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Yesterday we saw Ross Douthat helpfully advising New York Times readers how to find the “right” religion (nonbelief doesn’t count as faith); and today we find the Free Press touting religion by showing how “finding God” transformed the lives of nonbelievers for the better. (Note the implication that God is out there to be found!)

Rather than discuss the waning of religion in the West—something that Douthat avoided, too—Savodnik, an editor of the Free Press,  simply tells the stories of a few notables who became religious and how much solace the conversion gave them.  These are anecdotes, not a documentation of either the waning of religion or the overall benefits of religion to society. But, added together, they paint a picture of religion as something that people need, and something that will fill our “god-shaped” hole—our need to believe in the supernatural to give meaning to our lives. As I’ve said, I have no doubt that some people really can be helped by believing; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose crippling depression was cured by embracing Christianity, comes to mind. But what these anecdotes don’t convince me of is that we all need religion and would be better off following the people in the article (except for Dawkins).

Further, the piece doesn’t address the problem of forcing yourself to believe something that you’ve already rejected as false. I am not sure how Hirsi Ali, a former atheist, got herself to believe in the reality of Christianity (the status of Jesus as God/Son of God, the Resurrection, etc.), but of course people who reject something can really come to believe it if it’s important to believe it. (See Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

The notion that this article is slanted towards getting people to believe is buttressed by its unfair and snarky treatment of Richard Dawkins, an atheist who is lumped in with the “believers’ just to show how hollow his idea of being a “cultural Christian” is.

Why am I highlighting this article, as I did Douthat’s yesterday? It’s because I sense that vocal liberals are now trying to push belief on the rest of us, asserting that our lives are empty without faith. I’m not sure why that’s true, and will let the readers give their hypotheses below.  The Free Press may be soft on religion because its founder, Bari Weiss, is an observant Jew, and her partner, Nellie Bowles, converted when the got married. But that’s just a speculation.  However, I’d expect a journalistic venue that touts rationality to at least counter an article like the one below with one showing how intellectuals benefited by giving up their belief in God.

Click the headline below if you have a subscription, or find the article archived here.

I’ll just list the nonbelievers or “searchers” whose lives suddenly improved when they settled on a given faith, and then add a quote from the article. Note that the photos of the converts (and Dawkins, too) are surrounded by halos. First, the point of the article:

But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.””

I’m surprised that Haidt, whose religiosity I don’t know, would tout religion here and in other places. I thought he was more rational than that. And Ferguson’s claim that atheist societies can’t function because of nihilism is flat wrong. Look at Scandinavia, for crying out loud!

On to the believers:

Matthew Crawford. He was a “a searcher” who converted to the Anglican Church after he met an Anglican woman (whom he later married) while giving a talk in a church. He says this of being an Anglican:

“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.” He meant God, but he also seemed to be talking about his wife.

“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.

“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”’

Yes, but that “sense of meaning beyond ourselves” can include our love of friends and family, our work, our avocations, and, for me, science.  You don’t need God to get a “sense of meaning.”

Joe Rogan and Russell Brand.

In February 2024, podcaster Joe Rogan, in a conversation about the sorry state of America’s youth with New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, said: “We need Jesus.” Not five years earlier, Rogan had hosted Richard Dawkins on his show and poked fun at Christians.

In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”

I guess the Jews, Hindus, and Muslims are deficient because they don’t, according to Rogan, need Jesus. As for Brand, well, he’s a loose cannon and I take no lesson from his conversion.

Jordan Peterson. What can you say about a guy who can’t even explain clearly what he believes? Now, however, he’s decided that God is “hyper-real”—whatever that means.

All drawings photoshopped by the Free Press.

Then in July, Elon Musk—the former “atheist hero,” the king of electric vehicles and space exploration, the champion of free expression—sat down with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has studied the intersection of religion and ideology, to discuss God. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

Then, last month, Peterson’s book We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine was published. Peterson had always avoided saying whether he believed in a higher power. Now, sporting a jacket emblazoned with the Calvary cross, he was pushing back against the new atheists. “I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting the book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

I’d like to ask Dr. Peterson why he is so sure that there even is a god. But all I’d get was his usual preparation of word salad.

Paul Kingsnorth. Here’s another searcher who found “true” religion: Romanian Orthodoxy after he was at first a Zen Buddhist and then a “neopagan”:

When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a “rational choice.”

“If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that,” he said. “How does that happen?”

“The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

He said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Here we have another person asserting that we’re at a “tipping point”. Perhaps that’s true, but what’s the evidence? And, if we advance in rationality and discard religion, that doesn’t mean that we have to chuck out all the art and music that was inspired by religion.  Modern art and music are not inspired by religion, and yet the culture survives. You can admire Chartres without having to be a Christian. Yes, it’s a beautiful testament, but one of a pervasive delusion.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We’ve hear her story before: first a Muslim, then an atheist and then, after severe depression, found relief in Christianity, and embraces its empirical tenets, like the existence, meaning, and resurrection of Jesus.

Quotes:

Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”

Scruton is dead wrong here. What was Picasso’s or Monet’s connection to God? They were atheists! See a longer list here. And you can find a list of atheist composers and musicians here; they include Bizet, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Shostakovich, and Verdi. And don’t forget that before about 1850, nobody would admit that they were atheists, so the list is surely longer. Scruton is simply full of it. But I digress; back to Hirsi Ali

“It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.

On September 1, Hirsi Ali and Ferguson and their sons were baptized. “I had a spiritual void in my life, and Ayaan certainly did,” Ferguson said. “Her discovery of a Christian God saved her.”

When I asked Hirsi Ali and Ferguson whether their faith was real or just a political balm meant to combat the “cult of power”—whether they were, as Dawkins said, “theological Christians” or a “cultural” ones—they said their faith was “genuine.”

I do believe them, and I’m find with Hirsi Ali embracing Christianity if it helped relieve her crippling depression. But I don’t like her proselytizing about it, implying that others might find similar relief.

Jordan Hall. Another searcher who felt empty but filled his god-shaped hole by joining the Swannanoa Christian Church in North Carolina.

The emptiness he’d spent years fleeing was not just his emptiness, as far as he could tell. It was society-wide.

“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger,” Hall said. “It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”

He meant plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. “The horrifying brokenness of people.”

Well, you could say this about nearly every era, so the times we’re going through (with a lot of the horror that we face caused by religion) does not suggest, at least to me, that religion will fix the world. What religion? Islam? Christianity? Judaism? Or will the world be better if everyone embraces the faith they find congenial? That hasn’t worked so well if the world really is broken?

Finally,

Richard Dawkins, who also sports a halo:

The piece does everything it can to make Dawkins not only look bad, but also look as if he’s a quasi-Christian:

When we spoke—via Zoom, Dawkins in a brightly lit room at home in Oxford, England—he was a tad irritable. He was in a navy blazer, and there was a wall of books behind him, and he seemed a little exasperated with all the God talk.

Dawkins had created a furor when, in the midst of the often violent, pro-Hamas demonstrations in London and New York and elsewhere, he appeared on a British radio program and called himself a “cultural Christian.” He went on to say, “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”

“I rather regret” having said all that now, he told me.

Yes, he caused a furor, but I don’t mind much. I am, after all, a cultural Jew, even though I’m not in a Jewish country. It’s just the tribe you belong to, just like the country you belong to, and you don’t have to believe a word of religions tenets, as neither Richard nor I do.

And the rest:

Dawkins underscored that he, like Sam Harris, is still very much an atheist. He did not see any contradiction in saying, as he had to Rachel Johnson on the Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) radio show, that he was “happy” with the number of Christians declining in Britain and that he “would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.”

“The tendency you’re talking about,” he told me, alluding to Hirsi Ali, “is, I think, mostly people who don’t necessarily believe Jesus was the son of God or born of a virgin, or rose from the dead, but nevertheless think that Christianity is a good thing, that Christianity would benefit the world if more people believed it, that Christianity might be the sort of basis for a lot of what’s good about Western civilization.”

And yet, Dawkins did admit he was worried about losing the world that had been bequeathed to us by Christianity. “If we substituted any alternative religion,” he said in his April interview, “that would be truly dreadful.”

It wasn’t just about the danger of what was coming. It was about what we were losing, or might lose.

“Some of the greatest music ever written is church music, music inspired by Christianity,” he told me, echoing Roger Scruton. J.S. Bach would never have composed his Mass in B Minor—with all those violins, cellos, sopranos, and tenors weaving together, pointing us toward the heavens—without the divine, he said. Nor would Dostoevsky, as Paul Kingsnorth said, have written The Brothers Karamazov had he not been a believer. Had the world not been changed in countless unbelievable ways by that art? Had that art not changed us?

When I mentioned Dawkins’s distinction between cultural and theological Christianity to Kingsnorth, he said he thought Dawkins was deliberately sidestepping a deeper conversation about the nature of belief.

“As far as he’s concerned, it’s just chemicals in the brain,” Kingsnorth said of Dawkins. “But the reason religion persists is people keep having experiences of God, and Dawkins doesn’t seem to want to deal with that.”

Admiration for the artistry of churches, mosques and religious paintings does not constitute support for a psychological need to be religious, much less for the truth of religion.  Seriously, Richard should write an essay about that misconception, which I call “The Argument from Cathedrals.” And I bet the “alternative religion” he’s thinking about is probably Islam. I wouldn’t want to live in an America that had been founded by Islamists rather than Christians, either, but that speaks to how the religions make people behave rather than to their truth.

As for Kingsnorth, he’s just wrong: religion is indeed chemicals in the brain. And really, the “experiences of God” that people have consist largely of what you get from being proselytized.  There are many ways one could show the existence of God (stars spelling out Christian words, prayers being answered for Christians alone, etc.), but people’s “experience of religion” is not convincing evidence, especially given the way that people become religious. Have you ever seen something like this?

These people are having “experiences” of god so intense they’re speaking in tongues. (I love glossolalia!).  This is social contagion, and you can see similar things at football games.

Again, I’m floating the idea that liberals and intellectuals are pushing the idea that we have to go back to religion for our own and society’s good. I don’t know why—perhaps because times are rough now, and God is the Biggest Coughdrop.  But times will get better, and religion, at least in the West, will continue to wane.

