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Book reviews

The Babylon Bee’s The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender: The Comprehensive Handbook to Men, Women, and Millions of New Genders We Just Made Up! (Salem Books, 2023)

Image credit: The Babylon Bee

The Babylon Bee Guide to Gender is the perfect Hanukkah and Christmas gift for LGBTQ zealots who would rather murder you instead of argue for their distortion of heterosexual normativity.

Ordinary people (you know, the only two genders on the planet called “men” and “women”) will laugh, often hysterically, at the Bee’s reduction of the idiocies of gender zealots to quick one-liners or strings of memorable verbal phrases.  It is simultaneously most unfortunate that those who have been infected with gender ideology by leftist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and woke weakling professors who want to make a name for themselves by talking about gender, gender, and more gender will believe the sorry shit the Bee is mocking.

(Sorry for the string of adjectives before “professors”; I know they’re repetitive concepts, being terms denoting people who want to kill fellow human beings.)

However, disregarding the pains of those who suffer from gender ideology for the moment, the humor in the book is substantial.  Consider the following quotes:

Gender is “whatever we want it to be, and it’s never what we don’t not not want it to be” (4).  Wha-what?  That’s the point, though; since gender ideology is not based on rational science, trying to state its tenets yields as irrational language as any verbal tongue-twister.

“A key concept we’ll be discussing throughout this book is the core difference between the fluid, imagination-driven concept of gender identity and things that try to make us question our gender identity—bigoted, hateful things such as ‘reality,’ ‘facts,’ and most importantly biology” (7).

“If they can’t tell at a glance that you are a non-cisconforming fairy-bodied triosoul, they obviously hate you, and the only thing you can do both for their benefit and for the forwarding of culture is to proverbially smash them into the ground with charges of hate speech, microaggression, macroaggression, misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and possibly even racism.  Did I say ‘possibly racism’?  I meant ‘definitely racism.’  Always racism” (10).

“’Maleness’ only exists as a spiritual force of political oppression that can manifest itself in all kinds of bodies, no matter what the genetics say” (17).

“Men are a dark force of unbalanced power that must be neutralized at all costs.  They are the main cause of all the bad things, such as global warming, racism, climate change, and global warming.  The evil force of manhood can take the form of a man, woman, or Brian Stelter” (30).  The repetition of “global warming”, I suspect, is deliberate to illustrate that gender zealots merely repeat themselves needlessly because they are not critical thinkers of a valid philosophy.

Margaret Sanger is correctly described as “the feminist and women’s rights activist who was indirectly responsible for one of humanity’s greatest achievements: baby murder.  Sanger notably also inspired the charismatic world leader Adolf H.  Don’t worry about his last name.  It’s not important” (50).

Regarding pronouns: “And if you’re not on our side, we will punch you in your ignorant, bigoted, and probably white face.  We will win this war.  Join us or die, infidel!” (67).

“Pride is loving who you are despite what others may think, and also attempting to force others to think in the exact same way as you; otherwise, they are fascist aggressors who literally want you to die, and they should die themselves unless they change their beliefs” (129).

Political activism is defined as “the act of intimidating and terrorizing elected officials into passing laws to officially recognize gender ideology as the law of the land.  If we don’t do this, politicians will turn this country into The Handmaid’s Tale and hunt down trans people for sport” (190).

Universities “cost $200k a year and turn kids into obedient gender activists with highly effective slogan-repeating skills and second-to-none demonic screams” (199).

Other items in the work provide more of the Bee’s inimitable comedic commentary: a chart on inventing a gender (58), Pride flags (61-2), replacing family traditions like “sitting around the campfire” with “sitting around the burning police station” (99), how a woman can attract a man (“Show up at his front door barefoot, wearing a housewife dress, holding a load of fresh bread, and offer to bear his children.  Subtle!”) (107), a “Gender-Sensitive Pickup Line Generator” table (115), commentary on “The Church of Gender” (119ff), an analysis of woke corporations (146ff), “The Twenty-Five Step Process to Changing Your Gender” (162-7), and the gender glossary (210ff), wherein “biology” is defined as “hate speech” (211).

