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In this week’s news-and-snark piece, Bill Maher offers a piece that may be controversial, for it’s about how men need to be “men” again.  He avers that the loss of masculinity in males is one reason why women are disappointed in men, and why people are having less sex.  The data are eye-opening; for example, 44% of Gen Z men say they’ve had no relationship experience at all during their teen years.  That means up to age 20! And you might be interested in the new genre of literature he describes: “romantasy”, in which women get involved with animals or half-animals like centaurs.

His solution? Men should “man up”. His example: Taylor Swift being engaged to football star Travis Kelce (“old-school wood”) after writing songs about all the lame men she was once involved with. (He describes songs by other women.) Is he right?  I have no idea.

The guests are Jonathan Haidt (not shown), Stephanie Ruhle and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (Retired).

 

Well, I might as well reveal part of my very long list of “best music”.  This time I’ll post my choice of the best “songs about aging or dying” for Baby Boomers.  These aren’t necessarily all good (I’m not a fan of Mellencamp, for instance), but they’re all notable. And yes, I realize that “Long May You Run” is really about Neil Young’s car (a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse he called Mortimer Hearseburg), but it’s still appropriate.  Further, some of the songs are about lost love, but all refer to the sadness of passing time.

Father and Son                        Cat Stevens
Touch of Gray                        The Grateful Dead
When I’m Sixty-Four            The Beatles
Boys of Summer                     Don Henley
Cherry Bomb                          John Mellencamp
Long May You Run                Stills-Young Band
All Summer Long                   The Beach Boys
Caroline No                            The Beach Boys
Nick of Time                          Bonnie Raitt
When We Was Fab                 George Harrison
All those Years Ago                George Harrison
Rockin’ Chair                         The Band
Taxi                                         Harry Chapin
Cat’s in the Cradle                  Harry Chapin
Old Friends (Bookends)         Simon and Garfunkel
Don’t Fear the Reaper             Blue Öyster Cult
Wasted on the Way                 Crosby Stills & Nash

I welcome readers’ suggestions, and I’ll put up five of the songs that I think are particularly good and underappreciated:

“Boys of Summer” (1984). For some reason this song absolutely brings back my own teenage years, and quite vividly:

“Caroline, No” (1966), by the great Brian Wilson.

“All Those Years Ago” (1981).  Nobody seems to remember this song by George Harrison, but it’s not only great, but a moving tribute to his late fellow Beatle, John Lennon. It’s clear that despite their tiffs, Harrison really loved Lennon.

“Taxi” by Harry Chapin (1972).  I’m sure this song is long forgotten, but it’s among the very best ones on the list. The “soprano” part is sung by “Big John” Wallace, Chapin’s bassist; everybody thought that the original record used a female voice. You can end the song at 7:31; it just repeats with the lyrics shown.

“Nick of Time” by Bonnie Raitt (1989).  I love this song; the tune is excellent, with a good hook, and the words are wonderful:

I am SO tired of people demonizing J. K. Rowling for being a transphobe and a bigot without ever having paid attention to what’s she said and written.  In fact, she’s sympathetic to trans people, but, like me, thinks that trans rights on occasion clash with the rights of biological women, and in those cases the rights of natal women can take precedence (this occurs in sports, prisons, and a few other circumstances). And, like Rowling, I have been somewhat demonized by taking a stand identical to hers (I was, for example, recently branded “anti-trans” by the head of our department’s DEI Committee, clearly by people who have ignored what I’ve written, too).

But I kvetch. This Substack post by Katie Pinns tries to un-demonize Rowling by actually showing us what she wrote.  Now you know that won’t change the minds of those like Emma Watson who have parted ways with Rowling on no good grounds: gender ideologues are impervious to the facts.  But at least Pinns has Rowling’s statements down in black and white, and I’ve added one important link. Click screenshot to read:

I’ll give some quotes from Pinns (indented) who in turn quotes Rowling (doubly indented). There are several pages worth, so check for yourself if you think I’m cherry-picking.

Few public figures attract as much noise as J.K. Rowling. For many people, the controversy around her name has become so thick with slogans, screenshots, and second‑hand outrage that her actual words have been buried under the reaction to them. People repeat that she “hates trans people,” or that women’s crisis centres are “transphobic,” without ever checking what she has actually said.

So this piece goes back to the source. Not the discourse. Not the memes. Her words.

Rowling’s central point is simple: sex is real, and it matters. She has said:

“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased… It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

This is the foundation of her position. She argues that biological sex shapes women’s lives, especially in relation to male violence, discrimination, and safeguarding. She also says explicitly that recognising sex does not erase or demean trans people.

Her concern is that if society stops acknowledging sex, women lose the language they need to describe their experiences. That’s not a fringe view; it’s the basis of decades of women’s rights advocacy.

Rowling has repeatedly said she supports trans people’s right to live free from discrimination:

“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans.”

She also describes feeling “kinship” with trans people because both women and trans people are vulnerable to male violence. Her objection is not to trans people themselves, but to the idea that acknowledging sex is inherently hateful.

And, as Pinns notes, Rowling makes these pronouncements not to “erase” or demonize trans people, but to prompt a discussion about clashes of “rights” as well as whether there’s a need for affirmative care, including surgery, on people below an age of consent. As Pinns says, “Much of the public anger directed at her is based on claims she never made. Her insistence on correcting the record is part of why she continues to speak.”

There are more quotes from Rowling, and you can read her longer explanations of her views at places like this one.  She has of course been subject to a multitude of threats of violence, but she’s stood her ground, responding with humor and not a small amount of snark, which makes her enemies even madder.  Here’s a quote from her sober and revealing essay linked in the first sentence of this paragraph:

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

. . . .Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

Finally, I’ll quote Pinns again:

Much of the backlash against Rowling spills over onto women’s crisis centres, rape support services, and safeguarding charities that maintain female-only spaces. These organisations often base their policies on:

– the reality of male violence

– the needs of traumatised women

– legal exemptions that allow single-sex services

– safeguarding obligations

Rowling’s position aligns with these long-standing principles. Calling such services “transphobic” erases the reasons they exist.

Despite the headlines, Rowling has not said that trans people shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t have rights, or are a threat. She has not argued against healthcare for trans adults. She has not advocated discrimination.

As the West starts to realize that it’s unfair for biological men, however they identify, to enter some women’s spaces, or to compete in women’s sports, or that there are dangers in “affirmative care” doled out to adolescents who aren’t of age, I’m hoping that Rowling will no longer be immediately dismissed by ideologues, but that her arguments will be taken seriously and answered.

Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive,”which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortedned to simply this:

“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning.. This is why I became a theist.”

So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could?  But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism.  The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.

Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine,  is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book

You can read his article for free as it’s been archived. Click below if you want a lame justification for theism:

Beha, considering nonbelief after he gave it up in college, decided that there were two forms of atheism: a scientific form and a “romantic” form. Quotes from his article are indented below, though bold headings are mine,

Scientific atheism

Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.

The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.

As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.

Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.

Of course I don’t give a rat’s patootie if we can’t establish from first principles that we can understand the world through our senses. The answer to that blockheaded objection is that yes, that’s right, but only the scientific method construed broadly (i.e. empirical work with testing or replication) actually WORKS.  If you want to establish where typhoid comes from, and then prevent it or cure it, then you must use a secular, empirical method: science.

Now Beha admits that this world view does “work”. But then he says it has problems. Fur one thing, it doesn’t give you meaning, nor, he adds, does it explain consciousness:

If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.

Here the man is deeply confused. Of course subjective experience is “real” to the subject, but it’s very hard (“the hard problem”) to figure out how it arises in the brain.  And denying that consciousness arises through materialistic processes in the brain (and elsewhere) is just wrong.  We know it’s wrong, for we can affect consciousness by material interventions like anesthesia and psychological tricks, so the phenomenon must, unless it comes from God, be “material” in origin.  Here Beha seems perilously close to Douthat saying that because science can’t explain consciousness, there must be a god.

Romantic atheism

Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.

Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.

Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.

But romantic atheism also fails to give us “meaning,” and Beha desperately wants and needs meaning!

A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt.

Once again we see Beha desperately looking for a world view that gives his life meaning—and happiness. That much is clear from not only the above, but from other stuff.

Beha wants “meaning”, and that meaning must come from faith (Some quotes)

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

. . .After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.

