Amidst all the furore over LGBT rights, a couple of scientists reviewed over 200 academic studies to see they could answer some key questions about the sources of LGBT desires. The full review can be found at https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/number-50-fall-2016
Firstly, are LGB people "born that way" due to genetics or some other mechanism? The short answer is, "mostly no." It seems that at most, genes or other birth mechanisms are one factor among many in determining LGB attraction. However, they did find one very sad factor that correlates with LGB attraction, even if it doesn't necessarily cause it. Here are some abstracts from their abstract:
"Epidemiological studies show a rather modest association between genetic factors and sexual attractions or behaviors, but do not provide significant evidence pointing to particular genes. There is also limited evidence for other hypothesized biological causes of homosexual behaviors, attractions, or identity — such as the influence of hormones on prenatal development. Studies of the brains of homosexuals and heterosexuals have found some differences, but have not demonstrated that these differences are inborn. One environmental factor that appears to be correlated with non-heterosexuality is childhood sexual abuse victimization"
Secondly, is there any evidence for the transgender community's theory that gender identity is largely disconnected from biological sex and/or that such 'gender dysphoria' should be treated medically? Here, the answer is "there is no conclusive evidence for these views, and some evidence against them." In their words again:
"The causes of such cross-gender identification remain poorly understood. Research has so far been inconclusive. Gender dysphoria — a sense of incongruence between one’s biological sex and one’s gender, accompanied by clinically significant distress or impairment — is sometimes treated in adults by hormones or surgery, but there is little scientific evidence that these therapeutic interventions have psychological benefits. Science has shown that gender identity issues in children usually do not persist into adolescence or adulthood, and there is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of puberty-delaying treatments."
They add:
We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures. There is a clear need for more research in these areas.
So what is going on? The study sheds a little light on this by also reviewing a third area -- the belief that LGBT feelings are linked to mental health issues. The study does find evidence that such a link exists (with the sad results of increased anxiety, depression and suicide amongst LGBT people), but only found partial evidence for the LGBT community's assertion that such issues are entirely due to stigmatisation and discrimination. The study's authors suggest that trauma arising from childhood sexual abuse may be another factor causing poor mental health.
In conclusion, science has not found any conclusive causes of such feelings but has found a few factors that are correlated with them. The biggest single correlated factor is childhood sexual abuse; other linked factors are mental health issues, genetics (though no one particular gene), and differences in brain development.
My best guess based on the evidence to date is that LGBT attraction has multiple possible causes, and maybe multiple causes for a single individual.
Saturday, 16 November 2019
Sunday, 28 April 2019
Why Carole Cadwalladr is a Conspiracy Theorist
Carole Cadwalladr has recently gained a high profile through a TED talk or two. She's been around for a while, digging up information on the activities of data analytics companies, especially Cambridge Analytica.
Some of my friends have quoted her approvingly on social media. I was less impressed. Eventually someone called on me to do a proper analysis of one of her articles.
Here it is. The article can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy?fbclid=IwAR0FD3P6OeJDT1ObEyRPx8KHQUv-PK0LM6oRU9mdEgo8fj57e7Z7YdjhFj4
If you don't want to read the whole thing, my conclusions are in the last 4 paragraphs. (Unlike Carole who likes to put her conclusions at the beginning and then makes us wait ages for any justification!)
The article says at the beginning that Cambridge Analytica won the election for Donald Trump. The statement has no supporting evidence; however it is in a quote from someone (meaning it can be disowned if libel proceedings are raised).
The same employee then claims that CA interfered in elections around the world in ways that would be illegal in the West. Again, no supporting evidence.
Then another firm gets mentioned - Palantir. No actual link is made between Palantir and CA but the language used implies guilt by association.
This is followed by a statement that is obviously true (probably to make it look like the whole story is true) but that on its own has little impact ("a small handful of Silicon Valley firms are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.")
Then it makes another unsubstantiated statement ("Brexit and Trump are intertwined") and makes it seem believable by saying the same thing in several different ways.
So much for the dramatic-sounding but potentially misleading introduction. Let's get down to the main story - or rather, the "three strands" of the story. Once again, each is presented as a fait accompli with no supporting evidence. One would hope that such evidence might eventually appear somewhere in the article.
