A thinking liberal spanks the Democrats

February 25, 2019 • 12:00 pm

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything that Fareed Zakaria ever said that I disagreed with, and I can’t think of another liberal journalist of whom I can say that. (Granted, I haven’t heard more than a fraction of what he’s said!)

At any rate, in his latest Washington Post piece he goes after the Democrats, including the mystifyingly popular Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for prizing emotions over facts and proposing programs that have no realistic chance of being enacted. It’s not that he opposes the sentiments underlying the proposals, for he agrees with them, as do I (universal healthcare, higher taxes, and so on); it’s just that he has more sensible alternatives.

One excerpt:

In their zeal to match the sweeping rhetoric of right-wing populism, Democrats are spinning out dramatic proposals in which facts are sometimes misrepresented, the numbers occasionally don’t add up, and emotional appeal tends to trump actual policy analysis.

. . .Universal health care is an important moral and political goal. But the U.S. system is insanely complex, and getting from here to single-payer would probably be so disruptive and expensive that it’s not going to happen. There is a path to universal coverage that is simpler: Switzerland has one of the best health-care systems in the world, and it’s essentially Obamacare with a real mandate. No one on the left is talking about such a model, likely because it feels too much like those incremental policies of the past.

Or consider the tax proposals being tossed around on the left, including a wealth tax championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). I understand the appeal of tapping into those vast accumulations of billionaire loot. But there is a reason nine of the 12 European countries that instituted similar taxes have repealed them in the last 25 years. They massively distort economic activity, often incentivizing people to hide assets, devalue them and create dummy corporations. Faced with a wealth tax, most rich people would likely value and transfer assets the questionable way that Fred Trump did in passing his fortune on to his children.

There are smarter, better ways to address inequality — raise the capital gains tax to the same level as income taxes; increase the estate tax; and get rid of the massive loopholes that make the U.S. tax code one of the most complex and corrupt in the world. But again, this is less stirring stuff than burning the billionaires.

Or, if you don’t want to read the piece, most of Zakaria’s statements are in the video below:

Here Ocasio-Cortez takes full credit for the “Green New Deal”, which is good in principle but suffers precisely from what Zakaria pinpoints above. She then proclaims that until someone else produces a better Green New Deal, “I’m the boss!” Sorry, but she works for the American people, though she doesn’t seem to have realized that. She is the very model of a modern Authoritarian Leftist.

Goff responds to my critique of “religious fictionalism”

February 25, 2019 • 10:15 am

I recently wrote a critique of philosopher Philip Goff’s TLS article on “religious fictionalism”, his idea that all of us, including atheists, might benefit from becoming religious fictionalists, embracing a practice that Goff describes as follows:

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction.

Goff didn’t just say that we should forgather in lovely churchlike buildings and commune in a non-believing way, but we should also engage in religious activities like prayer (though he didn’t say to whom we should pray):

While many atheists will no doubt see the benefit of shared traditions, they may find it hard to see the point of prayer and worship. In response, the fictionalist will point out that we are not cold-blooded creatures of reason motivated purely by an accurate understanding of the world around us. Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship.

He also argued that religious fictionalism was the mainstream trend in theology, with no literal belief in the truth statements of, say, Christianity, until the sixteenth century (here he relies on the ever-obscurantist Karen Armstrong).

Now, irked by my critique, Goff has responded on his own website Conscience and Consciousness; click on the article below:

Here Goff walks back his earlier claims, admitting that yes, fictionalism may not have been the dominant strain of even ancient theology, but that some theologians were semi-fictionalists. He then gives up that claim entirely and argues that his article was really about how adhering to religious fictionalism could make our society better. To wit:

The final move in [Jerry’s] post is to decisively reject the idea that fictionalism would or could be a good thing. Jerry says:

“Goff’s whole argument hinges on the fact that worshiping God and professing belief gives you a sense of community that is inaccessible by any other route.”

