearch that claims that 3.2 million lives were saved by the vaccines without actually introducing any new data or revealing what estimates they relied on that told them that vaccines save lives.
But I also talked a fair bit in this piece about the Stanford nonsense, so we'll talk a little bit about that today.
It's too late to get any merchandise for Christmas or Hanukkah, I assume.
Not next Christmas or Hanukkah.
Yeah, or I don't know what you might celebrate that would warrant a gift.
Flag Day.
That's a long ways off, Brett.
Yes, that's true.
Good on you for knowing that.
Okay, the only reason we know that is because some dear friends of ours just told us that they're having a baby, and the baby is due on Flag Day.
So we are thrilled, but there will be, I assume for some people, gift-giving opportunities before the middle of June.
Yes, I'm assuming they planned it that way.
I am assuming they did not.
Delivery on Flag Day.
Yeah, it's hard to plan these sorts of things, as you know.
Touche.
Yes.
Okay, but darkhorsestore.org has lots of cool stuff that you could get for Flag Day if you really wanted to, but it seems to me that's waiting a long time.
And we are supported by you, our audience.
We appreciate you there for subscribing to this main YouTube channel, or the Dark Horse Podcast Clips YouTube channel, or the Odyssey channels, or hitting subscribe, however you do, wherever you get your podcasts.
Liking, sharing, Both the clips and the full episodes.
And recognizing that if YouTube is driving you crazy with the ads, that's really not on us because they are putting ads on our stuff even though they have demonetized us as of a year and a half ago now.
Even though the stuff they demonetized us for is true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It wasn't misinformation or disinformation.
The most galling thing about it to them was that it was true.
Right?
If we had lied, no big whoop.
But because we spoke the truth, wow.
Yeah, surely we're not pleased.
Not to be allowed.
You can also join one of our Patreons where we have conversations every month on both of them, and through our Patreons you can access our Discord server where there's a fabulous community of people who do things like have karaoke hour.
So consider joining.
Our Patreons and joining the Discord there.
And, of course, we have sponsors, to whom we are very grateful.
They are helping us out a lot, and we, in return, only accept as sponsors companies whom we actually, really, truly do vouch for.
So, without further ado, we will start the hour with three ads, as we always do, starting with Seed.
Our first sponsor this week is Seed.
Seed is a company focused on bacteria and the microbiome, and they have a terrific probiotic called DS-01 Daily Synbiotic, S-Y-N.
I always prefer eating real food to taking pills, but I have to say I love this product.
I love the Seed Daily Synbiotic.
There are a lot of things that you can do to enhance your health.
Our sign-off here at Dark Horse includes three of them, of course.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
But a lot is hidden in those words.
What, for instance, constitutes good food?
Good food is real food, whole food, food that has been alive recently and was grown with care and conditions as ancient as possible given the constraints of the 21st century.
But even many people who eat such a diet end up missing something.
In part because our soils are impoverished due to decades into centuries now of agricultural practices that take the nutrients out of them.
We, humans, contain multitudes.
Every individual human contains so many other organisms, some of which may harm us, but many of which exist with us in harmony.
We need them.
This is why probiotics can be an important tool in a healthy lifestyle, even if you eat nutrient-dense food and avoid processed foods and sugar.
But not all probiotics are created equally.
Seed's DSO-1 Daily Symbiotics is a broad-spectrum, 2-in-1 probiotic and prebiotic.
It contains 24 distinct probiotic strains in a 2-in-1 capsule that protects the probiotics until they hit the colon, where they are most effective.
If you've taken a probiotic before and it didn't do anything for you, it's probably because the good bacteria weren't surviving your GI tract.
Seed is designed differently with that two-in-one capsule, and that makes all the difference.
That's why it works.
Seed's daily symbiotic supports gut, skin, and heart health and micronutrient synthesis.
We have heard from several people who have used Seed and report improvements to their digestive function in 24 to 48 hours.
Start a new healthy habit today.
Visit seed.com slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse to redeem 20% off your first month of Seed's DS-01 Daily Symbiotic.
That's seed.com slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse.
Our second sponsor this week is Moink.
That's moo plus oink.
M-O-I-N-K.
And this gets us into the eat good food.
Man, is Moink good food.
An eighth generation farmer founded Moink and is working hard to help save the family farm and get its customers access to the highest quality meat on earth.
Did you know that 97% of the chickens served in the U.S.
are dipped in chlorine?
Well, family farms don't tend to do that and certainly the meat you get from Moink doesn't.
Moink delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, and wild-caught Alaskan salmon direct to your door.
That is, it delivers meat that, when those animals were alive, were eating the food that they evolved eating, as opposed to some hyper-processed food that contains lots of ingredients that the animals have spent no evolutionary time eating until, like, yesterday.
Moink farmers farm like our grandparents did.
As a result, moink meat tastes like it should, which is to say delicious.
Unlike the supermarket, moink gives you total control over the quality and source of your food.
You choose the meat delivered in every box, like ribeyes, chicken breasts, pork chops, salmon fillets, and much more, and you can cancel any time.
We love everything about Moink.
The fact that the meat is grass-fed and finished on small farms, the lovely publications that come along with it, and of course the meat itself.
Pork, beef, lamb, chickens, it's all completely delicious.
Consider starting the new year, or treating someone else in the new year, to some truly fabulous meat grown humanely with care and fantastic for you.
Shark Tank host Kevin O'Leary called Moink's bacon the best bacon he's ever tasted, and I agree.
It's amazing.
Keep American farming going by signing up at moinkbox.com slash Dark Horse right now, and listeners of this show will receive free filet mignon for a year.
That's one year of the best filet mignon you'll ever taste, but for a limited time.
That's M-O-I-N-K box dot com slash Dark Horse.
Moinkbox dot com slash Dark Horse.
Our final sponsor this week, you will not be surprised to know, is MD Hearing Aid.
MD Hearing Aid makes high quality, effective hearing aids for a tiny fraction of what most hearing aids cost.
And you can buy them directly from MD Hearing Aid.
MD Hearing Aid was founded by an ENT surgeon who made it his mission to develop quality hearing aid that anyone could afford.
Most people who need a hearing aid only require a few settings, so he removed several of the less often needed components ...and cut out the middleman.
MD Hearing Aid has sold over a million units and has a 45-day risk-free trial money-back guarantee.
These hearing aids aim to fit so well that no one will know you're wearing them.
The rechargeable batteries last up to 30 hours, their Volt Plus model is water-resistant in up to three feet of water, and you don't need a prescription to get one.
You buy it directly from the source, where audiologists and licensed hearing specialists are available seven days a week.
Everyone can empathize with what it feels like to be left out of a conversation that others are enjoying.
Here's a testimonial from a friend of ours who has substantial hearing loss and who relies on hearing aids.
We asked her to try this product and here's what she said.
She said, with my particular type of hearing loss, a deep male voice in a noisy room is the hardest situation for me to hear and understand speech.
I wore the MD hearing aid to have a conversation with a deep voiced male in a room with a lot of white noise.
The MD hearing aid passed the test as my conversation partner's voice was clear and understandable.
At a price point of under $1,000, I was amazed at how effective they are.
MD Hearing Aid is bringing affordable hearing to hundreds of thousands of people.
People who might not otherwise be able to afford high quality hearing aids.
Get clinic level care for 90% less with MD Hearing Aid.
Go to mdhearingaid.com and use the promo code Dark Horse to get their new buy one get one deal.
A pair of hearing aids cost just $149.99.
Plus, Dark Horse listeners receive a free extra charging case, $100 value.
So head to mdhearingaid.com and use the promo code Dark Horse to get their new buy one get one deal, a pair of hearing aids for $149.99.
Awesome.
One more thing to say about logistics.
I guess two things.
We will be here for the last day of the year.
We'll do a live stream on New Year's Eve.
Regular time, regular place, and there will also be one more guest episode of Dark Horse releasing next Wednesday probably.
Should be an awesome conversation.
You've already had it, but I'm excited to listen to it.
Yep, it's a good one for sure.
So we do have two more dark... I'm not supposed to say he's... I think it's okay.
I think our listeners get it.
Dark heath, if that's the way you pluralize horses.
Which, obviously.
Yes.
Yeah, it is.
All right.
Let's talk first about the new Bad Word List from Stanford.
Oh, hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
So, this is a project that they've actually been working on.
Stanford has been working on it.
It's specific to the IT community at Stanford for about 18 months, and we were just made aware of it via Twitter.
At this point, maybe a week ago, several days ago, and I looked at it, went, whoa, this is crazy, and I saved it, thinking that I'd write about it for my sub stack, and by the time I went back a couple days later, Stanford had made it private.
Wall Street Journal, though, put out an op-ed the same day, and they've got a PDF of the original document that is revealed.
But let me share a few of these things.
So basically, they are... You can share my screen if you like here, Zach.
It is obvious that this is a form of newspeak, that this is akin to what is going on in Orwell's 1984.
And I have in my substack this last week the following quotations from 1984 in which Winston, the protagonist of 1984, is being lectured by a fellow employee of the Ministry of Truth, Mini True.
Syme asks him, do you know that newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?
He follows that up with, don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
And it is clear from this list that Stanford has put out, and which has now gotten a lot of attention because Wall Street Journal did this very brief op-ed on it, that indeed it is about constraining people and constraining thought.
I will share a few of what is on their now private site, except Wall Street Journal revealed it, but here's something.
What's on screen now, and I'm not going to read this whole thing, is just a screenshot from what is open to the public still, or at least it was a few days ago when I published.
My sub stack.
And it includes, just the final bullet point here, small changes could make a huge difference.
Have you ever seen, heard, or said an email domain or IP address being white listed or black listed?
These terms assign value connotations based on color.
White equals good and black equals bad.
An act which is subconsciously racialized.
Consider using the words allow list and deny list.
So I have had enough, frankly.
So I have said here, Okay, you petty tyrants and narcissists, guess what?
Not everything is about race.
Here I am quoting myself.
Lightness and darkness which are most simply described by the colors white and black exist without humans around to name them.
Furthermore, we are primates.
The clade of mammals that has evolved and how we navigate our sensory world from being largely olfactory.
Look at most mammals and you see how snouty they are.
We have one right here on screen and we see everything from neurologically to sensorially.
A move within early mammals to become more olfaction based and then a move within primates to become more vision based with the frontation as our eyes move forward in our heads and we have binocular vision.
We are largely visual.
Okay, that's what we are.
We assess our world, I continue in the substack piece, in myriad ways, but first and foremost, for most of us, we do so by sight.
In darkness we cannot see, and so darkness is more fraught.
It is actually more dangerous to attempt to navigate in the darkness.
