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Ideological Blindness In Real Life
I was speaking with a co-worker the other day, and we got into a discussion about men and women in sports. He almost took offense to my statement that men are generally stronger than women. He claimed I was trying to say men were better than women by citing examples of men beating top-ranked women, like when the 203rd ranked men’s tennis player beat both Venus and Serena Williams after they declared they could beat any man outside the top 200.
It was a strange experience because I didn’t think people could really be so blinded by ideology. I thought these sorts of people existed only in the dark recesses of college campuses for the sole purpose of being reported upon by The Daily Wire. Yet here I was, speaking with someone who was aghast at my simple statement of fact. “I have a degree in anthropology!”
As always, I was respectful and tried to keep the tone light, but he bristled at the slightest implication that men were stronger than women. I realize now that ideological blindness is very, very real, and that it is really, really dangerous. If real people — people I know and interact with — can succumb to it, I really worry for the future, more so than I have in the past. I had always hoped that the extreme left wing was relegated to the very far margins of our republic; unfortunately, it seems I was mistaken.
Published in Culture
I was about to post ‘the first realization is always the hardest’, but that’s not actually true-the surprise helps to insulate you from the full ramifications until a while later.
The worst is yet to come, so steel yourself and welcome to our hell.
Your tone is probably the more constructive in most everyday situations than that of the jaded and callused among us, though. Try not to lose it, we need a variety of strategies in response to this threat.
It’s often hard to spot where ideology ends and ignorance begins. Or is it the other way around? This seems to be one of those times.
He has been watching too many movies where the 90 lb heroine beats up all the big bad men. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind that women are shown defending themselves effectively (there are ways) or even as aggressors with appropriate weapons. But I very much dislike jettisoning the prohibition against men hitting women. I am a very strong woman, but I am always astounded how much stronger most men are compared to me. Not all men; but most men. I couldn’t beat my uncle at arm wrestling, with a 30 year age difference and me using both arms. .
So I’ve been concerned that women were buying into the very dangerous narrative that there is no difference in strength between men and women. But for a man to believe it? That’s insane.
Welcome to reality.
My son and his girlfriend at the time got into a discussion about pro sports. She was offended by his comment that no one was watching the WNBA. He then asked her to name the players on the Detroit team (I don’t even know the name of the team) and she couldn’t name one. But she could name players on the men’s team. It isn’t just physical differences, women and men do not have the same interests.
And that is ok.
Feminists have done women unfathomable damage by encouraging them to compete with men in areas where men, on average, will always be stronger better.
Ideology is always the problem. There’s reality where we learn about the real world by bumping into real things, failing and eventually figuring out the basics. We have traditions that emerged over the millennia of this trial and error and analytical insights that help us make sense of life. Then there are abstractions about the process that get turned into ideologies and we go to school to learn them. This is fine, but then we approach reality as if the model, the abstraction the ideology were more real than reality. I’ve an acquaintance who went from being super student through ivy league undergraduate and then graduate school to tenure who has never had a non academic job. He’s in control of everything in his life, and always has been. He’s never had to pay a price for being wrong, indeed in his field there is no way to know if you wrong. The man in all his brilliance can’t deal with anything real, not his kids, his wife, his house, his budget, or people out of his field.
When I was doing research on la violencia in Colombia , most of the materials I could find were written by marxists, but there were marxists who did real research then fit their findings into a marxist framework, these guys were useful; and there were marxists who picked through reality to find information that fit their marxist interpretation. These were not useful. Our educated elite are largely the latter.
I think this is where a great many of the twenty-first century arguments start. One person makes a statement of objective, but comparative, fact: “Men are generally stronger than women.” The listener’s response is emotional, and introduces the concept of victimhood into the comparison–“You’re saying that men are better than women, because ‘stronger’ must equal ‘better,’ so you’re being mean about women”
We’re at a point where almost any use of a comparative adjective, about any matter at all, starts a little war like this. I don’t want to derail the thread with a discussion of whether or not there is an “objective” reality independent of us, or how that might work, but I think it would be so much easier, and so much better, and so much more productive if we could go back to a few common points of understanding which can clearly be demonstrated through experiment and experience (funny, I bet those two words come from the same root, somewhere way back), and that some things just are, with no need for time-consuming, pointless, and acrimonious, debate.
Did they actually say that? I thought the Williams sisters showed they had a pretty realistic understanding of their skills versus men after the McEnroe “incident” a while back.
As an experiment, try telling him that women on the average have more emotional intelligence than do men, and see how he reacts.
I suspect he will nod approvingly.
“Outside the top 200” sounds a lot like the kind of caveat that would be used by someone trying to boast without expecting to be called on it.
The US military sorta/kinda bought into this years ago. I know it almost led to one of the best military working dogs I ever knew being destroyed. (The one in my avi.) Lord knows what effect it has on our infantry.
It happened in 1998, at their first Australian Open. They were kids.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
Just wait till we end up fighting a real adversary. It’s not going to be pretty. You can mask a lot with tactics and superior weapons fighting against chumps.
