Category: “progressives”

Amazon review of “The War on Science” volume rejected for using “woke” as pejorative

March 5, 2026 • 11:00 am

Reader Jon Gallant recently finished the essay collection compiled and edited by Lawrence Krauss, The War on Science:  Thirty-Nine Renowed Scientists and Scholars speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.” (Luana and I have a paper in it taken from our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology).

Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission).  I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:

At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company.  Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes?  I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure.  I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:

Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”.  After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe.  My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon.  The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.

In truth, I can see no other explanation.  The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear.  If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.

I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)

Kathleen Stock on female genital mutilation, cultural relativism, and a recent (odious) paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics

December 20, 2025 • 11:00 am

Over at UnHerd, philosopher Kathleen Stock, formerly of the University of Sussex, critiques a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics that I discussed recently, a paper you can read by clicking below. (You may remember that Stock, an OBE, was forced to resign from Sussex after she was demonized for her views on gender identity. These involved claims that there are but two biological sexes, and her cancellation was largely the result of a campaign by students.)

As I said in my earlier post, this paper seems to whitewash female genital mutilation (FGM), and does so in several ways. The authors think that the term “mutilation” is pejorative, and is more accurate and less inflammatory than saying “female genital modification”, which covers a variety of methods of FGM, some much more dangerous than others, as well as cosmetic genital surgery on biological women or surgery on trans-identifying males to give them a simulacrum of female genitalia. (There is also circumcision, which some lump in with the more dire forms of FGM.)

The Ahmadu et al. paper also notes that anti-FGM campaigns in Africa, where the mutilation is practiced most often, have their own harms. As Stock comments in the article below,

And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors.
They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

And if you don’t believe Stock, here’s a small part of the section of the Ahmadu et al. paper trying to push the word “trauma” out of descriptionos of FGM:

Most affected women themselves rarely use the word ‘trauma’ to describe their experiences of the practices. If they describe the experiences in negative terms, they may use words such as ‘difficult’ or ‘painful’, but some of them may simultaneously describe the experience as celebratory, empowering, important and significant. This may even accompany experiences of pain, but this pain, when made sense of in its cultural context, does not equate to trauma.

Researchers and clinicians often use the mostly biomedically based DSM-5 (the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to assess trauma, with a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While narratives of women who have experienced a cultural or religious-based procedure may contain descriptions of symptoms that fall into the PTSD nosological category (such as ‘unwanted upsetting memories’, ‘negative affect’, ‘nightmares’ or heightened sensations, vigilance or sleep disturbance), the cross-cultural validity of PTSD as a construct and its use in migrant populations has been widely contested, because it applies Western cultural understandings to people who do not necessarily equate the experience of pain as directly causing trauma.

That is first-class progressive whitewashing! As Stock describes :

[Anti-FGM campaigns] also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

Finally, Ahmadu et al. note that anti-FGM campaigns, and the term “mutilation”, have led to unfair stigmatization of some groups in the West that practiced FGM in their ancestral countries (and still practice it in the West, though to a much lesser extent). You could argue, for example, that it leads to bigotry in the West against those of Somalian ancestry, as FGM is rather common there. And I agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize an entire group because some of them practice FGM. Only the perpetrators should be punished and the promoters rebuked. But the practice should be loudly decried, and aimed at communities who employ it.

In her article, Stock rebukes the article as a prime example of “cultural relativism,” the view that while people within a given culture can judge some acts more moral than others, considering different cultures one cannot judge some as having behaviors more moral than do others.  One might, if one were stupid, criticize this as forms of ethical appropriation. So, say the relativists, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those in Somalia who practice infibulation of young women.

You can read Stock’s article by clicking below, but if you’re paywalled you can find the article archived here.

Stock is not a moral relativist, at least when it comes to genital “modification,” a term she opposes.  I’ll put up a few quotes, but you should read the whole piece, either online or in the archived version:

Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.

Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.

That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behaviour generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.

Stock lumps the authors into three groups, which she calls “the Conservatives” (no genital surgeries of any type), the “Centrists” (okay with circumcision for males but no surgery on females), and “Permissives” (people who think that “it is up to the parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.” [that quote is from the Ahmadu et al. paper]. These conflicting views lead to the tension that Stock and others can perceive in this paper. What are the sweating authors trying to say?