Everyone knows this.
You know this.
Stop making everything about your particular grievance, and you might find that the world is a more expansive and fantastic place to live in.
Seriously, whitelist and blacklist.
As if everyone who is using terms white and black is referring to people with dark or light or dark skin color.
Yeah, and... It's insane.
And we're also not supposed to say things who are insane.
Admittedly, it has been some days since I looked at this list, but my sense is that, unlike the 1984 version, the policing of various perceived truths here is about protecting all sorts of people who might find themselves affronted by some turn of phrase that does not properly protect them from a disability, for example, or
Um, some piece of phenotype, uh, and it's, uh, it's preposterous.
It's preposterous.
Um, oh, go ahead.
No, I've just, I've got a few to share, but you go ahead.
Okay.
Um, you can show my screen here again, Zach.
Um, these are, and I also, I tweeted these out too.
So those of you who were looking at my Twitter, these will be familiar to you, but they suggest instead of brown bag, consider using lunch and learn or tech talk.
Why?
Historically associated with the brown paper bag test that certain black sororities and fraternities used to judge skin color.
Those whose skin color was darker than the brown bag were not allowed to join.
Brown bag is actually historically associated with bags that are brown.
Because they're made of paper, it's not bleached, which is actually a good thing.
Yes.
So, that's one.
Instead of abusive relationship, consider using relationship with an abusive person.
Why?
Because the relationship doesn't commit abuse, a person does, so it is important to make that fact clear.
Because this is a pressing societal issue.
The people are unsure if it's the people or one of the people in a relationship or the relationship itself that is causing the abuse.
So rather than, I don't know, working to help someone who is suffering abuse at the hand of another person, we're going to police the language.
That's what we're going to do.
This is a beauty, actually, because one can imagine, right, that were the convention Corrected to this that somebody else would decide that it was effective in this configuration and that you know that Demonizing the idea of the relationship when in fact it is a person who has abused you in the you know The relationship is a two-party Interaction right so you can have a snitch situation like oh Right.
Well, and that's the point is that this is really about power.
This is about the power to cause you not to say something in some normal way that you would ordinarily say it and to force you into some configuration that puts somebody else's priorities front and center in your Your worldview, which as people who have been faced with many of these things, that is exactly the experience.
You are creating a transgression in order to demonstrate that I will abide by your instructions.
Which we don't.
It tells me that using the word transgression is probably itself a transgression because it brings to mind trans people and transgression has a negative connotation and if you put a negative connotation to people's heads associated with trans people you're probably doing a transphobia.
Yes, on the other hand...
I mean, were you?
You were doing a transphobia, I think.
No, I wasn't intending to, but you know, intent is irrelevant, as the loons on the left have instructed us.
And I would point out that one could equally make the argument that I was actually providing recognition for trans people in Gresham, which is a suburb of Portland.
It's spelled totally differently.
Oh, is it?
Oh, you and your spelling again.
I know, I know.
I knew it would happen.
And there's nothing, I see nothing in the Stanford list about those who are spelling impaired, incidentally.
So, fix that.
We apparently deserve what we get.
Yeah.
Okay, next one.
Instead of long time no see, consider using I haven't seen you in so long.
Instead of no can do, consider saying I can't do it.
Why?
The phrase, long time no see, was originally used to mock indigenous people and Chinese who spoke pidgin English, and no can do also originated from stereotypes that mocked non-native English speakers.
Now, there are a lot of things in English that pick up on a lot of errors in English usage by all sorts of people, including native English speakers, but the ones that we have to be aware of are ones that have been named and called out by those who are actually just seeking power, as you just said.
Yes, I would point out actually, as we've been pointing out for years, that the purpose of language, this may sound far-fetched, perhaps a claim that cannot be supported logically, but I believe that we could establish the purpose of language is to convey meaning.
That's more of your adaptive arm-waving hypothesis.
It's a just-so story about language.
I think language is a mind virus.
Really?
Ah, did not see us going there, but alright.
Language is a mind virus.
Yeah, that's going to be an uphill battle for you.
I'm sure I shouldn't say uphill battle, though I'm not sure why I shouldn't say uphill battle.
Some people don't have access to hills, Brett.
Some people, oh because you're living at the bottom of the hill, you're Fighting uphill.
Which in some places is the place you want to live, but in some places it's not the place you want to live.
Not when you're in battle.
You shouldn't.
You want to be at the top of the hill.
So we would be highlighting a disadvantage of people who live at the bottom of the hill by pointing out the struggles that they face on the way to defeating the people at the top.
And some people have never benefited from being able to experience battle and so won't be able to really understand what it refers to and therefore should be protected from their own ignorance by not having it mentioned.
And some people live embattled.
Without ever having physically fought, and we do not... Boy, do we have a lot of evidence of that!
We do not want to denigrate the struggles that they have faced by highlighting the fact that they were not, in fact, violent.
Right.
I do, though.
You do.
Because those struggles aren't as big as the ones who were actually physically embattled.
Sorry.
No.
Yeah.
Next one.
Instead of prostitute, consider using debase.
Why?
It unnecessarily correlates corrupt or unworthy purposes with sex work.
Because you wouldn't want little girls to get the idea that they shouldn't aspire to being prostitutes, should you?
Yeah, I'm still old school this way.
I probably would, but I get your point.
This actually was the one that angered me.
The rest of this, it's like, are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
This one.
Really?
We're going to protect the reputation of people who have, yes, unfortunately, found themselves having to make a living by selling their bodies.
No.
No.
Next one.
Instead of submit, consider using process.
Why?
Depending on the context, the term can imply allowing others to have power over you.
I want to point out that this is from the same people who talk about kink shaming and engage in BDSM and, you know, like to really populate the way and don't want us to talk about prostituting because that might associate negative things with sex work, like to really populate the way and don't want us to talk about prostituting because that might Well, but this actually puts us in a position to run a hypothesis.
Because the key feature of all of these is not that anyone imagines we are going to stop speaking in these ways.
The point is they want to establish a rule in order that they can choose to enforce it or not enforce it, depending upon whether the person who is speaking is one they wish to enable or hobble.
It's the low posted speed limit.
And low posted speed limits, as I understand, as I've learned from you, I believe.
Having been a racist tool, especially in the South, such that, you know, police officers who were on the speed beat could choose whether or not to pull you over if you were breaking the law, and if the posted speed limit was really lower than the road demanded, almost everyone was going to be going over it, and then they could choose to pull over the people, usually the dark-skinned people, who they wanted to give tickets to and harass.
Yep.
So this is a modern version of a low posted speed limit.
It is a modern version of a low posted speed limit, and actually I would point out that given that this list is seemingly or nominally intended to protect a wide range of people from linguistic slights, I'm going to claim that this is the Stanford Prism Experiment.
Oh, good.
Yes.
Oh, yes.
The Stanford Prism Experiment.
Oh, it's so good.
Man, you're the best.
Oh, wow!
Yeah.
This is a great moment.
I am enjoying this.
I no longer remember what we're talking about, but I feel good about it.
Well, you're about to re-remember, because here's another one.
Instead of seminal, consider using leading or groundbreaking.
Why?
Because this term reinforces male-dominated language.
Right.
Now I would point out I get it.
It's so good.
Oh man.
I think two is probably offensive, but many can play at this game.
You said you were about to re-remember.
You are going to re-remember.
Re-remember.
And I believe that what you said is offensive to people who stutter.
Re-remember.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah.
You don't have any comment on seminal?
I mean, it kind of speaks for itself.
It does.
My position on Twitter was that now they're just being hysterical.
Whoa!
Yeah, okay, give me my screen back here for a minute because I got two more to show that actually came out of the site directly, but I just want to find them here.
Okay, you can put my screen back on.
This is just a PDF, again, of Wall Street Journal collected the Stanford list that is now not public except that Wall Street Journal did it for them.
So they also say instead of using Spirit Animal, which like I never thought that was a particularly interesting way of describing anything.
As a zoologist, it feels like, what?
Really?
What?
Huh?
Okay, but instead of spirit animal, say favorite animal, or animal I most admire or would like to be.
Why?
The term refers to an animal spirit that guides and protects one on a journey, so to equate it with an animal one likes is to demean the significance of the term.
Not to mention all the other animals.
Well, no, their point is like, no, spirit animals are a real thing and you're being culturally appropriative and taking it from the people who really actually have spirit animals, which no, wrong, don't exist.
Can I do this though?
I feel people in the past who were not bewildered by this kind of nonsense are my spirit animal.
Is that, can I do that?
How would I refer to them?
Those people?
People who were not confused this way.
Well, I think it sounds like you want to refer to them as your spirit animals.
I do want to.
Okay, done!
But is that not, in and of itself, my defense?
Because them being my spirit animals, I get to not be confused in the way that the people who made this list apparently are.
Yeah, maybe.
Okay, one more.
I'm going to scroll.
Wait a second.
I think you came up with it before.
Did I?
Yeah.
What if not being confused is my kink?
Then these people are shaming me.
Right?
Not cool.
Oh, yeah.
See?
I found the loophole.
Yeah.
Not being a nutterbutter.
Not being a nutterbutter is my kink.
I'm just referring to the cookies, guys.
Oh, right.
That's the cookie, right?
Yes, as far as I know, it's a 50-something.
It's been a while.
It's probably something else, too.
Okay, and finally, this is, interestingly, The one that got a lot of play because I think the Wall Street Journal put it in its headline and a lot of people went on about it.
Instead of using American, consider using U.S.
citizen.
The context is this term often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the U.S.
is the most important country in the Americas, which is actually made up of 42 countries.
Now, the thereby insinuating that the U.S.
is the most important country in the Americas bit is silly.
But Stanford has apparently taken this and only this off their list.
Really?
It's the one that I looked at and I was like, yeah, we all get this if we've traveled.
Right.
And yet there's people, and I think I'm not going to name them, but there's people who are recognized and very smart and highly educated who have said no one has ever objected to the word American.
Like in a blog post, no one has ever objected to this.
Have you ever been to Latin America?
Because actually, I think Every time.
Certainly that we were there in any place in Latin America, in Mexico or Central America.
It may have happened less in South America, but certainly in Mesoamerica and Central America and Mexico.
When people ask you where you're from, If you say in response, uh, I'm an American, Americano, Americana, um, they look at you funny like, yes, so am I. So you didn't answer where you're from.
So, you know, Estados Unidos, I'm from the United States.
Isn't a what are you?
Um, but, you know, people appreciate you answering, I'm a Norte Americano.
