In the first part of a two-part episode, we continue to chart the increasingly malignant influence of the IDW and satellites, examining the journey of Heather Heying (of the Dark Horse Podcast which she co-presents with her husband Bret Weinstein) from scientific reductionism all the way to (as she herself puts it) "full TERF". Content Warnings for Transphobia, Ableism, anti-Sex Worker stuff, etc. Part 2 up very soon. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Previous eps on the Weinsteins and Heying: 60, 61, and 62 Ligand Bonds in Inorganic Chemistry: https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemistry/Modules_and_Websites_(Inorganic_Chemistry)/Coordination_Chemistry/Structure_and_Nomenclature_of_Coordination_Compounds/Ligands Ligand Bonds in Molecular Biology: https://biologydictionary.net/ligand/ Full notes under Part 2
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And welcome to episode 83 of I Don't Speak German,
the evergreen supertanker of podcasts which is jammed sideways into the Suez Canal that is the internet and single-handedly blocking all the back and forth trade in Nazi bullshit.
You can thank us later.
Indeed, indeed.
Given our subject matter today, the evergreen reference is certainly apt, we should say.
Good, good.
I'm going in sight unseen, so I'm accidentally being relevant.
There you go.
Well, we're talking about Bret Weinstein and Heather Hying again.
And, obviously, they taught at the Evergreen State College for a number of years, so that's the joke I was going for there.
Oh, of course they did!
God, I didn't even think of that!
There you go.
I should just not even... I should just talk and just trust to luck that it's going to be right.
That's basically what I do, anyway.
Yeah, we're good.
Don't worry, don't worry.
Don't worry, we're going to talk about a bit of Evergreen today.
Which may be, I don't know, this might be a two-parter, we'll kind of find out in the process, because I guess announcements should be made is that we are in the process of doing some significant hardware upgrades, which mean nothing to most people who are listening to this podcast.
It is the most, like, if podcasters talking about, like, microphones and podcast recording stuff is boring to normal people, talking about the kinds of things that we have had to do to upgrade all our hardware is even more, but all.
But it is made possible by our Patreon supporters, and I do appreciate it.
So, yeah.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, yeah.
There's probably podcasts about that, to be honest.
If that's what you're thirsting to hear, go and find them.
Yeah, so we've just seemed to have had a breakthrough with Daniel's hardware, when mine has run into problems.
But we'll thrash it out, don't worry.
But yeah, so we haven't introduced ourselves, but you know who I am.
I'm Jack Graham, and of course you've already heard the voice of my fellow stereotype accuracy denier, Daniel Harper.
Indeed, that's me, Daniel Harper.
I'm here talking about people.
Stereotype denying, that's the thing.
Yeah, it's terrible the way we go around denying the accuracy of stereotypes.
Just goes to show.
Anyway, yeah.
Firstly, a word about our last episode, episode 82, which was on Scott Alexander, Stroke Siskind, and the Slate Star Codex, with our wonderful special guests David Gerrard and Elizabeth Sandover.
That episode has been really well received.
Firstly, we had a big uptake in downloads.
They were selling like hotcakes, copies of that episode.
And we've had lots of good responses on Twitter, so thank you for that, everybody.
I did get a couple of responses where people said, like, this felt a little bit inside, like it felt a little, you know, for people who kind of knew this subject, kind of joking around, as opposed to something that was a little bit better organized.
And, you know, like, I get that criticism, and I do, we do try To kind of ramp up a little bit more.
In my defense, the reason that we are doing this serious hardware upgrade is because my computer was literally in the process of dying while we were recording that.
And Jack did everything in his power to make that listenable, and he did a great job.
But if you couldn't tell that we were under severe strife during that recording, that's totally on Jack.
Jack made that happen.
So, you know, I would normally we would have tried to organize that a little bit better.
But given the given the issues that we're running into, I feel like even just kind of getting it out there was kind of a triumph.
But I do hear that criticism and we will kind of work on that in the future for sure.
Yeah, as you say, just getting it recorded and released was an heroic effort, mainly mine.
And I also want to directly blame David Gerrard, it was largely his fault, because as people who've listened to that episode will have noticed, I tried desperately to get people to be kind of basics so that uh intro level listeners wouldn't be lost and david gerard i mean both of them really but particularly dave just completely overrode that immediately just responded to my pleas for go back to the beginning and start with the basics with yeah so rocco's basilisk so yeah
well what i learned from that episode is that you don't need me You can just shitcan me and do this podcast with David.
That's what I learned.
Don't give me ideas.
You do control the means of production on this one.
That's right, yes.
So there's that, and there's also the fact that our bonus episode for March is now out.
It's on the 1992 satirical mockumentary Bob Roberts, written by, starring and directed by Tim Robbins.
And it's a very good episode, I think.
And if you want to listen to that, then you have to give one or other of us A mere dollar on Patreon, which is nothing.
It's not even like two-thirds of a pound at the moment, isn't it?
So, you know, come on.
What are you waiting for?
Yeah, that one was a fun recording and I listened to the episode and it was fun.
It's a fun listen, so check it out.
Also, check out the movie, which is quite good.
Yeah, do watch the movie first, because it is worth watching, and you will be lost if you don't watch the movie before you listen to the show.
But yeah, do both.
Tim Robbins has actually said, you know, pirate the movie, so feel free to do so.
