As part of their coalition with the Green Party, the Scottish Government have pledged to introduce gender self-identification within the first year of the present Parliament.
For the reasons I have previously given, this means that men will legally become women just by saying they are, and women will become men just by saying they are.
This will not be regarded by the Scottish Government – or by the police or Crown or Scottish courts – as a legal fiction, but as the simple expression of reality.
We as a society will be expected to believe that people can literally change sex, and there will be sanctions if we don’t.
If the Scottish people do not rise up against this and stop it, we will all have surrendered to collective insanity.
I have been able to tell a girl from a boy and a man from a woman for the entire period of my living memory, a period now extending to well over fifty years.
The evidence of my own eyes and ears over that same period tells me that everyone else who is not in some way physically or mentally impaired has the ability to do it too.
I am confident that the ability that I know I have is one shared by the entire human species.
I am confident that this is so because being a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, must be one of the most overdetermined realities that there can possibly be for human beings.
It would make no sense if we could not recognise that reality in one another, instinctively, as a trait of being human, and without the need for active thought or any training or education of any kind.
It is as fundamental, and as little requiring of justification or explanation, as the ability to recognise the face of your own mother or father or sister or brother out of every other human being on the whole planet.
I say that the ability is overdetermined because if I search my mind, I can think of myriad factors that must enter into it, and I’ve listed some of the obvious ones previously, but if you ask me for some “theory” of how I am able to do it, I can only shrug my shoulders.
It doesn’t matter at all to me how I am able to do it, just that I can, and that it is one of the most fundamental realities on which I base my life.
If the Scottish Government, or anyone else, have a “theory”, or offer to produce an “expert” to tell me I can’t do this, then I am as sure as I am of anything in my life that I am right and they are wrong.
So when they tell me that what I know is a man is in fact a woman or that what I know is a woman is in fact a man, I know that they will be lying to me, trying to get me to accept as a fact something I know to be a fiction.
If the proposed legislation is allowed to pass and Nicola Sturgeon self-identifies as a man, gets a gender recognition certificate to that effect and uses that to get a birth certificate that says she is of the male sex, I know as surely as I know anything that this will be a lie.
If John Swinney self-identifies as a woman and goes through the same process to legally change to the female sex, I know as surely as I know anything that this too will be a lie.
No more nor less than The Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Scottish Government will be imposing on me a version of “reality” that I – and they – know to be an utter fiction.
No more nor less than The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, they will be seeking to punish me, and everyone else who knows what reality is, by charging us with “hate crimes”.
It is completely irrelevant to me what their motives are for doing this.
There is no motive in the world worth surrendering reality for, and this is for a simple reason, one that Orwell and his protagonist Winston Smith understood all too well.
If even just once you are prepared to surrender reality and choose to believe in something you know to be false – for any reason, and with any motive – you have lost yourself, and you’ll never find yourself again.
I desperately hope that my fellow Scottish citizens, men and women both, will rise up in defence of reality and kill this insanity stone dead.
But if they don’t, let me use the privilege I have of putting something on the public record, here and now, for the many thousands of readers of this blog.
Boys are not girls, and girls are not boys, no matter how much they think or say they are.
Men are not women, and women are not men, no matter how much they think or say they are.
Males are not females and females are not males, no matter how much they think or say they are.
“Gender identity” is not real.
Sex is not a choice.
I’ll defend reality till the day I die, and they can lock me up if they want to.
Gordon Dangerfield 
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
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“I’ll defend reality till the day I die, and they can lock me up if they want to.”
Careful what you wish for…
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They had better start building more prisons Gordon as I am of the opinion that you are not alone in this. Probably see you in prison.
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I’d say they can’t imprison us all, Bob, but I certainly wouldn’t put it past them to try.
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They don’t need to imprison us all. As with the crime of “jigsaw identification” they will selectively imprison the people they wish to remove from positions of influence. This is going to happen, make no mistake. Most of the public will have no inkling of what is going on and we will sleepwalk into hell.
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Prisons are going to be full or bursting at the seams for having an opinion , just an opinion . Dangerous times ahead in Sturgeon Scotland.
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It’s scary indeed, Pauline, but the answer to it is what it has always been — organised mass resistance.
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The problem is, that I think that they might be selective in who they choose to prosecute, as in Orwell’s 1984. A few carefully selected prosecutions of people who have careers to lose, families to protect, would have the chilling effect necessary that has already been achieved with the legal anonymity of the alphabet women. How many people from the wider public are even fully aware how this works or understand the implications of the imprisonment of CM and the prosecutions of Mark Hirst and Maria Miller?
Resistance would have to be very carefully organised. With the media playing down incidents like this, most of the public might continue to be unaware. It all depends on how cunningly the legislation is deployed and who they use it against. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much stirring of outrage in the wider community. I would have thought that parents of school age children by now should have raised concerns about what is happening in schools regarding some disturbing guidance re curriculum changes as well as unisex toilets. That might be due to the media again, of course, managing the news.
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Here’s a start. Demo 11am at Holyrood on the 2nd September.
All we can do is raise our voices.
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And that’s exactly what they will see, Gordon.
This is one of those things were managerialism has to be collapsed and the sovereignty on the people has to be seen in its full glory.
Thomas Jefferson believed there should be revolution against politicians every five years or so, for exactly the reason that politicians always need to be reminded that people are sovereign, servants of the people are servants.
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Thanks for posting the info for the demo, nallyanders. Hope to see you — and everyone else who can possibly make it — there!
And totally agree, tombkane. In fact, as Billy Connolly said (probably quoting someone else) the desire to be a politician should absolutely preclude you from being one. If people had to be dragged kicking and screaming from real jobs to do their civic duty for a couple of years in the Scottish Parliament, I think we’d see an astonishing improvement in government.
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“The desire to enter politics should automatically debar one from doing so”, wasn’t it? Mark Twain springs to mind, but it might not be him.
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If this is what Scotland is now and should it be re-affirmed at the next election, I’m out. Time to draw up Plan B and ensure I can still sell up before everyone else tries to do the same thing.
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The next elections will be for Councils next year. If the SNP get a big enough fright there, Sturgeon might just have to rethink!
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It’s trivialising an important subject: but to my mind getting to change your birth certificate becuase you don’t like what’s there is a nonsense. I might be embarrased at being born in Aberdeen – but I don’t get to change Aberdeen to Anstruther.
Incidentally, I agree with everything to say, Gordon.
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Thanks, Robert. The example might be a “trivial” one but the point is the same. Facts are facts, reality is reality and it must be defended. Anyone who is willing to surrender reality because it suits them in one area gives up the right to be trusted ever to know the truth in any other area.
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The SNP are putting the agreement to the membership, however, the ballot is NON-BINDING. I nearly fell off my chair when I heard that on the news. So SHE has decided on bringing Harvie and Slater in but she’s NOT caring what the members of her own Party think about it. Meanwhile, if the Greens’ members reject the idea it’s dead in the water.
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all regimes eventually overstep themselves and Sturgeon is going that way.
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I agree with all you say here, Gordon.
What’s really worrying me is, once again, the media are playing down the GRA reforms and barely mentioning the implications. The reforms aren’t being highlighted anywhere in the media. What the blazes is going on?
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I can’t get behind their thinking on this – if any thinking is involved. It often seems as if they just embark on something either hoping to succeed or are so carried away in cult-like conviction that they believe that they can impose this and get away with it. Perhaps they are just so distanced from ordinary people that they consider that once legislation is in place ordinary voters are impotent and can be intimidated by law into acceptance.
However, this belief system is so fundamentally at odds with the lived experiences of ordinary people that I can’t see how it would gain acceptance once the consequences of self-id begin to impact on their lives. Maybe the over-confidence of this middle-class cult will be tested by how it is received by the mass of the electorate who are mostly not aware of what it is coming down the pipeline. It may have captured the middle-class university-educated young but they might find that you can’t treat the remainder of the population with contempt as they seem to assume.
Winston Smith put his faith in the ‘proles’, the ordinary folk, outside the Party and largely ignored by the Party, who he saw as retaining down-to-earth pragmatism and a freedom of spirit which might have been their saving grace. Those in the SG who think they can impose this ideology with little resistance could find that they have underestimated the common sense of the ordinary electorate. I can’t help but think that those outside the cult will simply laugh at the precious and their ‘pronouns’. Laughter at the absurd presumptuousness of the whole thing might be what it takes to bring sense back.
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Agreed, sadscot and jgedd. Noam Chomsky often talks about how much less stupidity he has to cut through when he talks to working class audiences who haven’t had their ordinary common sense “educated” out of them and I think it totally applies here.
I dream of the day when the “proles” en masse declare that the Emperor has no clothes and all of this stuff just collapses under the weight of its own foolishness. It happened to McCarthyism after the Army hearings, and there’s no reason why it can’t happen to this too.
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In the Reporting Scotland segment last night, Glenn Campbell was interviewing young Greens one of whom stressed that the opportunity to “get gender reforms through” was “too good to pass”. So there you are, there’s the priority for young Greens, not the planet, not the environment, something else entirely.
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‘Noam Chomsky often talks about how much less stupidity he has to cut through when he talks to working class audiences who haven’t had their ordinary common sense “educated” out of them and I think it totally applies here.’
Recently on the Mess with Graham Linehan, Helen Joyce said that there was evidence that educated people were more susceptible to trans-ideology (unfortunately she didn’t cite the source). She thought it was because educated people often try to see the counter-intuitive side. Apart from quantum physics i don’t see that counter-intuitive arguments are at all common, so i find her reason a bit weak. Climate change sometimes having a local cooling effect is hardly complicated or in need of intelligence unless someone is being wilfully stupid.
But the reasons for denial, whatever they are, would be worthy of more research.
One simple reason could be that a working class person is hardly going to lose their job if they are ‘Gender Critical’. Working class people don’t get cancelled.
Many highly qualified people won’t have time to do the research needed. If the MSM did their job it would take 2 minute to explain, but they aren’t.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/20-questions-for-robin-ince-and-his
Educated people can’t possibly think that women in prison and rape crisis centres will somehow be protected from men by some magic words. Surely they just haven’t thought about it, there is no debate.
Another possible explanation is that more educated people have less reason to distrust institutions. They will often be entrenched in those same institutions themselves. When i asked Mike Russell to review the Sandyford clinic in light of the Keira Bell case, he replied that it was up the clinicians. As though what happened at Tavistock couldn’t possibly happen elsewhere.
So called intelligent people can be incredibly naive. They haven’t got a clue about what is going on around them. Andy Wightman is intelligent. He was on the Sturgeon committee into Salmond stitch-up but hadn’t got a clue what questions to ask. He still thinks of the women as victims!
Mike Russell is also fairly intelligent, he is just incredibly naive, if things look too bad then they can’t be true, they must be conspiracy theories. When i asked Jenny Minto (Russell’s replacement) to support the Women’s Pledge, she replied by giving the analogy of a parent having enough love for two children (i hadn’t even mentioned trans).
Educated people may by definition be more aware of the world’s problems? It used to be the case that the Guardian and Times would report fairly on world affairs but that is no longer the case (e.g. the fake news on Venezuela and media blackouts on Palestine and Bolivia etc.) so this may be a thing of the past. Even so more awareness of bad news could result in more numbness and negativity overload.
If i was a psychology researcher i would also look at links to religion for reasons of denial. If you believe in god, it is very hard to see the world as a series of accumulating disasters. Religions tend to promote a positive world view but positivity has been proven by psychologists to result in less accurate view of reality compared to pessimism.
Lots of things to talk about in prison.
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Yes, anandprasad, we’ll be chatting away merrily as we sew those mailbags!
I actually like Helen Joyce’s argument about the attraction for academics and students — and young people generally — of counter-intuitive “theories”. I’ve talked about this before, and you and I have discussed it here, but when David Lodge had his zany literature professor Morris Zapp talk about Derridean deconstruction as “the last intellectual thrill left” and “like sawing through the branch you’re sitting on”, I think he had in mind this exact phenomenon.
As you know, I was a graduate student myself in California, in the nineties and noughties and I’m in no doubt at all that the Arts and Social Sciences faculties there coveted the prestige of the hard sciences with their bizarre theories of multiple dimensions and uncertainty principles and vibrating strings. And lo and behold, there at hand to provide exactly the bizarre and counter-intuitive stuff they wanted for their own disciplines was the “continental philosophy” of Foucault and Derrida and Barthes and Lacan and Baudrillard, and all their US disciples like the queen of “queer theory”, Judith Butler, who was up the road at UC Berkeley. (In fact, the University of California campus next to mine, UC Irvine, imported half of the “Yale School” of deconstruction, including Derrida himself, while I was there, and I even went down into Orange County from my own campus to hear him lecture one time just for the hell of it. The lecture was, as expected, a combination of the merest truisms and utter gibberish, all in the most amount of polysyllables possible.)
So, as I say, I’m a believer in Joyce’s argument and indeed, along with simple brainwashing and peer pressure and the imposition of authority on weak and impressionable minds, I think it’s a major factor in what is allowing these cults to spread and flourish.
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MSM biding their time? She’s even more stupid than we thought if she thinks she’s bribed them onside.
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GH, I certainly hope so. It is deeply worrying that the Scottish media, so far, are holding back. Surely they must report the alarm that exists surrounding these reforms? I’m going to email BBC Scotland and STV to find out what’s happening.
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I agree with you sadscot re the corrupt and reviled media , they who present themselves as the fourth estate who are sworn to hold government to account , they are in truth a shower of corrupt lying fraudsters in thrall and complicit with corrupt govt and politicians
As a trade unionist I despise when people lose their jobs , but I celebrate when I hear of these lying rags going bust and these liars facing the dole it is what they deserve they have earned their misery Sturgeon’s £3 million bribe with our money is only delaying the inevitable and it can’t come quick enough
Investigative reporters ha,ha,ha,ha,ha liars and parasites
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Thanks Gordon. Not exactly working-class myself but i was pouring concrete and driving taxis in Orange County in the late 1980s!
Pity Helen didn’t mention the research because i may be barking in the wrong forest never mind the wrong tree.
I thought Helen was talking about a general poll of trans-ideolgy acceptance broken down to social/economic strata.
If Helen was talking about how easily educated people grasped Queer Theory then i totally agree. I am sure i couldn’t even get what Judith Butler was saying.
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Ha, Orange County is not for the likes of us!
I’m misleading you here, though. I just seized on what you said about Helen’s wee bit on “educated” people being susceptible to counter-intuitive nonsense to expound on my own pet theory again. I have no idea if that’s what Helen meant, and I wasn’t addressing the rest of your comment at all, leaving that to stand for itself.
And of course NO-ONE “grasps” queer theory if by that we mean understanding it, because it’s all pretentious nonsense.
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Queer theory is c**p, anandprsad. It take about a minute to work out that all it is, in the end, is a cul de sac where predatory human beings will lurk and where legal principles like consent, age barriers, etc. will disappear, allowing a free-for-all for the strongest. Foucault’s philosophy, dissected by Judith Butler, leads directly to a moral vacuum ripe for exploitation by the usual suspects. Believe me, you are missing nothing. People who go in for this stuff don’t even believe in it. They are middle-class virtue signallers with too much time on their hands to access extreme porn and w**k themselves into a coma.
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No need for asterisks here, lorncal! If the middle-class virtue-signallers are wanking themselves into a coma, then it’s only right that we should be able to read about it in uncensored form.
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Its my right to demand a single cell see you inside Gordon i’ll be on the ground floor ( to many steps oan the gallery LoL .
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I’ll be the one blubbing like a baby, Ronnie!
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Hey Anderson get tae the back of the queue , I want wan wae a separate shower
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Watching 5 Robins squabbling in the garden.
They know.
Robins smarter than the reality deniers.
We should have some good discussions in the nick.
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See above, anandprasad. Maybe we can identify our way out.
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To a women’s prison. Out of the frying pan Into the fire. You would find out about no nonsense common sense then.
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And, in addition to self-ID being harmful to reality, it’s also harmful to:
1. People with Gender Dysphoria, because they will no longer get the counselling and psychological support they need for their condition.
2. Women and girls: because sex based rights in law can no longer have meaning, which will have an untold number of detrimental consequences on their lives.
3. Vulnerable women that need women-only safe spaces. (Including in prisons)
4. Safeguarding of children, because anyone can change their name along with their gender identity, and predators will be hard to trace.
5. Statistical analysis that can inform policy, because sex class statistics will no longer have any meaning.
6. Girls, because self-ID makes them think they can transition out of being sexually objectified and discriminated against, but at a greater health cost than boys because they need more modification to ‘pass as a man’.
7. Our sanity.
The only group of people that self-ID benefits are men with paraphilias, those men that get a sexual kick out of identifying as something else: they want women to be submissive, feminine and discriminated against: they get a sexual kick out of being in women’s safe spaces and having access to children. These are predators in society. This is a campaign to allow men’s sexual fetishes free rein.
How many trans men (born women) campaign for self-ID? I have no idea – I’ve not heard of one yet (but I’m by no means in the loop – so if you do know of any, let me know).
No mandate was even sought for this – no debate. Scottish Greens subscribe to Queer Theory, so their voters should have known what to expect (except the Greens weren’t voted into power), but the SNP have kept it all under the radar from the general public, their voters.
The GRA reform should be immediately binned, all illegal Stonewall-subscribing practices should be immediately stopped (including the police arresting people just because it was a trans identifying person making the complaint: the rest of us don’t get that courtesy), and THEN there should be public debate on the matter with open discussions on potential consequences and the balance of cost/benefit explored. All pornography in Scotland should also be banned – and certainly none promoted in schools – just ban all of it, if people can’t use it in a reasonable and restricted manner, then any and all of it needs to be banned to make it clear what’s shown is not normal behaviour, or it will carry on normalising fetishes and rape. (This suggestion is for the possession of pornographic material, you can’t police the Internet, and the main thing is the ban itself – with criminal charges – that demonstrates it’s unacceptable).
Gordon, you’ve changed the subject here, so I had to post the recent gossip about Judith Mackinnon and the corrupt practices of the Scottish civil service at the end of the previous article. It doesn’t seem to me that it’s just a few of them at the top that are bad eggs, the whole thing is rotten. I want independence, and I want the whole lot of them cleared out, evicted, and told not to come back. Starting a new civil service from scratch will be a tough call, but I think it’ll be worth it. If you have any ideas for how I can go about getting these things, immediately preferably, I’d be grateful to hear them.
