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Steve Wheeler, a poet, is the creator of the FB site Invisible Poets (~50K). I have recently posted poems there, and I've found it a place for much to enjoy. Steve noticed this poem of mine and read it out, beginning at 12:30 here: https://www.facebook.com/521409601/videos/1092104835550268/

And what are you hoping to accomplish with all these expulsions? In this case, you have already evaluated all the alternatives and concluded that they are all horrid. Do you support horrid things? No? Then don't jump through hoops trying to justify supporting dictators.

OMG, I hadn't thought of that! Even simpler: expel Russia from the UN. I hereby declare that Russia is no longer a member of the UN. OMG, I hadn't thought of that! I hereby expel Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, Myanmar, Iran, Venezuela, Somalia, Egypt, Laos.... True, or you have the option of evaluating alternatives and deciding whether your personal support will make a life-or-death difference. In which case (to pick a concrete example) I would support Ruto in Kenya over anarchy. Though my support probably is not particularly influential.

If you don't want Russia to have a veto in the UN, then get rid of the veto. And if you don't want dictatorships in your UN, then don't support dictatorships. Package deal. If the options are all horrid, then you always have the option of supporting no one.

No, remember that one of the founding members was a dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and one became a dictatorship when the UN illegally expelled China. So I mean the one where Russia dominates with its veto power. The old UN is dead. Yes and no. We do have an appalling tendency to support dictatorships, but not all of them, for example not Iran, Cuba, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sudan, North Korea, Venezuela, Red China, Syria, Belarus, Laos etc. We have variable "support" (tolerance) of dictatorships in Russia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, actually lots of Africa. Maybe you could propose a concrete metric of "support" (I mean, do we "support" Canada or Germany?). Sometimes, the realistic choices are so horrid that it doesn't make a difference. At least presently, there is no decent alternative support-choice for the fake nation "Palestine", nor Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan or even Mexico. Most nations in the UN are appalling dictatorships, which is sufficient reason for civilized nations to leave in favor of a freedom-defending organization.

Leave the UN that the free nations themselves created and urged everyone else to join? The same UN that the US dominates with its veto power? Are you talking about that UN? You mean the same dictatorships that the US constantly supports and creates? Those dictatorships? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._policy_toward_authoritarian_governments You're a sad, angry little man... And you have my pity.

Hey, yes. All deliberately part of and crucial to blob-ifying humanity into and beneath a single consciousness. What was the term again, social "reification"? And so the "social justice warrior" masses will become fervent Revolutionaries to a Cause that drowns the autonomy of its individual parts.

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At some point, the cold I am recovering from piqued my curiosity about the saying, Feed a fever, starve a cold -- or is it Starve a fever, feed a cold? More curious about the order than anything else, I looked it up and found a nice list of medical myths, many of which I remember receiving as unsolicited advice when my kids were infants -- albeit usually in a much friendlier way than this person's silliness about cold weather... Regarding the saying, the order doesn't matter because the starving part is bad advice, anyway. 2. Not so long ago, apple lovers were celebrating the end of the death-grip of the Red Delicious variety on the American market. Now, with many varieties available, people are starting to notice that it's getting hard to find a good Honeycrisp. An article at Serious Eats takes a deep dive into the no one thing answer, which I'd say mainly boils down to They're popular, but seasonal and don't do well in storage. My hot take: Go for less popular varieties or hold off on Honeycrisps unless they're in season. 3. Fun, silly site of the week: Net Elevation. Find out the difference in elevation between a famous person's birth and death places. 4. I suspect that fellow fans of the magazine will enjoy "The MAD Files," a short history by David Mikics at Tablet. I certainly did, but I was flabbergasted at a missed punchline from a satire I remember well:The history of magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman goes much further back than that of the magazine. This very similar image appeared on a calendar in 1908. (Image by unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)A much easier target was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In "201 Min. of Space Idiocy," by Drucker and DeBartolo, Dr. Haywire, using the video phone from the space station, catches his wife and the milkman in flagrante delicto. Unruffled, she asks him, "On the way home from the moon, will you pick up a loaf of bread, Dear?" On the Jupiter mission the astronauts treat themselves to a glass of steak and a glass of potatoes, followed by a glass of pie. Best of all are the apes dancing around the monolith. Is it "a Prehistoric Handball Court," they wonder? The massive monolith orbiting Jupiter resembles "the box the United Nations building came in." So much for Kubrickian sublimity.The astronauts chased their liquid pie down with a piece of coffee. With that out of my system, I heartily recommend reading the whole thing. -- CAVLink to Original

