I wonder if we can track trends via Christmas/New Year’s cards. Out of roughly 100 cards, we received one with explicit pronouns. This was from a Ph.D. engineer (colleague of Dr. Jill Biden, MD?) who opened by characterizing 2020 as “bizarre” (the Swedish MD/PhDs might agree with him that it is bizarre for middle aged people to cower in place for a year to avoid a 0.1% chance of nasty flu symptoms or worse). Here’s an excerpt from the letter:
[usually-female name] (they/them) left [Company A] to join [Company B]… a few months later they left [Company B] to become a consultant for [Company C]… they have the distinction of having been hired twice of having been hired twice during a difficult time for employment generally.
Pronouns are also specified for two additional children, the author (“he/him”) and the mother of the three kids (“she/her”).
I have gotten accustomed to receiving business correspondence, e.g., from Linode, festooned with pronoun specifications, but can’t recall too many previous personal letters containing them (their/theirs). Readers: what did you get in your mailboxes this year in terms of pronoun specs?
Can you not find a more boring, inconsequential topic to write about?
Or to comment about!
Bernie: If pronouns are inconsequential, why would people take up the time of every recipient of every email that they send with these pronoun specifications in the signature line?
None, thank goodness. I think that’s probably because I get many fewer Christmas cards than you, though. Lots were available on Redbubble, but I didn’t get any. All my grinches are mean ones.
https://www.redbubble.com/shop/pronouns+greeting-cards
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105402/covid-hospitalization-rates-us-by-age-group/ Covid is serious. It’s a not .1% chance of serious illness. Some large number of diagnosed covid sufferers need to be hospitalized. ~ 20% Now there are plenty of asymptomatic people that don’t figure into this number, but that’s a lot of people going to the hospital.
But it’s precisely those people that aren’t figuring into your number that don’t experience COVID as a serious illness. For the vast majority of people where this presents as cold and flu-like symptoms if it’s noticed at all we’re not going to tell a doctor let alone go to the hospital. Most people have to get a pretty bad regular flu before they get a medical professional involved.
SuperMike: The CDC says that roughly half of Americans have been infected with coronavirus thus far. If you believe your own 20 percent number for middle-aged people, you should have seen 1 out of every 10 of your middle-aged acquaintances go to the hospital for COVID-19 care (not “treatment” since there is no medical therapy available that both the FDA and the WHO agree is useful). Is that what you’ve seen?
So only 1 of 100 of your cards were from “woke” friends/family?
Why then do 7 out of 10 “Dr.” Phil blog posts have some sort of snark about the left’s use of pronouns? Your own data shows they are only used by the fringe 1% of the “radical left.”
Mike: Only about 15 cards included a narrative letter. Most were just photo cards. So actually the prevalence of pronoun specifications among my friends (mostly 40-70 years of age) is 1 in 15. I wonder if the prevalence of pronouns would be higher among a younger group.
Bernie said he can’t think of a more inconsequential take. That over half of the country is either adapting or accepting that biology does not determine sex seems, well, pretty consequential. That one of our premiere science journals declared the same is also quite consequential. That both Science and Nature joined the #EndSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia movement–something that is also part of the same movement, also seems consequential.
My personal feeling is that abortion was the original catalyst (or really, contraception). When we decided that we could arbitrarily decide which human beings are actually human beings, and which can be killed, we changed the way we think about each other in a way that can’t ever be corrected I don’t think.
In other tens years we’ll be cloning human beings on a regular basis and we’ll be writing civil rights bills for machines.
Does anyone know what #WallStreetBets uses for pronouns? I want to make sure I address them correctly on Discord.
So many disastrous policies are being pushed down on public that pronouns are not getting attention they would command otherwise.
The Pronavirus hasn’t really caught on yet here other than within the local S&M club, so none of my baker’s dozen Christmas cards were afflicted.