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I agree with all seven on your list, Contrary. Needless to say, the epidemic numbers of troubled girls who were formerly (and often still are) self-harming or suffering from eating disorders and are now “trans” will end up with the shittiest deal from this dreadful fad while the boys and young men telling everyone to suck their ladydicks will emerge relatively unscathed.
‘Twas ever thus.
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Aye. ‘Twas ever thus.
One thing that came to mind: if this insanity does take over, and with the huge number of girls transitioning, it may come to pass that women will take over the world – by stealth, in disguise. That would be a good outcome (well, best of a horrible breakdown in society, but ignoring all that) to my mind; but all you ordinary blokes should maybe be a lot more afraid than you are!! (The number of men that still say ‘this doesn’t affect me’… Think again, and think ahead!)
It would be a wee bit hilarious (gallows humour) having all those men transitioning to become submissive discriminated-against women, just to find themselves ruled over by actual women that have muscled their way into all those male-only positions of power. ‘Be kind’ – hah, no chance, there are millennia of pay-back to cover, heh heh heh. Do you remember the Two Ronnies ‘the Worm That Turned’ sketches? I keep wondering if the trans activists used that as their template for their favoured dystopian future.
(But apart from that, I wish girls weren’t being convinced the only out for them is to transition, society has really failed our children, and it’s heartbreaking to see)
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Contrary, I also hoped this might happen but the bullying that trans men (female to male) are subjected to by trans women (male to female) has shown me that the power differential still exits. For instance in Canada TReVOICES are being bullied by Morgan Ogier-a man in a wig who thinks he’s a woman- and who has been instrumental in shutting off Vancouver Rape Funding and has huge influence at the UN where he is pushing for gender ID. The man at the centre of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre Mridul is of that ilk!! Lesbian and Gay bars are constantly being targeted by a nameless actor ,a homphobic male bully , as being trans phobic. He’s the one who allegedly reported Marion Miller’s tweet to the police!!
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Thanks Jane; I guess world domination will have to wait, then. And also makes a mockery of trans men thinking they can identify out of being women.
The irony is, of course, that all these trans women (activists), who try to insist they are women but were ‘born in the wrong body’, are behaving exactly like men would – which just goes to show how shallow and mysoginistic,,, and typically male, they are!
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Agree with every word, Gordon Dangerfield: once this is enshrined in law, it is over. I also think now that pointing out the legal, social, political, health, etc, implications of this proposed legislation must run parallel with the realities of the psychological knowledge of paraphilia and fetish, of the depth and extent of pornography in the overall trans movement, and in the end implications of queer theory in which consent as a legal concept will disappear, as it must, as queer theory is a moral vacuum that takes no account of age, sex, disability and so on.
We must insist on legal definitions, according to all psychological and psychiatric knowledge of what paraphilia is, what fetish is, what the correlation of pornography to criminal sexual act is, the link, if any. If, as most psychologists that I have have read state is correct, then almost all so-called ‘trans women’ in the West are actually paraphilics – who could be dangerous in women’s spaces.
The law must explain the difference between the festish/paraphilia, ‘flashing’, which is a criminal offence, and ‘trans women’ with their male sex organs undressing in front of women and children. Will the law on flashing be quietly repealed, ostensibly allowing these men to commit crimes against women and children? The legal definition of ‘narcissism’ and its effect on crime must also be explained, as, again, it plays a large part in the trans (paraphiliac), persona, according to psychologists.
The term ‘trans’ itself desperately requires to be given some kind of legal interpretation. Laws cannot be based on loose assumptions or feelings in someone’s head. If the word, ‘woman’ no longer has any meaning in law, what does ‘trans woman’ mean in law? If there is no category, there cannot be any sub category.
The Maya Forstater case, albeit English Law, is a case in point where the judge was willing to interpret the law according to the Prophet Stonewall, pre empting the law there, in other words. Even the appeal judgement that she was entitled to hold her philosophical belief that women and men are not interchangeable, insisted that misgendering could be offensive and a crime. If you do not believe that a man can be a woman, and vice versa, being forced to use pronouns that you find offensive in the context is paramount to stating, in law, that you WILL recognise trans ideology, whether you believe in it or not and the ruling becomes meaningless.
‘Trans men’ (FtM) pose no real threat to men or their sex-based spaces in the criminal/sexual sense, but the same principles apply, and, of course, the physical transitioning for females is far more final and barbaric. Then, there are the ‘trans children’, probably the area more than any other that the law needs to be clarified and applied, as do parental rights and the right to object to one’s children having access, in schools, to the trans ideology of Stonewall. This stuff is often claimed to be S28 all over again, but for trans people. It is not. Same-sex attraction is still rooted in biological sex. No gay people claimed to BE the other sex. Some ‘trans women’ even claim to be lesbian women, and become enraged when lesbians won’t entertain them. So, basically, they ‘know’ they are omen, then they ‘know’ they are lesbian women’. The people who believe this stuff must be a sandwich short of a picnic or are staring into a moral vacuum themselves.
It is an absolute dog’s breakfast as it stands, and the thought that the SNP/Green government will push through this stuff without giving any real thought to how it will affect every aspect of our society, is madness. I had hoped that they would think again, but the utter refusal to remove that ‘trans woman’ – a fully functioning male (Trans Identified Male, TIM) from Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre because he has broken every law in the book, is beyond rational explanation.
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There used to be an open slot on Ch 4 in the 80’s. I think it was usually broadcast early Sat evening.
I clearly remember watching some self declared paedophile promoting PIE- the Paedophile Information Exchange -( I think)
He looked a real creep but there he was on national tv openly advocating the “ benefits” of “ experienced “ men introducing children to the joys of sex.
It now seems unbelievable but it happened.
I have never heard of paraphilia but in all probability I had never heard of paedophilia before said broadcast.
I’m not qualified to comment on your apparent linkage between paraphilia and trans matters so you may well be correct.
I do hope however that the current discussion and exposure of the fundamental absurdity of this proposed law and the catastrophic consequences which will follow will lead the public to the same conclusion they quickly reached about paedophilia when PIE popped up on their TV screens.
For the record I am not comparing a person who wishes to live or appear as a member of the opposite sex to paedophilia but criticising a law which like paedophilia seeks to subvert nature.
What’s the proposed variation to the law on rape in the GRA?
Can a man who holds a GRA certificate & has complied in all aspects to become a “ woman” and thus legally recognised as such in Scotland ever be guilty of rape?
Because as the law stands at the moment a woman cannot rape another woman.
Keep sounding the warning bell Mr Dangerfield.
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Veritas: a paraphilia can be classed as a number of this: paedophilia; exhibitionism (flashing); voyeurism. Others are: frotteurism (rubbing up against a person sexually and without their consent); sado/masochism, transvestism. Fetishes are things which give sexual pleasure and which are other than human body parts, eg. a stiletto, knickers, stockings, rubber, and even tattoos and body piercings which stimulate sexual interest. Zoophilia is the sexual love of animals (without their consent, obviously, since they cannot be deemed to give consent legally, although bestiality has always been a crime).
According to the research I have done on the subject, all of these exist within what is now the trans community since Stonewall and its allies widened the trans umbrella to include every kind of sexual activity, including queering and kink, sissy porn and a host of other sexual activities. It would appear that almost all ‘trans women’ in the West are heterosexual male paraphilics/festishists. Moreover, the behaviours they display are almost exclusively male, even when they have supposedly transitioned.
I hasten to add that I am not being condemnatory here – live and let live, so long as it’s legal and not harmful to anyone else – but what has happened in recent years is that the whole gamut of the porn industry is being pulled into the public arena now, where everyone, willing or non-consenting is being press-ganged into participating in these men’s (it is mainly men) paraphilias and fetishes, and the law seems quite willing to indulge the trans lobby in this without giving a thought to the adverse impact on women and girls – and it will have an adverse impact that will, in time, completely cancel their human rights, civil rights, rights to a job, rights to a specific female prize, sport, course, etc.
There can be no other end to this stuff, and only a blind fool or someone who has skin in this particular game (some judges have always had a reputation for being somewhat off-centre in their sexual proclivities, as have some politicians), someone who is looking to make a fast buck out of the transition industries, or someone who is getting big, fat donations to their party coffers, and so on could possibly think otherwise because the handful of people who are genuinely body dysphoric/dysmorphic really are few and far between. I think we can safely say that the people who are not trans but support this stuff to the point of dying in a ditch over it have some sort of skin in the game, and it’s not compassion, although, granted, there will be those who see it as a form of compassion. Unfortunately for them, their compassion stops with the trans lobby and excludes women completely – and these are mainly women themselves, the ‘just be kind’ variety.
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Brilliant, lorncal, and don’t get me started on lawyers. Aren’t we supposed to be the ones insisting on precision in such areas?
I challenge any legislator, prosecutor or judge to give me a coherent definition of “gender” yet they use it all the time, sometimes synonymously with sex and sometimes not, as if they have the slightest idea what they’re talking about.
As a result, the law on this is in the same disgraceful, shambolic state as the culture and the politics.
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When I first met Sociology forty odd years ago, I learned that sex is what is what you are born with and gender what you make of this. This is obviously a long process, which will be different for everybody, and every body.
The idea of sex in biology is essentially and by definition binary. That is how this kind of reproduction works in many terrestrial species; a male element and a female element are combined to reproduce a new member of the species in question. Because we human beings are mammals, we cannot evade our binary nature.
We can either make of this exactly what it is, to use a metaphor, confine it to the bedroom, or we can build cultures and economies that exploit this essential duality to reproduce systems of power and control. History suggests that the latter course was favoured, but how now to extricate ourselves from the effects of this and then to do the other thing?? And that is before the irrationality of gender politics is thrown in the pot.
For clarity I often return to a paper by Erving Goffman called “The arrangement between the sexes” published I think in about 1980. His crisp analysis and dry with are a very good tonic. In a more modern context, the work of Luce Irigaray is very interesting.
I am a bit alarmed that the complexity of gender, the “what is made of sex” bit, has no stable legal definition.
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“… I challenge any legislator, prosecutor or judge to give me a coherent definition of “gender” yet they use it all the time, sometimes synonymously with sex and sometimes not, as if they have the slightest idea what they’re talking about… ”
In a nutshell. Couldn’t agree more.
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Also, lorncal, what you say above about paraphilia only adds to my deep disappointment in Joanna Cherry’s statement today that she is only opposed to self-ID and not to making things easier for people to get gender recognition certificates which, apparently, she supports.
We need to recognise that providing for these certificates in the 2004 Act was a mistake, based on the deliberate lies of those proposing it that they were only interested in being kind to a poor suffering minority who quite recognised that they were suffering from a mental disorder and only wished to alleviate it.
And now we are where we are.
I don’t understand Joanna’s position on this.
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In reference to your comment below re Joanna Cherry I posted on WOS that I was extremely disappointed in JC’s approach to the constitutional issue , I lauded her defeat of the clownshoe Boris’s prorogation of WM but after her success she failed miserably to take up the legal challenge to the gross and blatant breaches of the TOU . The multitudinous and frequent breaches have never been challenged by the unionist parties in Scotland as you would expect as they are supportive of them and they are traitors
But you would expect ANY party or leader who purports to be a champion of independence to IMMEDIATELY launch a legal challenge EXPOSING these continuous breaches , when england continues on with their perfidity as they ALWAYS do , that challenge then becomes an international challenge VIA the ECJ and UN to highlight and expose the english parliament’s treachery by treating an equal partner as having been subsumed and captured . THAT IMO is what Joanna Cherry should be vociferously proposing and promoting but instead she like others is capitulating in their opposition by offering alternative proposals to the twittler taliban trans , so named by Breeks on WOS
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Gordon/Twathater: it must be possible to ensure that, for purposes of living their lives as they choose, trans people can access a GRC fairly quickly and easily, but not as a key to the door of women’s sex-based spaces and rights, so I can see where Joanna Cherry is coming from. However, I am totally opposed to that GRC being anything other than a key to living life as best one can as a trans person, with dignity (most transsexuals who have transitioned have no desire to invade female spaces and rights, and have an understanding that they are men, not women, albeit they feel more comfortable living as women). They do need protection from the law, as do trans men. It should not apply to any records other than as an addendum to the original birth certificate which cannot ever supersede the original birth certificate.
I can also understand why trans people would not want their birth details spread far and wide, but data protection already offers this protection. Why should trans people, above anyone else, get special privileges to wipe out their origins? It’s ludicrous. Why should they be recorded as women when they commit crimes? A very recent case in the US highlights the sheer cruelty and nonsense of the law that this makes. A man who had attacked a number of children, ranging from a baby to, I think, an eight-year-old, proclaimed himself trans. The judge actually stated in court that he sympathized with the perpetrator that his offending had been brought on by his struggle with his gender identity, so gave him a lighter tariff in a women’s prison.
You really couldn’t make this up, and it is why I believe that many men (and, perhaps, even women) who support this trans phenomenon are themselves, not sexually conservative, shall we say. What about those poor, innocent children? The implications for the law and justice in the whole of the West must now be huge and detrimental to all but the trans community and lobby. The depth of the cruelty to those children from this ruling by this one judge in that one court alone, should be enough to show any normal human being that something is very, very wrong.
Even where a GRC is granted, it should be on the basis of making life a little easier or trans people, but never, ever to allow them access to spaces and rights that belong to another group, or to evade legal responsibility or to garner legal and administrative privileges that no other group enjoys. All it should mean, at the end of the day is: that a trans person can call him/her self female/male and live his/her life as that sex for social ease and nothing else. However, as most of the psychologists I researched admitted, heterosexual, autogynephile (paraphilic) men, in particular, want access to all things female for very specific sexual reasons and through hatred of women and their gains, and, in some cases, as a prelude to access to children. Unless the law is forced to acknowledge that this is the case, from testimony by psychologists, this stuff will pass into law and great harm will be done before it can be overturned.
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OK, being daft and naïve: what difference does it ACTUALLY make to have in writing that you are changing sex (if not because you wish to use certain toilets)?
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Andrea: having a GRC, to my mind, is, indeed, rather pointless, since more or less the whole of the 2004 GRA has been superseded by subsequent legislation, but Gordon could probably give you a better and fuller answer. Personally, I am in favour of repealing the 2004 GRA and dropping the self-ID part of the GRA reform. The only real way that I can see that a GRC would be of any real use would be if the person involved used the GRC to get access to medical transitioning under proper scrutiny, having first undergone counselling.
I think that the real questions that must be asked about this whole nonsense is: why? I have already said that it appears to me (and others before me, of course) that it is a men’s sexual rights movement, but the sexual rewards are the crumbs allotted to the foot soldiers, I think – the men who are pushing this stuff, and it is mainly men, even when they are ‘trans women’. The libido is a powerful stimulus and used wisely, can be both a source of pleasure to oneself and others, but, used unwisely, can become the master or mistress of the individual. This unwise use of the libido, stimulated by extreme porn saturation, is rendering rational thinking people into robots, almost, and they, in turn are the activists who are destroying the lives of vulnerable, naive young people and children.
The lengths that some men will go to feed their libido is how this whole mess has been created by those in power: the big tech, pharma, insurance, media giants who are making loads of lovely lolly. That’s not it all, however. We all need to ask WHY governments and public and private institutions are also pushing it. Why is Nicola Sturgeon pushing it? For power. More power. Authoritarian power. Fascist power. From the early 20th century onwards, social engineering has been the order of the day, breaking down society to rebuild it in the shape beloved of power-hungry politicians and oligarchs.
The other question we need to ask is: why erase women? The answer must be, even if it is not actually worked ou and articulated as such, because women generally are less driven by their libido and are the guardians, for the greater part, of children and the young and vulnerable. They don’t always conform to that generalization, of course, but, on the whole, they are the gatekeepers, the civilizers because biological reality demands that of them. The first thing that all authoritarian regimes do is insist that females return to the hearth and the kitchen, and strip them of any sort of power: economic; political; legal.
The only things that stands in the way of a cowed populace right across the West are democracy and law. I think that Mr Dangerfield has a fine instinct about the role that the law is expected to play, even as the politicians are playing out the political aspects. Hitler did not die in the Bunker and Stalin did not die in his dacha. Their shades are reborn every generation in a new crop of politicians, and the most ruthless of these rise to the top all over Europe and the West and pull the legal system and democratic institutions into their pockets. The West is dying and our top people are feeding it the poison. People like them simply move on to other, more lucrative sinecures where power is guaranteed.
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Lorcal, I stand by my offer.
Do you have any idea of the extent to which this destruction of sex will impinge upon, contradict or obfuscate existing legislation? Or is this a bit of an unknown unknown?
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Thank you, Duncan. I will give it some thought, I promise. I believe it will impinge on numerous areas of law – and, probably, in the area of civil law, with cases being brought against the Scottish government, Stonewall, Mermaids, the prison service, the police service, the NHS, etc. As for the criminal law, as the law stands on sexual offences, I cannot see how this stuff – specifically self-ID without any medical gate, when there must be some much more amenable way to help trans people attain a Gender Recognition Certificate than allowing a free-for-all and eliminating women as a sex – will not put women and girls, and even very wee boys who also go to female toilets and changing rooms, in the way of potential harm. Do I believe that all Trans Identified Males are a potential danger, no, but enough will be through their paraphilias/fetishes, never mind the actual predators, that it is not a risk that should be taken. I have encountered the rage and fall-out when you suggest that access to women’s and girls’ spaces is not necessary, giving away, to my mind, what the real agenda of so many in this movement actually is. Likewise, one psychologist suggested that asking translesbians (males who identify as lesbian women) whether hooking up with another translesbian would fix the ‘lesbians won’t sleep with us’ narrative, then standing well back, would also give the game away.
