Graham Linehan went fishing on ChatGPT to find someone who would agree with him. Unfortunately, not even a bullshit fountain would play his game.
Where is a person’s ‘gender identity’ located?
is such a goddamn stupid question. What is he, a phrenologist? The brain is a big messy association engine — you feed it a simple little word, like “woman”, and stuff is going to be firing all over the cortex, with signals ping-ponging all over the place. There isn’t a tight little kernel for each concept that can be localized to one discrete spot.
Even a dumb mindless text generator like ChatGPT can’t find a way to answer that question, so it does its usual game of pulling up and splicing together snippets of information, failing to find any sense in it. So Linehan refines his question — usually good idea, but in this case more revealing of his own biases than anything constructive. How do we know we have a gender identity if we cannot locate it in the brain?
OK, Graham, how do you know where your car keys are, if you don’t know where the map is located in your brain? How do you know how old you are if you can’t find the perceptual clock in your cortex? Quick, tell me where the Irish accent is located — if you can’t give me a set of stereotaxic coordinates, then it doesn’t exist.
Don’t worry, he eventually found something to feed his sense of outrage.
This reminded me of a short ‘conversation’ I had on Twitter, where someone — a philosophy professor, no less — exposed how ignorant of logic he was.
1. The sexes–male and female–have been around since before Saturn had rings.
2. Societies have not.
3. If something predates societies, then it cannot be a social construct.
4. So, the sexes–male and female– cannot be social constructs.
Let’s take that apart.
1. I don’t know how old Saturn’s rings are — apparently, there’s a lot of uncertainty — but fine, this is a philosopher’s way of saying sex is really old. I’d agree, yeast have sexes, which is defined by a single mating type locus in the genome. So sex is at least as old as eukaryotes.
2. Now we are already getting on shaky ground. Define “societies”. Primates have cultures, patterns of behavior that are passed on by education and learning from generation to generation. We are plagued by the fuzziness of that “before Saturn had rings” nonsense, but to get around the difficulty of dealing with his even more poorly defined term of “societies”, I’ll agree, even though it might be that primate societies might be older than Saturn’s rings, we’ll have to wait for the astronomers to figure out. At least I can definitely agree that societies, broadly defined, are definitely younger than sexual reproduction and meiosis.
3. Kaboom, there’s the stupid leap of illogic. Sex evolves, it changes rapidly, and social definitions of sexual behavior change frenetically. We humans do not possess a single genetic locus that cleanly defines sex — we have piled on all these complexities and elaborations that are still essential parts of sex, and many of them are entirely cultural. We are more than MATa or MATα. The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.
Sure, you can get me to agree in general with points 1 and 2, but with point 3 you’re suddenly endorsing the idea that Victorian ideas about sex and sex roles, for example, cannot possibly be social constructs because ancient eukaryotes could carry out meiosis. You think you’ve crafted an inescapable syllogism and have caught me, but really, you’re the one trapped.
4. False.
My conversation with Mr Bogardus did not last long, in particular because he was spectacularly dishonest for someone who teaches philosophy for a living. I told him a couple of times that my disagreement was with point #3, to which he would respond with ‘oh, so you don’t think #2 is true?’, which was infuriating. He didn’t care what I said, he had a logic trap he wanted to force me into, and any time I pointed out the hole in his reasoning, he’d try to invent a new conflict.
But then, that’s the way TERFs work: stupidity and lies are all they’ve got.
“with signals ping-ponging all over the place!”
PZ, get out of my brain!!!!!!! Oh, look, a squirrel …
It is a stupid word game and Tomas Bogardus, whoever that is, is a Fake Philosopher and a rather dumb one.
He is trying to combine “sex”, “gender”, and “gender Identity” together as the same thing.
They aren’t.
They are separate. They may coincide. They may not.
And ignored the 1.7% of the human population who are intersexes.
Reading some comments by transgender folx, I wonder if the brain is hard-wired to handle being a certain sex and if it’s hard-wired for the wrong sex, that leads to Gender Dysphoria. Does this make sense, or should this IT guy stick to computers?
I’m as critical about ChatGPT as the next person, but I like what it did here.
I looked for Tomas Bogardus on Google.
About what I thought. He is a generic right wingnut xian hater.
MA degree from Biola which is a fundie xian bible college. Pepperdine is also xian.
