culture, Rod Fleming's World, Page 8

11/12/2024

How Contemporary Gallery Art became a disaster

Originally posted 2017-07-31 23:25:11.

Contemporary gallery art is a very expensive, publicly-funded white elephant, a crutch of the elite. To call today’s art education, which feeds the galleries with an unending supply of this visual tripe, a catastrophic disaster, would be an understatement. It’s time we stopped pandering to its promoters.

Today we live in a West where multiculturalism has all but made us forget that Post-Renaissance European culture is what shaped the world. Everywhere, people learn English. In India, Urdu is dying because students are taught in English.

Yet language is not alone amongst our triumphs. Alongside our technological and scientific prowess there is another pillar of our culture: our art.

Continue reading “How Contemporary Gallery Art became a disaster”

11/12/2024

Homosexual Transsexual and Transvestite: not the same.

Originally posted 2022-03-10 19:15:56.

Gender has become a hot button issue in recent years. But few people understand what is going on.

Women and men are different, despite the fashionable orthodoxies. These differences are innate and they have an unexpected usefulness. The differences between women and men carry forward into the discussion of Transsexuals and transvestites.

Continue reading “Homosexual Transsexual and Transvestite: not the same.”

11/12/2024

Gently but firmly: When does that become coercion?

Originally posted 2022-09-19 18:44:56.

‘Gently but firmly’ is the manner in which parents of children manifesting sex non-conforming behaviour are adjured to make those children desist.

Professors J Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard penned an open letter to the Fourth Wave Now website in 2017. It is as relevant today as it was then. In it they made many valuable points. The article is long but the most concerning part is here:

If you want your childhood-onset gender dysphoric child to desist, and if your child is still well below the age of puberty (which varies, but let’s say, younger than 11 years), you should firmly (but kindly and patiently) insist that your child is a member of his/her birth sex…You should not allow your child to engage in behaviors such as cross dressing and fantasy play as the other sex. Above all else, you should not let your child socially transition to the other sex.

At the same time, you should recognize that despite your best efforts, your child may ultimately need to transition to be happy. If your child’s gender dysphoria persists well into adolescence (again, the ages vary by child, but let’s say age 14 or so), s/he is much more likely to transition. At that point, in our opinion, parents should consider supporting transition.
(my italics)

(I will put a copy of the original paper on my websites at https://www.rodfleming.com and https://[kofi].com/sexology )

Bailey and Blanchard are both highly respected and here they are simply restating what we might call the ‘establishment position’. However, there are significant problems with the above statement and I will deal with these. I am aware that they do not use the phrase ‘gently but firmly’ here, but that is a reasonable rendering of the phrase they do use.

Continue reading “Gently but firmly: When does that become coercion?”

11/12/2024

Who we are 2: Cooking, Chattering and Time

Originally posted 2020-04-23 17:59:17.

Cooking is now seen as the definitive characteristic of modern humans, from which all others followed. It seems to have directly led to the development of tools, especially blade design, but it had many other consequences.

Cooking, particularly of meats and fats but also starches, partially pre-digests the food, making more energy available to us and allowing us to use less to digest it. We put this extra energy into growing brains. Growing big brains burns many calories and just running them consumes a significant part of our daily food intake. We know that the physical structures which allow us to speak were evolving at the same time as our brains were growing larger. Speech allowed more complex and efficient communication and cooperation. This encouraged conceptual thinking and other intellectual skills, again leading to the development of bigger brains.

Continue reading “Who we are 2: Cooking, Chattering and Time”