Just to show you how, in the hiring process, New Zealand gives much more weight to identity than to merit, I enclose part of the job description for the position of Chief Operating Officer of Wellington Water, the water utility for the Greater Wellington region (Wellington, a lovely city, is the capital of New Zealand).  The document was sent to me by a Kiwi who, of course, wishes to remain anonymous (you are not allowed to point out things like this for fear of losing your job or being demoted).

At the end of the whole job description (I have it on pdf), there’s a “person specification”, which gives both the “essential” and the “desired” qualities of the person to be hired.  Note that experience in working in such a water system (“three waters” delivery refers to drinking water, storm water, and sewage) or having established a network in the water sector are only “desired” qualities (including a bachelor’s degree).

 But the essential qualities, part of which I’ve outlined in red, include “an understanding and knowledge of te ao Maori, tikanga and the principles relating to Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.  Here’s the end of the ad:

I’ll explain the three terms. Teo ao Māori is defined this way by the University of Otago in NZ:

Te Ao Māori denotes the Māori World. While simple in definition, it is rich in meaning and vast in breadth and depth.

Here, Te Ao Māori refers to three key areas:

• te Reo Māori (Māori language)
• Tikanga Māori (protocols and customs)
• te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi)

Together, these three areas will provide you with a broad overview, and hopefully, a better understanding of Māori culture and Māori realities.

“Tikanga” is Māori social lore, defined this way:

Tikanga, or societal lore within Māori culture, can best be described as behavioural guidelines for living and interacting with others. Tikanga tends to be based on experience and learning that has been handed down through generations, also deeply rooted in logic and common sense. While concepts of tikanga are constant, their practice can vary between iwi and hapū. For example, the way in which a hapū greet and welcomemanuhiri (visitors) may differ from the way another hapū extends greetings to its manuhiri. However, both will ensure that they meet their responsibilities of manaakitanga (hospitality) to host and care for their visitors.

Participating in a different culture requires a base level of awareness and understanding, which takes both time and patience. If you are unfamiliar with tikanga, learn as much as you can from as many sources as possible; this will enrich your experiences with the culture and improve your ability to participate more fully, and with greater confidence . Remember, ‘When in Rome, do as Romans do!’

And, finally, to run the water system you have to know the principles of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, regarded as a sacred document in New Zealand and used as the basis of the indigenous people’s attempt to gain power and equity.

Seriously, why do you even need these “qualifications” to run a water system?

Only if you know what’s going on in New Zealand can you see why the qualifications are given this way: identity—that is, Māori descent—is much more important than skills. As my correspondent wrote, quoted with permission:

So woke and DEI still rule in our capital city.  The Person Specification is also borderline racist, because it is unlikely that anyone other than a Maori would be deemed to be sufficiently steeped in te ao Maori and tikanga.

The correspondent added this:

Given the required skill set, it will not surprise you to learn that Wellington has the most poorly maintained and least efficient water supply and sewerage system of any major city in New Zealand, and routinely loses more than 50 per cent of the water stored in its supply dams because of an enormous number of leaks in the reticulation system.

When I asked for evidence that Wellington’s water system is indeed in bad shape, the reader sent me a bunch of stuff (too much to post), including this headline from the New Zealand Herald (check the photos, click to read):

As if that wasn’t enough indication of trouble, this is from the Wellington Scoop last May (click to read):

From Wellington Water‘s own website, highlighting the problems; click to read:

Their “story” (again on their website; click to read):

An important aspect of Wellington Water’s story is “te mana o te wai”, essentially meaning “the spirit of the water”. And that, of course, can be divined only by Maori.

Bolding below is mine. Note the prevalence of indigenous concepts involving superstition: 

Te Mana o te Wai

As a water services provider, on behalf of its shareholding councils, Wellington Water is required to give effect to te mana o te wai. Te mana o te wai is an expression in te reo Māori of the essential health of water, its significance to Māori, and the obligations everyone has towards water. Te mana o te wai is embedded as a fundamental concept in the management of water under the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, and giving effect to te mana o te wai is a requirement of water services providers under the Water Services Act, overseen through Taumata Arowai.

Wellington Water carries out this duty by working with iwi mana whenua within its area of operations to understand and give effect to their expressions of te mana o te wai. This includes the aspiration to begin long term strategy and planning processes from a position of understanding iwi priorities, through to working with iwi  [“iwi” are Māori tribes] on service delivery.

To further support this work, Wellington Water carries out ongoing training for staff on the principles of Te Tiriti, in te reo Māori, and capability building in te ao Māori me nga tikanga Māori. [“The Māori world and the Māori culture”]

“Mana” is, according to the Māori, a supernatural force in a person, place or object”that pervades all objects and gives them “power, prestige, and authority”.

New Zealanders of all stripes should be embarrassed that they so blatantly put ancestry above merit. Perhaps if they prized merit more, the Wellington Water system would not be in so much trouble.

Mark Sturtevant is back with some lovely insect photos (he got a bit excited about one of the wasps).  His captions and IDs are indented (he’s also provided links), and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. There’s one snail at the end.

Here is another set of critter pictures. All of these were taken in area parks near home, which is in eastern Michigan.

Readers may remember that my last post finished with pictures from the Magic Field, where large Cicada Killer wasps were provisioning their burrows with paralyzed cicadas. These wasps often concentrate burrows in the same area, probably because they favor the same soil conditions. It was noted that a smaller Mystery Wasp would frequent the area as well, perhaps because it too favored those conditions. I will start with those wasps, but their introduction will take a while to explain. Bear with me.

The blackish Mystery Wasps were common sights in Cicada Killer Town, running quickly on the ground and frenetically searching in various nooks and crannies. They would investigate my shoes, backpack, and I’d even see them go into the cavernous Cicada Killer burrows. What were they? There was zero chance to get pictures since they were dialed at “11” for hyperactivity. Oh, well, I thought.

But one day I saw one of the wasps was carrying an object under its body. I approached, and the wasp dropped the object and retreated only a couple feet. It was a field cricket, paralyzed, and its hind legs had been removed. This no doubt was to make it easier to carry and to stuff down a burrow somewhere. Such is the Economy of Nature, as Darwin would say. But to me this was a valuable clue about the Mystery Wasps. I put the cricket down, and the wasp immediately ran up and carried away its prize. Back home, I searched for “cricket hunting wasp” in BugGuide (which is my go-to place for identifying arthropods online), and bingo. It was the Steel-blue Cricket Hunter (Chlorion aerarium). From the pictures therein one could see that the wasp was a thing of great beauty! My discouragement about getting pictures turned to determination. I was going to get pictures, even if I had to cheat a little.

I returned to the Magic Field with the trusty butterfly net and quickly caught one of the wasps. Back at home again, I set up my light box which is a large enclosure made with foam board and netting across the front. I often use this to photograph flying insects when the need arises.

A favorite trick for getting an active subject to sit for pictures is to give them food or water. A drop of diluted honey definitely did the trick this time, as it made my hungry but hyperactive friend settle right down so that I could take pictures shown below.

Excuse me, but this is where ‘ol Mark has to completely lose it for a moment.

LOOK AT THIS BEAUTIFUL CREATURE!! JUST LOOK AT IT!!!

Ok, sorry about that. The next pictures include a frontal view, and there you can see that she has impressive mandibles. This is typical of solitary wasps that carry prey to their lair. 

Next up are more insects. I always pass a field of sunflowers on the way to one of the area parks. But once I stopped to try for pictures. Here is a Common Eastern Bumble Bee (Bombus impatiens) in a nice composition.

I think it was on that same outing that I found this this Nessus Sphinx Moth caterpillar (Amphion floridensis) that had been parasitized by what are probably Braconid wasps. Those are wasp cocoons anchored to the back of the caterpillar, which was quite moribund and soon would die.

Another caterpillar is shown in the next picture. This is the larva of the Beautiful Wood Nymph (Eudryas grata). What I think is rather interesting about this colorful cat is that it shows false head mimicry, where its rear end is presented as its head while the actual head is kept tucked away. “Beautiful Wood Nymph” does not conjure up what the moth looks like, as it is a bird dropping mimic, complete with splatter effects as shown in the link. Bird dropping mimicry has its advantages since one only has to sit out in plain sight.

Speaking of bird dropping mimics, here is another example. This is the young larva of the Eastern Giant Swallowtail Butterfly (Papilio cresphontes), our largest butterfly. Unlike the previous example that resembles dried out bird poo, the oeuvre of the Giant Swallowtail cat is to look like the shiny fresh stuff. The caterpillar will grow to a size that is not so passable as a bird dropping, so once it reaches its last larval instar they look more like a scary  snake mimic, as the linked pictures show.

Next up is one of our Tiger Moths. There are several similar-looking species, but this is the Harnessed Tiger Moth (Apantesis phalerata).

Moving on to beetles, here is a pair of mating v (Harmonia axyridis). I might not bother taking this picture, but it provided an opportunity to show something a bit different. Those yellow thingies decorating the elytra are the fruiting bodies of entomophagous fungi that I suppose will doom these beetles.

To expand on this, one can hardly do better than Ze Frank who made an entertaining episode on fungi that parasitize insects, and here it is.  Everyone MUST watch it. It starts out with something awful, and then it gets a lot worse. What fun!

Next up is a brightly colored Swamp Milkweed Beetle, Labidomera clivicollis.

The restroom at one of the parks had numerous moth flies sitting on the tiles. These very small flies have a larval stage that feeds on – oh, I don’t know, presumably organic matter and algae. So the adult flies are common in restrooms. The species is Clogmia albipunctata, and I am rather bummed with the picture since in this otherwise good focus stack I managed to not focus on the interesting antennae. [JAC: Note how closely this fly resembles a moth!]

And for closure, here are a pair of terrestrial snails that I put together for pictures. They are Brown-lipped snails, Cepaea nemoralis. I had learned that they are native to Europe, but are now common over much of the U.S.

All of us who have taken heterodox positions on even a single issue are liable to be tarred using accusations of guilt by association. Because I think that trans-identifying men should not be allowed to compete in sports against (biological) women, and that such trans people therefore don’t have exactly the same unlimited “rights” as  biological women, I am therefore often called a “transphobe”, allied with those nutjobs who don’t want trans people to have any rights—or even allied with Nazis. This of course is not an argument, but a simple slur that avoids the ethical issues, and it’s thoughtless, though such arguments do convince some of the witless. (If you want to see a site whose whole method is to go after people—especially Steve Pinker—by showing who they’ve met or are otherwise associated with, go here. The author of that site appears to know nothing of science, but uses association with hereditarians as a sign of being an overall horrible person: a “ghoul” or a “grifter.” LOL.)

