#Richard Dawkins

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Hi would it be okay if i asked you why you detest richard dawkins?? Cause i also hate him to pieces and would like to share some indulgent hatered of this fucking old ass shit man. Please go off

I mean, to go FULLY into it would require me to write an entire essay, and I just don't want to?

But the short version is

antitheism is cultural genocide and patently bullshit

focusing on genes rather than the whole organism in evolution is patently ridiculous when the minimum unit of evolution is the *population*, not the gene

in fact, when you realize the minimum unit is the population rather than the gene, you see that altruism and social behavior are very beneficial, even across species (see: symbiosis), and "selfishness" "red in tooth and claw" "law of the jungle" are just bullshit things some people made up to justify their crappy behavior (re: racism. their crappy behavior was racism.)

IQ and intelligence are smoke and mirrors we invented to convince ourselves we're more evolved than other animals (we're not, and every organisms has the intelligence it needs for its environment, adapted for its ecology, and that means that a diversity of intelligences is actually a good thing like diversity of anything is a good thing)

the man is a eugenecist and that speaks for itself

I hate him, and I hate that we live in a world where he is still alive and Stephen Jay Gould is dead, zichrono livracha

#richard dawkins #stephen jay gould #antitheism #evolution #the selfish gene #altruism #sociality

[fuckyeahreligionpigeon]

#atheism #baptist #buddhism #christianity #judaism #islam #catholicism #mormonism #jehovah witness #scientology #religion #richard dawkins

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Religion is a distraction from true education." -- Richard Dawkins

#Richard Dawkins #education #religion #religion is ignorance #religion is a mental illness

[h0rifix]

"𝔦 𝔞𝔪 𝔞𝔤𝔞𝔦𝔫𝔰𝔱 𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔦𝔤𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔟𝔢𝔠𝔞𝔲𝔰𝔢 𝔦𝔱 𝔱𝔢𝔞𝔠𝔥𝔢𝔰 𝔲𝔰 𝔱𝔬 𝔟𝔢 𝔰𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔰𝔣𝔦𝔢𝔡 𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔫𝔬𝔱 𝔲𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔯𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔩𝔡"

- 𝐑𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐃𝐚𝐰𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐬. (unknown date). ‘unknown work’

#gothic blog #gothic horror #southern goth aesthetic #southern gothic #horror blog #southern horror #midwest gothic #tw religious themes #religious trauma #ex religious #religious imagery #richard dawkins #the god delusion #ethel cain core #midwestern gothic #midwest #southern aesthetic #southern americana #small town gothic #western gothic #gothic #ethel cain #atheist #atheism

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent.

Richard Dawkins

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest cheetah or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a cheetah wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the cheetah or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you better be running.

#dawkins #richard dawkins #quote #cheetah #gazelle #survival #nature #jungle #darwinian #survival of species #africa #speed

[bear-of-mirrors]

I never want to hear another atheist get mad about being called “culturally xtian” ever again.

#richard dawkins #atheists #atheism #cultural Xtianity #cultural christianity

[cerebrodigital]

Richard Dawkins sobre la biología #Frases

#richard dawkins #frases #biologia

[spilledreality]

On conflict theory

Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement,” which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who... uh... made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice. After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I'm sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle. And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and...it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men's female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.

from Mr & Mrs Smith, cf Margulis vs Dawkins, Graeber vs Hobbes, and critiques of Randall Collins's (via Weber) conflict theory

#lynn margulis #richard dawkins #john p smith #jane p smith #david graeber #thomas hobbes #randall collins #max weber

[fallensapphires]

Places: Fairy Gardens

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

#fairy garden #fairycore #fairy tail #fairy aesthetic #fairy core #fairy cottage #fairies #fairy #faeirie #faerycore #faery aesthetic #faerie #fair folk #gardens #garden aesthetic #richard dawkins #fairy house #fairy land #fairy realm #fairy world #fairy moodboard #faecore #fae folk #fairy vibes #faeries #fae #garden moodboard #places #place aesthetic #place moodboard

[a-typical]

It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. Lenny Bruce rightly quipped that 'If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.' But the theology and punishment-theory behind it is even worse. The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to have passed down the male line - transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? Augustine, by the way, who rightly regarded himself as something of a personal authority on sin, was responsible for  coining the phrase 'original sin'. Before him it was known as 'ancestral sin'. Augustine's pronouncements and debates epitomize, for me, the unhealthy preoccupation of early Christian theologians with sin. They could have devoted their pages and their sermons to extolling the sky splashed with stars, or mountains and green forests, seas and dawn choruses. These are occasionally mentioned, but the Christian focus is overwhelmingly on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin. What a nasty little preoccupation to have dominating your life.