First of all, she jumps to a claim that doesn't directly support any of her three strands: "Cambridge Analytica is a central point in the Right's 'propaganda machine'" (once again, presented as a quote from someone whose reliability isn't established beyond the fact he's a professor). She doesn't define 'central point'. She misleadingly mentions the Right immediately after describing some of the activities of the 'alt-right', thus implying the two are the same.
She does, however, define 'propaganda machine' -- but only after linking two names to it, one being a high-profile Republican political figure and both being directors of CA, on the basis that she "believed" these two guys were linked to the "propaganda machine". That's not good evidence.
Then she makes her connection to Brexit - on the basis of a quote from the communications director of Leave.EU that Cambridge Analytica was directed to "help" the Leave campaign. That quote is actually the highest quality evidence she has presented for anything so far.
After patting herself on the back for writing an article that triggered investigations into Leave.EU, she makes her most specific allegation so far -- that four Leave-preferring campaign groups spent money with one Canadian data company and that this constitutes collusion. She then states that 'Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”'... in other words, there is evidence that her accusation of collusion has been investigated and found to be false, but she wants us to disbelieve that so she puts the statement into the mouths of Vote Leave and puts the Commissions's investigation and findings in inverted commas. Much later in the article she expands on her scepticism by quoting 'sources close to the investigation' -- so not even attributable quotes.
Next she makes the most meaningful statement in her whole article to date: that Britain's electoral spending laws are no longer fit for purpose. It's a statement that is pretty clearly true but doesn't provide any evidence towards her various unsupported conclusions.
Then she alleges that CA and the Canadian data company were intimately entwined. Once again this is presented as a quote from a former employee. She presents no further evidence beyond that.Next she heads down yet another side branch, claiming that CA's parent company SCL was "part of the British defence establishment" because it has a "Director of Defence Operations" who was a former military head of psyops. That's waaay too strong a claim. Lots of companies contract to the Ministry of Defence and lots hire ex-military personnel to help them win and manage contracts. The most she has actually established is that SCL made plans to win contracts from the MOD and that they had a psyops expert on board.
Back to the main story: she claims that CA collected loads of data from personality quizzes on Facebook and from other stories and used it to create profiles of individual voters, who could then be sent targeted messages. This is pretty much established as truth and has been decried since as unacceptable, causing CA to go out of business. (And it's now specifically banned by GDPR).
She then (finally!) gives some evidence for one of her 'three strands': "How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire." Actually, she isn't talking about British democracy yet, and all she has established is that CA had the data to send people highly targeted messages, which doesn't prove that democracy was thereby subverted. But she does manage to get the billionaire's involvement in.
She does try to prove her point about subversion (which is critical to her whole argument) with yet another quote from someone -- an associate professor of philosophy (!!!) I would have expected a full professor of psychology at least for such an important point. Maybe she thinks that by the time people have got this far through the article they will have given up checking whether her quotes come from reliable-seeming sources.
Then she's off on a side channel again, this time claiming that CA and the Canadian company supported the development of a Minority Report-like system in Trinidad in 2013. Apart from smearing CA's moral standards, the only thing this proves as far as the main argument is concerned is that CA and the Canadian company had had a close working relationship. So she's generated some evidence to support one of her other side branches.
Now she jumps from this side channel to one of her three strands -- that the US is laying a basis for an authoritarian surveillance state. Her argument is that the same company that did the thing in Trinidad (which she calls 'the company that got Trump elected', a claim she still hasn't proved but seems to be trying to establish by repetition) has been awarded contracts by two US government departments - Defense and State, Oh, and the political guy who was director of CA is now high up in the White House. This is nowhere near enough evidence that the US is laying a basis for an authoritarian surveillance state -- if one of my students tried to make this link, I would fail them. If we had a clue what the contracts were for or how big they were, that might give us a clue -- but in the US as in the UK, all sorts of companies work with Defense. We can't assume that building data profiles of individuals suitable for 'Minority Report'-style monitoring was the only kind of work that CA did, whereas the author apparently does assume that here.
In her next paragraph she says "Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch". What documents? Involved how? She gives one example -- CA tried to place an article in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and Murdoch himself allegedly had some involvement. So what?
Now she drags Palantir back into the story -- because they too are owned by an (allegedly) right-leaning billionaire. And they too do data analytics. I think this must be her evidence for her third strand -- that "we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data." It's weak evidence, to put it kindly.
