Not sure about Quillette

I've featured Quillette on the website Blogs sidebar here for a while. It was established to offer a home to those afflicted by the excesses of the SJW 'left', primarily in American academia.

One might have hoped for some deeper, more analytic analysis there of the whole cultural revolution thing currently sweeping through the liberal establishment, the kind of thing Poulantzas was addressing.

But actually Quillette seems to have turned into an 'anti-SJW' version of what Steve Sailer has flagged as Grievance Studies.

In the dialectic, antithesis is a precursor of synthesis.

I do hope things improve.

Gun Girls

Steve Sailer had an amusing YouTube video of girls firing guns (badly) - which has now, unfortunately, been taken down.

Most of the problems shown were due to recoil, the women not holding the stock firmly enough against the shoulder or not bracing. In other cases, unfamiliarity with how it feels when a gun fires.

Commentator 'Twinkie' writes:

"Unlike most of you here, I’ve actually trained men and women in unarmed and armed combat. Let me break down a few things for those of you for whom the subject is entirely theoretical (or media-derived, one way or another).

In unarmed combat, women are at a SEVERE disadvantage against men. There is a whole host of biomechanical factors that make this so. This is not just a matter of “upper body strength” disparity (though that difference on average is HUGE). Punching-, kicking-, and throwing-power derives from the rotational force of the hips, and men are much stronger than women in this area (men who “punch like girls” punch with their upper body/arms only – trained fighters generate much greater force from the twist of the hips). It also hurts women that their bone density is low (that “thudding” power some men have is a combination of good technique AND high bone density – Manny Pacquiao, for example, is reputed to have the wrist diameter comparable to much higher weight boxers).

There are basically THREE ways in which a woman can beat a man. One, she catches him by surprise and doesn’t stop. Sucker punching (or kicking/elbowing/kneeing/head-butting) works. Two, she is armed. Three, there is a large skill disparity in favor of the woman (e.g. if she is an Olympic Judoka and the man is untrained, the odds are good she will throw him on his head). In combination of two or all of these factors (and a little luck), women can beat men. But, outside of them, it’s fantasy, pure and simple – it’s men beating small children, basically.

I won’t go into impact/bladed weapons for now, but in terms of firearms training, I’ve found that – initially – women are MUCH EASIER to train to a decent standard. Women are generally afraid of guns – they are disproportionately affected by the noise and recoil. BUT, they harbor much fewer illusions about their natural abilities and tend to follow instruction better. In my experience (and those of many other trainers I know), women novices are therefore easier to train than male novices (too many idiot males think they know what they are doing). Nonetheless, at the upper echelons of shooting, men will dominate, whether it is accurate, long distance shooting or shooting on the move. Women just seem to lack the high-level visuo-spatial ability (and quick mathematical ability for long distance shooting) to do it at elite levels.

Another major problem for most women is that they suffer from hesitation. People often talk about “fight or flight,” but the choices are actually “fight, flight, or freeze.” Many, perhaps, most untrained men freeze when confronted with threats as well, but women are particularly prone to hesitating and not acting violently and decisively to neutralize threats. This is probably both biological and social. ..."

An interesting, if robust view.

[Note: "Another use of Twinkie can be in describing an Asian American who has become completely integrated into White American, or mainstream American culture, thus losing their traditional Asian values. A reference to "Twinkie" can be seen in the 2004 film Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, where Harold, a Korean American, is referred to as a "Twinkie". This term is derived from the traditional metaphor "banana" and means "yellow on the outside, white on the inside"].

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We are waiting for major blizzards expected this evening and tomorrow afternoon. As I write, a rather dessicated snowfall has been dusting the ground for hours.

Before the serious snow

There's tension in the house: shouldn't we be panic-buying in Waitrose?

Sunday: select two from four

There are six choices (2 from 4). It's a real hard call. An additional constraint is that you'd expect one candidate from the left (top two) and one from the right (bottom two). But even that's not certain.