He is just a Trans hater who is redefining words and concepts to make fake arguments.
I’ve seen enough.
That is 5 minutes of my life wasted on yet again, another of countless fundie xian haters.
To point out the obvious, Trans hate and attempting to redefine words to erase Trans people as people contributes to their high rate of morbidity and early death, often by suicide.
Anyone who makes it their life work to spread hate like Bogardus is malevolent, evil, and creepy,
I’m as much of a philosopher as Bogardus since I too, can redefine words to mean whatever I want them to mean.
A lot of people view philosophy these days as meaningless garbage. Guys like Bogardus make this an easy idea to defend. It’s certain that almost all attention paid to philosophy is from other self described philosophers. They simply have almost no relevance in modern society.
I’m one of the few that claim that it isn’t all garbage. There are a few philosophers like Daniel Dennett and the philosophy of science people who still do good and worthwhile work.
To JoeBuddha #3
“I wonder if the brain is hard-wired to handle being a certain sex and if it’s hard-wired for the wrong sex, that leads to Gender Dysphoria.”
I think this is the first time I’ve heard a comment by a cisgender person on what it is to be transgender that I could go along with. We’re being asked to explain the inexplicable, yet our enemies like to pretend that getting the right definitions should be easy, and if we have a hard time finding them, obviously we don’t know what we’re talking about. How many people, straight, gay, cisgender, transgender can neatly explain everything that’s going on inside them? But if you hesitate over this and that, does that mean you’re not what you are?
I often say that I was born with a perfectly sound mind in a perfectly sound body. They just don’t go together, that’s all. Despite what our enemies say, there’s nothing wrong with my mind. There’s often plenty wrong with theirs. They make that clear in so many ways.
I dislike the term “gender identity”. I think it leads to great confusion. There is of course the term “subconscious sex”, and in certain quarters you’ll find the term “psychological sex”. I think either of those is preferable to gender identity. They might give cisgender people a better lead on what we’re talking about.
In any case, my own informal definition of “gender identity” is “a function of the brain that gives the self a gender quality”. I think this is the concept cisgender people find difficult: the notion that the “self”, as distinct from the body, can be male, female, non-binary, etc. My reply is, “Look, I didn’t make this world. I just live in it.”
In any case, this notion of gender identity is widely and constantly attacked in one way or the other by our enemies. Their strategy is aimed at proving the non-existence of the gender identity, whereby they disprove the existence of transgender people. If there are no transgender people, then there’s no need for transgender rights.
E.g., recently I saw a video of a young lad (with an eminently slappable face) who was declaring that transgenderism is a “subjective feeling”. I.e., it isn’t a real, objective phenomenon, and therefore being transgender isn’t a real, objective phenomenon. After slapping this kid’s face, I would have asked him, “Who told you that transgenderism is a feeling, subjective or otherwise? Because it isn’t a feeling.” I’d compare it to a competency in math. What kind of feeling is a competency in math? Maybe that’s just a function of the brain with no feelings attached to it.
“Sex” may have been around in some form for, I don’t know, a billion years, but the way it manifests itself varies all over the map. Some species don’t have distinct male and female organisms, and IIRC sometimes there aren’t even distinct male and female gametes (assuming the word “gamete” even applies.) In a number of species that do have distinct male and female, individual organisms may change sex during their lifetime, triggered by all sorts of things. And of course, everything changes over time. A lot.
Moreover, when you talk about “transgender,” you’re not really talking about sex in that sense. What people talk about is what society conflates with gametes, chromosomes, even reproductive anatomy. The word “gender” was appropriated to designate that. And that is absolutely socially constructed, and varies from society to society (not to mention subculture) and from century to century. And people who cross their society’s gender lines, or live somewhere between, have been around long before Christianity or even Judaism. There is concrete evidence (i.e., writings, etc.) for it as far back as 3000 — 4000 BC. That is, roughly as far back as there was writing enough to memorialize it. (Since the cave people didn’t write liturgies and histories, we don’t know one way or another for them.) They have existed in Western (i.e., European-based) societies as far back as we have records, and that despite being persecuted and exterminated mercilessly. It takes a real and probably deliberate ignorance and denial of history to pretend that there’s anything novel about it.
