The Great Feminization

Helen Andrews | Compact Magazine

 

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym "J. Stone," argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire "woke" era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to "different availability of aptitude at the high end" as well as taste differences between men and women "not attributable to socialization." Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers's resignation.

The essay argued that it wasn't just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they'd cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria.

This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as "wokeness" is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before? 

 

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Are the U.S. and E.U. Governments Satanic?

John leake | Focal Points

As we related in our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19, just before Dr. McCullough departed to Washington D.C. for his Senate testimony on November 19, 2020, he had a disturbing conversation with his church pastor, Andrew Forrest.

“We don’t understand what’s happening in our world,” McCullough explained. “My YouTube videos about early treatment were taken down, and then my planned WebEx conference with an Australian MP about treatment was hacked. Now my hospital administrators are acting like I’m out of line for accepting a U.S. Senator’s invitation to testify about the disease. It’s as though, for the first time in history, our medical system is opposed to caring for the sick. What on earth is going on?”

Andrew wasn’t at all surprised.

“There are times when evil prevails over good in a large way,” he said. “We know from the dark periods of history that this has happened before, and now it’s happening again. What you describe is Satan working in the hearts and minds of people, sowing fear, confusion, and anger. All you can do is keeping trying to do good until it turns the tide. For your Senate speech, your message must be joyous and happy and clear, uncluttered by negative emotion. That way you will let the light of God shine forth in this darkness.

At the time Dr. McCullough told me this story, I thought that Pastor Forrest was being melodramatic. Surely, I thought, what he was describing was ordinary human fear and stupidity, and not the work of a supernatural being—a malevolent spirit called “Satan.”

Since then, I have been increasingly drawn to the conclusion that Pastor Forrest was onto something.

Even if one rejects the idea of the devil as a supernatural spirit that actually exists, a rational and impartial observer will still marvel at how large masses of humans will suddenly—as if infected with a spiritual contagion—participate in an irrational and highly destructive enterprise.

In researching my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, I examined how the “Devil” has been depicted in literature going back to the Bible.

The Greek word for devil, diábolos, means “the one who divides.” The English word “diabolic” comes from the Greek verb diabollein, which means “to tear apart.”

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Professors’ study disputes long-standing claim conservatives are more rigid thinkers

College Fix

Key Takeaways

• A recent study disputes the notion that conservatives are inherently more rigid in their beliefs, suggesting both conservatives and progressives exhibit similar psychological traits.
• The study, involving collaboration among professors, aimed to address biases in the social sciences' examination of political ideology and emphasized fair testing of the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis.
• Findings indicate that while conservatives can be rigid, this is only sometimes and to a minor degree, and political extremity at both ends correlates with less evidence-based belief updating.
• The research highlights the importance of ideological diversity in academia, suggesting that the lack of varied viewpoints may influence how political ideologies are studied.

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"Neurodiversity", needles, and 9am gin...

Comment: Highly recommended folks read this one...  Neurodiversity? No, vaccine injury...

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MIRI'S MASSIVE MISSIVES

One of my earliest experiences of realising that the world, and people, didn’t function quite as I’d been taught they did came - astonishingly enough - courtesy of school. Not via a lesson or teacher, of course, but rather, through one of my friends. 

I had a friend, we’ll call her Catherine, who, at the age of sixteen, was widely considered to have it all. She was extremely clever (and top of the class for everything), pretty, slim, and, for a swot, reasonably popular - she wasn’t in with the token Mean Girls (she was too nice for them), but she had two really close friends, Shauna and Natalie, who she did everything with. She even had neat handwriting and an immaculately tidy room. She might easily have been hated if she wasn’t so nice - but she was, and so everyone generally liked her.

She also had a very nice family: married parents who’d been together since school and got along well together, a younger brother she was close to, and nearby grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins.

You’d imagine, then, that Catherine was having quite a pleasant experience growing up, and I had assumed that she was, until one day after history class, she grabbed my arm and hissed in a low whisper:

“Will you walk to maths with me?”

“But I’m not in your maths class,” I said, puzzled. “You know I can’t count and I’m in with the remedials.”

“I know,” she said. “But can you just walk with me to mine anyway? You’ll still be able to get to yours on time.”