Yeah, he's been very explicit about, like, you should definitely just pirate this at this point.
So yeah, I feel no obligation to Fucking Miramax, who did the original distribution!
Like, fuck you, Harvey Weinstein.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But moving from one egregious Weinstein to another egregious Weinstein, it's the Brett and Weinstein and Heather Hying again that are the subjects of our show this evening, isn't it, Daniel?
Yeah.
No, it is.
And I should... Egregious in different ways, I should stress.
Oh, no, no, no.
Very much.
Although, well, we'll get into that, I think.
Pretty bad.
One of the things that I've kind of run into is...
The Nazis, the overt white nationalists, just aren't doing that much right now, and this kind of IDW crowd, this kind of extended universe of the intellectual dark web, are just getting more and more awful, and pushing their ideas into the mainstream the way that sort of the alt-right was in like 2015 and 2016.
Yeah, they're the vanguard at the moment.
Indeed, and so I feel fine about using this forum in which to discuss these guys because this is like hardcore reactionary dipshittery of the highest order with a massive audience.
And while these are not like overt Nazis by any stretch of the imagination, Well, we'll get there!
We'll get there!
About some of the things they believe, and the things that they say on their shows.
If they're not actual Nazis, they're certainly carrying water for Nazis, knowingly or otherwise, and they're part of the whole overall malaise that pushes things Nazi-wood, aren't they?
Indeed, indeed.
And, you know, the other kind of the flip side of that is, you know, the work that the kind of, again, that James Lindsay and Hying and Weinstein and etc.
are doing makes it easier for the actual white nationalists to gain power at some point in the future.
This episode, if I have the courage to do it this way, this episode will be called Heather Hying is an anti-trans bigot.
That was my planning title for this episode, which we may soften slightly, but we'll see.
So you, listener, will know whether we stuck with that or not when you download this episode.
But we are going to be talking today about turfery, which I just prefer to call anti-trans bigotry because that's what it is.
I also do want to highlight that I've had a number of people who are trans reach out to me and say, like, hey, I'd be happy to come on and kind of talk about trans issues at some point.
I didn't want to, like, I don't want to bring a trans person on just to, like, share the trauma of the material we're going to be discussing today.
I don't like bringing trans people on to talk about trans issues specifically, right?
I'd rather bring People on who I don't I don't want to expose them to that like simplistic thing because trans people are people and they have expertise and knowledge and they have personalities and should be able to talk about things other than like what it's like to be traumatized as a trans person.
That said, I have tried to do my research and I've tried to kind of look into this stuff on my own and I do not speak for trans people, but I don't feel like you have to be trans to understand how awful this material is.
And I'm just gonna say this stuff is pretty bad.
Like, it's pretty awful if you're a trans person or if you love a trans person.
It's actually in some ways worse.
For these kind of like, oh no, I'm a rationalist, I'm just left of center, I love trans people, I have trans friends, but I have questions about this stuff.
There is, in some ways, it's worse than just this outright bigotry from Nazis, because you expect a Nazi to be a Nazi, but you don't expect kind of the soft-spoken, you know, rational, centrist, liberal type To just go out and out for the kind of bigotry that we're going to be exploring in this episode today.
And so that's what we're going to talk about.
And they're very positioning as the rational centrist gives them a kind of an alibi and in the process kind of just immediately off the bat, you know, legitimizes or, you know, it potentially in the eyes of some people legitimizes what they're saying, which often just essentially amounts to bigotry.
Larded up in Sudi language.
Absolutely.
So just a little bit of backstory on Brett and Heather.
You can go back and look at our prior episodes.
I don't remember exactly what numbers they were that we did.
We did Brett and Heather, and then we did Eric Weinstein in a two-part.
You should probably listen to all three of those episodes at some point before you kind of get into this one.
But Brett and Heather were professors at the Evergreen State College until 2017, in which Brett decided he didn't want to participate in some On campus activities that were meant to be sensitive about race, and he wanted to throw his big rational brain genius around, and eventually he and his wife left the university.
Again, this is the vastly oversimplified version, which I just don't want to get into the details of the evergreen story again.
Please go back and check out that episode or at least the show notes to kind of get caught up on this.
But what is important is that I've been tracking Brett and Heather for like six or eight months now, kind of following their their live streams on a regular basis.
It's kind of my kind of standard part of my kind of standard weekend listening is listening to their live stream and then the Q&A they do after the live stream.
And they have there's so much that we just missed in those episodes because ultimately these shows have to kind of highlight the things that are kind of most pertinent.
And we kind of design an outline that gives you a sense of kind of the overall picture.
And what we missed, not for lack of caring, not for lack of caring, but just for lack of wanting to get into the details, was the just sheer anti-transness that has been growing since I started kind of following these people.
And the thing that really kind of indicated that it was time to do this episode was that Heather Hying, on one of the Dark Horse podcast episodes, declared herself, she says, I'm going to go full turf.
And then proceeds to go full TERF.
TERF being Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
And, you know, it is, I don't know, like, I guess, I guess you in the UK have a little bit more experience with kind of TERFiness being a kind of a mainstream phenomenon.
Do you have kind of thoughts about that before we kind of dig into this a little bit more?
Well, yeah, I don't want to derail the podcast, but yeah, anti-trans bigotry is unfortunately endemic in the British media from, you know, right the way across the spectrum to the supposedly centrist and liberal outlets.