IMHO, it’s a logical consequence of splitting humanity into two groups, assigned at birth, and then imposing all kinds of secondary stuff on them, like what they’re supposed to like, to want, to hate, and how they’re supposed to relate to other people. Once you do that, there are always going to be people who don’t fit. (Genetic variation, anyone?) You can either shrug your shoulders and go, “different strokes …” and just find a place for them — which is what most pre-Christian societies did. Or you fight a never-ending war against humanity itself, trying to put round pegs into square holes, which is what most patriarchal (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) societies do.
BTW, I’m a lot leery of the usual claims that being transgender is inborn. There is certainly an inborn component, just as there is in people who just can’t make themselves be the doctor or football hero that daddy and mommy want them to be. (Or, in my case, door-to-door soap salesperson.) But I think it’s a lot more complicated than a simple “born with a female brain” concept, and teasing out how much is due to nature and how much to nurture is pretty much impossible. We aren’t anywhere close to even asking the right questions. (A huge part of science is figuring out what questions to ask. Ask the wrong question, you’ll get nonsense back. Cf. the first part of the original post.)
I bet he’d agree that paths over terrain can exist before “society,” certainly before people. But civilizations build roads, too, and those are “social constructs,” right?
If we take sex and gender out of it completely, #3 doesn’t work. That’s more likely to be convincing to someone who’s triggered over gender (for whichever reason).
And if they buy that, you can tell them about “desire paths” where people don’t always travel on pre-planned sidewalks. Blow some minds!
To Allison #8
“BTW, I’m a lot leery of the usual claims that being transgender is inborn.”
I agree. I’m not convinced that one’s transgender nature is something solely inborn. It’s just that this notion that it’s part nurture can be abused, and it’s something that TERFs are happy to do–e.g., when J.K. Rowling suggests that if a teenage girl has an eating disorder it might lead her to become trans male. I’d want a clear-cut explanation of how an eating disorder can produce gender dysphoria, not just a half-baked assertion that it can.
Then at times you’ll see TERFs promote the notion that we transpeople rebel against our assigned gender roles and decide to adopt the opposite gender. The solution seems to be that if we abandon traditional gender roles then no one will have anything to rebel against and then (woo-hoo!) there won’t be any more gender dysphoria and hence no more transgender people.
In other words, this idea of a nurture component of transgenderism is one that our enemies frequently use as a way of erasing transgenderism. It’s a result of poor upbringing, etc.
Which doesn’t of course mean that there is no nurture component at all. We just need to look for the truth of the matter, not some convenient notion that will allow for the abolition of transgender rights.
This is the sort of question that I personally tend to avoid. For me being trans is a practical matter: this is what I am. Now how can I live in such a way as to maximize my happiness? Why I’m trans is far and away a question of less importance to me. Why waste my time on a question that’s not going to come close to being settled in my lifetime?
Republicans are going to be freaking out when they realize the chatbots are feeding pregnant women science-based information like the fact that abortions are safe, don’t cause cancer or mental health issues, and are significantly safer for their mental health than giving birth, even if they give the baby up for adoption.
What are the odds they’ll start passing laws making it a criminal offense to allow a chatbot to tell the truth about abortion?
It’s pretty obvious what needs to happen: AI needs to have bigotry and dishonesty programmed in.
Language came after society (at least some form of it) so when we talk about something it can definitely be a social construct because we use language to define it.
It is far worse than that.
The Trans haters have taken to inventing new diseases and syndromes that don’t even exist. As well as recycling the old ones…demons, demonic possession, and witchcraft.
The latest notorious example is Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.
All reputable medical associations have condemned this claim.
Which blames Trans on peer influence and social contagion.
Like getting beaten up in school and having your parents kick you out on to the street is going to make you Trans.
It’s just words strung together by a hater and doesn’t exist in the real world
The woman MD that made it up never even talked to one Trans teenager.
@14 Every minority gets its invented psychiatric disorder – ROGD for trans people to match fatal excited-delirium for Black people in police custody.
True.
It is not just minorities.
Hysteria was originally a medical condition of women.
@ raven #14
“The latest notorious example is Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.”
Actually, ROGD has been around for a while. I’ve been thinking that it’s about time for the haters to come up with a new mega-lie. It seems to me they invent a new one every five years or so.
Lately I’ve been hearing more and more talk about autogynephilia. In a way that’s a good sign. It could be an indication that they’re running out of inspiration. They’re down to recycling one long-ago discredited bit of BS. On the other hand it is a bit depressing. A good lie never dies, so it can always be recycled as needed.
