My Review of / Response to Bryan Caplan's "Don't Be a Feminist"

Professional provocateur Bryan Caplan has put up excerpts of the title essay from his new book, Don't Be a Feminist. It is written as a letter to his daughter. 

My quick comments:

>And since I am your father, you know I’m not evil. 

WTF? Most evil people are fathers. Is this Bryan's level of logic / persuasion? "Defer to me because I impregnated your mother."

Oy.

>To start, what is “feminism”?  Many casually define it as “the view that men and women should be treated equally” or even “the radical notion that women are people.”  However, virtually all non-feminists in the United States believe exactly the same thing.  In this careful 2016 survey, for example, only 33% of men said they were feminists, yet 94% of men agreed that “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.”

Just because people say something doesn't mean it is true. Most people say they aren't racist, but tons of people are. 

One example of reality vs claims: My wife, a brilliant and award-winning teacher, was told by several men (not at her university) that she only got the job at Carnegie Mellon because she is a woman. Given that they said this to her face, just imagine how many men thought that. 

And I'm sure every one of those sexist men says they agree “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.” But in reality, they resent women who succeed. 

This is what women face today. 

This is why we need feminism. 

Within my lifetime,  women in the US were NOT able to:

• Get a credit card in their own name.
• Be guaranteed that they would not get fired for being pregnant.
• Serve on a jury everywhere.
• Fight on the front lines.
• Go to any Ivy League school.
• Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment.
• Decide not to have sex with their husband.
• Marry whomever they chose.
• Take the birth control pill regardless of where they lived.

This discrimination and oppression were part of the very structure of our society just a short while ago. For nearly all of human history, men and women were not social, political, and economic equals. The leading conservative jurist on our current Supreme Court wants to go back to at least some of this.

This is why we need feminism.

But no. The real problem, in Bryan's eyes, is that some women and men want to actually improve our society, rather than just pay lip service. For Bryan, lip service is enough. Feminism has gone too far because some women dared to be mean to him on Twitter. 

"Dear daughter, don't you dare be uppity to us wise professors!" 

These "loud" feminists will continue to be opposed by deeply angry, resentful men who read Bryan as an ally in their hatred of "uppity" women.

As represented in the excerpts, this "Don't Be a Feminist" essay is such whiny, self-pitying, and self-righteous garbage it literally pains me. Moreso, it is shockingly blind to the realities in our world -- the facts faced by his kid and my kid. 

Here is just one example of many. It shows the structural reasons women aren't in computer science. It isn't, as Bryan would have us believe, simply because men are manly mathletes. More. (More, by center-right Tyler Cowen.)

This is the world his daughter lives in. This is why we need feminism. 

Defer to the wise white man who knows better?

No thanks, Daddy.

More for Bryan Caplan and his misogynist followers

Song: “All Too Well” (10-minute version) (Taylor’s version)

Note: Not all of Bryan Caplan's readers are misogynists. At least two are actually thoughtful. But there are clearly whiney little losers who love Bryan because he helps them blame "uppity women" for their failures. 

Bryan's anti-feminist argument (which, honestly, should just be "don't be a jerk to Scott Aaronson on Twitter") is based on his straight-white-rich-over-educated-male view that "women have it easier." This is because men used to be drafted and (a few) work hazardous jobs. 

He seems to have missed the news that in 2022, women in the United States don't have the right to bodily autonomy. 

I wonder how anti-feminist Bryan would be if his daughter was raped and then forced to risk her life to carry the pregnancy to term and give birth to his child.

Because that is the world his fellow anti-feminists want and are building.

In case I'm not clear, here is a cut chapter from Losing My Religions:

I am writing this in Germany, where yesterday, I woke up to the leaked SCOTUS draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade. Anyone paying attention knew this was coming at least since Ruth Bader Ginsburg died; the theocrats’ fifty-year plan has paid off big-time.

Fuck.

It is 2022. We should be working to secure basic human rights for transgender people, and our concern for animals should be increasing. We should be expanding the circle of our moral concern. Instead, the Supreme Court has decreed that half our population no longer has the right to self-determination.

I knew this was coming as soon as Anthony Kennedy retired. But still, I am so goddamn angry. 

Update after Roe was officially overturned:

Alito, who wrote today’s “This is how The Handmaid’s Tale starts” opinion, cites – again, to support a legal decision in 2022 – Matthew Hale, a 17th-century “jurist” who had at least two women executed for witchcraft.

In addition to killing women for “witchcraft,” Alito’s hero Matthew Hale also wrote a treatise saying a husband could never “rape” his wife. This is because the woman is, for all intents and purposes, his property. She has no agency. She has no choice. 

