Goodbye New Scientist

Right: Front Cover of New Scientist 21 April 2018.

By MRA-UK: After looking at the picture on the right, you will not be surprised to hear that I have cancelled my subscription to New Scientist (after too many decades to recall). There is nothing in the NS article that you haven’t heard before, repeatedly. Placing such material in New Scientist is a coup for the feminists, conveying as it does an aura of scientific respectability on their Patriarchy narrative – though they must be getting blasé now that they have total control of the media and can mob, vilify and destroy anyone who stands against them.
In truth, the origins of sexism lie in the female monopoly of the uterus, and the evolved pair bond which involves the ceding of moral authority to the woman (gynocentrism). As gatekeepers of sex, and hence the wielders of selection pressure, women have moulded men to their requirements. The result is resource provision flowing from men to women, for which men are now vilified in the form of the pay gap. The pay gap mantra and #MeToo are to be interpreted as women changing their required male spec. They have previously bred the Doberman, now they want a King Charles Spaniel. And all the while they are herding men in the direction of their choice, they hold the banner of Patriarchy in front of them to blindside men into believing that men are in charge: Patriarchy that great bugaboo, that Wizard of Oz, that charade, that act of mutual conning, that saviour of men’s blushes. The whole of this site is testament to sexist disadvantage of men, and how well it is hidden under the Patriarchy fig leaf.
It is several years since unacceptable gender-political articles started appearing in New Scientist. I did blog on a few, for instance Male and Female Brains, Letter to New Scientist (relating to on-line ‘hate’), Tim Hunt, Ellen Pao and the Reddit Debacle, and Ads in New Scientist – oh, and That Google Memo. In truth, there has been an objectionable article in virtually every edition for years now.
The previous edition (7 April 2018) included a dreadful Leader Editorial on the PSA test. The article lambasted famous men (e.g., Stephen Fry), who, after recently being diagnosed with prostate cancer, had been publicly urging men to get a PSA test. Like others who decry the PSA test, they had nothing to offer in its place. The effectiveness of the mammogram test for breast cancer has also been questioned in some quarters, but I doubt that you will ever see New Scientist advising women not to bother with one – they wouldn’t dare. But they are content to leave men with no test at all for a disease which is notoriously asymptomatic – until it is too late.
The fact that I attended the funeral of a college friend who died of prostate cancer a couple of weeks ago sharpens my opinion, as does the fact that the number of my friends who have, or have had, prostate cancer is getting too large to count. 
This terrible article even trotted out the flagrantly callous “men usually die with prostate cancer rather than of it“. You might have expected better of a scientific publication. Indeed you would, but then New Scientist is no longer a scientific publication. The fact that, if a man lives long enough he can expect to contract prostate cancer, but to die of something else, has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that in 2015 in the UK some 11,819 men died of prostate cancer – more than the number of women who died from breast cancer. That’s of not with, please note, New Scientist.
But I digress. Back to edition 21 April 2018, and that Origins of Sexism report. It was simply the stuff that you can read on a billionty web sites and a great many newspapers and magazines every day of the week. Here is another picture from the article, so you get the message…

I hardly need describe the contents of the article, do I? It is thick with ‘sexual violence’. Surprise!
It praises #MeToo as a positive movement for change. I had a rather different take on it in The Anatomy Of Our Decline and The Silence Of The Dogs.
To ‘prove’ male privilege the article reproduces the opinion of one trans woman. This has no place in any organ pretending to be scientific. Had they gathered personal experiences from a statistically meaningful sample of both trans women and trans men, and properly controlled for other effects such as race, family background, socioeconomics, etc., then it would have been an interesting piece of social research. As it is, all I can say is that I could quote trans women with the opposite opinion to that presented in the article. So what?
Here we have yet another article claiming to have identified the reason for the high male suicide rate. Guess what? “Seeking help could be construed as a threat to masculinity“. Ah! I felt sure it would be the fault of masculinity, i.e., men’s own fault. Well, everything is always men’s own fault. When men get killed in war, it’s their own fault – because men start all the wars. QED. Funny, though, as far as I’m aware, no one has done the research to identify the causes of male suicide. And as for it being “a loss of power, control and autonomy” (i.e., their own fault), those words would be perfectly apposite to describe the typical man’s experience of the Family Courts. There is ample evidence that men’s suicide peaks rather spectacularly after separation, especially if child contact issues are involved. And as for these macho fools’ failure in the help-seeking department, just where do the delightful authors of this piece of secondary feminism suggest that men can go to get help with defeating the monsters which feminism has prepared for them in the form of the Family Courts, the judicial system and the domestic violence industry?
Unconscious bias features as a heading – read my take on that here.
James Damore’s famous Google Memo is quoted. Oddly they don’t see fit to mention that the feminist hegemony had him summarily sacked. Well, it would hardly play well against the Patriarch narrative. Heaven forbid that our feminist overlords should be seen to be powerful, let alone tyrannical. That would wreck everything. (I recall hearing a feminist interviewed on Radio 4 use Damore’s memo as a refutation that the feminist-left were censorious – a truly impressive display of pretzel logic). The article states that Damore “cited the influence of prenatal testosterone on developing brains as one possible cause” – that is, a cause of gender differences leading to a greater propensity of males to go into the tech sector. “Unfortunately for Damore“, it continues, “the science is not so clear cut“. Err, yes it is – see the references at the end of this post. Or watch this video featuring  Helena Cronin and Simon Baron Cohen . 
Amusingly, the New Scientist attempt to support their claim that “the science is not so clear cut“ starts with two observations which actually support Damore, including the quote from Larry Cahill, “there are biologically based sex differences at all levels of mammalian brain function“. The only support for their own claim that “the science is not so clear cut” is to cite “a study of 1400 human brains which found that they can’t be simply classified into male and female“. They gave no reference, but it is clear from the “1400 brains” that they are referring to the work of Daphna Joel which I deconstructed here. Joel is an apologist for social constructivism, seeming to wilfully misinterpret her team’s own brain scan findings. This was another case of both the New Scientist and Daphna Joel falling over themselves to align their empirical findings with a feminist interpretation. But they just don’t. It’s as if they’ve been shown a picture of a rabbit but they insist it’s a dog, because it’s a dog they want.
New Scientist is collaborating with the anti-scientific, social-constructivist, feminist-leftist propagandists. What use is a science magazine which promotes anti-science? None.

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