I don't know, which also isn't very precise because obviously it includes Canadians and Mexicans, but like this one, as much as I'm not going to stop referring to myself as an American when I'm in America, when I'm in the United States of America, this is actually, there is a point here, unlike almost all the rest, and there are a few others for which there's points here.
There are really offensive terms on this list that no one uses anymore.
Like on the screen here, half-breed.
Who calls anyone a half-breed at this point?
We got over that, right?
Those who did that are not using that language anymore, right?
There is language that has been understood to be actually racist in that case, and they don't say that anymore.
The fact that Stanford took American off the list and didn't take I can't even remember.
Some of the gender stuff is completely insane.
Suggests that all they're doing, all they're doing is responding to publicity.
They have not investigated their positions at all.
They are just trying to get the Wall Street Journal off their back.
And a few other people who didn't spend time looking through the whole list and just went like, what?
American?
I'm going to call myself an American.
Well, yes, so am I.
But recognize that when you're in Guatemala and you say, I'm an American, you may be met with usually kind response.
It's like, yeah, I am too.
You still haven't told me where you're from.
The funny thing is that in practice in Latin America, everybody who is Awake to the Issue ends up distinguishing between Norteamericanos and other Americans with the term gringo, which does have a derisive history.
I believe the history is that it is a reference actually to the color of American money, strangely.
Which is odd, because of course it would be Verdean Spanish.
But nonetheless, the point is, whatever the etymology of the term, by referring to yourself as a gringo, or if you're referring to somebody who is not present who you are looking for, saying, she's a gringo, or whatever, it reveals that you are sort of... Am I always wandering off?
Not always.
I mean, it's happened.
But anyway, you are revealing that there is a kind of arrogance that often goes with being an American citizen and that you are kind of aware that it exists.
Anyway, so in communities that are mixed between people from Latin America and people visiting Latin America, the term gringo has lost its stigma and is simply used as a descriptive term with a kind of a wink.
Yeah, I think when we started going together, when we started traveling together into Latin America, that would have been our first trip when we were You know, barely in our 20s would have been the early 90s.
At that point, certainly before going down, I would not have used the term gringo or gringa about myself because it felt like an epithet, a slur.
And now I, now you, I do.
And it's just, it is the way to be clear when, when you're there.
Like, yeah, you know, oh, that, you know, that neighborhood is super gringified.
You know, that's, that's where the tourists are.
That's where the gringos are.
Like it's, it's become sort of normal background.
It's become normal, which also, I mean, there are so many things wrong with the style of thinking that goes into a list like Stanford has produced here, but one of them is the whole idea that one fixes problems by policing speech, which does not mean that there aren't terms that Feel like, yeah, that's off.
That shouldn't be there.
But in general, even in those cases, you are at best completing a job of fixing something by deciding not to use a term because there's something off about it.
You're not solving a problem.
And I don't know why it is that Feeble-minded folks who are interested in social justice, and I am not synonymizing those two things.
There are many of us who are interested in justice, recognize its social dimension, but feeble-minded, petty, social justice-oriented folks in every generation become obsessed with language, rather than understanding, A, language is a tool, right?
Here's an example, a pet peeve of mine.
As I think I've talked about on Dark Horse before, I don't like talking about Christopher Columbus because no such person ever existed and we in general do not translate names.
However, if I want to be understood, I do not say Colonde.
Right?
Cristóbal Colón may have been the man's name, but if I want to be understood, I will say Columbus Day, and then maybe we'll have a conversation about why Columbus Day and Columbus, Ohio is an absurd... Columbia.
Columbia, right.
The country.
Any of these things are a strange abuse of language, but to be understood, one uses the language that, you know, if you say On that list, for example, was the horror of the term walk-in appointment, right?
Because of course not everybody can walk, right?
Now, if you try to come up with a term, you know, a locomotive in appointment, oh, you're welcome to locomote in.
Am I taking a train?
Yeah, I've responded to all of these things in my subsec this week, and you quickly get to Harrison Bergeron space, reality space, where there will be someone.
In existence, or who has been in existence, or who could plausibly be in existence, who can't do the thing that you are trying to be inclusive about.
And if inclusivity is actually the highest or one of the highest goals, you're screwed.
There's no possibility for awesomeness, for excellence, for discovery, for For doing something different, for being unique.
Uniqueness is the thing that shall not be allowed.
Not just uniqueness, but majority isn't enough.
It needs to be everyone or nothing.
Or no one.
Let's say that you are unable to walk.
As many people are.
We may end up unable to walk.
One doesn't know.
This is the least of your problems.
I'm not saying I can't imagine a case in which I bristle at some term that's used, but the point is there's actually no there there.
Have we solved the problem by purging the term walk-in from our language?
No, we have not.
You could equally make the argument actually walking around people who can't walk is the real offense, so we should all not walk If we haven't established that everyone present in every context is able to join us should they so wish.
That's as valid an argument as the idea that you shouldn't say walk-in appointment.
My guess would be that if we actually were able to just survey language that we would find people who cannot walk using the term walk-in appointment without thinking about it themselves.
Can I make a walk-in appointment?
Are walk-ins welcome?
That kind of thing.
So anyway, again, the whole thing amounts to a power grab masquerading as an attempt to be good to people who are disadvantaged.
It is people who are not generally disadvantaged using the disadvantaged as an excuse to wield power over others.
Yes.
So I'm reminded of two things that are somewhat distinct, but before, I've actually got another list put out by the University of Oregon that Stanford links to about it for trans, trans words, words that are sort of over in trans space that we should or shouldn't use and what they mean and all of this.
But two things first that I want to say on this topic.
As I, and I wrote about this in the Substack this week, We were at a conference, back when we were Evergreen professors, where I was engaging with a Title IX compliance officer.
So it wasn't our Title IX compliance officer, so thankfully I did not have to abide by her injunctions.
But she clearly had a view of her own role and responsibility that far was overreach rather extraordinarily.
And she had this sense of if everyone can't participate, then no one can participate.
So I was at that point, I had already done a couple, and I think I was sort of in the early days of putting together and creating this 11-week study abroad program that we then ran with our boys, and we had 30 students, and it went all over the place, right, in Ecuador.
It was including the deep, deep Ecuador and Amazon.
There was a sort of a shallow Amazonian place, I call their starter Amazon field site, and then we went deep into the Amazon, and And I said to this Title IX Compliance Officer, what would you have had me do had a student in a wheelchair said that they wanted to participate in this program?
And she said, well, you would have had to figure out a way to allow them to participate.
I said, well, you know, it seems like the wrong program for them, but you're saying that I would have to create paperwork and assignments back home so that while we're in the field for 11 weeks, which is a big chunk of the academic year, they're doing work back home.
She said, no, no, no, they have to be able to go.
I said to her, my exact quote was, the Amazon is not ADA compliant.
You know, if it were, it wouldn't be the Amazon.
And she said, well, then you'd have to cancel the program.
And this was so extraordinary.
I really thought that I had misheard her, and I pressed her a couple times.
She said, no, you can't.
If someone who wants to go can't go, then no one can go.
The end point of this ideology that would keep a lot of people who never had an opportunity to travel at all from seeing, frankly, one of the most miraculous and intensely biologically gorgeous and educational places on the entire planet.
Because someone who's confused about their abilities has said they want to go and can't.
So, as if Denying these other people that opportunity does the person who is aggrieved any good.
If they're spiteful, it does, doesn't it?
Because this helps the spiteful.
It's about power.
But, you know, this is one of the things I sometimes say about constructing systems that work.
Is that you actually have to build, if the system is of any size, you have to build discretion into it, right?
And so what you need is someone to be able to say, well actually no good is done by a shutting down your program in order to accommodate somebody that can't be accommodated by the thing that's in the title of the program that you're going to go do that they can't do, right?
You have to have somebody in a position to make that judgment and you know, Even from the point of view of the person who can't go and wishes to be included and upon finding they cannot be included might spitefully want to see the whole thing shut down, the best thing you can do for them Is leave the program intact and say, I'm sorry, there's no way to make an accommodation here that would work, right?
That is life.
The education that one needs is, yeah, it sucks.
There's certain things you will be able to do.
This is the hand you've been dealt and it's not as good a hand as some other people in this regard.
Right, but the question for all of us, every moment of every day, is what's the best use of the hand that I've got, right?
And you know, yes, if somebody has damaged the hand that you have, you know, in a negligent fashion, there is something to be done, right?
The idea that denying people who had nothing to do with your disadvantage the ability to do something that they have the skills and the capacity to do is preposterous.
I do remember a story many years ago.
I think I watched it on 60 Minutes.
Somebody had invented, and these things now exist, we've seen them I think in Europe, But a bathroom that self-cleans, a public bathroom, like a stainless steel bathroom that self-cleans in between each... Yeah, sprays the whole thing down with bleach or something.
I don't know how it works but it's a miraculous thing and it solves the problem of public bathrooms become quite grotesque quickly.
And I believe they were being installed and then somebody sued because they were not ADA compliant and they were removed.
And so the idea, well, how did denying people who could have had access to this bathroom help the folks who wouldn't have been able to use it?
It didn't.
It's an obviously illogical remedy.
In fact, it's not a remedy.
It's a non-remedy that solves a dissonance.
Yes.
Right?
Yes.
But, you know... Yeah, it doesn't solve the dissonance.
It pretends the dissonance has no place in the universe.
It just pushes off that discovery until another thing will reveal that actually...
If you are, for instance, wheelchair bound, and we're not supposed to say disabled, wheelchair bound, all of these things, those are all on this list here, right?
That is, no doubt, Unfortunate.
And there are probably also other things that you can discover that you will be able to do as a result of not having the locomotory powers that you either did before something happened, or you would have had you not been born unable to move your legs.
Pretending.
Pretending doesn't help you.
Pretending that you actually have all of the same skills and capacities as everyone around you who does have full use of their legs is helpful to no one it's not kind it's not helpful and this you know this this this may be the crux which is that we are told and so many you know
Good liberals are compelled that what you need to do with regard to the trans stuff, with regard to this language stuff, is to be kind.
Just be kind.
Just do for the person what they ask you to do for them.
It's how they feel.
It's their identity.
Like, you know what?
Your kindness, your attempt at kindness, is not only not a kindness to everyone else, often, because you're actually doing damage.
You're destroying systems that work and destroying the safety of women and children and homosexuals and all of this.
We're talking about the trans stuff, but it's not a kindness to the person.
It's not a kindness to them to pretend that reality is not reality.
It's the opposite of a kindness.
It is the opposite of a kindness.
Helping somebody to be as able as they can be in light of whatever cards they've been dealt is the right thing, and pretending that we can solve their problem by policing everybody else's behavior is an absurdity.
Yeah.
So there's one other thing before I show you some of this transglossary.