#Richard Dawkins #The God Delusion #atheism #atheist #agnostic #antireligion #anti religion #agnosticism #godless #exchristian #anti theism #anti theist #nonreligious #non religious #religious trauma #secularism #religion #atypicalreads #books #intelligent design

[thebardostate]

Where Does Consciousness Come From?

(This is Part 2 of a three part series on consciousness. Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.

A 25 year bet was settled last week when two rival scientific explanations for consciousness - Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) - both failed to discover any neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) in the human brain. Neuroscientist Cristof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers agreed that neuroscience can't yet explain how our brains produce consciousness.

I say "yet" because it is an article of faith among the disciples of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett that consciousness (if it exists at all) will eventually be shown to be a mere illusion or "epiphenomenon" generated by biochemical activity in our brains. They argue that the mind is only what the brain does, so consciousness ceases when the brain dies. They dismiss as pseudoscientific "woo" fantasy any notion that consciousness might survive the physical death of the brain.

(source: @myjetpack)

Materialist neo-Darwinism appears to enjoy broad support across the physical and biological sciences, in medicine, and from science popularizers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan. It can fairly be called the orthodox scientific view.

And yet, we see from the results of the wager that the origins of consciousness remain an open question. It is considered one of the greatest unsolved problems in science. Thus far, scientific orthodoxy has gotten us exactly...nowhere.

What is it Like to be a Bat?

Enter Thomas Nagel, a marquee name in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In 1974 Nagel published the widely influential essay "What is it Like to be a Bat?" in which he argued that there's a lot more to being a bat than just hanging around upside down in the dark. Bats perceive their world thru echo location. Nothing in human experience prepares us for what that must be like: bats don't "see" their homes because they're in pitch darkness, nor do they "feel" their way along in the dark because they're flying thru the air. We can speculate, but we humans don't have a clue what it feels like to be a bat. And yet, science knows a great deal about bat brains.

In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos Nagel argues that the materialist neo-Darwinist conception of reality is almost certainly false, with far-reaching implications for evolution and quantum physics. He is incredulous at the just-so story that Dawkins, Dennett, et. al. are expecting us to swallow:

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naive response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

However, Nagel is no sock puppet for religion, as some of his materialist critics have insinuated. In fact, he is an atheist:

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them. I believe that these two radically opposed conceptions cannot exhaust the possibilities.

Back to the Drawing Board

So if consciousness doesn't come from the brain, then where does it come from?

In Nagel's estimation it's high time science started looking for alternative explanations instead of continuing to double down on materialist neo-Darwinism, which by now has had ample time to put up or shut up (Karl Popper called these breezy we'll-solve-it-someday assurances "promissory materialism".) Nagel critiques the three basic approaches that materialists have pursued thus far:

Treat consciousness as a black box, and infer what might lurk inside the box by carefully observing its behavior from the outside. This is the behaviorist approach, whose sterility was so evident by the late 1960s that it sparked the cognitive revolution in psychology.

Systematically trace all mental events to physical counterparts "somewhere" in the brain. This is the approach that GWT and IIT take, using medical techniques like functional MRI to observe the brain as we carry out various activities. One of the problems with this approach is brain plasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself (e.g., after a stroke); plasticity makes it difficult to pin down exactly where in the brain mental events occur (to say nothing about how the brain pulls off the plasticity trick in the first place.) Another problem is that mental activities can interact and overlap, such as when we drive a car and talk on the phone at the same time. Sometimes we can multitask, and sometimes we can't. Where do those complex interactions play out in the brain? What about things produced by the brain itself but not experienced by the senses like imagination, the placebo effect and hallucinations? And finally, there is a world of difference between images from fMRI and the actual, subjective, first-person experiences we have when performing those tasks. They're just not the same. I'll have much more to say about this approach to consciousness research in Part 3 of this series.

Deny that there is any such thing as consciousness - this is eliminative materialism aka illusionism, whose most prominent proponent is Dennett. But if we buy into this, why should we stop at questioning our own consciousness? Why don't we just deny that anything exists at all, and go full-on nihilist atheist? Philosopher Galen Strawson called illusionism "the silliest claim ever made" while philosopher John Searle called it an "intellectual pathology." (Plus which, when you get down into the weeds of eliminative materialism, you find that it's just reheated behaviorism anyway.)