Alito did not need to cite Hale in the original draft. He did not need to keep the Hale citation in the final opinion. His argument (such as it is) didn’t hinge on some obscure guy from hundreds of years ago. Hale’s obscene opinions from hundreds of years ago had no bearing on “giving the decision back to the states.” 

Yet knowing exactly what it meant, Alito and his fellow Christian Nationalists chose to cite Hale, holding him up as a legal mind who should determine our laws today.

And even though Hale’s witchcraft and rape assertions were clearly spelled out following the leak, Alito and his fellow Xtian Taliban all chose to keep Hale in the final decision.

They could have cited any of the federalists in U.S. history. They chose to cite a rape defender to whom women were wenches or witches.

Alito and Co. have made it very clear. Women have no agency. The majority of the Supreme Court of the United States believes women cannot choose to not have sex. They cannot choose if and when to be pregnant. They cannot choose to terminate a pregnancy. 

Their “legal” argument is simple: Women exist to serve the man and bear as many of his children as he chooses to have. 

They could not be clearer on this. 

The Handmaid’s Tale is not a “hysterical overreaction.” It is their playbook. It is their ideal.

The Male Victimhood Complex

 Lucinda Williams - "World Without Tears"

"If we lived in a world without tears

How would bruises find

The face to lie upon?

How would scars find skin

To etch themselves into?

How would broken find the bones"

Over at his substack, Bryan Caplan continues to give his rabid followers what they want: victimhood status. And an enemy to blame for all their failures - "feminists" who just won't admit that women have it so much better than men.  

In the comment section, I asked, "Hey Bryan - over the course of their lives, how often will your daughter need to worry about her physical safety, compared to your sons?" 

To which one of his acolytes said that Bryan's sons had to worry much more because men take dangerous jobs.

Yeesh.

I assume it is obvious that the regular possibility of assault or rape is different than any fear you might have from a job you choose to take. And not only do men choose jobs (the vast majority of which aren't unsafe) but they also aren't always at work.

And would you rather be in an accident at work or raped? 

And of course, Professor Caplan's sons aren't going to be loggers or drillers. (I've only known one person who worked on an oil rig, and she loved the job and was never afraid.) 

Finally, do men really feel fear when at work? I worked in a small-scale factory that, in retrospect, was pretty dangerous. And I moved a lot of heavy stuff as a stocker. But none of that is remotely comparable to being a woman in a world that celebrates Andrew Tate.

Of course, Bryan's substack project isn't about finding facts and trying to shift the world to create liberty and justice for all. No - Caplan's crying clan is just out to have a mutual pathetic pity party. 

A nice outcome from a frustrating process

To try to avoid the filter bubble, I read several center-right individuals, including the incredibly arrogant Bryan Caplan. I toss in a comment here and there but don't engage with his "white men are the real victims!" readership. I have at times dropped in links, including to Losing My Religions.

So yesterday, One Step got a donation from someone whose name I didn't recognize, with the note "Via Lose My Religions. Thanks to Matt for sharing and providing the free download." 

I thanked them for the contribution and asked them how they heard of the book, and they said:

"Thank you! I enjoyed the read. Losing My Religions kept my interest to the end. I found it enjoyable and interesting. For what it's worth.

"I got to it from Bet On It, Bryan Caplan's Substack. I honestly don't remember if I downloaded it from one of your comments or found it via your profile. I just remember when we had the debate about Feminism, I was clicking around and saved some links. I downloaded the PDF shortly after that."

Song: Lyle Lovett's "Road to Ensenada," a key song from Losing.

Image for my pal Bryan:

Sexism part 3 - insidious and unrecognized

Mary Chapin Carpenter - "He Think's He'll Keep Her" 

Preface: I only recognized the below later in life. If my engineering near-marriage experience had gone through, I'm sure we would have followed the normal script. (In part because she had a worse last name than me, believe it or not.) 

But once we know better, we should do better.

And yes, the below isn't universal. However, it is common and generally unquestioned.

In my review of Bryan Caplan's Don't Be a Feminist, I listed things that women couldn't do in the United States within my lifetime:

• Get a credit card in their own name.
• Be guaranteed that they would not get fired for being pregnant.
• Serve on a jury everywhere.
• Fight on the front lines.
• Go to any Ivy League school.
• Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment.
• Decide not to have sex with their husband.
• Marry whomever they chose.
• Take the birth control pill regardless of where they lived.

(And of course, even today, men will force raped 10-year-olds to carry the pregnancy to term and bear their rapist's child.)

But now, laws have changed. So aren't women now equal?

Think about the life of an "average" female. When they're born, they are given their father's name, even though the woman risked her life to construct the baby and give birth; she often feeds the baby from her own body. (When they found out EK had Anne's last name, multiple women asked Anne, "But how will people know who the father is?" WTF??)

