Poor neurobiologists... they can't catch a break

 So these poor souls can't do right by anyone. 

If they claim there are gender-based differences in the brain, they are called sexists and worse. Heck, there is even a name for them: NEUROSEXISM! Don't believe me? Read Nature's glowing review of the Genderd Brain, a book, that shatters old, sexist, outdated stereotypes! All hail this final blow to the Patriarchy! (Except... well, maybe the science does not actually say that, and it is quite worrysome that Nature gets into the social activism game ignoring the papers it (and other papers) regularly publish in the topic... but that is a different conversation.)

So now saying that there may be gendered differences in the human brain will unleash the Social Justice Warriors, who will do their best to get you silenced or even get you fired.

OK, so you accept that our brains are uniform- there are no gendered differences. At the present the leading feminist standpoint is that women are the same as men, and all differences between women and men are the products of our society (you know: da patriarchy). This means it is true in neuroscience, too, as we have seen. As a researcher you really, really do not want to lose your position at your research institute, you do not wish to be the target of a Twitter mob, and you do want to get funded, so you obligingly stand in the line, and work from this angle, or just do your best to avoid this issue altogether, and ignore the topics that would shed light on the basics of these differences which do seem to exist between men and women. (Long story- read the link above.) A question: is it good for science (and humanity) when there are forbidden areas where scientific inquiry dares not to go?

And then comes the other side of Social Justice. Activists who claim you deliberately ignore the differences in the brain because you hate women, and you are a sexist pig serving the Patriarchy, and who will, eventually, again, unleash the very same Social Justice Warriors to write outraged articles about you. There really is no good choice here. It is the Schrödinger's Patriarchy. It oppresses women by claiming they are different from men and simultaneously oppresses women by claiming they are the same as men.

Obviously, for humanity's sake, you should accept what science tells you, and factor this into your medical treatments, policymaking, etc. However when simply saying that women are, well, different, and not just "menstruating people" will earn you death threats, when simply saying that women are different from men will literally unleash hell on you and your family, well, it is a difficult choice, isn't it? The pressure to ignore the differences is not exactly conductive in helping shedding the old habits of only using male animals and men in your studies. Perhaps Dr Liisa Galea should direct her attention to those pesky feminists, too, because I suspect they are the ones needing to be convinced -perhaps starting with Dr Hyde and Dr Halpern. (Who at least argue that there are differences, however negligible -without actually supporting this hypothesis.) 

 The fact remains: there are contradicting demands on science: on one hand it should not acknowledge the statistical differences between male and female brains, on the other it definitely should take them into consideration and include them in the design of preclinical and clinical experiments. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

But what do I know. Facts are not objective, as we know. Identity politics over everything.

Fuck, just reading this makes me wonder where we put our collective common sense. The saying about the truth being a revolutionary act in dictatorships seems to work in our age of wokeness, too.

Let's blame the whistleblowers, shall we?

 So there were several instances when the obvious bias of certain media outlets, or even whole "scientific fields" (I am not sure how gender studies constitute as science, but whatever) have been revealed by people who submitted fake articles and got published.

The Independent has published an outrageously, obviously over the top article about comedy and free speech (rather a call to curtail it). Got published, no problem. This is very important as it exposed how certain (if not all) media outlets do nothing but pushing agendas. When it was realized it was a hoax, people were outraged at the perpetrators -rather than actually at the obviously biased media outlet. No hard questions about how this may or may not be an endemic issue with all media printed or otherwise. Nothing to see here. After all, it is not as if it is something important, right? We only get our news from them, after all, they only shape our reality.

Same with the Grievance Studies affair- the authors managed to publish a whole chapter of Mein Kampf as a feminist manifesto, they argued for chaining white students, and talked about rape culture in dog parks -and were enthusiastically welcomed by the academic publishers. They passed through peer review, and it seems like social sciences embraced these articles wholeheartedly.

When it became clear these were fake articles, again, the outrage was not directed at the publishers (and the academics who peer-reviewed them), there were no hard questions ask how these academic fields can be biased to this cartoonish level where the Mein Kampf is actually publishable -no, the outrage was directed against these horrible hoaxers.

To this day there are no consequences of these events. None at all. The people who are responsible for these hoaxes are trying to push a conversation about them, they do appear on programs, podcasts and whatnot, but these are very much isolated from the "mainstream". The mainstream media, the mainstream conversation resolutely ignores them. If anything they only blame them for exposing this agenda-driven "science" to the whole world, giving ammunition for right-wingers, climate change deniers and so on to question the integrity and validity of science (as the above linked Atlantic article does, too). So to recap: it is not an issue if you pervert science. It is only an issue when you publicise it.

And this, again, is ignored completely. 

 

You are trying too hard - Aliens and colonial oppression

 OK, so apple pie is racist. Right. I find this whole argument a bit on the far too much side, but then I've read this one about the story of the Aliens from the aliens' perspective and realized that the apple pie article is reasonably sane compared to this.

Obviously we have to reinterpret everything from the bad guy's perspective. I mean it can be a fun thing to do: the Last Ringbearer was kind of good, and after reading much Warhammer 40K I did realize the Empire in Star Wars was a positive force in the universe. All good, it is always interesting to see things from other viewpoints.

However, the author of this article really went off the deep end when he is trying to push his agenda of critical race theory through Aliens.

Some quotes:

'They find an alien spaceship with a cache of alien eggs. In the spirit of rapacious colonizers past, they try to salvage one of the aliens for biological experimentation, but the infant bravely fights back, killing all of the crew except Ripley.'

'And the aliens repeatedly sacrifice themselves to damage the invaders, spraying their acid blood on their attackers in a final, gallant act of defiance.'

' The alien mother manages to climb aboard the escaping human spacecraft, and, enraged at the wanton murder of her children, tries to take revenge. But even that is denied her. Ripley shoots her out the airlock into space. The entire alien encampment is wiped out, just as American soldiers wiped out the Vietnam village of My Lai in 1968.' (Emphasis by me.)

And this is where it becomes just a parody of itself and the whole critical race theory it is trying to push. A really bad one at that. Making comparisons between the aliens in this setting and the mass murder in My Lai... well, that is not just poor taste. That is literally spitting on the graves of those who were murdered by American soldiers. And this trash is being published online.

Astonishing. People have lost their ability to think. Both the author of this piece of crap and the editors who gave it the go-ahead.