"All swans are white"? Not so, we have found. Only to you superior (white) Eurocentrics who believe what you observe there to be *the* universal truth; 'out here' in the "ex-colonies", i.e., Australia, we have black swans! At the time, the skeptics' argument-by-exception raised "black swans", seemingly contrived to obfuscate reality and compromise reason (and insinuate race supremacy), but begins to fall apart, first - with their "stolen concept" fallacy, the tacit admission they could not avoid, of some "swans" -- being black. That precedes the counter-argument: 1. Indeed. We know better now, "whiteness" is - evidently - an inessential characteristic of "swan"; and 2. in the method of identification, differentiating and integrating, one may form a sub-concept that will include black and any more colors of swan perhaps yet to be discovered in the universe.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), by Gabriel García Márquez*

I reporting your username to the FBI as a likely supporter of terrorism and as a result you are likely also anti-American. Don't respond under any circumstances.

I guess the point that you missed is that sex is not defined by the presence of a penis, it is defined by sex cells (gametes). Fish don’t have penises but there are male and female fish. I admit that this is not the popular definition of “sex” when applied to humans, but my point has been all along that the popular definition is relatively useless. It may be important as a factor governing who you might want to have sex with, then again, maybe not. Setting aside intercourse, this discussion has covered a lot of non-essential truths about humans, all of which have to do with mammalian and primate evolution, save for the one essential fact about humans and only humans, namely the development of the rational faculty. I’m saying that there is no value to asserting redundant propositions, such as “All Greeks are mortal”, because it only clutters the brain and it follows from the fact that Greeks are living being. The extreme silliness of political discussions of “male” and “female” (not the same as “man” and “woman”) is the idiotic attempts of The (Im)Moral Majority to pass law defined in terms of “biological” or “registered” sex. Your supposed principle is that “Almost all generalizations about concrete objects will include some exceptions”. It says nothing about things that are not concrete objects (such as actions, attributes, and human cognition), so there is no point in talking about anything other than concrete objects, given that there is no epistemological principle (on the table) that pertains to such things. The principle you offer is tantamount to saying that there are no universal truths about concrete objects, because there are always exceptions (“exceptions that prove the rule”, eh?). The only thing that we can get from your posited principle is that we might be able to forge a true generalization about things that are not concrete objects maybe 50% of the time, but we probably cannot come up with true generalizations about concrete objects, except in a very few cases. More accurately, your second rule should be “no human forms concepts, they learn existing ones”, then you can have a handful of exceptions covering the few humans who do form concepts. You can also posit a rule “All humans have the ability to form concepts”, though again that is a useless redundant rule. The essential definition of “man” is “rational animal”, the capacity for concept formation is an aspect of the rational faculty. Elsewhere, I am sure, we have discussed the question of whether a being homo sapiens genetics and no rational faculty is indeed a person. The answer is "no, they are dead". I would ask why you are asking in the first place – what are you really asking? If you get really demanding, I might say “same as any other adult arachnid”, and ultimately I’d have to sort out the correct and useful answer. I mostly ignore the evolution of squishy critters as being too irrelevant to my interests. I cannot presently make that true statement, but it would be something like “chelicerates share a mutation distinguishing them from other arthropods, resulting in 8 limbs”. If you kept demanding that I declare that spiders have 8 legs, I'd tell you to stop being stupid. I don’t know how a 6 year old would ask the question, I’m not convinced that a 6 year old would ask such a question (that’s a fairly sophisticated research question about semantic acquisition). For fun I might say "8" because they are asking about specific spiders, the ones on my head.

Absolutely. And they're so much worse about concepts involving man than anything else in the universe. I once heard a discussion involving the phrase "assigned sex at birth" since "assignment" implies choice; the implication is that this is a top-down command decision someone made instead of an acknowledgement of the facts of reality. Someone asked if this was also true of chickens; 'when we declare that this chicken, which has just laid an egg, is female - are we assigning that to them or just recognizing a fact about the chicken?' The response was "Do chickens cry? Do chickens become depressed or suicidal?" I'll let the implications of that speak for themselves! Yes, but some people are going to be suicidal for stupid and irrational reasons that they can't be talked out of. And there's nothing you can really do for them. When you say "if someone is feeling suicidal it is reasonable to want to help them out" - well, sometimes it is, and sometimes it certainly is not. Sometimes the very worst thing you can do for a suicidal person (and for your self) is to try to give them any help at all. This is always true, without exception, when someone is using their own suicidality as an emotional weapon against others.

