Delusional Devaluation of Women and Children

The New York Times recently published this essay:
Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created

It’s gated, but you can probably get to it here.

The headline accurately reflects a straw man definition of “maternal instinct” no reasonable person would take seriously.

“All around her swirled near-rapturous descriptions of the joys of new motherhood. They all celebrated the same thing — the woman who is able to instantly intuit and satisfy her baby’s every need, and to do it all on her own.”

First, it makes intuition into omniscience and omnipotence. Second, it argues most women are idiots. They believe that.

I’m quite sure that anyone who has spent time around a new mother – a new father perhaps – knows it’s bullshit. That’s why wise women seek mates who will stick around after the baby is born. Faithful, protective, providing fathers are prized by mothers because they support and protect mothers and children. Call it pre-maternal instinct.

Like devotion to their children, prudence in reproductive partner selection is not always displayed by all women, even though the negative consequences of failure to do this are numerous and evident from five hundred thousand years of human evolution.

Which raises another problem with the definition: It assumes (“all on her own“) that a father’s contributions of food, shelter, and defense do not satisfy any (“her baby’s every need“) need of a mother or infant. It also asserts no women help. This defies all our experience. But the NYT claim is that women who feel a special, protective bond to their child are victims of their own false consciousness. And it’s not just humans. At very least it’s mammals. Animals whose females are built to suckle their young.

A mammal’s progeny are expensive, and a much larger percentage of the survival budget for pre-literate hunter-gatherers. Nurturing and protecting a child is a huge investment that for much of our evolutionary history paid off only sporadically. Relatively slow development of mammal young means time spent and resources diverted. The opportunity cost of carrying and caring for a human child is highest of all. Every psychologically coherent human values children, AT THE LEAST, because of the investment in creating them and maintaining their lives. More so when food took the fittest of your tribe huge amounts of time and significant risk to secure, shelter was precarious, and death was lurking in the next tree, behind the next bush, or slithering along in the grass.

Five hundred thousand years of this biological imperative have shaped human psychology. NYT denials notwithstanding.

The burden does fall more heavily on those whose investment is highest: Women, and especially mothers. How can this existential necessity, recognized by all human societies, be detrimental to human well being? Recognizing this is a discovery, not an invention.

I posted this on Twitter in response to the NYT headline: “Try telling that to a Grizzly.

Other animals were mentioned in others’ Tweets. I was surprised that I saw no responses to the effect that Grizzlies, dogs, etc. aren’t human so the NYT story is still correct. I expected a bunch of whataboutism: “Whatabout animals that abandon their young even before ‘birth’?” Well, a frog, or an ant, has a very low investment in the hundreds or thousands of eggs she lays.

I think “hatching” would be the proper term for these examples, not the bonding experience of live birth, but the TRA cadre is as likely to think about that distinction as is a turkey. What’s the gestation period for turkeys?

“Hatching,” IAC, isn’t pejorative in this context. Many birds treat their young as more important than themselves. Avian mothers will chance death to draw predators away. Female birds instinctively act to prevent species extinction, but the NYT tells us human females demonstrating any such tendency are victims of patriarchal conspiracy.

If human maternal instinct is a patriarchal myth, are Grizzly bears, dogs, and chimpanzees (especially that Bonobo ‘matriarchy’ we’re supposed to be instructed by) mammal outliers?

We are considering homo sapiens, however, and I can’t name any mammal that does not nurture its offspring. If maternal neglect _wasn’t_ a psychological aberration in mammals, there would be no mammals. Characterizing human females as duped out of a heightened sensitivity, of caring deference, to their children is a clear attempt to rewrite five hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology and the psychological consequences. That is, it rejects reality.

Consider the denial of biological fact necessary to say “transwomen are women.” Transwomen don’t have any possibility of bonding with a child they have carried. So women can’t be allowed to either.

Consider our plunging birth rates. Is denigrating female regard for children as a patriarchal plot existentially more threatening than climate change? The climate change people will tell you fewer humans is a good thing. Interests converge.

Consider the insistence on normalizing the sexual fetishes of a small minority. Salacious drag queen performances for toddlers and porn in middle school libraries suggests treating children as acceptable sexual targets; disposable toys.