It is very, very mainstream, very normalised and it is by no means an automatic badge of shame, you know, to be a TERF.
In the British media.
I think it's interesting that she actually declared herself a TERF in those terms.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
In fact, we'll just go ahead and play a clip right now.
Now, this is not from the Dark Horse podcast.
This is actually from another podcast, from someone named Kelly J. Keane, who is, I believe, one of your, one who lives in, lives around, in your neck of the woods.
And she does a show on YouTube called Biological Women's Hours.
And she has, behind her on screen on the YouTube, she has shirts, like merch, with various slogans, and a giant neon sign saying Adult Human Female, in case you had any indication as to what this show was going to be like.
Yeah, she obviously doesn't want you to be in any doubt where she stands.
Right.
And so just after Heather Hying showed up on, did the I'm going to go full turf segment on her own show, she got invited to come on to Biological Women's Hour.
And so here you get to hear in Heather's own words why she describes herself as a turf.
So here we go.
The reason I reached out this time is I'd heard you'd gone full turf and I wondered when you knew and how that happened.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so a few episodes ago on the podcast that my husband Brett and I do together, exactly, I used that phrase, right?
I said, I'm just going to go full turf here.
And I did that intentionally, having known, you know, internally and with a few conversations, certainly with him and a few other people.
That this epithet, this slur that is used against many of us, was one that I was prepared to own precisely because I find the rise in slurs against women who are doing something that is not appreciated by some small segment of the society a bit alarming.
So she's really she's doing the full week reclaiming a slur she's yeah she's yeah.
The turf is our discourse the the whole thing believe me we're gonna get like i wanted to start with a clip just to indicate.
Heather Hying has declared herself a full TERF.
There is no question about that.
She claims the word.
She is going full on into this thing.
She has been gradually pushing further and further into that, and her husband has gone along with it willingly.
Um, Heather is much more sort of aggressive about it.
And honestly, until I was prepping this episode, I was willing to cut Brett a little bit of slack on this in terms of, like, pushing back slightly.
But as I was prepping these clips today and kind of relisted to this stuff and, like, really kind of putting it in, An organized fashion, it really becomes clear that Brett is like his token resistance is just that it's token resistance.
And it is ultimately what he does is agree and amplify with her while trying to provide the slightest bit of nuance there.
And what may not come across in that clip is the sort of the level of Moral indignation that Heather has about this topic But we're going to we're gonna hear a lot more of that as we move forward.
So Before we get into that before we really kind of get into the turfiness.
I thought it was worthwhile to sort of talk a little bit about Where this comes from aware like me as someone who's kind of followed these people for a while I Kind of seize the origins of this, right?
And in order to do that, we're actually going to start in a weird place.
And that is, we're going to talk about ligands.
We're going to talk about what, sorry?
Ligands.
L-I-G-A-N-D-S.
And so, this is a concept in chemistry and molecular biology.
And among those of us who Follow Brett and Heather around on Twitter and who talked to each other.
There was a bit of a kind of a thing in which Heather, in the process of talking about the COVID vaccines back about four or five months ago, the kind of newly, at the time, kind of newly developed, newly released COVID vaccines.
She was talking about various problems that kind of might come about.
And talking about sort of the, uh, the nanoparticle, uh, the lipid nanoparticle that the, uh, mRNA vaccines are actually encased in.
And, uh, she was reading a paper that used the word ligand.
And in that context, the idea was that, uh, there was going to be, in that context, it's like, we're going to put a little blobby bit on the surface of the lipid, lipid nanoparticle so that we can, um, track these things or so that we can eliminate them to make the vaccine safer, et cetera, et cetera.
Kind of complicated discourse around this.
It doesn't really matter for our purposes, although we could do a full series of episodes about the way that these two people have treated the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccines in particular, which would be a fascinating place to go, but we're just going to kind of leave that aside.
The point is that the paper, the abstract actually, use the word ligand, And then Heather kind of jumps in and describes what a ligand is to the audience.
She says that is a molecule with a metal ion in the middle.
Those are her exact words.
Now, I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
I took a 500 level course in inorganic chemistry in which we did a ton of coordination chemistry and complex ions and you learn like yeah there's a ton of ligands out there and it kind of is that within the confines of inorganic chemistry.
That has nothing to do with what the paper was actually referring to.
And so in the next episode, they felt very early in that episode to the need to clarify her comments on that.
And so we're now going to play a bit about how they feel about the correction that Heather gives about ligands.
And I promise you this is going somewhere interesting, at least I hope it is, because I understand this is way off topic.
But I want you to hear the way that she describes her relationship with this concept.
So again, I promise this is going somewhere.
Just give me a second here.
Bear with me, all right?
One of which is the subject of a ligand, which most people will have heard me say and then just blown off because it's yet another technical term.
Most people have no familiarity with.
So there are two definitions, and I said as a throwaway line, the chemistry definition rather than the molecular biology definition.
The molecular biology definition being something that binds to a receptor, something that is reversible.
And I will say, I just wanted to let you know this, but back when I taught with my favorite molecular biologist, and I taught with him three times I guess, he always used this word and every single time I said to him, the definition that you're using is not sticking for me.
And ultimately we agreed, in part because of the milieu in which we were in, where I was teaching phylogenetic systematics, that is to say macroevolution, how it is that we make claims about deep history and what those claims are, and also comparative anatomy.