Thinking she must have some vitally important gossip or something to share with me, I accompanied her, but was left none the wiser when we got to her classroom and no such gossip had been divulged.

A few weeks later, the same thing happened again: after history, Catherine asked me to walk with her to maths.

I couldn’t understand it, and tried to think if there was anything linking these two events. The only thing I could think of was that on both occasions, our mutual friend Shauna - who was in Catherine’s maths class - hadn’t been in for history. Shauna had recently discovered the joys of alcopops, and older boys who could drive, and so was frequently MIA for morning classes.

So, eventually, I questioned Catherine about this, and was absolutely astonished when she shamefacedly admitted she needed me to walk with her from history to maths when Shauna wasn’t there, as she was too anxious to walk there on her own. She said she never walked to class alone and had structured her timetable specifically in order to make sure there was always a “crossover friend” to walk between classes with.

“But... but...” I stuttered, trying to get my head around how perfect, poised Catherine could be too scared to walk down a corridor on her own. “You walk to school on your own.”

“I know,” she said, eyes cast downwards in shame. “I’ve been stealing my mum’s gin and swigging it before I leave the house so I don’t get too anxious on the way.”

Believe me when I say if there was anyone in my year at school you would predict might start drinking hard liquor first thing in the morning, it was not Catherine. Shauna, maybe (Shauna, definitely, in later years, as it turned out) but not Catherine.

I couldn’t understand it.

One would normally associate that level of crippling anxiety and burgeoning alcoholism with a severely damaged and traumatised person, which Catherine was not. Although she did well at school, that wasn’t because of pressure from her parents, who hadn’t been particularly academic themselves and would have supported her to leave school at 16 had she wanted to, like they did. She had a good family, nice friends, a future full of potential - what was she so anxious about?

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What the hell is going on here, anyway?

Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com

Over the course of my young career here I've amassed a very eclectic group of readers from all across the political spectrum, which I quite enjoy. Sometimes I read the comments sections just to watch what happens when you bring people together from wildly different worldviews who wouldn't normally interact with each other very much and see how those reality tunnels dance together in a conversation or debate.

I can't rightly call my whole audience left-wing or right-wing, conspiracy theorists or anarchists, activists or intellectuals, or almost any other label I can think of. There's only one attribute that comes to mind which unites pretty much all of my readers and social media followers, and that's a drive to know what's really going on in the world. Their curiosity about what's going on in what specific field may differ from person to person, as do the conclusions they reach, but basically I think we're all united by a desire, perhaps often an obsessive one, to come to some understanding of what's really happening in the world.

If schools, news media and politicians told people what's really going on in the world, this curiosity wouldn't exist. There'd be no need to do deep investigations into what's really happening, because it would be public knowledge, right there in our faces every day, and I'd be out of a job. The only reason people like me get to make a living trying to expose what's really happening in the world to as many people as possible is because the teachers, news reporters and politicians don't do that job for us, and instead dedicate themselves to the craft of filling public consciousness with power-authorized lies. So people gather in little fringe communities like this one in an attempt to help each other slice through the fog of propaganda and disinfo.
We are truth seekers. We seek in different ways and we find different answers, but we are united by a burning desire for truth. By the question, "What the hell is going on here, anyway?"

And this is why I don't make any distinction between the quest to punch through the veil of establishment narrative management and the quest to come to a deep understanding of our own true nature. Some readers complain about the way I'll be writing about Russiagate or Venezuela one minute and then suddenly pivot to the illusory nature of the ego or processing early childhood trauma the next, but to me they're all exactly the same thing: it's all an attempt to describe the truth about what's really going on. 

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Smith: An Examination Of The Leftist Cult And Their Religion

Brandon Smith
Alt-Market.com

There is a common misconception among newer activists in the liberty movement that the idea of the “false left/right paradigm” means that there is no political spectrum; that the entire notion of left vs right is a fabrication. This is not exactly the case. When we talk about false paradigms in regards to politics (or geopolitics), what we are actually referring to is the elitist class, otherwise known as globalists, and the fact that they have no left or right political orientation. They do not care about Democrats or Republicans, they have no loyalty to either party. Their loyalty is to their own agenda, and they will exploit BOTH sides to get what they want whenever possible.