In fact, I didn’t say this and I don’t think it. The humanist Philip Kitcher, in his excellent book Life After Faith (which I reviewed for TLS, accessible here), agrees with me that there are many crucial social roles religion has played historically, such as binding the community together and promoting positive social action. However, after a careful discussion of what he calls ‘refined religion’ (something like what I call ‘semi-fictionalism) he ends up arguing that humanists should work to develop alternative structures and institutions that could play the same role. I think that’s a great idea and I honestly wish him well. But it’s not an either/or. The fact remains that secular humanism has not managed to produce institutions that bring ordinary people from all socioeconomic backgrounds together for weekly meetings, celebrating rites of passages, and marking the changes of the year. And the advantage of reinterpreting religion rather than starting again is that you get to keep the traditions, the beautiful buildings, and the structures and resources of a way of life stretching back thousands of years. I understand the objections to the beliefs of religion, but I find it hard to understand the concern if some people (such as myself) want to maintain the traditions whilst dispensing with some or all the beliefs.

Of course Goff said what he denies saying. As you can see above, he said this: “Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship”. He’s arguing for professing belief and worshiping God, even if the beliefs you profess are fictions. 

But let’s leave that quibbling aside. The question is whether gathering together in a group and participating in quasi-religious activities like praying and worshiping a God in which you don’t believe (after all, we all know God doesn’t exist, right?), is a good way to satisfy the human need for cohesion. Goff argues that “secular humanism has not managed to produce institutions that bring ordinary people from all socioeconomic backgrounds together for weekly meetings, celebrating rites of passages, and marking the changes of the year.”

Well first of all, do we really need weekly meetings of people? They don’t have them in Denmark, Sweden, or Germany, and yet these countries seem pretty sound. People have found other ways to cohere. As for celebrating rites of passage and marking changes of the year,” nonbelievers have found ways to do that, too. Is a secular wedding inferior to a religious one, or is the nonbelieving new couple somehow unsatisfied? And, of course, other rites of passage, like college graduation, don’t even involve or require gods. Does having a priest at a funeral, telling us that the deceased is with god, make that a more satisfying funeral?

But what about the religious buildings, the stained glass, the incense? Can’t we have those? Yes, of course; I bow to nobody in my admiration of the great cathedrals of Europe and the beautiful mosques of the Middle East. We can keep these as architectural monuments, or allow the faithful to maintain them, without having to use them as stone vessels to contain a bogus worship. These buildings are relics of a time when humanity in its infancy needed God, and needed these buildings to assure them that there was a God and an afterlife. But we can still admire them without signing on to the numinous feelings that brought them forth.

But numinous feelings are what Goff really wants to maintain, as he notes in another essay on his site, “Coming out as a liberal Christian“. Here Goff says that he doesn’t believe in the supernatural or the whole Jesus myth, and so on, but finds it hard to say what he really does believe in. Why does he consider himself a liberal Christian? His answer is this:

My positive creed is a little harder to state. I believe in what William James called ‘the More’; what Plato called ‘the Form of the Good’. That is to say, I believe that we are aware, in our experience of beauty and our deepest moral experiences, of something real, of great value, which goes beyond the reality which empirical science makes known to us. We are aware in these experiences of a certain depth and profundity to reality. I take religion to be a system of metaphor-involving, institutionalised practices, aimed at helping individuals and communities to live in greater awareness of this ineffable aspect of reality.

So it’s more than just an emotion, it’s a reality that eludes empirical science. (This connects with Goff’s “panpsychism,” which I mention below.)  Well, yes, sometimes even atheists feel part of something bigger than themselves, but what’s bigger is the immensity and awesomeness of the cosmos: stuff that is empirical reality and can be understood by science. Perhaps we’re not yet at the stage where we can understand the physical basis of that awe, but I am not convinced that it’s because we apprehend that there’s Something Out There that is real but “ineffable.”

At the end of his response, Goff does some psychologizing, just as Chris Mooney used to do. He must have hit a nerve if I was so irritated, right?. Here’s what Goff said:

This brings me to the final question I would like here to consider: Why did my article irritate Jerry so much? Why would you want to shut down so hastily the possibility of something that has the potential to bind communities together and direct their energies to a common ethical goal? The only sense I can make of this is that he likes the great Science V Religion war to be black and white and is irked by the introduction of shades of grey. Ideologies, whether communism or scientism or religious fundamentalism, bring a comforting certainty that allows us to avoid the messy complexities of the real world. If only life were so simple.