Then it's back to Vote Leave and the Canadian company. Her primary allegation is that the link was forged because Vote Leave's Chief Technology Officer was a former CA employee. This is one of her better pieces of evidence.
Next is a graphic showing how everyone is allegedly linked. It's misleading (again) -- firstly for including Donald Trump (who hasn't been mentioned as having any role so far); secondly by linking Trump directly to CA as well as through Steve Bannon (there's no evidence AT ALL for a direct link in the article); and thirdly by including a firm and a person who haven't previously been named (another thing my students get marked down for).
I'm going to stop my analysis here, except for one thing. Apparently the £100,000 sent to the Canadian firm by Veterans for Britain led to "a small number of people they identified as “persuadable” [being] bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days."
Seriously??? A 'small' number of people -- let's be generous and say 'small' is 10,000 people. They have been sent more than a billion ads? That's 10,000 ads each! No way could even the most dedicated social media user have seen 10,000 ads in a few days, never mind Veterans for Britain. Even if it's more than 10,00 people, or the article is using an American billion rather than a British one, we're still talking hundreds and hundreds of ads in a few days.
My conclusion: This is indeed a conspiracy theory because it alleges covert collusion between multiple individuals to do something/things that was at best unethical and at worst illegal.
The article has three 'strands'. None of those strands come close to being proved by the evidence presented. One is based on a lot of supposition about the nature and extent of CA's contracts with Defense and State in the US. One is based on the views of a mid-level academic in philosophy about psychology. And the third is generalised from two examples -- and it's not even clear that the allegation is true in one of those two cases.
And then there's the fourth claim -- that Cambridge Analytica got Donald Trump elected. Repeating the claim several times without presenting any supporting evidence does not make it true.
Finally the article is misleading on several occasions. I cannot prove that it is deliberate but I would be very, very surprised if it isn't.
Some of my friends have quoted her approvingly on social media. I was less impressed. Eventually someone called on me to do a proper analysis of one of her articles.
Here it is. The article can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy?fbclid=IwAR0FD3P6OeJDT1ObEyRPx8KHQUv-PK0LM6oRU9mdEgo8fj57e7Z7YdjhFj4
If you don't want to read the whole thing, my conclusions are in the last 4 paragraphs. (Unlike Carole who likes to put her conclusions at the beginning and then makes us wait ages for any justification!)
The article says at the beginning that Cambridge Analytica won the election for Donald Trump. The statement has no supporting evidence; however it is in a quote from someone (meaning it can be disowned if libel proceedings are raised).
The same employee then claims that CA interfered in elections around the world in ways that would be illegal in the West. Again, no supporting evidence.
Then another firm gets mentioned - Palantir. No actual link is made between Palantir and CA but the language used implies guilt by association.
This is followed by a statement that is obviously true (probably to make it look like the whole story is true) but that on its own has little impact ("a small handful of Silicon Valley firms are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.")
Then it makes another unsubstantiated statement ("Brexit and Trump are intertwined") and makes it seem believable by saying the same thing in several different ways.
So much for the dramatic-sounding but potentially misleading introduction. Let's get down to the main story - or rather, the "three strands" of the story. Once again, each is presented as a fait accompli with no supporting evidence. One would hope that such evidence might eventually appear somewhere in the article.
First of all, she jumps to a claim that doesn't directly support any of her three strands: "Cambridge Analytica is a central point in the Right's 'propaganda machine'" (once again, presented as a quote from someone whose reliability isn't established beyond the fact he's a professor). She doesn't define 'central point'. She misleadingly mentions the Right immediately after describing some of the activities of the 'alt-right', thus implying the two are the same.
She does, however, define 'propaganda machine' -- but only after linking two names to it, one being a high-profile Republican political figure and both being directors of CA, on the basis that she "believed" these two guys were linked to the "propaganda machine". That's not good evidence.
Then she makes her connection to Brexit - on the basis of a quote from the communications director of Leave.EU that Cambridge Analytica was directed to "help" the Leave campaign. That quote is actually the highest quality evidence she has presented for anything so far.
After patting herself on the back for writing an article that triggered investigations into Leave.EU, she makes her most specific allegation so far -- that four Leave-preferring campaign groups spent money with one Canadian data company and that this constitutes collusion. She then states that 'Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”'... in other words, there is evidence that her accusation of collusion has been investigated and found to be false, but she wants us to disbelieve that so she puts the statement into the mouths of Vote Leave and puts the Commissions's investigation and findings in inverted commas. Much later in the article she expands on her scepticism by quoting 'sources close to the investigation' -- so not even attributable quotes.