Alan Sokal has pointed out the stupidity of guilt-by-association arguments in a short piece in The Critic (click below, or find it archived here):

Sokal’s introductory story is about a 12-year-old boy demonized by his teacher because he made a comment that reminded her of Margaret Thatcher. And that’s how it goes: back then, being like Thatcher in even one misconstrued way was enough to damn you to hell. Sokal then segues, unsurprisingly, into the demonizing regularly practiced by sex and gender extremists:

I’m no fan of Margaret Thatcher — to put it mildly — but should it really be a surprise that on some issues she might have the same ideas as pinko me? Is it truly so difficult for us lefties to concede that the conservatives might occasionally — OK, very occasionally — be right? (And of course vice versa.) Have we all now become so politically tribal that we are unable — or simply unwilling — to evaluate ideas on their merits?

[Philosopher Arianne] Shahvisi’s recounting of this story did not, of course, come out of the blue. The context was an essay of hers in which she accused “gender critical feminists” (the scare quotes are hers) of “fairy-tale fear-mongering that puts them in league with the far right”. One reader objected to “yet another article belittling gender critical feminists in your pages”:

Many who consider themselves left-leaning progressives are branded as being ‘in league with the far right’ for their opposition to an ideology which they regard as a dangerously regressive move by patriarchal capitalism to seize control of, and profit from, the bodies of children (increasingly young girls) and women.

— adding, astutely, that “it is telling that trans men are relatively invisible in all this: no one is chanting ‘Trans men are men’”. Unfazed by this exposure of her conflation of two radically different ideologies, Shahvisi doubled down on guilt-by-association, using her childhood story as “evidence”.

Sokal shouldn’t need to point out the obvious, but this tactic is ubiquitous these days, and we shouldn’t even engage in argument with people who judge people’s views solely by who those people associate with, or what magazines they sometimes read:

There is, in reality, nothing surprising or objectionable about the fact that people who disagree on issues X, Y and Z might nevertheless find themselves in agreement on issue W. Indeed, it is the contrary — unanimity of views within each tribe, with no overlap between them — that ought to be surprising and disconcerting.

But serious ethical and pragmatic questions nevertheless arise whenever one finds that people with whom one is ordinarily in disagreement — and whose ultimate goals differ radically from one’s own — may be on the same side as oneself on one or more discrete questions of public policy. Should one cooperate with “the other side” on those particular issues? And if so, to what extent?

Well, I regularly find myself tucked in bed with extreme conservatives, but that, to me, is not a problem, I just give my own views, and work on my own, not really “cooperating” with anybody. That’s one way to at least mitigate the tarring by association. I’ll quote Sokal at length when he extends Shahvisi’s argument:

So let’s follow Shahvisi’s example, but first set the facts straight by specifying more accurately what each tribe believes. Gender-critical feminists want to abolish, or at least to weaken, prescriptive gender norms: they want to liberate people of both sexes to pursue their own interests and talents and to follow their predilections, without regard to sex-based stereotypes or statistics. Social conservatives want to strengthen prescriptive gender norms: to reestablish a world in which men are masculine and women are feminine, in the traditional senses of the words, and everyone is at least publicly heterosexual. (These are, it goes without saying, broad-strokes generalizations; there are of course many differences of emphasis and detail within each camp.) The two philosophies are thus diametrically opposed[1].

But, despite this deep overall conflict, can there sometimes exist small points of agreement between the two tribes? Yes, there can; and this gives rise to serious dilemmas.

Should gender-critical feminists cooperate with social conservatives to ensure that post-pubescent people engaged in competitive sports should play in the category of their biological sex, not their self-declared “gender identity”? Or to ensure that puberty blockers should not ordinarily be prescribed to minors as a treatment for gender dysphoria outside of registered clinical trials?

To me the answer is obvious, at least for myself: you cannot cooperate with extreme social conservatives without giving at least some credibility to their other views—views with which you don’t agree (I would note my pro-choice stands and lifelong affiliation as a Democrat).  I will say what I think about puberty blockers (they shouldn’t be used till age 18 or so), and if conservatives want to quote me, fine. But I am not a member of any conservative organization that takes this stand, though I am friends with a group of like-minded liberals who have some gender-critical views.

Sokal winds up with the right conclusion, though: argue about policies and facts, not about associations.  Since I’m somewhat hermitic by nature, I don’t really cooperate with many organizations, and those I cooperate with, like Heterodox Academy or FIRE, have views I largely agree with.

The answer to these questions is far from obvious. But worrying about guilt by association — and worrying, above all, about the opprobrium emanating from those who, like Shahvisi and Judith Butler[2], wield it as a political weapon — mislocates the problem. Instead, what is needed is level-headed political analysis. The first and primary question is: What are the merits and demerits of the proposed policy? And if it appears that the merits outweigh the demerits, then the second question is: Do the short-term gains from tactical cooperation with “the opposition” outweigh the potential long-term liabilities? The pros and cons need to be assessed and argued carefully, not assumed a priori. People who conclude in good faith that the balance falls on the “pro” side (or, for that matter, on the “con” side) may of course be wrong — and it is perfectly fair to criticise their conclusion and their reasoning — but they should not be tarred as traitors, sell-outs or worse.

By contrast, the whole point of invoking guilt by association is precisely to circumvent this discussion — not only to circumvent the second step, but above all to circumvent the first: to denigrate the proposed policy, and render it anathema to all fair-minded people, without having to address its merits and demerits. That approach — need this really be said? — ought to be repugnant to anyone who advocates a thoughtful politics.

h/t: Jez

Where do I begin with a piece so ridiculous, so imbued with superstition, and so dependent on seeing “truth” as “what makes you feel good”, that it would take hours to properly dissect it? I suppose I can say that this long op-ed by NYT columnist Ross Douthat, a religious Catholic and a conservative, seems to be of a piece with a new movement among liberals: softness towards religion.  All over the MSM, which includes the NYT and even The Free Press, we see articles telling us—despite the rise of “nones”—that we must have religion to keep society together; and (check the Free Press link), scholars, intellectuals, and public figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson are become more explicitly religious. They apparently have realized something that’s escaped the rest of us. Examine your belly, and perhaps you’ll see the “god-shaped hole” invariably mentioned in these articles.

In this piece (click below or find the piece archived her , Douthat tells us that, if we’re without faith, we have to fix that situation immediately. And then he tells us how to go about choosing a faith.  Speaking personally, I can’t find my god-shaped hole, nor do I feel I need a faith to improve my well being or give meaning to my life. Moreover, I don’t understand how, if I were to follow Douthat’s instructions and find a congenial faith (his is Catholicism, but he says others will do), I could force myself to believe something that I find unbelievable.  Perhaps some propagandizing, á la Orwell, could do it, but nobody wants that kind of treatment.

First, though, I give the data from a Pew Survey of America’s “nones”—people without a formal religious affiliation—from 2007 till now. You can see a more or less steady rise over time, with a stasis or even a drop occurring rarely, and then a 3% drop between 2022 and 2023.  I suppose that people like Douthat are pinning their “god-shaped hole” hypothesis on this one year of data, as if people in 2022 suddenly realized that their lives lacked meaning without God.  But seriously, we’d need more data than this to show that Americans are becoming less religious. My own guess is that “nones” will resume their increase, and then level off at an asymptote that is higher, representing a level of agnosticism or atheism that won’t be exceeded because there are some people that really do need religion or inherit it from their parents.

Remember, too, that some of these “nones” are spiritual, panthesists, or believers in something numinous or supernatural; they’re simply those people unaffiliated with a church. But even atheists and agnostics have grown; as Wikipedia notes in its article on “Irreligion in the United States“:

According to Pew, all three subgroups that together make up the religious “nones” have grown over time: in 2021, atheists were 4% (up from 2% in 2011), 5% agnostics (3% a decade before) and 20% “nothing in particular” (14% ten years before).  In 2023, atheists are still 4%.

Here are the nones:

Other countries are even more irreligious: here’s another Pew-file-derived map from 2010: 15 years ago, showing the percentage of “nones. Many countries then, like Australia, Canada most of Western Europe and Scandinavia, and of course China (formerly a godless Communist land) have more nones than America, and this trend is also increasing.

File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Here’s a figure from the WaPo showing the rise of atheism (not “nones”) in Iceland, and it’s striking: there are more nonbelievers than believers.

As for other countries in Scandinavia, I urge you to read Phil Zuckerman’s book Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment.  The book is based on interviews of Danes and Swedes, and the Amazon summary notes this:

What he found is that nearly all of his interviewees live their lives without much fear of the Grim Reaper or worries about the hereafter. This led him to wonder how and why it is that certain societies are non-religious in a world that seems to be marked by increasing religiosity. Drawing on prominent sociological theories and his own extensive research, Zuckerman ventures some interesting answers. This fascinating approach directly counters the claims of outspoken, conservative American Christians who argue that a society without God would be hell on earth. It is crucial, Zuckerman believes, for Americans to know that “society without God is not only possible, but it can be quite civil and pleasant.”

Indeed, and it’s not as if the Icelanders, Danes, and Swedes have frantically turned to crystals, reiki, or other forms of woo to fill that God-shaped hole. As Zuckerman tells us, Danes and Swedes have found meaning in their life by living a secular existence. I suspect that is the case for many readers here, too. 

 

All this is to show that, at least in the West, religion is on the decline, and people like Douthat ignore all the data showing that. Rather, they are promoting faith because the world is not a particularly great place right now (some of it has to do with Trump, some with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza), and also because they are “believers in belief”, those who either aren’t religious but like the “little people” argument for belief, or, alternatively those who want to justify their own belief by showing how it helped them and could help others. I do think that religion can help some people, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who suffered from depression, but that in general it is a societal impairment: a form of delusion that we really can do without (see Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress).

On to Douthat’s Big Push for Faith:

The first thing he does is to assert, without any proof or links, that religion is on the rise and “nones” on the wane (I urge you to check out the link below):

The long rise of the Nones, Americans with no religious affiliation, has seemingly reached its limit, and a fascination with the numinous shadows our culture once again. Within the intelligentsia there is a wave of notable conversions and a striking nostalgia for belief.