People like your coworker is why I only discuss work at work and nothing else. No personal stuff. No political stuff. Nothing but work and only just work. People like your coworker exist and they all seem to have an in with the HR department. HR departments are there to protect the company and if they sense one of the SJW snowflakes on a tear they will reprimand you so quick it will make your head spin out of instinctual company self preservation.
Same, except we’ll throw in sports, but just the current game(s). No “men and women in sports.” Just “Did you catch that hit Wilson laid out on Marchessault?”
Just another example of liberal/statists demanding that it be true because they think it should be true, and any evidence against it is just hate or lies.
It is their overall worldview, as evidenced by their continued belief in things like Socialism, gun bans and guaranteed equality of outcome. It doesn’t have to ever work. The failure of each of these every time they are tried is just further proof of sabotage by the liars and haters.
Simply put, they don’t want to live in a world where women are not the physical equal to men. So they have to believe it is so, and to keep up the pretense they must silence and attack any who suggest otherwise.
Which is why they like to consider themselves the ‘reality based community’. More pretense.
True Leftists never allow facts to get in the way of their ideology.
When I was building my first building for my business I was helping the concrete block layer. I was putting the blocks on a scaffold and he was cementing them in place. The blocks where probably over fifty lbs each. He would use his left hand to pick up the block and his right to place the mortar between the block. After lunch he switched hands. I was young and strong and could carry a block in each hand but no way could I hold a block out at shoulder level and place it on a wall. He did this for ten hours every day. Frank was in his sixties. There may be a woman that could do that but I wouldn’t want to meet her. Women can do many things but physical labor of that type is debilitating and perhaps out of reach of 99.999 of women. Yes a woman could lay block but if you were paying by the hour to have it done you would want Frank.
Well, that’s just the worst of it. He seems to believe he knows exactly what he’s talking about because of his recently-acquired degree, although it’s likely easy to convince yourself of anything once you’ve been run through the full machine that is university indoctrination.
That’s why they went for 201 and below… not to 200.
Here and here are where I found it.
I normally follow this rule, but my circumstances at this point are rather unique. I’m working in a national park this summer, and I live in employee housing with most everyone else. I’ve found it’s quite difficult to avoid such conversations in this case.
I agree with your acquaintance. Wymyn are as strong as men. In fact, some of them actually are men.
(And it’s amazing what a little testosterone will do. Remember the East German female Olympians in the ’80s?)
Logic is not a strong suit of the left. Leftists prey on people who can’t think logically.
Here’s my favorite story to date:
A coworker is an ex-Marine and a well-educated and very capable engineer. He’s such a leftist that I try different things out on him now and then. We were talking about some political issue and he came back on me with, “That’s just a generalization.” To which I replied: “Generalizations are the beginning of wisdom.” He went nuts, saying that such a statement is ridiculous on its face. He’s never listened to Dennis Prager, I guess.
You might enjoy my post from last February on this general subject:
http://ricochet.com/496789/120-lb-women-cannot-throw-240-lb-men-around-in-general/
At it’s most basic, any ideology is merely a decision-making framework, made necessary by unavoidable ignorance.
It is impossible to have 100% perfect information whenever making any decision. Therefore, in addition to robust data one must use a priori beliefs and assumptions based on tradition, culture, and educated guesses in order to make decisions. Those a priori beliefs and assumptions are otherwise known as “ideology”. The less robust data one has when confronted by a decision, the more one must rely on ideology. One can never be totally free from ideology, or else one would be unable to ever make a decision.
(e.g. If I don’t know whether a bear is friendly or hostile, it’s ideology that tells me to be cautious of the bear. Without ideology, I wouldn’t be able to make that decision without first gathering more data on the bear. That takes time, and bears move fast.)
When utilized honestly, I believe that ideology results in better decisions more than 50% of the time. After all, these a priori beliefs and assumptions are based on millions of years of natural selection, experience, and/or divine revelation.
Ideology causes bad decisions, on the other hand, when one favours ideology more than available data when making decisions. i.e. In cases where ignorance is avoidable.
(e.g. Say that my ideology isn’t to always be cautious of bears I don’t know, which buys me time to study the situation, but rather to always attack bears I don’t know, which doesn’t. Assume in this scenario that I’m unarmed. That would therefore be a very sub-optimal ideology.)
Actually, that’s probably pretty revealing; they viewed their skill level as somewhere below at least the highest 200 men. And at this point I bet they wouldn’t quibble with the idea that they underestimated by some degree the difference that they recognized.
Re: possessing all knowledge before making a decision, which is of course a) impossible and b) crippling, there’s this word of wisdom from one of my all-time favorite, um, politicians, if you can call him that at all:
Be always sure you’re right — THEN GO AHEAD! – Colonel / Congressman David “Davy” Crockett.
I have some friends who drew some temporary assignments working with Army co-ed basic training companies. I can’t print most of what they had to report. In (CoC) summary, they were informed that nobody would be washing out. Got that?
PT scores, for instance, were ignored. Nobody washed out. Got that?
BTW at 6’5″, I can’t wait for somebody to stand next to me and try to tell me that there’s no difference between the sexes. Along the same line, by that newly – coined anthropologist’s assertion, shouldn’t , oh, say, 30% or so of the NBA be made up of women?
If it weren’t for the sexism it would be 50%! /sarc