Beyond the globalists, average people do indeed fall on a political spectrum that could be broken down and simplified to a set of basic ideals or ideologies. On the left side of the spectrum we find the collectivists and socialists, who believe that society (the group) is vastly more important than the individual and that the actions of individuals must be strictly monitored and governed to prevent negative effects on the group.

The core argument of the leftists is:

“We are all a part of society and must act in harmony with society so that the system continues to function. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...”

On the right side of the spectrum we find the individualists, sovereignty activists and true conservatives. People who, in varying degrees, believe that society should be restricted from dictating the life of the individual and that group participation should be voluntary. Where leftists seek to centralize, people on the right seek to decentralize.
The argument of the conservative is:

“Without the individual the group does not exist. The group is an abstraction created in the mind. When groups do form they should only exist to serve and protect the inherent rights of individuals, not be used as a mechanism of control by weak people who are afraid to function on their own...” 

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70 Years Later, It's Still '1984'

Matthew Feeney

Inside Sources

 In October 1947 Eric Blair, known today by his pen name George Orwell, wrote a letter to the co-owner of the Secker & Warburg publishing house. In that letter, Orwell noted that he was in the “last lap” of the rough draft of a novel, describing it as “a most dreadful mess.” 

Orwell had sequestered himself on the Scottish island of Jura in order to finish the novel. He completed it the following year, having transformed his “most dreadful mess” into “1984,” one of the 20th century’s most important novels. Published in 1949, the novel turns 70 this year. The anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect on the novel’s significance and its most valuable but sometimes overlooked lesson.

The main lesson of “1984” is not “Persistent Surveillance is Bad” or “Authoritarian Governments Are Dangerous.” These are true statements, but not the most important message. “1984” is at its core a novel about language; how it can be used by governments to subjugate and obfuscate and by citizens to resist oppression.

Orwell was a master of the English language and his legacy lives on through some of the words he created. Even those who haven’t read “1984” know some of its “Newspeak.” “1984” provides English speakers with a vocabulary to discuss surveillance, police states and authoritarianism, which includes terms such as “Big Brother,” “Thought Police,” “Unperson” and “Doublethink,” to name a few.

The authoritarian government of Orwell’s Oceania doesn’t merely severely punish dissent — it seeks to make even thinking about dissent impossible. When Inner Party member O’Brien tortures “1984’s” protagonist, Winston Smith, he holds up his hand with four fingers extended and asks Smith how many fingers he sees. When Smith replies, “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!” O’Brien inflicts excruciating pain. After Smith finally claims to see five fingers, O’Brien emphasizes that saying “Five” is not enough; “’No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four.”

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The 4 Skills Every 18 year-old Should Have | COACH RED PILL

Comment: Don't always agree with this guy but he has a lot of good practical advise for young men.  He's also being covertly censored by the Youtube-Google monopoly so give him some support.

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Coach Red Pill

Researchers try to recreate human-like thinking in machines

The LGI network’s architecture. Credit: Qi and Wu. 

Ingrid Fadelli
Techexplore.com

Researchers at Oxford University have recently tried to recreate human thinking patterns in machines, using a language guided imagination (LGI) network. Their method, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could inform the development of artificial intelligence that is capable of human-like thinking, which entails a goal-directed flow of mental ideas guided by language. 

Human thinking generally requires the brain to understand a particular language expression and use it to organize the flow of ideas in the mind. For instance, if a person leaving her house realizes that it's raining, she might internally say, "If I get an umbrella, I might avoid getting wet," and then decide to pick up an umbrella on the way out. As this thought goes through her mind, however, she will automatically know what the visual input (i.e. raindrops) she observes means, and how holding an umbrella could prevent getting wet, perhaps even imagining the feeling of holding the umbrella or getting wet under the rain.

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You REALLY want to know? US Army asks members how serving ‘impacted’ them, gets schooled in replies

RT

The US Army probably expected an influx of patriotic replies when it asked for testimonies about people’s service. Instead, Twitter offered disturbing stories of debilitating injuries, mental health problems and suicide. 