The link goes to a Free Press article full of anecdotes: notable people like Jordan Peterson and Hirsi Ali who have become religious. But of course this says nothing about the general trend.  He then dismisses atheism, which is a bad thing to do.  Why go looking for the “right” religion for you when there is no evidence for a God? Later Douthat says that we don’t need to find a religion whose epistemic claims are true, but, for crying out loud, it’s a “god-shaped hole” and you must fill it by finding a religion with a god.  My definition of religion has always been Dan Dennett’s take from his book Breaking the Spell:

“social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought”

Now this may not apply to some forms of faith, like Zen Buddhism, but it’s good enough for me as it covers all the Abrahamic faiths as well as faiths like Hinduism. And remember, Douthat is concerned with filling the god-shaped hole to give our lives meaning:

The ultimate goal of the sincere religious quest is a relationship or an experience of grace that can’t be obtained through reasoning alone. But for the open-minded person who hasn’t received divine direction, a religious quest can still be a rational undertaking — not a leap into pure mystery but a serious endeavor with a real hope of making progress toward the truth.

Here we see another problem: Douthat never defines what “truth” is.  He dismisses the need to choose religions based on the empirical truth of their tenets, so I suppose he means the slippery notion of a “true” religion is “one that feels right.” And that’s how he largely proceeds in this tedious article.

To dispose of the need for empirical truths when choosing a faith, Douthat simply says that they’re all true in a way, but some are more true than others—that is, some feel more right than others:

The starting place for this endeavor is the recognition that Dawkins is simply wrong about the requirement for believers to disbelieve in every other faith. The bookstore of all religions isn’t necessarily a library of total falsehoods with one lonely truth hidden somewhere on the shelves, and embracing one revelation doesn’t require believing that every other religion is made up.

A sincere believer in Hindu polytheism, for instance, doesn’t need to assume that the singular God of the monotheistic faiths is just a fiction: Jehovah might be one deity among many, whose powers were exaggerated by his adherents but whose deeds were entirely real. Or alternatively a Hindu might interpret his faith’s pantheon as localized expressions of a single ultimate divinity and regard the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as a way of personifying that divinity as well.

. . .So the religious seeker, looking out across a diverse religious landscape, should assume that there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought, not one truth and a million fictions. And this suggests, crucially, that even if you start in what turns out to be a wronger-than-average place, you can still draw closer to ultimate reality by conforming yourself to whatever that tradition still gets right.

What does he mean by “gets right”?  But wait! There’s more!

. . . .This principle does not presume that all religions are identical, that there is no scenario in which any soul is ever lost. (Certainly it was not a matter of indifference to Lewis whether people worshiped Aslan or Tash.) The idea, rather, is that if God ordered the universe for human beings, then even a flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality — such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth will find some kind of reward.

Yep, any religion can fill part of that hole, perhaps not as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle, but better than atheism could.

He concludes that the more popular religions are more likely to be “true”, but that could be tautological if you define “truth” as “satisfying psychological needs”.  I still define “truth” as “what exists in the universe and can reliably be confirmed by others,” or, as the OED says:

Something that conforms with fact or reality.

NOT “something that makes you psychologically satisified”. That definition isn’t in there! Saying the more popular religions are more true is meaningless.  Douthat:

This doesn’t imply, however, that a religious search should begin at random. Rather, you should start the way you would in any other arena, by looking for wisdom in crowded places, in collective insights rather than just individual ones, in traditions that have inspired civilizations, not temporary communities.

If this sounds like an argument that the more popular and enduring world religions are more likely than others to be true, that’s exactly what I’m arguing.

Yes, if a new revelation suddenly arrives, there will be a moment when the truest faith will be one of the smallest. But if a faith claims to be much truer than the competition, it’s reasonable to expect proof of those qualities to emerge on a reasonable timeline, to see world-historical and not just individual effects. So for the novice, it makes sense to start with religions in which those effects are already manifest and there’s no question that the faith has staying power.

Here he seems to see “truth” as the OED sees it: a “true” religion makes empirical claims (“conforming with fact or reality”) that are verifiable.  But in that case no religion is truer than others!  And we all know about the conflicting empirical claims of even the major Abrahamic faiths: who was the prophet, was Jesus resurrected, what miracles were done, and so on.

I don’t want to repeat the criteria Douthat gives for choosing the best faith for you. (For example, if you don’t want too much supernatural stuff, he suggests you choose a more humanistic religion.) But there always has to be a god in it, and absent any convincing evidence for such a being (again, Douthat doesn’t discuss this), I don’t know why you should go choosing a religion in the first place, since all of them (according to my definition) include that supernatural being.

He moves more towards Christianity, of course, because he’s a Catholic.

Or the big question might be: How has God acted in history? In that case, you don’t want to start at the end of things, comparing the systems that the followers of Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha constructed to explain the revelation. You want to start with the taproot — with the allegedly divine person, the allegedly sacred book, the historical credibility of the story and the immediate consequences for the world.

If you have no strong reaction to the core stories, you can step back and use other questions to chart your path. But if you find Jesus to be a remarkable figure and the Gospels shockingly credible, if God speaks to you through the Bhagavad Gita or the Quran or the Pentateuch, if Buddha’s teaching seems like the answer to the riddles of your life — well, you probably shouldn’t simply return to the more abstract questions.

No: If you feel yourself to have a completely open mind and suddenly a specific text or figure leaps out at you, then you should take the possibility that God is speaking to you seriously; at the very least, it’s a signal that this is where you’re supposed to start.

But again: what is the evidence that God exists, much less than he’s speaking to you personally? Finally, Douthat winds up with a story that sort of pulls the reader towards Jesus:

Consider the story of religious pilgrimage offered recently by the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, he found that spiritual interests grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.

He found that worship in actual paganism, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments and some stark mystical experiences as well.

But it would have been unimaginable to him at the start of the journey that the Christian faith imparted to him weakly in his childhood — that “ancient, tired religion” as he put it — could have possibly been his destination in the end. Only the act of questing delivered him back to the initial place, no longer old and tired but fresh and new.

Clearly, Kingsnorth found the truth!

In the end, I consider the whole piece worthless given the lack of definition of a “true” religion and the slippery alternation between truth seen as psychological comfort and truth seen in the empirical sense as what really exists. And, of course, shouldn’t you begin your quest with evidence for god in hand?

At the conclusion of the piece, we learn that this spate of advice is taken from an upcoming book by Douthat:

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.”

That is one book I’m not going to review. And really, could Douthat tell me why I should be religious? I don’t harbor a god-shaped hole nor do I feel that my life lacks meaning. Douthat just wants to know that he’s in good company, living in a fully religious world.

h/t: Barry

Today we have the second installment (13 total) of Robert Lang‘s photos from his visit to Brazil’s Pantanal region. Robert’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Pantanal, Part II: Mammals

Continuing our mid-2025 journey to the Pantanal in Brazil, we saw quite a few different species of mammal, ranging from tiny monkeys to the giant anteater. Most of these sightings came from safari jeep trips, which we typically took twice a day. But not all; on one of our first river outings, we saw a giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) chowing down on a fish. These guys get up to about six feet long—but they’re still adorable. (They’re one of the most endangered mammal species in the Neotropics, according to Wikipedia):

Even higher on the adorability scale was this crab-eating fox (Cerdocyon thous) mother and kits that we happened across. We watched the kits chew on their mother and each other and tumble around as the sun went down, and eventually they all wandered off into the grass. As regular readers know, true foxes are Honorary Cats, according to our host; these foxes are not closely related to true foxes, so their honorary feline status is, as yet, undetermined [JAC: I pronounce these Honorary Cats as well]:

Another contender for the cute-ness crown is the capuchin monkey (family Cebinae; I don’t know the species here). We usually saw these in groups, but they usually headed for the trees before we got close enough for good photos. I got this one, though:

Another small mammal that we saw quite a few of is the agouti (Dasyprocta sp.) It’s one of the larger rodents of South America:

But the largest species of rodent is the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), of which we saw many. In fact, they wandered around our cabins at one of the places we stayed. They seem like they’re always somewhere between chill and bored, and get up to 60–70 kilos in mass. The babies, though, rival the animals I’ve already shown for cuteness. (Baby animals will do that.)  [JAC: This is the world’s largest living rodent]:

On the larger side of things, there were a few types of deer. Here’s a pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus) buck:

And a gray brocket (Mazama gouazoubira):

A few non-natives, introduced by the ranchers who own most of the Pantanal. There are feral pigs (Sus domesticus), but we saw them only once or twice:

But we regularly saw cattle, which are the primary agricultural output of the Pantanal. Most of them are light-colored Zebuines (Bos indicus), a humped breed that can survive through the long dry season, but there are a smattering of other breeds around:

The local jaguars can and do take cattle on occasion, so some of the ranchers have added a water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), larger and more aggressive, to their herd, to discourage any jaguars lurking about:

But the largest—at least, by length, though not weight—of the mammal sightings was the relatively rare giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla). We had two sightings of those, one of which we were able to approach on foot from downwide (their eyesight is terrible, but their sense of smell is acute); that was a lucky treat:

Coming soon: reptiles, invertebrates, and birds, birds, birds.

Here’s a livestream video you may want to check in on from time to time. As Space.com describes, it’s from the ISS:

Cameras are officially rolling! Or, in this case, streaming.

SpaceTV-1, a set of Ultra High Definition 4k cameras from space streaming company Sen, was delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) last year, and is now broadcasting live views of Earth and space for all the world to see.

The London-based company is pursuing a mission to provide anyone and everyone with easy access to an experience usually reserved for astronauts — the overview effect. A phenomenon coined for the awe of seeing our planet from space and the effect it has on a person’s perception of humanity, Apollo 14‘s lunar module pilot NASA astronaut Ed Mitchell described the overview effect as, “an instant global consciousness,” accompanied with “an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it,” and Sen wants that for everybody.

. . . The SpaceTV-1 camera suite was delivered to the ISS in March, 2024, aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on the CRS-30 cargo mission last year. SpaceTV-1 was attached to the Bartolomeo platform on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Columbus module. The package includes three cameras, providing three unique views of space around the ISS and Earth below.