Next she makes the most meaningful statement in her whole article to date: that Britain's electoral spending laws are no longer fit for purpose. It's a statement that is pretty clearly true but doesn't provide any evidence towards her various unsupported conclusions.
Then she alleges that CA and the Canadian data company were intimately entwined. Once again this is presented as a quote from a former employee. She presents no further evidence beyond that.Next she heads down yet another side branch, claiming that CA's parent company SCL was "part of the British defence establishment" because it has a "Director of Defence Operations" who was a former military head of psyops. That's waaay too strong a claim. Lots of companies contract to the Ministry of Defence and lots hire ex-military personnel to help them win and manage contracts. The most she has actually established is that SCL made plans to win contracts from the MOD and that they had a psyops expert on board.
Back to the main story: she claims that CA collected loads of data from personality quizzes on Facebook and from other stories and used it to create profiles of individual voters, who could then be sent targeted messages. This is pretty much established as truth and has been decried since as unacceptable, causing CA to go out of business. (And it's now specifically banned by GDPR).
She then (finally!) gives some evidence for one of her 'three strands': "How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire." Actually, she isn't talking about British democracy yet, and all she has established is that CA had the data to send people highly targeted messages, which doesn't prove that democracy was thereby subverted. But she does manage to get the billionaire's involvement in.
She does try to prove her point about subversion (which is critical to her whole argument) with yet another quote from someone -- an associate professor of philosophy (!!!) I would have expected a full professor of psychology at least for such an important point. Maybe she thinks that by the time people have got this far through the article they will have given up checking whether her quotes come from reliable-seeming sources.
Then she's off on a side channel again, this time claiming that CA and the Canadian company supported the development of a Minority Report-like system in Trinidad in 2013. Apart from smearing CA's moral standards, the only thing this proves as far as the main argument is concerned is that CA and the Canadian company had had a close working relationship. So she's generated some evidence to support one of her other side branches.
Now she jumps from this side channel to one of her three strands -- that the US is laying a basis for an authoritarian surveillance state. Her argument is that the same company that did the thing in Trinidad (which she calls 'the company that got Trump elected', a claim she still hasn't proved but seems to be trying to establish by repetition) has been awarded contracts by two US government departments - Defense and State, Oh, and the political guy who was director of CA is now high up in the White House. This is nowhere near enough evidence that the US is laying a basis for an authoritarian surveillance state -- if one of my students tried to make this link, I would fail them. If we had a clue what the contracts were for or how big they were, that might give us a clue -- but in the US as in the UK, all sorts of companies work with Defense. We can't assume that building data profiles of individuals suitable for 'Minority Report'-style monitoring was the only kind of work that CA did, whereas the author apparently does assume that here.
In her next paragraph she says "Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch". What documents? Involved how? She gives one example -- CA tried to place an article in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and Murdoch himself allegedly had some involvement. So what?
Now she drags Palantir back into the story -- because they too are owned by an (allegedly) right-leaning billionaire. And they too do data analytics. I think this must be her evidence for her third strand -- that "we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data." It's weak evidence, to put it kindly.
Then it's back to Vote Leave and the Canadian company. Her primary allegation is that the link was forged because Vote Leave's Chief Technology Officer was a former CA employee. This is one of her better pieces of evidence.
Next is a graphic showing how everyone is allegedly linked. It's misleading (again) -- firstly for including Donald Trump (who hasn't been mentioned as having any role so far); secondly by linking Trump directly to CA as well as through Steve Bannon (there's no evidence AT ALL for a direct link in the article); and thirdly by including a firm and a person who haven't previously been named (another thing my students get marked down for).
I'm going to stop my analysis here, except for one thing. Apparently the £100,000 sent to the Canadian firm by Veterans for Britain led to "a small number of people they identified as “persuadable” [being] bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days."
Seriously??? A 'small' number of people -- let's be generous and say 'small' is 10,000 people. They have been sent more than a billion ads? That's 10,000 ads each! No way could even the most dedicated social media user have seen 10,000 ads in a few days, never mind Veterans for Britain. Even if it's more than 10,00 people, or the article is using an American billion rather than a British one, we're still talking hundreds and hundreds of ads in a few days.