It all began with a a video of a soldier who told the camera he joined to serve "something greater than myself." The army, the featured soldier said, had given him the opportunity to "give to others" and better himself "as a man and a lawyer."

The Army then made the mistake of asking Twitter at large for their thoughts.

That was where the patriotism ended. The account was quickly inundated with responses from former service members and their families — and they make for some seriously disturbing reading.

From damaged mental health and suicide, friends lost to war, post-traumatic stress (PTSD), nightmares and life-changing injuries, almost none of the responses were positive. 

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Manufacturing anxiety

Frank Furedi 
spiked.com

How the mental-health panic is messing up the next generation.

We live in a world in which children and young people are constantly told they are at risk of mental illness. Report after report claims that an epidemic of stress, anxiety, depression and other ailments is ruining young people’s lives. Every year the age of those at risk of mental-health problems seems to get lower. A recent report on children in Walsall, England claimed that children as young as three are suffering from mental-health issues. Last month a survey of schools concluded that schoolchildren’s mental health is at a ‘crisis point’. Teachers expressed a sense of helplessness. One said it was like ‘a slow-motion car crash for our young people that I am powerless to stop and can’t bear to watch or be part of anymore’.

Since the turn of the century, there has been a constant stream of scare stories about the apparently distressing state of young people’s mental health. Every year the scale of the epidemic appears to expand and the number of psychological problems afflicting the young seems to grow. Invariably, reports claim that ‘the crisis of mental health is far greater than we thought’.

One of the most unfortunate consequences of these claims of a mental-health crisis is that normal young people come to be treated as patients. This usually leads to a well-meaning but entirely counterproductive attempt to protect young people from the pressures of everyday life. Schools and universities have adopted practices that are better suited to a clinic than an educational institution. Last week it was reported that the University of Bristol will offer a 12-week happiness course for all of its students. The course will even make up 20 of the 120 credit points students pursue each year. 

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The Netflix Series “13 Reasons Why” Linked to a Spike in Suicide Rates

Vigilant Citizen

A study supported by the National Institute of Mental Health observed a near 30% increase in suicide rates amongst teenagers in the month following the release of “13 Reasons Why” on Netflix. 

Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry recently published a study titled Association Between the Release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and Suicide Rates in the United States: An Interrupted Times Series Analysis and its conclusion is quite telling:

The release of 13 Reasons Why was associated with a significant increase in monthly suicide rates among U.S. youth aged 10 to 17 years. Caution regarding the exposure of children and adolescents to the series is warranted.

According to the study, 13 Reasons Why was associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates amongst young people directly following its release in April 2017. The number of deaths by suicide recorded during this month was greater than the number seen in any single month during the five-year period examined by the researchers.

These results confirm prior concerns regarding the show. Indeed, immediately after its release, various mental health specialists and organizations warned against the insidious effects of the show on its viewership. The main problem: Graphic depiction of suicide combined the glorification of the person committing it.

“Mental health experts describe the show as worrisome and point to how its relatable characters and graphic depiction of suicide can pose a health risk for young people already struggling with mental health issues.”
– CNN, ’13 Reasons Why’ tied to rise in suicide searches online

Shortly after the show’s premiere, a study revealed that 13 Reasons Why was linked to a rise in suicide-related web searches, notably “How to commit suicide”.

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My Role in Weaponizing ‘Moral Equivalence’ and ‘Religious Freedom’

James George Jatras
Strategic Culture

It’s confession time …

Without getting overly autobiographical, it is worth noting that my perspectives (whatever their value) on American public policy and global affairs reflect decades of first-hand, professional experience in both the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government. The former was at the Department of State as a commissioned US Foreign Service Officer, the latter at the US Senate as a policy adviser to the Republican leadership.

I’d like to believe that at all times my intentions were to serve the best interests of my country as viewed in light of the most venerable principles of the American nation, as well as the Christian, European, and human values that once undergirded that nation.

However, the consequences of my efforts, together with those of others, sometimes went horribly wrong. On at least two occasions, there was, to say the least, a disconnect between good intention and sound judgment, between what I had hoped and expected could be achieved – and what turned out to be the results.

