Defining "Woman"

 

The news last week included a statement under oath by a woman nominated to be a justice on the United States Supreme Court and selected because she was a woman, that she could not define the term “woman” because she was not a biologist. Besides perhaps committing a bit of mild perjury(since an intelligent person whose education went beyond high school probably would know the answer), Judge Jackson made a misstep by referring to biology. As a matter of biology, the answer is clear and well known. A woman is an adult human with two X chromosomes and female sex organs, i.e. the adult female of the species. To be true to the leftist fashions of the moment, she should have said she is not a gender studies professor, since those are the “scholars” relied on by the left to muddy the waters.

Of course there is more going on with this than facts of biology, and Judge Jackson may have to rule on controversies related to some of those things. A person has a right to dress like, behave as, and wish to be seen as a member of the opposite sex. It’s a free country, and a person can claim or pretend to be anything he wants—including a member of the opposite sex. There is no right to demand that anyone else believe or pretend to believe any of one’s opinions, heartfelt delusions included. Other people are free to reach their own conclusions, and attempts to coerce them are wrong. Someone should have asked Judge Jackson if she agrees with that. If anyone did, I missed it.

War News

Some things about the war in Ukraine are obvious. The Russians are the aggressors, and the war is the fault of their dictator Putin. There is fighting on more than one front, and the Ukrainians have not been overrun. Many Ukrainian civilians have been killed, and many others have become refugees. Some things about the war are difficult or impossible to know accurately in the midst of the fighting, such as counts of casualties in both armies, the effectiveness of various weapons and tactics, the degree to which Russian controlled territory is actually under their control, how much and how effectively Ukrainian guerrillas are operating behind Russian positions, and so on. The fog of war is real, and it is well known that early reports on conflicts are often incomplete, tinged by propaganda, or even completely wrong. War correspondents in Ukraine have a difficult job.

The job of writers and journalists back in the United States is far easier, and one should expect better than what some are producing. There is a lot of ignorance and dishonesty out there – some of it about the war and some about the history and background. I have read more than one story reporting that the Germans’ decision to increase spending on defense is a departure from nearly eighty years of post World War II pacifism. The truth is that from the 1960s through the 1980s West Germany fielded the largest NATO army deployed in Europe and dropped its defenses after the fall of the Soviet Union less out of pacifism than a pragmatic opinion that the threat had disappeared. Other stories talk of the war in Ukraine as ending a seventy five year European order of peace and unity. The truth is that from 1947 to the fall of the Soviet Union what Europe had was not a peaceful order but an armed truce between hostile forces facing each other across the iron curtain. A peaceful European order goes back only about thirty years, and even then one has to ignore a few things in the Balkans, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine. Various political hacks in the traditional media try to blame the war for price inflation in the United States, ignoring the fact that the rate of price inflation was high and climbing before the Russians invaded Ukraine, and the fact that under both Trump and Biden, the US government manufactured money at inflationary rates.

There is also worse. Various people, mainly Trumpists including Trump and anti-American leftists, seem to have a soft spot for Putin. One can believe that Biden has handled things badly or that America should avoid pushing Russia into becoming a client state of China or that admitting Ukraine to NATO would be a mistake or simply that this should not be our fight, without becoming an apologist for or fan of what the Russians are doing.

Geopolitical Braketology

There is a guessing game in which players place each famous subject, usually but not always a present or past political or geopolitical actor, into one of four categories, pretending any deceased subject is still alive and selecting the highest number that applies:

1)      Someone whom one would be willing to stop and help if one found him lying beside a road, choking

2)      Someone whom one would walk on by and let nature take its course if one found him lying beside a road, choking

3)       Someone whom one would wish to make the world a  better place  by suffering a fatal ruptured aortal aneurysm, preferably before the game’s next round

4)       Someone whom one would willingly shoot dead if one could do so (legally to be sure).

Once a subject’s name is selected, each player secretly marks whether he rates the subject as  a one, a two, a three, or a four. Players then guess which category the largest number of players picked. The player or players guessing right win the round. The strategy, such as it is, is in trying to figure out the other players’ attitudes about the subject. For example one might think that many people would give, say,  George H. W. Bush  a one, Justin Trudeau or Donald Trump a two, Chairman Xi a three, and Osama bin Laden a four. 

It is not much of a game,  but thinking about how people would answer its question can interesting. For example I would suppose that right now  a lot of people would bump Putin  up from a three to a four.