I said before that if François Fillon could get into the second round he'd likely win. If you followed the betting you'd have to go for Macron - Le Pen .. with Macron to win the in the run-off.

Somehow I can't see bubble-candidate Macron winning ... .

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Update (Sunday 8.15 pm): looks like I was wrong.

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Essential reading: "The French, Coming Apart" - via Steve Sailer.

Globalisation, then neoliberalism, finally political correctness

Charles Murray at Middlebury College, March 2017

From the Wikipedia bio:

"William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic. Born in 1964 in Englewood, New Jersey, Deresiewicz attended Columbia University before teaching English at Yale University from 1998-2008.

"He is the author of A Jane Austen Education, How Six Novels Taught me About Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter (Penguin Press, 2011) and Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press, 2014). ..."

Deresiewicz has a from-the-heart (if overlong) essay on the current wave of 'political correctness' at US colleges. Check it out, or the shorter summary by Steve Sailer here.

"Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color - two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base.

"As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics.

"Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). …

"The term political correctness, which originated in the 1970s as a form of self-mockery among progressive college students, was a deliberately ironic invocation of Stalinism. By now we’ve lost the irony but kept the Stalinism - and it was a feature of Stalinism that you could be convicted for an act that was not a crime at the time you committed it. So you were always already guilty, or could be made to be guilty, and therefore were always controllable.

"You were also always under surveillance by a cadre of what Jane Austen called, in a very different context, “voluntary spies,” and what my students called the PC police. Regimes of virtue produce informants (which really does wonders for social cohesion). …

"There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize - that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. ... It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white.

"In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group. ...

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

Because political correctness is presented by its advocates in moral terms, it's sometimes difficult to understand it as the optimised ideology of globalisation - a form of capitalism which really got going in the 1980s-90s, powered by Internet-mediated supply-chains and the economic rise of China.

More precisely, political correctness provides the moralistic framework, neoliberalism the ideology while globalisation captures the underlying economic dynamics:

"Economic neoliberalism is an economic theory and an ideological conviction that supports maximizing the economic freedom for individuals and thus reducing the amount of state intervention to the bare minimum.

"In this regards, it does advocate the elimination of government-imposed restrictions on transnational movements of goods, capital and people .... However, although these aspects are considered important aspects of globalization, this essay argues firstly that globalization is a much richer and multi-dimensional process that extends beyond transnational economic transactions. ..."

Following Marx, we should understand that causality has worked in the direction indicated by the title of this piece: first the economics, then the political justifications, finally the moral underpinnings. It is ironic that the political left now provides ideological cover for global capital.

Two stories on a Russian theme

Frequent visitors here will I know how often I give op-ed writers on The Times a hard time for PC-inspired nonsense. Today, however, Hugo Rifkind recounts an amusing story in his piece: "Russia lost Eurovision but won the mind games".

"My absolute favourite anecdote about modern Russia comes from the British author, Edward Docx. At a dinner with the cream of Russian literary society, he happened to mention that the panel of the Man Booker Prize of 2011 was headed by Dame Stella Rimington, the former director-general of MI5.

"Docx recalled: “They guffaw ‘Oh, the West! Oh, England! Oh, hypocrisy! You mean,’ they splutter, ‘that the winner of your most famous literary prize is judged by the security services?’ ” Startled, Docx protested that Dame Stella was retired now, and wrote thrillers herself. Sure, his hosts chortled. Like Vladimir Putin is retired from the KGB! And the more Docx blushed and stammered, the more they laughed and laughed."

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From Wikipedia:

"Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (also known as KAL007) was a scheduled Korean Air Lines flight from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage. On September 1, 1983, the airliner serving the flight was shot down by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor, near Moneron Island west of Sakhalin in the Sea of Japan.

"The interceptor's pilot was Major Gennadi Osipovich. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Larry McDonald, a Representative from Georgia in the United States House of Representatives.

"The aircraft was en route from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul when it flew through Soviet prohibited airspace around the time of a U.S. aerial reconnaissance mission."