My conclusion: This is indeed a conspiracy theory because it alleges covert collusion between multiple individuals to do something/things that was at best unethical and at worst illegal.
The article has three 'strands'. None of those strands come close to being proved by the evidence presented. One is based on a lot of supposition about the nature and extent of CA's contracts with Defense and State in the US. One is based on the views of a mid-level academic in philosophy about psychology. And the third is generalised from two examples -- and it's not even clear that the allegation is true in one of those two cases.
And then there's the fourth claim -- that Cambridge Analytica got Donald Trump elected. Repeating the claim several times without presenting any supporting evidence does not make it true.
Finally the article is misleading on several occasions. I cannot prove that it is deliberate but I would be very, very surprised if it isn't.
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Why Progressive Politics Will Collapse
February, I am told, was LGBT Pride Month. In truth, LGBT “awareness” is so pervasive in our society that I saw little change except for a few cases where the letters LGBT were attached to increasingly unlikely events (LGBT Computer Game Jam?).
There is no obvious sign that LGBT pride events will become a thing of the past – indeed, to all appearances the movement seems to be growing stronger all the time. Yet that is exactly what I am going to predict: that the promotion of progressive politics (typified by the twin policies of abortion rights and LGBT rights) will, at some point, be consigned to history.
What is the basis for my prediction? To answer that I need to begin with a (short!) history lesson.
The Anabaptists
We’ll begin with an attempt to establish a theocracy in the city of Munster in Germany in the early days of Protestantism. Munster had a long history of anti-Catholic feeling from its Lutheran pastor and a man called Bernard Rothmann who regularly churned out pamphlets opposing Catholic doctrine. Towards the end of the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25, Rothmann’s pamphlets started to proclaim that the Bible called for the absolute equality of man in all matters including the distribution of wealth. The pamphlets, which were distributed throughout northern Germany, successfully called upon the poor of the region to join the citizens of Munster to share the wealth of the town and benefit spiritually from being the elect of Heaven.
A group of Anabaptists (Protestants whose key belief was adult baptism) arrived in town and were quickly elected to the city government. As moderate Lutherans hurriedly left the city, their property was shared out to the poor. Soon there was a proclamation that all property was held in common.
The city was soon under siege by forces led by the local Catholic bishop. It did not stop the development of new polices. Everybody was re-baptised. Icons and other images were smashed in cathedrals and monasteries. Then a new leader was appointed (because the old one believed he had a prophecy that he should set forth from the city to fight the Catholics with just twelve men – it didn’t work) who proclaimed that he had the royal authority of David and that the city was the new Zion. And because there were far more women of marriageable age in town than men – most of them ex-nuns – polygamy was legalised. The leader took sixteen wives.
All the while people were starving because of the siege. In the end the city was taken, the leaders killed, and the new Zion was at an end.
The French Revolution
The French Revolution of 1789-1799 began with an uprising among the heavily taxed and starving common people against the aristocracy and clergy, led by some middle class men with radical ideas. It took three years of political struggle before the revolutionaries were fully in control; the king was executed shortly afterwards.
Very soon after that the radical Robespierre and his Jacobins assumed power. The following two years brought a mixture of good and bad ideas – price controls on food, abolishing slavery, expelling all religious leaders, creating a new secular calendar – but it also brought public executions of anyone remotely suspected of opposing the Revolution, giving the period its name of the “Reign of Terror”. There are stories of farmers reporting that their neighbours had expressed anti-Revolutionary sympathies and then taking over their farms after the inevitable execution. Old scores were settled in a similar way; there was no effective court system to weigh competing claims for justice, just a swift route to the guillotine for those who were accused.
The next government suspended elections, repudiated debts (creating financial instability in the process), and further persecuted the Catholic clergy. They did have significant military successes abroad but charges of corruption facilitated a coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799.
Soviet Communism
Soviet Communism lasted from 1917 until 1989-91. Like the French Revolution, it started as a peasants’ revolt led by some radicals. Once established, they introduced a planned economy in which all industries were nationalised and controlled by the State. They too introduced a new calendar.
The Party was supposed to represent the interests of the workers, with Congress as its highest decision making body. However after Stalin took power, Congress became largely symbolic.
