ere's a great sentence I came across the other day:
As many have pointed out in the case of the Soviet Union and other countries seized by leftist ideologies, putting the power of the state behind an ideology inevitably involves brainwashing resistors.
A sentence like this is something I aspire to create, but upon first reading I misread it. As the rectifier behind the pulpit said, pointing at the induction center, resistance is useless!
All ideologies invent new words to characterize their opponents; as often as not they backfire. The word ‘capitalism’ was invented by Karl Marx to denigrate his opponents. They adopted it and their economic success drove Marxism into academia, where it resides like a latent virus, ready to start replicating when society goes under stress.
And creating social stress is the lefties' MO. Their wordsmiths finally wore out the term ‘racist.’ Oh sure, they still run its tattered remains up the flagpole, and some people still salute it. But when The Cat in the Hat is deemed racist propaganda, it proves (a) the term has lost most of its meaning, or (b) the left has lost most of its marbles, or (c) both a and b. The latest mot du jour is the even more unconvincing ‘white supremacist.’ And then there are those pseudo-pronouns that sound so ridiculous they have to force people to use them.
(Just FYI, my pronoun is “yer holiness.” You may also address me as “yer majestiness” And you must pronounce it “yer”, not “your.” (Except on Tuesdays, when you must say “eurrr.”) Never mind if I'm an atheistic anti-royalist, if I identify as a pope, you must acknowledge my truth, or you're a racist!)
The number of genders is inversely proportional to the usefulness of the term
One effect of such things is to create a new faction of people who say to themselves: Hey yeah, why not? There's probably a dam of sexist jokes, anti-semitic jokes, race jokes and jokes about midgets out there somewhere ready to burst. At the moment, the only thing holding it back is the threats from the warriors, e-cons and publicity-averse employers.
The kind of sex
Take ‘gender.’ If there are now 71 different genders, as I am now reliably informed, and if people can change from one to the other at will, doesn't this just mean there is really no such thing? We've surpassed the Eskimos: we have 71 words for . . . what? Already 'gender' has no meaning. (‘Orientation’ might be a better term if someone was interested in such things, since it doesn't imply anything biological. Better yet, don't tell us!)
While the term ‘gender’ tends to roll off the tongue, its new meaning equivocates sex and sexual orientation. Activists use this to create the impression that orientation is biological and fixed, while simultaneously claiming that it is fluid. Because there is no scientific basis for the existence of vast numbers of ‘genders’, the term has lost much of its value and is now generally avoided by biologists who wish to maintain scientific neutrality.
A simple misunderstanding of biology could explain the blogger who says that Schizophyllum commune, a species of fungus[1] that causes white rot on wood and sometimes bronchopulmonary disease and rhinosinusitis in humans, has 28,000 sexes because it has some 300 alleles on its A locus and 90 on its B locus.
There are entire books on fungal sex, each one more titillating than the last. It is a very complicated subject. Like S. commune, yeast too are heterothallic, which means each cell is a specific genetic type and can only mate with a cell of a different genetic type. But that doesn't mean there are 28,000 different sexes, let alone 28,000 genders, because those genes are just pheromones and incompatibility factors[2], analogous to different blood types and incest taboos in humans. To have a sex, you gotta have a physiological difference. These factors don't create different sexes; they prevent yeast from inbreeding, and believe you me, the last thing you want is an inbred yeast.
But heck, you gotta do something to get the kids interested in fungi. As Casselton and Olesnicky[3] write:
After initial pheromone reception, the unicellular yeasts form a protrusion in the direction of the pheromone source, and this elongated cell is referred to as a schmoo.
At least incompatibility factors and yeast cells are real. Humans don't have schmoos, only schmucks, schlimazels and schlemiels; their role in human mating remains conjectural.
Fake biology
Of course, libs know gender is just fake biology. As others have noted, they don't invent it to bring people closer to reality. They do it for power and status: to demonstrate their power over the common man. If they can get you to deny a ridiculous assertion, you're just affirming that it has power, therefore they have power to oppress you. If they can get e-cons to call alt-righters racist, and alt-righters to call e-cons cucks, it's a victory. If they can get women to call men misogynists, and the men call them misandric in response, that too is a victory. Leftism profits by creating division, and anything that makes people hate each other is a victory.
But the law of diminishing returns wins in the end. ‘Deplorables’ is now a term of pride for cons. If the libs keep using terms like sexist, patriarchy, colonialist, and racist to mean things that don't correspond to anything real, it'll be a race between the term becoming archaic and being adopted as an expression of national pride.
The recent rash of encomiums for Hugh Hefner, the god of airbrushing, shows that feminism became archaic long ago. Female promiscuity was the promise that feminism held out to guys, and Heff helped fulfill it. If the airbrushing of history keeps up, it won't just be the American Civil War that's been airbrushed out of existence; one day we'll wake up to discover that sexism never existed either, and the next generation will think it was all a dumb fad, like goldfish swallowing.
And maybe they'll be right. Libs might call themselves resistors, or even resisters, but there is nothing behind their ideas. Their purpose is not to instruct, but to convince the speaker of his own popularity and virtue. They lack any substantial connection to reality. They are Potemkin ideas.
[1] Erdmann S, Freihorst D, Raudaskoski M, Schmidt-Heck W, Jung EM, Senftleben D, Kothe E. (2012). Transcriptome and functional analysis of mating in the basidiomycete Schizophyllum commune. Eukaryot Cell. 11(5):571–589. Abstract
[2] Papazian HP (1951). The Incompatibility Factors and a Related Gene in Schizophyllum Commune. Genetics. 36(5): 441–459. Full text
[3] Casselton LA, Olesnicky NS. (1998) Molecular genetics of mating recognition in basidiomycete fungi. Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 62(1):55–70. Abstract
oct 01, 2017; last edited oct 15, 2017, 5:26 am
