January 22, 2014

Bullying and Projection

The media mania to punish Grantland for one of its rare good articles because it was about not just a conman (which would be okay), but about a conman who wore a miniskirt (which is Not OK) is tied into the Anti-Bullying Movement of recent years. 

The logic is that, by definition, anyone who is "transgendered" was bullied on the school playground, and is therefore above criticism.

The bullying part is no doubt often true. 

For example, I knew somebody who is now a drag queen. I first met him when he was two years old. And he was the gayest two-year-old imaginable. As I heard him explain to some little girls with whom he was dressing up Barbie dolls, "I only play with girl toys. That's just the way I am."

I never heard about him being bullied at school, but it's hard to imagine he wasn't bullied by some moron.

On the other hand, reading about Dr. V., it's hard to not to notice that the promoter was a lifelong bully:
For all her wild stories, though, what Dr. V was most, Kinney [an investor out $60k] said, was a difficult person to deal with. “She would just explode. If you’re disagreeing with her while she had one of her headaches, you were in trouble.”

From an email from the promoter to the reporter:
“To whom this may concern,” it read. “I spoke with Caleb Hannan last Saturday his deportment is reminiscent to schoolyard bullies, his sole intention is to injure or bring harm to me … Because of a computer glitch, some documents that are germane only to me, were visible to web-viewers, government officials have now rectified this egregious condition … Caleb Hannan came into possession of documents that were clearly marked: MADE NON-PUBLIC (Restricted) … Exposing NON-PUBLIC Documents is a Crime, and prosecution of such are under the auspices of many State and Federal Laws, including Hate Crimes Legislation signed into Law by President Obama.”

Hannan notes:
Over the course of what was now eight months of reporting, Dr. V had accused me of being everything from a corporate spy to a liar and a fraud. She had also threatened me. One of the quotes I was able to type down during our last conversation was this: “You have no idea what I have done and what I can do.” It’s not all that menacing when transcribed, but her tone made it clear she believed she could harm me. 

This is not wholly idiosyncratic. For example, the article that more or less launched World War T was a lavishly sympathetic New York Times story about the injustice done to a former male truckdriver who is not being allowed to beat up women for pay in mixed martial arts bouts.

A certain fraction of the trans community seem to represent less "a woman's mind trapped in a man's body" than an exaggeratedly masculine mind (as economist Deirdre [nee Donald] McCloskey kind of sort of admits in this New Republic article "I Know What Chelsea Manning Is Going Through").

To my regret, I've had the experience of noting that a subsection of the male-to-female trans-identified can be atrocious bullies. I got dragged into a bout of bullying organized by McCloskey, computer scientist Lynn Conway, and a few other  trans academics because they were out to get Northwestern U. professor J. Michael Bailey, and I had written about him. (This is not to say that Bailey is wholly right, just that trying to have chilling effects on free speech is a worse solution than, as Justice Brandeis said, more speech.)

McCloskey and Conway set out to systematically demonize anybody who had ever said a good word about Bailey (and, boy, are they ever systematic -- Simon Baron-Cohen could have a field day with their output). Their work was picked up and spread by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has used its crusade against "hate groups" to become the most lucrative hate group in America. This might sound strange, but it really isn't: after all, McCloskey and Conway are much smarter than most SPLC staffers, and also much more masculine -- thus, the flavor of their witchburning fervor is notably different from that of the women and dweeby dudes out to get Larry Summers or James D. Watson. Meanwhile the SPLC leadership is cunning about sniffing out the coming wave of money-making opportunities.

Here's a good New York Times article summarizing the campaign to silence Bailey.

For some reason, McCloskey liked to denounce "the Steve Sailers, Stephen Pinkers, and Seth Roberts of the world," an unusual case of somebody spelling my name right and Pinker's name wrong. 

Here's an email exchange between McCloskey and Roberts (minus Roberts' last email) that McCloskey hosts on his website because he thinks it makes him look good. McCloskey starts out politely, but ... buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. (Roberts' version is on p. 117 here.) 

Obviously, McCloskey has a lot of issues.

You be the judge of who is trying to bully whom.

Freud's concept of "projection" explains much about the postmodern world.
    

50 comments:

Anonymous said...

For some reason, McCloskey liked to denounce "the Steve Sailers, Stephen Pinkers, and Seth Roberts of the world," an odd case of somebody spelling my name right and Pinker's name wrong.

It's hilarious that he went after Seth Roberts, a blogger whose main interests are trying out weird diet habits, like eating butter or honey before bed.

Anonymous said...