I was thirty two when this happened, and it was a big, scary deal. In the story which follows (comment #24 from here) you should recall that the SAC is the US Strategic Air Command, their nuclear bomber force.

"I was in college when KAL 007 happened; we were all shocked but it was pretty clear it was a mistake. But a few weeks later, I was in my room listening to the college radio station (it was a really good station BTW) when the Emergency Broadcast System activated; I figured it was the standard test of the system, but when the alert tones stopped, instead of the typical “this is only a test” statement I heard “Attention: Please stand by for an official statement from Washington D.C.”…my pulse spiked and I immediately jumped to the window to look in the general direction of the SAC base about 30 miles away, then just as quickly tore my eyes away from the window and shut the curtain – after all, you really don’t want to be looking at the bomb when it goes off.

"After a few seconds, my rational mind began to assert itself, thinking “this has got to be a mistake.” And after another few seconds, the message on the radio cut off, the DJ said, “Woops, I’m probably in big trouble now,” and the standard “this is only a test” recording came on. I decided that escaping near-certain nuclear annihilation was worthy of a shot of whiskey, even at 10am; fortunately my first class that day was after lunch.

"The DJ was right; I never heard him on the station again."

Going interstellar

I'm interested in the Internet blogosphere reaction to Yuri Milner's $100 million investment into the new starwisp.

Incidentally, Milner is quoted at having £3 billion in his bank account, so his proposed investment is 3.3% of his wealth. It's not however coming out in one lump sum - I hear talk of a 10 or 20 year programme of research.

Let's be optimistic and say a decade. Then Milner is spending 0.33% of his wealth per year on this project. Given his likely return on assets invested, this is a rounding error in his global interest rate.

Luboš Motl focuses, as expected, on the physics of the thing. He writes,

"We want to accelerate a few grams to c/5. The kinetic energy may still be "barely" computed by the non-relativistic formula and it is E = mc²/50. If m were 5 grams, we get 9 trillion joules."

Now, one kiloton of TNT (a small nuke) is equivalent to 4 trillion joules, so when this interstellar probe hits the atmosphere of a planet around Alpha Centauri, it's going to look to the alien inhabitants like someone detonated a 2 kt nuke in their atmosphere. Did anyone mention we're going to send a swarm of these things?

This kind of first strike is a bit extreme, even for me ... .

Steve Sailer is reminded of the famous Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle book, "The Mote in God's Eye", and sees a parallel with immigration policy:

"A half-dozen centuries in the future, humanity has stumbled into a fortuitous discovery of a faster than light interstellar travel technology and spreads out across the habitable planets of the galaxy, never encountering any other intelligent life.

"Then a slower-than-light spacecraft driven by a light sail arrives from an unexplored solar system.

"Our Space Navy goes to visit the planet that sent it and discovers a civilization that seems as advanced as ours, except they don’t have our faster-than-light travel technology, so they are stuck in their solar system, except for sending out the occasional expensive probe. We can visit them, but they can’t visit us.

"Their extremely gracious ambassadors greet our ambassadors in a most affable manner.

"The book then turns into an ecological detective story as a few suspicious Earthlings try to unravel the complex story of the Moties’ nature before diplomacy gets too far advanced to put the brakes on proposals such as sharing the FTL drive with the aliens in the name of interstellar harmony and goodwill. We wouldn’t want to be seen as speciesist, now would we?"

Centauri Dreams wonders about the project itself, the timescales and whether it would work. No-one seems to have seen the engineering plans for the interstellar device, but with accelerations estimated in the region of 20,000-60,000g you can forget anything with a framed structure. The ultrathin sail will be the entire device, embedding sensors, communications and control.

"Writing for The Atlantic, Ross Andersen describes the sail this way in Inside a Billionaire’s New Interstellar Mission:

"Picture a thin disc about the size of a round picnic tabletop. It would have miniaturized electronics onboard, including a power source, cameras, photon thrusters for navigation, and a laser for communication. Some of this kit would be bundled into the disc’s center, and some would be distributed through the rest of the sail. But it would all be a single unit: If you saw it streaking by, it would look like a flat, round sheet of reflective material.