And he was teaching genetics and molecular biology and developmental biology.
And so all these fields sort of colliding in a, I thought, mostly really effective way in this program.
In my language of phylogenetic systematics, I came to understand ligand as this sort of junk term.
It's like this category that isn't a single thing.
It certainly doesn't have a single history.
It's kind of vague, and it can mean different things even within molecular biology depending on exactly what the context is.
You know, it's a molecule or sometimes an atom that binds to another thing.
It's always an organic molecule it binds to.
Often it's a protein, but not always.
And I think it's always reversible, though I'm not even sure it's always used that way.
I think it has to be.
So, the point here is not to kind of know what a ligand is in terms of molecular biology.
The point is to sort of hear her talk through the concept, because ligand is something that I mean, it's a fairly basic concept in inorganic chemistry in terms of coordination complexes.
And her summary of, it's a molecule with a metal ion in the middle, is actually pretty accurate if you're going to define it within the context of inorganic chemistry.
When she gets into molecular biology, which It's not her field, although she talks openly about virology and talks about various things that have strong molecular biology origins.
in ways that are like less than helpful from what I understand from biologists in my DMs.
She talks about these things in kind of like these very detailed... she sounds like she knows what she's talking about.
She's talking about, well, is it a protein?
Is it a thing?
I think the reaction is reversible, etc.
etc.
This is kind of undergraduate level molecular biology, and the point of a ligand is not that it's Some particular set of things.
Some particular set of structures that you can always define as a ligand.
A ligand is defined By its activity within a particular situation.
It is a thing that is always a Lewis base.
You don't have to know what that is, but it donates protons to and inserts into some kind of site to kind of bond to a kind of larger protein or a larger molecule.
And I have included links to both a ChemWiki and to a molecular biology spot that kind of explained this in a lot more detail.
But again, what I find interesting is that a ligand, as I would understand it, is something that is defined by, not by a thing that is or is not a particular thing, but as something that is defined by within a kind of complex but as something that is defined by within a kind of complex relationship with other molecules, that it would be defined like it's a ligand in this place, but it may not act as a And, And the metaphor that I would use is, what is a shoe?
Is a shoe a junk category?
Because you can define what a shoe is, but is a sock a shoe?
Right?
Is, you know, if I need covering for my feet and put and wrap it in, you know, a bread bag, is that a shoe?
Is it acting as a shoe in this situation?
If we are looking for kind of like firm definitions of the term shoe, then we're going to lose a lot of things that are very aptly used to shoes.
Like a shoe is a thing that is protecting your feet in any particular spot, not Not a, like, well-defined category of things that definitely are or are not shoes all the time.
And that's kind of the way we have to understand Ligand.
It's a little bit like the, you know, is a hot dog a sandwich kind of question, right?
Like, it's defined in context of how it's being used.
And people with an understanding of These subjects will use the term Ligand as a way of describing a particular kind of thing, and everybody understands what you're doing.
But Heather, despite, like, teaching... Sorry, I will use her last name out of respect.
You know, I try not to... There's that subtle misogyny of doing kind of the first name thing.
Hying uses... She team-taught with a molecular biologist over several years.
She described it many times and never seemed to grasp this very, very basic concept.
In my opinion, the way that she treats trans issues is very, very similar because she has basic fundamental misunderstandings of what trans people are actually trying to tell her.
Um, and it's complete nonsense.
It's complete bullshit.
But if you're just talking about like the definition of a ligand, uh, you know, like it's, it's ignorance.
It's, uh, you know, you're, you're, you're leaving yourself.
You're not really understanding the concept, but you're not actually like actively harming people unless you happen to work in molecular biology.
Um, not so much when it comes to, uh, other things.
Hopefully, all of that was reasonably clear.
Jack, please tell me one way or the other.
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
I mean, it's not unusual for a transphobe to completely misunderstand what, as you put it, trans people are trying to tell them about themselves.
It's the basis of transphobia, really.
In the interpersonal sense and in the quote-unquote intellectual sense, isn't it?
The arguments are based upon, I mean, by all indications, willful misunderstanding of what is actually being claimed.
And I think the interesting inability to grasp the idea of things as relational rather than, you know, something is not innately a ligand, it becomes a ligand depending upon its relationship with other things.
I think I see where you're going with that.
Right, right.
I think most of our audience kind of understands where this is going, right?
Yeah.
And that's what I find, it was fascinating when I saw, when I listened to that bit, because she could have, and Brett kind of gets in there and they start talking about, what is a ligand?
Is an amino acid a ligand?
is a neurotransmitter, a ligand, etc, etc.
And it's like, you're kind of like, I understand that you're kind of having a philosophical question about like, what would it would not be kind of defined that way.
But also, you're not molecular biologists, and you're not like, you're just not understanding the way the term of art is used.
And the fact that the term is fuzzy, and the fact that it's situational and relational does not make the term ligand Not useful, because it is incredibly useful for the people who need to use it on a day-to-day basis.
And so, again, she admits that she's kind of coming at this from her phylogenetics and systematics brain, which is fine, but, like, the thing that you're trying to describe doesn't fit into that context.
Also, their entire shtick that they've been going for is, we're going to define everything in terms of evolutionary biology, and every single process can be reduced to some kind of selection pressure, etc., etc.
That's a bigger question that we're not even going to get into here, but this is a pattern, right?