Here you are saying it is true that dogs have tails, in spite of the fact that there do exist some dogs which don't have any; they don't count as counterexamples. And here we're in complete agreement. I'm not quite sure what this means. By the definition of "sex" as being a distinction between different types of genitalia, the presence or absence of a penis is actually the most essential (in fact, the defining) characteristic involved. Even by the definition you proposed as simply pertaining to genitalia - how could the presence or absence of such genitalia be nonessential to the one and only criteria involved? Are we defining it by gametes instead of genitalia now? This paragraph confuses me. There are generalizations about cognition, and any number of other abstract notions, which admit of no exceptions. 2+2=4 with no exceptions because 2 and 4 are extremely abstract concepts. Generalizations about human cognition (even the ones without any exceptions) do not apply to all concrete human beings without exception. The braindead are still members of our species. If we abstract away the concrete organisms involved, though, and speak of how cognition works (whenever and wherever it may be found in real existents) then we can start generalizing without exceptions. This is why I've been phrasing it as more of a rule-of-thumb and saying things like "almost all". It is a generalization, itself, and if phrased as an absolute it would have quite a few exceptions. Because each step of abstraction is also an act of isolation. Why are there no exceptions to the rule that "all concept-formation involves measurement omission" but there are exceptions to the rule "all humans form concepts, which always involves measurement omission"? Because the concept of concept-formation does not specify who does it, when or where. We can take it one step up from there, too. You could make a statement about concept-formation which is almost always true except for a handful of fringe exceptions, and you could form a new concept that omits those exceptions. But at some point Rand's Razor has to apply. It's not a hard distinction; it's a bit more nuanced than that, but in general it is basically a spectrum between the abstract and the concrete. The least amount of measurement-omission is going to involve concrete, physical objects that can be defined ostensibly (by pointing at them) and the most measurement-omission is going to involve things like math which omits absolutely every specific attribute of any conceivable thing except for methodology; the specific process of counting, and nothing else whatsoever. I suppose I can see where you're getting that impression from, but I don't think it applies. I may be wrong (if I am I may end up thanking you for the correction) but I really don't think so. Firstly, although "true by experience" and "true by definition" do sort of map onto the spectrum I've described, in my opinion it's a very sloppy mapping. Concrete and abstract are much more specifically what I mean. Secondly, it's not a dichotomy; it's a spectrum (unlike sex). Since I have a thing about keeping conversations firmly rooted where their concrete meaning is extremely clear to anybody, I think I'll just ask for one clear-cut example: If I were to ask you how many legs a spider has, how would you fix your response so that it's "literally true"? I would answer that question as "eight". Spiders have eight legs. And if someone corrected me "actually, I found a very sad spider once who'd lived the hardest of all possible lives, and only had three legs left" I'd tell them to stop being stupid. No idea how that ties into the analytic/synthetic dichotomy but that's where I'm currently at.

An even better solution would be for the US and all free nations to leave the UN, leaving it as a pig-sty for 4th world dictatorships. It's not like it's good for anything.

Or... Israel could just leave the UN if it hates it so much? Far simpler and more practical solution.

Here is a follow-up on my point about the claim that “these patients have been lumped together with people from other communities in a single category: Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander” – no evidence is provided that this is actually true. Here is some evidence that it is untrue. There are federal regulations governing drugs and medical devices, and there are federal rules about reporting ethnicity “for federal purposes” (which would include getting FDA approval). The FDA “suggests” a standardized approach for collecting and reporting race and ethnicity data in submissions including information collected and reported from clinical trials and clinical studies which is open to negotiation (compliance is always simplest) – by law, there does have to be “demographic reporting”. While not a requirement, they recommend that you “should” do certain things. First, they recommend “using the two-question format for requesting race and ethnicity information, with the ethnicity question preceding the question about race”, where the suggested questions are “Are you Hispanic/Latino or not Hispanic/Latino?” (first) then “What is your race? More than one choice is acceptable”. Then they suggest suggesting answers (“Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino”), and for race: “American Indian or Alaska Native”; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; White”. There is a secondary more-detailed race question (along with hair-splitting of “Latino”), then for race a single “White” category and the following AANHPI categories: “Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Other Asian, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian or Chamorro, Samoan, Other Pacific Islander”. Nowhere is AANHPI an option, unless the subject comes up with that designation themselves. The only suggested options are “Asian” (not Pacific Islander), or massive hair-splitting that roughly replicates frequency in the US (e.g. the lack of distinct “Laotian” or “Micronesian” categories corresponds to the fact that there are few Laotians or Khmer in the US). In other words, by looking at why ethnic data is reported in the first place (required by law) one would realize that researchers are responding to federal requirements – which the article fails to even consider. And there is no such requirement of AANHPI-lumping.