Nagel believes these materialist accounts are all incomplete because each in its own way fails to explain the familiar first-person experience of being alive and conscious. But even setting that aside, he points out a further problem for the neo-Darwinists.

Why Did Consciousness Evolve?

In its own way, materialist Neo-Darwinism is a "theory of everything" in so far as biology goes. As such, it must be able to explain why consciousness evolved in the first place.

It's quite plausible that natural selection could have produced organisms that adapt and reproduce without being conscious. We can imagine robot-like zombies that carry out a series of evolved instructions and reproduce without ever having experiencing first-person subjective consciousness, like little automatons. And yet, we are conscious. Why? What evolutionary purpose could first-person awareness have served?

A standard materialist explanation is that consciousness emerged as a byproduct of evolution (a "spandrel" as Steven Jay Gould called it) rather like junk DNA. If we are not satisfied with the just-so story that the mental comes as a free bonus to the physical, then we will have to look for our answers elsewhere.

Opening the Window on Consciousness

We landed in this situation because science has sought to explain nature entirely in physical terms, without invoking theism. It has been spectacularly successful - particularly in the physical sciences - but the cost has been excluding consciousness along with the gods. Eventually this exclusion was bound to be challenged. We cannot have a complete picture of the world without understanding our own consciousness that makes that picture possible. If consciousness isn't generated by the brain, the implications for evolution and quantum physics will be far-reaching. (Nagel, 2012)

In the concluding part of this series we'll take a fresh look at the medical evidence for certain so-called 'paranormal' phenomena. These have been systematically excluded from mainstream scientific consideration because, if they proved true, they would undercut materialist explanations of consciousness. What do medical anomalies like Near-Death Experiences and Terminal Lucidity imply about the nature of consciousness?

#consciousness #philosophy #materialism and its discontents #cognitive science #philosophy of mind #global workspace theory #integrated information theory #artificial consciousness #neuronal correlates of consciousness #richard dawkins #thomas nagel #daniel dennett #spiritual atheism #atheist #atheism #agnosticism #agnostic #theism #mind and cosmos #mind body problem #what is it like to be a bat? #brain #consciousness series

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

dawkins is also just so fucking full of himself

ignoring your (very valid, don't get me wrong) criticisms, i feel like he's unpleasant to be around just like on a PERSONAL level

he seems like the kind of guy who tries to one-up you whenever you tell a story, regardless of what the story actually was and like he'd tell profoundly unfunny jokes (not even necessarily racist or sexist just... really unfunny ones) and then get pissy when nobody laughed

oh yeah he's just a jerk on top of everything but idk there are many jerks out there not all of them get tons of press and attention to spread their pseudoscientific jerk ideas

#richard dawkins

[gobcorend]

"Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though." - Richard Dawkins

#palestine #free palestine #free gaza #freepalastine🇵🇸 #we stand with palestine #ceasefire #gaza strip #israel #gaza #usa #joe biden #president biden #biden #quotes #richard dawkins #phrases #frases #morals #morality #estados unidos #Instagram #united nations

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"... when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong." -- Richard Dawkins

The midpoint between a truth and a falsehood is still a falsehood.

#Richard Dawkins #middle ground fallacy #logical fallacies #religion is a mental illness

[mceajc]

I watched a TERF interview

I didn't want to, but I felt I had to. The video is

I left a comment on the video. It turned out about 3k words. Here it is

I'm going to write comments as I listen, so apologies in advance for poor formatting or any other issues.

@2:35 Helen Joyce - whose background is in mathematics, and not the study of gender expression - went to speak to an expert on queer and trans experience, and threw away what was written and wrote it herself because she disagreed with it. How interesting that she imposed her own viewpoint on her readers bereft of expert opinion. Gender presentation doesn't have anything to do with sex and reproduction. That's the whole point about having a different word to describe it. @3:00 "I see continua everywhere I look ... all these things is a smooth continuum - the one thing that isn't is sex". I find it very strange for a scientist - a biologist no less - to say that sex is binary given the vast number of ways that biological organisms reproduce. Perhaps this exception only exists in your mind, and not reality, perhaps?

This statement is also provably false, because of the existence of intersex people - never mind the other organisms who have stranger lifecycles.

@3:35 "Language is used as something to express your thoughts clearly" Language is malleable and ever changing - and words for people who refuse to conform to this invisible binary have existed for centuries in cultures all across the world. If you want to be clearly understood, be careful how terms are used. So far, the terms "male", "man", "woman" and "female" have yet to be defined clearly. I hope they are, because I fail to see the rationality of the statements made so far with the definitons as I understand them.