These people are so depressing. Recently a young transgender girl in England was brutally murdered, stabbed multiple times by two other teenagers and left to die in a public park. Transgender people all over the British Isles were holding candlelit vigils for her. On some reports of events on YouTube, they had the sense to turn off the comments. On one report they failed to do that, giving the haters the chance to have a go at transgender people–and there was some pretty sickening stuff there. They kill a young transgender person and then start mocking transgender people generally.
You know how it is: when people hit bottom, that’s never the end of it. They just start tunneling.
And, of course, there was “drapetomania,” the mental illness which made slaves want to escape!
OT.
The former president Jimmy Carter, now 98, is going to receive hospice care in his home.
He has been active in habitat for humanity ever since he left politics and seems to be one of the few altruistic politicians out there, even though he -like literally all presidents- made his share of mistakes.
Ironically his major legacy is that Reagan succeded him and started 40 years of neoliberal hegemony.
Lets see if I can play around with logic like your philosophy “professor”.
Linehan went fishing in a chat bot to find someone to agree with him that all this transgender identity nonsense is false. Instead the chat bot produced a perfectly sensible argument that it isn’t. But chat bots are artificial therefore anything they say is artificial therefore gender identity is artificial. Its all perfectly logical Linehan wins the kewpie doll and he can move on to putting ping-pong balls in carnival clowns mouths unless of course he is the carnival clown.
Someone should tell this alleged philosopher it is absolutely a social construct that Saturn has D, C, B, A, F, G, and E rings in order of increasing distance from the planet.
The lunkhead just doesn’t know what a social construct is.
[meta]
Silentbob, nobody alleges Graham is a philosopher.
(You might be confused by the OP, which does name Tomas as such)
[Ah, nevermind. Sorry, Silentbob, you were clearly referring to Tomas.
Though he’s more than allegedly a philosopher: “Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pepperdine University”]
The “Saturn’s Rings” reference is probably because there was a genuinely interesting study published in “science” only a few months ago, suggesting the rings formed when a moon suddenly and cataclysmically shattered due to an orbital resonance causing it to get too close to saturn.
https://www.science.org/content/article/lost-moon-may-have-spawned-saturn-s-rings
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn1234
It reached the popular press, probably why he knew about it.
@raven #6
“A lot of people view philosophy these days as meaningless garbage.”
I have encountered this and find it staggering.
Burden of Proof is a philosophical concept. You examine how claims are made and how truth seeking would be impacted by allowing assertion without evidence and so on.
All the logical fallacies are defined by philosophical reasoning.
Science is, as you say, a product of philosphy. As is the concept of the rule of law, even human rights.
These are fundamental issues of the humanities. The people who trash philosophy are often ignorant of it or zealots who hate their ideologies and dogmas being questioned.
Just here to echo (1) raven’s comment — sex is not synonymous with gender, so this ‘philosopher’ is already being dishonest right out of the gate by conflating them, and (2) Jean’s comment that even for things that are not social constructs, the act of talking about them is. To choose an appropriately astronomical example, just look at the outrage and despair after the IAU redefined Pluto as a dwarf planet.
You haven’t read Bostrom, our last wacko. Bostrom is the one who collects science fiction ideas and explains how killer robots are going to get us all before we spread through the galaxy as virtual people in computronium shells around stars someday unless we all become post humans by genetic engineering.
None of which really matters because he claims with are all living in computer simulations. (I hope whoever is running our universe remembers to pay their electric bill.)
We had fun making fun of him a few weeks ago on FTBs.
Or the currrent mindless hater, Bogardus, who plays word games and attempts to define persecuted minorities out of existence.
I could name a lot more, Jordan Peterson, the effective altruists, and the whole misogynist clade, the anti-wokeists, etc..
The point I was making is that there are a lot of so called philosophers who give the whole field a bad name. It seems anyone can dress up and play philosopher and justify any political ideology, no matter how reprehensible and destructive it is.
As I said, philosophers give a bad name to the whole field.
No science isn’t philosophy. That is nonsense. You are claiming a lot more for philosophy than it deserves.
Arguable.
I would call these political science, sociology, or law.
I’ve certainly heard about these and discussed them, both at school and afterwards, and have never taken a philosophy course in my life.
