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 Read Nature's glowing review of the Genderd Brain, a book, that shatters old, sexist, outdated stereotypes!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.

The circles of identity politics - or whatever are we going to fight against next?

A relatively old case, but an interesting one which demonstrates how identity politics works. It is a simple one: a woman stabbed her boyfriend, and essentially got away with it with a slap on the wrist.

It is, I have to say, probably enraging a few people -after all, the judgement goes against any sense of justice, because the defendant is a woman. (See: women are wonderful effect -no wonder they get reduced sentences for comparable crimes, right?)

So I was holding my breath when I saw the Guardian headline complaining about injustice with the following headline from two years ago: The Lavinia Woodland case exposes equality before the law as a myth… could it be? The Woke of the Woke, the Flagship of Identity Politics actually stood up against a gross injustice, even if it is about a woman, you know, a person who is suppressed by the systemic forces of a Patriarchy? Maybe now we can have a level-headed discussion about sentencing policies that are so ridiculous it is hard to know where to start to describe them? That maybe the Guardian may point out that women are favoured which leads to miscarriages of justice (not in a legal sense, but in a moral one).

Well, fuck no. Of course not.

The Guardian found a different narrative.

Now it is not heroic, abused women in the yokes of the Patriarchy; after all, a woman is now a beneficiary of this Evil System.
Now it is the minority women against the evil white supremacy which puts them into prison.

There is a kernel of truth in this argument. It is undeniable that money and status played a role in this case. In fact, one can argue, it is the only factor that played any role in the judgement. A poor woman (white or non-white) would not have gotten away so easy. And yes, there is racism in the justice system.

However, deliberately staying blind to the larger injustice - the different sentencing standards for different genders- just because it does not fit into our narrative -well, this is the repugnant part of identity politics. A man would have gotten an even harsher sentence poor or not. And your narrative about the poor, abused women -well, very few criminals are criminals because they chose that life based on a school competency test. Your compassion is only reserved for one part of the population, and you do not see any reason why you should extend it to other human beings who are not in your in-group. If it is about men, your in-group is women, if it is about a white woman, your in-group is minority women. Since everything is relative, you can move the goal posts as much as you like -as long as you keep the victim/oppressor narrative. You are warping reality even when what you say is factually true. Because what you do not say matters, too. You can make fake news without uttering a falsehood, as it is demonstrated so well in this case.

The blatant hypocrisy about refugees in the West

So Manuel Valls is now saying the refugee crisis is destabilizing Europe, and that the borders need to be protected, and that we can't just take anyone who wanders across the borders.
Other Western politicians talked about the cultural effect the large influx of refugees causes, the financial burden, the need to protect the borders.

And yet, when Orban was saying (and doing) the very same thing not 6 months ago, he was a far-right politician, a racist, and a Nazi -not to mention the whole nation of Hungary along with him.

The hypocrisy is maddening. And one of the worst thing is that from a staunch anti-Fidesz voter I have became quite sympathetic to the asshole; after all, he still looks like a better alternative than his critics. If you judge someone by his enemies, Orban is actually a pretty good guy. And for this: fuck you Valls, fuck you Faymann, fuck you The Guardian, and Der Spiegel.
You had no right to make a pro-Orban thinker out of me.

Cologne and the press

There were a series of mass attacks on women during New Year's Eve; attacks which were coordinated, committed by people who "look African and Middle Eastern", and attacks which did not really get a lot of attention from the media for a long time. Even the police reported initially that all was well... The very first thing that came to my mind was the fact that the far right was actually using this as a warning cry to whip up the fear: they are coming to rape your daughters... we came to an age when closet Nazis are more dependable source of information than the mainstream media. The second thing actually reinforced this notion: it took an awful lot of time and misinformation for the facts to come out: it was not committed by Germans, or by people who have been living in Germany for decades. These attacks were prominently committed by newcomers, who were arriving as refugees.

The media outlets took up this story very slowly. The Guardian specifically was silent for five full days; even though they were really fast to comment on the Shirtgate, or on Mattelgate (the missing female figurine), and were really eager to jump to conclusions on refugee matters as well previously. But now they were taking their time. Suddenly everyone is surprised, as if this was not predicted before. Well, guess what. It has. Cairo and Sweden had experienced similar attacks (which was promptly covered up by the police); it was not really difficult to imagine something like this can happen in areas where refugees/economic migrants were present en masse. Suddenly people are surprised about the skewed sex ratio- oh, my, there's a lot of men in the crowd! Too bad, though they called everyone a Nazi who said the very same thing before; and interestingly this fact did not register for the photographers, either, who spent a year trying to pick up the odd little girl from the crowds of young men for emotional photos about the plight of the refugees.

The Guardian's rich and very excitable feminist writers are also silent; as if actual attacks of women's basic rights were not worth the effort. Even the victim-blaming from the Major of Cologne was left unmentioned... This cartoon sums up everything nicely.

But the Guardian was not silent on other matters. It was running a really long feature on the Two Tailed Dog party, in which they equated Orban with the Far Right (which he is not), and that idiot who charged a police station in France and got shot was featured prominently on the front page, too. It took five days for articles on Cologne to appear. One even called for asking for tough questions, but then avoided to do so.
One genius piece managed to have the following two quotes in the same article:

Abroad, Merkel will work for burden sharing, tougher measures to patrol Europe’s borders and seek solutions to stop the refugees at source

Already the venomous Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán is calling for tougher border controls,

Really?

It seems like the media by propagating the idea of uncontrolled migration boxed itself into a corner it cannot come out of without looking foolish or criminally negligent. And what they are doing now is just as bad.

The main problem is: this sort of behaviour completely surrenders the issue to the far right. It only gets stronger when the media does not report, lies, when the media and the police covers these things up, when you label everyone with concerns racist... you are responsible for turning away from the victims (the women who were assaulted), and you are responsible for the strengthening of the far right, and the gangs who mete out their own justice, and beat up Middle Eastern people on the street.