Stand By Your Non-Man

Alcohol culture is woke.

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Despite the desperate pleas of his wife, his RA, and his psychiatrist, Jonah insists on continuing to record the Ruminant, and his sanity may be steadily slipping away with each mumbled syllable. Today, he largely resists the temptation to discuss the Trump indictment, instead digging into Johns Hopkins’ baffling new classification of lesbians, California’s push to punish “non-affirming parents”, and the sheer lack of decorum we all must now endure. Things conclude on familiar ground with an ol’-fashioned, extra-curmudgeonly rant about the new right’s bizarre nostalgia for the Dark Ages.

Show Notes:

– The McCarthy Report on Trump’s indictment

– Advisory Opinions, also on Trump’s indictment

– The “non-men” of Johns Hopkins

– Michael Knowles and the 1220s

– Politico’s Patrick Deneen profile

– Alcohol is woke

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Comments (82)
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  1. Avatar photo
    Denise Cote

    My mother grew up in a house without electricity and indoor plumbing. There is no way in hell I'd want to go back 100 years, never mind 800. Those people are crazy and clueless.

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  2. VV

    I understand that it’s not probable that Trump sold state secrets to foreign powers or something of the sort, but I think it is still the case that he has shown himself to be a man of exceptionally poor character who is brazen in his violation of norms and perhaps laws and whose ethical framework is largely transactional. Given that, while some may be jumping to conclusions, you can see how people might be willing to entertain the possibility.

    Trump continues to reap what he himself has sown. People are suspicious of him because he has given them every reason to consider him untrustworthy.

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    Ben Connelly

    Barton Swaim ripped Deneen’s new book in the Wall Street Journal! Man he didn’t pull his punches. I enjoyed that review.

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  4. Sean

    I think you're correct that "Mine! My boxes!" probably explains most and perhaps even all of the situation with Trump and the classified materials (and other presidential records) he held onto. But it's also possible that in his mind, Trump thought some of the material would somehow burnish his legacy or support his narratives on decisions he made. The conversation around the Iran attack plans he apparently showed to the writer and publisher of an autobiography of Mark Meadows seemed to be about "proving" that he was surrounded by warmongers whom he kept at bay. That may be a one-off, but it may also be just the only piece we know of regarding a bigger pattern of Trump hoping the classified material would be important to shaping how people viewed his time in office.

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    The Bell Tower

    Imagine if teachers and doctors and other public officials were secretly (and openly) conspiring to put minors through gay conversion therapy instead of this transitioning baloney. How amenable might the progressive robots in this country be to such a thing? I suspect not very.

    A word about conspiracy, DEI and motivated minorities. I’ve already noted the similarity that DEI has to the French Revolutionary Representatives on Mission. I’m not making some conspiratorial argument that there are secret hideouts where professors plot the end of the republic through such a nefarious goal. Rather, my point is that the practical effect of training people specifically in dogmatic nonsense and then pushing them out into places they don’t belong and giving them the authority (Chief Diversity Officer? Seriously?) to spread and enforce their essentially religious beliefs has the same outcome.

    During the revolution, dogmatic zealots were deployed to keep generals and other high ranking officials in line with revolutionary dogma. That is the practical result of chief diversity officers, the offices they run and the missions they are responsible for enacting.

    I can assure you that in any of the last five major corporations for which I worked, I could not object to being asked to use someone’s preferred pronouns or perhaps even to declare my own. I’m all for politeness and acceptance but that is different from the power being deployed here which serves to build an enforceable hierarchy of victimhood with real world consequences if average citizens don’t comply with the latest dogma.

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    1. Hikingguy

      Are you on the job to work or to fret about how somebody else wants to be addressed?

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      1. Avatar photo
        The Bell Tower

        Let me put it this way. It took me half an article to figure out that when the author was saying “they,” he (she? They? Xi?) were (was? Is?) referring to Ezra Miller because he (sorry, they) is (are) non-binary or whatever. If I make a mistake like that at work, I don’t think I should be penalized and intellectually, I have no interest in spending mental cycles trying to work such things out. Where does it end and how do I know that next year, I won’t be in the wrong with the most up to date non-offensive references?

        I’ve known some trans individuals and on a personal level, I have no problem doing my best to respect their wishes. That’s different from making it an enforceable norm in a public setting where you may or may not know what’s expected and where your job may depend on it - especially when there are people who take advantage of existing rules to punish people they don’t like by claiming abuse that can’t be disproved. I’ve seen this first hand.

        To answer your question: I’m there to work, not do mental gymnastics trying to keep up with the latest in vogue sensitivity lingo. It’s the definition of arbitrary power and all of it detracts from actual work.

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    CarsonJ

    I wonder if the 1220s specifically were chosen because it's after the signing of Magna Carta (1215), so they have a nod towards individual rights as a concept without committing to everything that comes with actual individual rights, like religious freedom.

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  7. BPhillips

    From what I've read about the California bill, it isn't about the state getting involved with a family solely because a child identifies as non-binary or trans. It merely says it is OK to take into consideration the parents attitude about their child's gender identity in custody disputes. Am I crazy for thinking this makes complete sense? If a 15year old trans kid's parents are divorcing & having a custody dispute, I think you should 100% take into account the parent's views toward the child's preferences. If one parent is loving & accepting and the other is trying to enroll the child in conversion therapy, that should weigh very heavily in the custody decisions.