I was thinking when we were talking about language, like, wait a minute, excuse me, I remember, I remember Hoping for and advocating for language change when I was in my 20s.
And I think the thing that makes it different is that I was hoping for, I wasn't the first by any means, but I was hoping to add something to the repertoire rather than restrict or take something away.
Which is to say, Ms.
The honorific Ms.
M-S period.
Because And, you know, everyone who's thought about this knows why, but because Mister exists as an honorific that doesn't specify anything except the sex of the person, the fact that they're an adult.
It's a man.
It's an honorific for a man that doesn't imagine anything else about him, whether or not he's a doctor, whether or not he's married, whether or not he's, you know, anything, right?
Whereas there was no, until Ms., there was no honorific for a woman, that is to say an adult human female, that didn't inherently specify whether or not she was married, Mrs., or not married, Miss.
And so there was no equivalent.
You had Mr., which basically, and so Mr. versus Mrs. or Miss.
...tells us that the language as it existed, without an honorific for women that didn't specify whether you were married or not, that somehow being married was a fundamental thing that you needed to know about a woman.
And so, you know, Ms.
seemed, and still does seem to me, to fill a gap that was necessary and that revealed past sexism in the language.
Well, I think actually there are two structural differences that argue in favor of this one as an actual remedy.
And as an addition as opposed to a taking away.
You weren't arguing that nobody should be allowed to say Mrs. or Miss about themselves.
Sure, of course not.
So the point is there are contexts in which women were not common or found at all that women gained access to in which their marital status was specifically not relevant.
And so the idea that men had a term that didn't convey this piece of information because in a business context or scientific context it was completely irrelevant, Means that having access to a neutral term that does not convey availability as a fundamental is valuable.
So in effect what you had is the previous state of the language was a form of compelled speech, right?
You had to convey marital status because you didn't have an option that didn't contain it.
You either conveyed it incorrectly, right?
You could use Misses if you weren't married, right?
Nobody can stop you from doing that.
But then the point is that conveys a false piece of information.
Yeah, right.
So the idea that the past version was coercive, maybe in a past world, it made sense to allow that because this piece of information was relevant in all contexts.
Who knows?
But In a liberated world where women are participating fully in these venues where marital status is utterly beside the point, you need that equivalent term.
And so adding to the language, giving an option that is neutral and not compelling the conveying of a piece of information that's irrelevant, Both seem to me to change this, but it is the very rare example of a linguistic change that actually solves a problem, solves an actual problem.
It is architected.
Language evolves.
Language generally doesn't get changed from on high like this.
This misunderstands how language changes.
With each generation we have new phrases, new ways of using words, and other words and phrases or meanings fall out of use, and that is what happens.
And there will always be someone who says, Oh, I missed that thing.
I really want this.
Or like, how could we be, you know, abusing the language this way?
Like, okay, we can, we can get riled up about all of these things.
Right.
But that is what happens to language.
Whereas this, ah, you can't do that.
Like that's not how this works.
And sometimes there can be a recognition, like with Miz, you know, we're actually missing a word.
Yep.
Our language is missing a word.
And here we go.
Yeah, actually, you know what?
That's another really good point, is that I'm drawing it too cleanly, where language evolves, we agree on this, but architected changes are almost never a good idea, right?
That's not true if... New words come into being all the time.
And they are often architected, or have to be architected, because you've done something technically new, right?
Like, you know, I'm sure the term electronic Did not exist.
Electric existed, there were lots of motors and things, but then electronic had to be invented as a term that connoted something beyond that, some kind of processing.
And so anyway, when you are involved in the production of some new capacity or technology or observation of some pattern, the ability to say... What if you're literary?
I mean, Shakespeare brought how many words into language, right?
I don't know, but it's a lot.
I guess the point is, when there's something new that needs to be said and you don't have a word for it, architecting a word that conveys it as well as possible is a good thing.
When you are trying to force a change onto language that is already adequate to convey everything you've got, wow, no.
It's not the remedy.
That's right.
Okay, let's look at a few more of these attempts at... I mean, this isn't actually compelled speech.
This is the Trans Glossary.
You can show my screen if you like here.
This is one of the links that Stanford gave on its site for where its source material came from.
University of Oregon, Human Resources, Trans Glossary 101.
There's just four.
They're all interesting.
Assigned Sex.
The Declaration... Here, I'll make it a little bit bigger.
I don't know.
What is going on?
Okay, I forgot.
Yeah, no, I thought I was... Okay, sorry.
No, that's really not helping at all.
So I'll just go back to where I was.
It's going to be small for you guys, so I'm going to read it.
And the bats in our audience were momentarily pleased at that change.
Yeah.
I turned the list upside down.
Okay.
Assigned sex.
The declaration by a medical provider of an individual's sex and gender is based on genitalia appearance at birth.
After the assignment, the individual is expected to grow up and exist within a certain set of gender roles appropriate to their assigned gender.
Commonly seen as female assigned at birth, or male assigned at birth, also see sex.
I don't know in what way this is right, actually.
I think that they've made as many errors as they possibly could in a set of sentences this long.
Well, I think it's right, just, you know, it assumes a many-worlds interpretation of physics in which there's a world in which an obstetrician Tells you what gender you are and then hands you either a truck or a set of cooking implements depending upon the assignment.
If that world exists, then this is a perfectly appropriate point to be making.
I don't know when this was made, but it's up in the end of 2022.
A, sex isn't assigned at birth, it's observed at birth, or before birth.
I've said it a billion places at this point.
So just, that's point one.
But after the assignment, no it's not an assignment, but after the assignment, the individual is expected to grow up and exist within a certain set of gender roles appropriate to their assigned gender.
Says who?
Like, when are you living?
The 1950s?
What is going on here?
That's not the world that we were living in until you yahoos decided to come in and decide that if you felt like wearing lipstick that must mean you're a woman.
What is happening?
Wouldn't it be wonderful though, I would love to see a skit in which the obstetrician declares the child male and then the parents are like, oh good, what careers does that open up for them?
Exactly!
This is so—I just don't understand how anyone can put a list like this together and not the entire time go, God, this is regressive.
God, we're going backwards.
Oh, this is bad.
Like, this is so frickin' regressive.
But at some level, look, we keep falling into this, right?
This is sophistry, and the real point of this list is not the Content of the list.
The real point of this list is to see if you're afraid of them.
If you're afraid of them, then you will start attempting to do these things.
If you are not afraid of them, you might just go on speaking in ways that convey things to people as if that was your purpose.
Okay, next one from the University of Oregon's trans resources list.
Cisgender privilege.
Cisgender, of course, meaning that how you present to the world is the sex that you are.
The set of privilege, and I will say before I read their cisgender privilege thing, I will call someone trans who is identifying as trans.
I have rejected from way back, back when we had trans students and I, we were thinking about this and wading through it and all of this, that one point a student who was sort of dabbling, one of the cues, you know, queer questioning something, decided to tell the entire class, it's not a class that we were teaching together, but decided to tell the entire class that all the rest of us We needed to start introducing ourselves as cis.
As cisgender.
And I said, no.
No, we don't.
That is not what we are.
Cis is a word created by the tiny minority to make it seem that the world is not as it is.
So I object to the term.
I acknowledge that if you're going to have trans, That there needs to be a category to which to compare it to.
But that doesn't mean that the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of us, for whom genetics and development went in the normal way, and who do not feel a deep sense of misalignment between the sex that we are and the sex that we feel ourselves to be, do not need to be walking around saying, I'm a cis.
No, we just are.
So, cisgender privilege, they say.
The set of privileges conferred to people who are perceived to be cisgender.
Examples.
Having one's correct pronouns used.
No harassment in public restrooms.
No denial of access to health care.
This no denial of access to health care thing is up there with, if you don't affirm your child's new trans identity, they're going to kill themselves.
It's right up there with that.
It's this claim, oh, trans people are having their health care denied.
No!
Trans people have not had any health care that is available to all the rest of us ever denied to them.
What in some places people under some ages are being restricted from having is permanently misfiguring or hormonally disrupting procedures done which no one who is not trans would ever choose to have done.
Right.
So it's not about health care.
It's about the thing that somehow you've decided you should expect to have access to because you have a condition that is suddenly fashionable.
It's not healthcare.
It's exactly if you identified as fentanyl deficient, are you entitled to have fentanyl distributed to you?
Exactly.
And the answer is no, you're not entitled to any such thing.
The way we do medicine, there are prescription drugs.
This is one you can't have it unless a doctor decides you need it.
Right.
And yet, you know, the needle distribution stuff for heroin addicts is, you know, not too far from this, right?
And yes, it's Better to have clean needles than dirty needles, but it's better not to have access to any needles at all.
I am not making a claim about what I think should happen in that space with regard to people addicted to drugs that they shoot up, but it is the same kind of logic.
Like, well, obviously the thing you need to do is just give them access to all the things that they say they need.
Or...
We could try to help them not be addicts.
Right.
We could define what is you hurting yourself and not help you do that and just decide what kind of
Now this is a harder argument to make in an era where our medicine has become so prone to injure people as a matter of, I don't know, doing pharma's bidding, but in a decent world you would rig this in such a way that doctors were a bias in the direction of improving your health rather than, you know, maiming you because you had a feeling.
Yes.
I will say, cisgender privilege, though, also is not a good term because it's just ambiguous.
It sounds like your parents treated your sister better than you.
You know what I'm going to say.
Right?
It's spelled differently.
It is spelled differently.
But yes, it sounds the same.
It's only spelled differently if you're spelling it.
Yes.
True.
Okay, two more.
I don't know how I won that point, but I feel that I did.
I mean, the last point that you made was true.
I don't know that that counts as winning, but... In my world, yes.
Very much so.
Two more from the University of Oregon's trans resources.
You can show my screen if you like, Zach.
Lesbian.
I don't even know if the person writing this knows how to write, but lesbian, a person who self-identifies as a woman's capacity to be emotionally, physically, and or sexually attracted to other people who identify as women.
Wow.
No.
This is not a draft.
Just, just, just, no.
Lesbian is someone who is an adult human female woman who is sexually attracted to other adult human females.
Women.
Not trans women.
Not people who emotionally feel like women on the inside.
No.
Uh-uh.
Raw.
Yeah, this one is easier to define than they're letting on.
A lot.
A lot.
And finally, sex.
A term used historically and within the medical field to identify genetic, hormonal, physical characteristics including genitalia which are used to classify an individual as female, male, or intersex.
To also social behavior activity engaged in by an individual with one or more partners to express attractions and arousal.
A term used historically and within the medical field.
Archaic!
500 million years, guys.
Maybe closer to 2 billion.