Then the baby is treated differently than a boy from the time they are an infant. As a young woman, she is often referred to as "Miss," because her marital status must be conveyed to everyone -- if they are currently owned by a husband is the important information. (When working in the local school district, Anne has had kids insist they have to call her either "Miss" or "Missus."*) 

If she gets married to a man, her father (!) "gives her away" to the husband. She then takes the man's name to convey the change in ownership from father to husband at the moment when another man says "I pronounce you man and wife."

If you really think about it, this is totally fucked up. 

Three things:

1. As said, with a very small change, I would have followed the standard script. My kids would have my last name and Diane would probably have gone by "Mrs. Matt Ball."

2. This isn't the worst thing in the world; your average woman in the United States has it better than most people in the world, especially women in patriarchal societies. But when you have Tangerine-Palpatine-endorsed Republicans saying publicly that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, how different are we from the Taliban, really?

3. I'm not as angry about this as this series implies. Bryan is just following his sexist programming and is playing to his angry, incel audience. (Not that they are all incels, but pretty much no one calls Bryan out. So he does what gets him positive feedback.)

Much, much more: 10,000 Years of Patriarchy. 

*One little girl asked Anne, "Why do you wear boy shoes?"

I hate it when the right is right

Dar Williams - The World's Not Falling Apart

There are many things I dislike about the current right-wing in the United States. I assume that is clear.

But given human nature and the world as it is, the center-right is right about several things. Markets are very often more effective than central planning. Incentives matter. Everything involves trade-offs. Once you get beyond immediate tribe, "to each according to their need; from each according to their ability" simply doesn't work. 

Another area where the center-right is correct: many radical environmentalists and climate doomers are not simply confused, but are actively dishonest about their motivations. At the core, they are against capitalism, "progress," and the modern world in general.

Sometimes they are relatively overt about this; e.g., Against “Green Capitalism”: The Environmental Struggle Must Be Anti-Capitalist and Revolutionary. 

Of course, the problem is neither capitalism nor fossil fuels. 

The problem is the immense amount of profound and unnecessary misery in the world today. 

Reducing that misery is the first and only bottom line, not some mistaken idea of "saving the planet" or reviving a failed political ideology. 

Here again, some in the climate cult are clear about their indifference to the suffering of others. (The cruelty of climate fanatics; “Is the West saying Africa should remain undeveloped?”)

It is important to realize that we could cool the earth right now if we really wanted to. Injecting aerosols into the stratosphere would be cheap and we know it would work. But is this even part of the discussion?

As I write in Losing My Religions:

Haven’t there always been [doomers] yelling “The sky is falling”? Hasn’t every single one of their doomsday predictions from the 60s, 70s, and 80s been proven wrong?

Shouldn’t this give us pause when evaluating new doomsday claims?

And not to be cynical, but if global warming truly is The Worst Thing Ever, why is geoengineering a topic we can’t even discuss? Ocean seeding and enhanced weathering – these aren’t even part of the discussion. Increasing albedo is verboten because the sky would look different? A slightly-less-blue sky overrides The Worst Thing Ever? 

Vox’s Bryan Walsh wrote in July 12 2022’s Future Perfect: “To argue, as the climate activist Greta Thunberg did in a tweet earlier this month, that nuclear power can never be considered ‘green’ is to implicitly reveal that your fear of nuclear trumps your fear of climate change. And if that becomes the norm, the climate will pay the price.” [Already done - and worse.] Or, as James Lovelock put it decades ago: “Some time in the next century, when the adverse effects of climate change begin to bite, people will look back in anger at those who now so foolishly continue to pollute by burning fossil fuel instead of accepting the beneficence of nuclear power.“

As I've made it clear in many past posts, this isn't to say we should simply continue the status quo. Despite all the progress we've made, the status quo is truly terrible. That is why we must work to reduce suffering, rather than just worship at our Church of Doom. 

Additional reading:

Matt Yglesias: Two visions of environmentalism: A better world for people vs. a world with less human impact

Via Andrew Tobias: Please take a little time to explain why the geoengineering aspects you don’t like are worse than what is already happening [and will inevitably happen w/o geoengineering]

David Friedman: Climate and the Media (tl;dr - don't believe what you read)

Breakthrough Institute: tl;dr by Bryan Walsh of Vox: "Taylor Dotson argues that such calls fail precisely because they seek to leap the hard, slow work of politics in favor of the home run of revolution. Remember: We should judge interventions not on how they sound or how they make us feel as we chant the words, but on how effective they ultimately are."

And, of course, I must repost: "Why climate tribalism only helps the deniers."

"Infinite capacity to rationalize"

Song: The incredibly beautiful and exceptionally sad "A Man I'll Never Be." It is especially heart-wrenching to know that Brad Delp, the singer, killed himself.