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    1. Brilliantly Oblivious

      The wording from the bill is as below. Note the last line of the quote here.
      Affirmation of gender identification will be considered in The health, safety, and welfare of the child. The implication is that a non affirming parent would not have a similar level of concern for the health...
      This might be true if non-affirming parents were all transphobic bigots but is this the case? Are not most nonaffirming parents of minors (who the bill is talking about) not concerned that their children get appropriate mental health care which might alternatives to the affirmation model?
      " In making a determination of the best interests of the child in a proceeding described in Section 3021, the court shall, among any other factors it finds relevant and consistent with Section 3020, consider all of the following:
      (1) (A) The health, safety, and welfare of the child.
      (B) As used in this paragraph, the health, safety, and welfare of the child includes a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity."

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      1. BPhillips

        Obviously a parent should help their child get appropriate mental health care if needed. The same as seeking emergency medical care if a child has appendicitis. That is not mutually exclusive to accepting a child as they are. Children who live in homes with parents who affirm their child's gender identity have better mental health than children who's parents don't. This really should seem obvious.

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      2. Avatar photo
        TimNYC88

        Well... I mean, a whole slew of studies show that suicide rates among trans teenagers drop sharply when their gender identity is affirmed by their parents/family/etc. Under the circumstances, given that the state is trying to make a determination about what is in the child's best interests, in terms of their health, safety, and welfare... isn't that relevant?

        Regardless of how you feel about the issues, if there's a straightforward finding of "If we put them with Parent A, their odds of attempting suicide go up. If we put them with Parent B, their odds of attempting suicide go down." that's... pretty relevant by any reasonable standard.

        People may be concerned about teens making "permanent, harmful, changes to their bodies" — as though things like playing literally any sport, driving cars, drinking alcohol (even to a relatively small degree), having sex, or basically just existing in the world in any capacity whatsoever do not also cause or at least entail the risk of negative changes — but no change is quite as permanent and irreversible as death.

        Call me crazy, but I think that's probably worth avoiding.

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        1. Brilliantly Oblivious

          Could you give links to a few of those studies. I’m not doubting you, but in the field(pardon me Smith College) of trans health, there have been more than a few studies that have not been exactly rigorous. (Acts, that applies to a lot of studies in medicine)

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            TimNYC88

            A) Happy to supply them; I'll get back to you tomorrow once I have them.

            and

            B) Holy cow, when did they get email notifications back on? I had largely stopped commenting because I wasn't hearing anything when my comments were replied to!

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    This comment has been deleted

  9. Sean O

    These Integralists who want to live in Early- to Mid- Medieval Europe aren't angry at the Enlightenment. Look at the dates. They want to live in pre- Martin Luther, and even pre- Jan Hus times. They are angry at the Reformation. They can't accept it happened, and that the pope is no longer in charge of all Christendom. Ask them if it would have been better if the Catholic German states had crushed the Protestants during the 30 Years' War rather than having the Peace of Westphalia. They would answer the former is better (even though Catholics during the war were divided. See Catholic France fighting with Protestant German states and Protestant Sweden against the Catholic German states). They are papal supremecists and want the 'infallible' pope back in charge. I'm not one of those weird, fundamentalist Protestants who believes the last (and only) good pope was Gregory I, but it is pretty clear a lot of popes were mediocre at best and many were bad. And Jonah is right about the "reincarnation" bit. These people believe that if the pope were in charge they would be by his side as some leading luminary, instead of some poor Saxon getting mowed down by a Norman knight at Hastings or a Magyar peasent dying at 16 from cholera. They wouldn't be leading Catholic luminaries, because they aren't currently. It is not like American cardinals and bishops are banned from Conclaves, diets, councils, and synods. But they aren't the ones at those gatherings, and will never be. The Integralists are play-acting and LARPing.

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    1. Avatar photo
      George.Skinner

      The Catholic Integralists are a bit like today's left wing fans of Marxism - they delude themselves into thinking it's possible to keep all the parts of the system that they like without getting stuck with all of the stuff that didn't work. Unfortunately, both Marxists and Catholics need to come to terms with the fact that their systems are going to be involve and be run by humans. Re-run the experiment of a single church involved in all aspects of life, and you won't necessarily get the exact same problems and mistakes, but the ones that evolve will come from the same causes. The same ambitious people filling the church hierarchy in search of power rather than spiritual devotion; the same hubris regarding infallibility and resistance to correction; the same tendency of humans to warp and inappropriately extrapolate theology to justify all sorts of questionable dogma.

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    Michael Berkowitz

    This isn't directly about the Johns Hopkins mini-debacle or the notion of transitioning kids, but it relates:

    I am assuming -- and would be interested to hear reasoned pushback -- that were a neighborhood to be overwhelmingly devout churchgoers and the one poor atheist kid in the class get beat on for riding his bike on Sunday, the public school's reaction should be to denounce the outrageous behavior of the attackers, to explain about the freedoms that citizens enjoy and to encourage the kids to imagine how they would feel were they in the minority and suffered for it. I do 𝗻𝗼𝘁 think the public school should be in the business of telling the kids that the Sabbath isn't really a 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.

    Likewise if the majority Muslim kids beat on the kid who named his pet "Muhammad", I don't think the appropriate response for a public school would be to tell the attackers that there's nothing wrong with doing that.

    I wonder, then, why the public schools' standard answer to gay and trans kids being mistreated seems to be to explain that there's nothing wrong with being that way. One can argue that those are immutable characteristics and thus differ from beliefs, but their very immutability is far from universally recognized and anyway it's not clear why that should make a difference -- it's not as if telling a kid "Don't be atheist" or "Don't be an infidel" is an option.

    I appreciate Mr. Goldberg mostly for the clarity of his thinking about issues like these and would like to hear him or the community here weigh in on them.

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