I was the only one on this thread that even bothered to defend philosophy, by claiming that it isn’t all garbage.
You can make that case but it takes a lot of work.
raven:
It’s a subset of natural philosophy.
(Your denial evinces a weak ontology)
Doesn’t need defending.
—
PS
heh.
Morales you are trolling again.
I realize that is your sole reason for existence but this is stupid even for you.
Yeah, I knew it used to be called natural philosophy.
We’ve moved on from there a few centuries ago.
I’m a scientist myself and no one calls me a philosopher.
That is good because I would be insulted.
You can keep derailing this thread (and will) but I’m not going to waste any more time on trolls.
raven, I’m disputing you.
When you characterise that as trolling (with the bonus “again”), you are trying to be defensive. But it’s an irrelevance.
Still, you did not leave it at that, so…
Well, let’s take your own claim:
Those are political philosophy, philosophical sociology, and jurisprudence.
It’s just terminology.
In short, you got nothin’ and I will get the last word.
Your choice.
So, should Hamlet’s famed admonition to Horatio in Act I, scene 5 best be understood as:
1) An absolute claim about the eternal insurmountable limits of philosophical studies in general,
2) A timely claim about the limits of natural philosophy specifically as taught and studied in 16th-century European universities, or
3) A veiled personal insult about Horatio’s intellectual limitations?
Extra credit: Discuss how Dickens’s later invocation of indigestion as an explanation for ghostly visitations complicates Hamlet’s claim (or why it doesn’t). Would the assimilation of New World concepts such as bits of underdone potato have enabled Horatio’s research program to meet Hamlet’s challenge?
# 30
Can you imagine being so pathetic as to be someone who cherishes the “last word”? HAHAHAHAHA!
Silentbob, why do you imagine it’s cherished?
It’s just a statement of fact. I do those all the time.
@31. drsteve : Depends on the exact production of the play & which interpreation the actor and director were using? For 1,2 & 3 it could be any of these or all maybe?
It doesn’t becayuse Shakespeare was a long century or three before Dicken’s time?
Maybe but which one of Hamlet’s challenges? Not his last one to engage in duelling t the deaths – plural. Potatoes are posionous at some stages and some parts but probly not that handy there.
Thinking Hamlet this seems like a nice modern twist on it :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsinore_(video_game) WARNING : Contains spoilers.
Going back to the original article, if someone asked me “where is gender identity located,” I’d say it’s in the same place as the soul. Find that first.
Ironically [Carter’s] major legacy is that Reagan succeeded him and started 40 years of neoliberal hegemony.
Can we all PLEASE stop using the word “neoliberal” in reference to policies that are neither new nor in any way liberal? All of the actions and policies to which we sneeringly, and robotically, apply that label are, in fact, explicitly and diametrically opposed to nearly everything we normally think of as liberal values or policies. Calling all that nonsense “neoliberalism” is no more honest or sensible than calling Nazism “neo-Judaism.”
The only people to whom the word “neoliberal” might apply, are Democrats who readily cave to the loony or authoritarian right. But — being the ones who caved and all — they’re not the ones making the policies.
Dan Dare @25: You’re right, of course; but when philosophical reasoning gets good results in the sciences, as in all of your cited examples and more, people tend to call it “logic,” “reason,” or “common sense,” not “philosophy.” It may still be “philosophy,” but our tendency to add other labels nonetheless contributes to philosophy’s bad reputation.
Think of “philosophy” (which means “pursuit of knowledge”) as the ancient mother who gave birth to all the more specialized pursuits of knowledge — physics, math, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc. Philosophy also created a lot of things, the most useful of which, of course, she gave to her kids, and the kids readily took, because they’d need it. So now Philosophy’s house is stripped of all of her most useful contributions, so now she looks like a crazy old empty-nester with nothing on her shelves anymore but the useless tinkerings none of her kids wanted or came back to get. “Thanks for the ‘burden of proof,’ mom, it’s really coming in handy! What? No, I don’t want gender-essentialism either, I mean thanks, but none of us have any room for it, it just gets in the way. Theology can keep it, but you really should tell him it won’t do him any good either, which is why he’s still living in your basement and maxing out your credit card!”
the problem I have with philology and philosophers is the abstractness that is usually engaged in which while the reasoning is consistent is divorced from any reality. This is a very good example while “sex” is about reproduction in plants and animals who can be said to have a sex it is not solely or primarily about reproduction in all animals. Especially in humans where “sex” has a very important role in social structure that is apart from reproduction so the reasoning for only two sex roles completely falls apart when we look at the reality of the human condition. It is as if they never heard of humans before.
spell check bah!