The centralised economy was rarely as well run as economies in Western countries. For example, the “One Big Factory” system where one factory would be the only supplier of a certain object for the whole Soviet Union was probably designed more to enforce dependency of the various internal republics on each other than for efficiency of production. It did not help that every factory had a manager and also a Party representative; the former could take no decisions without the approval of the latter, and the cost of running the huge Party bureaucracy was significant.
However, the economy showed its worst face during the “Holodomor” famine in Ukraine in 1932. The comparatively small harvest that did grow was shipped elsewhere (and considerable amounts were sold abroad) while the people literally starved to death – and were forced to watch films which portrayed peasants as counterrevolutionaries hoarding grain and potatoes. The number who starved to death in 1932-33 across the USSR (but mostly in Ukraine) was probably higher than the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler; as a measure of the desperation, 2500 people were convicted of cannibalism during that period.
Communist rule was sustained by suppression of alternative views by arrests or (in neighbouring countries) military force; by suppression of news from the West (many people were banned from travelling to non-Communist states); by inculcating a fear of Americans in particular; and by various economic tricks that robbed individuals in favour of the State. Eventually a new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, decided on a policy of openness to the West instead and granted free elections. The whole Communist system collapsed shortly after that.
So why is this history lesson relevant to modern progressive politics?
It’s relevant because there is a pattern to the above stories. It goes like this:
I believe that progressive politics has reached stage 4: the stage of lunatic policies. It has certainly reached the previous stage, in lobbying if not in law: OFSTED’s head wants LGBT issues to be taught in primary schools (where they don’t even have sex education yet!) and the BBC recently screened a series of LGBT children’s stories on young children’s channel CBeebies.
Let’s take two examples of the lunacy, both from the USA whose politics tends to be a few years ahead of the UK’s:
Abortion
As President Trump and various US states have introduced limits on abortion, other Democrat-controlled states have gone the other way. It has now reached the stage where bills in some states and in the US Senate have been proposed to guarantee that babies who are accidentally born alive during an abortion should have a right to life and medical care – and every bill has been vetoed by Democrats.
Yes, you read that right. Democrat support for abortion has reached the stage of supporting infanticide (by deliberate neglect) of live babies. Every Democrat currently in the running to oppose Trump at the next election supports this kind of infanticide.
In many ways it’s just the logic of abortion taken to its ultimate extreme. Abortion rights advocates pay no attention to the rights of the baby; it’s all about the rights of the mother. Yet now the pretence that abortion doesn’t matter because an unborn baby is not a human being is gone; the belief is seen in its fullness. And to many Americans, it’s obvious (and horrifying) lunacy.
LGBT
The lunacy in LGBT is coming from the T – transgender rights. Apparently anyone can declare themselves to be transgender whenever they feel like it. Men can do so in a shop if they want to use the women’s toilets – an employee of the Target chain was fired for denying a man this ‘right’. Transgender people can compete in sports for the opposite sex which means several US women’s sports events are now being won by “transgender” men. And for good measure, there aren’t just two genders to choose from; you can be somewhere in between. New York State has defined a list of 23 genders that people can officially be (with a handful of new pronouns that people are legally forced to use), and a politician elsewhere in the US managed to find reference to 71 different genders. (He did it because his state’s legislature had to vote on whether to approve each one separately, and as he had hoped, they ran out of time!)
All of this has greatly upset feminists and other women who feel unsafe in public toilets where men are allowed entry (with good reason). Marina Navratilova, known as a lesbian as well as a star tennis player, has called the admission of men to women’s sports “insanity” – and has been roundly condemned by the current generation of LGBT lobbyists for doing so.
The feminists are right. Martina is right. This is lunacy.
What happens next?
What happens next is suppression and oppression of views opposing the progressive orthodoxy (which can already be observed, for example in the 'debate' about “gay conversion therapy”) followed by collapse of the whole belief system. I cannot say when this will occur, only that the collapse may well be sudden. I know of someone who predicted the collapse of Soviet Communism in an article written in May 1989 – but it wasn’t published until 1990, by which time it looked far less prescient than at the time it was written.
After that – who knows what will happen. If good sense prevails then being lesbian/gay/bisexual will probably be viewed as involuntary but not ‘normal’. A desire to change gender (to the other one – there are only two) will be viewed primarily as an unusual mental condition and treated as such, with transgender surgery only being a last resort. Abortion will be recognised as ending the life of a human being whose rights must be weighed against the mother’s. Maybe, to some extent, the father and the rest of the family should have a say too.
