Progressives in America like to think that Europe is very far ahead of us. And since Europe is more progressive than us, we should become more progressive to catch up to them. But what happens when the Europeans have gone further down the road of progressivism, and they turn back because it led them to a dead end?
Here’s the latest from Daily Wire, about an expert in gender dysphoria named Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala.
Excerpt:
Finland’s leading expert on pediatric gender medicine says “four out of five” children will grow out of their gender confusion.
Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, the chief psychiatrist at Tampere University, Finland’s largest pediatric gender clinic, recently had an interview with the country’s top newspaper about her reluctance to recommend surgical and chemical sex change services for minors who identify as transgender.
Dr. Kaltiala explained that while it is “important to accept the child as they are,” it is also necessary to recognize that it is common for children to strongly identify with the opposite sex at some point in their lives, but four out of five children who identify as transgender will grow out of it during puberty.
And what about the argument that if we don’t let children make permanent, life-altering decisions without adult supervision, then they will end themselves?
This:
Transgender advocacy groups… frequently rely on the debunked affirm-or-suicide narrative to lobby for early medicalization of childhood gender dysphoria.
Dr. Kaltiala calls the notion that hormone treatments and legal gender recognition for minors are urgently needed due to increased suicide risk “purposeful disinformation” and “irresponsible.” Suicidal thoughts and behavior in young people with “gender identity” issues are related to concurrent psychiatric disorders, not just “unaffirmed” gender, she explained.
“Mentally healthy young people who experience their gender in a way that differs from their biological body are not automatically suicidal,” said Dr. Kaltiala.
Here’s a study:
In a large Swedish study, suicide mortality significantly increased among adults who received sex-change treatments, and a Finnish study found that the mental health of many minors who received hormonal care deteriorated.
“Therefore, it is not justified to tell the parents of young people experiencing transgenderism that the young person is at risk of suicide without corrective treatment and that the danger can be countered with gender reassignment treatment,” says Dr. Kaltiala. She recommends not beginning medicalization before adulthood.
If I get asked about these issues at work, I just come to my blog and dig up these articles. I hope you get some use out of my blog when it’s your turn to debate.
A friend of mine knows the author of this article in the Wall Street Journal. The article is about Texas Tech, which is supposed to be a merit-based, professional university. And yet now we find out that the faculty is screening job candidates to prefer candidates who toe the secular left line on wokeness. Let’s take a look.
Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.” These short, written declarations are meant to summarize an academic job seeker’s past and potential contributions to DEI efforts on campus.
[…]At Texas Tech University, a candidate for a faculty job in the department of biological sciences was flagged by the department’s search committee for not knowing the difference between “equality” and “equity.” Another was flagged for his repeated use of the pronoun “he” when referring to professors. Still another was praised for having made a “land acknowledgment” during the interview process. A land acknowledgment is a statement noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.
[…]One Texas Tech search committee penalized a candidate for espousing race-neutrality in teaching. The candidate “mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally,” the evaluation notes. “This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.”
Another search committee flagged a candidate for failing to properly understand “the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct,” noting that this suggests a “rather superficial understanding of DEI more generally.” This distinction arises frequently in DEI training, always as a markedly ideological talking point. According to the schema, equality means equal opportunity, but, to use the words of Vice President Kamala Harris, “Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.” Somehow, failing to explain that distinction reflects poorly on a biologist.
The biology department’s search committees also rewarded fluency in the language of identity politics. An immunology candidate was praised for awareness of the problems of “unconscious bias.” “Inclusivity in lab” was listed as a virology candidate’s strength: “her theme will be diversity, and she will actively work to creating the culture—e.g. enforce code of conduct, prevent microaggressions etc.” Another candidate’s strengths included “Land acknowledgement in talk.”
Many critics rightly point out that diversity statements invite viewpoint discrimination. DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views. Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence.
[…]One cell biology candidate was given a “red flag” for alleged “microaggressions towards women faculty.” The report names two examples: “assuming one junior faculty was a graduate student” and “minimizing the difficulties of women in the US by comparing to worse situations elsewhere.”
The first thing to say is isn’t it wonderful that this fellow was able to get his hands on these documents and expose the school? Already, the school has announced that it is eliminating these DEI policies. Just like that, in one day, one man made a big difference. It’s important to say that, because so many people today like to justify being passive by adopting cynical points of view. “Both political parties are the same”, “the system is rigged”, “even the people on my team are not as committed as me”, etc. They want to appear to be conservative, but without having to do any actions. Well, real conservatism is done with actions – actions that get results.
It looks like even STEM departments are losing their vision about what happens when a young person exchanges tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives for knowledge. They think that we find value in being taught morality by secular leftists, and so we should be paying for that. But from my perspective, work is very difficult. People expect you to know how to write code. Just take a look at any job description for a programmer. You’re going to see a ton of programming languages (Kotlin), frameworks (Axon), services (Kafka), and libraries (React), listed there. People expect you to know how to use them. And they want months and years of experience with these tools. You don’t have time in college to waste on secular leftist indoctrination. You need to earn money.