"We’ve also got a problem in that concept, because Jim Benford has pointed out that a flat sail is not a good ‘beam-rider’ — we’ll likely have to look at the kind of curved sail designs both Jim and brother Gregory Benford have studied in lab work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But get a sail under that beam successfully and it reaches Pluto the day after launch, as Andersen notes. Another 20 years and it’s streaking through the Alpha Centauri system."

It's easy to poke holes in the mission concept as we currently understand it:

• The device can't be slowed so dwell-time on target is under a second
• For similar sums we could image exoplanets with near-Earth space telescopes
• Future progress might obsolete the probes before they even arrived.

Better to let the study programme think creatively about what you could actually do better with a relativistic flyby.

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Most optimistic timeline:

2016: R&D project starts
2026: Infrastructure build project starts (10 years)
2036: Launch (and 20 year coast to Alpha Centauri)
2060: Results received back here on Earth.

We get the results in 44 years, when I will be 109 years old. Hmm.

Today's links

Around the Internet today for your amusement and education.

1. 10 Essentials of Quantum Mechanics

As the title suggests, Backreaction lists ten key points. It's a bit subjective as to which is the greatest misconception corrected here, but I'd vote for number 4.

"4. There is no spooky action at a distance

"Nowhere in quantum mechanics is information ever transmitted non-locally, so that it jumps over a stretch of space without having to go through all places in between. Entanglement is itself non-local, but it doesn’t do any action – it is a correlation that is not connected to non-local transfer of information or any other observable.

"It was a great confusion in the early days of quantum mechanics, but we know today that the theory can be made perfectly compatible with Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity in which information cannot be transferred faster than the speed of light."

2. A spat about increasing human IQ

Why did Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex), Garrett Jones (Hive Mind), and Razib Khan (GNXP) even bother to alert Steve Hsu to this pernicious post, and who is PZ Myers anyway?

Whatever - Professor Hsu gives a reasoned and educational reply.

"Myers is both confused and insulting in his blog post, but I'll refrain from ad hominem attacks, and just focus on the science.

Myers seems to think that humans with much better cognitive abilities than our own can't exist. Sort of like a farmer in 1957 claiming that chickens that are bigger and faster maturing than his own could not exist [...] . I urge Myers to read some books on population genetics before returning to this discussion.

"The argument for why there are probably genomes not very different from our own, but which lead to much better cognitive ability, is very simple, and I went through it in a post called Explain it to me like I'm five years old [...] ."

Worth following the link even if you're older than five.

3. A spat about the KKK on campus (Indiana University)

Via Breitbart (h/t Steve Sailer).

 'Students be careful, there's someone walking around in kkk gear with a whip.'

"Residential hall advisor Ethan Gill quickly wrote an email to his students, warning them of the “threat” on campus: “There has been a person reported walking around campus in a KKK outfit holding a whip. Because the person is protected under first amendment rights, IUPD cannot remove this person from campus unless an act of violence is committed. Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight, always be with someone and if you have no dire reason to be out of the building, I would recommend staying indoors if you’re alone.”

"Later in the evening, Gill was forced to retract his warning on his Facebook page, where he clarified that the purported Klansman was actually just an innocent priest dressed in liturgical garments. The “whip” turned out to be the clergyman’s robe-like belt that was tied around his waist."

Are there no safe spaces anywhere any more? Will no-one think of the children?

Diary: genetics + NHS screening + political correctness

1. Reading the rather good "Ancestors in Our Genome: The New Science of Human Evolution" by Dr Eugene E. Harris, Professor of Biology at the City University of New York. Based on whole genome analyses from diverse human populations, chimpanzees, gorillas and other apes and monkeys, what can be said about our recent evolutionary history? The right framework to think about this turns out to be population genetics. What follows is an extremely informative history of the last 20-30 years of human evolution research plus a very good conceptual overview of population genetics itself. I intend to write a much more detailed review once I've finished this book. (Update: read it here).