I’m not sure how “faith”—Beha is curiously reticent to tell us what he actually believes—is supposed to provide us with an “absolute foundation”, unless you become a traditional theist who thinks that God interacts with you personally and that it is this God that gives your life meaning. But he won’t say that in clear, explicit terms.  One hallmark of the new “liberal” religion is that it’s both fuzzy and slippery.

Beha goes on to argue that “liberals” (aka people who don’t buy Trump) adhere to both forms of atheism, but, in the end, to ground not just life but also society requires theism, for theism is our only source of “rights”:

Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.

. . .Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.

“Our status as creatures of God”?  How does he know there is a God? Is it because science can’t explain emotions and other subjective experiences—that we don’t understand consciousness?  In the end, Beha apparently thinks there’s a God because it makes him feel better, and gives his life meaning.

Well, good for him! But there are plenty of us who derive “meaning” as a result of doing what we find fulfilling and joyful (see this interesting post and thread).  I, for one, never pondered the question “what must I do to give my life meaning?”  That meaning arose, as for many of us, as post facto rationalization of doing what we found to be fulfilling.

At any rate, this is a curiously anodyne essay, absolutely personal and not generalizable to the rest of humanity. It is the story of a journey, but one that ends with embracing a god for which there’s no evidence. Excuse me if I can’t follow that path.

*************

Beha, clearly flogging his newfound theism, has a guest essay in the Feb. 11 NYT, “My conversion to skeptical belief” (archived here), which emphasizes that his beliefs are inextricably intertwined with doubt, and so he repeats what many believers have said before. An example:

In the face of this I attempt — with varying degrees of success at varying times — to take a page from Montaigne’s book and embrace skeptical belief. I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism.

What does this mean in practice? Embracing skeptical belief does not mean believing things without “really” believing them. It means understanding your beliefs as limited, contingent and fallible, recognizing that they can’t be proved correct, that someone else’s refusal to come around to them does not indicate stupidity or obstinacy or bad faith.

Similarly, a skeptical believer recognizes doubt as an essential component of belief, rather than its opposite. To a skeptical believer, the great mark of sincerity is the extent to which you attempt to live out your beliefs in your own life despite your own doubts, not the extent to which you silence those doubts or the doubts of others.

. . . To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the woman selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to anyone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world.

What I try instead to do on this day is simply meet each choice I face with my fallible and limited beliefs, and respond to that choice in the way those beliefs actually commend.

Of course the worldview of humanism could yield the same results, except you needn’t ground your acts and beliefs in a Sky Daddy. Why must actions be somehow grounded in the supernatural instead of in a philosophy that you should be kind and helpful to your fellow humans?

h/t Barry

 

In this Free Press article, Steve Pinker and Marian Tupy (the latter identified as “the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of Superabundance”) once again recount the undoubtable progress that humanity has made over the past six or seven centuries.  The progress described here will be familiar to you if you’ve read Pinker’s two big books, Better Angels and Enlightenment Now: the progress has been in health, longevity, reduced poverty, better nutrition, less chance of violent death, and almost all indices of “well being”.

Click to read (if you have a subscription):

I’m not sure why Pinker is constantly attacked by people for touting progress, as the data are irrefutable, but I guess there’s a subgroup of “progressive” historians (and perhaps conservative ones) who like to aver that we’ve made little progress since the Middle Ages. Indeed, perhaps we’ve even regressed, and we’d be better off living in the Middle Ages. This Whiggish view is usually espoused by the religious, who say that the waning of religion has impoverished modern life. Perhaps leftish people don’t like the notion that we’re making progress (e.g., some say we’re worse off in racial relations now than during Jim Crow days), while rightish ones don’t like the palpable loss of faith of people in the West.

A few quotes:

Last month at Yale, the influential political blogger Curtis Yarvin, in a debate against Free Press contributor Jed Rubenfeld, argued that America ought to “end the democratic experiment”—and establish a monarchy. Yarvin has noted that Donald Trump is “biologically suited” to be America’s monarch. The ideas may sound extreme, but they have been influential. J.D. Vance describes Yarvin as “a friend,” and has cited his work. And Yarvin is part of a family of movements, known as the Dark Enlightenment, Techno-authoritarianism, and Neo-Reaction (NRx)—that reject the entire family of enlightenment values.

Meanwhile, theocracy is making a comeback, in movements known as theoconservatism, Christian Nationalism, and National Conservatism. The “National Conservatism Statement of Principles,” for example, declares that “where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” The list of signatories is a lookbook of influential conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, Peter Thiel, and Trump administration insiders Michael Anton and Russell Vought—as well as our fellow Free Press contributors Christopher Rufo and Rod Dreher.

The latter, a friend of the vice president, has said elsewhere that the West will not “recover until and unless we become re-enchanted and seek a form of Christianity, and indeed of Judaism, that is more mystical, that valorizes this direct perception of the Holy Spirit, of holiness, and of transcendence.”

. . . Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”

Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”

One of the themes of this article is how religion has in fact been an impediment in progress, and this seems to be the strongest attack on religion I’ve seen yet from Pinker (I haven’t read Tupy before). Perhaps Steve is preparing for his debate with Ross Douthat later this month (stay tuned), which will be about God. Doubthat’s new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious.

Here’s the money quote about progress, which I’ve put in bold:

It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.

I won’t go through the numbers, as you probably know them, but they’re impressive. Here are just a few facts:

Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?

Do people really want to go back to medieval times if they lose, on average, 46 years of life?

But the other theme of the piece is morality. In short, religious morality impedes human well-being by not giving people an impetus to help humanity, but rather telling them to live by this or that religious dictum that will please their God. I agree with the harm to behavior done by religion, but have taken issue with Pinker and Tupy’s idea not that morality can be humanistic, which it can be, but that humanistic morality is objective rather than subjective. And they seem certain about this:

Our moral purpose, then, is to use knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing: health, freedom, peace, knowledge, beauty, social connection.

. . .The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society.

A partial list: Kant’s categorical imperative and his practical prescriptions for peace. The American Founders’ analyses of tyranny, democracy, and fundamental rights. Bentham’s cases against cruelty to animals and the persecution of homosexuals. Astell’s brief against the oppression of women. Voltaire’s arguments against religious persecution. Montesquieu’s case against slavery. Beccaria’s arguments against judicial torture. Rousseau’s case against harsh treatment of children.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best.

Crucially, these moral conclusions were based on reasons. As Plato pointed out 2,300 years ago, morality can’t be grounded in divine edicts. If a commandment itself has no moral justification, why should we obey it? If it does, why not just appeal to the justification itself?

Such justification is not hard to find. All of us claim a basic right to our own well-being. If we were not alive, healthy, nourished, educated, and embedded in a community, we could not deliberate about morality (or anything else) in the first place. And because we are embedded in a community, where people can affect each other’s well-being, we can’t stop at this basic claim. None of us can coherently demand these conditions for ourselves without granting them to others. I can’t say “I’m allowed to hurt you, but you’re not allowed to hurt me, because I’m me and you’re not,” and expect to be taken seriously.

Now I agree that society will run better if people conduct themselves in a manner that won’t injure other people.  But to say that morality is objective, that the moral act is the one that increases “well-being”, is to buy into the fallacies that beset Sam Harris’s identical theory broached in his book The Moral Landscape.  While increasing well-being does jibe with our usual notions of what’s moral, there are problems. I’ve described some of these in a previous post called “The absence of objective morality“, asserting that, in the end, no morality is objective; all forms of morality are based on subjective preferences. I’ll quote myself here:

It’s clear that empirical observation can inform moral statements. If you think that it’s okay to kick a dog because it doesn’t mind it, well, just try kicking a dog. But in the end, saying whether it’s right or wrong to do things depends on one’s preferences. True, most people agree on their preferences, and their concept of morality by and large agrees with Sam’s consequentialist view that what is the “right” thing to do is what maximizes “well being”.  But that is only one criterion for “rightness”, and others, like deontologists such as Kant, don’t agree with that utilitarian concept. And of course people disagree violently about things like abortion—and many other moral issues.

One problem with Sam’s theory, or any utilitarian theory of morality, is how to judge “well being”. There are different forms of well being, even in a given moral situation, and how do you weigh them off against one another? There is no common currency of well being, though we know that some things, like torturing or killing someone without reason, clearly does not increase well being of either that person or of society. Yet there is no objective way to weigh one form of well being against another. Abortion is one such situation: one weighs the well being of the fetus, which will develop into a sentient human, against that of the mother, who presumably doesn’t want to have the baby.