@Raging Bee: My understanding is that ‘neoliberal’ is actually legitimately useful jargon for highlighting the idea that as of the Clinton administration, the policy positions of our country’s less right-wing party are better understood as centrist. That is to say, if the US somehow magically became a multiparty democracy overnight, the GOP would be the right-wing party, the Democrats would be the centrist party (with its own internal center-right and center-left wings), and there would be no serious left-wing party (for there to be a serious left-wing party would require a second magical act of transformation, on the US Green Party or another suitable possibility.)
In short: Obama and Biden are neoliberals, not leftists, and this a very important distinction to make.
If you don’t think your local political parties are sufficiently progressive, you can push them left by getting involved in them and putting actual leftist policy on their agendas.
Claiming that due to imaginary third party politics, Obama and Biden are neoliberal is just silly.
@ Matthew Currie #35
“Going back to the original article, if someone asked me “where is gender identity located,” I’d say it’s in the same place as the soul.”
Except that gender identity is a real thing, and as for the soul, you can argue about that if you like. Gender identity is in the brain. Exactly how it works? I recently saw a note stating that neurologists reckon they’re decades away from figuring it out, and that sounds right to me.
It can be noted that it is one of our enemies’ main efforts to deny that gender identity is a real, objective phenomenon. If they can make gender identity disappear, they make transgender people disappear, which is what they want.
@Tethys: No, my idiotic Hamlet bit was silly.
My point about distinguishing between Democratic Party leadership and the US political left was quite serious, and already led me to the same boldfaced conclusion you’re trying to moonsplain to me now.
However, the point I was originally trying to make about the utility of ‘neoliberalism’ as jargon got away from me because I was too focused on recent use among leftists I’ve been listening to, and it’s rather decoupled from my point about the Dems anyway.
Anyway, I totally agree with @Raging Bee’s general idea about the importance of careful use of terminology in this context, it was the specifics I was quibbling with.
Probably it’s true that there really OUGHT to be a better X than ‘neoliberal’ for my ‘Obama and Biden are X, not leftist’ formulation. Any suggestions?
In short: Obama and Biden are neoliberals, not leftists, and this a very important distinction to make.
First, yes, it is an important distinction; but that doesn’t mean “neoliberal” is anywhere near the best label to apply to the non-leftist Democrats. (Also, “leftist” is pretty vague too, we really should be using more descriptive terms, such as “socialist” or “social-democrat;” but that’s another matter.)
And second, Obama, Biden and the Clintons are not the ones actually making the policies we’re calling “neoliberal.” We can apply the label to those individuals and others like them; but not to the policies they’re caving to, and certainly not to the people actually devising and enacting those policies. Those aren’t “neoliberal,” they’re hyper-capitalist, libertarian, theocratic, anti-progressive, know-nothingist, anti-rationalist, racist, and/or fascist. WORD CHOICES MATTER, FOLKS!
(This has been a public service message from your resident unemployed tech-writer.)
1. The sexes–male and female–have been around since before Saturn had rings.
That’s almost, but not quite, as asinine as one loony Christian’s assertion that “Marriage” was created and sanctified by God before he even created the Universe, let alone humans to partake of marriage.
Drsteve
I did not explain anything to you, but I disagreed with neoliberal. I will second Raging Bees comments on the subject, which explain the difference well.
I’m named after an extinct ocean, btw. ;)
It seems we actually agree that Biden and Obama aren’t neoliberals.
I would characterize their shared administration as centrist, and am pleased that Joe is ‘Woke’ and demonstrating his ability to evolve beyond giving lip service to social ills like racism and sexism. I’m actually surprised that he has been pretty progressive in enacting legislation, though it took the Roe va Wade debacle for some of the supposed progressives to understand that the religious rights threat to remove rights from women and POC are quite real.
@ ^ Tethys : “I’m named after an extinct ocean, btw.
Ah! So this Tethys :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_Ocean
NOT the Saturnian moon Tethys :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_(moon)
Or Titan of Hellenic myth Tethys :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_(mythology)
I must admit I had wondered about that – although your icon is a bit of a giveaway..