@6:00 "My hands are female" What an odd turn of phrase. I would have used the word "feminine". Anyway, this sort of phraseology is a bit disingenuous. It makes it sound like there is no overlap whatsoever between the bodies of a male and female. If I said "anyone under 1.6 metres tall is female, because the average height of a male is 1.7 metres", people would - quite rightly - look at me like a complete imbecile. Helen gets to say essentially the same thing in a slightly oblique way and ... gets away with it?

@7:00 I would agree that some people do take things to the extreme and say things like "heteronormative is a bad thing". This does not make it less bad to have heteronormativity the assumed default, or to view "nontraditional" family units as inherently less valuable - or in some cases as actively bad. Assuming things like that does make someone a prejudiced bigot, whose views are unsupported by evidence.

@9:00 I see a strange dissonance between complaining about sex and gender stereotypes while also mocking the queer groups who go against these stereotypes. To then immediately follow this with the incoherent sentence "it's worse than ... if he doesn't like rugby he's a poofter and let's bully him, it's now saying he's actually a girl." I don't think anyone is saying you should treat a child who doesn't like rugby as a girl. This is a very strange assertion to make. Are there any examples of a child being treated as a girl because they didn't like rugby? What on earth is the point being made here? You seem to be the ones trying to enforce the "pink box blue box" binary, and I am glad you see the harm in this - hardly an argument against allowing a wider variety of gender expression.

@9:44 If people learn gender identity/expression from the stereotypes, then what is your explanation for the existence of gender nonconforming (nonbinary) folk - both trans and cis? Helen then goes on to assert that sissy boys are being encouraged to identify as girls? Where is the evidence for this?

@10:15 I do wonder whether people might be even happier if they got to explore different gender expressions and roles. It would likely affirm a great many peoples' feelings that they are secure in their own gender, as well as experience what life is like for others.

@11:00 I absolutely agree that there should not be pressure to be one thing or another.

@12:19 "your sex is the best guess that a doctor had when you were born" This is factually accurate, and mistakes are made. There are many documented cases where intersex people were operated upon as a baby when a determination fell between the "accepted range" for some physical characteristic. It's not as though doctors do genetic, endocrine and hormone testing on every baby and put that into a spreadsheet which then spits out "male" or "female" - mainly because even that would be unreliable.

@12:37 "a tiny number of people". I suppose if you think a "tiny number of people" is bigger than 160 million, and that's using the very lower end of the prevalence of intersex characteristics of 0.02% of 8 billion people. There could be many hundreds of thousands in the UK alone, and we will never know unless we perform invasive genome, hormone and other tests in order to find out.

@13:00 Echo chambers are not good, on that we agree. I would urge anyone to actually speak to trans folk and get to know them, rather than dismiss their lived experience out of hand.

@15:36 From a 2021 published study across some 30 OECD countries that legalised gam marriage, the suicide rate dropped between 10 and 20%. Other studies indicate that the rate of suicide for LGBT kids can be as high as eight times higher if the child is someone "who experience high levels of rejection from their families during adolescence".

@16:05 This is disingenuous - in all likelihood a lie. Yes, being on cross-sex hormones can produce sterility. No responsible doctor has ever given cross-sex hormones to a child. Puberty blockers, on the other hand, do exactly what they say and delay the onset of puberty. This allows time for everyone involved in the process to come to a decision. Often, the option is there to have sperm or eggs stored before any potentially irreversible effects happen. NOBODY is sterilising children. If anyone has evidence of this, absolutely those doctors should be reported. I have seen no evidence of this.

I'm a little surprised that so many people are shocked and appalled by the idea of sterility. Infertility affects up to 7% of men, and many millions of women. Many men and women choose sterility. Fertility is hardly a good measure of whether someone's life is worthwhile or not.

@16:35 I am very glad that there has not been an increase in children committing suicide. People commit suicide when they are out of options and that's the last positive action they can take to end suffering. People commit suicide because they don't get the support they desperately need. So perhaps you are right, and it is a "playground fad" to act trans, or pretend to be trans, or explore different gender roles - who eventually grow up to be either secure in their assigned gender, or who transition in a loving, supporting home. I rather suspect that this will be the case when the scientific studies come in.

@17:06 "I think much more probable" - well, at least you are honest that there is no evidence supporting your assertions either.