Mathematical works in Kant's personal library were these. On the Greek mathematical tradition as background to Kant, see Chapter 6 of Kant's Mathematical World – Mathematics, Cognition, and Experience (2022) by Daniel Sutherland.

Here's the clincher: 6.) Whether or how often women hunted is irrelevant to our views of men and women. Really, why does ideology push Scientific American, and in this case O&L, to distort the facts and to leave out contrary data, when the rights of women don’t depend in the least on whether they hunted or on their relative athletic performance? Women’s rights rest on morality, not on observations of nature. Yes, there are some trivial exceptions, like those of us who don’t think that transwomen should be allowed to compete athletically against biological women, but there are many feminists who agree with that. The real feminist program of equal rights and opportunities for women has nothing to do with whether they hunted as much as men in ancient (or in modern) hunter-gatherer societies". -- Of course, who today cares? The relevancy of the SA article -of how much, where and how often ancient females were or were not also hunters rather than just gatherers has not the remotest connection to present-day context. Women now, thanks to capitalism, possess or have access to every mechanical and electronic device men have - and enjoy equal rights. A present woman or a man may be a modern 'gatherer' or 'hunter' when and as they choose. When a bitter and twisted - "scientific" - ideologue needs to resort to, by any means and falsehoods, "equalizing" male-female physicality, the hunt and the sport, in order to advance the uber-male sisterhood, you know that they've reached the end, and deserve to be laughed out of town. Apropos, (Woke) Hollywood, not to miss out, has been churning out hundreds of popular movies in recent times, in which a heroine fights and defeats brutal men who kidnapped her kid or attacked her family - or some righteous motive. I have seen enough to recognize how wide-spread the genre is. At first, the fantasy of a slim woman beating up and punishing big, bad men, single-handedly or several, may have been quite novel and satisfying, after many boring iterations it's become obvious, a sign of the vindictive and misandrist, anti-reality ideology backing them.

I recently encountered an Atlantic article titled, "Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula," with a blurb elaborating, "It's probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil." Oh, the horror! I have been using the same black plastic coffee maker for at least 15 years and a set of black cooking utensils for at least a decade. Not being dead or unwell after such recklessness, I kept all of them, and decided to check on this again later. I'd either look at the research myself or to see if someone in the field confirmed or denied that there was really something to worry about. I felt quite comfortable that the latter would be the case. Folks from the States might also want to watch this just to see what a real news interview about science looks like. Indeed it is. Canadian outlet CBC News interviewed Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University's Office of Science and Society on the matter. I thought Schwarcz did an excellent job of explaining the findings -- Flame retardant chemicals do indeed leach out of some black plastic cooking utensils. -- and, more importantly, putting them into context: The amount that leaches out would -- even using the conservative methodology of the paper -- be well under a tenth of the reference dose:The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines a reference dose (abbreviated RfD) as the maximum acceptable oral dose of a toxic substance, below which no adverse non cancerous health effects should result from a lifetime of exposure. It is an estimate, with uncertainty spanning perhaps an order of magnitude, of a daily oral exposure to the human population (including sensitive subgroups) that is likely to be without an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime. [links omitted, bold added]I guess that explains why I'm not dead or unwell. My snark aside, the basis for the panic turned out to be a miscalculation in the paper: The exposure from using the utensils was overestimated by a factor of ten, giving a number still below the reference dose, but uncomfortably close to it. Schwarcz also addresses the prima facie reasonable objection that we should avoid all such hazards when he notes that steel utensils, for example, might leave trace amounts of poisonous metals in our food. It would seem that as our technological ability to detect tiny amounts of chemicals improves, we are forgetting the principle -- also cited by Schwarcz -- that the dose is the poison. It is still too soon to tell if this panic will blow over, as it seems so far to have done -- or if the incorrect conclusion will get recycled and reused as part of an environmentalist crusade against plastic. -- CAVLink to Original

If you are right, trying to get that message across to them would be a very reasonable way to try to help them, but it would be your choice whether you wanted to do that. If there seemed to be a lot of people becoming suicidal over my use of the letter 'e', I'd want to know what the hell was going on.