Cultural relativism, while in style among progressives, is a non-starter. You can see that by simply imagining John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and ask imaginary people who have not been acculturated to look at various cultures from behind that veil and then say which culture they’d rather live in. If you are a young girl, would you rather be in Somalia or Denmark? If you’re gay, would you rather be in Iran or Israel? And so on.  Here’s Stock’s ending where she asserts that not all forms of “genital modification” should be lumped together or considered equally bad:

Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.

But still, there is always a limit on what behaviours might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.

With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.

Here Stock comes close to equating “more moral” with “creating more well being,” a position that Sam Harris takes in The Moral Landscape, and a position I’ve criticized. But here the niceties of ethics are irrelevant. There is simply no way that forcing FGM upon girls can be considered better than banning it.

“Progressives” appear to whitewash female genital mutilation

December 17, 2025 • 10:20 am

This is an example of how horrible cultural practices are excused—or made to seem less harmful—by “progressives” (read “the woke”) when they’re characteristic of minority groups. In this case the practice is one of the cruelest and most misogynistic forms of behavior around—female genital mutilation (FGM), especially in its most damaging form, infibulation (there are three forms of FGM; see below).  I

This issue came to my mind when I saw this tweet:

Here’s the article in the Times of London referred to in the tweet; click to read.

 

And that led me to an essay in the Journal of Medical Ethics (below) highlighted in the above article.

The Times article above seems toi me a pretty accurate characterization of the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) article, though a bit hyperbolic:

Laws that ban female genital mutilation (FGM) are harmful and “stigmatising” towards migrant communities, academics have claimed in a British Medical Journal publication.

The essay argues that criticism of FGM, which involves cutting or removing females’ genitals for non-medical reasons, is “sensationalist” and based on “racialised stereotypes”.

It draws an equivalence between FGM in Africa and a trend for cosmetic genital procedures in the UK and US whereby women undergo surgery to create a “designer vagina”.

The article was published in the BMJ’s Journal of Medical Ethics, and its 25 co-authors include academics at the University of Cambridge, the University of Bristol and Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985, but remains commonplace in areas of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with the highest prevalence in Somalia.

It can cause severe pain, harm and long-term health problems, and organisations including the United Nations support bans and recognise it as a violation of women and girls’ human rights.

However, the article suggests that laws that ban FGM, including in the UK, are “causing harms to people” and can “objectify girls and women as passive victims”.

It says: “Laws against ‘FGM’ in Western countries have resulted in the marginalisation of migrant communities, reinforcing exclusionary practices and contributing to their social stigmatisation. While intended to protect, such legislation can serve as a tool of exclusion, deepening the divide between these communities and the broader society.”

The article claims that critics of FGM “ignore similar practices that have long been customary in powerful countries of the Global North”. It compares FGM to a rare type of cosmetic surgery called labiaplasty, which is offered by surgeons in Western nations.

Now if you read the original article below, you’ll see that though the authors admit here and there that female genital mutilation is harmful, their purpose is really to rename it, as “female genital modification as well as to reduce bigotry against cultures that practice FGM.

This authors argue that conflating FGM with other forms of genital surgery, such as that performed on transgender males or females in the “Global North” causes confusion and confused social policy. They also say it leads to discrimination against people who practice it in their native countries in the “Global South”, like Somalia, but after those people immigrate to the “Global North”.  Yes, they do say FGM is harmful, but so are these other surgeries, including circumcision.  But the article’s real result, I think, is to de-stigmatize the practice as a whole when the authors try reduce discrimination against cultures that practice FGM in their native lands.

A few quotes from the essay above:

One might also point to the tyranny of ‘types’ promulgated by the standard tale. Despite being the least common, infibulation (the sewing together of the outer labia, type 3) has come to stand for all forms of female genital practices in the popular imagination. Thus, communities that practise other forms, such as some Shia Muslims, who reportedly excise a small amount of skin from a girl’s prepuce, the so-called clitoral hood, as a religious duty and rite of inclusion, are immediately deemed ‘mutilators’.35 While some Shia and some Sunni Muslims argue that a notion of gender equality underlies the practice—in communities where both boys and girls undergo ritual circumcision—the use of the term ‘mutilation’ shuts down meaningful dialogue.

In contrast, boys who undergo circumcision, whether performed by so-called traditional operators or medically trained personnel, are rarely considered victims of mutilation, and the various forms of male genital practices—some as altering as infibulation—elude equivalent scrutiny.

