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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
Ironically, I bet your friend would also be one who would insist “It’s never ok to hit a woman!” (Which rule would of course be unnecessary if women and men were equal physically.)
Oh, I had to give some wiggle room for the progressives.
After writing this, I recalled something from when I worked for the U.S. Forest Service. There was a lady on our district who determined that she wanted to be a smokejumper. At the time, she would be the first to make it, and if any female could do it, she could. She was in tremendous physical condition to start with, and she went to work with a passion to get in even better shape. She was, without question, one of the most physically fit people on the district. She washed out.
This may say more about the discipline of anthropology than anything else. Tell your anthropologist friend to read Greg Cochran. On second thought, don’t.
Perfectly stated. Every decision is made with imperfect/incomplete information, and to claim otherwise is foolish.
Thank you!
That’s what I call “willful ignorance,” and it seems more common each day. If it doesn’t fit within the current mindset, it is either wrong or hateful.
If I was a betting man, I might wager that, on average, when all other factors are kept constant, men who subscribe to the ideology that “it’s never ok to hit a woman” probably tend to have better life outcomes than men who subscribe to the ideology that “hitting a woman can be justified in rare circumstances”, and that it’s an example of an a priori belief that probably works out for the best more than 50% of the time, over all, on average, statistically-speaking, if one were to gather the empirical evidence, even though it’s almost certainly unsound logically.
I hope at some point their ideology decides gravity doesn’t exist.
It is never OK to lose control of oneself.
But I can easily justify hitting a woman or a child – I smack my kids to teach them not to do incredibly stupid things, for example. Force can (and should) be used when it leads to better outcomes.
You probably have not met any womyn that like / wanted to be hit.
Inaccurate. There are plenty of instances in life where “losing control” is a necessary survival mechanism.
e.g. If I touch a hot stove my brain automatically makes my arm yank my hand away from the heat source. This does not happen consciously. It happens automatically, because conscious decision-making takes way too much time and my hand would be burning even more during the interval. In such an instance, I have lost conscious control of my hand, and for good reason. Some call this phenomenon, “rational irrationality”.
A better way to phrase the maxim could be, it is never OK to lose control of oneself if said loss of control results in negative consequences.
The ends may not justify the means, but they definitely justify unconscious actions.
Your co-worker wins the prize, hands down.
Over the years I have been frustrated by leftist imperviosity to evidence on things like capitalism’s superiority to socialism, the flaws in global warming theory or the evils of the Castro regime.
I have led a sheltered life. Those leftists are geniuses compared to your co-worker.
I used to wonder what all those frillions of Gender Studies graduates were going to do for a living. Now I know that they’re successfully assaulting every company and organization large enough to have an HR department.
They may be one of the most successful invading armies ever. They will bring the entire Western World to it’s knees.
The rule isn’t that you have to believe it, but that you must assert and vigorously defend it, else you haven’t shown the proper repudiation of your “male privileged” and “toxic masculinity”.
I still believe in spanking children under certain circumstances. Sometimes the only way to get to their head is through the other end.
As for hitting a woman, only if someone’s life is at stake, and I would still feel terrible about it.
This post raises a question.
Do we conservatives have similar blind spots?
I can’t see any.
Of course not. Everyone who agrees with me is a paragon of virtue, and everyone who disagrees with me shall be cast into the pit, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
That’s just science.
Like when they get stuck in the cat door.
Isn’t most of engineering based on scientific generalizations?
Learn to read ALOT and maybe you will get through without a visit to HR.
I guess he should have gotten a degree in biology or physiology. Maybe physics (levers and mass in motion).
I don’t dismiss anthropology outright, but a little research is required to decide if you should laugh in the person’s face.
a) Ask him what level of degree. If it’s a bachelor’s degree or lower, I give you permission to laugh in his face.
b) If it’s higher than a bachelor’s degree, ask the “anthropologist” how many field missions he’s participated in, and where.
I can respect an anthropologist if they’ve done real field work.
Irony intended, I assume.
A friend of mine who is pretty far-right — he cites Vox Day as one of his favorite bloggers — once raised this same subject with me, but he exposed, I think, ideological blindness from the other direction. He argued that men are so naturally stronger and more dexterous than women that he — a 45-ish man of average fitness with no specialty training — would be able to outfight ANY woman, even including those trained as fighters, like female MMA champions. He didn’t argue that it would be a competitive fight, or that he could go several rounds, but that it wouldn’t be much of a contest, dismissing even the development of fighting strategy and tactics in women who train every day to compete at such things.
This has been going on a long time. In the early 1970s the college coffeehouse conversation used to go like this:
PC Maroon: “There’s no difference between men and women.”
Me: “There is in their brains.”
PCM: “Nu uh!”
Me: The distribution and number of estrogen receptors is different between male and female brains. That doesn’t speak to intellectual capacity, but the assertion that there is no difference is false.”
Actually, we now know that we know that there are women with testes, so you can’t say that “men are stronger than women.”
I think the question of political correctness can be our blind spot as well as theirs. As the OP points out, they tend to ignore reality when reality isn’t politically correct. Our blind spot tends to be that we too often excuse actual offensive behavior as merely politically incorrect.
The appropriate response would be something like this:
“Hmm. Anthropology. I wonder if you could get your money back?”
Two serious points.
These people will be the bureaucrats (apparatchiks) that will be making your and your children’s lives miserable for a long time.
A society who can’t even consider reality is doomed. Time to find the hammer to nail the lid shut.
Here’s a conversation starter (and ender):
“I was reading the other day that the WNBA uses basketballs that are one inch smaller in circumference than the men’s ball. Don’t you think that’s sexist?”
I balked at that too… and then thought “Cops sometimes have to hit women. Oh yeah. Duh.”
Yep. Those people are out there.
Reality is lame can I live somewhere else.