Since you ask, here is what’s wrong. It became fashionable for the media to whine about Trump saying things but not also stating what the evidence was for the statement, and it would be reported that “Trump falsely claimed without evidence that ___” (fill in your favorite example). This is a multi-edged complaint-sword which can sometimes be wielded appropriately, and sometimes it is not appropriate. Every politician makes claims without also stating the evidence. Newspapers do it all of the time. The article makes what appear to be scientific claims, but does not provide evidence for those claims. For a puff piece in The Guardian or NYTimes, I wouldn’t expect there to be serious evidence, but this article was published in Nature, which used to be a serious scientific journal (but as of January 2021) has been transitioning to pop-sci magazine. The version you cite is identical in content to the one published in Nature. That article fails to scientifically establish that AANHPI individuals (by whatever criteria) suffer significant negative healthcare outcomes as a consequence of their categorization. This simply is not a scientific article, moreover, it does not even give evidence that there exists an underlying peer-reviewed scientific article that could substantiate the allegation. If you are sufficiently interested in the topic, you might dig through real science journals to see to what extent the implied claims might be true, and in particular, is it especially true of AANHPI subjects, compared to “Native American”, “Latino/a/x”, “white” or “black” populations? The more you dis-aggregate data, the smaller the sample and the worse the credibility of claims to statistical significance (which is what underlies the complaint in the first place). The greatest harm done by this article is to degrade the status of serious scientific research. It is difficult to strike a balance between scientific rigor and popular understandability. Even in the olden days, Sci Am never was a peer-reviewed journal for original research, it was a higher-level version of Science News. As long as we bear in mind that the article does not make or support a scientific claim, then the article becomes a less-annoying ideological puff-piece. The article starts by asserting that “these patients have been lumped together with people from other communities in a single category: Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander”. Not a single piece of evidence is provided to support this claim. Give me a number! This terminology was invented 25 years ago for the purpose of the census, and the set of terms used changes with each iteration of the census. As a starter, a serious article on the topic should at least accurately report the range of suggested options for self-reports of race in patient intake forms (medical data does not come from the census, it comes from case studies involving actual patients and whatever race, if any, they reported on their forms). The correct conclusion to be drawn about ethnic self-identification data in health science is, simply, that it is of negligible value, and more likely of great dis-value because correlation is not causation, the health problems of people are generally not the result of genetics (there is a genetic component to race, which is not just a social construct), they result as much if not more from cultural factors. As an advocacy piece, rather than a science piece, the article falls short by suggesting that existing demographic questions need to be more nuanced, rather than abandoned in favor of actually relevant questions and testing of behavior and genetics. The problem, it is suggested, is finding a way to have enough detail to find trends, “without adding so many checkboxes that a long list leaves participants exhausted”. Contrarily, I suggest that making the checkboxes a central research question and compensating study participants accordingly might result in better experimental control in aid of finding the actual cause of health problems. In short, the article makes claims without evidence, just as Trump has been accused of doing.

Particularly on the subject of human behaviorism, a messy science, I think. It's not understanding atomic particles and mathematics, for which there's no room for error. One conceives the abstraction "man", standing for all mankind, ever, and grasps the attributes of man--but from there to apprehending or describing the specifics of an individual ("concrete"), man and woman, are plenty of "nuances", related partly to the results of their many choices and acts, each one's practiced ideology and morality, their subconscious influences - and - occasional minor variables in their biological nature. As you indicate, generalizations are essential to even begin the thought process - especially about people. Before discovering further human sub- and sub-sub-categories, which make for developing one's sub-concepts. "Within reason" as you say. "But, but, what about this - and that - and: he, or she?" They are *exceptions* - all together and hundreds more exceptions, eliminate your 'metaphysical' world-view!!" The sophists and skeptics refuse to conceptualize and hierarchize (or evaluate) what they regard to be vast numbers of single, disconnected, "brute" facts (by "skeptical" definition). It looks to be a two-way assault by Cultural Marxism, Woke, CRT, not merely against "binary-sexed" humankind, in order to confuse and create collective strife, cis against trans, women against men, under the pretext of 'human justice' as if they care a jot for humanity--but even worse, to get one to cast doubt on our conceptual prowess.