. . . . Recent quantitative and qualitative research reveals that affected migrants who expect a permanent future in the Global North overwhelmingly opt to stop their cultural or religious female genital practices. Nevertheless, the belief persists that migrants are committed to preserving these traditions, and stories of ‘FGM’ practices after immigration abound in public discourse and news reporting, despite a lack of evidence, and indeed evidence to the contrary. Such misrepresentation and stereotyping fuel suspicion towards minority communities and families, resulting in harmful consequences for the girls and families involved.

, , ,We have written this critique to expand that conversation. Over the past four decades, great damage has been done to the process of rational policy formation by misleading and sensational media coverage of affected women from practising communities in the Global South. In concert with anti-FGM activist organisations, mainstream newspapers in North America, Europe and Australia have firmly fixed in the minds of their readers a typifying ‘dark continent’ ‘female genital mutilation’ image based on the atypical practice of infibulation, which should not be confused with the far more common forms of female genital practices that continue to prevail in many African and South-East Asian societies, and which are gaining in popularity among cosmetic surgeons and majority populations in North America and Europe (although never under the label ‘genital mutilation’—the expression ‘designer vagina’ is sometimes used).

Additionally, while reading the mainstream media coverage of ‘FGM’, one would never know that the custom does not selectively pick on women. Almost without exception, wherever there are female genital modifications, the local social norms regarding genital alteration are gender inclusive or gender equal and approvingly call for male genital modifications as well. Political patriarchy may have rather little to do with it.

Now FGM is illegal everywhere in the “Global North”, and this article says that the practice here is very rare. There are actually three main types of FGM as classified by WHO. All are harmful, and I list them below. First, though, is the practice really rare in the “Global North”? It’s very hard to find data as cases are, for obvious reasons, not often reported.  I first consulted ChatGPT, whose data must of course be taken with a grain of salt. But it does give references, a few of which I’ve checked to see if they say what they’re alleged to say; the ones I’ve checked do.  I also add below a link from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has founded an anti-FGM organization (she was a victim) and she gives statistics as well.

First, from the bot, when I asked it “how common is female genital mutilation in the West”?

Female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) is much less common in Western countries than in the regions where the practice has traditionally been concentrated (mainly parts of Africa, the Middle East, and some countries in Asia), but it does occur in the West — largely within migrant and diaspora communities from countries where FGM is prevalent. World Health Organization+1

Here’s an overview of how common it is in the West:

📊 General Western Prevalence

  • Overall Western prevalence is low compared with high-prevalence countries in Africa or the Middle East. In most Western populations, FGM is very rare or nearly absent overall, and national prevalence rates are typically well below 2 % of the general female population. However, estimates can vary based on methods and data limitations. Political Islam Center

🇪🇺 Europe

  • At least ~600,000 women and girls residing in European countries are estimated to have undergone FGM, with an additional ~130,000–190,000 girls and women at risk in some European Union countries. FGM/C Research Initiative

  • The largest numbers of FGM survivors in Europe are found in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. FGM/C Research Initiative

  • Because most European countries do not collect comprehensive health data on FGM, these figures are estimates drawn from community surveys, health systems data, and extrapolations. End FGM

🇺🇸 United States

  • Estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the U.S. either have undergone FGM or are at risk, mostly because they or their parents come from countries where the practice is common. PRB

  • For example, one estimate identified over 500,000 women and girls at risk or already cut based on countries of origin with high FGM prevalence. Political Islam Center

🇨🇦 Canada and Other Western Countries

  • Canada and other Western nations also report thousands of women and girls who have undergone FGM, again primarily within immigrant communities. For example, the CSPII FGM Index estimated Canadian prevalence at around 0.47 % of the female population — substantially lower than in high-prevalence countries. Political Islam Center

🧠 What This Means

  • In the general Western population, FGM prevalence is very low because the practice is not part of mainstream Western culture or norms.

  • Most cases in Western countries occur in migrant communities from regions where FGM is traditionally practiced.

  • Due to legal bans and active public health and human rights efforts, Western countries also focus heavily on prevention and protection to reduce incidence.

In the Anchorage Daily News, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes what’s indented blow, making claims about people living with FGM in the U.S. It’s not clear how often the mutilation was done before immigration, but I suspect that a lot of it is done in America, especially because you don’t have to have it done by a doctor. See below.