2. How many screening programmes does the NHS run for 'elderly men'? I'm already on the  faecal occult blood (FOB) test programme (as yucky as it sounds) and have been sent off for a colonoscopy (the link takes you to my diary of the experience). Today I received the invitation for abdominal aortic aneurysm screening which thankfully promises to be just an abdominal gel rub-down and an ultrasound scan: ten minutes. I will let you know. Google tells me that I've now run the gamut of age-appropriate screening.

3. Only in America department (from the New York Times via Steve Sailer who has the summarised story).

"Anna didn’t want to keep her feelings secret. As far as she knew, neither did D.J. In recent weeks, their relationship had changed, and it wasn’t clear when or how to share the news. ‘‘It’s your call,’’ she said to him in the lead-up to a meeting with his mother and older brother. ‘‘It’s your family. It’s up to you.’’

When she arrived at the house on Memorial Day in 2011, Anna didn’t know what D.J. planned to do. His brother, Wesley, was working in the garden, so she went straight inside to speak with D.J. and his mother, P. They chatted for a while at the dining table about D.J.’s plans for school and for getting his own apartment. Then there was a lull in the conversation after Wesley came back in, and Anna took hold of D.J.’s hand. ‘‘We have something to tell you,’’ they announced at last. ‘‘We’re in love.’’

‘‘What do you mean, in love?’’ P. asked, the color draining from her face.

To Wesley, she looked pale and weak, like ‘‘Caesar when he found out that Brutus betrayed him.’’ He felt sick to his stomach. What made them so uncomfortable was not that Anna was 41 and D.J. was 30, or that Anna is white and D.J. is black, or even that Anna was married with two children while D.J. had never dated anyone. What made them so upset — what led to all the arguing that followed, and the criminal trial and million-­dollar civil suit — was the fact that Anna can speak and D.J. can’t; that she was a tenured professor of ethics at Rutgers University in Newark and D.J. has been declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler. …"

Anna has now been found guilty of sexual assault and - with sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 9 - could end up in the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women for up to 40 years.

The dangers of treadmills

"Silicon Valley's Dave Goldberg died after gym accident"

"The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and SurveyMonkey chief executive Dave Goldberg died of severe head trauma, according to local officials. Mr Goldberg, 47, husband of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, was found lying next to a gym treadmill on Friday at a holiday resort in Mexico. Mexican authorities have no plans for a criminal investigation. The officials said Goldberg still had vital signs when he was discovered, but later died at a hospital.

"He reportedly left his room in the resort near Nuevo Vallarta at 16:00 local time to exercise, and family members went to look for him when he failed to return. He was found at about 18:30 in the gym, lying by a treadmill, with a blow to the lower back of his head. It was apparent he had slipped on the treadmill and hit the machine, a spokesman for the Nayarit state prosecutor said."

When we heard this news Clare and myself broke into an animated discussion as to just how dangerous treadmills are. We were busy thinking up lethal scenarios: maybe the guy was running flat out and got tired, but couldn't get to the 'off' switch in time; perhaps he was distracted for some reason and turned, losing his balance?

One hypothesis which frankly never occurred to us was that this account of Mr Goldberg's death might actually be a tiny bit fabricated. Could the Mexican drug cartels really have had something to do with this?

(Update: I think not - it really was an unfortunate accident.)

The intelligence sweet spot

In an otherwise NA-specific article Steve Sailer makes the following observation about advertisers, that they prefer those:

"who have been to college, because they have more money, but who are not all that bright because (cf. The Bell Curve) there aren’t many people out at the right edge of the bell curve. The spending sweetspot is a little to the right of the median IQ."

