Sunday, March 12, 2023



The great androgyny myth rides again

It is a central feminist claim that we should aim at a mix of sex-related psychological characteristics. Women should have some male characteristics as well as female ones. Men too should be more female in their thinking and attitudes. "Androgyny" is the goal

Needless to say, there have been various attempts to prove the functional superiority of androgyny. The work of Sandra Bem was prominent in that connection long ago. In the '70s, she put together a set of questions (the BSRI) that identified male and female characteristics and showed that a combination of such characteritics was "healthier".

I did a survey back in the '80s to look at the issue. The BSRI had already by the time been shown not to measure what it purported to measure so I used an alternative questionnaire that offered the prospect of being more valid than the BSRI. I applied it to a community sample rather than the much more customary student sample

I found that in the comunity at large, feminine attitudes correlated strongly with neuroticism, lack of assertiveness, and lack of self-esteem, which is pretty bad. Masculine orientation, however, also went with low self-esteem and low assertiveness. It was concluded that the best mental health was shown by undifferentiated respondents (those who tended to say that sexually polarized self-descriptions were inapplicable to them). Those who were androgynous (mixed attitudes) were generally LOW scorers on three indices of mental health.

My demonstration that androgyny in the community at large was NOT a good thing was thoroughly ignored however. I was not surprised. Leftists believe only what they want to believe and damn the evidence.

So the myth of androgyny lives on. Writers on the subject are still characterizing it the way Sandra Bem and others did many years ago. The theory rides high on a foundation of what feminists WANT to beleve and nothing much more.

The latest attempt to prove the wonderfulness of androgy is abstracted below. It is as ludicrous as the work of Sandra Bem. This time they decided to go directly into the brain, not examine what was in it via questionnaires.

What they found was that male brains are more complex. That was their basic finding. But that was NOT what was wanted. It made male brains look more versatie and efficient and that would never do.

So amid a flurry of complicated statistics they looked at what went with varying degrees of brain complexity. Female brains were the least complex but what about people who were half way along the continuum? Could they be the wonderful androgynes? Is medium complexity better than high complexity?

They predictably found that it was. Such people "had fewer internalizing symptoms", whatever that means. They don't define "internalizing symptoms" anywhere in their article. Generally, however, internalizing means keeping your feelings or issues inside you and not sharing your concerns with others. Extremes can be associated with poor mental health (depression etc) but there was no evidence of that in this study. "Externalizers" would not be too good either. Extremes of that would be neurotics.

So support offered to feminist beliefs by this study is negligible. If anything, it shows that male brains are superior in important ways. Horrors!


The Human Brain Is Best Described as Being on a Female/Male Continuum: Evidence from a Neuroimaging Connectivity Study

Yi Zhang et al.

Abstract

Psychological androgyny has long been associated with greater cognitive flexibility, adaptive behavior, and better mental health, but whether a similar concept can be defined using neural features remains unknown. Using the neuroimaging data from 9620 participants, we found that global functional connectivity was stronger in the male brain before middle age but became weaker after that, when compared with the female brain, after systematic testing of potentially confounding effects. We defined a brain gender continuum by estimating the likelihood of an observed functional connectivity matrix to represent a male brain. We found that participants mapped at the center of this continuum had fewer internalizing symptoms compared with those at the 2 extreme ends. These findings suggest a novel hypothesis proposing that there exists a neuroimaging concept of androgyny using the brain gender continuum, which may be associated with better mental health in a similar way to psychological androgyny.

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Fox news gave early warning of vacine problems

Negative reporting on Covid-19 shots that aired on Fox News was linked to increased vaccine hesitancy, according to a new study that shows how the nation’s No. 1 news network influenced viewers during a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people in the US.

Concerns about the safety of Covid vaccines as measured in reported side effects increased following heightened periods of negativity in Fox News coverage of vaccines, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Political Communication. Public opinion surveys also showed Fox viewers reported elevated levels of vaccine hesitancy throughout the pandemic compared to regular viewers of other programs.

“When Fox News’ negativity about vaccines goes up, so too does vaccine hesitancy. When it goes down, so too does vaccine hesitancy,” said Matthew Motta, a professor of health policy at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Earlier research has demonstrated that viewers of Fox viewers were less likely to be vaccinated than people who got their news elsewhere. Exposure to online misinformation has been linked to vaccine hesitancy, as has consumption of information from conservative and fringe sources. But the new findings highlight the power the network and other information sources have had to sow distrust among viewers.

To demonstrate this, Motta and his collaborator Dominik Stecula, a political scientist at Colorado State University, turned to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a government-run monitoring program that helps spot problems with shots early on. For example, the rollout of the Johnson & Johnson Covid shot was paused after nearly 7 million doses were administered because just six cases of blood clots were reported to VAERS.

Anyone can report adverse reactions to the clearinghouse — whether or not they’re associated with vaccination — and they’re published without fact-checking to show they really occurred. Anti-vaccine groups at times have encouraged followers to file reports to VAERS, aiming to sow doubts about safety. Facebook videos of people reading lists of these reported side-effects have gone viral.

Measuring Opinion

Motta and Stecula used the database as a proxy for public perception of Covid vaccines. Typically, you would expect to see reports of side effects distributed regularly over time as the vaccines rolled out and more Americans were immunized.

Instead, the analysis found that increases in reports of side effects tended to follow negative coverage of the vaccines on Fox News. Public opinion surveys conducted by the pair backed up their findings.

“There’s a remarkable correlation between VAERS reports and use of the anti-vaccine themes and the reporting that's done on the virus on Fox,” Stecula said.

Fox News didn’t respond to requests for comment. Fox has said that the network has aired pro-vaccine public service announcements and that a number of its on-air personalities have supported vaccination. The outlet reaches more than 2 million weekday primetime viewers daily.