. . . . Alaska is one of nine states without a specific FGM ban, and the costs of that inaction are real. According to a groundbreaking study published by AHA Foundation in 2023, 10,020 women and girls in the Western United States have ancestral ties to countries where FGM is practiced. Of these, approximately 2,780 are at high risk of being cut or already living with FGM and 750 are living with Type III FGM, the most severe form, in which the genital area is sewn almost completely closed. A significant percentage (23.2%) of the Type III FGM population is living in Alaska. These survivors face chronic pain, complications during childbirth and lifelong trauma — often without access to medical care or emotional support.

Perhaps I should have put what follows up first, but here are the four types of FGM classified by The World Health Organization (WHO). Hirsi Ali refers above to three forms; she’s talking about the first three.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified FGM into four broad categories in 1995 and again in 2007:

Type I: Partial or total removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce.

Type II: Partial or total removal of the clitoris and labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora.

Type III: Narrowing of the vaginal orifice by cutting and bringing together the labia minora and/or the labia majora to create a type of seal, with or without excision of the clitoris. In most instances, the cut edges of the labia are stitched together, which is referred to as ‘infibulation’.

Type IV: All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example: pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.

FGM is condemned by a number of international treaties and conventions, as well as by national legislation in many countries. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being,” and this statement has been used to argue that FGM violates the right to health and bodily integrity. With FGM considered as a form of violence against women, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women can be invoked. Similarly, defining it as a form of torture brings it under the rubric of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Moreover, since FGM is regarded as a traditional practice prejudicial to the health of children and is, in most cases, performed on minors, it violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child. An interagency statement on FGM, issued by 10 UN organizations, was issued in 2008.

Now all are harmful, and the first two either completely remove or considerably diminish the possibility of any sexual pleasure, which is one of the reasons they’re done. So all three are harmful.

What about circumcision? I’ll leave that aside for this post as it’s not as harmful as these forms of FGM, and isn’t banned. But many readers feel that that, too, is genital mutilation, and one can make the case that it shouldn’t be done until the prospective circumcisee is old enough to give permission. If people want to discuss that, please do so in the comments.

Now onto one form, infibulation, which I hadn’t read about in detail before. The details came from the following tweet:

Here are the details from that tweet. NOTE: THE BIT IN ITALICS IS DISTURBING AND YOU MAY NOT WANT THE DETAILS:

I just read in more detail about female genital mutilation, which Somalis perform on 99% of girls in their country.

It’s possibly the worst thing I’ve ever read.

Here it is below so you can read it too; although I would advise you not to.

But it is important to understand how alien and horrible Somali culture is.

These are acts such that if they happened to a single Danish girl in Denmark, they would be rightfully seen as the most gruesome and grotesque mistreatment ever. It would be a news story running for decades, and the perpetrator would be the most hated man in the country.

This is what every family in Somalia inflicts on their daughters.

Not 5000 years ago in the bronze age. Right now. The Somali immigrant that came here last week had this done to his daughter.

“The process begins with the girl being forcibly restrained; often held down by several female relatives, including her mother or aunts, to prevent movement amid her screams and struggles. The excisor, using crude tools like a razor blade, knife, or broken glass, starts by slicing off the clitoral glans (the sensitive tip of the clitoris) and the surrounding clitoral hood, exposing raw nerve endings and causing profuse bleeding as blood spurts from the severed arteries. Next, the labia minora (the inner vaginal lips) are completely excised, followed by the labia majora (the outer lips), with chunks of flesh being cut away in jagged, imprecise strokes, leaving behind a mangled, bloody wound where the vulva once was. Shock sets in from the excruciating pain, described by survivors as feeling like being torn apart alive, with waves of burning sensation radiating through the body.

Once the removals are complete, the excisor repositions the raw edges of the remaining labia majora and stitches them together over the vaginal opening using thorns, acacia needles, or coarse thread, creating a tight seal. This narrows the opening to the size of a matchstick or pinhole, just large enough for urine and menstrual blood to trickle out slowly, often leading to immediate complications like urinary retention, where the girl strains in agony to pass even a few drops. The stitching is done without regard for hygiene, increasing the risk of tetanus or other infections as pus forms in the festering wound. If the girl faints from blood loss or pain, she’s revived with slaps to continue the ordeal.

Immediately after, the girl’s legs are bound tightly together from hips to ankles with ropes or cloth strips to immobilize her and allow scar tissue to form over the next 40 days, during which she lies in excruciating discomfort, unable to move without tearing the stitches. Swelling balloons the genital area into a throbbing, inflamed mass, and fever often spikes as infection takes hold. Hemorrhage can be fatal if not stemmed, sometimes by packing the wound with herbs, animal dung, or ash, which only exacerbates the sepsis. Survivors recount nights of unrelenting torment, with the pain so intense it induces vomiting, hallucinations, or loss of consciousness.