This has the ring of truth about it, also accounting for the general dumbness of much TV and the broader media. And Mr Sailer has more: there is a class of irritating intellectual emanating from this part of the distribution which Sailer amusingly labels the Lumpenintelligentsia, characterised by 'self-absorption ,..., wounded amour propre, dimwittedness, and general cluelessness'. You will have heard their opinions in the broadcast media (Radio 4 in the UK is a particular offender) and TV news and current affairs programmes; also in the opinion pages of way too many newspapers.

Further on the subject of the immediate right-hand side of the IQ bell curve, Steve Hsu notes the results of an impressive Swedish Study.

"Match Made at Birth? What Traits of a Million Swedes Tell Us about CEOs

"Abstract: This paper analyzes the role three personal traits — cognitive and non-cognitive ability, and height — play in the market for CEOs. We merge data on the traits of more than one million Swedish males, measured at age 18 in a mandatory military enlistment test, with comprehensive data on their income, education, profession, and service as a CEO of any Swedish company."

Since the standard deviation of the IQ distribution is set at 15 points, the study tells us that the CEOs of large (Swedish) companies have IQs averaging around 115. This is not that high by academic standards. How puzzled should we be?

Steve Hsu observes: (bold = my emphasis)

"Performance beyond a certain level in the vast majority of fields (and business is certainly one of them) is principally a function of having no cognitive and personal qualities which fall below a (high, but not insanely high) hygene threshold -- and then multiplied by determination, of course.

"Conscientiousness, in fact, is the best single stable predictor of job success for complex jobs (well established in personality psychometrics).

"Very high intelligence actually negatively correlates with career success (Kotter), probably because smart people enjoy solving problems, rather than making money selling things -- which outside of quant trading, show business and sport is really the only way of being really successful.

"There are some extremely intelligent people in business (by which I mean high IQ, not just wise or experienced), but you tend to find them in the corners of the business landscape with the richest intellectual pastures: some areas of law, venture capital, some cutting edge technology fields."

Yep, seen this in telecoms. The toilers at the base of the organisation think the senior execs must be incredibly smart. Those I've seen mostly not so much.

That notorious racist Banksy

The offending Banksy graffiti before the Council scrubbed it

What is it with Clacton Council (home of the future UKIP power base)?

"Nigel Brown, Tendring District Council’s communications manager, said staff had inspected the site after receiving a complaint and ‘agreed that it could be seen as offensive’. …

"The council scrubbed the mural – potentially worth thousands of pounds – off the wall today after receiving a complaint on Tuesday from a member of the public saying ‘offensive and racist remarks’ had been painted on the wall.

"Mr Brown added: ‘We would obviously welcome an appropriate Banksy original on any of our seafronts and would be delighted if he returned in the future.’"

Fat chance of that - and you've got to like the 'appropriate'.

"A spokesman for Banksy said he would not comment on the council’s actions."

I guess his point has been made.

From The Daily Mail via Steve Sailer. I rather think Mr Sailer has Banksy nailed.

Women, Men and Microaggression

It's sometimes believed that political correctness is a characteristically feminine perspective - above all, don't hurt people's feelings. But the 'theory and practice' ranges more widely, as Steve Sailer's recent article on the new American concept of 'microaggression' points out.

From an American liberal arts college statement on 'microaggression':

"When you see or hear racist, heterosexist/homophobic, anti-Semitic, classist, ableist, sexist/cissexist speech etc., please submit it to us so that we may demonstrate that these acts are not simply isolated incidents, but rather part of structural inequalities."

Sailer comments:

"The cult of microaggressions is not something that either sex could have developed wholly on its own.

Granted, the role of women is readily apparent in the obsession with propriety, with feelings over logic, and the dislike of impersonal principles. Yet on their own, women are less interested in logic, which makes their likes and dislikes more idiosyncratic. A woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, so women normally put a huge amount of effort into thinking about individuals.

In contrast, these long, airless lists of identity-politics categories appeal to the Aspergery male systemizing mind more than to the female empathizing mind (to use Simon Baron-Cohen’s terminology)."
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Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, you will have observed that men and women do tend to think differently.