Thread by @EveKeneinan

“Sexual orientation” is real is the same way the “gender wage gap” is real.

It is something, but not at all the kind of thing most people think it is, and those with an agenda say it is.

This will come back to bite us because there is absolutely nothing in principle to prevent the extension of the concept of “sexual orientation” as common misunderstood to such phenomena as pedophilia.

This is already happening.

The argument is simple:

1 Sexual orientation is a kind of in-born natural characteristic than can be analogized to race or sex, sufficiently to demarcate classes deserving of civil rights recognition.
2 Pedophilia is a sexual orientation.
3 Therefore ________________________.

The problem there is that race and sex themselves, the two most “obvious” civil rights datapoints are not analogous.

Race clearly has a biological-genetic basis, but it’s loose cluster phenomenon. Humanity spread out and diversified, with continual crossbreeding at the borders of the groups, and so we get something like “human genetic space,” which is a continuum in which you’ll see clusters.

When people want to deny “race realism,” they sound like idiots if they mean “what we call race has nothing to do with genetics.”

What the PROBABLY mean is that “what we call ‘races’ do not have different NATURES,” which is true.

Genes mix. Remember the young woman whose video about her DNA test went viral? She was a light skinned African American woman, and SO interested in her African ancestry she took a DNA test SPECIFICALLY aimed at black Americans—aaaand surprise, she was mostly of European descent.

"According to a study released in 2014 which looked at the genetic make-up of Americans, the average ethnicity estimate for African Americans is 73.2% African, 24.0% European, and 0.8% Native American."
averagehttps://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5

So races, while rooted in genetics, are not very distinct categories. No can can really say how many “races” there even are. Because you can carve up human genetic space in various ways.

Racism is not only morally wrong, but also conceptually wrong.

Sexes, however, are dimorphic, a true natural binary. “Intersex” persons are men or women who had a developmental error. They aren’t some kind of “other sex.”

The two sexes exist around two different natural “poles.” I put it this way because here too there is OVERLAP of TRAITS.

So if you compare men and women, you are going to get a lot of things that look like this.

Men are MORE VARIABLE than women in many traits. That’s important to know.

But you’ll also get a lot of results that look like this:

And sometimes you’ll get results that look like THIS.

(This is true of upper body strength, by the way, and the reason WHY it isn’t really fair for trans women to compete with biological women.)

As you can see from that one, there are SOME women who are stronger than SOME men, but the AVERAGE man is stronger than the STRONGEST woman.

Racism is evil. I condemn in unequivocally.

BUT I’m an Aristotelian ethicist, so I know that it is human nature to fall into an OVERCORRECTION ERROR, and flip to the other side of an error with an opposite error.

Let’s take some simple examples from Aristotle:

It’s a vice to be a coward or a wastrel (with your money).

The virtues are means, courage and proper spending.

The overcorrection errors would be recklessness and being a miser.

Racism is an evil, a vice.

Not being racist in the virtue.

Being “progressively anti-racist” is the overcorrection error, also an evil/vice.

I’m with John McWhorter on this point:

https://twitter.com/johnhmcwhorter/status/1076900752927453190?lang=en

READ THIS PLEASE: archive.is/NIBA3

And watch this:

To repeat:

1 Racism is evil, a vice.
2 Militant Anti-racism is also a vice, stemming from an overcorrection error directed against the vice of racism.
3 The mean is the virtue, which is just not being a racist.

You see this Overcorrection Error EVERYWHERE in human nature.

The Victorians were extremely prudish and “sexually repressed” (Freud was junk science, but he taught us all to think about sex in a junk-scientific way).

So what did we do? We OVERCORRECTED with promiscuity.

In the (sometimes) well-meaning question for “social justice,” we have treated the categories of “race” and “sex” to be THE SAME KIND of category, or at least HIGHLY SIMILAR or ANALOGOUS.

But they aren’t. They are very different kinds of categories.

“Race” is NOT the same kind of thing as “sex” which NOT the same kind of thing as “sexual orientation” which is NOT the same kind of thing as “gender identity”.

We KNOW this on one level, but Intersectionality has to DENY this.

Question:

What is 60 kilometers added to 12 hours?

Answer:

Nothing. You can’t add distance to temporal duration. THEY AREN’T THE SAME KIND OF THING.

But “being black” is just like “being a woman” is just like “being attracted to (some) members of the same sex” is just like “having psychological dissonance with their own biological sex”.

Right?

Not really.

If they were the same, we shouldn’t have any problem with e.g. transracialism.

Why SHOULDN’T dysphoria with one’s race be just as valid an “identity” as dysphoria with one’s biological sex?

They are the same kind of Intersectional category, right?

Remember the case of the young feminist philosopher who published a paper arguing that MOST of the arguments in favor of transgenderism work, with modification, for transracialism?

She was SAVAGED.

It’s was the most disgraceful event in professional philosophy in a long time.

Feminists disgraced philosophy. I’m so shocked.

ere’s Wikipedia’s summary of the event: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_t…

Nora Berenstain, of the University of Tennessee was the most egregious actor in the affair.

Here’s her Facebook screed:

The Absolute State of Professional Philosophy, ladies and gentlemen.

So, yes, it’s Twitter and this thread is a bit of a ramble more than a coherent, step by step case, but the bottom lines here are:

1 when you overcorrect an evil, like racism, you get another evil, like militant anti-racism (which creates racism since it needs it to “fight” it),

2 the various “Intersectionality” categories don’t actual intersect, no more than space can intersect with time or mass.

Race ≠ Sex ≠ “Sexual Orientation” ≠ “Gender Identity” ≠ Religion ≠ Political Worldview etc. etc. etc.

They aren’t even closely ANALOGOUS.

An obvious corollary of this is that people who have moral objections to same-sex activities—which note, is not the same as “hating” people with same-sex attractions—ARE NOT analogous to RACISTS.

They are not BIGOTS per se, any more than anti-pedophiles are “bigots."

Although, of course, the new line the “Progressive" Far Left is pushing is that being anti-pedophilia IS in fact just BIGOTRY.

We’re not buying it yet, but they’ll keep pushing and pushing.

The arguments are all already in place:

“It’s a sexual orientation. How can you condemn 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩? They were ‘born that way’! We have a moral obligation to let pedoph … ‘Minor Attracted Persons’ be ‘who they are’! How can you be such a 𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙧, you 𝙥𝙚𝙙𝙤𝙥𝙝𝙤𝙗𝙚?”

etc.