The aftermath is a lifetime of suffering: the scarred seal must often be cut open (deinfibulation) for intercourse or childbirth, reopening old wounds and risking further tearing, excessive bleeding, or even death during delivery. Menstrual blood pools behind the barrier, causing chronic infections and foul odors; urination becomes a drawn-out, burning process; and sexual activity turns into a source of dread, with friction against the rigid scar tissue feeling like sandpaper on raw skin. Psychological scars run deep, manifesting as PTSD, depression, or a profound sense of bodily violation.”

Again, this is the most brutal form of FGM. Presumably most readers know why FGM is performed. It is “cultural,” but the cultural reasons are often explicit. It’s done to preserve virginity for marriage, as in some cultures you have to be a proven virgin to be married. It’s also done to control women’s sexuality so they don’t experience too much (or any) sexual pleasure; presumably this keeps them from wanting sex.

At any rate, although I’m not implying that the authors above are justifying FGM, I think they are minimizing its harms by saying that it leads to bigotry against people from cultures that practice FGM, even when they’re immigrants.  Read the paper if you wish and see if you agree.  But for sure people must agree that FGM has to stop; it’s the medical equivalent of wearing burqas, but much, much worse. The WHO is doing what it can to stop the practice, but it’s still very common in some places.

Everyone, and not just feminists, should be aware of it and speak out against it at appropriate times.  No, we shouldn’t demonize, say, the Somalis in America just because FGM is common in Somalia.  But I think it does no good at all to try to change the words to “female genital modification.”

Somebody asked Grok about the frequency of FGM in the U.S. and I have put the answer below the fold Again, it is hard to estimate numbers or frequenies.

Click “Continue reading” to see what Grok says:

Continue reading ““Progressives” appear to whitewash female genital mutilation” →

Social Justice wrecks the Sierra Club

November 14, 2025 • 10:00 am

This happens over and over again. It happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It happened with the ACLU. It happened with the Audubon Society. And now it’s happening with the Sierra Club. What is happening? An organization with a narrowly defined but admirable mission cannot resist the ideological Zeitgeist, and embraces social justice precepts that are not universally accepted. The organization becomes riven with controversy, and it erodes, becoming damaged. (This also happened with Scientific American, remember?)

The NYT from a week ago tells us how this is happening to the Sierra Club, which has lost money and membership after deciding to branch off into Social Justice Warriorism. Read about it by clicking the headline below, or find the article archived here for free.

I’ll put the upshot under bold headings, which are mine. Indented bits come from the article:

Why the club was good. 

The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to protect the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, but it grew into a giant of American environmentalism.

It helped expand national parks, keep dams out of the Grand Canyon and establish Earth Day.

In 2016, the club was at the height of its success, leading what many in the green movement consider the most successful environmental campaign put on by anyone in the 21st century: “Beyond Coal.”

Its secret was focus, according to activists involved. The club put its energy behind the single, measurable goal of closing all of the country’s 500-plus carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants. Armed with more than $120 million from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, they used lawsuits, petitions and protests to convince regulators and utilities that coal plants were too dirty and expensive to keep operating.

The move to social justice:

During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.

. . .It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common.

The club hired Mr. Jealous, its first Black executive director, that year to stop that slide, but his tenure accelerated it as accusations of sexual harassment, bullying, and overspending piled up.

The club became one in a string of “resistance” groups from Mr. Trump’s first administration that arrived at his second already exhausted from liberal infighting.

“It’s almost like uprooting a sequoia and converting it into an ax handle,” said Aaron Mair, a former board president.

Things got worse:

At the same time, the club asked its supporters to agree with positions farther from the environmental causes that had attracted them in the first place.

It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.

The club even turned on its own founder, John Muir, with Mr. Brune saying the environmental icon had used “deeply harmful racist stereotypes” in his writings about Native Americans and Black people in the 1860s.

You  can see part of the language guide below and a link to the whole thing, which is simply ludicrous.

They even came down on Israel:

In 2022, a group of union members asked the Sierra Club to “follow [its] values of antiracism and justice” and cancel sightseeing trips it operated in Israel, in protest of the country’s treatment of Palestinians.