As mentioned, One Step got a donation earlier this month from a new donor with the note that it was from having read Losing My Religions.

In our correspondence, he pointed to a book club debate (1, 2, but I strongly advise you to not go there). In the "debate" on animal ethics, there are so many words that say nothing at all. In the end, though, Bryan Caplan, being a straight white overly-educated upper-middle-class male, basically said that ethics = whatever he feels like ("intuitions").

Of course he does. 

And of course, his intuitions say non-human animals don't matter.

Of course they don't.

He gives this example to "prove" the "flaw" in vegetarian reasoning:

A: It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of suffering, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.

B: So if the only way for me to build a swimming pool is to bulldoze a den of mice, causing them to horribly suffer, it is wrong to build my pool?

A: Perhaps I overstated.

B: Indeed.

That's the level of "logic" and "argument" Bryan brings to this discussion: it is just fine to support factory farms because ... he wants a pool.

This is, obviously, a perfect example of Cleveland Amory's truism: "Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize, especially when it comes to something he wants to eat."

As I document to some extent in Losing, there is plenty of whack-a-doodle-dee-doo on the vegan side of things.  But to my mind, nothing is as bad as "Eating meat is fine because ... pool."

Update Dec 18: Found this longer examination at Betham's Newsletter.

Card from Tom Scholz, who basically is Boston.

The Path to Internet Fame

Green Day "Too Dumb to Die"

Takes ~30 seconds to get to actual song.
Dr. Who version. (We never got into Dr. Who - don't hate me!)

It is clear that a key way to become famous these days is to play to a sense of victimhood. The largest insatiable audience seems to be white males who lack success in some field (especially with women; please see this Atlantic article for more). 

Jordan Peterson is a vile example, but Bryan Caplan is the one I find more frustrating. He is clearly intelligent and only reacting to the fact that one of his pals was attacked by lunatics calling themselves feminists.

Obviously, I have great sympathy. As documented in Losing My Religions, crazed vegans have made my professional life miserable for decades. But that doesn't mean I write books saying "Don't be a vegan" or write endless columns about the persecution of non-vegans. Just because there are asshole vegans doesn't mean the cruelty of factory farms isn't a serious problem. 

It is simply sad the extent folks like Caplan will go to try to argue men have it worse off than women. Have they seen the world? What percentage of Presidents have been women? Vice Presidents? Senators? Justices? Legislators? Heads of Fortune 500 companies? (8.8%) Billionaires? (<10%) And women control less than 1% of global wealth. 

But yeah, the odds are stacked against men. 🙄

PS: Over on Substack, I came across a young blond philosopher named Matt. It appears that he has little to no luck with women, and he spends his time writing endless posts to prove he is smarter than anyone else. Like looking in a time-machine's mirror.  😬

Poor, poor men

Song: Alison Krauss & Union Station, "Let Me Touch You For Awhile"

New feedback on Losing My Religions: “The book makes me want to be a better human. I plan to keep giving my little donations to One Step forever (or as long am able to). I am going to share the ebook.”

I keep hearing from incels who aren't happy with my anti-Bryan-Caplan (et al.) posts about the treatment of women in this society (example). They are unable to get past their personal experience (a woman getting a job, a woman rejecting them) to see the actual societal trends.

For anyone who is actually interested in honestly considering the issue, here are good sources:

When women stopped coding. A real-life example and answer to the guys who claim that women have no interest in computers, so companies should quit trying to hire them.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. "Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives."

The Role of Benevolent Sexism in Gender Inequality. 

Georgia O'Keeffe

I could have scrolled Twitter all day long yesterday

Just a few of my favorites:



Biden in 1986.

Contrast with 2014:

March for Science.

The Descent of Trump.

The results of our national election may tell a story of division. Ballot measures tell a different tale.

Aaron Lewis: "I love that Donald Trump is being evicted by Black people."

Bryan Behar: "Can you imagine being so bad at your job that they ring church bells in another country when you’re done?"

Kurt "Mask Up, Vote Early" Eichenwald: It is quite fitting that the Rudy and Trumps other freakazoids  had their last big performance in a parking lot between a dildo shop and a crematorium. Because then they can all fuck off and die without needing to travel.

Elizabeth Spiers: "We already empathize with Trump supporters on policy. We want them all to have healthcare, to make a living wage, to have a fair and equal justice system. We don't have to empathize with them because they voted against those things and lost. ... Everyone I know who was upset about Trump winning was upset because we knew he'd hurt a lot of people. The Trump supporters I know who are upset are mostly upset because he can't hurt the right people anymore. It's not the same impulse."