But to me, the real killer of objective morality is the issue of animal rights—an issue that I don’t see as resolvable, at least in a utilitarian way. Is it moral to do experiments on primates to test human vaccines and drugs? If so, how many monkeys can you put in captivity and torture before it becomes wrong?  Is it wrong to keep lab animals captive just to answer a scientific question with no conceivable bearing on human welfare, but is just a matter of curiosity? Is it moral to eat meat? Answering questions about animal rights involves, if you’re a Harris-ian utilitarian, being able to assess the well being of animals, something that seems impossible. We do not know what it is like to be a bat.  We have no idea whether any creatures value their own lives, and which creatures feel pain (some surely do).

But in the end, trying to find a truly factual answer to the statement, “Is it immoral for humans to eat meat?”  or “is abortion wrong?”, or “is capital punishment wrong?” seems a futile effort. You can say that eating meat contributes to deforestation and global warming, and that’s true, but that doesn’t answer the question, for you have to then decide whether those effects are “immoral”. Even deciding whether to be a “well being” utilitarian is a choice. You might instead be a deontologist, adhering to a rule-based and not consequence-based morality.

You can make a rule that “anybody eating meat is acting immorally,” but on what do you base that statement? If you respond that “animals feel pain and it’s wrong to kill them,” someone might respond that “yes, but I get a lot of pleasure from eating meat.” How can you objectively weigh these positions? You can say that culinary enjoyment is a lower goal than animal welfare, but again, that’s a subjective judgment.

By saying I don’t accept the idea of moral claims representing “facts”, I’m not trying to promote nihilism. We need a moral code if, for nothing else, to act as a form of social glue and as a social contract. Without it, society would degenerate into a lawless and criminal enterprise—indeed, the idea of crime and punishment would vanish. All I’m arguing is that such claims rest at bottom on preference alone. It’s generally a good thing that evolution has bequeathed most of us with a similar set of moral preferences. I hasten to add, though, that what feelings evolution has instilled in us aren’t necessarily ones we should incorporate into morality, as some of them (widespread xenophobia, for instance) are outmoded in modern society. Others, like caring for one’s children, are good things to do.

In the end, I agree with Hume that there’s no way to derive an “ought” from an “is”. “Oughts” have their own sources, while “is”s may represent in part our evolutionarily evolved behaviors derived from living in small groups of hunter-gatherers. But that doesn’t make them evolutionary “oughts.”

To abortion, meat-eating, and animal rights we can now add “assisted dying.”  I favor it because I think it reduces suffering, but others say that it will actually increase net suffering by killing off people who could eventually be happy, or create societies in which people are sacrificed at will.  And don’t forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  If, as the authors claim, “None of us can coherently demand these conditions [of well being] for ourselves without granting them to others” then we open up a whole can of worms, especially involving war. In the end, saying that “well being” is a guide to objective morality begs the question of ethics:  we are supposed to do X because it is more moral, and that’s because it increases “well being”. But why is increasing well being always more moral? If it’s by definition, then that really is begging the question.

I’m clearly not a philosopher, but I don’t see “increasing well being” as an objective guide to what’s moral. It is a preference, based on the subjective choice that a society with more “well being” is the one we should prefer. That is usually true, I think, but not always, and runs into substantial difficulties when you try to do the moral calculus in given situations.

Otherwise, I look forward to Steve’s debate with Douthat in two weeks, which should be great fun, even if nobody changes their minds about God.

Okay, so as this website slowly circles the drain, we’re still going to have cats on Caturday, and three items to boot.

First on deck is Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street; he just turned 19, and served 15 of those years in the service of the Prime Minister. He’s in remarkably good shape for such an old cat, and here’s a two-minute video, in his own words, recounting how a careless photographer nearly tripped over him. Fortunately, Larry skittered away, perhaps losing half a life or so:

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From Bored Panda we have another large selection of cat memes. I’ll choose a few for your delectation.  Click the screenshot to read; the intro says this:

Last year, the estimated expenses of owning a cat were between $830 and $3,000. Clearly, no expense is spared for cat owners when it comes to their beloved fluffballs.

Bored Panda loves cats too. That’s why we are blessing you with a collection of wholesome and cute cat memes, courtesy of the “happycat318” Instagram page. Check out the times kitties cracked up their owners with some diabolical shenanigans!

More info: Instagram [the happycat 218 Instagram Page], the source of all the memes:

. . . And this is a true cat lover:

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A persistent moggy described by the UPI; click on screenshot to read:

The tail:

A cat escaped from his owners’ camper during a stop at a gas station in Spain and reappeared months later less than a mile from their home in France.

Patrick and Evelyne Sire, who live in Olonzac, in the Hérault region of France, said their cat, Filou apparently jumped out of an open window in their camper during an Aug. 9, 2025, stop at a gas station in Maçanet de la Selva, Spain, located near the French border about 155 miles from home.

Patrick Sire said Filou’s absence wasn’t noticed until the next morning.

Sire said he returned to the gas station twice in the ensuing days and weeks, but no one in the area had seen any signs of the missing feline.

The couple said they started to give up hope as the months passed, but they received a call Jan. 9 from a resident in Homps, less than a mile from their home, reporting Filou had been found.

The woman said she had been feeding the cat outdoors since December, and noticed he was very thin and appeared to be coughing. She took the feline to a local veterinarian, where a microchip scan identified him as Filou.

“Filou traveled all that way to get to us. But how did he do it? Did he follow the highway? Did he go through towns? Did he follow the rivers?” Patrick Sire told France3 News. “We’ll never know.”

Here’s a video in French, which shows the GPS cat and his staff. If you know a bit of French you can probably understand it, but if not you can still see how happy the staff is!:

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Lagniappe:  A cat makes a deposit:

Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/nb4NfkS7CJ

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) January 24, 2026

A sneaky and lazy moggy and its exercise wheel:

. . . and a woman talks to her cat, but inadvertently insults it:

h/t: Ginger K., Simon, Merilee

These are the last photos I have, and I’ve gathered singletons in a potpourri of photos. Please send me any good wildlife photos you have—otherwise there will be a LACUNA tomorrow. Captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

From Pratyaydipta Rudra in Oklahoma.

This is a Pine Squirrel [Tamiascirus sp.], photographed in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

From Adrian:

Here’s a picture of a European Pine Marten (Martes martes) from the shores of Loch Duich, near the Isle of Skye, Scotland:

From Guy:

Taken in Lake Saint Clair Metropark in Michigan a few years back by my 12 year old son Nolan at a bird-banding station where we volunteer. I think it’s a Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga striata) with the image taken in the fall (so I don’t really know if it’s male or female):

From Robert Lang, whose house and studio burned to the ground during the California fires last year; both are being rebuilt:

Our gardener found this California native tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.) while clearing some fire debris at my former studio and, knowing that my wife had a pet tarantula and was helping the Eaton Canyon Nature Center in its fire recovery, he left it for us at our temporary home in a little plastic bottle. (Umm…the tarantula was in a little plastic bottle. Not our home.) After we determined that ECNC didn’t have a place for one yet, we released it locally, but I took this picture before it wandered away. When we got home from the release, there was another plastic bottle on the porch with another tarantula inside.

A Hummingbird Moth (species unknown) from Marty Riddle:

The Hawk Moths, aka Hummingbird Moth, love the nectar in resident maintained gardens at Brooksby Village Peabody, Massachusetts:

And a cat/bird encounter from Barry Lyons:

For years now, I’ve had mourning doves  [Zenaida macroura] alight on my air conditioner. Some of them are regulars, and what interests me is that they haven’t taken the next obvious step: pecking at the window. What I mean is that a dove arrives and then stares into my apartment, sometimes moving its head back and forth: “Are you in there? Ah, there you are!” And then I get up from my chair and go feed them. But when will a dove start pecking at the window to alert me that he’s there? Why hasn’t it figured out that it’s something it can do? And at no cost to his safety because he can still fly away. And look at this photo. The dove seems to understand windows. Every time a cat goes to the window (I don’t own a cat; I cat-sit) it flares its wings instead of flying off, as if to say, “Ha ha, you can’t get me. I’m out here, you idiot.”

I have been wondering about the question above for a while, as I’ve read quite a few novels lately that use the word “luncheon”, with seemingly no distinction between that word and “lunch”.  I was too lazy to look it up, but, typing it in the search box, I found this short (1.5-minute) YouTube explanation below:

The Oxford English Dictionary agrees (the first meaning is “A large chunk of something, esp. bread, cheese, or some other food; a thick slice, a hunk; = lunch“).  The relevant entry:

There you go. But I still would like to be able to invite a friend to a restaurant for an informal luncheon.  That’s not correct, but it’s fun to say. And, at any rate, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say “luncheon” lately, even referring to a formal meal. And in fiction it’s used incorrectly all the time.