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Sorry Duncan a reply to Lorncal for her above posts, Lorncal I agree with all your posts and the exposures they contain , the only thing I cannot reconcile with is the acceptance of such a small percentage of the population holding any kind of sway or influence over such a vast amount of the population that it will and does impact
You are a better person with more compassion than me and I cannot say I have personal experience of the possible lived in presumed hell that genuine people who are in this situation are suffering BUT I must admit I am sick and tired of politicians and do gooders penalising and excluding normal members of society in order to satisfy their own self aggrandisment
As you say this is NOT about people suffering from mental health problems , this is about perverts and deviants demanding their SEXUAL FETISHES , I am no prude and don’t care what people get up to in their own homes as long as it is with consenting adults , BUT this is not that , this is an insidious creep by the abnormal to render the normal powerless and it is being pushed and supported by politicians , big business , big pharma and we know that the ultimate goal is OUR CHILDREN which these paedophiles are targeting
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no problem ….
If I may be so bold … maybe look at the issue not as about numbers of individuals holding opinion or espousing an ideology, but examine the forces and conditions which have made these particular opinions so prominent and powerful at this moment in history.
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“The term ‘trans’ itself desperately requires to be given some kind of legal interpretation.”
I guess Gordon can clarify here, but I seem to recall reading that the rules for statutory interpretation allow one to reference another Act which touches upon the same (or related) things in order to find a definition not otherwise provided. If so, the the HCA* specifically section 11 could provide that:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/section/11
“(7)A person is a member of a group defined by reference to transgender identity if the person is—
(a)a female-to-male transgender person,
(b)a male-to-female transgender person,
(c)a non-binary person,
(d)a person who cross-dresses,
and references to transgender identity are to be construed accordingly. ”
However, apart from ‘d’ being a concrete and final definition, the others seem to be loose. What is ‘a non-binary person’, and where is ‘transgender’ as used in ‘a’ and ‘b’ defined?
* Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021
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Twathater: I feel just as despondent as you do, believe me, but I have listened to many of these trans people of both sexes, and I cannot but feel compassion for some of them. Most of those (males) who express their need to transition and to live as females, even where they have not physically transitioned yet (although this type almost invariably do or are desperate to, as do many homosexual ones) appear to accept that they are men and will always be men. Their need doesn’t lie in accessing female spaces and rights per se.
This is a fairly recent phenomenon, and Professor Sheila Jeffreys offers the best explanation, to my mind, of what has changed, and she also pinpoints how it is actually trans activists, often, rather than the trans community itself, who are pushing the overturning of ALL female spaces and rights, and many of these are misogynists and woman haters. She views it, after having done reams of research, a men’s sexual rights movement, whereby all trans people are being used as foot soldiers and the vanguard for men with, often, very dubious sexual motives. The real change, she says, has come with the claim that ‘trans women’ are actually women, but, again, why are governments right across the Western world backing such a tiny minority?
Could it be: 1) because it isn’t such a tiny minority, for starters, which we will see as soon as this stuff passes into legislation, if we allow it to; 2) because corporations and their CEOs, some of them trans women hold the financial reins and are bankrolling both Stonewall and these governments and political parties; 3) because of the power that pushing this stuff through against majority wants and needs affords governments with authoritarian instincts? The other thing, of course, is a naked attempt to create social upheaval in order to recreate society as the movers and shakers wish, and because many of the people in power are themselves of dubious sexual continence? I think that all of these things are factors.
The psychologists I researched al seemed to be in agreement that most Western trans identified males are autogynephiles (AGP) – which means that they are in love with themselves as women; that is, browbeaten, submissive, inferior women, not as strong, competent women or ones with an opinion; and they may well, therefore, present a danger to real women and girls, or, indeed, anyone who challenges their trans status because that often makes them descend into a narcissistic rage, and they can lash out. Some psychologists actually believe that at least a percentage of what is termed ‘domestic violence’ is actually AGP rage at their female partners for not co-operating with, and participating in, their autogynephilia practices or just jealous rage at the femaleness.
However, tolerating and accepting people who may feel very intensely that they are the opposite sex to the one they were born into, need not mean that we surrender everything to them. Let them live in peace as they choose and try to make life as peaceful and accepting as possible without opening women’s and girls’ spaces up to them. Validation is NOT, emphatically NOT, a human right and neither does it exist in our law. We do not have to allow them to colonize our sex-based jobs, hospital wards, prisons, female institutions, medical services, etc. Third spaces and third space services are the only answer, and will always be the only answer. I think women are way past being kind now, and we will fight every inch of the way. Every, single inch and half-inch, every millimetre. We really have had enough, twathater, and this could lead to real disruption on our streets and public spaces, and we will call them out at every opportunity. Nicola, Lorna and Patrick, be aware that you won’t get away with this.
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Good and helpful information, JB. I’m afraid I have no better idea than you do, though, how we’re supposed to interpret it, or where we might go for legislative or judicial guidance. It’s a total, and disgraceful, legal mess.
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My two and a half-year-old grandchild can tell a girl from a boy when she shares ends on a see-saw in the park.
When you consider the real problems which Scotland and the world face and this is what Sturgeon’s minions obsess about…….
Keep on keeping on, Gordon.
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Thanks, tintochiel. I can’t remember quite that far back but I certainly knew by not much later. It’s one reason why it’s so ludicrous when we get told we’re obsessed with genitals or are demanding genital inspections to know who should be getting into which toilets.
I knew next to nothing about such matters at that age but, like everyone else, I’d have had nae bother spotting a boy in a skirt.
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It becomes even more obvious around puberty and after though, the very end biological purpose of that change. The difference between the sexes becomes even more apparent in the alteration of girls to women, boys to men. It’s as if the god (or goddess) of evolution had decided that we don’t want there to be any confusion around procreation so let’s build in a recognition system so that they don’t waste time pursuing a dead-end. ( Yes, there is same sex attraction which was perhaps not anticipated by the deity in charge but hell, let’s just wave it through anyway since all we care about here in quality control is procreation of the species. However, the inherent recognition system is still operative, the usual trigger system which we call sexual attraction, just that in this case it’s triggered by the same sex, that’s all.)
So far, so simple, but the deity of evolution did not anticipate that this ancient biological system would itself be called into question by a presumptuous new ‘religion’, angrily denying the factual evidence of millions of years and substituting ‘feelings’ for reality. There will be thunderbolts!
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Gordon, I might add my granddaughter does a better job than I do in telling one sex from the other: quite a few parents seem keen on dressing their children in non-gender specific clothing nowadays.
Apologies for “liking” myself, by the way. Don’t know how that happened. Honest, guv!
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I remember experiments in developmental psychology which demonstrate quite unambiguously that even infants can discern differences between boy and girl infants. I can’t remember now how young precisely but it is much less than two and a half.
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If I remember correctly, it’s about 18 months to two years old that children start to develop a sense of self that comes along with being a boy or a girl. I was always surprised that this developed first before they could draw objects one behind the other (something to do with perception, if they know a table has 4 legs, they’ll draw all of them whether or not they can see them).
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I was referring to experiments and observations on infants of only a few months old. I shall search out references. Professors Bower and Trevarthen during my time at EU came to similar conclusions from different directions. The importance of the period between eighteen months to two years derives from Piaget’s theories, which were beginning to fall out of favour for being too rigid and based on very limited data.
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Yes, my learning is very old and likely from Piaget’s theories – I always thought child development was far too varied to put age ranges against each little thing, but it is useful for measuring against. And it does depend on the type of tests used to determine developmental stages – it always seem to be a lot of guesswork and supposition with these.
I’ll be interested to see how the research determined a knowledge of sex-differences at two months old – I am always sceptical of claims of knowledge in an infant before it can communicate verbally, or do much physically at all – I think it’s at about two months babies start to get hand-eye coordination (?) – that is, they can grab something in front of them instead of waving their arms about aimlessly. As I say, my knowledge on this is very old and a dim memory (despite finding the subject quite fascinating), so it would be interesting to see some recent research.
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Unless I have misunderstood, I must disagree about the capacities of infants. From the moment of birth, there is a great deal that we all learn about the world, which becomes the basis of what we later call knowledge. In fact a foetus is also learning during the final trimester as it develops its nervous system and fine tunes its proprioception, curled up, head bowed, knees pulled up, concentrating on tiny little hands and feet, wiggling and squirming about within the comfort of the womb at the same time as neural pathways are laid down.
Bower demonstrated with a number of simple learning protocols that infants are able to deal quite happily with, for example, four value logic and perceive what he called higher order variables, which became more refined throughout development. What he proposed was quite radical, that perception is independent of sensory modality and that development goes from the abstract and general to the particular. Trevarthen had his postgrads drilled into a tight research programme, logging every small detail of parent infant interactions. He proposed that infants are social and sociable from their first breath, and in fact often lead and encourage their parents in social encounters. He had an evolutionary theory to explain it all, but I rather reacted against this, given I was reading Marx and Foucault in other places. But I could not deny the observations or experimental evidence.
The point of saying this is to say that you are right; that development is such a complex and divergent process that putting age ranges round the first appearance of conduct, behaviour of mental ability makes little sense. The professors I mentioned both contributed to the demise of the suchlike stage theories, most of which were informed by Piaget.
There is a Wiki article about Trevarthen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colwyn_Trevarthen
I can’t find anything much about Tom Bower though. He wrote a number of books in the seventies and eighties about child development and went off to teach in the USA.
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Sorry, I wasn’t suggesting infants do not have the capacity for certain things, the in-built instinct if you like (but I really don’t want to start on a nature/nurture debate!) – I was questioning the ability to TEST for it – that is, does the experiment prove the thing they are claiming? It’s not easy when you have to be gentle with babies and they can’t just fill out a questionnaire.
Babies apparently have very acute depth perception – and they are probably born with it – but how would you test this before most can see anything but big blurs? I suppose you could balance the baby on the edge of a table and see if it falls off,,, but that could be seen as unsporting. (I jest!)
When a foal is born, one of its biggest imperatives is to stand up and be able to walk within about an hour, it must be born with that immediate need and inbuilt motor control skills to do so. Human babies don’t have that – but they do have the capacity to develop it at a later stage (after cartilage has hardened I expect) just not immediately; there is no ‘instinct’ to do so. So there must be a sequence of development stages (just that the age of each development varies hugely) – I can imagine that all babies are born as social, it would seem essential for human development where the reliance on the parent is huge and that large brain wants to soak up information.
I remember my wee brother and a wee cousin – they were only a couple of months apart in age – at about a year old. My wee brother could point, say ‘ugh’, and race about the place at a hundred miles an hour slamming doors and making mischief – my wee cousin (slightly younger) could barely stand with wobbly legs but was forming sentences like “daddy, would you pick me up?” and “daddy, could I please have a drink of juice”. The difference was astonishing. My wee brother didn’t form a sentence until he was 3 in the end. None of them are wee any more though, and both grew up fine. The point of me reminiscing here is that I’m not sure even the sequence of development is particularly important, in many cases.
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Thank you. I think the nature/nurture thing is just anther false dichotomy and that in reality we are both born with a great deal to help (or hinder) development, AND that we learn a great deal while developing. My wife works with children and can recount many stories just like yours. I don not really want to dredge up all sorts of stuff about experimental methodology when applied to infants because it is dull and technical, but it is possible to use elements of their behaviour to infer ability to discriminate. You don’t need to ask infants to fill out questions 🙂 ethological description and coding of behaviour is also a very tight way of gathering data. Interesting tangent here. Thank you.
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This is a good article that demonstrates the scientific study behind what you already know to be true. Voice, face and gait are the main factors in determining the sex of an individual.
View at Medium.com
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Thanks, critgen. See also Morag’s brilliant comments on my “Letter to a Friend” post, linked to in the post above, which explain lucidly the science of chromosomes and “intersex” cases and where the science once again — and completely unsurprisingly — supports fully our most basic intuitions.
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It really would have to, don’t you think, Gordon, given that we are a dimorphic species? I don’t think that most people object to the trans existence per se, or feel that trans people should be discriminated against, but they do, instinctively, I think, shy away from saying that one sex can be the other. The real problem with all of this stuff is that the trans lobby will not allow a debate or allow science to enter the equation. In the end, they will be the ones whose progress will be halted. There seems to be a huge antipathy from parts of the trans community to the suggestion that paraphilia, and specifically, autogynephilia play a role in the trans woman phenomenon. It does appear to be the best fit, judging by the psychological evidence and dearth of medical evidence for the existence of the opposite sex brain in the body theory. However, follow-up scientific and psychological studies have been damned by accusations of transphobia. I very much doubt that an entire society has ever been held to ransom in this way by such a putative, small minority – which takes us full circle to the real reasons why this is happening at this specific time in our history in the West.
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Yes lorncal, I hope I’m not trivialising things too much when I say that I remember years ago Mick Jagger saying that English men really don’t need a lot of persuasion to dress up in drag, and Jimmy Logan saying that Stanley Baxter was “a bit ower fond ae wearin’ a frock”. It has always seemed obvious to me that this was about getting an erotic thrill and not about being a woman in any sense. At its extreme, I assume it’s a fantasy of being able to shag yourself.
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My example for this insanity is this. If the details on your birth certificate are not immutable, then I want to change my birth date and self-id as a 95yo man. I also want to claim back the 30 years of pension I’m now overdue. This is absolute insanity. I don’t know many trans people, but I’d always be kind to them, as I try to be with most people ( a bit of banter aside). It still doesn’t change the reality we all live in. It’s utter madness and needs resisted at all costs!
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Yep, lots of people deserve kindness and most of us are prepared to give it, even as far as going along with something we know to be untrue. But we MUST draw the line when we’re asked to give up reality for it.
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Yes, but it’s also more than that. We are being asked to subvert reality, but also to participate in the subversion before accepting that as our reality. It is completely 1984 and we are all Winston Smiths. I think that trans people will reap the whirlwind with this stuff when it is really other elements pushing it. Either that, or many, many, many people are going to have mental breakdowns in trying to cope with the overturning of reality.
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I strongly believe history will show this article from the Guardian to be up there as one of the most important and prophetic articles ever written.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/03/moonie-cult-leader
The similarities are jaw dropping
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I’ll read it, IM. Since it’s clearly about another cult, the similarities with this one will be inevitable, I think.
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And yet, the Guardian is very much supportive of the gender stuff we’re facing now. Bigtime.
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Dani Garavelli’s becoming a regular on the always gaslighting Graun’s opinion pages.
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“we consider non-binary people to be members of the wider trans
community, and will work to achieve improvements to their rights and
wellbeing, along with those of all trans people. We support the Non-Binary
Working Group and look forward to receiving their recommendations to
improve non-binary equality next year. Following from that, we will develop an
action plan by spring 2023, setting out how we will take forward their
recommendations and our next steps in achieving equality for non-binary
people.” The slightly evil part of my identity is looking forward to the commentary
as this bit of the agreement takes flight.
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The absolute joke of this, Annie, is that we’re all “non-binary” if “binary” means total conformity to one or the other of the sex stereotypes, and if it means “sexless” then it’s just more abject nonsense. Just what extra “rights” or “equality” a person who thinks they’re sexless should be afforded, other than our deepest pity for their narcissistic delusions, remains, as you say, to be seen.
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I do wonder in what way they are being discriminated (whoever they might be).
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I applaud everything you have said. You have given me hope. I am now willing to be jailed.
Thank you.
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Thanks, Astonished, but let’s work as hard as we can to make sure it never comes to that. I’ve been pretty miserable the couple of times I’ve gone camping so I’m not hopeful at all about my suitability for the prison life…
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Personally I see Wastmonster having something to say about it after they have allowed the SNP and Greens to hang themselves. They will say the Scottish parliament and legal system are no longer functional because they are trying to force through laws that the public don’t agree with and a Prosecution Service no longer serves the public interest and colludes with government in politically motivated show trials. It will give them the excuse they need to start shutting it down all down. I can only hope i’m wrong, but I don’t think so.
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That’s precisely how I see the game plan too.
A rerun of ‘the white man’s burden’ – to rescue the clueless natives from their absurd ‘leaders’. In return for all our resources, culture, autonomy etc, obviously.
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The thing is though, Scott, that all the Westminster parties have policies on this that are as bad as, or worse than, the SNP and Scottish Greens. If Boris Johnson had not replaced Theresa May and installed Amber Rudd, the previous Tory Minister was about to enact something very similar to what the SG are now proposing.
It was down to the personal initiative of Rudd herself that it was scrapped which, as I’ve said before, just goes to show that no-one is all bad. (Also, as I saw someone else saying, the public outcry over Rudd’s action has been zero, which shows how tiny the minority of zealots pushing this by intimidation and stealth actually is.)
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Aye. But it will be interesting for the Brits to be able watch the Scots experimenting on themselves, for a change, and to tweak the policies of the other “devolved nations”.
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“Boys are not girls, and girls are not boys…..
Men are not women, and women are not men…
Males are not females and females are not males, no matter how much they think or say they are.”
———
Bravo!
To which I add, contra the imbecile now in charge of Scottish Education, “Trans-women are NOT women, no matter how much they think or say they are.”
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Cynicusinexile
I complained formally about that particular person while she was in her last ministerial role when she used the terms, “transphobic and bigoted” towards those raising valid concerns about the proposed reforms. I also complained to my MSP and to Sturgeon. Sturgeon later used the same terms herself. I got no response to any of my emails.
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I await with interest the first rapist to walk free from court on the basis that he’s been wrongly charged because he’s a woman and women can’t be charged with rape.
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The way it works at the moment, as admitted by Humza Yousaf, is that crimes committed by trans-identifying males (ie MtF) are actually recorded as female crimes so it’s very possible that sexual assaults committed by these people can become, statistically, crimes committed by women. That’s really going to screw up the data.
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Gordon
The alternate reality that is trans ideology where science is denied and children are lied to and told that hacking bits of their bodies off and taking drugs will make them something they will never be is taking over many countries and if it is not reigned in an entire generation of children are going to have their lives ruined. It would seem to me that gay or lesbian children are of no value to the hard core peddlers of trans ideology and must be converted into the opposite sex. They prey on confused children and I have no doubt that many of the trans extremists have sinister motives, whether it is plain old misogyny or much worse. All of this is done in plain sight and regarding Scotland we have Patrick Harvie leading the charge who as far as I know is the only politician who has accepted a prize from a foundation set up by the self confessed paedophile Ian Dunn.