Trump and Kim Jong-un meet again

February 25, 2019 • 8:45 am

The good that the U.S. is trying to do in Venezuela, sending aid to the beleaguered and hungry populace —aid that never gets there— and supporting the self-declared president Juan Guaido instead of the nefarious dictator Maduro (Democrats: where is your support for Guaido?), is being offset by our “President’s” meeting this week with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi.

Trump somehow thinks that he’s going to “reform” North Korea, perhaps getting it to ditch its nuclear program.  But as I’ve written before (here and here), Trump is completely deluded. Nukes are what the DPRK has as its one bargaining chip, and eventually, if they keep developing them, they’ll be able to deliver nuclear bombs to the U.S.

Yes, it would be suicidal for Kim Jong-un to use them, but he’d take South Korea with him. Still, a North Korea without nukes is a nation without teeth. As I predicted, the DPRK will keep advancing its weapons program, and I predict that they’ll keep developing it up to the point where they either run out of money or, more likely, become a full-fledged nuclear power with long-distance missiles that can hit the U.S. There is no incentive for them to stop their progress, nor to delay their real aim of united both Koreas under DPRK leadership with the U.S. out of the picture.

Trump is the worst person to negotiate here, as he’s a narcissist with an inflated opinion of his abilities and a severe underestimate of Kim Jong-un’s smarts (and aims). And Trump seems to actually like Kim Jong-un. Bad mistake!

Should we even be negotiating? I don’t think so—not so long as we know that nothing will stop the DPRK’s development of nuclear weapons. It’s a hard situation, for our only alternative—economically squeezing the North—will ultimately hurt its people even more than they are already. But that’s all we can do. What we (but apparently not Trump) know is that Kim Jong-un will not give away his most precious resource, his nuclear weapons, and that North Korea has reneged on such agreements several times before.

I quake when I think what Trump will say to the dictator when they’re alone in a room in Hanoi. As NBC News reports, noting Trump’s unwarranted liking for the dictator:

And that’s why U.S intelligence officials are increasingly concerned about Trump’s upcoming second meeting with Kim in Vietnam — as North Korea has CONTINUED developing its nuclear arsenal after the first summit, NBC’s Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube report.

“‘One of the worst possible outcomes is he makes some crazy deal pledging to withdraw U.S. troops for a vague promise of denuclearization,’ said one former senior U.S. official.”

More: “Among the possible incentives the U.S. could offer North Korea during the summit is to establish diplomatic interests sections, one in Pyongyang and one in Washington, D.C., according to current and former U.S. officials.”

And: “The U.S. could also offer to formally end the war on the Korean Peninsula, more than six decades after North Korea and the United Nations Command signed the 1953 Armistice Agreement.”

Why does this worry intelligence officials?

As Lee and Kube write, some officials are concerned that the above outcomes could “amount to a de facto U.S. recognition of North Korea as a nuclear state.”

And that could happen even without significant concessions from Kim.

It all underscores the question: Why does Trump assail authoritarian leaders in some countries (Venezuela) and praise them in others (North Korea)?

I agree that if any kind of deal is struck, Trump will be the clear loser. As for the final question about Maduro versus Kim Jong-un, I have no answer.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos (and videos)

February 25, 2019 • 7:30 am

It’s been a while since we’ve had photos from Jamie Blilie, the 14-year-old son of James Blilie, but today we have several nice photos—as well as some videos. His dad’s notes are indented, and the first photo needs an ID.

Here are a few more photos from my 14-year old son Jamie. This is some kind of a shield bug (I think a true bug) from last fall.

 

Here is a mink (Neovison vison) hunting in our pond from last November.

Jamie’s video of the mink:

This is a common muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) foraging in our neighbor’s yard.