Thank you Australia:

Pros and Cons, Costs and Benefits

I try to read people on the right to avoid being in a bubble. It is hard, because so many of them act as though "woke" is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, straight white men are the persecuted these days, etc.

One of the conservatives I try to read is Bryan Caplan. His column this week on the costs and benefits of fossil fuels is one of the times that makes it worth it to be one of his readers.

A few quotes:

Regardless of what you believe about the impacts of rising CO2 levels on the planet’s future, if you are knowledgeable about the state of the world today, you must acknowledge that more human beings are flourishing than at any point in history — and if you’re at all knowledgeable about the ways fossil fuels power our world, you must recognize the use of these fuels as a major contributor to our unprecedented level of human flourishing.

While solar and wind are supported by our knowledge system in theory, in practice they face widespread local opposition because these “green,” “renewable” sources of energy involve enormous amounts of mining, take up huge amounts of space that would otherwise be occupied by humans or wildlife, and involve unprecedented amounts of long-distance electric transmission lines.

One cause for suspicion is the insistence not just on rapidly eliminating fossil fuels but on replacing them with exclusively “green” or “renewable” energy. These two terms refer primarily to intermittent solar and wind energy, always excluding nuclear energy and usually excluding large-scale hydroelectric energy — even though nuclear and hydro are the world’s two largest sources of non-carbon energy. A pro-human approach to reducing or CO2 emissions would eagerly embrace all forms of cost-effective non-carbon energy so as to produce as much non-carbon energy as possible 

We should think of potential global climate change from human impact as a change not from safe to dangerous but from dangerous to dangerous. We are taught to think of “climate change” as binary: we had a good climate, and we changed it to a bad climate. But if we recognize the natural danger of the global climate system, we see that any significant human impacts on climate are not taking a naturally safe global climate system and changing it to an unnaturally dangerous one but rather taking one dangerous global climate system and changing it into another dangerous global climate system. 

[I]f we look at the universally acknowledged history of climate and life on this planet, we inevitably come to the conclusion that rising CO2 levels leading to an unlivable planet is literally impossible — because the planet was incredibly livable for far less-adaptable organisms, with much in common with us, when CO2 was at levels that we could not come close to even if we wanted to.

1. The global climate system is near historic lows in CO2 and temperature.
2. We have no near-term mechanism of reaching even one-fourth the historical high of CO2.
3. Life on Earth thrived at far higher CO2 levels and temperatures in the past.

Wait, the planet isn't about to become uninhabitable??

These are similar to points I make in Losing My Religions. Further discussion.

Environmentalists Kill and Men are Whiney Little Bitches

OK, both of those claims in the headline should be modified with "Many."

From Open Philanthropy's Alexander Berger (emphasis added):

People died of heat in Japan because of energy conservation measures after their nuclear plans were shut down

So instead of using carbon-free electricity, they killed people. But that is small potatoes compared to who nuclear power has saved:

Climatologists James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha calculated that the use of nuclear power between 1971 and 2009 avoided the premature deaths of 1.84 million people by preventing air pollution from burning coal.

Also, one whiney white dude came out of the woodwork to complain about my takedown of Bryan Caplan's attack on his "feminism" strawman. (And didn't put his name on his rant.) Not to be ad hominem, but doesn't he read like someone who couldn't get a date in high school and resents that anyone other than straight white dudes has any say in anything?

His argument is basically that no woman can have earned her position. My reply:

See, this is the kind of "I'm a poor whiney white man who can't even put my name to my complaints" bullshit that just drives me crazy. Just like "we had a (half) black president, so racism isn't a thing. Except for whites being discriminated against."

Of course you doubt my wife's qualifications. THAT IS FUCKING SEXISM! Can't you fucking see that? You see my wife as inherently less than. Unworthy. 

Of course I can give you her fucking qualifications (won the college's top teaching award, president of the two national organizations, full teaching professor first year eligible) but it doesn't matter. All you see is an unworthy woman. Just like every other woman is unworthy because a school that had been nearly all male enacted policies to get past our inherent biases for others like us. Just because a few men in a world completely controlled by men decided that maybe things should be different. 

Poor you. 

Of all the discriminatory measures listed, you pick on health insurance. As though women get pregnant all on their own. In your world, women have to pay with their bodies and their careers to continue the species. And they should also pay more for insurance to have that privilege. And to have you tell them when they can have a child.

And all the rest of societies structural prejudices are "solved." Dream on. 

This country was made by men for men and men enacted laws to protect men's power. But a few decades ago, a few of those laws were undone. So everything is now "solved." Except for discrimination against whiney little bitches like yourself.

Your lack of empathy, your self-absorption, it is just astounding. You make me embarrassed to be a man. Except that I'll put my name on my comments.

Of course, there are daily examples of what women face; e.g., Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? 