Here’s a new article in Nature (click on the title screenshot below to read it); it’s about the dearth of information about the safety of drugs used by pregnant women. Except, to Nature, they refer not to “women” but to “pregnant people,” for in the article, that is about the only term that refers to women who are pregnant.  “Women” is used almost exclusively when it’s in quotations from others.

Here’s my count:

“Pregnant people”:  Used 41 times
“Women”:  Used 5 times, 4 of them in quotes from others

Clearly some bowdlerization is going on here.

The sad part of this article is that it has a lesson worth reading—a dearth of knowledge about how many drugs affect pregnant women—but it’s annoyingly peppered with politically correct and annoying usages. For example:

The first usage of the “pp” term is in fact in the subtitle, which I’ve highlighted below (again, click the article to read it):

Here’s a screenshot with “pregnant people” highlighted. This is only a small sample of the article:

Need I say more? What this means is that Nature is clearly truckling to the language adopted by extreme gender activists, who consider trans-identified men as “women”.  Ergo, the words “pregnant women” are seen as offensive, because “women” include trans-idenfied men who can’t have babies. Voilà:  “pregnant people.” Also, as reader Coel says below, “The main problem is trans-IDing women, aka ‘trans men’, who, being women, can get pregnant, but who they regard as ‘men’. Hence ‘pregnant women’ would exclude them, and so amount to erasure of and thus genocide of those ‘trans men’ who are indeed pregnant.”

Here are the five uses of the word “women”, all but the last quotes from other authors (they can’t sanitize other people’s words):

 

Note that the last usage of woman, not in quotes, is required because they are referring to females who are not pregnant. But the journal still slipped up: they could have used “people with uteruses”, or, like The Lancet, “bodies with vaginas”:

Conclusion: Nature has been ideologically captured. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

The journal should be ashamed of itself.

 

h/t: Schnoid

Well, this is the last batch of photos I have, and it’s very sad that the tank is empty. Please send some in if you have them. Don’t make me beg!

Today we have photos of ducks—or rather, one female duck— rom Aussie reader Keira McKenzie in Perth. Keira’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Here is a series of photos I took of a lone Pacific Black Duck [Anas superciliosis] from this afternoon [Feb. 11] at the park. Since the islands in the ponds have been completely cleared of all vegetation (the western island) and all the undergrowth cleared from the eastern island (this is because of the devastation throughout Perth’s trees from the polyphagous shothole borer), moat of the waterbirds have left for areas where they can roost & nest. 

The photos are taken in Hyde Park, Perth, Western Australia, on a hot humid afternoon.

I am very fond of them. I rescued one when it flew into the electric wires on the other side of the road one night. I carried it back across the road and into the park, putting it near the water’s edge. It was a pond-smelling little bundle, seemed uninjured and was very calm, and waddled off into the water and sailed into the night.

What a beautiful hen! It makes me eager for Duck Season to arrive at Botany Pond. Keira also sent a picture of her cat:

I shall sign off with a pic of my little Baba (currently zooming around the place for no apparent reason) slothing in the armchair in the heat with one of her favourite toys (the other is a wombat).

Yep, here I go again pointing out the decline in the quality of rock and pop music. But this time I’m joined by the music maven Rick Beato, who has always had the same opinion.  In this video he compares music from 1984 vs. 2026, juxtaposing the Grammy nominees for Song of the Year from both years. Save for one song, he finds the 2026 nominees lame, so there’s no contest. Music, he argues implictly, has gone downhill in the past four decades.

I’ll list the nominees and make some comments below. The winner for both years is is at the top. My own comments are flush left.

1984

Song of the Year

• “Every Breath You Take” – The Police
  • Sting (songwriter)
• “All Night Long (All Night)” – Lionel Richie
  • Lionel Richie (songwriter)
• “Beat It” – Michael Jackson
  • Michael Jackson (songwriter)
• “Billie Jean” – Michael Jackson
  • Michael Jackson (songwriter)
• “Maniac” – Michael Sembello
  • Michael Sembello & Dennis Matkosky (songwriters)

Had I voted, there would be no hesitation in my dubbing “Billie Jean” as Song of the Year, but all of these songs, as Beato agrees, are good and memorable. They will last, and will still be popular years from now (they’re still listened to 42 years later!).

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2026 (winner was announced on Feb. 1)

Song of the Year

• “Wildflower“
  • Billie Eilish O’Connell & Finneas O’Connell, songwriters (Billie Eilish)
• “Abracadabra”
  • Henry Walter, Lady Gaga & Andrew Watt, songwriters (Lady Gaga)
• “Anxiety”
  • Jaylah Hickmon, songwriter (Doechii)
• “APT.”
  • Amy Allen, Christopher Brody Brown, Rogét Chahayed, Henry Walter, Omer Fedi, Philip Lawrence, Bruno Mars, Chae Young Park & Theron Thomas, songwriters (Rosé & Bruno Mars)
• “DTMF”
  • Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, Scott Dittrich, Benjamin Falik, Roberto José Rosado Torres, Marco Daniel Borrero, Hugo René Sención Sanabria & Tyler Spry, songwriters (Bad Bunny)
• “Golden” (from KPop Demon Hunters)
  • Park Hong Jun, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo, Ejae & Mark Sonnenblick, songwriters (Huntrix: Ejae, Audrey Nuna & Rei Ami)
• “Luther”
  • Jack Antonoff, Roshwita Larisha Bacha, Matthew Bernard, Ink, Scott Bridgeway, Sam Dew, Kendrick Lamar, Mark Anthony Spears, Solána Rowe & Kamasi Washington, songwriters (Kendrick Lamar and SZA)
• “Manchild”
  • Amy Allen, Jack Antonoff & Sabrina Carpenter, songwriters (Sabrina Carpenter)

Beato finds “Wildflower” the best for this year; it is, he says, a “great song”. (This is Eilish’s tenth Grammy.)  While I don’t think it’s great, it is very good, and miles above all the other nominees. And it won. I’ll put it below. He simply dismisses the other seven songs, though a few have some merit, like being “well produced.”

The reasons Beato finds this year’s songs worse are that they are in general lame, derivative, often include many songwriters (too many writers spoil the song), and sometimes include sampling from older songs.

In contrast, only one of the 1984 songs has more than one writer, and all include the singer as a composer.  (Note that one is by Bad Bunny, and Beato can’t understand the words!)  Beato’s takeaway is that nobody will remember songs written by so many people, and nobody will remember these latest songs more than three years from now.

Beato:

Here is “Wildflower,” live with Billie Eilish (the official release is here, and the lyrics are here). The only accompaniments are a guitar, bass, two sets of drums, and three backup singers.

There’s an potpourri of Darwin-related material at the Friends of Darwin Newsletter website, especially extensive because today is Darwin Day.  Click below to read it; it discusses pollination (Athayde’s favorite topic), recommends two new books, and has a bunch of evolution-related links. I’ll put those below the screenshot. Today’s newsletter was written by Richard Carter.

The “missing links” (indents are quotes from article)

Some Darwin-related articles you might find of interest:

1. The importance of Charles Darwin’s documentary archive has been recognised by its inclusion on the UNESCO International Memory of the World Register. The Darwin Archive comprises documents held at Cambridge University Library, the Natural History Museum in London, the Linnean Society of London, Darwin’s former home at Down House in Kent, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the National Library of Scotland.
2. Podcast episode: The History of Revolutionary Ideas: Darwin.
   David Runciman talks to geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about the book that fundamentally altered our understanding of just about everything: Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.
3. Video: Darwin’s unexpected final obsession with earthworms.
4. Darwin Online has published Charles Darwin’s address book. Here’s their introduction, and here’s the address book.
5. The University of Edinburgh recently completed a five-year programme to catalogue, preserve, and enhance access to the Charles Lyell Collection. Geologist Lyell was a close friend of Darwin, and major influence on his work. Here’s the collection’s snazzy new website.
6. Leonard Jenyns on the variation of species and Charles Darwin on the origin of species 1844–1860
   At the 1856 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Rev. Leonard Jenyns (1800−1893) delivered one of the most significant statements on the nature and the origin of species in the years immediately preceding Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jenyns was a long-standing friend of Darwin and had turned down the place aboard HMS Beagle subsequently taken by Darwin.
7. The November 2025 issue of the journal Paleobiology contained a collection of papers exploring Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould’s 1972 paper on punctuated equilibria, in which they argued that species don’t always evolve through slow, steady change. Instead, the fossil record shows long periods in which species remain remarkably stable, interrupted by relatively brief bursts of evolutionary innovation linked to the origin of new species. The Paleobiology papers include a retrospective review of the importance of the idea of punctuated equilibria, and Niles Eldredge’s personal reflections.
8. Talking of brief evolutionary bursts, a recent paper finds that most living species derived from large groups which evolved in relatively short periods of time; or, as they put it, rapid radiations underlie most of the known diversity of life.
9. Talking even more of evolutionary bursts, another recent study suggests changes in solar energy fuelled high speed evolutionary changes 500-million years ago. (See also the original journal paper Orbitally‐driven nutrient pulses linked to early Cambrian periodic oxygenation and animal radiation.)
10. The case for subspecies—the neglected unit of conservation
    To lump or to split? Deciding whether an animal is a species or subspecies profoundly influences our conservation priorities. (See also my old post Lumpers v Splitters.)
11. Sexual selection in beetles leads to more rapid evolution of new species, long-term experiments show
    40 years of experiments following 200 generations of beetles show the importance of sexual selection in the emergence of new species. (See also the original journal paper: The effects of sexual selection on functional and molecular reproductive divergence during experimental evolution in seed beetles.)
12. Why did life evolve to be so colourful? Research is starting to give us some answers
    If evolution had taken a different turn, nature would be missing some colours.
13. Some of the biggest fossils Darwin sent home from the Beagle voyage were those of extinct giant ground sloths, Megatherium and Mylodon. Scientists have figured out how extinct giant ground sloths got so big and where it all went wrong.
14. Large brains and manual dexterity are both thought to have played an important role in human evolution. A new study has found that primates with longer thumbs tend to have bigger brains, suggesting the brain co-evolved with manual dexterity. (See also the original journal paper Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand.)
15. Thumbs and brains are all well and good, but paleoanthropologist John Hawks explores another human characteristic that remains an enduring evolutionary enigma: what the heck are chins for?

I haven’t looked at them all, but I did look at two related to my own field—speciation. I like article #10, called “In praise of subspecies,” which explains what subspecies are (they’re called “races” of plants and animals by many biologists), and  tells us how recognizing them will reduce the number of species. (This won’t satisfy all biologists, for many disagree with me that modern humans and Neanderthals are subspecies, not distinct species.) But I disagree with the author, Richard Smyth, who thinks that all subspecies should be units of conservation. That is, genetically and morphologically different populations of a species should all be conserved if they are considered “endangered”.  One should do that when possible, of course, but I feel the unit of conservation—the thing that must be saved, is the biological species. But Smyth gives a good summary of what subspecies are.

Biologists have long thought (and Allen Orr and I have a chapter on this in our book Speciation) that sexual selection promotes speciation by driving isolated populations in different directions, eventually leading to some of them becoming reproductively incompatible, through either unwillingness to mate or creating problems in hybrids. The experiments described in #11 are interesting, and show more divergence in populations of beetles that are subject to sexual selection than in those constrained to be monogamous, but they don’t show the advent of reproductive barriers between populations. They do, however, show more divergence in the sexually-selected population, which is posited to be the first step in speciation.

Remember, Darwin’s greatest book was called On the Origin of Species (a shortened title).  Yet he didn’t help us understand species very much, as he had no concept of species being groups separated by reproductive barriers. It wasn’t until the 1930s that biologists began to understand how new species originated when they realized that the key to understanding the “lumpiness” of nature—distinct species in one area—was figuring out how those groups could coexist, and that meant understanding how reproductive barriers arise. Darwin’s book would have been more appropriately titled On the Origin of Adaptations.

And that is my pronouncement for Darwin Day. I do recommend reading the first chapter of Speciation, but if you’re not an evolutionary biologist you can forget about the rest, which becomes technical at times.

xh/t: Athayde

In conjunction with its new sponsor, The Free Press, CBS News is launching a series of debates and town hall presentations. One of them is a debate about God featuring Steve Pinker and Ross Douthat, which should be a barn-burner. I am informed that that debate will take place on February 26, and will be broadcast live.

Douthat, as you know, has been flogging his new pro-Christianity book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and I’ve discussed excerpts published by Douthat here. It appears to be the usual guff, arguing that stuff about the Universe that we don’t understand, like consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics, comprise evidence for a creator God. Assessing all gods, Douthat (a pious Catholic) finds that the Christian one appears to be the “right” god. Are you surprised?

Pinker is an atheist, and has written about nonbelief from time to time in his books, but has not written an entire book on it.  I look forward to this debate, which will be broadcast live on THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, so mark your calendars. Pinker will surely be ready to answer Douthat’s shopworn “evidence,” so it should be fun.

Click below to access the general announcement.

Below: the series’ rationale and its upcoming debates and interviews. No dates and times have been announced save my finding out that Pinker vs. Douthat is on February 26.

This is, of course, the result of Bari Weiss becoming Editor of CBS News, and I’m not sure how I feel about this endeavor. Note that it’s sponsored by the Bank of America.

We live in a divided country. A country where many cannot talk to those with whom they disagree. Where people can’t speak across the political divide – or even sometimes across the kitchen table.

THINGS THAT MATTER aims to change that.

Sponsored by Bank of America, THINGS THAT MATTER is a series of town halls and debates that will feature the people in politics and culture who are shaping American life. The events will be held across the country, in front of audiences who have a stake in the topics under discussion.

This launch comes on the heels of CBS News’ successful town hall with Erika Kirk, which drove double-digit ratings increases in its time slot and generated 192 million views across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X – making it CBS News’ most-watched interview ever on social media.

JAC: Note that the town hall with Erika Kirk was NOT a success; it was lame and uninformative. There’s a link to the video below. Back to the blurb:

The events take Americans into the most important issues that directly affect their lives – immigration, capitalism, public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, artificial intelligence and the state of politics. The debates echo the country’s 250th anniversary, showing how the power of America’s earliest principles – civil, substantive discussion, free of rancor – have immense value today.

“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. “This series is for them. In a moment in which people believe that truth is whatever they are served on their social media feed, we can think of nothing more important than insisting that the only way to get to the truth is by speaking to one another.”

Bank of America has joined THINGS THAT MATTER as its title sponsor. Tracing its lineage to 1784, Bank of America is sponsoring the series in support of dialogue and debate during the country’s 250th anniversary year.

THINGS THAT MATTERwill kick off in the new year. An early look includes:

Town Halls:

• Vice President JD Vance on the state of the country and the future of the Republican Party.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on artificial intelligence.

• Maryland Governor Wes Moore on the state of the country and the future of the Democratic Party.

• In case you missed it: Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk on political violence, faith and grief – watch it here.

Debates:

• Gen Z and the American Dream: Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson. Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?

• God and Meaning: Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker. Does America Need God?

• The Sexual Revolution: Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey. Has Feminism Failed Women?

Readers are welcome to weigh in below on the topics and format of this forum.

I missed this Bill Maher “New Rules” clip from last October, but better late than never.  In this segment called “Crazy in gov,” Maher assesses whether Democrats or Republicans are more deranged,  Although he does point out some craziness on the part of “progressives,” but it is the Republicans who get the Most Deranged prize. So much for people who think Maher is right. He’s a classical liberal, for crying out loud!

I feel sorry for press secretary Karoline Leavitt, forced to mouth ardent defenses of Trump, but on the other hand maybe she actually believes the pablum she regurgitates.

Maher’s guests here are Michael Steele, co-host of MNBC Weeknight, and CNN political analyst Kate Bedingfield, who was former White House director of communications under Biden.

UPDATE: I couldn’t make out the lyrics, but Grok gave what he sang (h/t Luana), so it isn’t nearly as obscene as the entire lyrics linked here. But there are still obscene bits, not to mention suggestive ones. I suggest you use Google translate on this Spanish: “Si te lo meto no me llame'” And “if I put it in”? What does that mean?

So consider this a partial retraction. However, it’s still a pretty dirty song and there is also the crotch-grabbing and mock copulation.