It is bad enough that there is a pro trans lobby pushing this ideology, what especially concerns me about Scotland is that here we have the phenomenon of the cult like support Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP receive from nationalists. I am deeply concerned that she is going to be allowed to push the trans agenda and continue ruining children’s lives and erasing women because many of her supporters will back her no matter what. I have often said that Nicola Sturgeon could rape and murder a child live on TV and your average SNP voter would still vote for her and I believe the same is happening right now as she ruins children’s lives and erases women. At least when the Lib Dem’s tried pushing this agenda under Jo Swinson the electorate turned against them and the party is to all purposes essentially extinct now. Good riddance I say. I simply cannot see the same thing happening with Sturgeon’s SNP and I fear that things will go so far that there will be no going back.
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I may be in jail before you having spent much time ranting about this anti science crap!
Looking on the bright side one may be able to choose whether it is the Bar L or Cornton Vale – depending on who you choose to be on the day!
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Couldn’t this GRA legislation be challenged in the courts. I’d be more than willing to put towards a crowdfunding for this.
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You have to admire their evil brilliance…another reason to distract the great unwashed from thinking of Independence.
Perhaps one way to stop this is to share davidwferguson’s comment above with the Alphabet women.
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Derek
It has nothing to do with distracting about independence.
It’s about obtaining a standing internet army of millions of trans lunatics to spew endless propaganda in support of Sturgeon in her narcissistic pursuit of limitless power and adoration. Always trying to judge Sturgeon through the prism of independence completely misunderstands what she is about.
She used the SNP as a vehicle to gain power and influence in Scotland and now she is going to use trans ideology to try and gain the same internationally. Independence is of no real consequence to here, it was just a means to an end.
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The SNP leadership and the gender politics cult they have used to disenfranchise ordinary members have no interest in Independence. I know this from the inside. Iain Lawson’s blog provides the how and the who of it.
We would be quicker served if our press did the jobs we expect of them rather than provide support and cover for a government whose aims (Independence) they vehemently oppose. Its strange how that works?
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Well put Gordon. I’m trying to comprehend the incompressible. It defies all reason and the attempts to make one believe that black is white and to argue, rationally, that this is wrong, and an offence, is incomprehensible.
We all have different levels of courage. My father was brave enough to be imprisoned for his beliefs and his refusal to accept apartheid and racialism despite the authority’s attempts to claim that it was a matter of ‘common sense’ that black people were inferior to white people and that, therefore, it was acceptable to treat black and coloured people as less than human.
I’m not sure I’m as brave as he was, but we must do what we can and call out, as you do, bullshit, and not let it pass by default, whenever we can and at every opportunity. They can’t put everyone in prison and our strength is in numbers. We are the majority and this must be shouted out from the rooftops!
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Thanks, Ingwe. I suspect we’ve both been in some pretty dark places in our time, and whenever I’ve been in such a place, the one thing I’ve held onto, and that I’ve never lost faith in, is the need to behave decently. That may or may not be courage but it is sustaining (which is why, when Winston Smith lost it, he knew he it was over). I don’t doubt for a second that you have plenty of it.
On that subject, and because I never really need an excuse to quote them, these are my favourite lines of Adrienne Rich:
I know you are reading this poem listening for something,
torn between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing
else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
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Imagine if another minority, with seemingly unlimited power and influence wanted to change the very definition of reality to suit themselves at the detriment of others and that minority was the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas?
Imagine in another time and place this minority group were [insert oppressor].
In 2023 when a person is sworn in court to tell the truth are they being forced to lie, if they say there are only two immutable sexes? You don’t have to swear on a ‘holy’ book any more in a court in Scotland and i presumed it was because of this same dilemma. How can an atheist or agnostic swear on something they consider untrue. And if they do how can anything else they say be taken as truth.
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This is from today’s Guardian. Another article whooping about the advances “into government” being made by “the Scottish Greens” which fails to show any signs of research having been done on the serious concerns being raised about the underlying obsession with gender identity. Fortunately it’s been raised below the line.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/27/greens-power-snp-climate#comments
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Jane: every psychologist I read or listened to said that ‘trans women’ (the heterosexual ones) behave exactly like the bullying, domineering male stereotype even when they have taken hormones. I think that trans men (women) are coming, in the main, from a very different place, and it has little to do with enforcing sexual rights as the ‘trans women’s’ predominantly is. To a huge extent, from studies done in Sweden and elsewhere, the consensus appears to be that girls feel so undervalued that they see becoming a man as the only way they can exist as human beings in our society. Sad, sad reflection of what we have come to in the West, and it looks as if things in other parts of the world are a helluva lot worse for females, and, as in the West, getting worse by the day. I do think, though, that there are boys and young men out there who feel just as undervalued, if the large numbers of young men who take their own lives is anything by which to judge. Perhaps it is a total realignment of societal values that is required – the end of ‘toxic masculinity’ and encouragement to young boys and men to be a different kind of man, one who is still very relevant to the human family and to society, in partnership with females rather than in opposition to them.
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Lorncal
I’m struggling a bit with this. I don’t see that things are getting worse for women by the day in the west.
The worst bullies I ever worked with and for were women, not men. (I’m female.) I find the whole women v men debate tiring to be honest. We can’t just write off men as being one thing and present women as all that is good because, for one thing, it’s a lie.
I believe women have seen real change in their lives in the workplace. I think things are mostly fair and sometimes are even tipped in favour of women. (I’ve seen that.) And with the advent of MeToo we’ve arrived at a place where, essentially, a woman can accuse a man of virtually anything. Governments and justice systems (like the ones in Scotland) are working hard right now to dispense with juries and alter court proceedings to favour the accuser in cases like that. That worries me a lot.
There is definitely toxic masculinity around, no doubt about that, but there’s also toxic feminism too, and how! I find both equally poisonous to be honest.
It’s all very well encouraging young men to be a different kind of man but young women aren’t exactly inspiring confidence either. What sort of message do programmes like “Love Island” send out to young women yet they’re watching these idiots parade like pieces of meat. I just don’t get that. During Me Too we’ve had prominent female actors declaring how they were obliged to take certain roles and comply with the requirements of the director in certain explicit scenes. They’re whining now but, they could have said no! If all female actors had said no then directors wouldn’t have got away with “exploiting” them. But were they exploited? Or did they just say yes because they knew if they didn’t, some other female actor would?
I think there should always be ways to communicate between the sexes without having to be at war with each other.
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I actually agree with much of that, sadscot. I, too, believe that there is a toxic femininity which says that men and women are equal to the point of there being little to no difference between the two sexes, but, as ‘Biologist’ explains so eloquently, we can never be the same thing because our differences are the very things that produce the next generation, and our physical strengths are very different, in general terms. I think that women, just as much as men, can be intolerant and pushy, and I also think that we have very much more in common than is reflected in our society.
When I hear young women say things such as: sex work is my choice; it pays well; and it empowers me, I want to slap them, frankly. Nothing about being used as lumps of meat is empowering; it is only demeaning. Nonetheless, I can understand the defensiveness. The absolute refusal of many women to take on board that they cannot drink as much as men is another point that so many young women today just don’t accept; and that, when they do drink as much, they might put themselves into situations where they are at risk. Yes, I know that seems sexist, but you don’t enter a tiger’s enclosure and expect it to behave like a moggie. Men take advantage of woman all the time because they are hard-wired to spread their genes and to take pleasure from it. It doesn’t preclude them from being good husbands and fathers, but when a girl’s dad says to her: I know what men are like; he means it, and she should listen.
Porn has always existed: it has been found in ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman, and Chinese, Japanese, etc. sources, but never before has it been so available to so many boys and men, in such forms that women really do not have a clue, and it is having an effect on how men relate to women and vice versa, and not in a good way. Queer theory would, ostensibly for both sexes, erase laws that inhibit/prohibit the full expression of who they are, particularly in their sexuality, but the end result can only be that consent will be erased, as will age barriers and other barriers that protect the vulnerable – and women are vulnerable, as are children, the disabled, the mentally disabled, animals, and that only males will have any sexual autonomy at all. Professor Sheila Jeffreys believes that the trans movement is, in its essence, a men’s sexual rights movement, and I have to agree with her. We may both be wrong, of course.
What I think has happened in the West, in particular, but could also happen elsewhere if lessons are not learned, is that women’s roles in society have simply not been recognized for the important part they play in our species’ development. Women, basically, have been written out of everything. The roles that women carried out hitherto the 1960s or thereabout, were, at the same time, given plaudits (mothers, wives, homemakers) but denigrated as inferior to men’s roles. Had women’s roles been afforded the respect that they deserve in the development of our species and its very existence, I do not believe we would be where we are now with this gender ideology.
Women are just as capable and intelligent as men, and educated women tend to have fewer children (balancing the population explosion), spend more of their income on their families and pass on their learned experience to their children, especially their daughters. It is fascinating to learn that, in the wealthy West, women opt not to participate as much as they could in science or technology when it is widely available to them, while men strive for these occupations because they tend to pay well. In every area of employment where women have entered in numbers, the pay grade slipped: teaching, for example; and the top jobs with the highest pay grades went to men. These are very contradictory results. Some biologists and psychologists believe that women simply place much more emphasis on a work-family balance precisely because of their biological sex.
I believe now, although I certainly didn’t in my twenties, that women should be rewarded for having children, and should certainly not suffer financial penalty which, I’m afraid, is almost always the cost of being a wife and mother, as is economic downturn, etc. It was true of pensions and welfare benefits, too. Where women work and raise children, the rewards (from the common tax pool) should reflect their dual input to our economy and to childrearing. It may be controversial, but, I do think that, until this becomes the norm, women will demand more and more of the jobs that go to men currently (and that enrages some men, as we can see now) and will produce fewer and fewer children – precisely because of the inequities in financial rewards. I believe that it is here that real equality is possible, if men and women would only work together to achieve it, but that is where toxic masculinity comes in: it is unwilling to even contemplate such a situation; and believes that men work hard and should get the rewards; that women’s work is trivial and undeserving of real recognition. I believe that it is in the law that the most destructive changes to our society may well come if this stuff is not stopped.
Sorry if this is overlong, Mr Dangerfield. I don’t mean to take advantage.
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You’re absolutely not overdoing it, lorncal. It’s excellent, and I’m honoured to have it here.
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Lorncal
Superb post! I couldn’t agree more.
One of the things that bothers me is that, while it is absolutely right to offer support to those suffering domestic abuse, I have long believed that we should be actively teaching youngsters that the only thing to do after the first time a partner strikes you is walk away and not go back. The mental damage done to a woman (or man) who has endured long term violence in a domestic situation will make that person less able or even unable to do that but a person who has just been hit for the first time absolutely can. And when he/she chooses to go back they’re making a conscious unwise, bad and dangerous choice. I think we should be shouting that from the rooftops at young people from the earliest point possible. We’re teaching them plenty of other things from Primary 1, why not this too when it’s still so prevalent? So many children are still growing up in violent homes and come to view this as the norm, it’s heartbreaking.
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Lorncal,
EXACTLY this: “Where women work and raise children, the rewards (from the common tax pool) should reflect their dual input to our economy and to childrearing.” – I’ve always believed this should be so (since becoming aware of the unfairness of society anyway) – it’s a job, women are doing an essential job, for the whole of society, and should be given respect for it, not penalised, whatever their economic status. I became rather furious at the new fad, within the middle classes, for saying if they could or couldn’t “afford” to have children – as though having children should be reserved for those with wealth, and children are just an asset to own.
Thanks for your post.
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“I am confident that this is so because being a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, must be one of the most overdetermined realities that there can possibly be for human beings.”
“It would make no sense if we could not recognise that reality in one another, instinctively, as a trait of being human, and without the need for active thought or any training or education of any kind”.
“It is as fundamental, and as little requiring of justification or explanation, as the ability to recognise the face of your own mother or father or sister or brother out of every other human being on the whole planet”.
These are important and fundamentally true statements “little requiring of justification or explanation”.
But there is an explanation – and it is as fundamental as human existence, itself because it is the very basis of human existence. Allow me, as a biological scientist, to provide a biological explanation. (I hold first degrees in zoology and in biochemistry, and I have a PhD in a medical science and spent a working life in universities).
The fundamental fact of biology is this: organisms exist for one purpose only; to pass on their genes. Their bodies are made by their genes as a means of the perpetuation of these same genes. There is no other (biological) reason for existence. Our (biological) somatic existence is as simple, prosaic and as futile as that – and that fact is very difficult to bear (which is why religion was invented) – especially at this time where the mores are those of narcissistic individualism.
Humans are sexually-reproducing organisms. All sexually-reproducing organisms whether flowering plants, sexually dimorphic insects (not all insects reproduce sexually – for example aphids are parthenogenic – they exist only as females and reproduce without sex), and all mammals – which includes humans.
The fundamental distinction between males and females is that males donate genetic material and females receive (male) genetic material (DNA) which, when they are brought together, create an entirely new, and utterly unique individual derived from the DNA of both. In the case of mammals, the female egg receives a male sperm inside the female body (sexually reproducing fish (mainly)simply release these gametes into the surrounding water, and leave them to find each other (external fertilisation) – but even this requires behaviour that brings male and female animals into sufficient proximity, in our case intimate proximity) to achieve that – and at core it is this sexual behaviour that makes reproduction possible – and which causes all the problems! (Who would be a male blac-widow spider?)
All sexually reproducing species have therefore evolved mechanisms that do two things: 1. Males and females recognise each other and are ‘attracted’ to each other and 2. They have anatomical, physiological and behavioural arrangements that allow sperm cells to come in contact with egg cells, penetrate the egg cells, and create new organisms by fusing their respective, highly complementary, DNA (fertilisation).
In all mammals (including humans) this involves (unlike say fish) internal fertilisation whereby, by anatomical means, the sperm is deposited inside the body of the female by means of the respective reproductive organs (testis and penis in males, and ovaries, uterus and vagina in females). The sex of the individual is determined by x and y chromosomes, body form starts as female and is cemented female by oestrogen, and changed to male by testosterone made respectively by ovaries and testes. These hormones also largely drive sexual behaviour and ‘condition’ the brain into the behaviour appropriate to the sex of the individual. It is these behavioural traits that largely give rise to how we regard ‘gender’ which is NOT a biological construct, but a behavioural and sociological one (this is a simplification, but is essentially true). We all recognise, not just male and female forms, but male and female behaviour. Vive la difference!
Like other sexually reproducing organisms, in order to achieve fertilisation, males and females must be able to recognise each other, get close to each other and have often elaborate courtship and pair-bonding rituals that prepare each other for sexual congress.
Recall, this is a biological argument – and not one about sociology or culture – but these fundamentally are also biological constructs since they derive from our genetically-determined humanity and provide the framework for human survival and thriving. (I am not here arguing that sex is only about reproduction, but at the biological level that is its ultimate – its main – function.
That is why “being a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, must be one of the most overdetermined realities that there can possibly be for human beings”. Indeed!
So that we get this right, and do not waste time, energy and gametes, (remember, in the state of nature and for much of human existence most people rarely lived to 40 years) we have to be able to immediately and unerringly recognise who is which sex and bloody well get on with it – and family and kinship structures have evolved to assist in child-rearing (it takes a village and all that). The biological bribe is that sex is fun – and lifelong loving relationships are the most worthwhile fulfilling things that we have. Serotinin sees to that (another sex-related hormone).
For all human existence, and in all human cultures up until this one, these matters were clear and unequivocal – and frankly remain so to the vast majority of heterosexual humanity (there may be biological utility to a degree of homosexuality, particularly where there is an imbalance of sexes in a given population – it has never been unknown, but that’s not what this piece is about).
Someone’s sexuality should NEVER be a reason for discrimination and cruelty, but that needs to be observed in respect of heterosexuals (the vast majority and the biologically normative orientation) by those who may be attracted to the same sex, or those who for whatever reason feel they are in the ‘wrong’ sex (whether these reasons be genetic, anatomical, psychological, sociological or just the fashion).
I have my own views as to why we are engaged in this kind of nuttiness, but others have put forward some of these.
There are those who have interests other than human thriving for doing so – and some who are acting through downright malice. In the past, society had mechanisms for ensuring that such people did not achieve positions of power and influence. Our kindness is being ill-used against us!
I would normally post using my own name, but the situation in Scotland is now so fraught, and so dangerous for those who state simple, scientific facts that ought not to require an explanation, that I am posting this under a pseudonym.
Gordon has my email and can check my identity, should he so wish, against posts in which I have used my full name.
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Sorry, “serotonin” should have been oxytocin – although serotonin, GABA, and a plethora of other neuro-endocine chemicals are involved too,
And of course, what I failed to mention: since sex is determined by x and y chromosomes, it is of course immutable!
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Thank you for that post. I found it very interesting.
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Thank you for this.
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We are behind in the game here when trained, honest people are wary of putting their names to facts. I’ll be taking the day off work on Thursday to go along to this protest. The place I work has recently adopted this having resisted it for decades (amongst other things) from its headquarters in its heartland.
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Hope to see you there, OP! (Shattering the illusions of the very sweet person who said online that I sounded like a caped crusading superhero, I’ll be the wee fat baldy man with the specs.)
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Good show. Hopefully their will be a good crowd there.
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there.. damnit.
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Hey Gordon you must be my younger (by a good few years) twin
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Wee fat baldy guys of the world unite, TH!
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Reblogged this on grumpygorgon.
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Thanks, Biologist, that’s very informative, and I can indeed confirm you are what you claim to be from the information you’ve provided to me.
As lesbians and some gay men are increasingly pointing out, same sex attraction is itself grounded in the biological facts you set out here, and the fight for lesbian and gay rights (which I and many other section 28 veterans participated in) offers not the slightest challenge to reality. The clue is in the names — “same sex”; “homo (from the Greek “homos” meaning “same”) sexual”.
That was, and is, a real fight because homophobes perceived exactly the same reality that we did, just as racists and sexists do, and they had to be beaten for lesbian and gay rights to be achieved.
The “trans” campaigners want something completely different. They don’t want the same rights as everyone else, based on the same reality. They want “rights” that no-one else has, based on a “reality” that doesn’t exist.
(Personally, like Chomsky — and Darwin — I am sceptical that selective advantage explains everything about evolution and suspect that the evolution of human homosexuality, and much else, remains a mystery to us, but that’s another story…)
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Thanks Gordon. As a scientist I have to say that nothing can completely explain everything about anything – including evolution, and their are many schools of evolutionary biologists who argue about all of this, but sexual selection and selective advantage are pretty big drivers.