(More from Tyler Cowen.)

But yeah, keep telling yourself that you're the one oppressed.

Photos, The Big 3-0, and Good News

From Vox, which has become the place for the most left-wing, doomer take on everything, Bryan Walsh offers "Good News":

While our brains are wired to focus on threats and our media and tech ecosystem amplifies the alarming, there are remarkable things happening all around us right now — innovations, breakthroughs, and everyday acts of progress that deserve our attention. 

Spring in Tucson:

Palo Verde in bloom.

Saguaro buds and blooms.

I got this when I asked ChatGPT to create an image of Anne as a cat.

Finally: there have been more than 30 reviews of Losing My Religions, but below are excerpts from the thirtieth official US Amazon review (written by someone in Greece):

The first time I felt Matt Ball's influence was in a warehouse in Seattle in roughly 2003. An animal advocate said to us: "The approach Matt Ball is suggesting really resonates with me."

It was a new concept, this idea of not being in a vegan "club" or making it about your own personal purity. This concept helped me--especially as a new vegan at the time--in the way I approached both my own advocacy and myself. I no longer feared minute ingredients or felt the need to check A-Z ingredient lists, nor did I need to worry about suggesting anyone exploring plant-based foods do the same. Bottom line: Make it easy not to eat animals, and don't make it about me.

And this is where "Losing" shined for me -- the flipping of conventional narratives. The most powerful example in the book, and my personal favorite is "The End of Veganism." 

Provocative title? Indeed. But Mr. Ball isn't here to hold your hand! He's here to slap your hand from your eyes and/or ears. To provide post-slap glasses to experience an alternate vision to the one where we are vegan, full stop we're done, end of suffering. To shift the focus from what IS vegan to creating a world with less suffering, vegan label begone.

For me, beyond shifting from vegan-as-identity, this means we approach others with the same compassion we're asking them to consider.

As noted in this chapter, one of the biggest barriers to people trying vegan is other vegans. I have experienced this directly when people tell me a version of "You're the most normal vegan I know." Another said to a friend: "I usually don't like vegans, but she's cool." [This reviewer is super-cool, by the way. -ed.]

Kudos to Matt Ball for his years of advocating for a more practical approach that could actually move the dial for animals.

Yes, I am talking to *you* (Plus: Owl!)

Two falls play big roles in Losing My Religions. Since then, two significantly-younger-than-me friends (who not only read Losing but are in the book) had serious falls. One of them woke up in the ambulance. 

Also since the book came out, two people with whom I have one degree of separation fell and died. 

So yeah - I am talking to you to take the risk of falls seriously. Modify your life to minimize the risk of falls and minimize the potential harm from falls. 

PS: From Bryan Walsh at Vox:

Casper, a great horned owl at British Columbia’s Orphaned Wildlife Rehabilitation Society, has become a one-bird foster system. Over 26 years, she has helped raise more than 500 rescued owlets. Because Casper can’t be released herself after old trap injuries, she teaches the babies what they’ll need outside rehab: flying, hunting, and, crucially, not treating humans like DoorDash with thumbs. The current class includes four owlets, all about six to seven weeks old, who learn by watching and mimicking her. It’s a useful reminder that wildlife rehab is not just bandages and baby bottles; sometimes, it’s about finding the right surrogate parent. 

Not Only White Men (2/2)

A reader notes that I spend an inordinate amount of time going after white men (Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Bryan Caplan*) while specifically noting that they are white men. 

Obviously, not every white man is terrible; some of us are just egomaniacs. And not every terrible person is a white man, e.g., Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, MTG, Boebert, Jill Stein, Amy Coney Handmaid's Tale, etc. etc. 

I don't know if a larger percentage of white men are terrible. Even though it seems like it, that could just be availability bias. But because of the patriarchy and centuries of institutional racism, the people who have a malicious impact on the course of human history are overwhelmingly white men.

Do I think my little rants will have any impact? I doubt it. But I do hope that readers will recognize that there is a large and impactful "white male victimhood" complex that is profitable and also normalizes hate and violence and murder. 

The party of law and order.

* More for Caplan's band of victims, via Tyler Cowen: Women around the world aren’t paid nearly enough

Equality (repost)

Seeing Bryan Caplan's strawman attacks on feminism (isn't he just so "brave"?) and reading one of his misogynist followers reminded me of this post:

tl;dr: if you are spending your time looking for differences, you are part of the problem.

There has always been an attitude of "Kids these days!" Looking through history, crotchety adults have always complained about the spoiled, lazy, disrespectful kids with their music and crazy clothes and obscene dances and "fancy new technology" (radios, telephones, etc.).

So it is easy to dismiss the book The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt as yet another in the long series of adults whining about kids these days. Yet I found a lot of interesting and useful insights in the book.

