The Impossible Achievement

U.S. Women's Soccer has accomplished the impossible. They have made the majority of red-blooded Americans cheer for a women's soccer team.

It was the Canadian soccer team, but still...

Come Thursday, when the US Women's Soccer team goes to play for the Bronze, Americans will proudly cheer on the Australian team.

One cannot diminish the massive impact of what U.S. Women's Soccer has done.  Virtually any sports team representing their country would have the support of the majority of their country, so the fact that they got nearly everyone to cheer their failure truly is an achievement.

Then again, one can hardly say this was a "sports team representing their country".  That's why I can't just say, "When the US goes to play for the Bronze." Because they do not represent our country. They represent themselves.  

Perhaps that's why the country didn't support them in return.

Rapinoe famously went on a crusade a mere four years ago to eject Jaelene Hinkle from the team because Hinkle is an evangelical who refused to play in a scrimmage after U.S. Soccer required players to wear a rainbow jersey in it. That makes it all the more delightful that Rapinoe just lost to a Canadian team that has a transgender player on it.

Megan Rapinoe once famously yelled, "I deserve this!"

Yes.  Yes you do.

COVID-19 talking points

Staying Connected While Staying In

For the second time I got this Facebook notification:

Staying Connected While Staying In

People on Facebook are showing how they're helping to slow the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19). Add a frame to your profile picture to increase awareness.

As a nonconformist who rejects the policy, the propaganda, and the social coercion, I decline. 

Red China virus

A kerfuffle has arisen over what to call the virus. I've been calling it the Coronavirus because it's a neutral designation, and one of the first quasi-official designations. If you want to be understood, you generally go with common, recognizable designations. That label has been popularized, and I have no overriding reason not to use it.

More pedantic is COVID-19. Trump has taken to calling it the Chinese virus to shine attention on the regime.  

I'd avoid that designation because it's too generic. However, there's nothing new about naming a disease in association with a particular region of origin, viz. German measles, Spanish influenza, Ebola, West Nile virus, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Cf. https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/13/17-diseases-named-after-places-or-people/

Some people call it the Wuhan virus, which is more accurate but obscure, unless you're a geography buff. 

If I wanted to use an alternate designation, I'd dub it the Red China virus (or Chinese gov't virus) due to the extensive complicity of the Communist regime in contributing this disaster. However, "Red China" has Cold War connotations that will be lost on anyone younger than a Baby Boomer.  

Can Men Speak on Abortion?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uInK5r1Y95A

Who's harming homosexuals?

It's hard to think of anything which has done as much harm to homosexuals as religion. #LGBT #atheism #religion

— Secular Outpost (@SecularOutpost) August 26, 2019

Actually, that's easy. By far the greatest harm to homosexuals is the harm they inflict on themselves and each other by a medically and psychologically self-destructive lifestyle. The homosexual lifestyle is suicidal to the homosexual and homicidal to his boyfriends. 

Red flag laws

https://www.thediplomad.com/2019/08/toxic-culture-and-red-flags.html

Let's ban everything!

https://armedacademic.org/2019/08/05/priorities/

"I'm sorry"

Not gay enough

Evidently, presidential hopeful Pete Buttboy isn't gay enough:

https://www.thecollegefix.com/yale-womens-studies-professor-gay-white-men-are-symbols-of-heterosexuality/

Poor guy–there's no niche for gay white boys in identity politics.

Cathedrals and mosques

I've seen some pundits complain that the Notre Dame fire got far more attention than China bulldozing the Keriya mosque. A few quick observations:

i) Different people have different reasons for what they value. Many people who aren't Catholic or Christian love Notre Dame as an architectural masterpiece. Many people love Paris. 

ii) At the risk of stating the obvious, there's nothing hypocritical about a Christian feeling greater attachment to Christian art than Muslim art or Buddhist art or Hindu art. As Christians, we naturally have more affinity with Christian art. 

iii) For that matter, we can also make discriminations within Christian art and architecture. If First Baptist Dallas burned to the ground, that would bother me far less than if York, Reims, Amiens, or Vézelay burned to the ground. 

iv) In addition, many westerners are naturally more familiar with western art than Muslim art. 

v) Then there's the question of whether it's wrong to destroy the art of a religion you disapprove of. That's separate from (ii). As a rule, I don't support the destruction of non-Christian art and architecture. But that doesn't mean I'd feel the same sense of loss. 

These are just elementary distinctions. But progressives can't keep more than one idea in their head at a time. 