“Palestine is an environmental issue from our standpoint,” Erica Dodt, the president of the Progressive Workers’ Union, which includes Sierra Club employees, said in an interview. “People are a huge part of our environment.”

The club postponed the trips. But Sierra Club officials said the club heard a backlash from donors including Mr. Bloomberg, the major funder of “Beyond Coal” who also gave to humanitarian causes in Israel. His staff declined to comment. The Sierra Club said he is still a donor.

Within days, the Sierra Club reversed itself and announced more trips to Israel.

If Palestine is part of the Sierra Club’s remit, and that includes “people” because humans are “part of the environment,” then there is nothing that does not become part of the Club’s mission!

The outcome: the Club lost members and money. and membership fractured:

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.

And this year, as the Trump administration returned better organized and better prepared than in its first term, the Sierra Club was the opposite. While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.

Here’s the NYT chart showing the decline in “champions” (volunteer helpers or people the club endorses, but see below for the decline in membership), as well as the rise in expenses, which are now higher than donations:

They surveyed the members, who aren’t happy:

In late 2020, the club surveyed its dues-paying members, its most hard-core supporters. The members said they supported racial justice, but when asked to choose among priorities they ranked climate change first, and racism tied for last.

More than half of members also said they were worried that the club’s shift toward social justice “will detract from its core mission of protecting the environment” and alienate conservatives, according to a copy of the survey obtained by The New York Times.

Well, it already has detracted from its core mission, which is always the problem. Once again we see an organization flaunting its virtue when it should be institutionally neutral except for issues affecting its core mission. But it was not like that, and lost out.

Then culture began permeating the organization, with allegations of sexual misconduct arising. In response, the Club instituterd a system to “discipline its volunteers”, and some volunteers got investigated without even being told why.  The deficit continued to increase and they chose as Executive Director Ben Jealous, who ran the NAACP and “promised employees to make the Sierra Club ‘the most progressive and inclusive employer in the movement, if not the nation.'”.

That, of course, is the kiss of death. Jealous fired 10% of the staff but also hired several “longtime associated as high salaries,” something that smacks of nepotism. Two of those salaries were over $300,000, which is simply ridiculous for the Sierra Club. Its “champions” declined by 60%, and dues-paying members were down by 27% from 2021. Even Jealous himself was accused of sexual harassment, and left the organization:

Is the Sierra Club moving away from Social Justice and back to its core mission? Don’t be ridiculous. Since Jealous left, the Club has shown no signs of reverting to its focus on strictly environmental issue:

In recent weeks, supporters who clicked on the group’s website for “current campaigns” were presented with 131 petitions, some out of date, like calls to support clean-energy funding that Mr. Trump has already gutted, or to support a voting-rights bill that died in 2023.

Patrick Murphy, the club’s current board president, who has helped lead the group since 2020, said in an interview that he could not name any decision he regretted.

“I have a hard time pinpointing how I believe we should have made different choices,” Mr. Murphy said. “And I’m happy with where we are today.”

It’s amazing that in the face of the Sierra Club falling apart, Murphy sticks to his guns. Seriously, they should adopt an institutional neutrality policy, which I think would make the group hew to what it’s good at. But they won’t, and they’ll learn their lesson the hard way.

Finally, here’s a bit from Nellie Bowles’s latest TGIF in The Free Press. The Sierra Club has an Equity Language Guide!

My favorite part: The Sierra Club put out the Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide. It tells staffers to avoid words like lame. Fine. But it also tells them not to celebrate clean energy jobs unreservedly because fossil fuel jobs are more likely to be unionized, so maybe we’re pro-coal now. Maybe we’re sort of a coal lobbying shop, actually. The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide says not to use the words vibrant or hardworking because they have racial overtones (I’ve never heard that one. Seems kinda racist.). And then there’s this list of words to avoid, which, for an activist organization, is really hard. Especially when trigger itself is a trigger word, triggering them into a new dimension of triggerdom.

Imagine explaining this to the guy who lives in a cabin in Yellowstone and whose job is to check water levels in creeks.

Que sera, sera.

Our new book on ideological threats to science

July 25, 2025 • 8:15 am

By “our,” I mean a group of 39 essays (and more than 39 people) about how science is being corrupted by the Left.