A wide angle lens captures the long curve of Earth’s horizon, with the occasional piece of the space station moving in and out of frame. A tighter view focuses directly on Earth, showing a stretch about 150 miles x 110 miles (240 kilometers x 180 kilometers). The third camera looks at the space station’s forward docking port, connected the the Harmony module.

It’s very easy to get mesmerized by the video, but you can always keep it in the background of your computer screen (there are some replays as there is signal loss when the ISS is on the other side of Earth from the receiver, but there are also helpful descriptions at the bottom of the screen. It is a YouTube video.

Sunrise is very soon!

h/t: Ginger K.

 

When dining with friends last night and talking about Trump’s controversial executive orders, I realized that there was some serendipity in these orders, which covered a variety of topics.  And the serendipity was that suddenly it has become okay to discuss things that were previously either taboo or fraught topics—things like the binary nature of human sex, whether DEI is a good thing, and how immigration needs to be reformed. That can only be to the good, for a taboo topic is one that doesn’t go away, but just goes underground where it simmers slowly until it boils over. Now we can talk about them, even if arguing why some of Trump’s orders are malign.

One of the topics newly airing, a topic with which I’ve had some acquaintance, is sex and  gender issues.  How many human sexes are there? To what extent must we respect people’s claims of being nonbinary or transsexual? Should the rights of transsexual people ever be curtailed to further the rights of others?  Should trans-identified men compete with women in sports, or be put in women’s prisons?  Previously, even asking these questions got one labeled a transphobe, and I well know that accusation (I reject it).  But it’s time to air these questions civilly and using data, though that is hard to do given the rancor of gender extremists.

Perhaps the first person demonized by gender fever was Abigail Shrier, whose views I’ve defended extensively.  She has maintained that there is such a thing as rapid onset gender dysphoria, that its rapidity comes from social contagion (people urging others to transition), and that therapists who engage in “affirmative therapy” are engaged in malpractice, for they promote medical treatment (hormones and surgery) to kids who are too young to understand what they’re getting..

Shrier’s first book broaching these topics, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), was praised by some (including me) but demonized by many, especially those with “gender fever”. You may remember that the ACLU’s LGBTQ+ law expert, trans-identified woman Chase Strangio, called for banning Shrier’s book in a tweet that he later deleted:

It’s shameful that an ACLU bigwig called for censorship of a book he didn’t like. Clearly, for Strangio, ideological purity takes precedence over free speech. That attitude will spell the death of the ACLU–at least as we knew it.

Shrier’s second book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids aren’t Growing Up, deals not just with affirmative therapy but the “therapization” of all of life for young people in America, imbuing many with the idea that they suffer from some mental disorder that needs professional assistance.  I read that book, too, and gave it a glowing review on this site. Both books are well worth reading.

But my point here is twofold. First, it’s now okay to talk about the topics of her books without being demonized. Second, Shrier was pretty much right about all of her theses: there is social contagion causing gender dysphoria, accounting for its sudden rise, and, especially, that giving surgery, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones to children or adolescents is a bad idea.

In her new piece at the Free Press (click below or find a free version at this archived link), Shrier takes a victory lap: it’s now okay to seriously consider and discuss her ideas (except, of course, among extreme gender activists, who will never discuss any idea that contradict their ideology), and, importantly, she was right about social contagion and especially about the dangers of willy-nilly dispensing affirmative therapy, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones to children and adolescents.

I’ll give a few quotes. Shrier, who previously wrote op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, is a clear and engaging writer, a pleasure to read, and she starts her new piece with a real hook:

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.

On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

Did you know that a lot of the damaging gender policy came from Obama?

If it seems odd that the spell of pediatric gender medicine should have been ended by politicians and not physicians, consider that in America, politics is how it began. Specifically, it began with Obamacare.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.

If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man. If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.

To mandate coverage for gender treatments, activists “snuck in gender identity without Congress ever voting for it,” Abbruzzese told me. Transgender rights groups filed lawsuits, to test whether judges agreed: Suddenly, a “woman” was anyone who claimed to be one, as far as provision of healthcare was concerned. Luxury cosmetic treatments became available even to minors covered by their parents’ insurance—at fire-sale prices.

Shrier discusses the odious and harmful organization The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which never saw an intervention towards transition it didn’t like, and even collaborated with the U.S. govenment (the Biden administration) to hide data suggesting that affirmative care and puberty blockers did not help young people with gender dysphoria. This hiding of data that the author Johanna Olson-Kennedy (and the Biden administration) didn’t like is one of the most disgusting incidents I know of involving withholding data:

[WPATH] suppressed publication of systematic reviews of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries undertaken by Johns Hopkins University. That research would almost certainly have revealed, as so many systematic reviews have now done, that while the risk of sterility, cardiac event, osteoporosis, and bone fracture were high, any alleged mental health benefits of the WPATH-approved puberty blockers-to-cross sex hormones protocol remained unproven.

But the Biden administration pressed onward, suing any state that enacted bans on medical transition for minors. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender adult, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries in its September 2022 standards of care. Again and again, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris used the bully pulpit to assure “transgender Americans . . . especially the young people” that “your president has your back,” as Biden declared in an April 2021 address to Congress.

In 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services published a fact sheet claiming that gender affirming treatments for youth were “crucial to overall health and well-being.” Any physician or therapist who might otherwise have been tempted to discourage trans-identified youth from immediate and irreversible medical transition sat up and took note.

The Obama and Biden administrations worked in tandem with activist organizations. Federal funds poured into tainted research. Gender physician Johanna Olson-Kennedy received nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on gender-confused adolescents ages 11 and up. (She later lowered the age to 8.) Olson-Kennedy and a team of colleagues recruited hundreds of transgender-identified minors. They gave one cohort of the children cross-sex hormones and another puberty blockers—to determine if either treatment produced improvements in mental health. (There was no control group.) After only one year on cross-sex hormones, two of her 315 subjects had committed suicide.

As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to the bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states,” according to The New York Times. She told the Times she intends to publish the data, but that getting her work to a place where it wouldn’t be “weaponized” required it to be “clear and concise. And that takes time.”

The public that had funded her research has never had the opportunity to review its results.

Surely the fact that Rachel Levine is a trans-identified man affected her harmful behavior as Assistant Secretary of Health, which underscores the dangers of appointing wolves to guard the henhouse, or at least reporting on the state of the hens.  Likewise, Chase Strangio, as the ACLU’s director of LGBTQ litigation, is another harmful wolf. He has corrupted the ACLU’s mission away from providing civil rights for all to prioritizing the rights of LGBTQ individuals.

As Shrier reports, Trump’s new Executive orders ameliorate the situations she’s warned about (yes, it is okay to admit that some of Trump’s orders are salubrious):

Trump’s executive order directs federally funded institutions to stop reliance on WPATH, calling its recommendations “junk science.” Cut off from what Abbruzzese calls WPATH’s “evidence laundering,” insurers will be forced to evaluate the gender medical evidence and issue policies on their own. Systematic reviews and investigations already undertaken in England, Finland, and Sweden indicate it’s not likely they will find the evidence for medically transitioning children to be terribly impressive. Activist researchers into gender medicine might soon see their federal grants dry up.

Every healthcare entity accepting federal dollars (nearly all of them, in Obamacare’s world) risks losing contracts with Medicare and Medicaid if they continue to provide pediatric gender transitions.

This executive order does not abolish pediatric gender medicine. Boutique practices that do not rely on federal funding can still offer “top surgery” to minors, for instance. There will surely be litigation to challenge the reach of Trump’s order.

But that order does break the spell—and the spell was always our biggest problem. Parents who allowed their children to transition are often caricatured as Hollywood eccentrics, the sort who bequeath their estates to teacup Chihuahuas. The parents I spoke to—even those who allowed their children to transition—are nothing like that.

Many are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. They had wandered into a Truman Show, an all-consuming simulacrum, designed to convince them to abandon their protective instincts. If the parents still weren’t convinced, therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: “Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?”

In the end, Shrier pats herself and her “allies” on the back for raising the alarm, but it’s a well-deserved pat, and if I ever meet her, I’ll add one of my own:

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

When Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) was all the rage, and Boston University (BU) gave him his own Antiracist Research Center, I decided I’d better read his famous book, How To Be an Antiracist.  I found the book’s popularity puzzling, as it was a not-too-coherent mélange of autobiography and questionable but authoritative Diktats about racism, which was that it was ubiquitous, a feature of all white people, and that any law or rule that wasn’t explicitly antiracist was racist.  Further, if you are not actively involved in antiracist work, you are a racist.  As the NYT wrote, quoting a sentence from the first edition of Kendi’s book:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right.

Well, that was arguable, but in general I found that the book didn’t cohere, though of course its message resonated at the time, what with Black Lives Matter and all, and sold a gazillion copies. Kendi became the doyen of antiracism (his female counterpart was Robin DiAngelo), and Boston University set up a center run by Kendi, funded by $10 million from a donor, and, over the next three years, it got a further $43 million in grants and donations.

Given all this, I wasn’t too surprised to learn that, given the incoherence of his book—and I’ll admit that I haven’t read Stamped from the Beginning, which some of my friends like, and which won a National Book Award—BU’s Antiracist Research Center was not a success.  It was dogged by accusations of mismanagement, and really never did anything. Nineteen employees of the Center (nearly half of its staff) were laid off and BU launched an investigation, which, although it found no issues of misuse of money, decided to hire a management consultant firm, whose recommendations led to a revamping of the center about a year ago. On this site I reported on a discussion of Kendi’s efficacy by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and said this (Loury was responding to McWhorter’s statement that he didn’t understand the joy that Kendi’s downfall was provoking):

Loury responds that yes, Schadenfreude is not a great emotion, but he feels that Kendi is an “empty suit”—a “little man behind the curtain”—who “doesn’t know anything.”  Loury asserts it’s not really about Kendi, but the failure of the extreme antiracist extremists, like Black Lives Matter or the 1619 Project to make any progress.

I agree with Loury about the problems of an unequipped Kendi being made the symbol of a movement, and if you read his book How to be an Antiracist, you’ll see the intellectual vacuity of his ideas. McWhorter agrees that Kendi was chosen to be the symbol of that movement, and wasn’t equipped to lead it, but that’s no reason to be angry at him.  In response, Loury asserts that the man is a fraud, and so he does show a bit of Schadenfreude, for Loury adds that Kendi is an “embarrassment and an absurdity.”  Isn’t that Schadenfreude?