For example, as the (first) Cold War was entering its terminal phase, I was one of the primary planners and organizers of the May 1985 international conference in Washington, DC, “Moral Equivalence: False Images of U.S. and Soviet Values,” sponsored by the State Department and the Shavano Institute for National Leadership. As described byImprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, which later incorporated Shavano and published the remarks of some of the speakers, the conference brought together “forty-five participants from the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, Italy, Latin America, and Central Europe accepted the invitation to examine the issue of an alleged ‘moral equivalence’ between the two ‘superpowers.’ The attention this conference has received has been substantial. Articles have appeared in dozens of national publications such as Time, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Policy Review, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Post, and the New York Times, as well as in over 500 other newspapers throughout the nation.”

Among the headline participants were UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, the late, great Joseph Sobran, Richard Pipes, Sidney Hook, and many others spanning the spectrum from paleoconservatism, to libertarianism, to social democracy. As conceived by myself and other planners, the conference had a single message: that the godless ideology of Marxism-Leninism with its record of mass murder, destruction, and degradation (exemplified then by the USSR and its satellites) was not morally comparable to normal, non-ideological societies and states (then represented – so I believed at the time – by the United States and our allies.)

The conference was a smashing success (definitely worth the $45,000 allocated by the Department, though in the end Shavano commendably declined to accept the public funds, as reported by Imprimis). The phrase “moral equivalence” – which had been launched by Kirkpatrick a year earlier – became a widespread meme, with the communist Evil Empire weighed in the balances and found wanting.

Unfortunately “moral equivalence” is a meme that now just won’t die, even though the context for it receded into history a few years following our conference. What has since become evident (and maybe already was to eyes more discerning than mine at the time) was that the US and our (let’s be honest) satellites are every bit as ideological as the old Soviet Union. In fact, in some ways ours is the same ruling ideology as communism but shifted from economic class conflict of 
Bourgeoisie/Proletariat to new Oppressor/Victim paradigms defined by sex, race, religion, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, migration status, and so forth.

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Operation Mindfuck 2.0

Douglas Rushkoff
Medium.com

ropaganda used to mean getting people to believe stuff. Now it means getting them to question what they believe or whether there’s any truth at all. However disorienting this is, it may not be all bad.

The term “propaganda” originally referred to a 17th-century committee of Roman Catholic cardinals that sought to propagate the religion through foreign missions — the marginally and only temporarily benevolent face of European colonialism. In modern times, public relations guru Ed Bernays revived the term to describe the way Woodrow Wilson’s administration convinced Americans to support U.S. involvement in World War I. Propaganda was about telling the same story through so many media channels at once that there appeared to be only one story.

Today, however, the primary goal of government propaganda is to undermine our faith in everything. Not just our belief in particular stories in the news, but our trust in the people who are telling the stories, the platforms, and fact-based reality itself. Facts are, after all, the enemy of beliefs.

What many of us forget is that this new style of influence through disorientation is really an appropriation of the counterculture’s techniques. This is what the Situationists were doing. So were the hippies and “heads” of the 1960s.

Before Watergate anyway, it felt as if the press and the government were on the same side, telling the same story to us all. There was no way for the underfunded counterculture to compete with mainstream reality programming—except by undermining its premises. The flower children couldn’t overwhelm Richard Nixon’s National Guard troops, but they could put daisies in the barrels of their rifles.

Taken to the extreme, this sort of activist satire became Operation Mindfuck, first announced in 1968 by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their Illuminatus Trilogy. The idea was to undermine people’s faith in government, authority, and the sanctity of consensus reality itself by pranking everything, all the time.

The idea of Operation Mindfuck was to break the trance that kept America at war, blindly consuming, and oblivious to its impact on the rest of the world. Destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks and confusion. Say things that may or may not be true — but probably not. But maybe. 

Levitate the Pentagon as an act of protest. Publish conspiracy stories about Jackie Kennedy walking in on Lyndon Johnson sexually abusing the exit wound in JFK’s head when his body was being transported back to Washington, DC.

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Ignorance and Russophobia

Gordon Duff
NEO 

The roots of Russophobia run deep in the US. They go much further than censored or slanted media or political gameplaying in Washington. What has to, or at least should be accepted is that Russophobia is a belief system, just like a religion, but with no spiritual nature, no holy prophets but resembling the worst of religion. Russophobia is a religion of hate that no one understand or will acknowledge the root cause of.