An apology for thinking

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/04/roger-scruton-an-apology-for-thinking/

When a child says she's trans

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-a-child-says-shes-trans/561749/

Evangelical Jainism

This has been kicking around for 4 years already:

https://erlc.com/resource-library/press-releases/evangelical-coalition-releases-statement-on-responsible-care-for-animals

Signatories include Albert Mohler, Russell Moore, Richard Land, Daniel Akin, and Bill Hybels (because nothing says moral authority like Bill Hybels). Here's a sample:

We resolve to rule and treat all animals as living valued creatures, deserving of compassion, because they ultimately belong to God, because He has created them, declared them good, given them the breath of life, covenanted with them, and entrusted them to our responsible rule. So while animals have been given into our hand and for food this does not mean we can treat them as objects or act cruelly towards them.

http://www.everylivingthing.com/sign-the-statement/

i) Does that include termites, cockroaches, deer ticks, head lice, fire ants, tape worms, bot flies, Tsetse flies, and mosquitos? 

ii) What about rats? 

iii) What about venomous snakes in residential areas? Or reticulating pythons in residential areas?

iv) What about dangerous predators in residential areas, viz. wolves, cougars, crocodiles, grizzly bears? 

v) God didn't say every species is good. Gen 1 refers to the natural kinds that God created in the beginning. 

vi) What about all the animals God destroys in natural disasters and mass extinctions? 

The Every Living Thing site links to a video in which vegan open theist Gregory Boyd waxes sentimental about animal rights. 

It has a girl who pats herself on the back because she volunteers at an animal shelter. What about volunteering to visit shut-ins, nursing homes, and hospices, full of lonely or dying people? What about abandoned street kids around the world, some of them quite young. Or child trafficking? 

The video has a guy making the demonstrably false statement that "in treating animals more respectfully we will treat people more respectfully." To the contrary, lots of folks treat their pets much better than they treat strangers. Consider all the polls in which many respondents say that given a choice between saving their dog and saving a stranger, they'd save the dog. On the one hand we have laws against animal cruelty while, on the other hand, there's abortion, infanticide, and voluntary and involuntary euthanasia for the elderly, depressed, and developmentally disabled.  

Deplatforming ex-Muslims

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2fT_PhmYBw&t=161s

Trans privilege

I just don’t understand how anyone can say this is a level & fair playing field. 1000% increase in trans women taking part in sport recently. It’s a serious topic that has to be honestly dealt with for safety as much as integrity #fairplay pic.twitter.com/g2x4crSFdE

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) March 4, 2019

Coed wrestling

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2019/03/should-boys-and-girls-wrestle-each-other-a-case-study-in-sex-and-cultural-gender-confusion/

A few brief observations:

i) I'm no expert on intramural wrestling, but I imagine it would be very easy for a boy to seriously injure a girl. I'm not talking about a boy deliberately hurting a girl, but simply using the same techniques and making the same moves he'd use when wrestling a male opponent. Not only are boys naturally stronger, but boys who wrestle competitively are weightlifters to enhance their musculature. Although female wrestlers may lift weights as well, they can't add as much muscle mass or bone density as boys. 

ii) While I admire boys who forfeit games because they think it's dishonorable to wrestle girls, I think that's a mistake. If girls (and women) enter male space and compete with guys on their own terms, guys shouldn't abandon the field out of misplaced chivalry. Men have to be men. We cannot surrender to a feminist, misandrist ethos in which guys aren't allowed express their natural masculinity. 

Unfortunately, girls, as well as their willfully stupid parents, need to learn the hard way that there are intractable differences between men and women. We can't allow the destructive illusions of feminism to go unchallenged. Some girls will get hurt in the process, but they volunteered. If feminism prevails, that hurts everyone.

I do grant Olson's point that a boy might forfeit the match if he worries that full-body contact with a girl will trigger a very public, spontaneous erection. Perhaps cup protection gear would disguise it, although that might create a different problem if there's no place for that expansive pressure to go.  

iii) Ironically, the transgender thugs are illustrating the athletic superiority of men. 

All-male women's sports

Will the day come when women’s sport consists entirely of men, asks Rod Liddle https://t.co/Xffyq1dCuD

— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) March 2, 2019

Hijacking reality

"Transgenderism is an experiment to test how far reality can be hijacked. If you can make people agree that men are women, you can make them agree to anything." https://t.co/el8FpACQQW

— Alice Teller (@AliceTeller) February 20, 2019

Moral schizophrenia

In fact, most of this abuse involves homosexual assaults on pubescent boys, of the kind (not remotely connected with religion) that occurred at my private school. This fact is neglected at least partly because it is no longer respectable to disapprove of homosexuality as such, and many homosexual liberationists campaign for ever-lower ages of consent–which wold bring such offenses perilously close to being legal, especially given the feebleness with which the current age of consent is policed. Yet the [Roman Catholic] church is simultaneously criticized by  its foes for being against homosexual acts and for failing to act strongly enough against such acts… Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God (Zondervan 2010), 204.