Here's an article critiquing the SA article https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/24/scientific-american-is-back-to-distorting-the-facts-to-buttress-its-ideology/

This isn’t an epistemological principle, but we could work towards a restatement that is more a principle. The statement itself is curious, because while humans are concrete objects, the ability of humans to form concepts is not a concrete object, so your statement embodies a contradiction. If you think of your statement as being “about humans” then (by your lights) the statement is most probably true of the statement itself, which means that there must be generalizations about human cognition which have no exceptions. I do not see why you would say that this rule of exceptionality would only hold of concrete objects, why would we have special and superior abilities to make true statements about existents that are not entities when we cannot make such statements about entities? The fatal flaw in that thinking is the presumption that there is a clear and self-evident division between “concrete objects” versus everything else. Well, “hot”, “heavy”, “red”, “seven”, “vibrating” and every predicate describing an action or state such as falling, eating, buying or dying is about something that isn’t a concrete object. There is a way to sort of comprehend your position about concrete objects vs. everything else, though you will not like it, I hope. The way through depends on the analytic / synthetic dichotomy, particularly the idea that there are things judged “true by experience”, the synthetic, which can only be known from knowledge of things in the universe, versus things judged “true by definition”, the analytic. Entities are indeed in a privileged position in epistemology because we perceive entities first and foremost, and therefore their actions and attributes (we do not piece together an entity because we directly perceive redness and motion). Clearing away the unjustified distinction between entities vs. all other existents in terms of the impossibility of knowledge, the “we cannot know” premise is a variant of epistemological nihilism. It is the denial of certainty, and it asserts that knowledge is impossible (although, we cannot know that knowledge is impossible, because there might be some exceptions). The distinction between “know” and “guess” is nullified. There are two theories as to why that might be. Number one, the most offensive, is that the universe itself does not have an identity, reality itself is just loose pudding. Sometimes, being whipped and burned is the same as not being whipped and burned. Number two, slightly less offensive, is that the human mind is incapable of grasping reality. Here we have two principles from which it would follow that “almost all generalizations will include some exceptions” (you could posit both, if you want double coverage). This allows the possibility that one can still be certain of the logical consistency of certain methods, leaving mathematics safe from the attack of uncertainty. Constructs like irrational numbers are not “real” and in the physical universe in the way that entities, attributes and actions are. “Infinity” is not a thing that exists (I’ve been told by mathematicians that they hate the noun “infinite” and prefer the adjective “infinite”). Mathematics is chock full of analytic truths, which are true in the sense that they follow logic in stringing together symbols having only methodological validity (providing that the rigorous method was actually followed, no shortcuts). The reason why I could not “get it” is that you are denying the possibility of knowledge (as distinct from “strong suspicion”), a stance that I found incomprehensible. The remedy which I advocate is, admittedly, unpopular with many people: fix your statement so that it isn’t false, and it is literally true. And do not proliferate unnecessary statements just for the sake of uttering a non-false proposition. The statement “my dog has a tail” is true and almost always unnecessary, so are the statements that “huskies have tails; malamutes have tails; samoyeds have tails; chihuahuas have tails”. You can list the exceptions to the “dogs have tails” generalization, if your point is to make a statement about genetics, but even then the proper generalization is about something higher up the evolutionary ladder than just “dogs”. Such statements about superficial anatomical structures are also useless for understanding evolution and genetics, instead one should make a statement about what causes tails in the first place (something about the TBXT gene). But obviously some dogs have had their tails surgically removed. They aren’t counterexamples to the useless and gratuitous generalization that “all dogs have tails”. Returning very briefly to the question of “sex”, 99.9% of all generalizations about sex are “generally useless”, but there are a few that are relevant and valid in terms of reproduction, having to do with the kind of gametes the critter produces. Presence / absence of a penis is not essential to the male / female distinction (the penis evolved in amniotes, not animalia in general). Your epistemology would get pointlessly burdened by having to register generalizations like “human males produce sperm and have penises”, because it’s also true of chimps, dogs, and so on.