@17:39 "no evidence that not transitioning the child would decrease that risk". Well good luck getting ethical approval for denying treatment for gender dysphoria for a control group for that scientific study! What an asinine statement being played up as a reasonable argument.

@17:54 Indeed, it is very brave to hold these viewpoints. I am reminded of Posie Parker going to New Zealand to hold an anti-trans rally, and actual Nazi's showed up to support the rally - fascist salutes and everything!

@18:44 "I was so far in I couldn't get back". Disturbing echoes of - an echo chamber? It's almost as though surrounding yourself with people who agree with you only alienates yourself from the general public further.

@2104 Again, I am baffled by arguments set forth here. All homosexual couples are infertile, but somehow this does not cause any difficulty for Helen. I also don't see the relevance of who someone is attracted to being relevant to anything, but in this I admit I probably just don't understand what's trying to be said.

@22:36 I would love to see links to these studies and any critiques. I could not find them when I went looking.

@23:32 I think many trans folk, especially in the UK, will not recognise the process from this description. There are people who wait years just for a first appointment. The waiting list. As of 2023-12-01 there is a 60 MONTH waiting list for a first appointment at the London Gender Identity Clinic. https://www.genderkit.org.uk/resources/wait-times/

@24:25 I thank Dr. Dawkins for his common decency. I have a couple of questions. 1) Could you please define what you mean by "woman", and 2) in what way would you not accept someone saying "I am a woman"? Are you so very confident that every cis woman you meet will meet the standards of your definition of "woman", and would you ask them to prove their sex to you? I am minded of a US government official having a cis girl tormented because they thought "she looked trans".

@26:22 I would also like to thank Dr. Dawkins for highlighting a very important point that often gets lost in these discussions is the sincerity. Too many gender-critical groups will make the same, tired, nonsensical posit of "what if I identify as an attack helicopter". These people are being insincere, and if not, are obviously mentally disturbed because attack helicopters are made of metal and not flesh. Sincerity matters very much, and it gets ignored by a lot of the "what if" arguments.

@26:38 "I don't think that being a woman or a man is the sort of thing you pay a price to be". Well, hooray for free healthcare! I would like to point out that to many gender critical people, being able to have children is one of the defining traits of the sexes - does Helen feel that women who pay for fertility treatments to be "not real women or mothers"? Are a couple who pay to adopt a child "not real parents"? I find this argument offensive. As a logical parallel, perhaps I could say that people who have to pay to see don't deserve the same treatment as those who were born with perfect eyesight. But that would be a crass, cruel stance to take - wouldn't it, Helen?

@27:46 What goes on in "women only spaces" that a person's genitals become relevant? I've had GPs and doctors of both sexes, and I've never seen their genitals. It's not relevant to the care they have given me. I do of course have sympathy for people who have been raped and do not want to be in the presence of someone who reminds them of the terrible actions of the past, in the same way that I don't expect someone who was mauled by a dog to put up with an over-friendly dog when they visit a friends' house - if they make the request, obviously it is common decency to make accommodations - but that is hardly the default.

@28:00 I have mentioned sincerity before, and it is relevant here too, but it doesn't need repeating. Sport. Ah, yes, where everyone should be exactly the same in order to compete. I do not know the best way to divide sport up, but we never divide things into just male and female. There are age groups, weight classes, divisions, handicaps - a thousand different ways that allow people to compete with others of a similar level. Biological sex, to me, is one of the dumbest ways to split groups up by ability and I'm sure the feminists would agree.

@29:31 This is an interesting point, but not in the way I think Helen meant it.

@30:30 I feel unutterably sad when a woman says that women wouldn't win anything in an open event. Jasmine Paris won (at least one) in elite open competition. A friend I worked with won outright a long distance running event. I am certain Simone Biles would have wiped the floor against any man. I am certain that women, given the same desire, advantages and encouragement as men, would close the gap with men significantly. I would be horrified if someone suggested that Kenyan men should be excluded from the marathon because "otherwise, non-Kenyan's would never win any marathons."

@30:50 I see Helen addresses the gymnastics issue - to an extent.

@32:28 Here is where we see ample evidence against the prohibitions Helen seems to be seeking from America.

I would ask all the parents out there: would you feel safe sending your child - who is of a sex different to yours - alone into a public toilet? Which would you rather do instead: take the child into the other toilet, or go themselves into the other toilet? The answer is easy at the moment if you are a father with a baby, since the women's toilet is more likely to have a baby changing station - but for older children? What would you do?