The biggest bullies I see are these promoters of Political Correctness and their little toadies that leap to attack anyone who dissents.

Peter the Shark said...

The media mania to punish Grantland for one of its rare good articles

In defence of Grantland, Barnwell's football analysis is generally very good. His pre-game breakdown of the New England-Denver game was spot on.

agnostic said...

WorldStar Hip Hop has a variety of clips showing trannies starting shit, or escalating something trivial, verbally and physically.

It didn't come off as hyper-masculine, though -- more like a queen bee at the top of the female pecking order. (Just where those tranny MMA fighters want to be.) They're touchy and spastic in disposition, and dishonorable and cowardly in conduct. Like how girls pull hair, bite, scratch, etc.

John Craig said...

The logical extension of allowing transgenders to fight in the UFC:

http://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2013/05/should-transgenders-be-allowed-to-fight.html

Anonymous said...

Here's an email exchange between McCloskey and Roberts (minus Roberts' last email) that McCloskey hosts on his website because he thinks it makes him look good. McCloskey starts out politely, but ... buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. (Roberts' version is on p. 117 here.)

For archival purposes, I wouldn't try to make a complex point [about WTFE it is that we're supposed to be talking about here anyway???] by linking to not just one but TWO remote websites*.

Chances are that in anywhere from 24 hours to 24 days to 24 months, those links will be dead.


*Particularly when at least one of those websites is controlled by someone who is extremely mentally unstable.

Although maybe its inner drama queen will get a little faux-gina-tingle from the publicity?

[Maybe I should remove the ambiguity by adding some parentheses: (faux-gina)-tingle.

NOT faux-(gina-tingle).]




Anonymous said...

The biggest bullies I see are these promoters of Political Correctness and their little toadies that leap to attack anyone who dissents.

S.O.P. for The Frankfurt School.

Freud would say [if Freud had been honest, which he wasn't, but if Freud had been honest, then Freud would have said] that their rhetoric reflects their nature.

Although, even there, Freud revealed his own true nature, by using the verb "project", rather than the verb "reflect": Their rhetoric PROJECTS their nature.

It's very instructive for the Shkotzim to spend some time contemplating the difference between the two verbs.


Harry Baldwin said...

For some reason, McCloskey liked to denounce "the Steve Sailers, Stephen Pinkers, and Seth Roberts of the world," an unusual case of somebody spelling my name right and Pinker's name wrong.

Also, shouldn't it be "Seth Robertses of the world" if we're pluralizing names?

August said...

From my point of view, the surgeons who get paid a lot of money to disfigure these people and the activists who encourage them to parade themselves before the hoi polloi are the people preying on them. Even this business with calling Bradley Chelsea- if you were actively collaborating with the state to make his story disappear you couldn't do better.

Cail Corishev said...

I've only known one tranny -- male-to-female -- but he certainly fit this profile. For starters, he was a big, broad-shouldered, deep-voiced guy, so if anything he seemed more masculine because of the incongruity of his clothes and the lumps on his chest.

His "bullying" wasn't really cruel at first, but extremely narcissistic ("everyone must look at me at all times"), and it got crueler later. But even when it was "friendly" it was very in your face. I felt sorry for the guy, because he obviously expected this to fix whatever pain and confusion he had in his life, and it wasn't working.

I think men see women as having carte blanche to do pretty much anything they want in our society. That's kinda true, but it's because women are weaker, and (thought to be) less violent, more gentle, etc. So when these guys become "female," they think they should be allowed to do whatever they want just like women, but they still have the attributes of men (at least) that make people balk at that.

At least in WWT it will be very easy to see who is on which side. None of the middle ground like there was with "civil unions" on the way to gay marriage. If you write an article about a male-to-female trans and you call him "she," you're on one side; if you call him "he," you're on the other. Simple. Is sex defined by the chromosomes that control the actions of every cell in your body, or by a few bolt-on parts and how you dress?

John Mansfield said...

I feel just a little bit bad for, say, John Waters. Some people want so badly to be dangerous, perverse, or a bit odd, and America these days is so anxious to seem accepting of anything and offended by nothing. It drives up what a deviant has to do to show that he really does deviate.

Anonymous said...

Well, McCloskey is female in at least one sense of the word: He's a flaming bitch.

Anonymous said...

"Of course, it's generally best not to lie, Dr. Pennebaker notes. But because these sayings so frequently signal untruth, they can be confusing even when used in a neutral context. No wonder they often lead to a breakdown in personal communications. Some people refer to these phrases as 'tee-ups.' That is fitting. What do you do with a golf ball? You put it on a peg at the tee—tee it up—and then give it a giant wallop."

