Over the Limit

It’s a Dispatch crossover on today’s Remnant, as Sarah Isgur returns to the program to ...

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It’s a Dispatch crossover on today’s Remnant, as Sarah Isgur returns to the program to explore the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago raid, the meaning of executive privilege, and whether this situation can be compared with the Hillary Clinton email controversy. There’s also an extended discussion of child-rearing and the neuroscience of motherhood prompted by a recent New York Times op-ed. Oh, and a look at Sarah’s strange relationship with spiders.

Show Notes:

– Who gets to classify (and declassify) government secrets?

– Chelsea Conaboy: “Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created”

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  1. Keith Schooley

    Sarah, I know you're not an engineer, but can you describe in a conceptual way how a car might be designed to be equally safe for a man and for a pregnant woman? (Especially if you're going to take into account the baby's safety as well.)
    Perfectly happy that crash test dummies are now made in both male and female shapes but I doubt that it makes much difference when you're dealing with a human body and a 70 mph impact. Possibly a 150 lb. human has an advantage over a 250 lb. human in that there's less momentum to overcome, but bone mass is bone mass and the vulnerability of a fetus is the vulnerability of a fetus, regardless. I don't think you could do anything to make a woman safer that would not also make a man safer still.
    The safest option, honestly, would be for the vulnerable person to sit in the back seat where a seat belt is less necessary and where they'd fly into the padded front seat instead of the windshield and dashboard. But "women, especially pregnant women, should sit in the back seat" is going to fly just about as well as Dr. Fauci suggesting that no one should ever shake hands again. All that to say, I don't think it's quite fair to make the blanket statement, "Cars are made to be safe for men," unless there's at least a conceptual way of equalizing the situation or favoring women instead.

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    CynthiaW

    I finally got around this. Loved the spider chat.

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  3. Leah Miller

    More Remnant with Isgur, please! I gained a better sense of who each of you are as humans. I know I respect and enjoy both of you, but together your work is more revealing and insightful. Thank you for sharing.

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    The Bell Tower

    I do the same things with bugs and spiders in my house but my Dad certainly didn’t. He used to step on those big, horrifying (and flying!) Florida cockroaches in his bare feet just to mortify my brother and I. I still fear those more than anything else on this planet - real or imagined. But, my bug and spider deference is learned and perhaps rebellious to my parents’ programming.

    Anyway, Sarah left one assumption on the table or sort of bounced around it when it comes to Conaboy’s excerpt: the absence of equality does not automatically imply nefarious intent. IE: sexism. God Himself (or Zeus or Darwinian selection or whatever you believe) was not fair when he made female humans carry children in their wombs. Maybe seahorse men have an angry feminist wing.

    The absence of women in seatbelt engineering had a bad outcome but while I’m glad we’ve learned better, I don’t think a bunch of men just decided that they wanted more dead women. They left the women out, which was arguably a poor decision but not an evil one.

    My uncle was a big, tough Italian guy in the Goodfellas mold. My mother’s brother (his nephew) had a surgical mishap and wound up a vegetable for the rest of his life. I bring this up because I once caught my uncle in the hospital hallway crying his eyes out just after this happened. It was jarring to me as a young man because he’d never allow any of us to see such an emotion. Plenty of anger but never crying. He was hiding it from us and I interrupted it.

    I say that because stoicism in men is similarly frowned on in this day and age and progressives will say much the same things: that this stuff is toxic masculinity foisted on poor, sensitive men by the evil patriarchy.

    I don’t dispute that such stoicism is learned but why is it learned? I think, for example, in Rome that containing male emotions was probably a civilizing influence. Men in that world used their strength and violence to cause a lot of mayhem. See the Rape of the Sabine Women, for example. Rome was founded because a bunch of men on a hill invited their neighbors over for a barbecue and then killed them and took their women.

    Men who are raised to control their emotions and impulses are less likely to murder their neighbor and rape his wife. Is that sexist? Why is it bad?

    Women bear the children. A maternal instinct is a natural assumption. Now, maybe it’s a myth but there are plenty of natural explanations for the evolution of such a myth that don’t end in a smoke filled room of terrible, probably white men trying to keep women down.

    Progressive ideology often assumes that equality is the natural state of things. It ain’t.

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  5. Bill Farrand

    Since Jonah mentioned that he had see the movie "Fall", I just had to comment since I went to see it with some of my fellow rock climbing friends. The movie is just laughably bad and ridiculous in how it depicts rock climbing. The decisions the girls make in climbing the tower are also completely NOT what experienced climbers would do. Oh well...

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  6. Eric

    Sarah is spot on about spiders. On the tiny chance she hasn't already done a deep dive on portia fimbriata, she should.

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  7. Pohl

    Enjoyable listen, both halves.

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  8. Kathleen Houret

    Loved this podcast, both the first half and the second half. Sarah should be a Remnant regular.

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  9. Jdort05

    I disagree that spiders are the best versions of themselves today. I think they're sucky, primitive versions of the hyper-intelligent, interstellar kings of the universe they'll be 100 million years from now.

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  10. Glen

    Great episode. Proving nothing, I observed with humor that my daughter would turn anything, including trucks and other 'boy' toys into a tea party and my son would turn dolls and other 'girl' toys into superhero games. My kids were both good in school and my wife and I would argue how much was nature, how much was nurture all the time. I think that Sarah is correct that nature plays a large role and that parents can offer opportunities and polish at the margins at best.

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