Ih humans it is further complicated by psychosocial evolution that certainly modifies purely selective advantage (think about medicine and agriculture for a start). But I was making very general points to approach a deeper truth.
Completely agree about Lesbian and Gay rights -as well as racism. Race is largely a cultural distinction – there is no biological basis for it (bigger genetic variation within ‘races’ than between them.
Cultural/sexual distinctions as a basis of hate is anathema. And hard won women’s are what is under threat here – from testosterone-driven aggression!
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I’m going way off-topic here, but I’m interested. Is it evolution at all if it doesn’t alter the genome? Hard to see how medicine or agriculture (or any kind of culture) could do that. If it doesn’t alter the genome, isn’t it just change?
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Well, let’s look at why women survive for many years after their reproductive use is over – this is something that evolution has provided us (and some animals, whales I think too) with. We are social animals and so traits can be favoured if it benefits the society (not just an individual).
Women living after menopause – where they have stopped being able to reproduce – is thought to benefit a population because they are there to give support in general to the group, without being in competition with active child-bearing women. Why have menopause at all? It’s actually a positive thing for the population as a whole (not, I have to say, for those that have to suffer through it). Why don’t men have something similar? Probably because they don’t have to expend so many (bodily) resources in reproducing – child bearing really uses up a lot of energy and nutrients! So women have a non-reproductive role in society, and that physical characteristic has been selected for because societies that tend to have women living beyond menopause, tend to be more successful.
So, evolution is effected by societal and cultural factors.
Next, we can look at how, similarly, homosexuality might be a useful trait – or at least one that is not detrimental to a population and so would never be selected out. You don’t necessarily, in a group, want everyone competing for resources (having babies takes resources) – it might not seem great for the individual that’s not getting their genes passed on, but it can be good for society, because they are there working for and supporting the society they are part of.
Humans are social animals, and though we have evolved primarily to reproduce and pass on our genes, evolution has also made us to not be overwhelmingly reproductive (like mice are, say, with their boom-bust life cycles.) – there must be enough resources to sustain our population sizes, and the complexities of our social structures make a variety of traits desirable, not necessarily for each individual’s ability to reproduce, but for the ability of the population as a whole to be able to sustain itself and nurture all the children.
I also quite liked some of Dawkins’ ideas in The Selfish Gene – the genes need to be selfish to get themselves replicated, but the people in society need to be altruistic to ensure the success in survival of that next generation that inherit those genes. I think it was that book that explored how an altruistic society could be disrupted by just one selfish, self-serving individual. Our society at the moment seems to reward a sociopathic, selfish behaviour.
In reality, humans’ biggest evolutionary leap was in intelligence (or consciousness, or language, whichever) – our ability to not be changed by our environment, but to be able to change the environment in our favour. I don’t think the human body will really be doing much (natural) evolving again, much,,,
The genome changing constantly though, Gordon – mutations slip in all the time. And some things that may seem a rubbish trait – e.g. Sickle cell anaemia, is actually good as a recessive (not actively causing disease) gene because it confers protection from malaria (not exactly useful in Scotland though, so hasn’t been a problem here). I’m probably confusing things there – X and Y chromosomes are necessary to confer sex, which is binary, which enables reproduction – any variations on those will result in the mutations not being passed on so can’t have any evolutionary success. We are stuck with that one – men and women – with genes that confer physical reproductive traits, or the population dies out.
But, I’m not sure of the exact answer to Gordon’s question of ‘is it evolution if it doesn’t alter the genome’, so I’ll leave that to the expert!
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Gordon, thanks for the comment and the question:
“Hard to see how medicine or agriculture (or any kind of culture) could do that. If it doesn’t alter the genome, isn’t it just change?”
It’s a bit more complicated than that, Gordon. What you describe above is known as Lamarcksim – the notion (fallacy) that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired during its lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#:~:text=Lamarckism%2C%20also%20known%20as%20Lamarckian,or%20disuse%20during%20its%20lifetime.
Gregor Mendel showed that opposite: it was the existing genes that were passed on, and Darwin posited that these were ‘selected for’ (or failed) in/by environmental factors at a population level.
Genetic variation drives evolution. Organisms that are better adapted to a given environment are better fitted to pass on their genes. Genetic variation occurs naturally at a roughly have been estimated to be on the order of 10−4 to 10−6 per gene per generation so slowly vary naturally.
Most mutations are deleterious our neutral – but occasionally a gene will give an individual an advantage, and he/she will be more successful at passing on that gene, and over time it will increase its prevalence in a population. For example, a single gene mutation causes sickle-cell anaemia. That gene causes problems for those affected, but in Sub-Saharan Africa, it confers some resistance to malaria, therefore allowing those who possess it to pass it on. It’s persistence results from the fact that those who have it live to reproductive age and pass it on and being better fitted to survive malaria – if they have only one copy of the gene. The balance of advantage-disdavantage favours success in that particular environment – at a huge personal cost to those who have a double inheritance of the gene.
Sexual reproduction is useful in that it is another source of variation since, although we inherit 50% of our genes from each parent, a process of ‘crossing over’ during germ cell formation, results in the genes being reassorted (re-shuffled) and this can result in new combinations tha may confer reproductive/survival/ sex-selection advantage.
But the major source of human adaptive success is our versatility, we are not confined to a single habitat, and our brains have ensured that through technology (e.g. agriculture or medicine) we can survive in circumstances where in our native condition we would have failed. We are not stuck with a single environment, we create our own environment. People who in previous times would not have survived to reproductive age, are able to pass on genes, thus overcoming a large element of the ‘nature’ that would have selected against us. (It is very unlikely that many of us would survive or thrive if returned unaided by modern technology to the African environment in which we evolved – though the remnant population is very successful – or was until we started destroying their environment. It has been argued that this, coupled with the remarkable fact of huge genetic assortment involved in global travel and migration, has rendered us ‘Post-evolutionary’ organisms – natural selection no longer operates on us.
But as we are finding out with pandemics and climate change, the mass manipulation of our environment, brings its own problems – and our propensity for violence along with this, could finish us off!
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A Biologist, interesting stuff, thanks,,,, we must have been writing at the same time – I laughed when I saw you had also used the sickle cell anaemia example, lol, but I must inform everyone that this isn’t a conspiracy on our part – just a very well known, and proven, example!
Thanks for clarifying the ‘altering the genome’ question. (I’m a Mendel/Darwin subscriber)
I think pandemics are unavoidable due to globalisation (or an increased frequency of them are) and will be detrimental, but not the end of us. But climate change has a very good chance of doing so – once all the world resources are gone, once our world becomes uninhabitable, once all the water is polluted, we may not survive. We do have the intelligence to live sustainably I believe – it’s just that those in power don’t want it,,, it would be a good time to stop rewarding the greedy and the selfish.
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Biologist, I wasn’t subscribing to what I now know from you is Lamarcksim. Rather, I was questioning something you said which sounded to me like what I now know to be Lamarckism; namely, “psychosocial evolution that certainly modifies purely selective advantage (think about medicine and agriculture for a start)”
My point was that is is hard to see how “psychosocial evolution that certainly modifies purely selective advantage”, and which is connected somehow to medicine and agriculture, could alter the genome, and how indeed the genome could be altered by any kind of culture. Hence:
“Is it evolution at all if it doesn’t alter the genome? … If it doesn’t alter the genome, isn’t it just change?”
I think you’re agreeing that change (for example, an increasingly healthy population, generation on generation) isn’t evolution unless it is caused by a mutation which alters the genome and is then passed on.
I’m still puzzled therefore by how some “psychosocial” development (related for example to medicine and agriculture) could result in alteration of the genome in a member of one generation that was then passed on to the next. That’s what still sounds like Lamarckism to me, and what I was asking about.
In other words, I still don’t understand why we would apply the term “evolution” to a “psychosocial” thing like better medical care, unless it actually PRODUCED mutation, as opposed to just giving an otherwise non-advantageous mutation a better chance to survive.
Are you saying, for example, that if, say, a rogue batch of vaccine wiped out everyone in the world today except those with sickle-cell anaemia, leaving their descendants to carry forward the human race, then this would be “psychosocial evolution”?
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@ Contrary, I’m way off my home ground here, but you may find the example of lions and elephants relevant. Both exist in family groups of related females, led by the eldest females. Alpha males visit temporarily (I won’t say come and go here), bringing in their DNA contribution. Male offspring either wander off, or are evicted, I’m not sure, but that avoids inbreeding. The senior females are the reserve of experience and knowledge, eg of water holes. I don’t know whether their fertility declines, but to me that would make evolutionary sense. Their evolved value now is in supporting their female-line descendants: all of them.
Perhaps the same applied to early humans.
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Bruceb,
I think we can find analogies and similarities in any social animal groupings – and how we have developed and evolved in human society is all just theoretical really, and it’s not homogeneous either – that’s why there are different cultures, different populations developed differently and in this context, with different attitudes to the oppression of women within a population.
I highlighted that our biggest evolutionary change was intelligence – enabling us to manipulate our environment, which then allows us far more complex social groupings than other animals. I think all analogies need to be taken in context – what works out best for the survival of that species in any particular environment is not necessarily the reason the same behaviour developed in another species etc (parallel evolution). What works for elephants, for example, did not work well for mammoths (I’m assuming a similar social structure, and that it didn’t mitigate or suit the changing environment) in a different environment.
I can only speculate on how our social behaviour developed into women being oppressed as a group – I’d say it was a natural, then unnatural, development from women needing protection (while bearing & raising children, who also need protection). Men have been bred to be good protectors – strong, fast, aggressive – after all. But what also comes with being protected is a loss of freedom – you are dependent. As a group, a species, wanting to survive, this division of labour, alongside behavioural traits, is a good strategy.
But then we develop very complex social structures, groups turn into large populations, and we get government – all these can offer the protections and support needed while women expend resources on bearing children. So as society developed into civilisation, we could have developed into both sexes having equal status, and equal respect for each other, there is no reason why not – the state (our governments and institutions) could be equal and fair, while still mainintaining the evolutionary winning strategy in family groups (child-bearing/protectors/support), with equal choices in roles outside that grouping.
Unfortunately that protector/dependant status, instead, has been exaggerated and exacerbated in our civilisation – instead of getting respect and acknowledgement of their role, women are deemed to be less than human, because, probably, all those handy protective traits men have been bred for also confer a physical superiority and more aggressive stance, and if you are born into a group that affords you automatic privileges – why wouldn’t you want to maintain it? Good evolutionary survival traits are for women to accept that dependency, and some loss of freedom. Men used to have a greater burden of providing for the family, and expected to do so, but why that should develop into the law allowing men to beat the woman he’s meant to be protecting, and why there should be stricter rules on women’s behaviour (she gets hanged for infedelity, a man might get some disapproving frowns) – I can’t even begin to guess. I can only assume that by this stage, society has become too complex for our evolutionary heritage.
I think things are murky at the moment, society is changing and developing fast, and we will need to use intelligence and education to navigate through it. Humans are very successful, as far as species survival goes, and it has been shown that education and a good environment produces a sustainable population size – not the out-of-control population increases dystopian futures predict. We just need to learn to be sustainable with our environment too, and learn to give everyone in society the respect they deserve for the roles they play in it.
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Sorry Gordon, it’s that word ‘evolution’. Ill-chosen in this context. Psychosocial ‘evolution’ is NOT biological evolution, but is its product. A better word might have been ’emergence’.
Those (presumably) very early changes to our genome (e.g, the ones that created our huge brain) brought about changes in our behaviour and adaptability that resulted in us living in extended families and then settled societies supported by agriculture, and now other technologies- including e.g medicine. Birth-control technologies, for example, inevitably divorce us from evolutionary pressures (and likely make us ultimately more vulnerable to catastrophic change by limiting genetic diversity). For hitherto, a mark of human evolution has been our supreme adaptability.
By these means (technologies) we abstract ourselves to a large extent from the natural forces of biological evolution whereby we evolved as nomadic hunter-gatherers. We create our own environment and lose touch with our place in the biosphere – which we are now in the process of destroying!
Does that clarify?
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Thanks, Biologist, I think I see it now — a distinction between natural selection as a driving force of evolution on the one hand and pyschosocial emergence, which has the capacity to interfere with evolution (and indeed render us extinct!) on the other hand.
It’s fascinating stuff.
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Ah, I see, it’s Gordon’s sharp legal mind picking up on the reference to ‘evolution’. I took it to mean development in the context of psychosocial (and I have no idea what that really means).
To divert a bit again, A Biologist – yes we abstract ourselves from environment-driven natural selection – but part of our evolution gave us intelligence and the ability to communicate complex concepts, which then allow us to manipulate our environment. Our bodies don’t tend to evolve any more, because of technology (which we have due to intelligence) lessening the need (no selection of specific traits, or resistance). Our technology, due to the intelligence we possess, then brings about a different kind of evolution that allows for a far wider variety, and diversity, within our populations. Less restriction, and more possibilities.
Take something like dyslexia – seen as a learning disability in society at the moment – could have been selected for in the past within a different kind of society – plenty of dyslexics are very successful, they tend to be creative, can envisage complex concepts, and have good memories – in a society that doesn’t use written communication, these are very good survival traits. It’s only due to the way society is structured now, and the homogeneous nature of our education systems, that puts the average dyslexic at a disadvantage. As part of our evolution, we should be diversifying, not trying to fit everyone into a homogenous robotic mass, and ensuring all variety of skills are used to the best advantage for the population as a whole, not suppressed because it doesn’t fit into an abstract norm.
Then we have the human brain increasing in size, and babies with larger skulls being born – but women’s bodies are not evolving alongside this tendency, so less babies can be born naturally, and more women need medical intervention to give birth. Now, in the natural world of natural selection, this might not be a good survival strategy (if all medical sciences mysteriously disappeared tomorrow, there would likely be a crisis) – BUT, if we see the development of technology as part of our evolution, then is relying on medical intervention a bad thing? Should we accept, at some point, that our bodies are going to require medical intervention at all stages of our lives, because we do not have natural selection weeding out less than ideal (physical) survival traits – that is, is medical intervention just part of our evolution? We would then, of course, need society to provide medical services as a right (‘free’ for the use of all).
Do we decide that the ‘natural forces of biological selection’ are the only way we should, or can, evolve – or do we accept that intelligence – and manipulation of our environment, technology, etc – is also natural selection? (And that we should actually be using that intelligence to make a better environment, and social structures, instead of destroying everything).
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Absolutely correct Gordon.
A quick word for Contrary – in principle you are correct insofar as we have the mental capacity to understand what we are doing to our life-sustaining systems, and in theory, do something about it.
But ecosystems are complex and deep-faceted, and we are far from knowing more than a fraction about how they work – we simply do not know what we don’t know – and the idea that we can control the unknowable is intrinsically flawed. We do not know what we have broken and are breaking still. A prime example of human hubris.
So even with pure intent and the best will in the world, it is not at all clear that we can retrieve the situation. We have cut ourselves off from our biotic origins; we have lost sight of the fact that life-support systems are cyclical and self-replenishing – not linear and hugely entropic.
Our current survival methods are massively extractive and non-replenishing – and we are losing habitats and species at a terrifying rate.
And we do not have the “best will in the world”.
On the contrary we have political and economic systems that dare not name these truths – let alone take steps of sufficient size and quality to have anything but a minor effect. And we are largely in denial.
Even if we did know what to do, and had the will to do it, (we really do not) I’m afraid power lies in the hands of those who have no interest or desire whatsoever to rectify things – indeed some of them are even planning to flee the planet and live in Mars (Good luck with that!). Recycling waste and riding bicycles and electric cars do not begin to dent it. This cannot be done ate the level of atomised individual – however well-meaning!
I am afraid that this Jonathan Cook article sums it up much better than I have here – and recommend it to everyone.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-08-13/climate-apocalypse-billionaire-bunkers/
As these life-systems deplete and degrade, I fear the results will be mass human migration (it has started) , famine, and war on an unprecedented scale.
If humans are to survive at all, it will be in small residual populations that somehow find a means of re-establishing their links to, and dependence on, the rest of the biosphere – what’s left of it.
Ah hae ma doots!
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A Biologist, yes, I wasn’t suggesting that the biologically selected-for evolutionary trait for intelligence is necessarily a WINNING survival strategy – just that it COULD be. Obviously it doesn’t look that great at the moment.
What I am suggesting is, hypothetically speaking, that as soon as we developed intelligence to allow us to manipulate our environment, evolutionary development driven by that environment is then moot. Humans are top of the food chain because they are not restricted by their environment – we are definitely not better adapted to Antarctica conditions than penguins, or to undersea conditions than crustaceans, or the rest; but those specialised adaptations can’t live without that particular environment, and we can.
So our new evolutionary development is in being able to keep the gene pool diversified, and maintain the environment to suit that diversification. Hypothetically.
Not all members of a population will be working in the best interests of the survival of the species, but the majority will be. Awareness of climate change and concern about the environment, is also awareness that some people have pushed it too far and are not working in the interests of our survival as a species – the manipulation of the environment has gone beyond what our physical evolution can tolerate; we are supposed to manipulate that environment to suit us, not to make it detrimental. It remains to be seen if those working against our best interests can be weeded out and suppressed. Human survival may depend on it. I don’t think going back and trying to compete in a survival of the fittest at the mercy of our environment method is going to work, and I don’t think that should be imposed on us; there is a sustainable solution.
Don’t get me wrong – where the environment sustains a specially adapted human population (e.g. In the Amazon forest, or nomadic desert peoples, etc), then a different population should not be imposing their own ideas of environmental manipulation on it. If there is success within in an environment, they should be allowed to continue that success however ‘different’ it might be.
On the subject of how much we know to enable sustainable environments: that’s the beauty of having intelligence as a survival strategy enabling diversity: we can have specialisation within the population as a whole – each individual can’t know everything – and many things can become known. There just needs to be the need, and drive, for something to become known. Realising we NEED biological diversity is good – it can then be put in the ‘important for survival’ category and given due importance and worked on. What you describe is the failure in acknowledging the need, and a lack of drive. There are a lot of people trying to sustain things that are unsustainable – for their own immediate selfish gain, not for the good of human survival.