Perhaps the most relevant for me is their discussion of "safetyism," the idea that kids need to be protected from everything. This resonated with me. When EK was four years old, my mom asked what values they had learned - EK answered "kindness and safety." I still have flashbacks of three times something really bad almost happened to EK.

Lukianoff and Haidt make the point that humans are antifragile - that we need to experience stress and be tested to get stronger. Not that everything that doesn't kill us makes us stronger, but that facing (reasonable) challenges is the only way we can grow and develop. "Luckily" for EK, they've had plenty of challenges (despite my best efforts). (We were just talking about how something that happened in 2007 had a very specific influence from then on.)

Where Lukianoff and Haidt lose me is their argument against looking at outcomes when working for social justice. The example they use to make their case is that under Title IX, the University of Virginia made women's rowing a varsity sport to help offset the huge (men's) football program. Lukianoff and Haidt's argument is that if more males are interested in sports than females, why shouldn't there be more (school-sponsored) athletic opportunities for the boys?

But how can we know that there is an inherent difference in interest? Who makes those determinations? For as long as adults have complained about kids, white males have said that girls don't like math and are more concerned with "nurturing" than having a career. (And blacks don't care about school or are "natural athletes," etc. And you don't just get that from ignorant rednecks - Nobel laureates, too, like James Watson.)

I'm not a "blank-slater" - I don't think that every human is conceived and born with equal potential in all areas. It is theoretically possible that Larry Summers is factually correct that boys have a greater standard deviation in math ability (see this for more discussion; see this for a counterpoint). But my question is: how can we know? People treat a baby - a baby - differently if that baby is dressed in pink vs blue. The same baby!

Can we really think that being treated a certain way from day one doesn't have an impact on a child's interests and subsequent "strengths"? Can we really claim that anyone who is not a straight white male is not influenced by society's stereotypes of them? It just boggles my mind that anyone would think they can measure the "natural and inherent" inclinations and skills of anyone.

This, of course, brings up Sam Harris' egomania. He paints himself and his center-right straight male friends as the only ones willing to "speak the truth." One of his "only I'm brave enough to say" claims (in addition to his bewildering ongoing insistence to talk about race and IQ) is that James Damore was "right" in his Google memo that "women just don't like working with computers, so tech firms should stop trying to hire women."

I think the actual evidence does not support Damore and Harris - listen to this for an explanation (video version). Also, see this for proof that it doesn't have to be this way.

But regardless, can he really say that no non-male could ever have an interest in coding? Here's my question to Sam: would you really want your daughters to have to work with someone with Damore's attitude? [I pity Sam's daughters. In his most recent book, he doesn't have even one woman. In general, the only time a woman is on his podcast, it is with a man or men.]

It continues to amaze me when straight white "liberal" males spend their time defending Charles Murray or complaining that male rowers at the University of Virginia aren't varsity athletes. Do they really think these are the main injustices that need to be addressed?

More importantly, can they not see that promoting the idea of "natural" and "inherent" differences between genders or races actively supports real-world discrimination? This is an honest question I wish they would answer. You don't have to watch many videos of Nazis and white supremacists before you hear one of them pointing to Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve as "scientific proof" of racist views.

Do you want to spend your limited time being against Nazis or defending Charles Murray?

Build a level playing field / Compassion is not zero-sum

Aimee Mann - How Am I Different

Ezra Klein has a recent podcast with Richard Reeves (a father to three sons) entitled The Men - and Boys - Are Not Alright. (Despite my criticisms below, the podcast is worth listening to.) 

To start with, they discuss the educational gap between boys and girls. On its face, this would seem to perhaps support people like Bryan Caplan's contention that society is biased toward girls. But upon being pressed by Ezra, Reeves admits that this education gap is mostly between children of color, especially Black boys and girls. 

So it isn't, as you'll see claimed by some conservatives and their incel followers, that "the bitches just hate men." Instead, it is actually an issue of poverty and the criminalization of Black boys and men. 

This, of course, leads to another area where Ezra pushed back. When Blacks are arrested at a higher rate, conservatives are quick to claim that this is because of something inherent in Black people (men and boys in particular). 

Similarly, for decades conservatives said that women just couldn't hack college, or athletics, or being a cop. (They still say this about computer science.) But now, when it seems as though some males are falling behind in some areas, conservatives are quick to blame "the system" as set up by "feminists." 

(Men aren't, of course, falling behind in terms of income. And here, conservatives also blame women - they aren't ambitious, they value family, they prefer lower-paying jobs.)

I would have liked Ezra to push back on the contention that boys' brains develop more slowly than girls'. I'm not saying this isn't true (I'm no blank-slater). But I don't know how we can know that for sure. 