I am reminded of James O'Brien's point of "who checks"? If you elimiate someone from a space becasue of what their genitals are - who checks? Or will you legally require all trans folk to wear a pink triangle? Will you require people to out themselves as trans whenever they use a toilet away from home? Would you subject a whole group of people to the same "urinary leash" that women suffered under in the past? Will you make it an offence to be in certain public areas simply because of who they are, and not becaseu of what they do? These are dystopian questions to be asked. I know they are not the same, but there are echoes of apartheid, segregation - things that I would like to think are in the past and should stay there.

Many of the points made for women having separate facilities that Helen raised are applicable to all women.

Further, there are women who have been assaulted by women. Do we make separate accommodations for them? Or would you recommend they use the men's facilities?

I have all the sympathy in the world for rape victims who have traumatic flashbacks, and who feel unsafe. I wonder if Helen is aware of the number of trans people who don't go swimming because of fear? Fear of ridicule, fear of assault? Trans folk who have been assaulted? All assaults are terrible things, and we should do what we can to prevent them - but removing personal liberties from an entire group, the vast, vast majority of whom are blameless? This does not sit well with me, though how to go about dealing with the problem in a better way is a tricky question I do not have the answer to.

I've made all the points I want to about sport, but with Lia Thomas - what exactly is the argument here? Did the other swimmers feel unsafe?

@37:55 I suspect there are many trans folk - and all the other queer folk - out there who would object to the statement that the bullying all goes one way. It very much does not all go one way, and it is the focussing on trans people by mostly right wing reactionaries and media which has caused a great proportion of the ruckus. People who live and work with trans folk have a generally normal reaction to the fact they are trans - it's the people to whom a trans person is an abstract that manage to "other" them so much as to make them figures of fear and disgust. That's my view of the situation, in any case.

Trans people have existed for a long time. There are newpaper articles over a hundred years old about trans folk - and are written in a much more sympathetic way than would be the case now. Even sex-change surgery is older than knee transplants. Something has indeed changed, but I doubt it is the human beings themselves - it is some manufactured reaction that has gained traction. At least partly. There are actual issues and problems to solve, and I fully believe that solving them in a sensible way will be helpful to men, women and everyone in between.

@40:16 No argument here about the IOC being corrupt. Not a great reason to demonise sincere trans folk.

@41:55 Funny in a not funny way how Helen points out the oppressive behaviours of society toward people with non-conforming sexual attraction, and these are the same behaviours many people are displaying towards trans folk. It's LGBTQIAAP+ because it is groups of people who have been judged by society at large to be in some way "less" and so have been treated badly - thrown out the military, disowned by parents, fired from jobs, subjected to conversion practices - or otherwise fallen foul of falling outside of what is seen as "acceptable". I don't think a human being's worth should be down to what society deems "acceptable". Everyone who falls outside of "acceptable" felt the need to band together. Being gender critical feels like groups trying to pull the ladder up after themselves - it feels like we are going backwards, socially, towards some puritan thinking.

@42:54 Do tell, Helen, how gay culture works. I am all ears.

Oh, I see you leave it to the listeners imagination. I'd love to hear a survey to see what the reality is.

@43:05 I am, and always will be, a staunch supporter of "The L comes first". They are the ones who stepped up in teh AIDS crisis and donated the blood that was so desperately needed to help keep those suffering alive.

@45:30 (paraphrasing) "The people in this movement [what Helen calls the "Sex Realists"] have been through some sort fo crucible - and these can be good bad or indifferent". Helen then goes on to list some of the least reality-based groups I could think of. The only one she missed out is "Flat Earthers".

I do find it interesting that Helen and - Maya, is it? - are both economists. I wonder how many sex and reproductive biologists are in this group? Curious to see a break-down.

I am a fan of the acronym FART - Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobe.

The dichotomy of "Intersex and trans people are a tiny minority, we shouldn't pander to their needs" and "trans and intersex folk are too numerous - they will destroy the data we use!"

It is saddening that some people see this as a battle, while trans folk just want to live their lives without fear or discrimination. If sex and gender were such natural things, we wouldn't need people like Helen to police it.

#richard dawkins #helen joyce #terf island #commentary #tw: misgendering #tw: suicide #Youtube

[correctopinionhaver]

dawkins: "i just think that god is a delusion."

peterson: "the jungian interpretation of religion..." *starts to tear up*

dawkins: "oh no, not again. okay, fine, god is real. just please stop crying."

#jordan peterson #richard dawkins