In response, McWhorter says that Kendi was thrust into a position for which he was not equipped, and it was not his fault that his Institute fell apart. (McWhorter says that what Boston University did in founding Kendi’s antiracist center  “was an insult to black achievement.”)  In other words, Loury blames Kendi for taking money and doing what he was unequipped to do, while McWhorter blames society and Boston University for thrusting Kendi into a job that was irresistible in order to do performative antiracism.

Now I learn from this tweet, followed by reporting (see below) that Kendi has left BU for Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C.

BU will just close Kendi’s center, which means he didn’t build anything lasting that could be handed on to others.

He says this move has been in the works for a while, but he only went to BU five years ago. It’s pretty clear he needed an exit after the scandal.

BU supposedly… https://t.co/IiADCHBr0a

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 30, 2025

You can read about Kendi’s move in many places, including BU Today, the Boston Globe, Axios, The National Review, and The Washington Post (I haven’t found a mention in the New York Times).  The Center will close on June 30 when its charter expires, and Howard University has also given Kendi his own institute:

Kendi will start at Howard this summer as a history professor and director of the tentatively named Howard University Institute for Advanced Research, according to the university. He will also bring with him the Emancipator, a digital magazine focused on racial inequity that was founded with the Boston Globe but has since gone independent.

The new institute will research the African diaspora through the lens of racism, technology, climate change and a host of other subjects, said Howard Provost Anthony K. Wutoh, and bring on fellows for each academic year with projects they propose. The effort will be funded largely through donors, though Wutoh said the specifics are not yet finalized.

As to why Kendi is leaving BU, the only guesses are from the National Review, which indicts a lack of productivity of the Center and speculates that Trump’s new DEI initiative may have been responsible:

Despite the generous funds, only two new research papers [from the BU institute] had been produced by the time of the employee layoffs. The exact count of total research papers is unclear.

“Despite all the headwinds we faced as a new organization founded during the pandemic and the intense backlash over critical race theory, I am very proud of all we envisioned, all we created, all we learned, all we achieved—the community we built, the people we helped and inspired,” Kendi said in a statement Thursday.

“To all the faculty, staff, administrators, students, supporters, and Boston community members, I feel honored to have been able to do this work with you over the last five years,” he added. “I am departing for an opportunity I could not pass up, but what connected us at CAR remains, especially during this precarious time. Our commitment to building an equitable and just society.”

The center’s closure and Kendi’s departure come as President Donald Trump roots out diversity, equity, and inclusion practices within the federal government and threatens to do the same in the private sector if corporations and universities fail to abandon the leftist ideology.

Taking the hint from the Republican administration, universities are halting research projects and shuttering offices related to DEI, according to the Wall Street Journal. Public higher-education institutions are reversing course because they could lose federal funding if they continue maintaining their diversity and inclusion efforts.

I’m not sure about the involvement of Trump’s DEI plans here, but I do have a few remarks. First, I don’t feel any joy that Kendi is leaving BU, even if he was sort of deep-sixed for non-productivity.  If McWhorter and Loury are correct, Kendi was simply unequipped to run a big institute. (As a side note, he also had stage 4 colon cancer, but appears to have survived it; and he did a lot of his work while waiting to see if he would be cured. That diagnosis is a huge burden to carry.) Kendi may, as they said, be good at helping with the “racial reckoning,” but appears to lack managerial skills (he’s only 42).

Second, I think that, in view of what happened at BU, Howard is making a mistake giving Kendi his own institute. As nearly everyone who’s studied the BU debacle admits, Kendi is unequipped to run a big institute. On the other hand, he’s published many books and shows no lack of scholarship, and his presence at Howard will undoubtedly be a magnet for students.  In my view, they should have just made him a professor, but one without an institute to run.  At any rate, we’ll see how the new Howard University Institute for Advanced Research will fare.

In the meantime, here’s Howard University’s welcome:

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D., as the director of the newly established Howard University Institute for Advanced Study.

The institute will be dedicated to interdisciplinary study advancing research of importance to the global African… pic.twitter.com/BlJIJ1j6Vj

— Howard University (@HowardU) January 30, 2025

Today’s photos are the continuation of John Avise‘s series of photographs of North Ameerican butterflies. The IDs and intro are captioned, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 8 

This week continues my 18-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Now we’ve come to some of the G’s and H’s.

Greenish Blue (Icaricia saepiolus), male topwing:

Greenish Blue, male underwing:

Greenish Blue, female:

Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae), male:

Gulf Fritillary, female:

Gulf Fritillary, underwing:

Gulf Fritillary, larva:

Hackberry Emperor (Asterocampus celtis), topwing:

Hackberry Emperor, underwing:

Hedgerow Hairstreak (Satyrium saepium), male:

Hedgerow Hairstreak, female:

Hoary Comma (Polygonia gracilis), topwing:

Hoary Comma, underwing:

Maher’s comedy bits are called “New Rules,” and last night’s 9-minute episode was called “New Rules: Everything is broken.”

Maher highlights Trump’s new dance, the “Icky Shuffle,” often performed to The Village People’s song, “YMCA”, with the dance accompanied by salacious gestures. Instead of “YMCA,” Maher suggests that the new American Anthem is Dylan’s “Everything is Broken” (1989). Maher then explicates why America is broken, and not all of it has to do ith Trump (viz., gas prices, massive immigration, terrible health care, repeated emergency refunding of the government, increased mental illness, influencers [!]).  Even Whole Foods gets some well-deserved snark.

It’s not his best bit, but there’s always a few chuckles.

The Kiffness combines two songs into a great music video: “Hold Onto My Fur” and the famous “Oh Long Johnson”

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From Bored Panda, we have pictures of stuff on cats (one of them stars the famous Japanese chill cat, Kagonekoshiro (“white basket cat”).  Click below to see them all; I’ll show only five:

This is the renowed Japanese cat Kagonekoshiro, also called Shironeko, who died at 18:

Cover y9ur sleeping moggie with Cheez-Its (I prefer the white cheddar version):

This cat is not happy. . .

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Newsweek apparently has a pets reporter, and here’s one of her reports (click to read):

The scoop:

A cat’s response to her feline sibling coming home from a vet appointment left the owner, and viewers, gasping with concern and laughter.

A January 16 TikTok video by user @marissanicoleeeee showed the owner’s two cats sitting on the floor next to each other. The Siamese cat had recently returned from a vet appointment where he was sedated.

Veterinarians sometimes suggest sedating cats during a vet visit if they are fearful, anxious or aggressive. Sedating cats helps them feel less stressed. Plus, it ensures the veterinary team is safe while handling the feline. Following sedation, cats might be groggy, sleepy and quieter, a Pets Radar article reported. It can take a few hours to a day for the sedation to fully wear off.

Still feeling the effects when they returned home, the owner’s cat did not have the reflexes felines normally possess. Instead, he sat there blissfully unaware his black cat sibling, Peach, was plotting to take “full advantage” of him.

Peach realized her feline sibling wasn’t fully himself. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to fight back, she took her chance and pawed him on his face, sending him toppling over. The owner gasped at what just unfolded in front of her.

The video. What a bad cat!

@marissanicoleeeee

#funnycat #vetmed #tik_tok

♬ Just the Two of Us – Grover Washington, Jr.

More:

Knowing what she did was bad, Peach immediately ran off. She thought she could get away with it, considering the state he was in, but her owner captured it all on film.

Meanwhile, the sedated cat rolled to his side and stayed on the ground. He looked up, confused about what happened. The owner felt sorry for him, writing “my poor sensitive boy” on the video.

Newsweek reached out to @marissanicoleeeee via TikTok for additional information and comment.

Viewer Reactions:

Peach’s unexpected reaction to her feline sibling coming home garnered 446,200 views, 101,900 likes and 138 comments on TikTok as of Wednesday. People called it a “hit and run.”

“I can’t stop watching this. The fact the black kitty BARELY tapped him is sending me,” commented a viewer. The owner responded that she agreed it was a light tap.

A second person said: “Black kitty is like, ‘Yo bro snap the F*** out of it.'”

Yep, it’s those likes and views that people want. Eventually you MONETIZE IT!

 

h/t Nicole, Ginger K.

New Zealand is the first country in the world to give natural geographic features the status of personhood, with all the rights of a human being. It was first done to Te Urewera, a remote area of the North Island, then to the North Island’s Whanganui River. Now CNN and Breaking Views (headlines below) report that personhood has been tranted to a third feature, the volcano Mount Taranaki, also on the North Island, and located here:

M.Bitton, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A bit about it from Wikipedia:

Taranaki Maunga, also known as Mount Egmont) is a dormant stratovolcano and legal person in the Taranaki region on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island.  At 2,518 metres (8,261 ft), it is the second highest mountain in the North Island, after Mount Ruapehu. It has a secondary cone, Fanthams Peak (Māori: Panitahi), 1,966 metres (6,450 ft), on its south side.

It’s a lovely mountain, and yet I didn’t see it when I visited the country a few years ago. Here are two photos from Wikipedia:

The caption for this one is: “Mount Taranaki (Mt Egmont), from Inglewood, New Zealand, 1896”

State Library of New South Wales, DL PX 150, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Click on the headlines below to read. The first article is from CNN, the second from Breaking Views. Quotes will be from CNN unless indicated otherwise.

Although the mountain was apparently sacred to the indigenous Māori people (it was considered an “ancestor”), it was renamed and claimed by Europeans who colonized the country. When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, ceding all Māori lands to their respective tribes (the treaty wasn’t signed by all indigenous tribes and has been subject to conflicting interpretations for nearly two centuries), the Māori could reasonably claim that the mountain had been stolen from them. On January 30, the New Zealand government redressed this appropriation by giving the mountain the same status as a human being. From CNN:

A mountain in New Zealand considered an ancestor by Indigenous people was recognized as a legal person on Thursday after a new law granted it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.

Mount Taranaki — now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Māori name — is the latest natural feature to be granted personhood in New Zealand, which has ruled that a river and a stretch of sacred land are people before. The pristine, snow-capped dormant volcano is the second highest on New Zealand’s North Island at 2,518 meters (8,261 feet) and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.