Perhaps we might want to take a look.

We will examine how America’s view of the world took root due to the efforts of religious missionaries and was eventually hijacked by the Deep State.

We’re going to show how a powerful group, called the China Lobby, financed by massive American military aid, intended to fund Chaing Kai Shek’s fake war against Japan, bought Washington, “lock stock and barrel,” and began blaming Russia for the world’s ills.

Though Chaing himself was a lifelong communist and close friend of Stalin, as the Chinese rose against his ineffective rule after the defeat of Japan and began backing Mao tse Tung, a witch hunt began targeting pro-Russian Americans, anti-fascists, and blaming them for “losing China.”

A similar “blame Russia” effort went on when the US “lost Vietnam” to Ho Chi Minh. Few Americans remember or take note that Ho was America’s “man in Vietnam” against the Vietnamese and was, in actuality, placed in control of Vietnam by the US after the war.

It was only when France threatened to elect a communist government did the US back their colonial return to Vietnam which ended in the military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Similarly, in Korea, the US continued to back the Japanese puppet, Syngman Rhee, after Japan’s surrender in 1945. While MacArthur democratized Japan, America oversaw the slaughter of democratic elements in South Korea which led to the overall uprising that eventually brought in North Korea in what the US termed an “invasion.”

If this smells a bit of America’s actions in Syria more than half a century later, I think we can say that the pattern continues. 

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“Gender therapy” doctor admits to advising kids to fake being suicidal to get transgender “treatments”

The Bridgehead

Earlier this year, I noted that transgender activists were going to use data on the suicide rate in the transgender community to go after schools they consider insufficiently supportive of their ideological agenda, despite the fact that there is no evidence that physical transition actually reduces suicidal ideation. As it turns out, there are some medical quacks willing to go quite a bit further in their crusade to assist young children in the transition process, including a psychologist from British Columbia, Canada:

Dr. Wallace Wong…is facing calls for an inquiry into the conduct of his practice. On February 28…Wong spoke at an event hosted by Vancouver Public Library. In a tape of the event obtained by Canadian pro-family group Culture Guard, Wong is heard proudly describing the scope of his children-only “gender therapy” practice, noting that his youngest client is not yet three years old and that he has 501 orphans and foster kids in his local practice.

If true, this indicates Wong has likely used his relationship with the BC Ministry of Children and Family to diagnose more than 10 to 20 percent of local children in government care as needing his “gender therapy,” according to Culture Guard President Kari Simpson.

In Wong’s own words, his practice began in 2010 with just “four clients at the ministry” but in the course of nine years, there was such an enormous surge of need within that population that he now has “more than 500 kids, [with] just the Ministry alone…. So we can imagine the demand of service is soaring…. The phenomenon is happening a lot faster than – than we expected.”

Simpson expressed outrage at this “soaring” demand, claiming Wong was “gender-jacking” vulnerable children from the Ministry and “profiting” handsomely into the bargain.

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Study finds that women - but not men - seek to actively punish sexualized women

Eric W. Dolan
PsyPost

New research has found evidence that both men and women are prejudiced towards sexualized women. But only women are willing to endure a cost to themselves to punish a woman who appears to be promiscuous. The findings appear in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Across cultures, women and girls have been subjected to various attempts to control their sexuality. This has included slut shaming, female genital cutting, and honor killings.

The researchers from the University of Warwick wanted to better understand what motivates individuals to suppress female - but not male - sexuality. "If society is to understand and overcome the sexual double standard, interventionists should seek to uncover how men and women vary in their attitudes towards sexualized women," they explained.

In the study, participants played one of three kinds of economic decision-making games. The participants were led to believe they were playing against a female opponent in real-time, but were actually only interacting with computerized responses.

The opponents varied in whether they appeared to be sexually accessible or sexually restricted. For some participants, the opponent was depicted as a woman wearing a tight, red outfit and an abundance of makeup. For others, the opponent was depicted as a woman wearing loose-fitting clothing with less makeup. 