No doubt there will be some “true believers” in progressive politics who will fight against the new ways to the end of their days. After all, Russia still has a Communist party. There just won’t be enough of them to make any major difference any more.
There is no obvious sign that LGBT pride events will become a thing of the past – indeed, to all appearances the movement seems to be growing stronger all the time. Yet that is exactly what I am going to predict: that the promotion of progressive politics (typified by the twin policies of abortion rights and LGBT rights) will, at some point, be consigned to history.
What is the basis for my prediction? To answer that I need to begin with a (short!) history lesson.
The Anabaptists
We’ll begin with an attempt to establish a theocracy in the city of Munster in Germany in the early days of Protestantism. Munster had a long history of anti-Catholic feeling from its Lutheran pastor and a man called Bernard Rothmann who regularly churned out pamphlets opposing Catholic doctrine. Towards the end of the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25, Rothmann’s pamphlets started to proclaim that the Bible called for the absolute equality of man in all matters including the distribution of wealth. The pamphlets, which were distributed throughout northern Germany, successfully called upon the poor of the region to join the citizens of Munster to share the wealth of the town and benefit spiritually from being the elect of Heaven.
A group of Anabaptists (Protestants whose key belief was adult baptism) arrived in town and were quickly elected to the city government. As moderate Lutherans hurriedly left the city, their property was shared out to the poor. Soon there was a proclamation that all property was held in common.
The city was soon under siege by forces led by the local Catholic bishop. It did not stop the development of new polices. Everybody was re-baptised. Icons and other images were smashed in cathedrals and monasteries. Then a new leader was appointed (because the old one believed he had a prophecy that he should set forth from the city to fight the Catholics with just twelve men – it didn’t work) who proclaimed that he had the royal authority of David and that the city was the new Zion. And because there were far more women of marriageable age in town than men – most of them ex-nuns – polygamy was legalised. The leader took sixteen wives.
All the while people were starving because of the siege. In the end the city was taken, the leaders killed, and the new Zion was at an end.
The French Revolution
The French Revolution of 1789-1799 began with an uprising among the heavily taxed and starving common people against the aristocracy and clergy, led by some middle class men with radical ideas. It took three years of political struggle before the revolutionaries were fully in control; the king was executed shortly afterwards.
Very soon after that the radical Robespierre and his Jacobins assumed power. The following two years brought a mixture of good and bad ideas – price controls on food, abolishing slavery, expelling all religious leaders, creating a new secular calendar – but it also brought public executions of anyone remotely suspected of opposing the Revolution, giving the period its name of the “Reign of Terror”. There are stories of farmers reporting that their neighbours had expressed anti-Revolutionary sympathies and then taking over their farms after the inevitable execution. Old scores were settled in a similar way; there was no effective court system to weigh competing claims for justice, just a swift route to the guillotine for those who were accused.
The next government suspended elections, repudiated debts (creating financial instability in the process), and further persecuted the Catholic clergy. They did have significant military successes abroad but charges of corruption facilitated a coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799.
Soviet Communism
Soviet Communism lasted from 1917 until 1989-91. Like the French Revolution, it started as a peasants’ revolt led by some radicals. Once established, they introduced a planned economy in which all industries were nationalised and controlled by the State. They too introduced a new calendar.
The Party was supposed to represent the interests of the workers, with Congress as its highest decision making body. However after Stalin took power, Congress became largely symbolic.
The centralised economy was rarely as well run as economies in Western countries. For example, the “One Big Factory” system where one factory would be the only supplier of a certain object for the whole Soviet Union was probably designed more to enforce dependency of the various internal republics on each other than for efficiency of production. It did not help that every factory had a manager and also a Party representative; the former could take no decisions without the approval of the latter, and the cost of running the huge Party bureaucracy was significant.
However, the economy showed its worst face during the “Holodomor” famine in Ukraine in 1932. The comparatively small harvest that did grow was shipped elsewhere (and considerable amounts were sold abroad) while the people literally starved to death – and were forced to watch films which portrayed peasants as counterrevolutionaries hoarding grain and potatoes. The number who starved to death in 1932-33 across the USSR (but mostly in Ukraine) was probably higher than the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler; as a measure of the desperation, 2500 people were convicted of cannibalism during that period.