Take electric cars for example – the wholesale replacement of the internal combustion engine with battery power seems like a mad idea to me; yes it will reduce air pollution in the short term – but where will you be dumping all those millions of new toxic batteries that have a limited lifespan?! Seems obvious to me to consider this – where is the long term thinking, and mitigation of the byproducts? We do need to stop cycling through repeated harmful behaviours. And I always think about all the innovations that the car and oil industries will have suppressed over the decades – there has likely been plenty of good ideas already but we will never hear of them, because it doesn’t suit their profit margin.
Going slightly back to the topic at hand – since reading about the billions and dollars being pumped into promoting trans ideology throughout the world, funding the trans activists and currying favour with power – my first thought was: if they truly want to be able to change sex, why wasn’t this vast pool of money pumped into medical research to try an enable it? The only thing that’s made sense of why not, so far, is that: no, they don’t want to actually change sex, and they don’t care about the small minority of people that do. Whatever the aims of this ideology is, it’s definitely got nothing to do with actually trying to change sex.
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Sorry: hard won women’s RIGHTS are what is under threat here – from testosterone-driven aggression!
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(Sorry, I have no idea how these threads work.) Comments on this subject constitute the best discussion I have ever read on any forum with a wide breadth of knowledge and information to impart. Thanks for that everyone.
I just wanted to bring up some reservations about observations on child development. A lot has to do with who is making the observation. Psychology is particularly prone to this. For instance, I’m a bit sceptical about young infants being able to tell sex of other infants. What was the methodology used to make these findings? ( I have to say, that I find myself often unable to decide on the sex of a baby unless I have been told. I’m sorry but at that age they do all look alike, to me anyway. (Perhaps why people have taken to colour coding in clothing their babies to avoid this ambiguity?) Young babies of both sexes, for instance, often don’t have a lot of hair during their first year, hence the reason, I suppose, that girl babies often now sport pink ribbons around their heads to avoid misidentification by cooing strangers.
Psychology is not always infallible in its conclusions. Bruno Bettelheim was a highly-regarded and influential psychologist particularly in the field of child development but controversy began to be raised about his methods while he was alive and after he died. Bettelheim had suffered internment in Nazi concentration camps and the horrors he had witnessed there and endured had obviously affected him personally, but in his later life as a psychologist it coloured much of his thinking. This was demonstrated in his views on autism where he blamed the condition on maternal withdrawal of affection, as the autistic children he observed, appeared to him to behave just like children who had survived the severe trauma of concentration camps. His absolute conviction affected the way in which those under his influence treated the parents of autistic children as being the cause of their offspring’s condition until eventually his views on the origins of autism were challenged and dismissed.
I tend to view the opinions of psychology with some scepticism and fall back on my own observations. Obviously there are professionals with some real insights but on the whole, where some opinion conflicts with my own lived experience I tend to discount it, especially in the field of gender studies. There does seem to be a trend, not only with transactivists, to be prescriptive about gender roles. As a child I did not accept that my behaviour was set by that of my sex. As Gordon Dangerfield says, we are all non-binary and identify with a spectrum of behaviours. I agree very much with that. It might be that fact which has led some people to accept transgender theory and believe that since they don’t fit this template of set behaviours for their sex, then they also accept the belief that some people are one of 57 varieties of sexual presentations. It is why some people see this as actually regressing to the old-fashioned view of sex difference which will trap women mainly in rigid concepts of what they are.
Personally, I identify as a human being first and my identity with women as a class is simply because of our shared biology. Apart from that, they are humans and I don’t favour women over men when it comes to individual identification. I dislike the whole idea of categorising people whether it’s class or sex or race and I think that might be common to most of us.
(Sorry for the long post but the discussion was so stimulating that there were so many threads of discussion that I would have liked to join but the subject expanded so much over the weekend and I didn’t get a chance to read it until today.)
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jgedd, I’ll risk being presumptuous, and thank you for your generous praise on behalf of all the commenters here because I completely agree with you. I’m very proud of the quality of the below-the-line discussion here.
I’ll largely leave the rest of your own high quality comment to stand for itself because the only aspect of child development that I’m really clued up on is language and others are much better qualified to respond on the aspects you raise here.
I will say that I’m even worse than you on the babies front and can’t tell them apart at all, let alone know what sex they are, but it’s amazing how quickly they develop and even the most determinedly “gender neutral”-minded parents (and as a leftie, I’ve known a LOT of them in my time) can’t hide it from you after a year or two.
I read The Uses of Enchantment in grad school because I had a prof who was much enamoured of it (and who in fact ended up being Chair of my Ph.D Committee) and I must admit I found it pretty unsettling. It is true that we’re much tougher as kids than we are now, though. I can’t believe how cheerfully I accepted Hansel and Gretel putting the witch in the oven, or how much I enjoyed playing with creepy-crawlies that would totally freak me out now…
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Hi Gordon, on a separate matter important to you, today’s Times has an article on Alex Salmond rehashing the allegations. What is notable is that they give the letters of the complainants both in the complaints process but also the different letters assigned to them during the trial.
They also give exact time and dates including that the complainant was [deleted for your, and my, protection, Scottie, because the legal position on this is now an absurdity where COPFS will likely come after Salmond supporters who repeat such things but not the SG lackeys who originally publish them — GD]. How can this possibly not be jigsaw identification?
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Very astute, Scottie. If there were the slightest consistency and integrity at COPFS, those responsible for that story would be having their collars felt right now, and would in due course be doing a LOT longer stretch than Craig Murray.
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Huh – Lady Dorrian just gave the MSM a free pass did she not? It’s not about what is said, but about who said it, as well as what’s in her imagination. Obviously we can’t discuss it.
Well spotted, Scottie – I wonder if they are pushing things to see how much they can get away with? Or if I was to be entirely cynical, maybe it’s there just to prod more people, of the ‘wrong sort’, to discuss and reveal names,,, I think most people have learnt to be silent on the issue now though!
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Good point Scottie. I think a few more people will be able to find out the names of the complainers from detail in today’s Times.
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I did not realise the Times article is an extract of a book by David Clegg and Keiren Andrews, soon to be published.
David Clegg is the man who’s refusing to tell the police (or the prior investigators) who leaked the complaint to his newspaper, illegally, from the government offices.
They aren’t going to let it lie are they? They believe they can keep going with impunity, and ignore any reasonable behaviour, with the legal system and the newspapers protecting them.
We are done for, we really are, ‘vote the SNP out of power’ in 5 years time is too late – the time was in May. We’ll be a quivering wreck of a country and of an independence movement in 5 years time.
This from the article:
” Within weeks of starting his new job McElhinney was faced with a problem he had not encountered in his 30 years as a civil servant. Several female members of staff approached him with concerns…” do they really expect us to believe that no politician has ever, over the past 30 years, ever sexually harassed someone?! That is just beyond credulity. An entire book of this mince, but of course they are ‘proper’ journalists and are allowed to identify anyone they like, as long as it shows Alex Salmond in a negative light.
I despair.
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Excellent article. Thanks for the article, heartened by the responses. I agree with all of them.
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Thanks, ObairPheallaidh. I’m very heartened by the quality of the comments too.
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Some years ago, in a case I was dealing with (extremely high profile) my client, who was being smeared, as is the methodology of the government against its opponents, was bound by the Official Secrets Act. But it didn’t stop the government making comments in the friendly-to-them press discussing matters that clearly breached the so-called ‘secrets’ supposedly protected.
Once the government had their article published, my client instructed me to publish a letter in the same paper making clear that, if the government had so little obligation to the OSA, why should he (my client). He was menaced again with the OSA. In the event, they didn’t proceed but they destroyed his career, nonetheless.
The similarity of the current conduct of rehashing the AS allegations in the press, despite the not guilty verdicts, on every charge, after a full trial, with the capacity for the complainants being identified, whilst innocent journalists are jailed or threatened with jail for conduct which didn’t permit complainant identification, resonates.
The enormity of what we’re up against can demoralise but we MUST retain hope and keep on writing, protesting and calling out the wrongs. If silenced, their victory will be total.
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Yes, it’s the exact same tactic, Ingwe. I have an idea for how we do something about it, and I had a long meeting yesterday with someone at the very heart of all of this, where we discussed this and other legal matters in detail. I can’t say more for now.
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Thanks Gordon. I’m happy to wait until it is possible for you to say more. I’m heartened by the knowledge that there are good people out there doing more than hand-wringing. I really believe that mass of the people are good, honest and decent and, if they could have their conscience raised above Love Island, etc they’d be horrified by what’s going on.
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Totally agree with all you say here, Ingwe
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Population management in Scotland:
Focus on reducing numbers of ethnic Scots – natives and native Scots speakers – i.e. the core of the independence vote.
Historic ‘displacement’ of 3-4 million Scots – largest out-migration for a country of Scotland’s size in W. Europe
Scotland today has the lowest fertility rate in UK.
Scottish population is not increasing, population now growing only via in-migration.
Unrestricted in-migration to Scotland is mostly from rest-UK, primarily England. Thus, Scotland’s population is becoming more English.
In-migration increases demand for housing, leads to housing shortage, inflated house prices.
In-migration of professional/managerial class from rest-UK absorbs most of Scotland’s higher paid jobs, which are advertised primarily in rest-UK.
Indigenous working-class Scots mostly have access only to lower wage less stable jobs and limited access to housing – this forms environmental conditions for low reproduction of indigenous Scots.
Results in an Ethnic and Cultural Division of Labour (within the UK Internal Colonialism Model).
Education policies in state schools promote ‘gay’ lifestyles that do not reproduce.
GRA legislation also promoting non reproducing lifestyles.
Long-established education policy prioritises English language, and no Scots language provision, influencing and diminishing ethnic identity of Scots speakers.
Educational policies promote British multiculturalism, makes Scots accept population change driven by migration that prioritizes movement from rest-UK, primarily England.
Private/independent school sector exempt from state policies – segregation.
State prioritises middle class elite (mostly unionist/Anglophone) reproduction in Scotland – the future meritocracy.
Conclusion: British state incl. devolved policy aims to reduce (eradicate?) Scottish ethnicity and hence desire for independence among indigenous people.
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2021/07/11/determinants-of-independence-demographics/
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Alf, I agree the British State limits the Scottish population size, by a variety of means – they only need a caretaker population to maintain their hunting-shooting-fishing grounds, after all. Hence having the population congested into the central belt, or forced to leave.
Our rural communities have been stripped already, and I really don’t know if it’s something that can be recovered from, or that the vestiges of what passes for Scottish culture can be reinstated. I hope that I’m being pessimistic, but I don’t think it’ll be anything but a sham in the future. Is it worth saving? Many people don’t appear to think so, which is sad, but the mindset that our culture is inferior runs deep. I certainly didn’t ever consider, as I fled my local community, and stayed away for economic reasons, that it would essentially disappear and I would no longer have the choice to go back to it (what it once was). Never again being able to speak my own local language, as I’m a stranger in foreign lands in the central belt, makes me feel sad. I already mourn for what is lost – but should we move on and develop along with whatever comes?… history is already in the past and won’t disappear – once we have freedom we can teach and learn it again.
Birth rate is low due to poverty & no opportunities, so it’s not surprising.
But what you say about gay lifestyles and GRA legislation being non reproductive seems to be utter nonsense – ‘promoting’ gay lifestyles doesn’t make anyone gay! And I don’t think the desire for having children is in any way affected by someone’s sexuality – I would say promoting any stable loving relationship is a good thing for nurturing children, and if those relationships are the happiest and most stable when it fits with those people’s sexuality, it’s a good thing. Certainly lesbian couples can fairly easily bear children – it just needs society’s acceptance of that circumstance to make it a good option. Gay men can adopt. No, I don’t believe anyone’s sexuality has anything to do with the desire (or not) to have children. And anything that creates a stable environment for nurturing children, is very good.
GRA legislation, in and of itself, does not affect reproduction – a tiny minority of people use it (just now) – and with the reform, people could even remain reproductively active! It’s the promotion of trans ideology, particularly in schools, that’s harmful – encouraging girls to permanently change their body to possibly never be fertile – for confusing children so they find it hard to form stable relationships, disrupting society etc.
These things are not some kind of British State sanctioned plot to suppress population growth – the first isn’t an issue in the slightest, and the effects of the second is a byproduct of something else entirely. I think you are way off base with these.
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The more I try and analyse this nonsense the more I’m now leaning to the fact that we’re over complicating an issue and instead be focusing to the most base of human traits – greed.
The mass tort legal system in America must surely be looking for new victims. That will surely signify a change whereas ‘ambulance chasing lawyers’ will no longer be camped outside A&E departments – they’ll be camped outside university campuses with pre prepared questionnaires offering financial incentives to students to get them to claim all sorts of horrors in return for a percentage of future windfall payouts.
I don’t know if it’s true or not because I can no longer access the link but in 2016, a survey was reportedly carried out among teenage female students resident in Texas, looking for the preferred career after graduating.
The winning profession – cheerleader !!
Damn it I’ve probably broken so many GRA laws just by writing this, it looks like I too will be joining you guys in the pokey.
As someone who committed the unforgivable sin of confusing Ian Anderson with Ian McKintosh, richly deserved.
Contrary, I hope you’ll forgive this bit of cognitive dissonance but Runrig’s farewell concert at Stirling Castle can now be viewed via BBC I player.
The bad news – the appearance by Donnie Munro isn’t included in the edited version.
The good news – there is no Pete Wishart.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000yxj9/runrig-the-last-dance-episode-2
Have plenty of tissues handy
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I disagree violently with this, Alf. I strongly support most of the things you see as a problem, and I have even less time for “Scottish ethnicity” than I do for “gender identity”.
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As a humble researcher I can only work on the evidence I find, not least in this instance from census data and public policy initiatives, and their outcomes. As you point out, often the reality may not correspond with prevailing thought.
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On the subject of ethnicity, as a determinant of Scottish independence: https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2021/08/15/determinants-of-independence-ethnicity/
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Okay, I see the sense in which you’re using “ethnicity”, which still seems to me a needless, and unhelpful, term to use, given all of its very well-established connotations.
I disagree more fundamentally though about language. There’s a well-known saying in linguistics that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Apparently, for example, many of the “dialects” of the Chinese “language” are mutually incomprehensible, which is one reason they have a standard “dialect”, Mandarin.
Linguistically, standard English is as good (i.e. as arbitrary) a choice for Scottish dialect speakers to assimilate to as Mandarin is for Chinese dialect speakers. The reason a particular language becomes the standard is entirely to do with armies and navies and nothing to do with any intrinsic superiority of the dialect “chosen” as the standard. In addition, the standard itself is continuously evolving and changing as it is a living thing which owes its apparent external existence to its actual internal existence in the minds of its individual speakers.
I think calls for a Scots standard language are theoretically flawed as well as hopelessly unrealistic. We have a standard language — standard English — in which I and millions of others are fluent and we have our many, many Scots dialects, which vary not just from geography but from class and age and other factors as well — the wee neds on Still Game who talk through their noses (no idea how that one evolved!), the present day students captured so brilliantly by Kevin Bridges, the way you talk to your granny or in court or on the phone versus the way you speak to your old mates from school etc etc. This fulfills everything we need linguistically unless you subscribe to the notion that a standard Scots language (which no-one in the whole world, with the possible exception of Billy Kay, actually speaks) would be somehow “superior” to standard English — as ludicrous a notion as that held by the ignorant snobs who think Jeremy Paxman somehow speaks a “superior” language to Rab C Nesbitt. Linguists laugh at these ridiculous prejudices.
You’re quite right, though, that the ridiculous prejudices against all of the Scots dialects (and Geordie and Scouse etc etc) are another battle we have to fight, including all of the internalisation of those prejudices by dialect speakers themselves in the “Scottish Cringe”. (I’m sure there’s a Scouse Cringe and Geordie Cringe too.)
I think, though, that it’s much sounder, and actually much easier, to fight that battle on linguistically informed grounds.
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As a matter of further interest (I hope!), and since this is something in which I do claim actual expertise, some of these factors are why the longstanding characterisation of James Macpherson as the forger of Fingal and the other Ossian poems is quite unfair.
In the 18th century when Macpherson was collecting the material for the poems, there was no standard orthography for transcribing Gaelic, nor was there standardisation of all of the Gaelic dialects. Macpherson did undoubtedly take huge artistic license with his “translations” and even more with the way in which he stitched the “fragments” of them together, but a large part of the necessity for doing so came from genuine ambiguity in the transcripts and oral recitations from which he worked. (Think of a Dundonian and a Glaswegian saying “pie” and you’ll get the idea.)
Macpherson should be a hero of Scottish literature and yet he is largely forgotten or unknown or regarded as having been comprehensively “exposed” by Samuel Johnson. He is basically the founder of Romanticism, beloved by all of the European Romantics as well as Whitman, Blake, Wordsworth and, of course, Burns. As it happens, he was also Napoleon’s favourite author, and Thomas Jefferson wrote to Scotland for a Gaelic primer so he could read the poems in the “original” (which, admittedly, didn’t exist as such, the one which finally appeared being a translation back into Gaelic of Macpherson’s English version!)
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On the matter of language as a determinant of independence:
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2021/07/04/paper-two-the-determinants-of-independence/
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Yes, we part company completely here, Alf.
Sapir-Whorf? Really?
I suggest you read New Horizons or What Kind of Creatures Are we? by Noam Chomsky or, for a more accessible introduction to actual linguistics, Mark Baker’s The Atoms of Language or The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.
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Maybe we should ask the BBC to get their investigator reporter Mark Daly to dress up as woman to find the real truth in what lies behind the makeup.
After all, he dressed up as a police officer and we all knew he wasn’t a real Bobby.
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Oh but he is a real boaby, and a real dick too…
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I was at uni with him……and I know
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Having very belatedly discovered ‘Still Game’ I now get the “real boaby” and, as Victor and Jack would put it, rather than dick, he’s a prick! 😂
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We should share war stories some time, scrandoonyeah. The number Daly did on Tommy Sheridan was truly despicable, and he carries a burning, vindictive hatred of Tommy to this day for daring to fight back against the criminal behaviour of the BBC. Another fine example of our objective, unbiased media!
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When I met him my intuition told me to keep well clear.
