Category Archives: News

News

I’m learning about transgenderism from this transgender activist’s activism

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J3551c4 Y4n1v
J3551c4 Y4n1v

Well, previously I had blogged about this transgender activist named Y4n1v who tried to force Canadian women to wax Y4n1v’s male genitals despite the fact that they only did waxes on women. There was something about the idea of forcing women to touch Y4n1v against their will that seemed like a great idea to Y4n1v. And now Y4n1v wants to force gynecologists to touch Y4n1v’s male genitals.

Here’s the latest from The Federalist:

Transgender Canadian and semi-professional complainer Jessica Y4n1v, who is a biological male, tweeted Monday that he was “shocked” to be turned away from a gynecologist.

[…]Y4n1v gained notoriety this past year for filing a complaint with the British Colombia Human Rights Tribunal against a group of home-based estheticians who refused to wax the complainant’s male genitalia. “The people that discriminated against me are forcing their beliefs on society,” Y4n1v said while representing himself before the tribunal, according to The Post Millennial.

Y4n1v says that it’s those people who are “forcing their beliefs on society”. They’re the fascists who are using government to force people who disagree with them to act against their worldview, beliefs and conscience.

Here are the latest Y4n1v tweets:

  • Gynaecologists form a part of the multidisciplinary team who engage with transgender and non‐binary patients, either as part of the transition stage performing surgery or managing pre‐ or post‐transition gynaecological problems.

  • The @cpsbc_ca [College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia] has confirmed to me that the refusal I’ve received is discrimination under the BC Human Rights Code and against their code of Ethics.

  • So @cpsbc_ca I’ll file a complaint with you today about that clinic. Trans people need to be included, not excluded from society. Pre and post gender affirming surgery care is super important!

And apparently, Canada is a very good place to do this sort of thing to women, because Canada is more secular and progressive and woke than the United States. In America, those nasty Christians want women to get married for life to a husband who loves them and gives them children and takes care of them. But in Canada, the secular left dominates, and they’re more concerned about transgender women using the government as a weapon to bully women to fondle Y4n1v’s genitals in order to avoid being arrested and put on trial and sent to jail.

Now, I know that all of our government-run institutions are trying their best to accommodate transgenderism. Heck, Obama even gave Bradley Manning a sex change at taxpayer expense, as a reward for betraying all our military secrets. Anything to help out his good friend Bradley Manning. So, I know that it’s coming here too.

So, this is what I find interesting about transgenderism, and it’s ideological precursor, same-sex marriage. When these things were presented to us, we were told that these things would not have any impact on our lives. It was just about living and letting others live. But now we know that Christians are being dragged into courts for refusing to celebrate this redefinition of marriage that destroys the aspect of complementary sexes – which is central to marriage. But it’s not just us. It’s the women on female sports teams who are being displaced by biological men. And it’s not just them. It’s the domestic violence victims in women’s shelters. And it’s not just them. It’s the prisoners in women’s prisons. And it’s not just them. It’s the girls in women’s bathrooms. And it’s not just them. It’s female waxing employees. And it’s not just them. Now it’s female gynecologists who need to be forced into sex work.

And keep in mind that radical feminists also want pro-life nurses and doctors to perform abortion. Surprise, again! The secular left in Canada and America are just as totalitarian and fascist as the secular left in North Korea, the USSR, or any other godless communist country. Atheism is incompatible with human rights, because you can’t rationally ground human rights in an accidental, materialist universe.

A lot of people pick on me because they think that I am not in favor of feminism, since I tell women what they must do in order to succeed at education, career, marriage, child-bearing, etc. by consulting research for best practices. But I would never ever allow women to be forced into sex work against their will. But, surprise! It turns out that it’s actually people on the left who really hate women.

News

Self-refuting statements defined and some common examples

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A conflict of worldviews
A conflict of worldviews

A common thing that I see is people trying to wall off arguments they don’t like by stating a slogan, like “you shouldn’t push your moral rules on other people” or “that’s true for you, but not for me”. Those slogans are meant to get the person out of having to be reasonable about respecting moral obligations, or having to consider how the world really works when choosing what to do.

Here is a fine article by Aaron, who writes at Apologetics Junkie.

Excerpt:

A self-defeating (or self-refuting) statement is one that fails to meet its own standard. In other words, it is a statement that cannot live up to its own criteria. Imagine if I were to say,

I cannot speak a word in English.

You intuitively see a problem here. I told you in English that I cannot speak a word in English. This statement is self-refuting. It does not meet its own standard or criteria. It self-destructs.

The important thing to remember with self-defeating statements is that they are necessarily false. In other words, there is no possible way for them to be true. This is because they violate a very fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction. This law states that A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. For example, it is not possible for God to exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense. This would violate the law of non-contradiction. So if I were to say, “God told me He doesn’t exist” you would see intuitively the obvious self-refuting nature of this statement.

Aaron goes on to explain how to deal with self-refuting statements in the article.