Communist rule was sustained by suppression of alternative views by arrests or (in neighbouring countries) military force; by suppression of news from the West (many people were banned from travelling to non-Communist states); by inculcating a fear of Americans in particular; and by various economic tricks that robbed individuals in favour of the State. Eventually a new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, decided on a policy of openness to the West instead and granted free elections. The whole Communist system collapsed shortly after that.
So why is this history lesson relevant to modern progressive politics?
It’s relevant because there is a pattern to the above stories. It goes like this:
- An (arguably) good cause triggers a major change in official policies.
- The new policies take time to be fully established.
- When they are, they are taught in schools and elsewhere as “the right way”.
- The movement is taken over by even more radical people and produces ideas that are obvious lunacy to anyone who is not a radical.
- The new somewhat crazy system is sustained by suppression and oppression of alternate views.
- The whole system suddenly collapses.
I believe that progressive politics has reached stage 4: the stage of lunatic policies. It has certainly reached the previous stage, in lobbying if not in law: OFSTED’s head wants LGBT issues to be taught in primary schools (where they don’t even have sex education yet!) and the BBC recently screened a series of LGBT children’s stories on young children’s channel CBeebies.
Let’s take two examples of the lunacy, both from the USA whose politics tends to be a few years ahead of the UK’s:
Abortion
As President Trump and various US states have introduced limits on abortion, other Democrat-controlled states have gone the other way. It has now reached the stage where bills in some states and in the US Senate have been proposed to guarantee that babies who are accidentally born alive during an abortion should have a right to life and medical care – and every bill has been vetoed by Democrats.
Yes, you read that right. Democrat support for abortion has reached the stage of supporting infanticide (by deliberate neglect) of live babies. Every Democrat currently in the running to oppose Trump at the next election supports this kind of infanticide.
In many ways it’s just the logic of abortion taken to its ultimate extreme. Abortion rights advocates pay no attention to the rights of the baby; it’s all about the rights of the mother. Yet now the pretence that abortion doesn’t matter because an unborn baby is not a human being is gone; the belief is seen in its fullness. And to many Americans, it’s obvious (and horrifying) lunacy.
LGBT
The lunacy in LGBT is coming from the T – transgender rights. Apparently anyone can declare themselves to be transgender whenever they feel like it. Men can do so in a shop if they want to use the women’s toilets – an employee of the Target chain was fired for denying a man this ‘right’. Transgender people can compete in sports for the opposite sex which means several US women’s sports events are now being won by “transgender” men. And for good measure, there aren’t just two genders to choose from; you can be somewhere in between. New York State has defined a list of 23 genders that people can officially be (with a handful of new pronouns that people are legally forced to use), and a politician elsewhere in the US managed to find reference to 71 different genders. (He did it because his state’s legislature had to vote on whether to approve each one separately, and as he had hoped, they ran out of time!)
All of this has greatly upset feminists and other women who feel unsafe in public toilets where men are allowed entry (with good reason). Marina Navratilova, known as a lesbian as well as a star tennis player, has called the admission of men to women’s sports “insanity” – and has been roundly condemned by the current generation of LGBT lobbyists for doing so.
The feminists are right. Martina is right. This is lunacy.
What happens next?
What happens next is suppression and oppression of views opposing the progressive orthodoxy (which can already be observed, for example in the 'debate' about “gay conversion therapy”) followed by collapse of the whole belief system. I cannot say when this will occur, only that the collapse may well be sudden. I know of someone who predicted the collapse of Soviet Communism in an article written in May 1989 – but it wasn’t published until 1990, by which time it looked far less prescient than at the time it was written.
After that – who knows what will happen. If good sense prevails then being lesbian/gay/bisexual will probably be viewed as involuntary but not ‘normal’. A desire to change gender (to the other one – there are only two) will be viewed primarily as an unusual mental condition and treated as such, with transgender surgery only being a last resort. Abortion will be recognised as ending the life of a human being whose rights must be weighed against the mother’s. Maybe, to some extent, the father and the rest of the family should have a say too.
No doubt there will be some “true believers” in progressive politics who will fight against the new ways to the end of their days. After all, Russia still has a Communist party. There just won’t be enough of them to make any major difference any more.
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