Michael Bailey

@DanFriedman81 On the other hand, Yglesias is pretty good.

@GuiveAssadi @DerekPederson3 Just my students. Although I’m proud of “professor.”

@profjmb @DerekPederson3 Do you want random people to call you “professor”, or just students you teach?

The remarkable thing about the whole “Dr. Jill Biden” thing is that I realized that in some areas of the country people evidently don’t address their professors as “Dr. so and so”.

Radical feminism is the worst of all feminisms because it combines the worst of feminism with the worst of Marxism* *And its adherents are usually the worst archetype of traumatized man-hating feminists.

@thepeacepoet99 Listen to the lyrics: youtube.com/watch?v=Ru8Ci1…

On days like this, I’m just glad I have most of my finger left in tact after an incident with a sharp blade. The fraught reality of being embodied remains an unfortunate thing for us all, regardless of where we stand on the concept of “gender identity.”

Another ludicrous misuse of academic resources: bureaucratically-curated "dialogues across differences."  Colleges should be cramming knowledge into their students' empty brains, not overseeing politically correct conversations about the ephemera of the moment. I discussed the betrayal of the universities and Trump’s halting efforts to reform them with Northwestern’s Young Americans for Freedom Chapter last week. Thank you to @calebnunes13 and @YAF at Northwestern for hosting me.

@Steve_Sailer @lokitekone @glukianoff There are plenty of honest, non scary autogynephiles on X who’d love the NYTImes to say the truth.

@glukianoff For example, the New York Times hasn't published the key word for understanding much of transgenderism, "autogynephilia," since 2019 because autogynephiles don't like anybody to know their secret, and they tend to be scary dudes.

In my career defending academic freedom and free speech, I never saw anything become as immediately radioactive as views that ran counter to the narrative on trans issues. Papers were retracted, compelled speech was treated as normal, and people were canceled for saying things that would have sounded like common sense just a few years earlier. It seemed to become a kind of secular blasphemy overnight. And usually, that is a sign that the true believers know, at some level, that they are on shaky ground. @hoovlet

@elegationvain Sometimes you say wise things. More of that.

Because women don’t sexually objectify men (not cause they’re “good” or “pure”, but because female sexuality doesn’t work that way), so when they learn male sexual attraction is object (anatomy) driven, it feels dehumanizing.

@Rongwrong_ I agree that scientists must engage philosophically to answer certain questions. Also that they tend to suck at that.

Fine, then don’t answer them! Nobody’s asking you to! All I’m asking is that scientists stay in their lane. They should stick to science, UNLESS they’ve gained expertise in other fields, which very few of them have. Of if they want to epistemically trespass (which we all do on X), fine, but let them acknowledge that’s what they’re doing.

Every person with a disorder of sex development has a definable sex. Analysis of their development path reveals how their body is organized around either gamete type. From my interview with @JosHershberger.

@profjmb Of course. But these are philosophical questions, not scientific questions.

@Rongwrong_ You are free to disagree. But philosophers tend to know less science and many also have agendas.

@profjmb Strongly disagree. Very few scientists seem qualified as metaphysicians and/or semanticists.

@Rongwrong_ In both cases scientists know most. And they aren’t especially motivated to address philosophical questions. Of course, there are some ignorant scientists and also some who can’t/wont see true things that violate their preferences.

The reason I asked is, you can compare the quality of scholarship and discourse. Metaphysics of race and metaphysics of gender/sex are similar. They address, or SHOULD address, similar questions. So you can compare. Metaphysics of race seems like a healthy, functional area of study. In contrast, I didn’t fully appreciate how bad philosophers of gender/sex are, especially gender-critical philosophers, until I compared them to philosophers of race. It’s night and day.

@Rongwrong_ No. I understand race as an imposition of a categorical social identity onto continuous genetic ancestry. Compared with sex, race is much more nebulous. But not dismissible as an illusion, if one doesn’t buy into categorical essentialism.

@profjmb This might sound unrelated, but have you by any chance read anything on the metaphysics of race?

@Rongwrong_ I don’t consider Alex Byrne GC per se, and he is excellent.

@profjmb You might also be interested that Kathleen Stock, in some ways the least bad of the gender-critical philosophers, defined “sex” in a way that can make CAIS 46,XY people female. She gave a property-cluster definition of “sex”.

@Rongwrong_ Excellent. I’d like to read if you can tell me where.

@IonaItalia I went for many years without reading fiction. But honestly I guess I never read many older than say Mark Twain.

@profjmb Understood, but what about older novels?

I'd be interested to know when men stopped reading fiction and why. 8 of my top 12 books were written by men and almost all became popular at the time because they were read by men.

@DeshadaRenada @Super70sSports Looked like Rose

@Super70sSports he's got some Pete Rose in him

Jimmy Connors won 109 tournaments including 8 grand slams, but this one point at age 39 late in the New York night is the defining moment of his entire career. Enjoy.