We saw him cross a majorroad, run down our residential street, and then climb our huge snowbank to access an area where our neighbor runs his snow thrower.  The muskrat is eating the green(ish) grass and maybe the roots churned up by the snow thrower.

Here’s Jamie’s video of that muskrat. Look at those feet!

These are all shot with Jamie’s Canon Powershot SX530 HS superzoom camera. At Christmas I gave him an Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mirrorless camera and several lenses. Some images from this gear will begin to show up.  He’s developing a good eye for and interest in landscape photos.  I am including one here:  The Mississippi River at Minneapolis.

I have also included a photo of the snow at our house in Minnesota.  I’m tired of winter!

Last but not least, a cool video.

A Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) on the suet log feeder I made, hanging off our back deck. There are a mated pair living in the open space across the street and we see both of them several times a day.  Spectacular!

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 25, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday again, February 25, 2019.  It’s also National Chocolate Covered Peanuts Day, and meh. But yay!—it’s Meher Baba’s birthday (he was born on February 25, 1894).  Don’t worry—be happy! He will help you!

He isn’t helping us with the weather in Chicago, though, as it has gotten cold again: it was 7° F (-14° C) when I walked to work a short while ago.  While the weather was mild yesterday (close to the freezing point), the wind was dire: up to 60 mph during the day, and blowing my car around on the road. I could barely walk on the streets at some times. Here’s PROOF (h/t Grania and Matthew, who both found this):

Note to readers: Posting will be light until Sunday as I have visitors most of this week as well as a conciliatory lunch with Scott Aaronson, whose views I criticized on this site but who was nice about it and suggested that we chat when he next came to Chicago. Bear with me; perhaps you can read the science posts of last week.

I didn’t watch the Oscars last night (in years past I did, but they’re boring and too long), nor did I (to my eternal shame) see any of the nominated movies. I note only that The Woke are upset that “Green Book” won the Oscar for best picture. Here’s HuffPo’s huffy take (click on screenshot):

Not much happened on this day in history. On February 25, Samuel Colt was given a U.S patent on his famous Colt revolver. And here’s a new one on me: on this day in 1866, according to Wikipedia, “Miners in Calaveras County, California, discover what is now called the Calaveras Skull – human remains that supposedly indicated that man, mastodons, and elephants had co-existed.” Well, like Piltdown Man, it was a hoax, with the skull only about 1,000 years old.

On this day in 1919, Oregon became the first U.S. state to tax gasoline: one cent per gallon.  On February 25, 1932, Hitler obtained German citizenship, enabling him to run for Reichspräsident in the same year. He lost to Hindenburg, but became well known to the German people.

On February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, gave a speech denouncing the “cult of personality” that had arisen around Joseph Stalin. The speech was called On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, and Wikipedia notes:

The speech was shocking in its day. There are reports that the audience reacted with applause and laughter at several points.There are also reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks, and others later committed suicide. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, bred on the panegyrics and permanent praise of the “genius” of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin’s homeland, where the days of protests and rioting ended with the Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. In the West, the speech politically devastated the organised left; the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its publication

On this day in 1986, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos fled the country after ruling it for two decades, and Corazon Aquino took over as the nation’s first woman president.  Finally, on this day in 1994, a Jewish man, Baruch Goldstein, committed an act of terrorism, using an automatic weapon to fire on Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in the city of Hebron. After he killed 29 and wounded 125, he was beaten to death by those who survived. Some misguided people still hold him up as a Jewish icon, but he was just a murdering thug.

Notables born on this day include Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841), Karl May (1842), Enrico Caruso (1873), Meher Baba (1894, see above), Zeppo Marx (1901), Millicent Fenwick (1910), Anthony Burgess (1917), Sun Myung Moon (1920), George Harrison (1943), Téa Leoni (1966), Nancy O’Dell (1967), and Chelsea Handler (1975).

Those who died on February 25 include Paul Reuter (1899), Bugs Moran (1957), Mark Rothko (1970), Elijah Muhammad (1975), Tennessee Williams (1983), Glenn Seaborg (1999, Nobel Laureate), and Don Bradman (2001, the greatest cricket batsman of all time). Here’s part 1 of a video biography of the great Bradman:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s dialogue is a bit opaque. Malgorzata explains: “Hili, like her servants, has an aversion to philosophy. She happened to read a Wikipedia entry and decided that the concept of ‘absolute’ might be useful.”