[Parte II: Yo Perreo Sola + Safaera][Refrán: Nesi & Bad Bunny]
Ante’ tú me pichaba’ (Tú me pichaba’)
Ahora yo picheo (Mmm, nah)
Antes tú no quería’ (No quería’)
Ahora yo no quiero (Mmm, no)
Ante’ tú me pichaba’ (-chaba’)
¡Las mujeres en el mundo entero!
Ahora yo picheo
Antes tú no quería’
Ahora yo no quiero
¡Perreando sin miedo!English Translation:
Before, you ignored me (You ignored me)
Now I ignore you (Mmm, nah)
Before, you didn’t want to (Didn’t want to)
Now I don’t want to (Mmm, no)
Before, you ignored me (-ignored)
Women all over the world!
Now I ignore you
Before, you didn’t want to
Now I don’t want to
Twerking without fear![Coro: Nesi & Bad Bunny, Ambos]
No, tranqui, yo perreo sola (Mmm, ey)
Ey, ey, ey, mueve, mueve, mueve
Yo perreo sola (Perreo sola)
Okey, ey, eyEnglish Translation:
No, chill, I twerk alone (Mmm, ey)
Ey, ey, ey, move, move, move
I twerk alone (Twerk alone)
Okay, ey, ey[Verso: Bad Bunny]
Mi bi anda fuga’o y yo quiero que tú me lo esconda’
Agárralo como bonga
Se mete una que la pone cachonda, ey
Brinca en los Audi, no en los Honda, ey
Si te lo meto no me llame’
Que esto no es pa’ que me ame’
Si tu novio no te—
Pa’ eso que no—, ey, eyEnglish Translation:
My thing is on the run and I want you to hide it for me
Grab it like a bonga
She takes one that makes her horny, ey
She jumps in the Audis, not in the Hondas, ey
If I put it in you, don’t call me
‘Cause this isn’t for you to love me
If your boyfriend doesn’t—
For that he doesn’t—, ey, ey[Puente: Bad Bunny]
En el perreo no se quita
Fuma y se pone bella, ey
Me llama si me necesita, ey
Pero por ahora está solita
Ella perrea—English Translation:
In the twerking she doesn’t stop
She smokes and gets beautiful, ey
She calls me if she needs me, ey
But for now she’s alone
She twerks—The medley transitioned into the next song after this bridge, cutting off before delving into additional explicit verses from the full studio version of “Safaera” (such as references to more graphic sexual acts or substances). This kept the performance energetic but toned down for the event. 

I didn’t plan to watch the Superbowl or its halftime show, and I didn’t.  But when I heard that Bad Bunny was the headliner of the halftime show, and reading that this was repeatedly described as “historic”, I figured his ethnicity was what made it “historic”, though I didn’t know his ethnic background.  Looking him up, I saw that he’s a Puerto Rican rapper, producer, and singer, and occasionally a professional wrestler. Wikipedia describes him as being “widely credited with helping Spanish-language rap reach mainstream global popularity and is considered one of the greatest Latino rappers of all time.” The article below says

So I figured, okay, he’s the first Hispanic to perform at halftime after 59 previous Superbowls.  But that seemed weird; surely there were others before him. Sure enough, Grok told me this:

Several Hispanic or Latino artists have performed at the Super Bowl halftime show prior to Bad Bunny’s appearance in 2020. Here’s a list of them, including the years they performed and brief notes on their heritage:

Gloria Estefan (Cuban-American): Performed in 1992 (Super Bowl XXVI, with Miami Sound Machine), 1995 (Super Bowl XXIX, with Miami Sound Machine), and 1999 (Super Bowl XXXIII).

Arturo Sandoval (Cuban): Performed in 1995 (Super Bowl XXIX).

Christina Aguilera (Ecuadorian descent): Performed in 2000 (Super Bowl XXXIV).

Enrique Iglesias (Spanish): Performed in 2000 (Super Bowl XXXIV).

Taboo (Jaime Luis Gomez of The Black Eyed Peas) (Mexican descent): Performed in 2011 (Super Bowl XLV).

Bruno Mars (Puerto Rican descent): Performed in 2014 (Super Bowl XLVIII) and 2016 (Super Bowl 50).

Gustavo Dudamel (Venezuelan): Conducted the orchestra in 2016 (Super Bowl 50). 

So I didn’t know what was “historic” about Bad Bunny’s appearance, but I supposed that it was because he sang in Spanish. Well, that’s one thing, but probably the most salient reason for all the excitement and praise was that the show occurred at an opportune moment: a time when liberal Americans, in the face of ICE’s assaults, can show their colors by being pro-immigrant (though Bad Bunny is, like all Puerto Ricans, an American citizen by birth).  As the article by David Volodzko in The Radicalist below begins (WARNING: graphic, sexual, and obscene language!):

The Apple Music Super Bowl LX halftime show opened in a sugar cane field with Bad Bunny singing in Spanish about girls sucking his dick, featuring guest appearances by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, some rapping about fucking girls with big tits in his car with his erect penis, then the dancers waved the flags of various Latin American countries with a sign that read, “Together, we are America,” and Bunny listed the countries of the Americas. At least it was entertaining. The political message was about as subtle as anything else Bad Bunny writes. We are all American. All Latinos are American. All the illegal immigrants coming to America from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras are American. Love defeats hate. Oppose ICE. Or something like that. The guy’s not exactly a philosopher.

As TODAY says, “Bad Bunny celebrated the history, culture and pride of Puerto Rico with his historic Super Bowl 2026 halftime show.” (The link also gives all the songs he sampled in the show.) Also, note that Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Cardi B, and Karol G. made cameo appearances in the show.

Here: take 13 minutes and watch for yourself, and note that, as a few readers said yesterday, he grabs his crotch quite a bit. Watch it by clicking on the “Watch on YouTube below” icon or here.

Click to read.

The point of the article, besides Bad Bunny’s obscenity, is that “Americans” refer to people in the U.S., not generally Latinos. Well, that doesn’t bother me. But Volodzko points out not only that this was not at all the first Spanish artist headlining the Superbow, and that the show was overly woke (again, I couldn’t care less).  The part I’m pointing out here is not only humorous but hypocritical: the nature of the show, with Bad Bunny grabbing his crotch and singing Spanish lyrics so obscene that I have to put them below the fold, would not be tolerated if the show was in English. Even Bad Bunny wouldn’t even get away with it if the lyrics were in English.

Remember when Justin Timberlake (accidentally) tore off Janet Jackson’s nipple cover at the Superbowl halftime show, exposing her nipple? That caused a huge scandal, which was called Nipplegate and has its own article on Wikipedia. Football is one of our national sports, and Americans want a good, clean halftime show.  I have to say that Bad Bunny’s show was lively and enjoyable, but think again when you read the lyrics below.

Finally, Volodzko avers that trying to mainstream Hispanic culture is unnecessary as it’s already here:

You see, Bad Bunny’s halftime performance signals the mainstreaming of Latin culture in America at a time when Latinos make up 20% of the population. The problem is, this abrasive performance was also totally unnecessary. It comes off like a celebration of Latino diversity, as if America has finally reached a moment when Latinos can be themselves. We’re here — deal with it. Except Latinos don’t need any mainstreaming. Shakira and J. Lo already did the halftime. Despacito was the No. 1 song in the United States and everybody loved it. Coco is one of the biggest Disney movies of all time. Chipotle is everywhere. Americans love Latin culture. Bad Bunny is declaring victory in a war that no longer exists. That’s because the subtext here is Trump, ICE, and immigration. And I’m sorry, but if that’s the conversation we’re having, then we are not all Americans.

I love Latin america. I have lived in many parts, including Puerto Rico. I am married to a Latina and we have a Latina daughter. I speak Spanish, I cook Latin food, and I dance salsa. Latin culture is a permanent part of my everyday life. Saying that we are not all Americans is not in any way disrespectful to Latinos. It’s just a fact.

Again, this isn’t a big deal to me. But the part below is—not that I’m a prude, but that Bad Bunny’s lyrics wouldn’t be tolerated except by people who don’t understand Spanish.  If he sang them in English, it would be a scandal worse than Nipplegate.

Writing for The Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli described it as “close to art” and “a cultural moment, a paradigm shift.” Time characterized the show as “a fierce act of resistance” and “a sharp cultural and history lesson.” I could go on, but I’ll spare you. What I won’t spare you, however, are his lyrics. Yes, I’m exactly the kind of white-privileged male that Fienberg is taking about. One who looks things up. Here are some selected lyrics from the song “Safaera,” which Bad Bunny sang during the show:

GO BELOW THE FOLD TO SEE THESE LYRICS IN ENGLISH, which you can see in Spanish here, I had them checked by a friend of mine of Puerto Rican descent, and she said they were “adequate enough”. She was also said they were “disgusting.”