Had the same feeling when I met Angus Robertson, socially, a few times In the mid nineties
Daly was baptised in the waters of Labour mythology and his grandfather was a leading union official, shipbuilding if I remember right
So no surprise he ended up at the BBC.
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Mark Hirst has just posted on Twitter that Alex Salmond is taking action over book extracts. Sorry don’t have any more information.
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If Gordon Dangerfield permits, here is the latter part of Alex Salmond’s statement today:
‘In responding to the allegations against me I have at all times respected the lawful processes and integrity of the Courts. I have trusted in those legal processes. I won two Court cases in the highest courts in the land both civil and criminal, where a judge found in my favour and jury of 9 women and 6 men acquitted me.
There are some who still wish to ignore the considered decisions of judges and the jury who actually heard the evidence and replace them with press smears based on malicious leaks and ludicrous gossip.
That stops now.
I have therefore instructed my legal team to write to the appropriate investigating authorities in order that these matters, including potential criminality, be comprehensively investigated.
Separately, I am also now actively considering afresh the legal remedies available in the civil courts.’
Some might say, about time. Perhaps Gordon Dangerfield might have something further to say on this at some point?
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Thanks for posting this, jgedd. I’ll be doing more than having something to say about it but can’t say more for now. It is, as you say, about time.
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I certainly hope you will be saying more on it, and helping us navigate the turbulent legal times to come. It’s sad that it has come to this, but what other recourse is there, for Alex Salmond?
After reading that book extract (and realising there WAS a book, so has been in the making for some time I imagine,,,), I realised that those people – Sturgeon and Clegg and allies – are never going to let it rest, and probably not even if Salmond left politics: that book must have been planned well before Alex decided to join Alba and fight the election. I don’t believe he’ll get any peace, ever, from those confidence tricksters, unless he does take a hard line and fight back (and win).
Maybe the book was planned ‘just in case’, but ah hae ma doots.
He has a tough time ahead, and I wish him luck. I also hope he has lost the slightly naive idea that Sturgeon and pals will ever play politics the old fashioned way, or think she has any kind of integrity (I’m making assumptions here, because his strategy for the GE in May seemed to rely on those two things).
I also wish us luck, because the yes movement continuing and the success of any bid for independence might hinge on having those charlatans, and the corrupt parts of our prosecution system, weeded out, or at least exposed. I don’t know if the legal actions themselves will ever achieve that, but they surely must shake things up, and at least put a stop to some of the most negative things we’ve been burdened with.
That sturgeon and co are still so hell bent on using proven lies and smears to continue their persecution of one man, tells me that Alex Salmond does, in fact, have the capability to end this union, and it looks like he is the best choice for the leader of the yes movement & for seeing us through the transition to independence. I can’t say I trust any politician (and I don’t agree with all his political stances), but he has the skills to do the job, has a proven track record of being principled, has shown a consistent desire to do the best for Scotland, has a strong belief in independence, and appears to believe in democracy. The degradation of his popularity through the intentional smears – along with existing scepticism from before (that I suspect comes from being a bit too much of a polished Westminster politician) – will be an issue, some of which could be mitigated by demonstrating there was a conspiracy against him somehow, and some by turning discussions about him from ‘feelz’ into ‘skills’. If someone wants independence, they’ve got to start looking at who has the right skills for the job, not thinking about how they feel about them. I can, however, be a bit brutal with people’s feelings when there is a job to get done, so I’m probably not the best person to advise on this!
Oh aye, and good luck to you too Gordon, whatever your role might be.
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Gordon, I have questions, if you are able to give any insight?: I’d been trying to think through the issue of Clegg writing a book, for financial gain, after refusing to reveal the identity of the person who’d ‘leaked’ part of Leslie Evans’ decision report from the government offices.
After the leak, Lord Pentland then ruled Evans’ report as unlawful. The criminal trial after that showed the allegations to have no substance.
Now, whistleblowers and journalists getting the info do need to have some protections – but does it not have to be ‘in the public interest’? I’m not wholly sure about that. The leak of private and confidential information was unlawful, but you could still say Clegg should be allowed to protect his source (on the principle that it could have been something that was in the public interest, whether confidential or not). But now we see Clegg, who published unfounded allegations, about to gain financially, from having created the scandal in the first place – is this something the police can use to tell him his source can no longer be protected?
Assuming that the police are bothering to investigate – there is an awful lot of silence from them on this matter, which IS in the public interest, because we can’t have government employees leaking private, confidential (GDPR rules), unlawful, and defamatory material without good cause. Particularly if those employees happened to have just got a big fat promotion and exorbitant pay rise, as though they’d just been rewarded for services rendered.
Do you think the commercial gain aspect has any impact on forcing Clegg to reveal the identity of the miscreant to the police?
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Your thinking is excellent, Contrary, and much better than anyone currently employed by COPFS. Section 10 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 and Article 10 of the ECHR provide the relevant protections for journalists and their sources but the protections can, and have, been overcome where there is an overriding public interest in doing so. Civil action is going to be the key here, and I’ll say no more than that for now.
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I’m hoping that much of COPFS is just cowed into silence, rather than not have a brain cell between them,,, though I’m not sure which is worse out of those two options, hm.
Civil action rather than criminal? The police really need to pull the finger out and ,,, pah, they aren’t going to touch anything to do with the current government are they, and even if they did, COPFS would just blatantly ignore it?! I wish people would just do the job they are paid to do, and were allowed to do it; instead we get a combined virtue-signalling / corruption waste-of-space system that only benefits the elite. Frustrating.
Okay Gordon, we’ll wait and see what evolves, it sounds like you might have A Plan!
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Re Contempt of Court 1981 and Article 10 ECHR
Surely Alex Salmond can establish that he has a legal right or claim that is of significant importance to satisfy overriding Section 10 ? I was thinking Interests of Justice . AS can already demonstrate for example that he had tried other ways to identify the source before resorting to the Court . I recall a recent case involving BBC Wales and Cardiff Council ( Child Protection.)
As you know Gordon I was late picking up on the details of this story and have shared a few comments . The political climate in Wales strikingly similar . Welsh Labour Govt. and Plaid Cymru carbon copy of SNP in terms of policy , and most recently allegations against the late Carl Sargeant.
At some point I will read your book 🙂
Best Wishes Claire🏴
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I agree, Claire. There’s also the question of preventing further crime, another of the exceptions in both section 10 and Article 10.
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Gordon, way to many posts on Sturgeons GRA hobby horse for me to read. Just want to say I really hope you don’t go to prison. Get yourself a good lawyer if it comes to it.😀😀😀😀
I know the young man ( female) who died recently adjacent to Queens Park. They ( as he preferred to be known ) had transitioned quite a number of years previously. An ex Head boy at Williamwood High School. Genuine transitioning has been happening without self Id so I find it difficult to understand the need for self id and these new laws.
As you say there is a difference between ensuring people are treated with respect and enforcing through the law and punishment other people to change their understanding of reality.
Is Sturgeon pushing GRA because she knows the potential damage it will do to independence or is she just a zealot on this matter?
On the other matter re the scumbags Clegg/Andrews. I hope Salmond gives them plenty of grief. If they are not prosecuted then it will quite clearly mean that the Britnat media in Scotland are above the law – just like Lady Dorian said. It does make you think they have been given a free pass from prosecution by the British state. Other newspapers are now also publishing excerpts that should be ‘recused’ ( I think that’s the legal term). A free for all attack on Salmond.
Sturgeon is bringing Scotland into disrepute. Is that the plan?
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“I’m sure there’s a Scouse Cringe and Geordie Cringe too.”
If one is comparing to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_cringe
Then, as someone born and raised within 10 miles of Newcastle, I can’t say I have any awareness of such an effect, nor really with respect to any region of England. Surely by definition, such can not exist for regions of England as English ‘culture’ is part and parcel of each of the regions.
There is at times dislike, rivalry, contempt, etc between folks from different regions (as there is in Scotland), but that is something else. There is also the ‘class’ difference and wealth distribution overlays, but again that is a distinct effect.
Maybe watch some of the episodes of “Auf_Wiedersehen, Pet” – if anything to the extent that Geordies have a distinct ‘culture’, I’d suggest they revel in it, not feel any form of shame.
So maybe you could clarify just what you mean by ‘Geordie Cringe’?
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Who said this? Where… Where?….
Ohhh, GD replying to Alf Baird: so he did say that. Interesting. I agree with you here JB, there appears to be no cringe in any of the English regions – they may be treated lower class by the south, but they are lower class of a superior race; and have always appeared to identify as Geordie (say) first and English second, with no inherent cringe factor.
The British Empire struck on a strategy to maintain the class divide, to benefit the elite, by offering racism to all members in England – even if you are the lowest class with nothing, you are still superior to ‘others’: it keeps the masses happy that they are still superior, and will ignore the wealth divide because the system is self perpetuating, in that you need the elitist hierarchy to maintain that inherent superiority. It’s why the working classes tend to be the most racist of all. It’s not as simple as that, of course, but there is no cringe factor in English regions, because they aren’t ‘other’.
Another thing that Gordon says above that’s been bothering me: I’m probably being really thick here, but he says “the well-established connotations” of the term “ethnicity” – what are these connotations? Can anyone explain, kindly and gently please? I didn’t think there was an issue with using ethnicity – I say things like “ethnic minority” all the time, should I no longer be doing so? I may have been making some embarrassing social faux-pas for some time now!
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Contrary, the Collins dictionary defines “ethnic” as “connected with or relating to different racial or cultural groups of people”. Personally, I always think of race when I hear it. I get very uncomfortable when I hear people talking about the Scottish or Irish “race”. Clearly, Alf was using it in its cultural sense, so fair enough. I’ll continue to avoid using it in that sense when there are plenty of other words that can make the same point.
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Okay, thanks Gordon.
I interpret ‘ethnic’ as cultural groups – I think it’s “race” as a term that’s not well defined and used very loosely, and I personally think of it more to do with very broad groups that have different skull structures from historic diaspora, sort of thing that archaeologists talk about – but I know that “racism” is more to do with discriminating against cultural groups and usually perceived differences in appearance of those. As such, I don’t see a big issue with implying scots or Irish or Welsh are each a race, if they are distinguished as a distinct cultural group, and discriminated against because of it. But I can see your point – if we label all Germans as being one thing (very efficient!) – is that being racist? Or discriminatory? Hmm. I’ll stop there, I’m wading into unknown waters.
The main thing is that I’m not making big embarrassing faux pas just by using the word. And it’s always good to know how other people interpret certain words – some common phrases can be stressful to people if the connotations for them aren’t pleasant, so I try (and usually fail) to be mindful of such things.
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Contrary, I’m afraid I don’t buy into that stuff any more than I buy into “gender identity”. Racists know perfectly well what race is and, believe me, it’s not for them “a term that’s not well defined and used very loosely, and … to do with very broad groups that have different skull structures from historic diaspora, sort of thing that archaeologists talk about”.
Rather, they know very well who their targets are and the people targeted by them know very well too that they’re being targeted and why. Those of us who want to fight racism need to start by acknowledging that we know these things too. Indeed, there’s no way to even start fighting racists until you do.
For example, when a racist is abusing someone who is clearly black, I can’t see how it’s remotely helpful to say that actually “black” isn’t really well-defined and kind of loose and so maybe the racist should review his whole ontological understanding.
The fact that “race” might not have a scientific basis is, in my view, of no more relevance to our common sense understanding of these facts than is the fact that “tables” and “chairs” and “rivers” and “sky” mean nothing to a physicist.
These seem to me to be false problems when the real problems of fighting racism are daunting enough.
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And to go back to why I’m uncomfortable with talk of the Scottish or Irish “race”, it’s for two main reasons:
(1) It elides real and important distinctions between, for example, a black Scottish person and a white Scottish person. If the white Scottish person is a racist, it’s silly to say to the black person that it’s okay because the racist just hasn’t understood that they’re actually both the same race.
(2) For many racists, the “Scottish race” means white people. I don’t think we should give them any pretext for that, however well-intentioned.
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Thanks Gordon. Yes, I believe I understand now.
First though, I want to make a point that whatever bizarre analogy you are making regarding physicists, I don’t agree with and object to. I have a physics degree (as well as a biology degree) which doesn’t make me an expert by any means but does give me an above-average understanding of the subject. Even then, without that, I can’t see how physicists, who study the physical world, can ever NOT have an understanding of a physical object and not be able to name it – it seems non-sensical. Indeed, the deeper understanding of how and why a thing is like it is – why is the sky blue, why a plant forms the patterns it does etc – gives a deeper appreciation of the beauty of the objects and systems in the natural world, and by necessity those things need to be named. I’ll ignore this as a hastily written thing: I realise you are busy and don’t want to have this discussion at all.
On the serious issue at hand:
(1) My hypothetical considerations on the meaning of terms used to describe ethnic groups or racial differences has absolutely no bearing on the real world, lived experience, of people that are subject to racial prejudice in every part of their lives and throughout their lives, as a consequence of, most often, skin colour (in part because racism ignores cultural groups) and it can have a detrimental impact on tackling racism: – yes, agreed, I will no longer discuss “race” etc (words and definitions) when considering “racism”.
(2) By using “racism” to describe anti-Scottish prejudice, people water down the very serious – life-long and within every aspect of their lives – impact racism actually has on people that are truly affected. Most Scots are automatically privileged in this regard by being “white”. – yes, agreed, I will now argue against anyone using the term “racism” inappropriately.
You have changed my mind on the subject (or, at least, decided it) – and though I doubt anyone is still reading, there may be a couple of more people giving it consideration. When I said I’m *probably* being thick – I know I am being, and I genuinely wanted to know the reasons behind your strong objections to Alf’s terminology – I wasn’t being facetious in the slightest, but didn’t know how to ask the question. So apologies for prodding you into expanding on the subject, but you have genuinely helped me here, and I don’t think it wastes time when it might have an impact on improving someone’s life somewhere in the world, however small the improvement is.
As an aside: I’ve never used the term ‘racism’ to describe anti-Scottish prejudices, but also have never objected to it – I am now going to do so (the latter, that is).
I similarly get irritated when men use “sexism” to describe a prejudiced situation – while technically it may be correct; it ignores the all-pervasive and life-long prejudicial effect sexism actually has on women’s lives, throughout every aspect of their lives.
Anyway, good, thanks again for taking the time.
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Thanks, Contrary, that’s very generous of you and I hope you know you can count on me too to change my mind as a result of discussions like this. It’s the main thing that separates us from the “no debate” cultists we’re opposing.
And don’t worry about us wasting our time. We wouldn’t be doing that even if it were just you and me but viewing figures for the blog show that thousands of people keep tuning in between my own infrequent posts and I have no doubt that many of them do so to read the latest comments.
Having said all of that, can I push my luck and try to convince you on the physics point too?
It may just be that you think I’m making a more complex and clever point than I am. I agree of course that when a particle physicist sits down at a table to do her abstruse calculations about strings vibrating in multiple dimensions, she knows that it is a chair she is sitting on and a table she is writing at. If she looks out of the window, she knows that it’s the sky she’s seeing, and a river flowing past.
My point is simply that these common sense notions disappear immediately as having any relevance to her work, not least because they are so rich and flexible, whereas the concepts of the hard sciences are as austere and precise as the human mind can make them. So even common sense concepts that we think are vaguely “scientific”, like “solid” and “liquid” and “gas” are of no use to physicists once they go beyond the very earliest stages of their work. No-one surely would ever cite a quantum physicist to prove the existence of “solids”, let alone tables because that would be what philosophers call a “category mistake”. A quark exists (if it does) in an entirely different realm of epistemology and ontology from a table and to say that the existence of a quark is relevant at all to the existence of a table is just to confuse hopelessly different ways of thinking and speaking. There is not a single scientific paper in existence that could relate the ontology of quarks to the “tableness” for humans of the object composed of those quarks.
It’s exactly in that way that I think “scientific” studies telling us race doesn’t exist are making a hopeless category mistake. If a physicist says “Haha! That table doesn’t exist! It’s just strings vibrating in twelve dimensions!” I just laugh because whatever reality she has captured at the quantum level, and however valuable it may be at that level, it bears no relation to tables, because tables are things conceived exclusively by human minds. I have exactly the same reaction to a geneticist (or anyone else) telling me that race doesn’t exist. Of course it doesn’t exist at that level of abstraction but that’s because NO common sense human concepts exist at that level.
It’s just as big a category mistake to say that race doesn’t exist because of “science” as it is to say that tables don’t exist because of “science”.
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No. I don’t believe it is wise to push your luck – when I said I object to your rather sweeping analogy, I meant ‘that sounds very much like you have formed ill-informed and prejudicial views based on little understanding of the subject, and I find it a bit offensive that you’d do so when discussing other types of prejudice’! Can’t believe you didn’t pick up on that.
But anyway, I’ll try and untangle some of the mincemeat you’ve made of conflating a million different things and stuck under the banner of ‘this is physics’ – unfortunately my physics learning is not fresh (finished the degree in 2014) and an undergraduate degree doesn’t cover a 10th of all the different fields in physics anyway – which you’ve managed to entangle (that’s a pun, by the way) in a most unbecoming manner.
Physical Science is the study of the physical world. That is, it’s trying to explain the physical world through observation, measurement and theory. If it can’t be measured (repeatedly), then it’s not ‘known’.
Next, you need to divide physics into ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’. Some fields of study can have elements of both, or they might be one or the other.
I can’t even begin to describe all the different field in physics, but there’s a lot: thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, astrophysics etc etc. And there will be cross-overs and sub-fields (I’ve just made up that term, but the likes of quantum mechanics belongs under ‘quantum physics’ which involves many other quantumy fields too).
So when you label ALL physicists as not having a clue what a “table” is, because a particle physicist, that suddenly morphs into a string theoretician, has lost their way on any kind of “common sense”, you are also saying an astrophysicist doesn’t know what a star is, or that planets orbit the sun, or that the earth is a sphere (well, it isn’t exactly, but it’s definitely not flat – because it’s been measured to not be flat).
“Common sense” notions are exactly at the centre of any physical science study – they don’t disappear in any sense – you have to understand what the field or study or theory is trying to achieve: you can’t say it’s all mince because someone mentioned 11 dimensions, and you don’t know what it’s in relation to – or a quark, or whatever.