That's how long sex has been around.
A term used historically.
Sex.
The word.
has been around probably about since language has been around.
It was one of the first things that people were using to categorize other people.
But that's all irrelevant.
This is from the people who really think that if you don't have a word for it, it doesn't exist.
And they'll make that argument too.
And some of them will say, no, of course we don't think that, but then you see some of the crap they say.
And Like, yeah, the fact that the word has or has not been abused or used or changed meaning this, that, or the other doesn't matter because sex itself?
We are part of a lineage that has been sexually reproducing with two and only two sexes for at least 500 million years.
Maybe closer to two billion with a B. It doesn't matter historically, medical field, this, that, or the other.
It doesn't matter.
Wait.
I think we are missing a term.
It does not immediately spring to mind what it might be, but In most cases, a word means something and then it may stop meaning that, or it may mean something and it may come to mean something else, right?
The idea, what's going to happen here, right?
You've got whatever the nice term for morons is, who have decided that you shouldn't use the term sex in the way it has been used to refer to patterns that go back hundreds of millions of years at least.
It's not going to work.
We're going to go back to calling it sex.
So, what do you call the brief period of time in which the morons have disproportionate power such that a term doesn't mean that thing?
It did mean it, and it will mean it, but it doesn't mean it right now.
The brief period of time?
Well, hopefully we can just call it a dark age, and we don't have to call it the end of civilization.
Oh yeah, it's like a linguistic dark age.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
No, that's exactly it.
Alright, good.
Oh, it's fabulous.
No, no, it's good.
The fact that, you know, a cognitive dark age, one in which you stop having science publicly interacted over, is a recognizable phenomenon, right?
When we say Dark Age, we do not mean it will forever be dark, right?
It might be that this one brings humanity to an end, but if humanity continues, we will go back to doing science.
You know why?
Because it works.
If humanity continues, we will go back to referring to sex in an intuitive way.
Why?
Because it conveys something that we want to convey with some regularity, right?
Accurately, because in this case, as in many cases, but not in all cases, Our collective intuition is correct that sex is real.
Yeah, I think this is right.
A linguistic dark age is exactly the right concept and I don't think it exists in our parlance and we need it.
If they're going to pull this shit on us, we need to have that term to explain what they're doing.
Good.
Shall we talk a little bit about this LA Magazine piece?
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, so Jeremy Lee Quinn, who you have interviewed on Dark Horse, he is a journalist.
Maybe you want to describe?
Yeah, he is a freelance journalist who has done an immensely good job of placing himself in the place where history is unfolding multiple times now.
He was actually on the ground At January 6th, among other things.
Right.
At the Capitol.
Anyway, he's interesting for a number of reasons.
One, he is exceedingly good at being even-handed.
Right?
His politics, he wears on his sleeve, but they do not impact the way he reports this.
When somebody's being a fool, it doesn't matter which side they're on.
He points to it and describes it very well.
And he happens to be far left, right?
He's far enough left that he describes himself as an anarchist.
When pressed on it, he's not simply an anarchist.
He has a rather nuanced understanding of anarchism and in what way it might be positive.
I, of course, disagree with him on this.
But nonetheless, he comes from the far left.
But he has critiqued left and right with equal attention to detail in recent times, and so he was on the ground in Portland during our... Meltdown?
What do you call a nightly recurring riot that goes on for over a hundred consecutive nights?
I don't know what you call it, but in any case he was there for that.
So anyway, he has continued to do this where he figures out where things are happening and he shows up and he documents them and he's collaborated with people whose bent is more The photographic and video nature in many cases.
Anyway, quite like the guy.
Really like what he's been doing.
You want to talk a little bit about his most recent thing from LA Magazine?
Yeah, so he has written this piece.
You can just show my screen.
I'll just read a bit from it.
Called Trans... yeah, there it is.
Exclusive.
Transgender Fugitive Who Spurred Wee Spa Riots Bears All.
Darren Mariker, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, the just-arrested Angelina who launched a firestorm from a women's locker room, spoke with LA Magazine while on the lam.
And so Meriger, again, I may be mispronouncing his name, is now in custody, but he was not for something like 15 months, I think.
And while he was not in custody and he was being looked for, Jeremy Lee Quinn sat down with him and did this interview, which is quite, quite interesting.
So let's just read.
Many people may remember that in the early summer or June of 2021, there was a spa in LA's Koreatown called the Wii Spa.
It's not a women's spa but it has like a women's floor and a men's floor and I went onto their site I don't remember there's like I've never been um but there there are it's it's got sex segregated spaces and there's also non-sex segregated spaces but um the locker room um the locker rooms are sex segregated and this dude walked into women's locker room naked and into the hot tubs, I guess, in the women's segregated spaces, you know, penis out and got called to account for it.
I think, I think the first woman who said, what are you doing here?
Actually, she got escorted off the premises first, but then ultimately he had indecent exposure charges thrown at him, and then he was fugitive from justice for like 15 months.
So, as Jeremy Lee Quinn writes it, Darren Meriger, the transgender Angeleno at the center of an indecent exposure row that began in the summer of 2021 at a Koreatown spa and then exploded into a national scandal, has been arrested in LA after 15 months on the lam.
It was June 23, 2021 at Weave Spa in Wilshire and South Rampart when 52-year-old Meriger caused a near-riot by exposing his, or was it her, penis to a locker room full of women.
In September 2021, the L.A.
County D.A.
filed five felony counts of indecent exposure against Meriger, and since, the Arcadia native has been the red-hot center of a huge blow-up over trans rights.
Okay, so, and then he does this interview.
Quinn does this interview with Meriger, and it's quite, quite remarkable.
Merger goes to the protests that are erupting about him.
But he goes as himself, which is to say he's a dude.
He looks like a dude.
Just looks like a dude.
And he goes and sits in his car.
And he says, I was first, here we have, I was first contacted by a black female who then went and summoned a large group to confront me.
It appeared to be a mixture of Antifa types as well as this black and pink group.
Continues that they thought that he was a proud boy.
Because he just looks like this big dude sitting in an escalade.
And they say, no, you're a proud boy.
People like us don't drive escalades.
That's a new rule, apparently.
It's assigned at birth.
You will or you will not have access to Escalades.
Yeah.
So, now we know that the people who were protesting on behalf of this dude's right to expose himself in women's locker rooms and in women's spas were hassling him for looking like a proud boy in an Escalade and didn't believe that he was the trans woman at the center of this.
Well, wait, wait, wait.
I want to add something.
You may be going there.
In the interview, it's quite clear he is under no illusion whatsoever about whether or not he looks like a man.
In fact, at one point in the interview, he says, how would anybody know if I didn't tell him, right?
But this is not A simple case of somebody gaming the system because... Well, go ahead.
So, let's just read this section that I think you're referring to here.
Let's back up a second, Quinn says.
Should we be using male or female pronouns with you?
How do you identify?
He says, I'm very neutral, like non-binary, although I don't like that word.
I'm legally female.
But I have facial hair, I have a penis, I have no breasts, I don't have a feminine voice, I don't wear makeup or dress up like a female.
So imagine you're a grocery store clerk and you're bagging my groceries and you say, excuse me, sir, I mean, am I supposed to be offended?
That'd be ridiculous.
How would this person know?
But technically, for legal terms, I am she, her.
I put female on my driver's license, but I've had to struggle my whole life fitting into traditional society.
Quinn says, and you sleep with women?
You're a female who has heterosexual sex with females?
Meriger, Meriger, whatever his name is, says, I have heterosexual sex because my penis fits in a vagina.
I don't tell women I'm with that I'm transgender because that's not my sex, so I'm not faking anything.
Gender is internal, sex is external.
He got his sex changed.
He got his official designation changed because California law now allows you to do that just by saying, I've decided I'm a different sex.
He is being somewhat precise in his language here, but the fact is that he is gaming the system.
He is just making a claim that he feels like a woman and he is actually in no way, in no way, In no way, doing anything that appears to have him be woman-like even.
So, just two more here.
Well, it's sort of relevant to that.
When I read that, it created some sympathy for him in my mind.
And he loses that sympathy later on for reasons we will get to.
But my sense is, okay, on the one hand, this is a person who is certainly clearer about where they are and what their expectations are with respect to the world than most folks If he were purely gaming the system, the idea that he has the right to be called she by some clerk who has no way of knowing might well be on the list of expectations.
Here, he's saying, look, how would a clerk know?
There's no outward sign.
This is about an inward feeling.
But my point is this.
This person is confused.
Most people are confused about many, many things.
The number of people who do not have profound confusions running around in their mind Uh, is very small at the moment.
I can't begrudge him taking the world at its word that if you feel differently inside saying, okay, I am now female and going to the lengths of changing your legal status, he I don't see that as gaming the system.
I see this as somebody who has taken what he's told are the new rules of the system and saying, this makes sense for me.
Now, this strikes me as the most obvious case of someone who has seen what he can do.
He literally has heterosexual sex with women.
He's a dude who likes to have sex with women, and he does.
And he doesn't tell them that he goes and pretends to be a woman because he got his legal status changed in order to get himself into spas and hang out with a bunch of naked women.
That's what he has gotten.
He gets to walk around with... I, as you know, did not like to play this card, as it were, but he gets to walk around with the privilege that big brawny men walk around with.
He gets to walk around at night with a lot less fear that, oh my god, I got to make sure I don't turn down that corner or down where there's a streetlight out or this side or the other because he's walking around like a dude because he is a dude.
Right.
And then because he had one legal thing changed as soon as the law changed in California, and now he gets to go and swing his dick around in a women's spa.
No, but you're right that that's appalling.
The question is whether what is appalling is that that is the new set of rules, or whether what is appalling is his availing himself of that rule.
I've had to struggle my whole life fitting into traditional society.
He says the right key words.
There is nothing here.
He says, was that something that was discussed with your therapist?
Quinn asks.
How did you come to the decision to make the appointment to go in to get the driver's license changed?
This is the only thing that's different for him, right?
He says, Our discussion basically started around April 2017.
Between April 2017 and 2019, I had figured that, evaluating how I fit and how I had problems in prison, you come to the conclusion that makes more sense, where you're going to fit better in life.
He's doing this because he doesn't want to be in a men's prison the next time he's arrested for being a criminal.
Right.
Perfectly rational.
Perfectly rational and having nothing.
Why would you have compassion for a male criminal who knows he's going to end up in prison again for thinking ahead and putting all the women prisoners at risk instead?
Because I believe in good governance.
And I believe that it is our obligation to create a set of rules that is sensible, to have discretion built into the system for edge cases.
Sorry, the dog just gave me a look like, what is your problem?
Yeah, what is your problem?