The reason that I think it's important is because it establishes That this kind of flaw in thinking does not limit itself to this particular topic, and that you can discover this flaw of thinking by listening to her speak about this fairly esoteric thing.
Also, she has had enough biology education that she should fucking understand what a ligand is.
That feels like really, really basic shit to me.
Anyway.
Should we move on?
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a lot more to be said about this, but let's let's crash on.
Sure.
Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna again delay us getting into the specific anti-trans bigotry and do another do another kind of deep dive into something else that I think informs this topic in terms of the way that Brent and Heather discuss it and that is this kind of generalized I don't want to say sex negativity, and I don't want to say prudishness.
In fact, I'm going to kind of give them a little bit of time to kind of talk about this issue.
But the way that they talk about sex and the way that they talk about relationships does, I think, help you to understand kind of where this is going as well.
So this is – sorry, I meant to kind of like call out where all these clips come from.
This one comes from – so there is a Dark Horse Clips channel.
And it's really nice when these people actually just produce clips of their longer shows because it's very easy for me to then kind of grab it and then like edit around that without having to find the specific moment in the longer show even if I listen to the longer show. - No.
But this is from a Dark Horse Clips video called Consequences of Destigmatizing Sex Work.
The original clip is from Dark Horse 42, and this clip starts around a minute and 30 minutes in the Dark Horse Clips version.
So this is about two minutes long, and we'll come back to it at the other end.
Sorry, I'm gonna, we can now play in stop clips in the middle, which we couldn't do before.
This is what your Patreon dollars are allowing us to do.
This is, I included the clip of this, this is from a Q&A kind of bit.
So I included a bit where she repeats the question that she got from one of the listeners, and then kind of the beginning of the answer.
So that's kind of what you're hearing here.
What do you perceive to be the downstream consequences of the de-stigmatization of sex work, particularly in young women?
So this warrants so much, and I will begin by saying that this is not exactly about sex work, but that I've got an essay that should be published within a few days at this point.
It's not yet out on the evolution of Sex and the evolution of love and on what I'm calling a kind of sexual autism which can be produced by basically being an avid watcher of pornography.
So pornography and sex work are not entirely overlapping.
But this movement that calls itself sex positive, which basically says, you know, any sex at any time is inherently good and sex work is inherently good and we need to remove all stigma associated with it.
has clearly been named in the same vein as many of these modern movements, such that if you resist it, it makes you seem like a prude.
What are you, not sex positive?
Are you sex negative?
Do you not like sex?
Well, no.
So I would say, and this is an argument that we have both made, that the so-called sex positive movement is actually an anti-love, anti-connection And really, in a lot of ways, an anti-sex movement, because it does move women, especially young women, into a mode that is more like one of the less honorable typical male modes, rather than a sort of
Being interested in a society and moving men and women both into a mode that is more like the ancestral female mode with regard to interest in long-term bond and commitment and healthy and wonderful and surprising sexuality.
Sounded like you had a couple comments there, Jack.
Please, go ahead.
Well, firstly, I mean, I just commented in response to sexual autism.
Can we just start here and just say, fuck you?
Just fuck you?
Yeah.
Anyway, please continue.
Please continue.
Yeah, I mean... I just don't know what to do with that, you know?
That is...
You know, I'm sorry to all and any neuro-atypical people listening to this who had to hear that, you know?
Fuck that person, really.
But yeah, sexual autism, I mean, yikes.
And also using autism in that way, that's completely like a far-right alt-right kind of thing that goes back to like 2012, at least.
Yeah, no.
Just, you know, and the fact that that comes very, like, you know, just instantly without even, like, comment to her thoughts kind of tells you kind of where her brain is on this.
But yeah, please continue.
Yeah, no, I mean, just that by itself is a yikes, and then in response, you know, that is something you develop as a result of watching loads of pornography.
I mean, that's a yikes.
That's yikes squared, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And then, you know, she characterizes what she's arguing against.
She characterizes sex positivity, and she attributes to it Claims and attitudes that they're simply not part of what sex positivity is about.
It's just a complete mischaracterisation.
And then she spends the rest of the clip fencing with this imaginary opponent that she's just dreamt up in her head.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And you and I are not here to discuss our personal lives, right?
But I understand ethical non-monogamy.
This is going to come up again, believe it or not.
I have deep and fulfilling relationships with a number of people.
And I am fully aware of sort of the vagaries, like the complexities of human sexuality, to a level that Heather Hying will never understand, it sounds like, to her detriment at that point.
But sex positivity is not... maybe like 15 or 20 years ago, or maybe if you run into the wrong people, then sex positivity sounds like...
We all need to be fucking each other all the time, or whatever.
But that's a strawman.
It's bullshit.
It's always been bullshit.
And sex positivity means understanding that some people just don't want to have sex, or they don't want to have sex right now.
Or they feel like they're not ready for it, or they don't want to have it with a particular person.
No, you don't want to have sex.
That's great.
We feel great about that.
That's fine.
You do you.
And that that means that, like, you know, both prude and slut are slurs, right?
You know, in that context.
It's like, no, you don't want to have sex.
That's great.
We feel great about that.
That's fine.
You do you.
That's the way it works.
And I have...
Yeah, and basically the only thing that doesn't fit into that framework is people going around saying things like, you will get sexual autism from watching porn.
