Long ago, when the long-form, TV news program 60 Minutes was red hot, I watched some episodes of it. During that time, I saw them do 3 stories about topics I knew. Each time, their story was full of bias and lies. They weren't political stories, either. They were ordinary life stories where they had cherry-picked the facts they showed in such a skewed manner that their end product no longer resembled reality. I stopped watching.
Recently, AP writer Ted Anthony retweeted a story about the coup in Myanmar. I dutifully clicked on the link and read it. I realized halfway through that I had no idea whether any of the things described there had really happened or if there wasn't a much larger part of the story they had suppressed. The media / Big Tech collusion to hide the Hunter Biden story was like the 3 false 60 Minutes stories - it had wrecked the last bits of my trust in the press. The AP story also quoted machine politicians and referred to them as "diplomats." Right.
In a comment on my recent series of blog posts exploring how you might extend transgender classification to the general case, Tim left this link to a Functional Neurology article. Here's the abstract.
During the intrauterine period the fetal brain develops in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in transsexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no proof that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Emphasis mine.
Caveat: "Ambiguous sex at birth" is a huge out for the authors. I have no idea what that means outside of hermaphroditism. Still, the final sentence is total bullocks.
I know the last sentence to be a lie. I have intimate knowledge of an F2M transition and her sex was never ambiguous until she got in deep with the LGBT crowd. As my friend was going through the waiting period to start her testosterone treatment, I had a chance to ask my GP about it. He told me that it would destroy your career to question any of the transgender propaganda. I've known him for years and he's about as steady a man as you can find. He said he doesn't trust any of the research coming out of the journals on this topic.
While trying to save my first marriage, I began seeing a family therapist for marriage counseling. She was life-changing for me and I've continued to see her off and on for almost 30 years. She's a thorough leftist and a Buddhist to boot. We talked about the transgender thing and she told me that it made her nauseous to see the way her industry had surrendered in the face of the transgender craze. Lives were being ruined and none of her colleagues were standing up to the lies.
I recently read most of Abigail Shrier's book, Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Her research directly contradicts the italicized statement in the abstract quoted above. Abigail goes through the tranny craze's social mechanisms in detail and they perfectly match what I've seen in my friend and her trans friends as well.
That abstract is partially nonsense. There are mountains of proof that social environment after birth has a dramatic and probably dominant effect on gender identity.
Exactly as my doctor predicted, the editorial staff at Functional Neurology caved. It's not hard to guess their motives because they're no different than my own at work. Every week, I see several examples of Modern Nazi Race Theory published on my social networking apps and I keep quiet. I like the money. I've got plans for my future and I'm not about to risk them on some Quixotic quest to fight against the current race madness.
Bonus Anecdote: A while back, my F2M friend was living with her lesbian lover. She hadn't started her testosterone treatment yet, so I suppose she was still female. Her lover then came out as transgender, too. That meant that my friend had gone through this series of transitions:
heterosexual woman -> lesbian -> heterosexual man -> gay man
Maybe I don't have sufficient imagination, but it's hard to see how this was a product of things that happened in the womb instead of peer-pressure mania.
Super Special Bonus Analysis: There's another fundamental problem with the Functional Neurology article. For any given F2M, do you have the experimental data from when they were in the womb to make the case that the suggested mechanism occurred? No. And yet they feel confident in saying that there is no evidence otherwise. Actually, there's no evidence for their case. A candidate mechanism with no empirical evidence to support it isn't science, it's wish fulfillment.
I'll stop with the examples here and just ask this question. What happens when you can't trust your institutions any more?
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| A post-apocalyptic world doesn't have to be a bad thing. If you pull back from trying to change society at large, you can still grow tobacco and cotton, make watermelon wine, which will be my 2021 Dixie project, play with Raspberry Pis and write a lunatic blog. As an added bonus, there ought to be a glut of derelict cars to rebuild. |
8 comments:
The media / Big Tech collusion to hide the Hunter Biden story was like the 3 false 60 Minutes stories - it had wrecked the last bits of my trust in the press.
Is that the fault of the press for not running with a story they had no information on, or of Giuliani, who refused to share copies of the evidence with the press?
I agree that, overall, our press is horrible. That's partly because our press is capitalistic. Money flowing in matters more than accuracy. One reason my preferred source is NPR, which does not rely directly on views for money.
This is from the publishers summary of Irreversible Damage:
Every person who has ever had a skeptical thought about the sudden rush toward a non-binary future but been afraid to express it - this book is for you.
What is the advantage of keeping society "binary"? Whom does it help? Does this description read like a book that will challenge you and expand your understanding, or one that will cater to you by telling you what you want to hear?
What happens when you can't trust your institutions any more?
Some people become skeptical, some turn to authors who tell them what they want to hear.
In the 70s, Sunday night was TV night for my parents. They would watch 60 minutes, All in the Family, MTM, Bob Newhart, etc.
Way back then, I never understood why anyone would willingly be interviewed on 60 minutes. No matter what you said, they would manipulate anything and everything that was said to make their pre-determined point.
My entire life, I have distrusted CBS news.
I used to like listening to Morning Edition back in the 80s on my commutes to work, whether that was in San Diego or up State New York. I slowly (too slowly) realized how biased they were; little subtle things. Like any organization, think tank, PAC, whatever, will be labeled as right-leaning, but never left leaning. At least that's what it was way back.
The local NPR, here, MPR, is a big hypocritical mass of leftists. They campaigned tirelessly for the light rail to make it to downtown St Paul, but then when they found out it would run next to their building, they cried foul. Ultimately, they soaked Minnesota to pay for sound proofing and vibration proofing their studios.
If they are supported by the tax payers, they should be unbiased. They are not. That doesn't mean they can't be trusted, but they must be listened to critically.
"Is that the fault of the press for not running with a story they had no information on, or of Giuliani, who refused to share copies of the evidence with the press?"
The New York Post ran a story on it, posted it online and Google immediately took it down. If anyone mentioned it in a Tweet that too would be taken down. No excuse for the rest of the media for not reporting on it.
ligneus,
For Google to take a story down, they would have to control the servers that the story is on, which I frankly disbelieve. At the very worst, perhaps Google delisted it, although I just ran a search and the story was there.
The excuse for the media not running the story is that there was no evidence of it besides what Rudy Giuliani said. Do you think Giuliani has that sort of credibility?
Mostly Nothing,
I always affirm people who advise reading and listening critically.
I don't know how we got to Giuliani. Whatever.
Here are some extra data points.
Teaching math the traditional way is racist.
Lehigh University is silencing data that conflicts with BLM's theology.
Amazon is suppressing transgender research that doesn't support the LGBT narrative.
These aren't outliers. This is witch mania reborn. My conclusion is that I can't trust anything I read any more unless I can verify it with empirical data of my own.
K T Cat,
If you don't understand Giulani's role in the supposed Hunter Biden laptop story, it's no wonder you are confused. There would have been no story in the Post without Giuliani.
Perhaps you could describe something in the first link you think is objectionable?
The AEI take on the Gunter's experience is more than a little slanted and incomplete.
We don't know why Amazon suppressed this book, but I just saw a dozen books on Amazon that opposed the legitimacy of transsexuals, warning about a 'transsexual agenda', etc., so I'm curious why you think it was for that reason.
What if the “Conspiracy” is Real?
ligneus,
Are you taking the position that Google/Twitter/et. al. should just republish lies, such as the ones from the My Pillow guy, with no attempt to curb misinformation?
Or, are you claiming that there are no left-wing nutjobs who find their Twitter accounts and Google searches altered (because that's pretty obviously false)?
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