“My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady, and the other was to be independent. The study of law was unusual for women of my generation.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933 - 2020)
“Maybe what we need these days is more sex and less gender.”
Bill Maher, Real Time (March 25, 2022)
Greetings!
Imagine that your 8-year old kid returns from school one day with a failing grade for having accurately described what makes a giraffe, well, a giraffe. As a parent, you are naturally puzzled, so you contact the school faculty and administrators to understand what happened. They tell you that your kid cannot possibly know what a giraffe is because he isn’t a zoologist, he hasn’t been to Africa, and in fact there is no way of telling for sure what makes a giraffe different from, say, a zebra or a wildebeest, because they all walk on four legs and get eaten by lions (let’s assume for a moment that we all know what a lion is, just for the sake of conversation). The correct answer, they tell you, would have been, “reality is complicated, I cannot know what a giraffe is, it is not up to me to describe what a giraffe is, and only a giraffe can answer that question”.
If you think such level of epistemological breakdown is infantile, ludicrous, and would never take place in a modern and sophisticated society (particularly at the highest levels of leadership), feel free to skip this post.
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SUPREME CAPTURE: The trailblazing and charismatic Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a.k.a. RBG) famously asserted that she wished to see all nine justices in the Supreme Court represented by women one day. Fast track to 2022, and three are already in place. But the next woman to join the ranks of America’s top judges is pretending not to know what it means to be one. In this breathtaking video, Ketanji Brown Jackson explains that her job is to resolve disputes, not to define what something is or isn’t. The big question now is not whether only a biologist would be entitled to recognize someone else’s sex or gender, as she seems to indicate, but whether she even has the capacity to think for herself.
OK, to give Mrs. Jackson the benefit of the doubt, Senate hearings can be somewhat tiresome, extravagant and clownish. We should then ask ourselves: Was this an isolated and inconsequential event?
CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY: “The question ‘what is a woman?’ is hardly the riddle of the sphinx”, says Andrew Doyle, a comedian and creator of the Twitter persona Titania McGrath. He suggests, however, that it’s a useful question for gauging whether someone - especially a public figure or someone running for office - still retains a basic degree of intellectual honesty or has been ideologically captured. In this article, he shares several examples of how the ‘identity-first’ approach has real-life consequences, sometimes benign but oftentimes tragic and violent: “… male athletes are competing in women’s sports, the media is reporting on male serial killers but using female pronouns, and a rape victim is told that the assault she experienced must have been a figment of her imagination (because there were no ‘men’ present). Incidents of this kind, now occurring too often to be dismissed as aberrations, have led us into […] a general loss of confidence in institutional authority.”
Read the article HERE.
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SOCIAL DEATH: Medicine. Hollywood. Education. Journalism. Anyone who has been paying attention must have noticed how America’s most important institutions are behaving in ways that radically contradict what they have stood for in the past. But at least the law is the law, right? Maybe not for long. What happens if, for instance, foundational norms of our justice system like impartiality, presumption of innocence and due process get thrown out the window? Or when law professors can no longer teach students to play devil’s advocate? Or when the American Bar Association begins to prioritize the dogma of equity and inclusion over the pursuit of truth? Or when law firms lose the right to represent unpopular clients and controversial causes? In this sobering article, Aaron Sibarium outlines the extent to which this shift has already taken place, and how anyone who defies the consensus is at risk of facing “social death”.
Read the article HERE.
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LENIENCY VS. ANARCHY: And what happens when public safety is no longer the focus of a city’s district attorney …?
FLICK OF THE WEEK: We have all been concerned with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lately. But in the sci-fi thriller The Invasion, an insidious behavior-altering epidemic takes over the human mind and threatens to decimate an entire nation. When a psychiatrist discovers that the epidemic's origins are extraterrestrial, she must fight to protect her son, who may hold the key to stopping the nightmare.