Because that's not you doing you, that's you being a bigot.
Well, and enforcing a certain kind of sexual activity on people.
You remember that bit in Cantwell's legal filing in which he has a segment where he says, this gets much, much worse?
That's the place where we are in this podcast episode.
Yeah.
We're not even to the anti-trans stuff yet, believe it or not.
This is still the preparatory material.
This is still the preparatory material to get you to the anti-trans bullshit.
I do deeply apologize for this episode, but this means a lot to me to get to put this together, so hopefully everyone will appreciate it.
So we are now going to move away from...
I just want to say another thing, which is that, you know, it's classic anti-sex worker stuff, because I don't know what sexual autism is supposed to be, but I think I can guess the rough outlines of it, you know, and I think this is bound to end in blaming sex workers for misogynistic violence, really, isn't it?
Which is something that is pretty clearly relevant to what's been happening in the US.
There was a mass shooting from a young man who may or may not have frequented massage parlors.
It may or may not have been sex workers in those massage parlors.
We really don't know any details about that, and let's not make assumptions one way or the other.
But it's pretty obvious that both the way that this man decided to go and commit these crimes, this mass shooting, and the way that our culture at large responded to it was deeply fucking racist and deeply fucking sexist and against sex work and against, you know, people having Healthy sexuality around these things.
Yeah, no, it feeds into the same thing.
I'm using this as a way of kind of getting to the anti-trans material, but we could spend an episode just talking about the way these people talk about sex in general among human beings.
I really had, believe me, there are a lot of clips in this episode, I had to trim the fuck out of this stuff, believe me.
I have so much more material about this.
So I want to move forward into another clip, and this is from Dark Horse 46.
So this is four episodes after the last one.
And again, they kind of come back to the same topics as people sort of ask questions, and those questions get kind of pushed up to the forefront.
And so they often do kind of have this You know, they'll kind of come back to topics as things move forward.
So this one is Dark Horse Clips Casual Sex and Sex Positivity.
And this starts about a minute 35 in the Dark Horse Clips thing on YouTube.
And this is a little over a minute long.
What we have spoken against is extremely casual sex and the idea that what, you know, men at their sort of second worst, so you know, not rape, but seeking the sort of the so-and-go strategy, which is what one of your students once called it, right?
Is not particularly interesting and certainly not honorable, and women aspiring to do the same thing is neither interesting nor honorable either.
No, it's also bad for society.
It's bad for society, and it's also just not – it's just the physical.
It's just the physical stuff.
And so, engaging in sex with someone with whom you don't imagine that you will be spending your life with is It can be an absolutely wonderful way to explore your body and your sexuality, but that is different from saying you need to save yourself for marriage, or that going to a bar because you want to pick someone up because you're horny and you know that you'll never see them again 12 hours later.
Both of those extremes can be recognized as extremes and leave a lot in the middle to be discussed.
Which is exactly what people who are sex positive, who have reasonable conversations about these things, and do education about these things, will literally always say.
Literally always.
There is no one saying, There are probably some people saying, you know.
There's always somebody.
There's always somebody kind of going like, go fuck whoever you want.
This is the best thing you could ever do.
It's great.
Most of those are, you know, activists.
You know, like, it's fine.
Focusing on outliers and atypical voices as characterizing entire movements is a form of dishonesty.
You know, you can do it if you like, but you're outing yourself as a liar.
And so, like, and again, when we talked about Brett and Heather before, we talked about their, you know, like, treatment of like, well, you know, defund the police is just a hashtag.
And we talked about, I did, I did an extended segment about a plaque, a statue that Heather saw, and that said, you know, this person was a laborer.
And she didn't know who the person was, but I googled it and found the thing, and then figured out who the person was.
And there's context that she missed, because what she sees is the big picture.
She sees the overall thing.
She sees the headline, and misses all of the context underneath that, right?
Yeah.
The relations!
And then chooses to speak, As if she does understand that, because she, as a biologist, uses the evolutionary lens to understand these things, and she has the real nuance because of her education in Evolutionary biology you see.
And so it's not worth actually understanding the sociological phenomenon of casual sex.
It's not worth understanding how people actually engage in these activities.
It's not worth understanding the arguments that people make.
You just take a step back, you view it through a magnifying lens, and you just talk about Yeah, you're not engaging in healthy activity because it doesn't seem healthy to me, without having any attempt to actually kind of understand it.
And that's, again, you see where this is going, right?
You see the argument that I'm making.
Missing the complexity of social and historical and political context, and the fact that everything is embedded in a network of relationships.
And collapsing it down into a simple biologically reductionist view of human behaviour because you think that your view is objective because it's grounded in an ideology that you think is backed by evolution.
Wow.
I've never seen anyone do that before.
Right.
Yeah, down this path lies race realism and human biodiversity and, you know, Charles Murray.
I also want to just briefly highlight an undertone I caught in that, which is that, you know, they're talking about casual sex being bad for society, essentially.
Ancient conservative talking point.
And I noticed that when they start talking about it, it's like, somewhere along the line, she says, it's bad when women do it as well.
So when we started talking about casual sex, then that was just implied to be men.
So who were they having the casual sex with?
And then it's at that point when she raises women doing it as well, it's at that point that Brett jumps in with, it's bad for society.
Now I'm sure he actually means it's just generally bad for society, casual sex, but I couldn't help noticing it was when the question of women doing it too came up that that was interjected.