Golfology, the new favorite metaphor in socio-political discourse?

Simmons should have began his piece, "Don't take this this article the wrong way but..."

Anonymous said...

What other golf terms or techniques could be used to highlight social or political behavior or reality?

Someone should get a leg-up on this.

eah said...

The article was a micro-transgression. That's a micro-aggession against a transgendered, uhh, person. Or maybe it was a macro-transgression.

Sideways said...

The worst part about the exchange is that McCloskey was so unhinged, he lost the capacity for reading comprehension.

Chicago said...

Everyone else is being bullied and forced to pretend that these types are really what they proclaim themselves to be. We must always refer to them as "she" and use their assumed female names even though we know it's all just fake, or else the stick comes crashing down on us. Everyone knows they're not really women but are something else; eunuchs perhaps, wanna-be women, whatever it is that they are is hard to pin down. However, we're all being coerced into going along with it.
Perhaps making people repeat things they know aren't true over and over again is just a part of the overall process of conditioning people, humiliating and beating them down into unquestioning acceptance of whatever the party line of the moment happens to be. We are the ones being bullied.

Anonymous said...

I noticed you used a male-gendered pronoun to refer to McCloskey

Gales of November said...

The masculine thing only fits some of them. Reading the insane rants of omnipresent commenters like Jos Truitt, Julia Serano, Zoe Brain and Valerie Keefe will quickly disabuse you of the idea that trans women are especially masculine, womanly, or intelligent. For example, Zoe Brain, who must get disability checks since he's always online, claims a bee sting turned him female. He also claims, Dr. V-style, to have advanced degrees he shows no evidence of ever attaining.

They often act more like weird nelly gay nerds who are attracted to women instead. Take Serano (please), whose books are canon for the trans cult. I'll give him credit for being a biologist in real life, but his books are nonsensical pomo gibberish and pseudo-intellectual pussy-begging. He's one of the male-to-female "transbians" who think becoming trans entitles them to sex, e.g. the Cotton Ceiling fiasco. His recent Daily Beast article "The Struggle to Find Trans Love" makes it clear he thinks "queer community" equals free pussy on demand. He refuses to accept that lesbians don't like dick. There are dozens of articles by these guys that are variations on the old 60s "Don't you like black guys" line.

I'd post some links, but those seem to leave my comments in some spam netherworld, never to be seen by human eyes. The fascinating Wordpress blog Gendertrender follows the latest trans cult news, for those who are interested.

Anonymous said...

Freud certainly should not be 'retired'.

Anonymous said...

The biggest bullies I see are these promoters of Political Correctness and their little toadies that leap to attack anyone who dissents.

There is an unholy heirarchy here. PC "thought leaders" come up with the PC concepts, e.g. "inclusion." Their henchmen establish these policies in the public and private sector workplaces. The toadies are the enforcers on the ground, lawyers, reporters,etc. that do the dirty work enforcing PC. The lackeys see unfortunate victims getting beaten up by the toadies so they encourage everyone to go along with PC silliness to keep the peace and everyone out of trouble. They all contribute in their own special way to the toxic environment we experience these days.

Reg Cæsar said...

For example, I knew somebody who is now a drag queen. I first met him when he was two years old.

What enquiring minds want to know, though, is , how old were you when you met him?

Not your exact age-- the arithmetic could expose him-- but roughly. Older kid? Teen? Young adult? His parents' age? Clearly old enough to see that he qualified for Guinness!!

Reg Cæsar said...

I Know What Chelsea Manning is Going Through

Yes, but what is going through Chelsea Manning?

Anonymous said...

Is anyone else curious about how many transgender/transexual people are ACTUALLY in the United States? Most articles that address it at all link to a UCLA study that pegs the number at 700,000 - or .3% of the population. This strikes me as almost certainly overstated.

Think about how many people you have met in your life. How many of them were trans? Or even repressed transexuals who, in a more open society, might like to live as the opposite gender. Maybe you've met one or two. Or you live in Hollywood or New York or Miami - big draws for the trans community. But is it one out of every 300?

If that widely adopted estimate is true, then a state like Iowa, with a population of 3,000,000, is home (or would be home if they didn't move to larger cities) to 9,000 trans people. Really? Enough to fill up a college basketball arena in Iowa alone?

Next time you're in a large crowd - say a 20,000 person arena - imagine 67 of them are trans. See if that seems right to you.

MAYBE, just maybe, the LGBT community is massively inflating these numbers, much as they did while touting the Kinsey study that pegged the percentage of the population that is gay at 10%. (It's 1.8 with an additional 1.7 self-identifying as bisexual, by the way.)