Now I know what you’re gonna say: the 39 chapters in the book below (find it here on Amazon) deal exclusively with threats to science from the Left but, as we all know, at the moment the threats to science from the Right (aka, the Trump Administration) are far more serious. In the short run that may be the case, but in the long run, well, who knows, but the threats from the Left continue, and that’s for sure. So think of it as a bunch of scientists and other academics analyzing how our trade is being hurt by “progressives.” And, at the time we submitted our manuscripts to editor Lawrence Krauss (who added a nice introdution), Trump hadn’t yet started slicing federal grant money from “bad” universities (I see that Penn and Columbia have just caved).

Luana and I have reworked our Skeptical Inquirer piece, “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” for the book, but there are lots of new and exciting contributions, at least judging by the titles (I’ve been gone and haven’t read most of them).

One that I have read is the introductory piece by Richard Dawkins, a new 33=page essay called “Scientific truth stands above human feelings and politics.”  It’s really, really good. We have Alan “Hoaxer” Sokal writing on “How ideology threatens to corrupt science,” Sally Satel on “Social justice, MD: Medicine under threat,” Carole Hooven on “Why I left Harvard,” Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin on “A deafening silence: bioethics and gender-affirming health care,” Elizabeth Weiss on “Burying science under indigenous religion,” Nicholas Christakis on “Teaching inclusion in a divided world,” Steve Pinker on “A five-point plan to save universities from themselves,” and 31—count them, 31—other essays. If you want to see the state of the art in how progressives ruin science, this is your book. Buy it ($35 hardcover, $17 on Kindle) and curl up in bed with these essays and a glass of sherry.  But wait! There’s more! See below the picture.

The book comes out in only four days, so get yours now. I’m not saying this to sell books; I can’t even remember if we get any remuneration for our contributions, but I don’t care.

UPDATE: I’ve put screenshots of the Table of Contents below”

Krauss is also releasing daily podcasts in the same order as the book’s chapters (sadly, Luana and I didn’t record one).  Below is the first one (one hour) with Richard Dawkins discussing his chapter with Lawrence, and Niall Ferguson’s interview is also up (they may have skipped Alan Sokal as there are 20 podcasts from 31 essays). You can find all the podcasts here.

Although Dawkins is dismissed by a certain group of know-nothings as a “white old man” whose thoughts are irrelevant, his chapter (and the interview) show that he hasn’t missed a lick, even at 84. Would that I could be half that cogent at that age!

The table of contents:

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UPDATE: As a reader noted (and I predicted), the Great Benighted, which includes the Hateful “Friendly”  Atheist, has gone after the book before it was even issued.  I very strongly doubt that the HA even read the book before he went after it.  So, you know, ignorance.

Why criticize the Left?

September 6, 2024 • 11:00 am

If you read here, you’ll know that I spend more of my time calling out the excesses of the Left than of the Right. I’ve explained why, and it’s not because I’m a right-winger or am unaware of their program and, especially, of their deranged candidate for President.

But this time I’ll let Bari Weiss answer for me, in an extract below from a recent piece she wrote for The Free Press.  I’m not interested much in the fracas about Tucker Carlson, for too much else is happening in the world, but below is an extract from Weiss’s piece that mirrors my own sentiments. You can read the whole piece, if you wish, by clicking on the headline.

An excerpt:

If there is a criticism I’ve gotten over the past several years it’s that I pay too much attention—and apply too much scrutiny—to the excesses of the illiberal left at the expense of the illiberal right. Wasn’t I ignoring the elephant and allowing myself to get distracted by the gnat?

My response to that is twofold.

The first is that there is no shortage of writers, reporters, and outlets focusing on the dangers of the far right. I saw the far left as conspicuously overlooked by people who otherwise take a great interest in political extremism. And I understand why they were averting their gaze: The social cost of noticing this subject is very high. Given that the job description of a journalist is to observe the world, uncover things in the public interest, and then tell the plain truth about it, choosing topics where others fall silent seems wise to me. It still does.

The second is that I have been concerned for years now that the illiberal ideology that has become increasingly mainstream on the political left—one that makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project—would inspire the mirror ideology on the right.

And that is exactly where we find ourselves, with an illiberal left that defaces Churchill statues—and an illiberal right that defaces Churchill’s legacy. With a left that insists 1619 was the year of the true founding of America—and a right that suggests the Greatest Generation was something closer to genociders. With a left that sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—and a right that sympathizes with the original ones.

Nick Cohen on the embrace of Islamism by the “progressive” Left

October 30, 2023 • 12:30 pm

Nick Cohen wrote an article in the Spectator that’s paywalled for most of us, but thank Ceiling Cat he also published it on his Substack site, “Writing from London.”  It was originally called “Why the far Left supports Hamas“, but the title was changed when the piece moved to Substack. The original title was more accurate!