No, the dog and I know.
There are two questions here, okay?
One, are you going to fault people for Utilizing the rules as they are laid out.
To my way of thinking, you have insane people who somehow gained power to change the rules that the rest of us live by, right?
Those people are despicable, right?
They are involved in a power game.
Somebody who looks at the rules and does what they think matches best Perfectly rational.
He doesn't think it's what matches best.
It means he doesn't have to go to a men's prison.
Perfectly rational.
He's gonna end, yes, rational, but having nothing to do with whether or not he actually feels like a woman.
He doesn't.
Well, I don't know.
Here, but you are a convicted sex offender, aren't you?
Gwen asks him.
Weren't you once caught without pants and masturbating while peering into the window of an 85-year-old Arcadia woman?
So what happened was this elderly man got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, and his bathroom overlooks another yard, and he saw me masturbating.
But even if it was masturbation, I don't have a problem with that because that's not illegal.
It's only illegal if you're masturbating in someone's face like George Michael.
A, that's not an answer.
B, he's despicable.
Yeah, this is one of the two places where he lost my sympathy.
I don't understand how he had your sympathy at all.
He's clearly doing everything he can to put himself in women's spaces where he can be Criminal.
There's lots of words I could say there.
He's going to end up in a women's prison if he ends up in prison again.
And there he will be putting all of the women at risk.
He has no place in a women's prison.
He has no place in a women's prison.
We both agree he has no place in a women's prison.
He has no place in a women's spa.
Totally agree.
However, the people who are really at fault here are the people who changed the rules so that a guy like this has discretion.
But he also has no confusion.
He has no remorse.
He says, look, I know I'm a dude, I have sex with women.
He walks us through it.
Right.
And then he just says, oh yeah, you know, because I haven't fit in in life.
Everyone doesn't fit in sometimes, dude.
Look, you may be right that he's gaming the system and I don't necessarily detect it.
Nonetheless, you've got two possible worlds.
You have a world in which we make You have rules that make sense and everybody is held to them.
Or you have a world in which dangerous people are allowed to create a hellscape in which you have choices you shouldn't have and they decide who will be flagged for making those choices and who will not.
Right?
Monsters deciding on the rules of sex and gender, silencing biologists and doctors and anybody else who would dare speak up and point out how insane this is, and then on the street they're saying, here's how we know you're full of shit.
You drive an Escalade.
Okay, so... No, they approached him because he looks like, in their words, a proud boy.
Right.
Okay, but...
He couldn't possibly be the person at the center of this.
We have the same, I'm going to forget the name of the institution that was shot up in the recent shooting that was touted as conservative shooting up a trans space and then the guy turned out to identify as trans.
Oh, the Colorado Springs, the queer bar outside of Colorado Springs.
Right.
Take a look at that.
Here you've got a situation in which a queer bar is shot up.
You have everybody saying, well, this is obviously anti-queer.
And then it turns out that the person who did the shooting identifies as queer.
And the point is, well, we know he's not.
Right?
You are free to tell us whether you do or don't identify, but if you turn out to be one of the ones we don't like, then we're in a position to say you're making it up.
So, I don't like a world in which discretion has anything to do with this.
Right?
But, I mean, I guess it's all discretion.
No, it's not all discretion.
The fact is, if The monsters are going to make a rule that says, hey, if you tell us you're female, you're female.
If you say you're trans, you're trans.
If they make that rule, they have to live with the downside of that argument.
I don't know where this guy falls.
I don't know.
He could be pure monster, and he could have no gender confusion, no strange feeling inside of him, be saying that because it's the right thing to say.
It's perfectly possible.
I don't buy it for a second.
Not with this guy.
One more segment here to read.
in this article, or he could be somebody who is looking at the rules as they are laid out and saying, actually, in light of the rules, this is what I am.
I don't buy it for a second.
Not with this guy.
One more segment here to read.
He is saying that someone, a guy, a trans woman, I guess, who goes by Bambi Salcido, I may be mispronouncing that, I guess I'll just read this, and you can show my screen if you like, Zach, just while I'm reading it.
You mean Bambi Salcido, Quinn writes, president and CEO of the TransLatinAt coalition, the largest trans-led organization in LA.
She said in a story about you, you'd think after getting arrested a bunch of times she'd just change clothes in a stall.
So Bambi does refer to this guy as a she.
And the guy, whose name I keep forgetting, says, right, so in the article, she says she goes to Wii Spa three times a year and she gets naked in there and she never has a problem.
So I spoke to Bambi Salcido on the phone before the story came out.
She admitted to me that she has boobs and she takes off her top and that she does not take off her bottoms because she has a penis.
Nobody knows she's transgender.
Quinn says, nobody knows you're transgender and you have a penis.
What's the difference?
That is to say, People read him as male because he's male.
We can go into that, but if she surgically altered parts of her body, that's transsexual.
I know that's a controversy in and of itself, but I can explain that.
Quinn says, are you saying that transitioning either hormonally or physically somehow disqualifies someone from being authentically transgender?
And he says, you have to understand gender identity.
Everybody's confusing your internal with your external.
All these external people are doing what is being called transitioning.
There's no transition.
That's called deviation.
I'm tired of that word transitioning.
It's a fake word that people like Bambi use.
The whole point is this is how you are born.
So, and this is the guy.
And he's saying that people who are actually living this with downstream consequences for themselves, who are actually having the surgery and the hormones, are a different kind of thing.
And he's the real deal.
Because he's just a dude who likes to go naked into women's spaces and be a nightmare.
I've said he's confused and he doesn't belong in these spaces.
I don't think there's any confusion here.
You and I have said that in fact trans is a very rare but long-standing thing and that what is highly unusual is that we have now taken technology and decided that if you are trans, in the sense that you have this profound dysphoria or whatever the defining characteristic is, that you are entitled to modify yourself with technological help.
Right?
And the point is you have a long-standing something that appears to exist elsewhere, and then you have a modern medical something, and the question is what is the relationship?
Now I don't like this guy's argument.
If people are actually trans and they have this profound dysphoria, and then they make a decision to modify themselves, I don't see that anything about their psychological state is lost, so I don't see why he would exclude them from the category, but his point is the fact of whatever the psychological state is, is distinct from the physical modification.
Well, I think, and maybe, and this gets to the next piece that we're going to talk about, but he thinks that gender identity is real, as do all the trans rights activists.
Confused.
Gender identity isn't real.
And like everyone, it seems, who reads now the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR is told that they really have to accept that gender identity is real or else they're transphobes.
Well, sorry, no.
Like, gender exists in non-human animals.
And sex exists in almost every life on the planet, right?
Gender as the software to the hardware that is sex, as in an animal that can move around the behavior, the behavioral ramifications of the sex that you are.
This guy's position, I have seen nothing, and this is the only piece I've read about him, But there is nothing anywhere in this piece that indicates anything about him actually feeling like a woman.
There's no evidence that he actually has the confusion in any way.
Right.
He just went to the DMV at the point that it became legal to do so and said, I know.
I know what I can do.
I can continue to walk around and have sex with any straight woman who will have me as the man that I am.
But then I also now get to enter women's spaces.
So he gets it both ways, and isn't that a dream for him?
Okay.
So one more little section from this.
Yeah.
Okay.
So one more section, Zach.
Let's get back to Wii Spa, Quinn says.
What brought you there that night?
I re-injured my back in an unprovoked attack in Malibu.
And I went to Wii Spa because it's the only place in town you can get hot and cold treatment, which is one of the best therapies you can get for anti-inflammation.
Were you living near Koreatown?
No, I was in the neighborhood.
My local pool in the marina was closed for maintenance.
Did you go to Wii Spa often?
No, I've only been there twice.
I had to do physical therapy every couple of days, and I roam a lot.
Everything in that interchange says predator to me.
Unprovoked attack in Malibu?
Oh, it's about the hot and cold treatment, but he didn't go to his pool, which wouldn't have had either of those.
Oh, because it was closed for maintenance.
Oh, I don't live near there.
I just roam a lot.
Like, This guy is just like every female Spidey-sense part of me.
Yep.
It's like, oh no.
You keep this guy out of women's prisons, out of women's spaces, out of everything having to do with single-sex spaces for women.
You and I have zero disagreement about that.
Of course.
My point is the most dangerous people are the people who would set up a rule where this is a question.
I'm not defending them.
Well, but in effect, you are ending up in the same place that they are, where the point is, look, you're female if you say you're female, unless we say you're not.
I'm not in the same place as them.
Well, in some sense, you're not in the same place.
They never should have set that up, and this guy, who looks like a predator, is taking advantage of it.
There are arguments about bad tax laws that allow rich people to not pay enough taxes.
And some honorable rich people say, you know what?
I am simultaneously going to take advantage of the tax laws that shouldn't exist so that I don't have to pay as much taxes because I'd be foolish not to, but I'm also going to work to change those tax laws so that we can get a better world.
Right.
This is just a predator taking advantage of a really bad situation, which was created by activists.
It was created by activists, but the point is those activists' de facto position is, you're female if you say you're female, unless we say you're not.
And they say he's not.
Okay, so I don't like accepting the second part of that formulation.
The point is, the only place to solve this issue is at the, no, you're not female if you say you're female.
Now, you may have to set a standard.
Given that there are transsexuals, we do have to figure out what the standard is that decides whether or not your driver's license declares you female.
I mean, how crazy is it?
If you don't look female, the idea that your driver's license says you're female is not about how you feel, it's about how to pursue you if you commit a crime, right?
It's a description of you so that we know who you are.
If your, you know, car rolls over and we need to identify you.
If you've committed a crime and we need to find you.
It's totally insane.
We just got submitted a passport renewal for one of our sons this week.
And now you can put X down.
You can choose M for male, F for female, or X for either other or doesn't want to say.
Declined to say.
You shouldn't be able to say that on your passport.
Your passport?
You should not be able to say that on your passport.
Right, of course not.
Of course not.
So anyway, my position is, look, There is no excuse for this guy being in these spaces, but the idea that there's a rule that says you are what you say you are, right?
But acknowledging that this guy's a predator who's behaving extraordinarily badly is not giving cover to the people who helped create the rules.
Well, but the problem is that because this guy does not look female, right?
Because he's not.
Yes, but some people do look female who are not.
Yeah, and they're also not.
Right, but the point is, there is a part of this that's like, there's nothing female about this guy, right?
And the answer is, unfortunately, these insane people have created a rule in which that doesn't matter.
Right?
And so, as you know, I'm not arguing for this guy's discretion to go into the women's spa.
What I'm arguing is that the insanity is that we've created a rule and what these people have done is they have created an exception to the rule that they don't even spell out.