Oh yes, we're going to start talking about Jordan Peterson here very shortly.
Oh great!
And by very shortly, we have one quick clip and then another clip, and we'll be talking about Jordan Peterson.
We won't be talking about lobsters, but we will be talking about enforced monogamy, in case you were worried that we wouldn't get into the Jordan Peterson content in this episode.
Yeah.
And this is, again, a bit of a swerve, because this is from the most recent episode.
So you might be thinking, look, all the clips that you're sharing are from like six months ago, which is like a fucking eternity in terms of internet culture.
Like, come on, give me something recent.
How about last week, episode 72?
I have clips that I found today as I was idly listening to stuff while I was prepping this episode.
This is some of the favorite shit that I do, is to just find like, yeah, they're still doing this shit, and in fact, they've gotten even worse.
So, what we're going to do, I didn't clip so much around this.
This clip that I'm about to play, I have some stopping points that I'm going to go to, because they go through about three separate topics that Jack and I are going to want to discuss in something like three minutes.
I'm going to play the first 39 seconds of this, and then we'll move on.
And this is, again, from Dark Horse episode number 72.
This is actually from the Q&A, the part two of their episode, and this clip starts around 9 minutes and 35 seconds into their clip, if you want to go look for it, and I guarantee that I'm not taking them out of context.
But let's do this.
God, we haven't even gotten to the anti-trans bigotry yet.
This all gets much, much worse.
That's the lesson.
There is a motivational problem.
Based originally in the invention of birth control, which I think birth control is a net positive, but it has huge implications for social systems that we did not properly anticipate, and we are now decades, many decades down the road, and the incentive structure is complete nonsense in part because of the idea that any sort of
Self-limitation in the sexual landscape is really oppression and that basically the height of sophistication as anything goes when it's not true.
Birth control you see is a net positive.
A net positive.
These people claim to be on the left.
They're a little like, you know what really fucked up society?
I mean, look, I understand probably a net positive, pluses and minuses, but like birth control, that was a real, that was kind of a real thing that maybe we should have thought about for a few more decades.
No, fuck you.
Women not having to be barefoot and pregnant and enforced pregnancy.
Giving women the sexual agency to live their lives as they chose.
Yeah.
Very good thing.
Now look, you're never going to hear... No, no, no, no, no.
That's really something that we should have considered very carefully before we allowed it to happen, you know?
And we're decades into this experiment, and although it's a net positive, I think we have to face up to the fact that it's had, you know, women having control of their own sexual agency and bodies, it's had lots of negative effects.
Yeah, just like imagine if women could just fuck, you know, could fuck fertile men and not...
And maybe not worry about pregnancy.
That's a bad thing.
This is on the way to MRA shit.
It's terrible.
Yeah.
It's full-on MRA shit.
Like, I mean, y'know... Yeah, it's on the way in the sense that they're not actually using the actual MRA buzzwords.
Right, right.
It's a softer talking point.
I mean, it's a softer version.
But it's full-on.
Like, it's a full-on.
Like, that's, y'know, I'm not even...
Like, that's what amazed me when I started, like, running into this stuff.
It's like, you're literally pursuing, like, Roosh V 2015 bullshit.
Like, that's literally what's going on here.
Speaking of which, time to talk about Jordan Peterson.
Time to talk about Jordan Peterson.
I just want to say, this tone of scientific impartiality that they affect, it's so insufferable.
No, I agree.
But yet, that's the structure that they use, the tone that they use there, is meant to
Present these opinions with this kind of like air of authenticity in this year of Like validity look we are biologists and we understand like complex systems We understand like how these all these like complicated systems interact and I know that you young woman Just want to go and have like a lot of really fun orgasms with the pretty boy next to you
And I'm not saying that you're wrong for wanting that, but society suffers when you do, and shouldn't you try to settle down a little bit more?
I mean, it's full-on reactionary nonsense, right?
And again, the misrepresentation of the critique.
Right, right.
What's happening that they're arguing against is apparently, you know, anything goes is the only proper... Anything goes, my god, what a telling phrase.
You know, Cole Porter was taking the piss out of that in the 1920s.
That's the only appropriate way to live and anything else is oppression.
You know, this very sophisticated social science and social criticism that's just being completely travestied there by people who are profoundly ignorant, who think they don't need to know this stuff because it can't be of any value, because it doesn't reduce down to evolutionary biology.
Right.
Well, and it can't be reduced.
It's not even that it can't be reduced to evolutionary biology.
It can't be reduced to this oversimplified nonsense, evo-psych version of evolutionary biology.
Well yeah, that's it.
It's not real evolutionary biology, it's a conservative ideology couched in terms of evolutionary biology.
Right.
And again, I've been in contact with... I have people pursuing or with PhDs in biology who are in my DMs pretty regularly these days talking about Brett and Heather.
And hopefully we will do some episodes about some of the nonsense that I just don't have the technical sophistication to really get into, but suffice to say, even when they are talking within quote-unquote their specialty, they're full of shit.
Anyway, we should get back to our clip or we will never finish this episode.
Yeah, I'm just trying to put off the Jordan Peterson stuff.
Fair enough, fair enough.
So I'm going to play about a minute of this and then we'll stop.
And this is of course where Jordan Peterson got into such trouble years ago by invoking the admittedly clumsy term enforced monogamy when in fact we come from a culture that has a legal prohibition against polygyny.
