Tea at Trianon: To Subvert Society

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

To Subvert Society

From The Washington Examiner:

On Thursday, Science, one of the top scientific publications in the world, ran a letter titled, “Transgender rights rely on inclusive language,” suggesting that biological sex is “context-dependent” and not binary.
If you had to go back and re-read that last sentence, let me assure you, you did indeed read it correctly. The letter — authored by two neuroscientists and a graduate student in biology — argues for “inclusive language around sex diversity,” and that, in the five years since the National Institutes of Health announced that research proposals should include sex as a biological variable, society has become hostile to transgender people.
The NIH’s directive was originally instated to address the fact that biomedical studies including only male participants lacked application to women. Pre-Clown World, this would be uncontroversial. But behold the pathway of thinking social justice ideology has plowed while I mourn my former field of neuroscience.
Anyone who follows my writing will know by now that sex is determined by gametes: eggs and sperm. As a result, there are only two sexes, and biological sex is not a spectrum. Intersex people, who possess a combination of female and male anatomy (and who are frequently tokenized by activists as a justification for outlandish claims), typically prefer to live as male or female, within a binary conception of sex.
It is certainly important to be sensitive regarding one’s choice of language, as reference to biological sex has been used to discriminate against transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people. But this sensitivity doesn’t require separating sex from its associated traits (for example, as detailed in the letter, remaining agnostic as to whether development of testicles is indicative of someone being male), or detaching sex from gender (how someone identifies), considering that the two differ for fewer than 1% of us.
Yet we’ve managed to arrive at infuriating terminology such as “menstruating people,” which separates sex from biological function. It doesn’t end there; if anyone has the potential to be female, this justifies the obsolescence of sex-based spaces and sports divisions and biomedical research that is actually relevant to women. (Read more.)