Who are you to question this person's sex?
I'm a biologist.
Doesn't count.
Doesn't matter.
Biology says sex isn't binary.
They're the only arbiters.
They create a rule and they're the only arbiters.
I agree that that's insane, but the fact that I come in this particular case, that I end up agreeing with them, doesn't make him anything less of a predator.
Well, I mean look, you don't know for sure what he is or isn't.
Quinn asks him several direct questions.
Like, he's been in prison for, uh, he's a convicted sex offender because he was masturbating while peering into the window of an 85 year old Arcadia woman.
The guy says, yeah, but I was masturbating.
That's not illegal.
That's not an answer.
And it was illegal.
He, like, Oh, okay.
So there's a question of... Creep is nowhere close to strong enough.
Oh, creep is nowhere close to strong enough.
Totally agree.
On the other hand, you know, all of the creepy shit that exists in porn now, right?
The fact is there's... But that's what you're... Like, we're talking about this guy.
No, we're talking about... We've got an industry which caters to creep.
Absolutely.
So the point is, being a creep ain't illegal.
He's right about that.
I don't know what the situation was with the window, whether he was breaking the law or not.
Presumably he was, because he was convicted.
But my point is, Western civilization has a problem with this exact concept.
It does not say creepiness is unacceptable.
It says actually it's monetizable.
In a world where creepiness is on the menu and your gender is what you say it is because a bunch of crazy people have gained enough power to make that the rule, I don't want to place that at this person's doorstep nor do I want to assume that I know what he's getting out of it.
I assume he's getting sexual gratification from being naked in front of a bunch of women that he's not really entitled to be naked in front of, but why is he there?
Because a bunch of insane assholes changed the rules so that we can't enforce anything that makes any sense.
So maybe what your position is, the part of your position that I wasn't seeing before is I, Brett, see most of what you, Heather, are seeing in this article, but I don't see evidence that this is the worst of what is being produced by the system.
There actually, like this looks pretty clear-cut, but there actually are some ambiguities, but there's a whole lot of place where there appear to be ambiguities where there actually aren't.
And we need to be thinking system-wide about, and as we are, but we need to be thinking system-wide about how depraved we are becoming.
Right.
We have to think about how depraved we are becoming, and frankly, at a game theory level, This isn't hard.
There's one place to solve this problem, and it has to do with the rules.
And yes, you may need some discretion for edge cases, but the one place to solve this is to make an unambiguous rule about who is and is not allowed to join the sport, to go to this prison, to join this woman's space.
That's the place to solve it.
There's no other place that is even remotely viable.
Yeah, and you know, actually it occurs to me, and this is something we've talked at before, but I never quite occurred to me before to think that actually their language around what happens when the doctor sees you for the first time if you didn't have ultrasound or amnia or something and so your sex hadn't been observed before birth at the point that your sex is observed at birth and they're assuring us that it's a sign that moves reality into
into this space of discretion that that takes reality from reality to discretionary space and so once reality is discretionary then everything is discretionary like it's it is stolen from us the part we're like no actually there's a there's a base truth here dude's a dude and in in this case he's not even trying in other cases they are trying and it doesn't matter still a dude
Yep, so before we go on to a case that does show what the worst of this looks like, I want to make one other point, and it's going to be a little hard for many people to grasp why it's related here.
Years ago I gave this TEDx talk on the personal responsibility vortex.
The basic point is there are two kinds of systems in the world.
There are systems in which the cleanup is done by the benevolent people.
Those systems evolve towards being ruthless.
And there are systems in which the ruthless pay the cost of cleaning up the system.
And those systems evolve towards benevolence.
You can adjust the rate at which you evolve in these two directions, but you're one side of the line or the other.
So the idea that the place to enforce this is, but are you really trans, right?
This is discretion and we're going to doubt you and all of that, creates a hellscape, right?
In which this is all going to be done based on selective enforcement and people's judgment and who has the power.
The only place to create a system You won't get everything you want out of the system.
You won't protect every single person who's in need of protection.
But the way to protect the maximum number of people from the various harms that actually threaten them is by structuring rules that are themselves sensible and then adjudicating those cases in which you cannot easily apply the rule using some sort of discretion where we know what the law was trying to do and we say here's the best we can do in this case, right?
What I'm getting at is the hellscape in which this is discretionary is the one in which the good people pay, right?
And just as we don't want to create tax law that's vague and have people abide by it on their honor, we want to create tax law that's utterly unambiguous and make it so that the people who pay are the people who actually violate the rules, right?
This is a case where you want good rules And then you want them enforced utterly without prejudice, right?
And we're headed in the other direction because dangerous people and their simpleton partners have engineered a set of rules that, you know, a child could game.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So yeah, you alluded to this other piece, which, I'm not sure that I actually... Oh, I guess I do have a few things highlighted in here.
You can show my screen here for a moment and then I'll have you take it off while I find the highlighted bits.
This you shared with me.
This is written by a woman named Mandy Stattmiller, I think.
Rabbit Hold number 78.
Dana Rivers is the story the media doesn't want you to read.
This is a story unparalleled in media censorship about deadly white male violence against a lesbian interracial couple and their black son.
When the media goes silent, there is always a reason why.
Mandy gives a trigger warning in this piece.
You give me a trigger warning when you shared it with me.
Which I almost never do.
You don't, yeah.
And this story warrants it.
This is...
This is so horrifying.
You really can't imagine what is going on.
But the very thumbnail version is that this guy started, you know, claims to be trans, started invading women's spaces, including, for instance, this, I think it's called MichFest.
I may have this wrong, but the famous and long lasting women's music festival in Michigan that was held every summer until These trans women started invading it with violence and aggression and all of this, and they basically had to shut it down.
So, you know, yet another example of women's spaces not being allowed to be women's spaces, because people who want women get to say they're women, and somehow you're not allowed to say, no, you're not.
This man is so full of rage, and particularly at one of the women in this interracial lesbian couple, That he showed up at their house, and he killed both of the women and their 19-year-old son, who happened to have been adopted as, I think, a baby from Africa.
He had just graduated from high school.
He was a stellar student.
He was, yeah, he was going on to great things.
And he slaughtered all of them, and the Number of things that he did to the woman whom he hated most as he killed her are extraordinary.
We've not heard about this story.
That's the other story.
What we did hear about, apparently, and I don't remember this, but what Mandy, the author of this piece, reports is that this guy, Dana Rivers,
was lauded in the liberal media back in the 90s when he first came out as trans and was was just a media darling for a while for being so brave and the fact is that you know he never really passed and so women who saw him coming into women's faces would say things to him and on
Some of those women, he took out his rage to such a degree that they're now dead.
Brutally so.
And he is likely to be, he took away the iPad or something of the young man who he killed.
And he was still wearing it on his person when he turned himself in.
So, you know, there's really no ambiguity about whether or not he committed these crimes.
But because of new law in California, at the point that he's convicted, he's going to go to a women's prison.
Yeah, it's really, you know, and we pointed out years ago at this point that this was the danger, that, you know, we're talking about all kinds of things that are, yes, horrifying, like the fact that men can now compete against women in women's sports, but the, you know, the deep end of the pool really is prison, right?
At the point that somebody can decide that they go to a women's prison, irrespective of what they've been convicted of, Irrespective of what phenotype they have.
Just show my screen here.
These are the people who were killed while we talked.
But, you know, this is a completely unfudgable issue, right?
The fact is, men who are capable of raping women should not be in a women's prison.
Now in this case, you've got a guy who is not only physically enabled as a man, he still retains his penis, But he is obviously, there's so many quotes in this thing that make it clear that this is the most deeply misogynistic person, right?
In fact there's one... Violently, like rape fantasy that he published as porn on Amazon and some of it is still up.
Yes, multiple books that he has self-published on Amazon that contain just the most twisted and bizarre, the most extreme anti-female kinds of sex, rape, violent fantasy stuff, that the idea that any court would do anything other than look at him and say, no dude,
You're going to a maximum security men's prison is, you know, that's the only rational thing to do with somebody this depraved and dangerous.
That's right.
And the fact, I mean, I really see this as two stories.
One, there is the terrifying, very awful story that Mandy Stettmiller has written here.
And then there's the story of the fact that it's not being covered.
Right?
You are being told, we are all being told that trans is an important issue and that in order for justice to prevail, we must provide the right to self-define.
Okay?
Then some of us say, well, In principle, you should have the right to self-define until you get to the place where that's a threat to other people's rights, and then there's something that absolutely has to be discussed.
Oh, really?
You really want to keep these people from enjoying the protection of a space that matches their internal sense of themselves?
Yes.
No, I'm most worried about prison.
Like, let's go to the prison.
Of course.
Women are allowed to have women-only spaces.
Men are allowed to have men-only spaces, too.
Of course.
But my point isn't that that's an ambiguous case.
My point is we have a perfectly unambiguous case.
There is no argument to be made that a person like this Belongs in a women's prison because he says well really you think somebody would identify as female just to go to a women's prison Yes, I do and I've said so before this case became public, right?
Okay, that's I mean the the other guy from the Wii Spa thing, you know He he says as much in his answer.
This is part of why I I feel pretty very confident about my assessment of him He says well, you know, I've just really felt this way and also prison wasn't a good match for me.
Like of course Of course men's prison isn't a good match for you.
It's a good match for just about anyone.
Right.
Are you joking?
It's not.
It's just so obvious a thing to say, and to think that, well, that must mean I'm a woman inside.
It's like, no, that means prison sucks.
But I'm trying to get at this other point, which is, okay, people on side A.
...said, in order to be just, in order to be kind, in order to be decent, we must carve out the space to self-define.
Then some of us said, that is going to cause you problems when you get to things like women's sports, women-only spaces, women's prison.
And they said, no it won't, because that would require somebody to identify as female in order to game the system.
Yada yada yada.
Yeah, happens all the time.
Really?
No, it doesn't happen.
You're exaggerating how often it happens.
Hey, take a look at this, the most horrifying story of a violent, sexually motivated murder by somebody who just happens to have self-published several books in which he explores these kind of depraved fantasies.
So, this is the end of that argument, except it took Mandy Stettmiller to write it on her substack in order for us even to have access to the case, because the point is the system is now so biased in favor of this argument that it will actually obscure a case like this.
And in fact, it's been now at least many days since I read it, so I don't remember if I've got this exactly right.
What was I going to say?
I've now lost it.
It'll come back.
Okay, let me read a couple things and I'll come back to you.
Sure.
To paraphrase Spiked Online, how you identify as a man matters about as much as whether you feel like your criminality is actually justified and fully righteous because all the women you've assaulted deserved it.