As I've noted before, if you dress a baby in stereotypical boy or girl clothes, people treat that same baby differently. This differential treatment starts when still a baby! How can you tease out the nature signal from the nurture? 

If, in our sexist society, boys are raised to value physical activities (e.g., sports) while girls are raised to value intellectual activities (e.g., school), how can we say that boys do worse (on average) in school because of their brain development? 

What about the fact that boys and girls don't seem to differ in the same way on standardized test scores? In this case, conservatives are quick to claim SAT math scores "prove" that boys are inherently better at math.

So to be clear: According to conservatives, when boys do worse in school, it is the system's fault. When boys do better at math, it is because boys are inherently better.

I am not saying that the system is set up perfectly to allow boys to reach their full potential. For example: there are many fewer male teachers in public schools than several decades ago. This, along with the incredible incarceration and unemployment rates of young Black men, leaves boys - especially Black boys - with fewer role models for societal-approved success. However, the declining number of young men working with boys is because of systemic racism and the even lower value our society gives to public-school teaching - because it is considered "women's work."

The facts don't support blaming feminism for the current plight of some boys and men. Instead of spending our time attacking "feminists," what we should and can do instead is to recognize and address* society's systemic racism and sexism.

Yes, it is easier to complain about mean "feminists" on Twitter. And it will earn you quick praise from the many angry young men eager to believe their failures are because of "the bitches." There are tens of millions in the United States who go about their days believing society is biased against white males in favor of inherently inferior women and Blacks.  

Also, for people like Caplan et al.,  I realize:

The more you invest in a set of beliefs -- the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction -- the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don't give up. You double down.

-Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia

But while well-off white men (like Caplan) will continue to thrive, nothing will really improve for much of society - and indeed, it will get worse - until we want to lift up everyone.

* As Malcolm Gladwell makes clear in his three-part education miniseries of Revisionist History (starting with "Carlos Doesn't Remember") trying to deal with racism and inequality through college programs is simply too late. High School is too late. We have to start improving the lives of those born into poverty even before they are born.

PS:

Two Books

Tori Amos - Me and a Gun

I've read Running with the Buffaloes three times; I think the only book I've read more is Contact. So when Kara Goucher, a runner at CU during that time and the wife of Buffaloes' star Adam, came out with a memoir, I put it on reserve at the library right away. 

tl;dr: The Longest Race is a depressing book. In the end, I wished her grandfather had never introduced her to running - her life may well have been happier. I'm just so sorry she went through all that abuse. If there was one book I could have Bryan Caplan read, it might be this one; maybe it would help him see that women don't have it easier than men. (I doubt it, though, since he gets off being idolized by his incel followers.)

Here's a public radio interview with Kara.

Unfortunately, Malcolm Gladwell has become a putz. For years after the cheating and abuses came to light, he continued to defend Alberto Salazar, the villain of Nike's Oregon Project. 

BTW, if you've ever pursued athletics seriously, or run with the goal of getting better, Running with the Buffaloes is an amazing book. Try try try not to read any spoilers beforehand (including the book's description). 

OTOH, Dan Levitt's new one, What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner, is a wonderful read. The description is pretty accurate:

For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life traveled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who we are.

Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ve got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal, enough salt to fill a saltshaker, enough chlorine to disinfect several backyard swimming pools, and enough iron to forge a 3-inch nail. But how did these elements combine to make us human?  

Sunday Funny: You are my everything

 From Dave Barry's latest*:

The blame must be placed squarely on the same phenomenon that is also causing virtually every other major problem humanity is dealing with these days, including droughts, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, blizzards, El Niño (Spanish for “The Nino”), tornados, earthquakes, inflation, the housing shortage, influencers, TV-lawyer ads, two-factor authentication and explosive diarrhea. I am referring, of course, to Global Climate Change™.

Except, of course, the one thing that actually is being driven in part by increased levels of carbon dioxide. From Hannah Ritchie's newsletter that appeared at the same time as Barry's, there is more food because of the evil carbon:

Yes, I'm guilty of a lot. But I don't claim every ill in the world could be solved by veganism. Just the opposite.

*Barry's linked column is about smoke from Canada's wildfires. From Vox's Bryan Walsh:

Burned area worldwide during the 2025-26 fire season came in 18 percent below the 2002-2024 average, and as the [below] chart shows, carbon emissions from fires globally in the first half of 2026 were the lowest since satellites started measuring nearly a quarter century ago, coming in at roughly half their early-2000s level.

Good News ... from Vox?

Vox's "Good News" newsletter, by Bryan Walsh, is, of course, sometimes infected by Vox's Doom Dogma. But this last one was great! Please share it around.

Ranting that everything is terrible and getting worse helps make things worse. The only way to make things better is to internalize:

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.