Finally, since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher:

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Book reviews

Daniel J. Sullivan’s An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition (TAN Books, 2009; originally published 1957)

This 1957 masterpiece can help beleaguered conservative and pro-life people in 2023 understand how leftists (either ignorant of or deliberately opposed to basic philosophy) attempt to destroy contemporary society.

I found so much of this work significant that I have annotated (either by underlining, adding parallel lines in the margins, or drawing stars of David) virtually all pages, so repeating those annotations here would be repetitious to the extreme.  However, the few comments which follow may be of particular interest to conservatives and pro-life activists concerned about, among other topics, the delusions of gender activists and anti-life/pro-abortion ideas.

For example, I think everyone has read about or seen on social media the lunacy of gender activists who claim that a man can become a woman merely by (poof!) claiming to be one.  The mental illness of transgender activists doesn’t stand a chance when confronted with biological reality, a foundation principle of Western philosophy.

Sullivan’s comments throughout the book about reality being the basis of philosophical speculation should therefore encourage those who argue rightfully that there are two genders and that no cacophonous rage shouting by a transgender person that he is female can overcome reality.

In short, dealt with it, buddy.  You have a penis and a scrotum containing two testes.  Enjoy being a man.

Similarly, abortion wrongs activists have argued that the unborn child is not a person (which is, apparently, a legal term more than a philosophical one).  In philosophical terms, this is comparable to saying that the unborn child is not a being in his or her own right.  This rejection of science is necessary if abortion zealots want to force all of us to accept their anti-human philosophy.

Again, Sullivan’s comments about being, which are passim, can help pro-life persons counter those deluded souls who think that human life doesn’t begin with the reality of fertilization.  Personhood, existence, or being isn’t granted to someone just because (poof!) his or her mother thinks so.  The right to life, the right to exist, is an essential, inherent aspect of our humanity.

In short (yes, I know: the second one in this review), pro-abortion zealots should therefore shut up already and accept the reality that a pregnant woman carries another human being and that both mother and unborn child deserve our love and protection.

Reading Sullivan’s work can be disturbing for many.  For example, Protestant Christians may ineluctably conclude that their denomination’s “Reformation” wasn’t that as much as a divorce from a coherent philosophy begun in the ancient pagan world through solid logical reasoning and refined by Western (Catholic) Christian saints for 1,500 years.  The subjectivism of the Protestant mindset would lead to the nihilism of today, and all of us suffer from that five-hundred year rupture from reality and sound logical thinking.

Likewise, a second major disturbing result of Sullivan’s work is that many would reject philosophical study because it is infused with ideas and terms developed by the Roman Catholic Church.  American Catholics know well that anti-Catholicism is a vibrant force, not only in the area of respect for life, but in virtually all of society.  Therefore, the reader may despair that many in contemporary culture could remain ignorant of the structure and depth of philosophical principles simply because such profundity is rejected by their anti-Catholic bigotry.

Fortunately, though, there is hope that conservative young people will not only resurrect the sound philosophical conclusions reached by scholars like Sullivan, but also live their lives according to those principles.  Two instances can justify this hope.

Philosophical proofs for the existence of God?  St. Thomas Aquinas makes as much sense in the twenty-first century as he did in the thirteenth.

Can the old-fashioned virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice still apply in this utterly technological twenty-first century?  Stifled by sexual immorality; families consisting not of mothers and fathers but a mother and various baby daddies; and politicians like the fake Catholic Joe Biden supporting abortion, which harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers: all of these social realities testify to the relevance of these, not so much old-fashioned, but ancient virtues which have guided human beings in prehistoric cultures to our own.

Though brief for an introduction to a major field of study (280 pages of text, followed by extensive reading lists and an index), Sullivan’s work takes time to read, digest, and understand, so prepare at least a month for delving into his summary of 2,500 years of Western philosophy.

The presence of an index is a major benefit.  As many TAN Books customers know, works published by that firm often do not have indices, making it extremely difficult for students and faculty to conduct research without wasting time flipping through pages, hunting for a term or name.

Finally, since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture zealots and bans conservative and pro-life material, purchase this book from TAN Publishers directly: https://tanbooks.com/products/books/liberal-arts/philosophy/an-introduction-to-philosophy-perennial-principles-of-the-classical-realist-tradition/.