The legal recognition acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Māori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonized. It fulfills an agreement of redress from the country’s government to Indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.

How can a mountain be a person?

The law passed Thursday gives Taranaki Maunga all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. Its legal personality has a name: Te Kāhui Tupua, which the law views as “a living and indivisible whole.” It includes Taranaki and its surrounding peaks and land, “incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements.”

A newly created entity will be “the face and voice” of the mountain, the law says, with four members from local Māori iwi, or tribes, and four members appointed by the country’s Conservation Minister.

The vote on giving the mountain personhood was unanimous in Parliament: 123 to 0.  It’s not completely clear to me what “personhood” means, except that the Māori get to be guardians of the mountain.  Here’s a bit from CNN:

The mountain’s legal rights are intended to uphold its health and wellbeing. They will be employed to stop forced sales, restore its traditional uses and allow conservation work to protect the native wildlife that flourishes there. Public access will remain.

And from Breaking Views:

The legislation, passed by Labour in 2023, recognises Mount Taranaki, alongside its companion peaks, as a living ancestor with its own identity and rights.

. . . . The park surrounding Mount Taranaki will be renamed Te Papa-Kura o Taranaki, with management plans requiring dual approval from the conservation minister and iwi leaders.

Under the Taranaki Maunga Collective Redress Bill, an oversight committee (Te Tōpuni Kōkōrangi) of four iwi and four Crown representatives will govern and set cultural and spiritual values.

A conservation board, including three iwi representatives, will work with the Department of Conservation on daily management. All governance costs will be funded by the Crown. [The New Zealand government.]

There are a couple of issues here. As I said, I have no objection to giving the mountain special conservation status and letting the Māori have most of the governance, though this could create a slippery-slope situation in which every geographic feature could be considered special to the Māori before colonization.

But what is added by giving the mountain “personhood”? As far as I can see, nothing substantive save the recognition that the mountain is an “ancestor”. Yet that formalizes a supernatural belief, which should not be the case.  Everything else, like damaging the mountain, building forbidden structures on it and the like, can come under the rubric of conservation.

But, as you can see by the unanimous vote, Kiwis of European-ancestry are in no mood to buck the tide of the sacralization of indigenous claims.  Would we name the Grand Canyon as a “person” (“Mr. Canyon”?) if a Native America group regarded it as sacred?  Mt. McKinley was renamed, Mt. Denali as that was the traditional name of the local indigenous people. I have no issue with that (Trump, of course, wants to remove the indigenous name), but if the mountain was seen to have spiritual or sacred properties (I doubt that it did, but can find no information), should we deem the mountain a person?

As far as I can see, considering geographic features “people” because they had supernatural and spiritual aspects is a violation of the First Amendment. Now New Zealand has no such provision (it doesn’t even have a constitution), so the government can do what it wants. And what it wants is to give the Māori exactly what they demand.

And all of this is happening at a fraught time in New Zealand’s politics. What is happening is that there is a government bill to codify the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi so they can become clear law, instead of the nebulous provisions (there are different translations and different interpretations) that people cite to justify what they want. (A common theme you’ll see here is the Māori reliance on the treaty to demand equal rights to teach their “ways of knowing” in schools, a demand that cannot possibly be derived from the three provisions of the Treaty.) In other words, the bill would create a sort of New Zealand constitution based on the Treaty.

But the bill is not going to pass.  As CNN says:

The unity provided brief respite in a tense period for race relations in New Zealand. In November, tens of thousands of people marched to Parliament to protest a law that would reshape the Treaty of Waitangi by setting rigid legal definitions for each clause. Detractors say the law — which is not expected to pass — would strip Māori of legal rights and dramatically reverse progress from the past five decades.

The “progress” to which they refer is largely the increasing hegemony of Māori rights and privileges over the past five decades, to the point that, though they constitute only 18% of the inhabitants, they claim at least half of the rights: a huge form of affirmative action. Now it’s clear that Māori were mistreated and subject to bigotry in the past, but what we see happening in New Zealand now is not just an attempt to create equal opportunities for all, or even equity for all groups (to me the former is okay while the latter is not). The goal is larger than equity:  to try to create a Super Equity in which indigenous people get at least half of everything, including half the time in science class.

That would be a debacle, but it’s happening, and it will happen far beyond the schools. The result will be the erosion of merit in favor of identity—exactly what has happened in the U.S.

New Zealand really does need a bill like this, but it needs a Constitution even more. Neither will come to pass.

Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t add that in the U.S., corporations have been granted certain privileges and responsibilities of “personhood”, including the right to be sued and to be subject to civil or criminal charges. I have no dog in that fight, but there’s nothing spiritual or sacred about it.

h/t: Christopher

Speaking of FIRE and free speech, I got an email from that organization this morning about how The University of Connecticut has altered the traditional Hippocratic Oath to reflect Social Justice considerations. (It’s far from the only med school that has done this.)  This can be considered compelled speech, which students are supposed to recite even if they disagree with it. You can see the traditional forms of the oath here, and hear the newer one here, starting at 44:12. The students are asked to repeat the oath after the speaker.

The new oath is also transcribed below at the Do No Harm site; I’ve put in a red box the parts that disturbed FIRE:

Here’s the email I got from FIRE:

Incoming medical students typically recite the Hippocratic Oath, a pledge to do no harm to patients. But last August, the University of Connecticut required freshmen medical students to recite an ideologically-charged version of the Hippocratic Oath that reads, in part, 

“I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

The school violated students’ First Amendment rights against compelled speech by forcing them to affirm contested political viewpoints. The oath effectively emboldens administrators to punish students who, in their opinion, failed to uphold these nebulous commitments. What, exactly, must a medical student do to “support policies that promote social justice”? If a student disagrees with UConn’s definition of “social justice” or chooses not to promote it in the prescribed way, could she be dismissed for violating her oath?

Today, free speech group FIRE called on UConn to make clear that students may refrain from reciting all or part of the oath without any threat of penalty and will not have to affirm any political viewpoints as a condition of their education at the school.

FIRE Program Officer Ross Marchand: “The constant threat of discipline hangs over UConn students. At any time, administrators could decide that a student has broken the vague, partisan oath that she was forced to take. Even an insufficient commitment to ‘social justice’ could land a student in trouble. UConn prioritized politics and ideology above education and the First Amendment, creating a culture of compulsion and fear.”

Thanks! Check out our letter to the school and our blog post.

The blog post notes this:

In August, UConn required the incoming class of 2028 to pledge allegiance not simply to patient care, but to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. The revised oath, which was finalized in 2022, includes a promise to “actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

This practice is a grave affront to students’ free speech rights. In January, FIRE called the medical school to confirm that the oath is mandatory; an admissions staff member told us it was. We are asking them to confirm this in writing.

As a public university, UConn is strictly bound by the First Amendment and cannot compel students to voice beliefs they do not hold. Public institutions have every right to use educational measures to try to address biases they believe stymie the healthcare system. But forcing students to pledge themselves to DEI policies — or any other ideological construct — with which they may disagree is First Amendment malpractice. This is no different than forcing students to pledge their allegiance to a political figure or the American flag.

. . .   and adds that these “Social Justice Oaths” are not uncommon:

UConn isn’t alone in making such changes to the Hippocratic Oath. Other prestigious medical schools, including those at Harvard, Columbia, Washington University, Pitt Med, and the Icahn School of Medicine, have adopted similar oaths in recent years. However, not all schools compel students to recite such oaths. When we raised concerns in 2022 about the University of Minnesota Medical School’s oath, which includes affirming that the school is on indigenous land and a vow to fight “white supremacy,” the university confirmed that students were not obligated to recite it. That’s the very least UConn could do to make clear that it puts medical education — and the law — ahead of politics.

The letter suggests that taking this oath is not optional but mandatory. From FIRE’s letter from Marchand to Dean Bruce Liang of the UConn Medical School:

FIRE called the UConn School of Medicine Admissions Office to clarify whether the oath, including these additions, is mandatory for students participating in the ceremony. A staff member confirmed that this oath is required for all incoming students. We have also emailed the admissions office to confirm the mandatory nature of the oath but have yet to receive a
written response.

. . . While UConn may encourage students to adopt the views contained in the oath, the First Amendment bars the university from requiring them to do so.  The First Amendment protects not only the right to speak but the right to refrain from speaking. As the Supreme Court has notably held, public institutions may not compel individuals to “declare a belief [and] … to utter what is not in [their] mind.”8 Requiring new students to pledge their loyalty to a particular ideology violates students’ expressive rights, is inconsistent with the role of the university as a bastion of free inquiry, and cannot lawfully be enforced at a public institution. UConn can require students to adhere to established medical standards, but this authority cannot be abused to demand allegiance to a prescribed set of political views—even ones that many students may hold.  Specifically, the school may not compel students to pledge to support or promote concepts such as “social justice” and “equity,” notions that have long been the subject of intense political polarization and debate

You’d think that these deans would know something about the prohibition about compelled speech, but of course they cannot conceive that anybody would opopose the social justice-y bits of their new Oath. They clearly need a lesson in the First Amendment!

Finally FIRE asks for a response in two weeks:

FIRE calls on UConn to make clear that students may refrain from reciting all or part of the oath without any threat of penalty and will not have to affirm any political viewpoints as a condition of their education at the school.
We request receipt of a response to this letter no later than the close of business on February 14, 2025

You can go to this page to send a quick fill-in-the-form letter. I did.

To finish up my reportage on the USC conference on Censorship in STEM, I present a video Day 3 for your delectation.  It’s 6½ hours long, but below I’ll give the time marks for three items of interest, one of which is of interest only because it includes ME.

First the whole day; I’ve put the written schedule at the bottom so you can find the other talks.

The first talk is by heterodox black political scientist Wilfred Reilly, speaking about ten taboo topics; it begins at the beginning. I won’t list the taboos, so you’ll have to listen to the talk to see them.

The second talk, involving Julia Schaletzky, Luana Maroja, and me, begins at 4:29:51; its topic is “Censorship, sciences, and the life sciences”.  I can’t bear to listen to myself again. But I advanced the video 5:26:00, where some guy asks me about filling the “god-shaped hole” in humanity, and by eliminating religion the hole is filled by solipsism, some undefined “meta-narrative”. I got as heated as I ever do in a meeting, which is not very heated, but did stand my ground.