Imagine if serial killers and child rapists could start to identify as being innocent, and that was respected too.
Identity is an insult to the brutality of reality.
Reality is that almost 100% of those convicted of sexual violence are male.
98% to be exact.
In UK prisons, almost half of those who identify with synthetic sex identities have been convicted of sexual offenses.
Incidentally, the phrase synthetic sex identities is excellent, and that is What is being used here to indicate those who are trying to pass as the sex that they are not.
There is not a female prisoner on earth who deserves the punishment of being housed with Dana Rivers, a psychopathic, revenge-obsessed male who has already taken the lives of two women in their family.
I ask you, how many more women does Rivers have to kill before all the requests to be kind becomes a little too much for all of us to bear?
So yeah, I do have it.
Two things.
One, let us just notice that the fools who have engineered our new system, their logic Right?
That, in fact, even, you know, we've used these same cases before, but Caitlyn Jenner did not win the men's decathlon.
Right?
Bruce Jenner did.
It is absurd to have a system in which we cannot talk about Bruce Jenner's, you know, it is perfectly valid to say Bruce Jenner won the men's decathlon, later transitioned to become Caitlyn Jenner, who identifies as female.
That is all factual, but we're not allowed to say it because of this phony concept of deadnaming.
Now here's the thing.
This absurd idea that you should be able to identify as innocent is actually perfectly logically consistent with the idea that deadnaming is a problem.
Say that sentence again.
The idea that you could identify as innocent to escape responsibility for a crime is perfectly logically consistent with the idea that it is wrong to deadname Caitlyn Jenner by talking about her Olympic triumph as Bruce.
The point is if you can Forbid us to talk about the actual manner in which you won some award in the past, then you can also walk away from a crime that you've committed because you are now identifying as somebody different.
This is a new person.
That person is dead.
Oh yes, he committed a crime, but he is now dead.
Right?
That is nonsense.
Is there any chance, I would not have expected to find myself steelmanning any part of their argument, but is there any chance that they are a little bit confused?
By the fact that for some crimes, intent does matter.
Murder and manslaughter are actually different crimes, even if the effect on the person who's been killed is the same.
I don't quite get your argument.
I would say intent always matters.
There is gross negligence, but it's very different than murder.
I don't care if you think you're innocent.
If you're not, you're not.
I do care a little bit if you were trying to kill that person as opposed to if you weren't killing that person because it says some different things about your mental state and who you are as a human being and what your likelihood is of doing such a thing again in the future.
Right.
I mean, what... So I guess because intent is a feature of the mind, It does take it into the space of, well, I'm just creating it.
This is something that bubbles up from my mind and therefore maybe all reality is like that.
Okay.
That's what it's doing.
I'd be more sympathetic to the steel manning if the very people who would be confused in this way were not also the people who claim intent doesn't matter, right?
They make that argument, and so it certainly is not exonerating here.
But the other thing that is true is, look, even if we steel man their gender position, your gender identity died with that past name, and this new name that you have identified with is your new gender identity.
There is nothing in the world that says that your murderous persona died with your gender identity.
Right?
If you're a person prone to murder, if you're a person who hates women, I don't care that you do or you don't identify as one.
My expectation is you didn't give up your hatred of women because you suddenly identified as one and in fact there's a terrible, I think it is at this festival that you were describing where this guy is terrorizing lesbians at this music festival, but at some point He is assaulting some woman and he says something like, you know, real women have cocks or something.
It's right here.
A flyer.
One particularly revolting flyer left for lesbians featured a man with a synthetic sex identity on the cover whose erect penis dominated the page.
Underneath the words, real women have cocks.
Yeah.
So anyway, the point is I don't really care.
Even if the guy genuinely did identify as female, the point is he's got a murderous rage at women and the whole idea of dead identity doesn't make any sense.
The point I had forgotten earlier was that in this piece it is also clear that many people who are ideologically committed to this fantasy world in which your gender identity is something you are just free to embrace at any moment and walk away from your past life, there's a point at which this man's crimes have been revealed and there are gender activists who are
Making excuses for him and in fact, there's a question somebody says somebody is quoted as saying well I don't want to judge him for what he's done until we know what these people did to him That's right, right and it's the most bone-chilling Rationalization you've ever heard right the guy has This is not somebody who's so mentally disabled that he doesn't know what he's doing.
their son, this is a former teacher. - Right, he's also a former teacher. - So this is not somebody who's so mentally disabled that he doesn't know what he's doing.
This is somebody who delights in this stuff and writes about it and in any case, the idea that, oh, we shouldn't want to pass judgment on this person who is, you know, I don't know I hesitate to recount how horrifying what he did to these people is, but the idea that we shouldn't pass judgment until we figure out whether they did something that might have in some sense justified this, I'm sorry, no.
Just because this all flies in the face of the stupid story you told us about how safe it would be for everybody to self-identify their gender You know, on a whim, right?
This is the story that says that's not true, and now you're not going to report it in the New York Times and the Washington Post and all of the other places that it should be discussed?
Really?
You're not going to report it?
And when it is discussed in other circles, you're going to make excuses for this person?
Like, how wrong?
You know, no, you were wrong.
You were wrong in the first place, and we are entitled now.
These people had to die in order to prove that we were right, that this was a danger?
No!
No, they shouldn't have had to.
They were innocent.
Yeah.
And they were living lives that benefited from some of the great successes of liberal advances of the 20th century, right?
This was a black and a white woman living together in love, having adopted a black son whom they raised to be an excellent young man.
And they're all dead.
And the race of the dude who killed them shouldn't matter at all, but all of these people who would have us believe in the progressive stack, and the more points you have against you because of historical injustice, the more right you have to speak?
The white dude who slaughtered these three people brutally?
Is being protected by the media because he pulled the Trump card that is, I call myself a woman?
Not even a woman.
We don't care about women anymore.
A trans woman.
I call myself a woman.
I'm a dude.
I call myself a woman.
That trumps everything else.
And it's the one of them that you can 100% opt into on a whim.
It's all it takes.
I now call myself... I'm gonna call myself a man.
Call yourself a woman anytime you want.
California's facilitating it.
Other states presumably will follow.
Surely there are people who are part of this who can see this and who have some power to help reverse it.
To the extent that there are monsters, it's the category they will end up in because it is entirely discretionary by these new insane rules.
And, you know, this is obviously, you know, I was I think it's hard to be a decent human and be prepared for what's described here.
And Mandy, in her description, she wasn't prepared to write it.
It's that horrifying.
But I think sometimes I also say that to make compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis.
There's another formulation of it that I think was written before I ever said that, which I didn't know about.
But anyway, I don't want to pretend that I made that up.
It was new to me, but somebody else had said something so similar that it bears mention, and I wish I remembered who exactly it was.
But that aside, the point is this requires a dispassionate analysis.
A dispassionate analysis says, you know what?
The hypothesis was if you changed the rules in this way, people would take advantage of it.
People who were specifically interested in utilizing the change in the rules because of their rage at women, because of a desire to take advantage of this category.
And this is the proof that that's true.
You don't get to hide it, right?
An honest analysis would say this is the exception and not the rule, which may be true.
This exception proves why we cannot have a rule that allows such exceptions.
But you don't get to pretend it didn't happen, right, by not writing the story or by making excuses for this person especially.
But apparently you do.
Yeah, well, apparently you do.
Apparently you do get to pretend it didn't happen.
But that is part of why in this season, when it would be great not to be talking or thinking about any of this, we have spent our time here today talking about some true horrors that are one of the downstream effects of the place that we started.
Stanford's list of bad words seems trivial in comparison, but that leads to this.
It does.
It does.
If you really become confused about whether or not you're assigned sex at birth, or... I mean, using the word seminal is offensive.
The people making these lists, and policing them, and making their living doing this kind of thing, really need to build something with their hands.
Plan a long hike, like a week, better a month, three months.
Go somewhere.
Outside of the country that you were born in, somewhere very different, with a language that you don't speak, and culture and food that you don't know, and make a go of it.
Like, experience things that you can't socially manipulate yourself into convincing yourself that you got this.
Because if these are the kinds of lists and policies you're making, you don't got this.
You're really confused.
Yeah, I would add one thing to it.
There is a general change in the way we make policy now.
And the general change is an argument carries the day.
We ignore why it carries the day.
Why did this argument about gender identity carry the day?
Because of power.
It was not a good argument, ever.
But it carried the day because of power.
But here's the thing that really troubles me.
How much evidence would you need before you realize that there was something wrong with the argument to begin with, right?
A rational entity pulls out of a nosedive, right?
At some point it becomes clear that the instrument that said you were flying horizontally is wrong and you ignore it and you pull out of the dive.
We are now in a situation where the wrong argument gets to win no matter how much evidence accumulates that it wasn't a good argument in the first place.
And this is now true effectively across the board.
You inoculated how many people?
With this thing which didn't do what you said it did and did a lot of things that you told us it didn't do, right?
At what point do we... We're now talking about literal inoculations.
We're talking about literal inoculations.
At what point do we get to say, you know what?
The amount of evidence that what you told us about these things was wrong in every regard is now so great, we're not listening to what you say about whether or not it's still something we should be giving to people because you turned out to be wrong, right?
And This is now happening on every topic, right?
The people who had the power to get their argument to carry the day in spite of the fact that they didn't know what they were talking about...
get to be right in the end even if all of the evidence says they weren't, right?
Somehow they are entitled to be right.
Rather than advancing these things as a proposal, the point is, oh, they've already concluded that they were right and the evidence will have to be refigured in order that they get to retain that status of being right.
They were right to begin with, they remain right, and it's nonsense.
The logic has never worked this way.
This has to be the flavor of this new dark age because That's the only case in which you would not allow the actual evidence to change your position, right?
The position is what it is for reasons that have nothing to do with what's true.
That's right.
All right, I think we're there.
I think we might be.
Yeah.
We're gonna take a break and come back with a Q&A.
And if you don't hang around for that, we'll be back on New Year's Eve.
Our producer has his head and his face in his hand, so I hope... We're all good.
Okay, he says we're all good.
We'll be back on New Year's Eve with our last livestream of the year.
There'll be an episode of Dark Horse with Brett interviewing a guest to be announced, released next week.
And before we see you next, unless you tune in for the Q&A in 15 minutes, we're in the middle of Hanukkah and Christmas is coming up and the solstice has just passed.
If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, as most of you are, the days are finally very, very slowly beginning to get a little bit longer, although they will also be getting colder for a while.
I've given physics.
Happy continuing Hanukkah. - What?
Happy ongoing Hanukkah to everyone.
Merry Christmas when you finally get there and Happy New Year's Eve to the X?