They are about as graphically obscene as yu can get.  Would they appear in a halftime show in English? Of course not.  They didn’t fly among many Hispanics, either. Here’s a contrast between assessments of Bad Bunny’s sbow by the Washington Post versus UHN Plus, a very popular Spanish-language online newspaper originating in Miami.

REPORT: Washington Post calls BAD BUNNY’S performance “wholesome” and full of “traditional family values” PROVING once again it is less trustworthy than a transgender priest. pic.twitter.com/MDnHxiSDoz

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) February 10, 2026

Wholesome? Did they even translate the lyrics?

I asked Luana, who speaks Spanish as well as her native Portuguese, to translate the UHN bit in the tweet on the right, and it says this: “Critique of the halftime show: images that generate embarrassment and reproach on the part of the public.”

There you go.  In the photo, of course, Bad Bunny is feigning copulation with a woman. I can’t see this as exactly a “wholesome” depiction of Hispanic culture. (It isn’t of course: it’s seen through the misogynistic lens of Bad Bunny.)

Anyway, if you don’t mind sexually graphic lyrics, go below the fold and read what Bad Bunny, who was very bad, sang during the show. Here’s the penultimate paragraph  from Volodzko:

You can decide whether you think the Super Bowl should be family-friendly or whether that ship has sailed. But I don’t think the English equivalent of this song would be allowed. So then what’s going on here? That’s the part that bothers me most about this latest flashpoint in our culture wars. I couldn’t care less whether Bad Bunny performed. I don’t watch the Super Bowl. But it’s the attempt to bullshit me, to gaslight me, to get away with something as if I wouldn’t notice, that rubs the wrong way. For example, to sing about girls sucking you off in front of millions of Americans and then pretend that people are objecting simply because they don’t like the sound of Spanish. Oh, because xenophobia is the problem, is it? Or as if Americans have a serious anti-Latino issue that needs addressing.

Rumors that BB was fined $10 million for crotch-grabbing and obscenity are false, though he was guilty of both!

Click “continue reading” to see the lyrics in English:

Part of the lyrics from “Safaera,” sung during halftime:

Pussy with dick, dick with ass (push it in)
Pussy with dick, dick with ass, yes (push it in)
Pussy with dick, dick with ass (push it in)
Your tits rubbing my nipples (push it in) …

Really big tits like Lourdes Chacón
Really big ass like Iris Chacón
I don’t know why I haven’t seen the pussy
But let’s go to bed to fuck you in panties …

I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt
To see what is hidden in your pants
I want to grind on you and grind on you and grind on you (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and grind on you and grind (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt, a blunt (hard, hard)
The ecstasy is already kicking in …

My dick is being chased and I want you to hide it
Grab it like a bonga
She took a pill that made her horny
She fucks in the Audi, not in the Honda, ayy
If I give it to you, don’t call me
Cause this is not to make you love me, ayy
If your boyfriend doesn’t eat your ass
He better fuck off

Come down to my house, I’ll lick it all up
Mami, I’ll lick it all up
Come down to my house, I’ll wear you out, ayy
I’ll wear you out
Come down to my house, I’ll lick it all up (papi, keep going!)
Mami, I’ll lick it all up (papi, keep going!)
Tell me, servant (papi, keep going)
If you smoke weed (papi, pa-papi) …

The dealer is twerking (hard!)
It seems like she fucks well while high
I want to take a selfie with that huge ass (wow)
Erect, erect, I’m erect, and it shows (whoa, whoa)
What are we gonna do with that huge ass?
In university they’re all A, A, A
But those tits are C
You are super horny, mami, I already know
I’m also horny, what are we gonna do?
With that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
Go crazy with that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
If you have that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
If you have that bum-bum, go crazy, buoh!

No, I’m not Martin Luther King, Jr., but I did fall asleep at my desk an hour ago because of my raging insomnia.  I did sleep well, however, for I had a very vivid dream, and dreams occur only during deep, restful sleep. This was a weird one, and though I’m not a Freudian who interprets dreams, I have no idea why my neurons created this scenario:

I was in a restaurant with tables and partitions between them, and at the partition by the next table was George Harrison with a guitar, singing “Blackbird.” That in itself was weird because that song is solely a Paul McCartney song, written and sung by him alone. But Paul McCartney himself was also there, standing right next to me at a partition with his arm around my waist. As Harrison got to the last line, “You were only waiting for this moment to arise,” McCartney leaned over and gave me a big wet kiss on the cheek. Then I woke up.

Before I fell asleep, I was dispirited at the state of America, and of my friends, all of which depresses me. Between our crazy President doing one stupid thing or another, and my Facebook page having all my friends saying constantly how bad Trump (and ICE) is, I cannot get away from American politics and its divisiveness.

Why do I keep looking, you ask? I will give Mencken’s quote from his great 1949 collection, Chrestomathy (everyone should have this book):

Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?

Here’s Macca singing “Blackbird”; this, at least cheers me up (the last line of the song here differs from that above):

Today we have some urban arthropod photos taken in Scotland by Marcel van Oijen. Marcel’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Urban wildlife in Scotland: 11 insects and 1 spider

Marcel van Oijen

This website recently hosted pictures of vertebrates in our Edinburgh garden. This time we show some of our favourite arthropod visitors. Unlike the vertebrates, which we see year-round, insects in Scotland are easiest to spot in the summer, followed by spiders in autumn. The following pictures were taken between mid-July and mid-September.

When we walk on the grass in summer, we see small bits of straw rising up and landing a meter or so away. Those are Straw Grass Moths (Agriphila straminella), one of the 2500 moth species in the UK. Grass moths are micromoths of about 1 cm length. When they land on the grass, they immediately freeze and allow themselves to be photographed from up close:

Once or twice a year we put out the moth trap to see what lives in our garden. The trap is just an open box with a lamp above. The moths fly toward the light and hide in the box, allowing us to admire them the next morning. Mornings are relatively cold, so most boxed moths hesitate to fly away even when we carefully take them out and take pictures. It is still not fully clear why moths are drawn to artificial light, but flight analysis suggests they treat lamps and natural light sources in the same way . We see Orange Swift Moths (Triodia sylvina) quite often. They are doing well, populations are increasing and expanding further into Scotland, but they are yet to reach Ireland.

Scalloped Oak Moth is another common species (Crocallis elinguaria):

There are 57 species of butterfly in the U.K. of which 35 breed in Scotland. We see Comma butterflies (Polygonia c-album) more and more each year:

There are two insects in this picture! Notice the huge size difference between the Buff-Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) and the Highland Midge (Culicoides impunctatus). The cute little midge is the reason why we don’t go wild camping in the Scottish Highlands in the summer, but in Edinburgh they are still fairly rare:

This is the most common hoverfly species in the U.K. (Helophilus pendulus):

The Peacock (Aglais io) is found all across Eurasia, and we see it very often. It is beautiful (but we like the moths more):

Like many larger butterflies, the Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) lets itself easily be photographed if you slowly move toward it, staying as low as you can:

The macromoth species that we see the most is the Large Yellow Underwing (Noctua pronuba). You can see that this one is nearing the end of its lifetime:

I find it difficult to take pictures of flies, so was happy to see this Common Siphona Fly (Siphona geniculata) land on the flower that I had just focused on:

The Eyed Ladybird (‘Ladybug’ in American) (Anatis ocellata) is one of the prettiest aphid-eaters:

And this is the only spider for today: a subadult of the Lesser Garden Spider (Metellina segmentata). Seeing it is a sign that autumn has come:

I have a busy day and can’t brain otherwise, so I’ll put up a video of the entire T.A.M.I. Show, an epochal rock and roll show, with many greats (see below) from 1964.

Why epochal? Well, for one thing, it introduced a white audience (I can’t see any non-whites in it) to black music, and not just soul music, but the blackest of black music: the music of James Brown, also known as the “Godfather of Soul” or “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” (he was).  He blew away most of the other performers, who were numerous and themselves good musicians.  Chuck Berry also appears twice (see below), and there was also more standard soul music that must have been new to most of the white students, including Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. I would date this show as the beginning of popularity of black rock and roll, though others might differ.

From Wikipedia:

T.A.M.I. Show is a 1964 concert film released by American International Pictures It includes performances by numerous popular rock and roll and R&B musicians from the United States and England. The concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28 and 29, 1964. Free tickets were distributed to local high school students. The acronym “T.A.M.I.” was used inconsistently in the show’s publicity to mean both “Teenage Awards Music International” and “Teen Age Music International”.