A 5X or 6X overestimation once again seems likely.

Percy Gryce said...

Kudos to Steve for using the (biologically) correct personal pronouns.

Also nice pun referring to the trannies' obsessive attacks: "and, boy, are they ever systematic."

Anonymous said...

I'm trans-royal, meaning I identify as the Queen of England. Please address me as "your majesty" at all times or I will kill myself. Thanks.

PC Makes You Stupid said...

Freud's concept of "projection" explains much about the postmodern world.

That's because Freud concept of projection explains much about his own tribe's mentality.

ben tillman said...

The biggest bullies I see are these promoters of Political Correctness and their little toadies that leap to attack anyone who dissents.

They have trillions of dollars of government resources backing them up. Of course, they're the "biggest" bullies.

Steve Sailer said...

Roughly his parents' age.

Rifleman said...

Freud's concept of "projection" explains much about the postmodern world.

That's because Freud concept of projection explains much about his own tribe's mentality.


True. Trannies are laughable amateurs in this realm.

Jews have 2-3000 years of training in this kind of psychological warfare.

Anonymous said...

The thing with demanding that you conform to their pronouns at the time is also particularly insane.

Today I'm feeling like Napoleon. Please refer to me as Your Excellency, Imperator, or General or you're OTHERING ME YOU BIGOT!

Pat Boyle said...

It is a little odd that there aren't more men who 'beat up women for money'. There seem to be plenty of women employed to beat up men. There are many women who advertise their services on specialty web sites and in the classifieds sections of free newspapers. Often they refer to themselves as goddesses. They charge substantial fees to whip men.

As far as I know there is no comparable market place for men to beat up women professionally. That's probably not because there aren't women who want a man to beat them, but rather because the volunteers have crowded the pros out. Almost any woman can find a man to whip her without paying a dime.

The exception would be the men who work in the large BDSM houses like Kink.com in their porn flics. But they are really movie performers whereas the females who whip men, perform in private.

I don't really understand transgender stuff. I have been approached by a transgender male at a pubic orgy. He seemed confused and offended when I rebuffed him. But generally they move in different circles than I do. Like homosexuality in general I find these non-standard sexual combinations rather icky and revolting.

I guess I'm a square and a hopeless prude.

Albertosaurus

Cail Corishev said...

Is anyone else curious about how many transgender/transexual people are ACTUALLY in the United States? Most articles that address it at all link to a UCLA study that pegs the number at 700,000 - or .3% of the population. This strikes me as almost certainly overstated.

I could buy something in that range. I read somewhere that the average person makes about 1000 acquaintances in a lifetime. If I'm somewhere near that, then my own 1 that I've met would be 0.1%, but I also live in a pretty conservative area. I assume they are several times more common in the cities, especially the most liberal ones. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if they're trying to include in that estimate all the ones "in the closet," just as they always have with estimates of homosexuals. If there's a guy who secretly wears his wife's lingerie once in a while, they'd want to count him among the oppressed.

Anonymous said...

Like homosexuality in general I find these non-standard sexual combinations rather icky and revolting. I guess I'm a square and a hopeless prude.

LOL'ed.

Granted, it's still only January, but that's gonna be a strong contender for 2014 KKKomment of the Year.

Oh, and Albertosaurus, if you can ever set me up with Princess Donna or Bobbi Starr or any of the other chicks up there at the Armory, then'll you'll have earned my eternal undying gratitude.

Anonymous said...

The two really effeminate sissy dudes that I knew as a kid [one in elementary school, the other in senior high school] died of AIDS in the 1980s.

Simon in London said...

Cail Corishev said...
"At least in WWT it will be very easy to see who is on which side. None of the middle ground like there was with "civil unions" on the way to gay marriage. If you write an article about a male-to-female trans and you call him "she," you're on one side; if you call him "he," you're on the other. Simple."

Personally I prefer 'it', since they are no longer either real men, or women.
But really IRL I just use their surnames, and avoid calling them anything at all.

Whiskey said...

Male societies, or rather those dominated by men, tend to create status based on "my D--- is bigger than yours" metaphorically and physically. You see this in the various beer ads, the "most annoying man in the world" and the various "secret societies" that show up in beer/liquor ads.

Female oriented societies dole out status based on morality.

Thus the whole "bullying" campaign. A few guys got involved, the Gracies and a few other martial artists, offering to teach self-defense. Practical, physical, decisive. And they were basically told to go away -- that the whole crusade was a giant fem-fest of weeping, moaning, angry denunciations, and the usual female status-jockeying over who was more moral. Like an ever weirder version of the 1980's SNL skit "Que es more muy macho? Fernando Llamas y Ricardo Montalban?"