Let’s takes complex numbers as an example – that is, a number that involves the square root of -1. This isn’t a number – it’s impossible by any practical measure, it doesn’t exist and can’t under any mathematical rules – it’s meaningless. BUT: it has to be used in many mathematical equations to get them to ‘work’ – it’s not an artifice, it’s a device, that gives us the ability to describe the real world in mathematical terms, and because it’s describing the real world, the end result is always ‘real’ (and you have done your working wrong if it isn’t). This is an example of an unreal thing being used as a means to an end – the end being a reproducible description of a real physical object or system that’s observable.
My point there is that when you say ‘strings vibrating’ – do you actually know what string theory is, what it is being formulated for, or how many physicists think there is any validity in it? I can’t tell you what, exactly, the answers to any of those are, but my best guesses are: yes they are postulating multiple dimensions – to try and get the very complex maths to ‘work’ (see above); it’s only one of the (very many) theories that’s trying to resolve the Grand Unified Theory (sorry, I forgotten what that’s actually called, it’s something like that); and, not very many.
So you are labelling the entire physics community based on your take of a very nebulous hypothesis?
On sub-atomic particles – they exist whether or not you want them to, and your table only exists because of them. If it’s (repeatedly) measurable, then it exists. Whether or not you think that’s relevant to your own ideas of the function of the table is by the by, it’s still made up of atoms, and those are made up of subatomic particles – which may behave in ways that are counterintuitive, but must always, in the end, be shown to produce the real-world observable object with all its ‘intuitive’ characteristics. It’s fine if you don’t care what comprises the table, and you don’t think it’s relevant, but to say all physicists are talking mince because they do care, seems very unfair.
You will now regret suggesting that no one would quote a quantum physicist to “prove” the existence of solids (etc). First off – no physicists “proves” the “existence” of anything! They measure, they describe, they observe – any of those things. An object’s existence is necessary before you can study it. Secondly, and Quantum mechanics is a subject I rather enjoyed getting my head around, so it’s a little bit of a pet subject of mine – lucky you – but I’ll try and stick to the fundamentals.
The main thing to remember, as you grapple with all those probabilities and energy levels and the wave-particle duality, is that the final product is always the real world object as observed. When quantum mechanics was formulated, Niels Bohr insisted all theories must match our Newtonian physics at n=’very large’: that is, At very large numbers all those mystery virtual particles you don’t believe in must behave in exactly the same way as the macro object they make up as described by Newtonian physics – so, all the sums add up. (I’m making the wild assumption you accept Newtonian physics).
The history of quantum mechanics, how it came about, is quite fascinating. All our classical physicist at the end of the 19th century thought they’d found everything there was to know, after the advent of thermodynamics (you know, properties of your gases, solids and liquids,,,) and Rutherford’s description of the atom (the typical picture of orbiting electrons around a nucleus – that might sound like “common sense” but it’s wrong, electrons are just a big cloud of probabilities travelling a relativistic speed around a possible nucleus) – they were just crossing t’s and dotting i’s, was what they thought. Max Planck was getting all his formulas in order, but couldn’t get rid of an irritating constant (Planck’s constant it later came to be known as). Turns out that constant was there because,,, yes, the quantum world exists. Anyway, I can recommend the book “Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate …” By um,,, oh I’ll have to look it up, Kamil someone? It’s very accessible and gives good descriptions of all the main players. Einstein had worked on his Special Relativity, General relatvity and had a theory on Planck’s Constant….
On Special Relativity – you may have heard the classic ‘moving clocks run slow’ (at relativistic speeds) – if you don’t believe this, then you don’t believe the GPS system works to find your location. That’s a practical application of the theory (the proof) – the satellites are moving at such a velocity in orbit, in comparison to us snails on the ground, that they need their timing (which is crucial for calculating the location) adjusted according to Special Relatvity.
I won’t go into the history or I’ll be here forever, it’s interesting to note though, that Einstein backtracked on many of the agreed theories in later life – there are some classic examples and ‘thought experiments’ as the debates went on. An oft quoted phrase is ‘God doesn’t play dice’ – in reference to quantum entanglement he declared that ‘spooky action at a distance’ couldn’t happen – well, about 10 years ago, I think (after an experiment was devised and equipment to carry it out was obtainable), it was shown to be a real phenomenon. The theories are used in quantum encryption.
Quantum mechanics comes down to a whole host of probabilities, that, in the end, produce the observable (and Newtonian) world around you. It’s very improbable that quantum tunnelling (this is where the energy level of a particle is too low to jump over a higher energy barrier, but it does anyway) occurs, but it does. Don’t care? Don’t think it makes any difference, it’s just invisible imaginary things and it’s all made up? Well, quantum tunnelling is the reason our sun burns at all – and no sun, no life. All the quantum physicists have done is made an observation, then described how it occurs. This can be used to develop nuclear fusion (not fission which is the dangerous radioactive nuclear power we have just now); that is, the knowledge is useful, and the developments from it could benefit humanity.
Is it just quarks you find offensive? What other subatomic particles do you believe are not worthwhile? Electrons – dunno how you’ll get your electricity without them. Alpha particles? Not sure where radiation poisoning comes from if they don’t exist. Likewise for gamma and beta rays. Where do your microwaves come from? Ah the good ol electromagnetic spectrum,,, all waves and particles at the same time, depending on how you measure them. Measurable, observable and real.
The Grand Unified Theory – is an attempt to bring all theories together and tie them all up – smacks a bit of the old Rutherford days when they thought they knew it all – but they have the thorny problem of gravity,,, it doesn’t fit, and it’s not quite known what it is (it exists and it’s measurable) – is it a wave or a particle or does it only exist as a field? Well just a couple of years ago, they demonstrated that it can come in wave form – a remarkable breakthrough, and I’m sure you took note when reported in the news – with a wavelength measured in kilometres. Interesting developments…
Which leads me onto all the things that, because of the interest physicists take in the physical world, questioning, measuring, observing, theorising: imagine when they’ve developed high-temperature superconductors – and our electricity can flow through wires with very little loss: efficiency means you require less energy production & power supplied at less cost to the environment. Imagine when it is discovered what gravity is, and we can counter it locally to make for efficient means of transport with little damage to the environment. Imagine ,,, well, there are just hundreds of things – some more immediately likely than others, but all are possibilities, and many can be used to create a sustainable environment too.
To get around to addressing the point, again I only get a rough idea of what you are getting at – that a table only has meaning because of what it means to the human mind, and the relevance of the scientific nature of that table has no real conceptual meaning to our daily lives. Well, I can only disagree – that’s all very well if you want to get up every morning to pray to your favourite sun god to make the sun rise – but I’ll accept orbital mechanics and quantum tunnelling any day over that, and take any useful developments from that knowledge. “Sunness” means all those things of how it functions to me. “Tableness” is the physical materials it’s made up of, the gluons that hold the sub-atomic particles together, the gravity that holds it to the floor, it’s mass that makes it heavy in that gravity, the different levels of conductivity of its parts, it’s moment of inertia that makes it difficult to tip over: it’s function is what makes it useful to me as a human being, but it only functions because it has all those properties. Science does not prove the existence of things, it (tries to) explain why they are what they are and the way they are. Each individual’s perception of any one object is unique to that person.
To say all physical objects only having meaning in a conceptual sense, to say that all descriptions of an object somehow take away from the “real” meaning of,,, what? It’s use to us? That we shouldn’t question the world around us because only our own interpretation – “common sense” has any real bearing on our lives? Nothing in “science” is as hard and fast as people seem to believe, perceived wisdom changes all the time, we are constantly learning and developing. To say that should stop, or that scientists shouldn’t be allowed an opinion because of “common sense” and “ontology”, pah.
I could go on,,,
You should have realised by now that the reason it’s not wise to bring up the subject of physics again, is because you gave leave for me to talk about a favoured subject, and once you open that can of worms,,,
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We’re at cross-purposes, Contrary. You’re completely right that I know little about quantum physics and understand even less. My point is about the human conceptual and language systems by which our minds construct the world for us as humans. To whatever extent the hard sciences of our time are correct, they are giving us an insight into a more objective form of reality, what Kant called “things in themselves”. But if we want to understand what Kant called “things for us” — for example, what a table is — then the place to look is in the human mind.
That particular wee bit of reality for humans which in English we call a table, and which our human mind constructs for us, is not reality for any other creature on the planet since, self-evidently, they don’t have a concept of, or use for, tables. They experience exactly the same physical stuff but their perceptual systems construct a completely different reality from it. When a spider is scuttling across a table, it’s experiencing exactly the same physical stuff as us, but it neither knows nor cares that it’s on a table, or what a table is.
I don’t in any way disparage adding any amount of knowledge to the concept of table by which our minds construct this particular wee bit of reality for humans. I’d be delighted if I knew string theory and could picture all the sub-atomic stuff rattling away in there. My point is simply that my knowledge of the tableness of the table — for example that it’s a useful device invented by humans to do things on — is completely independent of that additional knowledge, which in no way entered into the way the concept of table formed in my mind and came to be used by me to refer to what I (but not spiders) take to be real things in the world.
All of this is what I studied to Ph.D level (dissertation still patiently awaited by my Committee!) in philosophy of language and generative linguistics (among other subjects) so, as with you and physics, I do claim some expertise in it.
I recommended Noam Chomsky’s brilliant collection of lectures, What Kind of Creatures Are We?, to Alf Baird, and if you’re at all interested in following up on any of this, I would heartily recommend it again.
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No, I don’t think we are at cross purposes (I might as well as disagree with that too LOL) – we are coming at this from diametrically opposite ways of thinking, and it’s a bit of ‘and never the twain shall meet’ – we are also arguing about slightly different things,,, but trying to meet that middle ground is a good bit of mental gymnastics,
If you are trying to describe your thinking, or explain a point, or anything like that; in general it’s a good idea to pick analogies that will HELP others understand your point. If you pick a subject that you know nothing about, and make wide sweeping generalisation, erroneous statements and generally insult a whole swathe of people; you have rendered the anology meaningless, and in fact harmed any case you were trying to make, so it would have been better to leave it out. That was really my initial point.
But that’s a bit boring, most especially now we have a table AND spiders to talk about …
Remember as well, science has its roots in philosophy – science is just the formalised version of philosophy, the one that demands reproducible evidence of theoretical answers – both ask the fundamental question of why? of the world around us. For you to suggest that what any scientist says is stuff and nonsense because the entire world is just a figment of your imagination, then the scientist is just going to say: where is your evidence for that? You think you don’t need any, all the scientists that you disparaged are going to say yes, you do! It goes round in circles then – but that’s philosophy for you – it never actually answers the question, it just keeps asking it over and over again, does it not? I prefer to have answers, and I like to have some real-world reasoning behind them (yes, yes, I know you are saying it’s only real as we perceive it to be real,,, perhaps that’s true, but you need some mathematical formulas to back it up, heh).
And I do disagree with you about the concept of the table – the place to look is NOT the human mind, because we don’t ‘know’ the human mind or what it really perceives – what you describe is one tiny aspect of tableness – it’s function and it’s meaning to you as an end user. That concept is very narrow – for a start, all objects and things – the world around us – are parts of systems – everything is made up of, and are parts of, systems. Nothing is ever in isolation. To think that a table only has meaning because of the function it has to you, is a very tiny part of its overall being, its existence. You say ‘it was invented’ – someone out there decided on materials, construction, it’s end use function, it’s aesthetics, it’s structural stability, where it would be used etc – the life of that table has much more than its mere end functionality, and how someone perceives it, surely?
Imagine you go out travelling into space with your table, there is no gravity in your otherwise luxuriously appointed spaceship: without that gravity, the table is floating about willy nilly getting in your way, and nothing stays on the surface. Is the table a table still? It no longer functions as a table, it’s no use to you. So, then, I say – your concept of table ONLY has meaning in specific locations (in this case, where there is gravity). Is the object no longer a table when it stops functioning as one, or does it have its own intrinsic properties as part of the world around it, or does your memory of it having once being a table count towards your concept of tableness?
Animals have no concept of tableness? Yes, perhaps, but they still have a concept of the object you’ve deemed a table, because of its function to you. The cat thinks it’s a rather handy flat surface to lounge upon, and occasionally find morsels of food left on. The legs are good scratch posts. The spider trots along, finds a table leg and scuttles up it thinking ‘ this is a very straight tree’,,, then it comes across a CORNER! ‘Fantastic’ says the spider ‘an ideal place to build my dinner-catching web!’. The spider doesn’t care if you can lay something down on it, but it cares about the corners it has, but are the ‘flat surface with legs and lots of corners’ part of its tableness, or only its function for your use?
My point is, the table has intrinsic properties in and of itself, over and above your concept of its function, and that the system it’s part of may or may not confer it’s tableness. The table NEEDS gravity to function: so both form a system – those (and other intrinsic properties) are what you actually perceive, not just how the definition pertains to ‘a table’ in your conceptualisation. The table is its past, it’s present, it’s future; it’s interaction with cats, spiders, humans, gravity, the air, your hot dinner; it’s conductivity; it’s reaction to electromagnetic radiation, to give its colour; no table is an island…
I’m not dissing your dissertation though! I’m sure it’ll get flying colours, as long as you didn’t mention string theory (you’d be labelled a heretic then).
I’m certainly no expert – I’m merely a layperson that’s interested in physics, and other sciences – or rather, I’m interested in the world around me. You should read that book on the history of quantum physics (did you know that ‘quantum’ just means ‘in discrete amounts’?), it’s a very philosophical subject, and some of the thought experiments are quite the brain teasers. I forgot to look up the author again though.
On string theory – I have my doubts it’ll do what it set out to do (unify all theories), but I certainly don’t understand it, just that it feels too complex (the maths is,,, Urgh, incomprehensible) – I think the answers will lie in dark matter and dark energy,,, once they discover it, anyway – that’s going to be the next big breakthrough! Who knows, it’s all a big sea of probabilities 🙂
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You’re right that my analogy was very poorly chosen as a means of explaining my position to you, Contrary. You’re now attacking all kinds of positions that I don’t hold and that I’ve never expressed. Since I agree with you that the positions you attribute to me are silly and nonsensical, I see little point in wasting all of our time in explaining why you’ve wrongly attributed them to me. (In some cases — such as my believing, apparently, that the world is a figment of my imagination — I genuinely don’t know since they don’t seem even remotely to be based on anything I’ve said.)
I’ll continue to hope that what I’ve actually said in the thread works for, and is helpful to other people. For that purpose, I’m more than happy to let our exchange stand as it is and to move on to more productive exchanges on other topics.
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I honestly wasn’t trying to attack anything – it was an attempt at convincing you of another point of view – but the assumptions we have to make in trying to make points (just as you did in using science as examples) can *appear* as though they are attacks. This is the problem, as I see it, with human perception: it really is very different between each individual. (And assumptions can also come across as wrongly attributing positions – which is where communications can break down).
At no point do I believe you actually meant any kind of attack on scientific things, and you achieved the initial purpose of letting me see your point of view on racial prejudice – convincing me on views that I already have strong opinions on is not so easy. Sorry if I went over the top there, in real life I’m a lot more confrontational than I am online, and I do enjoy a lively debate – but it doesn’t come across well in writing! (As in, I could get immediate feedback of ‘I don’t think that!’ In person, but just roll with it otherwise,,,). That is, I thought this was a good chat, it expands (or should) our perceptions. But yes, the topic should be left as it is.
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JB, I meant no offence to Geordie culture but was just assuming that, say, the middle class lawyers there will play down their dialect and be embarrassed by folk getting mortal, tashing on etc, and that they’ll aspire to being respected by the big London lawyers. Nothing more profound than that, honest.
I’m a big Clement and La Frenais fan but actually AWP is one of my least favourites for some reason. My favourite is The Likely Lads and I could quote you dozens of lines but I’ll go for Terry’s line that I’d definitely consider for my own epitaph: “If I die tomorrow, you know what it’ll say on my gravestone? ‘None the bloody wiser!'”
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On the main theme I would commend the following book which I found comprehensive, authoritative, and brave:
‘IREVERSIBLE DAMAGE: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze’ by Abigail Shrier. (£5.69 Kindle, £8.33 paperback, £12.89 hardcover) (4.5 stars with 3,263 ratings).
“About the Author: Abigail Shrier is a writer for the Wall Street Journal. She holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a BPhil. from the University of Oxford; and a J.D. from Yale Law School.”
“Named a Book of the Year by the Economist, and one of the Best Books of 2021 by the Times”
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Apologies. Two “RRs” of course —
‘IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE’
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Good shout, Fearghas. I haven’t read it yet but I saw her on the Joe Rogan podcast and thought she was very good. She came across as someone with no axe to grind who started off just investigating an interesting story and got more and more horrified the deeper into it she got.
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Gordon, I think you would find your positive impression well confirmed in the book. Abigail Shrier is deeply discerning and incisive yet unremittingly respectful and constructive. She is literate with a spare and readable American style. She writes professionally but humanely as a woman and mother. She has extensively interviewed all sides, quoting (as far as I can remember) only this first hand material, with careful indexing. The central concern is for the ruined bodies and lives of teenage girls who have been scandalously cheered on in their injurious course by almost every level and institution of society. Thanks for the Joe Rogan reference, which I will look up.
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One assumes there is a formal record taken of courtroom presentations. Would it be possible to have the text of the defence case publicised, since it never made the media? Thinking perhaps of the full record for truth to posterity, with edited highlights for the hard of reading like me?
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I too was wondering about that. Is it shredded for ever? … does anyone get to see it? … is it available to an appeal court?
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Bruce and Robert, there will have been at least one person on the Salmond legal team taking detailed notes throughout, and someone on the Crown side doing the same. As long as there is a high degree of confidence in their accuracy and, of course, as long as they don’t breach the section 11 order at any point, those could be published.
It’s also possible for the Crown and the accused, and others if they can establish a good reason, to obtain a full transcript but this is so expensive that it’s hardly ever done, except for appeals, and even then only for limited parts of the evidence which is in issue. Transcripts used to be produced from notes taken by a shorthand writer who sat up beside the judge but now it’s all done from tapes.
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Ah, I see … the transcript is in the form of a tape; but payment is required to make a written transcript of the tape. I now see why there is a cost involved. I guess I wouldn’t get to just ask for a copy of the whole tape, and do my own transcript?
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