In 2006, T.A.M.I. Show was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

. . . T.A.M.I. Show is particularly well known for the performance of James Brown and the Famous Flames, which features his legendary dance moves and explosive energy. In interviews, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has claimed that choosing to follow Brown and the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) was the worst mistake of their careers, because no matter how well they performed, they could not top him. In a web-published interview, Binder takes credit for persuading the Stones to follow Brown, and serve as the centerpiece for the grand finale in which all the performers dance together onstage.

It used to be nearly impossible to see this (I watched it on a rented CD), but now much of it, including James Brown’s performance, is on YouTube—for free.  Here’s the set list in the entire concert, in order of appearance (from Wikipedia):

Do NOT miss James Brown, who comes on (with his Famous Flames) at one hour, 17 minutes into the show. As far as I can see, this video incorporates most but not all of the performances, and not in the order listed above. You can scroll through it to see your favorites, but James Brown’s appearance was historic for rock and roll, so don’t scroll past that one. Chuck Berry does a good performance at the start and then again at 13:30.

I used to subscribe to the New York Review of Books, which, while sometimes a repository for boring academic cat-fights, often included engaging and illuminating articles—until fabled editor Bob Silvers died in 2017.  Now, under the leadership of editor Emily Greenhouse, the magazine, always Left-leaning, seems to have become more progressive.

The article by gender scholar Paisley Currah in the December issue, for example, fully accepts the argument that trans people are fully and legally equivalent to the sex that they transitioned to or think they are, not their natal sex.  While for most issues trans people should have the same legal rights as cis people, I’ve argued that in a few cases, like sports, confinement in jails, and right to have a rape counselor or battered-woman’s helper the same as one’s natal sex, trans “rights” conflict with women’s “rights”. Further, an enlightened resolution of those “rights” involves accepting the biological definition of sex, based on gamete type, rather than the self-identification of sex adopted by many gender activists and “progressives.”

You can read the NYRB article by clicking below, or find it archived here.

What’s useful about Currah’s article is its summary of the history of legislation involving both biological sex and self-identified gender, as well as discrimination against women if they stepped outside what was seen as their “proper roles”. What’s not so useful is that Currah swallows the whole hog of “progressive” gender activism, arguing that those who hew to the biological definition of sex are not only endangering feminism (in fact, the opposite is true), but buttressing the Right, including Trump and Team MAGA.  Here he is wrong, for he neglects the many liberals who question the view that you are whatever sex you think you are. (Most Americans, for example, do not think that trans-identified men (“trans women”) should compete on women’s sports teams.) Currah further argues, also mistakenly, that legislation accepting that biological sex can matter legally, is  really “anti trans”.  I would argue that, at least in the cases I mentioned above, it is in fact “pro woman.”

There’s no doubt that much of the legislation involving trans people is meant to buttress a conservative, religious-based agenda, and I disagree with a lot of it (I think, for example, that there’s no good reason to ban transgender people from the military).  But when there are real clashes of rights, what we need is discussion and argumentation, not name-calling or claims that adherence to a definition of sex based on biology is designed to “erase” trans people—or rests at bottom on bigotry.

You can see where Currah is going at the outset:

On April 27, 2023, Kansas became the first state in the country to institute a statewide definition of sex. “A ‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the law declared, “and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Since then dozens of state legislatures have introduced similar bills; sixteen have passed. In Indiana and Nebraska governors have issued executive orders to the same end. Each of these measures effectively strips transgender people of legal recognition.

While Currah, tellingly, never gives a definition of “man” or “woman,” he seems to tacitly accepts the self-identification principle: “a woman is whoever she says she is,” regardless if that person has had no hormone therapy or surgery, and has a beard and a penis. He rejects the biologicaL sex definition on the grounds that so many seemingly intelligent people do. People like Steve Novella and Agustín Fuentes, for example, argue that gamete-based sex is associated or can be disassociated from many other traits, including chromosome type, hormonal titer, chromosome content, and morphology, so there is no one way to define biological sex. I won’t go into the arguments about how a gamete-based defintion is both nearly universal and also helps us make sense of biology; I’ve gone through that a million times.  If you want a good take on sex, see Richard Dawkins’s Substack article). Here’s Currah again:

There is no single sound definition of “biological sex.” Even if you know the chromosomes of a fertilized egg, you can’t definitively determine which type of reproductive cells will develop. . . .

But that definition, too, flies in the face of current knowledge. Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia. For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column. Most people? The frequency of true intersex people in the population, estimated by serious people rather than ideologues, lies between about 1 in 5600 and 1 in 20,000.  This means that, for all intents and purposes, sex is a true binary.

Currah’s implicit definition of “sex” based on self-identification leads him to reject all forms of discrimination involving biological sex, including the “hard case” of sports, where biology makes the crucial difference:

That coercion isn’t confined to trans people: the current wave of efforts to enshrine biological definitions of sex pressures cis people, too, to conform to a conservative vision of gender difference. A sports ban in Utah led officials to investigate the birth sex of a cis girl after parents of her competitors complained.

And while he’s again not explicit about gender medicine—at a time when “affirmative care” is being recognized as harmful and is being rolled back for young people—he seems to buy that, too, and without age limits:

A blitz of anti-trans executive orders requires that passports list birth sex, trans women in federal prisons be housed with men and denied transition-related medical care, and federal employees use bathrooms associated with their birth sex.

I am not as concerned with bathroom bills (though single-person bathrooms are one solution) as with medical care.  No, allowing a 12-year old girl to have a double mastectomy, or a teenage boy to start taking estrogen or testosterone blockers, or any adolescent to take pubery blockers, do not comprise an “enlightened” form of care. What about therapy—objective therapy? What about the fact that the vast majority of gender-dysphoric adolescents not given hormones or surgery eventually resolve as gay people as opposed to trans people?

Currah’s main conclusion is that accepting a biological definition of sex, and thinking that biological sex matters, are not only bigots bent on erasing trans people, but also are doing severe damage to feminism:

By campaigning to make birth sex the sole basis for legal distinctions between men and women, advocates of a “gender critical” feminism evidently hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood without jeopardizing cisgender women’s access to the rights and freedoms that feminism won. But the logic of this position in fact aligns with—and ultimately serves—the desire to roll back feminism itself. That trans and nonbinary people have been able to move beyond their birth sex classifications is due precisely to the successes of the women’s liberation movement. And that movement’s most influential social victory, the decoupling of ideas about biology from ideas about how women ought to be, is precisely the achievement under threat today.

Currah doesn’t realize that liberals like me don’t give a damn about women’s “roles” or “how women ought to be,” but do care about the difference that biology makes when rights clash between groups. He doesn’t realize that those on the Left who emphasize biology are not “transphobes,” but accept trans people but also care about women’s rights—the rights of natal women. (Note that if you think you can be whatever sex you think you are, there is no such thing as “women’s rights”; there are just “people’s rights.” This goes along with the inability of those favoring trans rights, including the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Skrmetti case, to even define “man” and “woman”.)

In fact, what does “feminism” even mean for those who think that you’re whatever sex you think you are? Does a biological man who suddenly identify as a woman gain a new set of “rights”?  If so, what are they beyond the “right” to be called whatever pronouns you want? Tarring one’s opponents as conservatives, bigots, or transphobes accomplishes nothing; in fact, it’s counterproductive. And society is beginning to realize this.

I will tar people like Currah, though, with one word: “misguided”.

Well, I can’t omit Bill Maher’s 8-minute weekly comedy monologue, especially because this week it’s about betting.  I’ve always called gambling, betting enterprises, and lotteries “taxes on the stupid”, because people who spend their money that way don’t seem to know that the expectation of money is far less than they’re spending.  And it’s a regressive form of taxation, as the poor spend more than the rich, both absolutely and relatively. It’s just an easy way for governments to raise money.  I don’t approve of government-funded gambling at all.

In this episode, a good one, Maher recounts the history of gaming in America, and although he opposes it, he also says it’s okay because he’s a libertarian.  On the other hand, he argues that gambling is un-American because it puts fate rather than initiative in control of your life. (Maher clearly is not a determinist.) You’ll appreciate the picture of a young, entrepreneurial Maher at 6:56.

Did I ever gamble. Well, when I used to be in a place that had slot machines I’d put a quarter in one and that was it (I never won). One time I really did want to make a substantial bet was when I was in Scotland some years ago, and wanted to bet that the Queen Mother would live to be at least 100. My girlfriend wouldn’t let me go into the betting parlor, and in the end I would have won: she lived to be 101. I was betting on her genes.

The guests include former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Chrystia Freeland.