It is a fantasy consistent with, and necessary to, transphilic dogma. The assertion’s base utility today includes denigrating protective mothers who show up at school board meetings with pointed questions, “Yours is not a natural human reaction, it’s a fascist ideological abomination which the DOJ must call out as incipient terrorism at the behest of Randi Weingarten: Human mothers superior devotion to their children is an invention of the patriarchy. Your children belong to us.

Why publish this tripe? Because it supports the anti-humanist radical transphiles, abortion absolutists, “all sex is rape” feminists, pedophilia apologists, and climate apocalypse fanatics.

The idea that mothers’ special relationship with their children is a human invention, rather than molded from five hundred thousand years of existential success is patent nonsense. That males invented it is not simply ludicrous, it is actively anti-woman and anti-human.

‘Under My Plan, Electricity Rates Will Necessarily Skyrocket’

That was Barack Obama in 2008. Obama’s electricity plan was not implemented, but it lurks in the dreams of the Green Ordealers: Every environmental problem could be solved if there were fewer humans and they were all less well off.

It’s Critical Race Theory applied to all humans everywhere. White people may be colonialist, homophobic, and racist by the accident of being. But every human being is a planet killer by the same standard.

In support of Critical Humanity Theory, President Biden is emulating Obama’s plan. On his first day in office Biden targeted energy in the form of gasoline, natural gas, and propane.

Now, with a world supply shock from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rate of oil price increase is exceeding the trajectory Obama planned for electricity.

Adding to the gasoline price acceleration, Biden today banned imports of Russian oil (Good for him, but it’s only about 3% of US usage.).

The President warned us to be ready for the “Putin price hike.” Nah. It will be a joint effort. I think Biden had ‘the don’t let a crisis go waste’ principle in mind: “I can raise gas prices, blame it on Putin, and AOC will be happy.”

Everything to the left on that chart can reasonably be called the ‘Biden price hike.’ These stickers were being placed on gas pumps long before Vlad mobilized.

Since the President refuses to unleash American oil and gas production, or change his decision to shutter the Keystone XL pipeline, I think the price hikes remain his.

Instead of importing the Keystone oil from Canada, an ally, we’re begging in Venezuela, and soon Iran, for oil.

Oil which we will burn. Just like American or Canadian oil. CO2 will not be reduced, but we’ll pay a lot more to produce it. To thugs.

I admit Justin Trudeau is a thug too, but there’s more hope Canada will depose him. If there was ever a worthwhile nation re-building effort we should support – it’s Canada.

Enter Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, telling us all we need to do to avoid high gas prices is buy electric cars.

“Clean transportation can bring significant cost savings for the American people as well. Last month, we announced a $5 billion investment to build out a nationwide electric vehicle charging network so that people from rural to suburban to urban communities can all benefit from the gas savings of driving an EV.”

Get back to me when that charging network you’re spending 5 billion taxpayer dollars on is complete, Pete. Meanwhile, how about a cost free initiative? Open Keystone XL and lift all Federal impediments to American energy production. We could be energy independent again.

Buttigieg is correct, there is a gasoline saving in driving an EV. That is not the same as saving money, saving energy, or reducing CO2 emissions, however.

There’s the cost of buying a new car you may well not need, and with groceries up 20%, maybe can’t afford. You also may be pinched financially by the cost of heating your home.

The taxes we pay to subsidize other people’s electric car purchases need to be accounted for.

And, what if everybody buys an EV? Will demand for electricity make prices:
a) rise,
b) fall,
c) remain the same, or,
d) go to zero, with a grid collapse?

Will the Feds add a special ‘transportation electricity’ tax in order to replace gasoline taxes? The Transportation Secretary didn’t address the question.

Electric cars get their power mostly from coal and natural gas. Prices on those fossil fuels are up, so that will raise electricity prices. Any money savings for electricity as fuel is unlikely to last without major investment in nuclear plants.

So saving money with an EV may be over optimistic in the mid-term. And, without nukes, in the long term.

Gasoline is the current energy hot-button. It’s a preview for the real green agenda: All energy costs must be high to discourage humans from reproducing.

You may find that objectionable. I do not mean every amateur environmentalist is an Extinction Rebellion fellow traveller, but the envirostatist elite are committed to that Malthusian principle. It explains a great deal, and its modern incarnation is well described by Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome 50 years ago.