Anonymous said...

I have been approached by a transgender male at a pubic orgy.


Pat/Albertosaurus- he's been there/done that. The list is endless.

Anonymous said...

Are there alter-sexuals who feel like man on monday and woman on tuesday and so forth?

Hunsdon said...

Albertosaurus said: I have been approached by a transgender male at a pubic orgy.

Hunsdon wondered: Is there any other kind?

Whiskey said...

Rifleman -- if you read the various literature available about Jews by the Romans (the Jewish War by Josephus), Greeks (various observations including IIRC Herodotus), Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians etc. you get a very different picture of Jews than the cliche today: stupid, mulish, unintelligent, stubborn, obnoxious, and very, very tribal in the way that the Highland Clans were described by the English who fought them in the 1600 and 1700's. Or the Appalachian hillbillies described by New Englanders and Aristocratic Tidewater gentlemen. And indeed the idea of psychological warfare and mind games is wholly absent in the Old Testament -- its all blood and guts and thunder.

Mind games and the like are a function of a far more feminized society. One in which physical strength and courage are not as important as manners, being "correct" and in sync with the court, oligarchs, etc. That certainly does not describe Jews until or around say maybe 1000 AD when things settled down. Until then it was who was more handy with a sword and willing to die.

By contrast, imagine say World War T taking place in the Frontier in say, 1870, John Wesley Hardin territory. You can't -- such an effort would have been summarily shot because male-dominated societies ultimately settle things by sword-point or gunpoint. This whole thing is entirely a female-dominated society seeking ever more power for Upper Class White women.

It is not nor has it ever been about a tiny 0.0009% of the population minority.

Sean said...

What level of rigour do you expect for an infomercial, eh?

Bullshit, that's what! Yet the bullshit gave the buyers something worth paying for, because they actually played better with the club at least in some part because of the bullshit. So those who bought the club got excellent value for money from Dr V. The bullshit was the most valuable part of the total package which purchasers of Dr. V's club were buying. So Dr V was not a con artist, her customers got a genuine benefit and that was dependent on the image of a genius. Her being a trans would not have hurt her business, except with those who thought you have to be born a woman to have a first class engineering brain!

She achieved something and helped people with their golf game, and the total product (of which her bullshit was an integral part of) was more useful than 99'9% of what is being sold in infomercials, but only as long as her false cv was accepted.


Who is to blame if a 6'3'' trans woman has mental problems as a result of her inability to 'pass' as a woman?

ben tillman said...

To my regret, I've had the experience of noting that a subsection of the male-to-female trans-identified can be atrocious bullies.

Wasn't Richard Raskind the original?

Yggdrasil's account of "Chrissy versus the Hulk" [Chris Evert vs. Richard Raskind/Renee Roberts] at the U.S. claycourts championships offers a brilliant insight regarding your observation:

Raskind had torn the civilizing mask from sport, and yet was parading around in a girl's tutu to protect himself from the harm consequent upon the rage of those in the audience like myself - much better schooled in the arts of actual conflict than in its civilized substitutes. He was protecting himself by repelling us and confusing our normal instincts with the elemental ugliness and unnaturalness of the scene he had created.

And the worst of it was that he had found a way to provoke us, while refusing to present himself as a capable foe.

ben tillman said...


Although, even there, Freud revealed his own true nature, by using the verb "project", rather than the verb "reflect": Their rhetoric PROJECTS their nature.

So you're saying there is such a thing as a Freudian slip. Nicely done.

BB753 said...

Was Bob Dole part of the swindle?

BB753 said...

Typo: Al Gore, not Bob Dole!

Anonymous said...

So you're saying there is such a thing as a Freudian slip.

There sure is.

What we call "Psychological Projection" should have been called "Psychological REFLECTION": When you observe another human being, and try to analyze that other human being's motivations, you invariably end up using that other human being as merely a mirror, which simply reflects your own nature right back at you.

The fact that Freud instead chose to use the word "Projection", rather than "Reflection", tells you just about all you need to know about the guy.

Which is that he was a monster.

Cail Corishev said...

Pat/Albertosaurus- he's been there/done that. The list is endless.

I'm eagerly awaiting the autobiography.

Anonymous said...

"Pat/Albertosaurus- he's been there/done that. The list is endless.

I'm eagerly awaiting the autobiography."

Forest Gump Lives!

Gilbert P

Miguel S. said...

Too bad its name before the dismemberment wasn't "Dick McCloskey."