This is Cohen at his best, though I haven’t followed him regularly. If you do, subscribe to his site.

First, the observation:

It’s not often that Brits can say that the US is behind the UK. But in understanding the dynamic between the successors to the old socialist left and radical Islam, US thinkers have years of catching up to do. It is not as if American commentators are wrong or uninteresting, it is just that, unlike their counterparts in Europe, they have not begun to come to terms with the Islamisation of the worst strains of left-wing politics, and the wider consequences for the progressive cause.

Moderates in the US  were pushed into taking a stand after the glorification of murder at a demonstration organised by the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America on 8 October. Mark that date. I hope when historians look back on these times they will notice that in the US and across Europe, the white far left and radical Islamists were organsising rallies to celebrate the attack on Israel.  No  Israeli retaliation had taken place on 8 October. The blood of the dead was not even dry,  Demonstrators were not protesting against an Israeli assault on Gaza city but in favour of the murder of Jewish civilians.

I hadn’t realize that many demonstrations in favor of Palestine preceded any Israeli retaliation, and thus were really either demonstrations of favor of Hamas and what it did, or anticipatory demonstrations damning Israel for what it might do. Given the timing, the obvious celebration of some of them, and my unfamiliarity with any anticipatory demonstrations, you can’t discount a motivation the these protests celebrated the killing of Jews.

I won’t reproduce Cohen’s whole analysis of “Why the far Left supports Hamas” (the original title), but here are a few trenchant paragraphs. His main idea is that Hamas (and Palestine) provides the Far Left with a cause it needs: a cause so pressing that it demands war and killing. Bolding below is mine:

The most imperialist country in the world is Russia, but the far left cannot oppose it  because Putin  is anti-western, and that is all that matters to them. Most people think that climate change won’t bring a radical reordering of society — “we’re just going to build some solar panels and electric cars and stuff,” as Smith puts it. There doesn’t seem much mileage in shouting about neo-liberalism given that it died in the 2008 crash.

In these circumstances, the Palestinian cause offers a way out of end-of-history ennui. Israel could be described as a colonial state, albeit one founded by refugees fleeing fascism. The struggle against it appeared to fit  a classic pattern.

And, as Smith nicely emphasizes, by supporting Hamas, the far left could draw a dividing between itself and the rest of the US progressive movement. A useful tactic because, if you are running a political or religious sect ,you need your members  to believe in something that most people will regard as insane: supporting the mass murder of Israeli teenagers, hailing your church’s leader as God’s chosen, insisting that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump. Sect members not only prove their  loyalty to their leaders. [sic] Crucially, they cut themselves off from friends, family and acquaintances,  who in normal circumstances might moderate their thinking and point out that the slogan “from the river to sea” means the ethnic cleansing of every Jew living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, as Hamas has just proved in the most brutal fashion imaginable.

. . . You can mock and denounce the far left as much as you like, and I have done my fair share of both. But the connection to ultra-reactionary regimes and movements did not bother Labour party members who voted for Corbyn to be their leader – twice!  You can blame Labour members as loudly as you like, and I have done my fair share of that too. But the fact remains that if you want to support the Palestinian cause, you have to accept at some level that the most dynamic anti-Zionist force is Hamas not one of the dying secular and socialist parties, and work out how to deal with that uncomfortable fact.

It is not, therefore, just sinister and stupid far-left sects who are caught in a conflict of principles. Unless they are very careful many progressives will find themselves ignoring the victims of Hamas crimes against humanity as Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan, Charles Dance and 2000 other artists did when they signed a petition condemning Israel that did not even mention the slaughter by Hamas that started the war.

Note that the UN did that, too, as you saw in the previous post. Cohen also digs up an old quote from Hitchens:

The far left copes with radical Islam by celebrating Hamas. At times it seems many progressive people cope with radical Islam by pretending it does not exist. They cannot look at the Hamas founding charter and see its Nazi-era conspiracy theories about Jews or examine how it enforces a reactionary dictatorship on the people of Gaza. They just talk as if it is not there.

Writing in 2008, the ex-Marxist Christopher Hitchens said that “The most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

In the end, Cohen says “the radical Islamist movement. . . is visibly dying” and suggests that perhaps Palestine will one day “be represented by people you need not recoil from in disgust.” One can hope. . .