Here are 20 examples of self-refutation, just to encourage you to click through and read it:

1. There is no truth.

2. You can’t know truth.

3. No one has the truth.

4. All truth is relative.

5. It’s true for you but not for me.

6. There are no absolutes.

7. No one can know any truth about religion.

8. You can’t know anything for sure.

9. You should doubt everything.

10. Only science can give us truth.

11. You can only know truth through experience.

12. All truth depends on your perspective.

13. You shouldn’t judge.

14. You shouldn’t force your morality on people.

15. You should live and let live.

16. God doesn’t take sides.

17. You shouldn’t try to convert people.

18. That’s just your view.

19. You should be tolerant of all views.

20. It is arrogant to claim to have the truth.

Have you ever heard any of those? It’s amazing how often I hear statements like that when discussing interesting things like moral issues and politics with young people. The trick to being prepared to answer these is to learn lots of them. Then you recognize them when you hear them.

Add yours in the comments!

News

What determines the prices of goods and services in a market economy?

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Basic Economics: Prices are set by supply and demand
Basic Economics: In a free market, prices are set by supply and demand

A few days ago, I posted the meme above on the blog’s Facebook page. The meme makes fun of unionized public school teachers, who feel entitled to the same salary and benefits as doctors, software engineers, etc. in the private sector. I thought that all Americans were familiar with basic economics. But judging from some of the comments to the meme, that is not the case. This post will help.

So, the point of this meme is simple, it’s to point out that the teachers who belong to teacher unions are ignorant of basic economics, specifically, the law of supply and demand. As we’ll see in a minute, this is literally lesson 1 of Economics 101.

When there is more demand for a product or service than there is a supply for it, then prices go up. When there is more supply for a product or service than there is a demand for it, prices go down.

A good place to see this explained is in a book by famous black economist Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell has written many books, but he wrote one book in particular for people who have no knowledge of basic economics. It’s called “Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy“. And the first few chapters explain how prices are set by supply and demand:

  1. What is Economics?
  2. The Role of Prices
  3. Price Controls
  4. An Overview of Prices

Most people who commented on the meme had some knowledge of basic economics, and how prices are determined.

Here’s Bruce:

Wages–the prices of labor–are set by free people bidding in an open market for the labor of people willing to work. They are not set by an emperor weighing abstractions. There are 3.7 million teachers working in the US, and only about 5000 professional athletes.

And Chris:

My coworkers and I (we are fintech people with highly specialized knowledge and computer skills) were talking about some computer-related consultants who are so specialized and so good that they command hundreds (if not thousands of dollars per hour). The top of the top cyber security guys, who do presentations at conferences on threats and vectors? Yeah, thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars per hour.

So far, so good. But others argued that the prices of goods and services are determined by a sinister cabal of politicians and other elites, who paid athletes lots of money in order to distract the masses with “bread and circuses”. Now, I know what you’re thinking. How does paying athletes MORE get people to care about sports? It doesn’t. Actually, it’s the (widespread) demand to see the performance of (scarce) elite athletes that causes the wages of those athletes to increase. It’s not a conspiracy – it’s free people making choices about what they want to buy in a free market.

It turns out that there are two views of how wages are set in an economy:

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of “socially necessary labor” required to produce it.

LTV is usually associated with Marxian economics… The LTV is central to Marxist theory, which holds that the working class is exploited under capitalism, and dissociates price and value. Marx did not refer to his own theory of value as a “labour theory of value”.

Mainstream neoclassical economics tends to reject the need for a LTV, concentrating instead on a theory of price determined by supply and demand.

Marxists economists believe that the value of a good or service is determined by the social utility of the work produced. But classical (“free market”) economists believe that value is determined by the scarcity of the good or service relative to the demand from consumers.

So, a Marxist economist might say “teaching English is valuable because it is relevant and meaningful”. But, a classical economist would say “conducting a security audit on distributed point-of-sale system is valuable, because few people can do it, but many people want it”.

So, the conspiracy theorists view of economics, which asserts that teachers should be paid more than software engineers and doctors, is actually based on Marxist (atheistic) assumptions. And yet many of the people who hold to the conspiracy view of prices fancy themselves to be Christians and conservatives.

I’ve noticed that school teachers and non-STEM university students and professors are very likely  to hold to the conspiracy theory view of prices and wages. Robert Nozick wrote a paper about why this happens. It turns out that “wordsmiths” (his word) are conditioned by their performance in the classroom to expect success in the free market economy. But when they find that their “brilliance” in English poetry, Medieval history, or lesbian dance theory has no value to anyone else, they fall in with these Marxist assumptions and conspiracy theory views of the economy. It’s a coping mechanism for people who value academic acclaim more than doing something useful for their neighbors.

Consider this article from College Pulse about a survey of 10,590 undergraduate students:

Students with certain majors are far more likely than their peers to approve of socialism. Philosophy majors, in particular, have a positive view of socialism. Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) say they view the economic system favorably, followed by 64% of anthropology majors, and 58% of both English and international relations majors. Accounting and finance majors are least likely to view socialism positively (20% and 22% respectively).

Do you know what accounting and finance students have to study? Basic economics.

I noticed that the practical commenters who were trying to explain why teachers earn less than software engineers all had some experience working for a living in the private sector. A couple of them mentioned how studying economics on their own had led them to a correct understanding of how the economy works. That’s what happened to me, as well.

As soon as I got my first job as a software engineer, and finished my study of Christian apologetics, the very next thing I studied was economics. It was Dr. Jay Richards who got me interested in it, when I heard him speaking about economics in an apologetics lecture for Stand to Reason. I contacted him, and he recommended the works of two famous economists, F. A. Hayek and Thomas Sowell. And that’s what I want to recommend to you, too. Our continued liberty and prosperity depends on ordinary Americans taking the time to educate themselves about basic economics.