Right now, I would be very careful about getting into any university that adopted these Diversity and Inclusion policies. When you get into a private sector workplace, you are expected to perform. You want to work 40 hours to move your cards, not 60 hours. So choose where you go to school wisely.
Today is the 80th anniversary of a very brave, self-sacrificial act that is well known by all American submariners. The story I talk about below occurred on February 7th, 1943, when America was at war against Japanese imperialists. It took place aboard the USS Growler, a Gato-class submarine. The hero of the story is Commander Howard W. Gilmore. Let’s take a look.
My first brush with the story of the Growler occurred when I was very young, and was playing a game called “Gato” (made by Spectrum Holobyte) on the Macintosh computer that my parents bought for my older brother. In the game, you played as the commander of the USS Growler. COMSUBPAC (Commander of Submarines in the Pacific) would send me missions, and I would execute them. I was able to find an online version that ran in Microsoft’s Edge browser on archive.org.
So, here is an article from the Submarine Force Museum about the USS Growler and Commander Howard W. Gilmore.
It says:
Howard Walter Gilmore was born in Selma, Alabama on September 29, 1902. He enlisted in the Navy on November 15, 1920 and was appointed to the US Naval Academy in 1922. In 1926 he was sent to his first station on the battleship USS Mississippi (BB-41). By 1930, Gilmore was seeking something new and exciting and underwent submarine training in New London.
[…]By March of 1942, construction of the Growler was finished, and Gilmore and his crew would operate out of Pearl Harbor in the Pacific theater.
Their first war patrol would come in late June 1942 in the Aleutian Islands. During this patrol, Gilmore once again narrowly escaped disaster, avoiding two torpedoes that were fired at him during an attack by three Japanese destroyers. In August, they would leave for their second patrol in the East China Sea near Taiwan. During what would end up being Growler’s most successful war patrol, they sunk four merchant ships totaling 15,000 tons. Her third patrol was quiet, and she would remain in Brisbane, Australia for the rest of 1942.
The Growler and her crew left Brisbane on New Year’s Day 1943 for her fourth war patrol. Her mission was to target Japanese shipping lanes in the Bismarck Archipelago. In early February, while charging her batteries on the surface, Gilmore spotted a provision ship and prepared for a surface attack. The 900-ton provision ship Hayasaki saw the on-coming submarine and attempted to ram the Growler. In the darkness, Gilmore “sounded the collision alarm and shouted, ‘Left full rudder!’-to no avail.
Perhaps inadvertently, Growler hit the Japanese adversary amidships at 17 knots, heeling the submarine 50 degrees, bending sideways 18 feet of her the bow, and disabling the forward torpedo tubes.” The Japanese crew began firing at the bridge, killing the assistant officer and a lookout who were on deck. Gilmore and two other men were also wounded during the burst of gun fire. Gilmore, without thinking, called for the bridge to be cleared. Gilmore realized that if they dove, the Growler could be saved, but there was no time for him to make it below. Despite this, he gave the call to “Take her down!”
LCDR Arnold Schade, shaken and unsure, followed the last order his captain would ever give him. Schade would surface the ship a few hours later but found no sign of the Hayasaki. There was also no sign of Gilmore. Schade and the crew were able to keep the battered ship together long enough to make it back to Brisbane on February 17th. Gilmore’s death would unfortunately not be the only tragedy for the Growler. On her 11th war patrol in 1944, she was lost at sea. By her end, The Growler received eight battle stars for her role in the Pacific War.
CDR Howard Gilmore was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his sacrifice to save his ship.
Whenever I see that someone has earned a Medal of Honor – the highest military award that can be given – I always look up their Medal of Honor citation.
There’s a good episode of “The Silent Service” about Gilmore:
As a Christian, I try to make the words of the Bible more practical by reading stories that parallel some of the teachings of Jesus. In this case, Gilmore is pretty clearly living out that command to “love your neighbor as yourself” and “in humility consider others more important than yourselves” and “greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. What’s interesting to me about this story is that it’s not an enlisted man or a lower officer who is doing it, it’s the Commander of the boat.
If you’re at all interested in getting started in learning military history, a good place to start is with the American submarine commanders in the Pacific. The enemy we fought was very clearly evil, and treated civilians and prisoners horribly. They attacked us first at Pearl Harbor. I have found the commanders to be mostly men of extraordinary intelligence and character. I especially recommend the books “Wahoo” and “Clear the Bridge!” by Richard O’Kane, and “Thunder Below” by Eugene Fluckey. Right now, I am reading Charles Lockwood’s “Sink ‘Em All”. Those can all be obtained as audio books, too. I just got “Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War against Japan” in the mail.
If you like board games, there is a good board game called “Silent Victory”, but it’s out of print. The manufacturer is trying to collect 500 orders in order to do a third printing. If you prefer computer games, “Crash Dive 2” puts you in command of a Gato-class submarine, and it’s not too complicated.