In the early days of the vaccine rollout, huge numbers of Americans delayed getting vaccines, keeping the virus in circulation and putting the most vulnerable at increased risk. Today, while 81% of eligible Americans have received at least one shot, less than 70% have completed their primary vaccine series and only 16% have received the updated bivalent booster that became available last fall.

Fox News did not respond to requests for comment. Fox has said that the network has aired pro-vaccine public service announcements and that a number of its on-air personalities have supported vaccination. The outlet reaches some 2 million weekday primetime viewers daily.

Usually, when viewers have direct experience with a disaster or another event news programming generally holds less influence. People don’t need a news anchor to tell them what’s going on when they’re in the middle of it.

But in this case, living through the pandemic didn’t diminish the power that Fox held over its audience.

“Content matters,” said Motta. “It matters what folks say on the airwaves, because those words can change people's attitudes and behaviors. It's a little scary.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-10/fox-news-content-led-to-covid-vaccine-hesitancy-among-viewers .

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Charles Barkley Eviscerates ESPN Host for Anti-White NBA Claims: 'Asinine, Silly, and Stupid'

Charles Barkley eviscerated ESPN talking head and former NBA player Kendrick Perkins after the latter implied the league’s MVP award has been given to Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić in consecutive years because he is white.

In response to a pretty clear consensus that Jokić could be deserving of being crowned the NBA’s most valuable individual player for a third year, Perkins used ESPN’s airwaves to promote a racist conspiracy theory: The voters might be motivated by race.

Perkins’ absurd opinion led to a Tuesday morning argument on “First Take” between him and former NBA star JJ Redick, who challenged the assertion.

Clips of the segment have gone viral online.

Barkley weighed in on the controversy Wednesday when he called into Denver’s Altitude Sports Radio, where he shredded Perkins as any one of three not-so-flattering adjectives.

Of course, Barkley opened with some self-deprecating humor about his golf game. “Hey, man, I’m trying to work on my golf game, and y’all are bringing me on the radio to talk about stupid stuff,” Barkley said.

In regard to Perkins’ comments, he continued, “That’s asinine and silly. Asinine, silly, and stupid. Pick one of the words, whatever one you want.”

“It’s a regular-season award,” Barkley added. “It ain’t who the best player is. It’s who had the best regular season. But every year ESPN gets these fools on the radio and TV, talk about who’s the best player.”

He concluded Jokić’s MVPs are “well-deserved” and slammed ESPN’s “fools” over the “silly” debates they engage in on shows such as “First Take.”

He also pointed out that you could count out how many “white guys” had won the MVP award over the last three decades.

Only three have won it since Larry Bird took it home for three consecutive years in the mid-1980s. Steve Nash won it in 2005 and 2006 while Dirk Nowitzki won it in 2007.

Jokić is the only “white guy” to have done it since, and both awards were after stellar seasons — much like the one he’s having right now. Barkley cited that as evidence Perkins was full of it.

“If that was the case, we’d have a lot more white MVPs. This crossed the line, in my opinion … It’s just total BS,” Barkley said of the race-bating.

After Barkley was asked by Altitude Sports Radio if he even watched the ESPN clip in question, his response was gold.

“I got a life,” the TNT NBA commentator said. “I don’t sit around and watch television.”

Leave it to Barkley to be the voice of reason. His impeccable rationale is probably why he doesn’t work for ESPN.

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Stanford Law Students Scream at Federal Appellate Judge, Call Him ‘Scum,’ because of his conservative judgments

A conservative federal judge on the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals was screamed at on Thursday by dozens of Stanford Law School students who disagreed with his rulings, bringing new light to the conversation about freedom of speech at America’s elite universities.

At an event titled “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” Judge Kyle Duncan was met by an angry crowd of students and faculty. The judge had been invited to speak by the Stanford chapter of the conservative Federalist Society.

A video of the event — posted by the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center — begins as dozens of students are yelling at the judge. Judge Duncan had apparently requested an administrator to calm the crowd, and he allowed the assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion to address the room.

Judge Duncan told the dean: “so, you’ve invited me to speak here and I’ve been heckled nonstop, and I’ve asked for an administrator —” before being cut off again by the crowd. One student yelled “your racism is showing” because Judge Duncan was speaking over the dean, who is Black.

The dean then took the podium to address the crowd. “I had to write something down because I am so uncomfortable up here,” she said. “Your advocacy, your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights,” she said as she turned to face Judge Duncan.

“Is your speaking here worth the pain that it has caused, the division it has caused?” she asked.

After she concluded her remarks, most of the protesters left the room and walked by Judge Duncan, calling him “scum” and asking him if he felt safer now that the protesters were leaving.

It is not immediately clear if the judge finished his prepared remarks.

Before taking his seat on the federal bench, Judge Duncan litigated conservative causes, including an argument against gay marriage before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judge Duncan has received attention for issuing a number of controversial opinions on abortion, the death penalty, and vaccine mandates since taking the bench in 2018. He also announced his refusal to using a transgender inmate’s “assumed name and preferred pronouns.”

Elite institutions like Stanford Law School have come into the national spotlight in recent years for events like the one Judge Duncan faced — students yelling at invited speakers with whom they disagree as their protests are either permitted or encouraged by the school’s bureaucracy.

Yale Law School is another one of those institutions. In response to similar events, Judge James Ho — also of the Fifth Circuit — announced that he would no longer hire clerks from Yale, saying “disruptions seem to occur with special frequency.”

Judge Elizabeth Branch of the Eleventh Circuit told National Review that she would follow Judge Ho’s lead. “Like Judge Ho, I am gravely concerned that the stifling of debate not only is antithetical to this country’s founding principles, but also stunts intellectual growth,” she said in an interview.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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