Hili: I’ve achieved an absolute.
A: What of?
Hili: Skepticism.
In Polish:
Hili: Osiągnęłam absolut.
Ja: Czego?
Hili: Sceptycyzmu.

Here’s a swell cat cartoon from reader Merilee: the Cat Hall of Fame:

A tweet with a duck:

Reader Barry interprets this as affection from the owl, and why the hell not?

Tweets from Grania, with the first being a TRUEFACT:

A majestic lynx in the snow (note that it’s a video):

The subtitles suggest that the baitballs, like the one shown below, are maladaptive to the schooling fish. But overall, considering the life cycle of the fish, I doubt it. If they risked their lives more by tightly schooling this way, then the behavior would disappear. Of course the baitball may be a maladaptive byproduct of schooling that evolved under other circumstances, but I don’t think so.

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1094178341576306688

A rare example of a cat being helpful. (“GOAT” = “greatest of all time”):

Tweets from Matthew. Does this first one show self-awareness?

Matthew says “Watch the whole video [below] to be convinced.” I am! This is the first case of mimicry I know of in which an organism evolves to look like a feather.

Whole video of the above:

And this gets Tweet of the Week: a night heron fishing using bait. It’s amazing how he retrieves the bait when the fish are too big. I can’t interpret this in any way other than it’s a bird who’s learned to fish with bait.

 

A grammar question

February 24, 2019 • 8:16 pm

So I was reading a book this evening that mentioned a Canadian hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Yes, I know that team, and always thought the name sounded curious, but then I thought, “Why isn’t it Maple Leaves?” After all, the plural of “leaf” is “leaves”.

Now you might say that the word “Leafs” is not a plural, but simply the name of the team. But that doesn’t make sense either, as there is no noun “leafs.” And suppose the team was named after an appropriate waterfowl, the Canada Goose. Would they call the team “The Canada Gooses”? No, they’d call it the “Canada Geese“.

Now I’m sure there’s an explanation for this, and that a Canadian reader will school me. But I’m still puzzled.

This is not right

Andrew Sullivan’s weekly trifecta. Part 2: Transgenderism in athletics and sexual attraction

February 24, 2019 • 2:15 pm

The second issue that Andrew Sullivan takes up in his New York Magazine column this week is that of transgender athletes and transphobia. The inspiration for his piece was the actions of Martina Navatilova, an openly gay ex-athlete who was a friend of the LGBTQ community. That is, until she recently declared that it was unfair in some instances for transwomen to compete in sports against biological women. That, as you know, is enough to brand someone as transphobic. The Guardian reports what happened to Navatilova:

The tennis player and gay rights campaigner first drew criticism from equalities activists and trans athletes when she tweeted in December: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”

Writing in the Sunday Times, Navratilova said she had subsequently promised to keep quiet on the subject until she had done some research on it. “Well, I’ve now done that and, if anything, my views have strengthened,” she wrote.

“To put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organisation is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires.

“It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.”

Her comments attracted criticism across social media. “We’re pretty devastated to discover that Martina Navratilova is transphobic,” tweeted the rights group Trans Actual. “If trans women had an advantage in sport, why aren’t trans women winning gold medals left, right and centre?”

But I think Navratoliva has a point, for the issue is not at all clearcut. Some organizations, like the Olympics, require specific hormone titers for trans women to compete in women’s events, while other just require self-identification. Given the physical differences in upperbody strength and muscularity between biological men and women, self-identification clearly creates an unfair situation. And I’m not even sure that a specified hormone level is enough to level the playing field, for muscularity of your youth doesn’t just go away.