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Teenage Climate-Change Protestors Have No Idea What They’re Protesting

Felix Kirby 
Quillette

The Extinction Rebellion, which is the umbrella term for Britain’s most recent large-scale climate-change protests, is said to have disrupted the travel of over 500,000 people, as well as cost London businesses £12-million per day. Before that, the Youth for Climate strikes, ignited by Swedish teenager Greta Thurnberg and tacitly supported by the U.K. Government, pulled north of 1.4-million students into the streets on a school day. Given the magnitude of these protests, one might hope that the protestors understood what they were protesting. Regrettably, this isn’t the case. Global-warming research is a hugely complex field, and it’s unlikely that any ordinary person—let alone a minor—would have any real grasp of it. Nor would they be able to appreciate the uncertainty that characterizes our understanding of how today’s human activity will affect the future state of the earth’s climate.

As a teenager, I fully understand the mindset of young people. We’re predisposed to leap before we look. This is borne out by neuroscience. Our prefrontal cortices, which regulate (among other things) decision-making, planning, self-awareness and inhibition, do not fully develop until we are in our mid-20s. Until then, we have difficulty analyzing the long-term consequences of our actions. The upshot is that many young people tend toward reckless behaviour. Our decisions tend to be rooted not in scientific analysis but in emotional reaction; and we tend to see protest not as a tool for social or legislative change, but simply as a chance to upset the status quo. This is especially true of the Youth for Climate movement, which first took inspiration from Thunberg, a student who is now 16 years old. 

The low level of sophistication on display at such gatherings is such that many participants seemingly would be fine with laws than banned flying, driving, gas boilers or even cows.
Indeed, such protests often are presented to young people as social events. If there is a guarantee that you, as a young person, will be stuffed into a public place for a good few hours with a group of your peers, and given social licence to vent at great volume, why not just go and cause some trouble? The spectacle of state-sponsored educational bodies encouraging children to attend climate protests compounds the problem further, as it essentially shifts the cost of the missed lessons onto the taxpayer.

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See also: The cult of Greta Thunberg - child crusader of the eco-warriors

A Stoic’s Key to Living with Presence

Maria Popova
Brain Pickings

“Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time.”

 

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her abiding insistence on choosing presence over productivity. But how do we really spend our days? In our era, the average human lifetime will contain two years of boredom, six months of watching commercials, 67 days of heartbreak, and 14 minutes of pure joy. 

This devastating arithmetic of time wasted versus time meaningfully spent may seem like a modern problem, but while the nature of our cultural technologies has undeniably exacerbated the ratio, the equation itself stretches all the way to antiquity, with only the variables altered. (Lest we forget, books were derided as a dangerous distraction in 12th-century Japan.)

That equation, and how to balance it more favorably toward a life of substance and presence rather than one of waste and want, is what the great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined at the end of his life in Letters from a Stoic (public library) — a collection of 124 letters he composed to his friend Lucilius, which also gave us Seneca on true and false friendship, overcoming fear, and the antidote to anxiety. 

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‘Political correctness gone mad’: Lord Admiral slams maritime museum for gender-neutral ships

Comment: First steps to soft totalitarianism...

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RT

 

The de-gendering of ships by a maritime museum is “political correctness gone mad,” a retired senior British Royal Navy officer has said. He warned conceding to pressure groups is a “very dangerous road” to go down. 

 

Admiral Lord Alan West was responding to the Scottish Maritime Museum’s decision to introduce a “gender neutral interpretation” of ships, following a spate of vandalism targeting the words ‘she’ and ‘her’ on one of their signs.

Lord West, the former head of the Royal Navy, phoned BBC Radio 4’s Today show, to argue that boats have been referred to as ‘she’ for centuries, and scraping that tradition would be “absolutely stupid.”

It’s stark staring bonkers and political correctness gone mad… an insult to a generation of sailors, the ships are seen almost as a mother to preserve us from the dangers of the sea and also from the violence of the enemy.

David Mann, director of the maritime museum, in Irvine, Scotland, claims they have been forced into making the changes, saying offended vandals have targeted their “very expensive” signs for a second year in a row.

The museum will now phase in the use of new gender neutral signs, having recognized the changes in society around gender neutral interpretation, despite previously having followed the universally-adopted maritime tradition of referring to vessels as female.

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