But below a talk you must hear. It’s from Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). I think it was the best talk of the conference, and was also the last one. Fortunately, you can avoid scrolling around above because the talk is also posted as a standalone video (below). It’s a bit over 52 minutes long, and the topic is “How cancel culture destroys trust in expertise.”  Lukianoff is a passionate and eloquent speaker.

It’s a very good talk packed with information and slides, beginning with what happened to professors during the Red Scare in America the 40s and 50s, and then going on to the increase in cancellation happening today: how many professors get fired, how many deplatforming attempts are happening and how fast they’re increasing, and how schools rate on free speech. (Lukianoff really doesn’t like Harvard or Columbia; see 28:00, at 44:30, and at 51:44, when he says that Columbia should declare itself a “technical school.”)

Lukianoff also gives a number of examples of demonization or cancellation, all of which bear on how speech is chilled (note his comment on the Nature Human Behavior policy), and describes some ongoing FIRE lawsuits to promote free speech.

There are a full twenty minutes of good questions, the first by Jonathan Rauch (“What about the ACLU, the AAUP, and other organizations like yours?”). All of the questions get thorough and thoughtful answers.

 

Finally, here’s the schedule for day 3:

Here! I’ve been dealing with trivial stuff all day involving billing and the post office (the Black Hole of government agencies) and have had no time to write. Enjoy Stephen Fry’s hourlong talk on Triggernometry on why the American Left promoted the rise of the American Right. I’ve been saying that for a long time, but perhaps those who deny my claim will listen to Stephen Fry, who is a much Bigger Fish than I! And he’s way smarter and more eloquent. I recommend that you not neglect this video.

Today’s photos come from Phil Frymire, who sends us birds photographed in South Africa. Phil’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Moving on from my previous submissions of mammals, here is a selection of birds from an August trip to South Africa. Lilac-breasted rollers are unforgettable, but I am a bit fuzzy on some of the other identifications. I forgot some of them and had to look them up online. Hopefully readers can make corrections if any errors remain.

Red-crested korhaan (Lophotis ruficrista):

Magpie shrike (Urolestes melanoleucus)

A pair of African fish eagles (Haliaeetus vocifer):

White-backed vulture (Gyps africanus), waiting for lions to leave a giraffe kill:

This is a poor photo of a black-headed oriole (Oriolus larvatus). This bird is a beautiful bright yellow. This was the only one we saw and it was quite skittish:

African green pigeon (Treron calvus):

White-fronted bee-eater (Merops bullockoides), perched on some elephant dung:

A gaggle of Egyptian geese (Alopochen aegyptiaca):

Hooded vulture (Necrosyrtes monachus), waiting for lions to abandon a buffalo kill:

Crested barbet (Trachyphonus vaillantii):

Helmeted guinea fowl (Numisa meleagris):

This is a saddle-billed stork (Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis). The first time I saw one I thought it must have an injury on its breast. No, the bare red spot is typical for the species:

Last, but certainly not least, my favorite bird seen on the trip, three lilac-breasted rollers (Coracias caudatus) [: This is my favorite African bird, too!]

I think people can use the links below to access the Oxford English Dictionary, which is also on our University of Chicago Library site.  I looked up definitions of “woman” and “female” to see what the OED says, as I regard it as the authoritative source of definitions used in everyday parlance.  So here we go, and I’ve put the links so you can check for yourselves.

“woman”

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/woman_n?tab=meaning_and_use#14234972

 

“female” which gives a bit of a tautological definition for the noun usage:

But in the adjectival form, the OED gives a pretty accurate biological definition of “female”, though it adds “the gender identity associated with this sex”.

 

If you don’t like these (and feel free to browse around for definitions that you like better; I’ve given the first ones), complain to the OED, not me!

And, of course, things may change next year.

In today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “others,” we see a familiar theme: Mo being guilty of exactly what he’s accusing others of. In fact, I think the theme of the whole strip can be condensed to one word: hyprocrisy.

Much of Chapter 5 of my book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (the chapter’s called “Why does it matter?”) deals with religiously-motivated child abuse, mostly in the form of religious parents denying medical care to children.  Some of the stories are horrific, especially the first one I tell involving a girl with bone cancer. While Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are major culprits, with their faith often mandating that God rather than doctors will cure children, there are other groups like them.  And when the children die, as they often do (Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibit blood transfusion, and the kids, indoctrinated with that dogma, may die if they don’t get blood), the parents used to get off with light prison sentences or even parole. After all, it’s religion, Jake, so it’s okay to let your your kids die in its name!  For some reason, all the cases I described in my book involve Christian parents.

Well, it’s still happening The Guardian reports today about on eight-year-old diabetic (type 1) girl whose father, converted to an evangelical sect, decided to deny his daughter the insulin she needed to live. (I am SO familiar with this kind of behavior. It’s not ubiquitous, but it’s not vanishingly rare, either.) The daughter died, of course (this was in 2022), and the death was likely a painful one.

The difference between this case, described below (click on screenshot to read), and similar cases in the U.S., is that the parents—and 10 other people—were convicted of manslaughter yesterday, a much more serious charge than often levied against such parents in the U.S. I suppose manslaughter is an appropriate charge, but one shouldn’t rule out murder charges, either since sane persons know what will happen if they withhold insulin from a diabetic child. (I know of no murder charges ever filed against these odious parents.) Anyway, I get quite exercised when helpless kids die because God is supposed to save them, and often this happens with the child’s assent, because they get propagandized. Religion often comes with the need to propagandize, especially to your kids.

An excerpt from the article:

It took Jason Struhs 36 hours to call the ambulance after the death of his daughter Elizabeth.

When the police followed shortly afterwards, they heard singing. The Saints, a religious sect in Queensland, that has been likened to a cult, were praying for the eight-year-old to be resurrected.

“I’m not jumping up and down in joy, but I’m at peace …” Jason told a police officer that day. “I gave my little girl what she wanted. And I expect God to look after her.”

Justice Martin Burns on Wednesday found Jason Struhs, and religious leader Brendan Stevens, along with Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie, brother Zachary, and 10 other members of the group, guilty of her manslaughter.

Elizabeth Struhs died at her family home in Rangeville, Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, on 6 or 7 January 2022, of diabetic ketoacidosis.

Jason told police: “There were no feelings of oh well, that didn’t work.”

“I have to be patient. I have to keep praying. I didn’t sit there and think that I had killed my daughter, I was thinking that she was in a better place now,” he said.

The delay before calling the ambulance after a child’s death is quite common, though I don’t know why. The kid is dead and it has to be reported. At any rate, there was a trial at the end of 2024.

Throughout the nine-week trial last year, the court heard hours of interviews with the Saints filmed by police, at the scene and in the days afterwards.

Recently released to the media, they give an insight into their beliefs.

Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie Struhs, believed so strongly in the Saints’ faith she had been previously jailed for not providing her daughter the necessaries of life in 2019, when Elizabeth became sick for the first time.

Jason took her to the hospital in a coma over Kerrie’s objections. She told the police she wasn’t grateful to the medical staff for saving her life.

“What do you think might have happened if she wasn’t taken to hospital the first time?” she was asked by police, days after Elizabeth’s death.

“I believe she would have got better and didn’t need any medical assistance at all,” she replied.

When Elizabeth was returned to the family with no lasting medical problems, she took it as proof of a miracle. She never attended hospital to see her daughter’s treatment.

A month after Kerrie was released from jail, Elizabeth was taken off her insulin after two-and-a-half healthy years and became sick again – but her mother told police she never had any doubts.

She told them she was surprised God was taking the situation “to the extreme … as in, to death”, but saw it as part of his plan for the “last days”.

If Elizabeth had died and was brought back in front of paramedics, more people would see the miracle, she said.

“These are end days. I see this as simply God is needing to show people, give people a chance to see that God is still here. And we are the ones that will declare it faithfully,” she told police.

Jason was originally not religious; it was only when he “found God” that he turned into someone who could kill his daughter:

For 17 years, his wife and many of his children attended the small home-based church service multiple times a week, but Jason Struhs didn’t believe in God at all.

For years he helped her administer insulin four times a day, take her to doctors, prepare specific meals and check her sugar levels.

. . . . After a verbal fight with his son Zachary and counselling by the other Saints, Jason converted in August 2021.

“The next four months after turning to God had been the best four months of my life, because I had peace. I now had family who loved me,” he said in his police statement.

The sentence below, which I’ve put in bold, is what really angers me. These people are so absolutely sure of the fictions they embrace that they are willing to let their offspring die because “they’ll be in a better place,” There is no evidence for such a place! Jason feels no remorse for what he did.

The Saints prayed and sang as a group. Finally, on 8 January, Jason called the paramedics.

“I said to everyone that even though God will raise Elizabeth, we couldn’t leave a corpse in the house, we couldn’t leave her body sitting there forever,” Jason said.

On 8 January, Jason told police his faith was stronger than ever.

“I am fully at peace at heart. I don’t feel sorry, I feel happy because now she’s at peace and so am I … she’s not dependent on me for her life now. I’m not trapped by diabetes as well.”

Burns will sentence all 14 on 11 February.

Only prosecution and strong sentences will curb this kind of behavior, though some of it will go on in secret, for religion is powerful.

I won’t harp on this further; you can read my book to see similar cases.  The point, of course, is that this girl would still be alive if there were no religion, for only religion would make a parent stop giving medical care to their offspring. (Well, I suppose there are other forms of such lunacy as well, but these are doctrines of Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other fringe Christian sects like the Saints.)  And the courts, in the U.S. at least, used to go much easier on parents like this than, say, parents whose kids died from malnourishment or related abuse. Religion used to give you somewhat of a pass, though that now seems to be changing, thank Ceiling Cat.

Here’s a video about the death of Elizabeth and the trial.  Do watch it, because you’ll see how these people remain deluded even though they thought God would “bring her back” after she died.

Finally, I present for your appraisal the cover of the Jehovah’s Witness magazine Awake! from 1994.  Every child on the cover of this magazine died because they refused blood transfusions. But it’s okay, because they put God first.  I used this slide in the talks I used to give about faith versus fact.  In the case of Elizabeth, faith is The Saints; fact is insulin.

h/t: Paul