I’ve written about this before (see here and here), and, as always, I remain conflicted. Clearly transgender people should be able to participate in athletics, but what are good criteria for competing in “men’s” and “women’s” events?  Should there be a third category: “transgender women’s sports”? I don’t know.  But I do believe that simple self-identification that conflicts with biological sex is not sufficient to allow you to compete in a gendered event. In 2018 in a Connecticut state high school track meet, both first and second places in the women’s 100-meter dash went to transgender women (see the video here). As I wrote at the time:

 In Connecticut, where first and second place went to transgender women in the race above, “self identification” is the rule, so you can be a fully biological male, not having transitioned in any way, and enter a race if you say you identify as a women. Other states are more stringent: Texas, for instance, insists that you compete as the gender given on your birth certificate.

Both seem problematic.  Surely there is something unfair about the above: in which transgender women who are physically men, by virtue of greater strength, clean up in a women’s athletic event by “self-identifying” as women. That may well be true and not just a ploy, but the problem is not psychology but physicality. A liberal response would be “the civil rights of gender self-identification outweighs the disappointment of non-transgender losers.” But that answer doesn’t satisfy me. The unfairness is deep and pervasive, and “self-identification” seems a dubious solution.

And I raised some difficult questions:

  • Should there be any testing of athletes, or should they simply be allowed to compete based on self-identification of gender? (This would, of course, mostly affect women’s sports; some say it would destroy women’s sports.)
  • If not, how many categories of competition do we want? The traditional men’s and women’s sports, or an intermediate category? (The latter would, of course, cause huge problems.)
  • If we don’t accept self-identification and want to retain traditional “men’s” and “women’s” sports, how do we determine the category in which an athlete belongs?
  • If the identification is based on hormones, can we set limits, as the IOC has done, to demarcate the classes? If we don’t use hormones, how do we classify?

As transgenderism becomes more common in Western society—and it will—the issue of how it should be treated in sports will become more important. Of course, that’s a different issue from how transgender people should be treated in society, for all decent-thinking people agree that they should be treated the same as everyone else.  But there’s that annoying thing about biological difference—most prominently manifested as upper-body strength—that cannot be waved away as simply a “social construct.”

These questions remain, and Sullivan agrees that they’re not simple:

But this is the current orthodoxy according to the widely read digital-media publisher PinkNews: “Trans women are women. So trans women’s bodies are women’s bodies. So trans women’s penises are women’s penises.” Um. “Regardless [of] the biological makeup of the trans woman — she remains a woman with her biology, therefore defining her as a biological woman,” said Pose star Indya Moore. In pursuit of this vision, the LGBTQIA++ movement is rallying around the new Minnesota powerlifting state champion, a recently transitioned trans woman, who — somehow —managed to crush her nearest biological female rivals on her first attempt.

If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt. A trans woman should, in my view, be treated exactly as a woman — unless, as in this case, it clashes with biological reality. There aren’t many contexts in which this really counts, but sports is one of them. Yes, it sucks. But denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people. And note that if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.

This is not going to go away, for sports is the one area—and the only one I can think of—where it’s problematic to accept someone’s self-designated gender identity. If you have a solution, by all means offer it in the comments.

But Sullivan, who will clearly be labeled a transphobe (so far I’ve avoided the label), does draw a firm line at one issue: he will not let transgender people tell him that he should be sleeping with transgender men, and he’s a transphobe if he won’t. There’s something deeply offensive about people telling you whom you should be attracted to and copulating with when that attraction is largely based on biology. Perhaps some people can overcome it, or even enjoy it, but if you can’t you shouldn’t be demonized. As Sullivan says, and I agree with him:

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try: “Maybe Sullivan … would give [a handsome trans man with a vagina who uses a dildo as a penis] a toss in the hay and next day, be singing a different tune about category woman/girl >>> category man/boy persons’ capacities to uphold and expand the experiences and meanings of homosex.” Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

But this is how deep the ideology runs. It wants to control not only the public discourse, and language, and rig sports contests, but also insinuate itself into the most intimate areas of an individual’s sex life. Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

The last paragraph is powerful. Yes, perhaps in some cases sexual desire—or the lack of it—is based on bigotry. But I don’t think that’s generally true. Sue Hyde and her like-minded ideologues should leave Sullivan’s sex life alone.