Also, to the degree that there is social enforcement of monogamy in both humans and in other species, it's the females who are doing the enforcing.
To the extent that there are winners from polygyny, which is the particular manifestation of polygamy, which is usually what people, when they're talking about humans, say, The winners are the very, very, very few males who actually end up with multiple female mates.
And you can also argue that they're not winning everything they think they're winning, but all the males who are therefore left unmated and all the females who are left with less childcare and partnership and everything else, and the children themselves, all lose.
And this is actually, I just happened to be Yeah, well I said it was on the way to MRA shit, and there you are, they've arrived at the station.
That's hypergamy!
And the cock carousel, and you know, ending up with a baiter who's a cock.
Yeah, I knew I knew where we were going and I apologize for not giving you these clips in advance, but Yeah, it's straight and in saying like so the thing that Jordan B. Peterson was saying like, you know The fact that Brent is going well, it's unfair to call that enforced monogamy.
It's like No, it was completely enforced monogamy.
He was pulling that shit directly off of, like, incel, MRA, Manosphere, like, bullshit.
It was like, you got a bunch of dudes who can't get laid, and the thing that you need to do is to make sure that they can have sex and have meaningful relationships.
And the way to do that is you need to enforce monogamy through legal structures or social structures, which is also the point of the, looking back to the last episode, the last full episode, the Scott Siskind essay, Untitled, was ultimately about that.
Like, this is entirely of a piece with the most reactionary garbage regarding these topics that, like, the internet has yet produced.
Yeah, absolutely.
But of course Jordan Peterson weasels his way out of it because he's not quite suggesting that women should be forced at gunpoint to marry this particular man that's chosen for them.
But he is essentially talking about, you know, we should have social stigmas and systems of norms and values.
He's essentially talking about going back to the system where, you know, marriages are arranged by patriarchal structures.
Exactly.
And that's the end point of this, right?
Yeah.
And again, I want to be clear, Brett and Heather met in high school, and they have spoken recently about their Courtship process and it sounds lovely that like Brett fell in love with her Kind of what he was young and decided this is a person I'm going to marry and then you know they kind of separated for a bit and then like he kind of found her later and they went to the same college and then like You know built a life together That's phenomenal.
I have zero problem with that.
Not everybody gets to do that, you know?
And to expect for that to be, like, the thing?
And, like, I know that Heather does some, like, wiggle around, like, this kind of idea of, Well, you know, neither, like, this kind of enforced monogamy, you know, kind of old-school patriarchal structure, or the sexual free-for-all, or, like, the right option for society.
We need to find, like, something in the middle.
But it's very clear from this conversation, and if they disagree, they can discuss this topic on their podcast, which gets many times what this podcast gets in terms of listeners.
It's very clear that they think somewhere very close to, you know, enforce monogamy.
Very close to a handful of sexual partners, maybe, if you do it in what we consider to be the right way.
And so it's like, it is enforcing this kind of moral value and claiming that it is through biology, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's that rhetoric of, well, I don't agree with either extreme.
That's just the familiar Sam Harris wiggle, isn't it?
You know, I'm against identity politics, left and right, but I'm going to spend all my time talking about how wokeness is bad and discount every instance of white supremacy as insignificant.
I mean, at least, again, not to give credit to the Nazis, but at least the Nazis are really honest.
They'll say, yeah, women should be property.
Fuck it.
They should be under the protection of a man who's going to keep them safe from the things around them.
And that's effectively what Brett and Heather are saying in a realistic sense in terms of how these things will We should move forward here and finish the rest of this clip, which I don't remember quite what's here, but it's going to be terrible.
they're clearly trying to say, you know, so we should move forward here and finish the rest of this clip, which I don't remember quite what's here, but it's going to be terrible.
So here we go.
I happened to be doing research yesterday on the health effects on children of mating systems in other human cultures, basically comparing monogamous cultures to polygynous cultures.
And, you know, Under polygyny, children fare less well.
They have lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes.
All of the hubbub about Enforced monogamy?
Who does he think he is?
Men always trying to enforce monogamy on women.
Like, nope.
It's been the other way around.
And, you know, luckily for women, most men are also interested in that because it's better for almost everyone, the only people for whom it's not better than, in a coherent system.
Yeah, it's a really bad way to run a society.
very few men.
And the sort of polyamorous, promiscuous is the term of art in evolutionary biology, free for all, doesn't work for anyone long term.
Yeah, it's a really bad way to run a society.
It may be a good way to generate an army, unfortunately.
So we should look out for this as a hazard.
So I should point out that the original question that led to this conversation was, what do we do about all of the angry young men who feel disaffected and unable to kind of move forward in our society?
And they then go into this nonsense about polygyny and polyamory.
So it looks like you listeners have been listening to us dealing with our kind of new setup here, and we've been having a good time, and I think things are going to work out, but we have hit a technical snag that we are unable to solve at this juncture.
So that is going to be the end of this episode with no clear conclusion and without the payoff to all the trophy bullshit.
But I assure you we still have another full episodes worth of content to cover including the way Brett and Heather feel about OnlyFans and the actual turfy nonsense that uh you were promised in the episode title so uh expect that uh very soon and until then uh we apologize because we meant to get this all done but uh you know computers are shit and no one should ever use them that was
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