Nice decor. The rug really pulls the room together.
I came across a lengthy rant about the 2016 movie “Anything”, which has a transwoman character played by a man who does not identify as a woman. I am marginally sympathetic to the idea that characters with characteristic X should be played by actors with characteristic X, especially if such actors (and other people) are subject to discrimination. I am, however, of the opinion that the job of an actor is largely to portray something he or she is not.
The particular argument in this rant was that the casting in this movie will lead to deaths. The sequence is as follows: straight men like to have sex with transwomen sex workers. If this actor wins awards, it will make these male clients more aware that they are having sex with other men. The male clients will be angry that they might be seen as gay, and might take it out on the sex workers by killing them.
To prevent this, we are all supposed to maintain the fiction that transwomen are not actually men, and we are never to give a male actor an opportunity to pretend he identifies as a woman; any actor who wants such a part must declare such an identity before auditioning. (My framing.)
Nothing was said about helping prostituted transwomen leave the business, or protect them from abuse by clients. Nothing was said about the myriad other ways clients could become more conscious of the actual sex of these sex workers.
I’m having trouble understanding the line of reasoning here. If there are straight men who specifically like to have sex with trans women in preference to (natal) women, then it’s presumably because they like the male/female body dynamic involved. They’re not going to discover through a movie or any other means that hey — you mean they’re men? Gender vs. sex probably isn’t a relevant topic in prostitution.
If the sex worker is ‘passing’ and someone who isn’t into trans women finds out, then I can imagine violence, sure. But otherwise, the argument escapes me.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines; Sense8 had a transwoman played by a real woman… And supposedly both of the Wachowskis are transwoman (the fact that they’ve both decided this really calls that into question.
Why is this? Could it be that they wanted all of their characters to be attractive instead of weird looking?
Oh look, failed Prime Minister Theresa May has awarded Geoff Boycott a knighthood before the door slammed her in the arse on the way out.
He is not a nice man. He was convicted of punching his girlfriend in the face 20 times (he says she fell over). He’s said on numerous occasions that only black cricketers get knighthoods and that he’d have to put on blackface to get one. Even the Sunday Express says he’s a racist. The BBC continues to employ him, though.
And Theresa May gave him a knighthood.
I already despised the concept and practice of knighthoods but this one sits especially badly. Come on, Theresa, you are already the second worst Prime Minister in UK history (Johnson has already secured first place after a few days in the job) and you’re pulling this shit?
I watched as the House of Commons was closed for an unwanted vacation yesterday (today?). Interesting stuff. We live in interesting times.
Hypothesis: Every large advance in communications leads to some kind of large societal disruption and the rise of social media is the indirect cause of our current interesting times.
I’m not sure of this as there’s evidence of efforts to undo ‘liberal’ ideals since way before reagan/thatcher, but it does seem to me that masses of people are way more easily herded in odd directions that ever before.
In order to illustrate his misery over the arrangement of yesterday’s classes, PZ decides to use a soundtrack – The Boomtown Rats’ 1979 song I Don’t Like Mondays, a cheerful little number about the USA’s first school mass-shooting, carried out by 16-year-old Brenda Spencer at Cleveland Elementary School, San Diego.
Nice message for a teacher to send to his students, no?
Towards the end of the comments there (in which, by the way, several commenters are actually calling out one Povril Sevens for his repeated calls for TERFs to die in fires or commit suicide* – silence from Myers himself, though), the odious Giliell, who has started referring to herself as a trans woman (f-m? fluid? she doesn’t say, but I’m sure it adds woke points) despite stating in the past that she is a mother, dismisses the issue of transwomen in sport with a simply delightful Dear Muslima, with a subtle hint of martyrdom at the end.
Also, quite frankly, professional sports is pretty low on my list of concerns. There’s open war on reproductive rights, fascism is rearing its ugly head, climate change is in full force, hitting women especially hard. When it comes to protecting women and children, the fairy tales spun about “parental alienation” are gaining more and more track, putting the lives of women and children who are fleeing violence at risk. Even if everything “gender critical feminists” said was true, the effects would pale in comparison to what is happening, yet they keep spending all their energy on fighting trans women, making it necessary for us to spend part of our energy protecting trans people.
There are bigger fights to be fought, so just let transwomen take over women’s sports? Then what? Bigger fights than changing rooms and rape crisis centres and refuges for women and and and.
*not because it’s wrong to say such things, but because it gives the TERF’s ammunition to throw back at them. I shit you not.
I have to admit that despite being a child of the 70s and having bought the single at the time, I didn’t know what the song was about until recently. I’m quite prepared to believe that PZ thought it was about mondays.
Hats off to Sastra for so patiently engaging with those Pharyngula people. I’ve had to train myself not to read the comments or – if I do – physically restrain myself from hitting the reply button, or I’d be there all week.
PZ is not. Doing a grand job, that is. He popped up earlier in the comments to warn someone off for something fairly footling but appears entirely happy with Porivil Sorrens’ many TERF-death-related posts and the people who – as AoS says – are shushing them because they might make the other people who want TERFs to be dead look bad.
Here’s a hint, pharyngulites, if you’re more worried about propaganda and purity than, you know, truth or having a damn good argument, then you have lost your way. You might want to have a good look at yourselves. But don’t die in any fires or tape any bags to your heads, nobody wants that.
I’m a Pharyngula people too, though. I like the others: find them interesting, intelligent, and thought provoking. Though the commenter who wants people to put plastic bags over their heads has some pretty serious anger issues, I think.
I didn’t say much to anyone — partly because I wasn’t addressing the main points in the OP, and partly because iirc PZ has said he doesn’t want to hear things argued against on this topic which have been well settled. Been there; done that; nothing left but cranks. Okay. I don’t agree, but it’s his blog.
The commentariat seems divided between agreeing completely and spoiling for a fight — sometimes both simultaneously. But that’s the way it’s always been.
I’m quite prepared to believe that PZ thought it was about mondays.
I’ve no doubt he hadn’t a clue, but mumble mumble intent mumble magic, as I believe was the standard pre-pile-on phrase over there for punishing honest mistakes, or more commonly no mistake at all, just deliberate bad-intention readings of perfectly innocent comments. He has been called on it but the last time I looked he hadn’t responded. Probably trying to find a way of interpreting the lyrics to mean something innocent.
the odious Giliell, who has started referring to herself as a trans woman
She’s probably claiming to be a trans man, or “non binary”, because it’s against The Rules for a woman to claim trans-womanhood–unless she’s claiming to identify as a man who identifies as a woman, which some English woman actually did, for real. And yes, she was serious.
Anyhoo. Whatever. Looks like I’ve misplaced my surprised face.
There are bigger fights to be fought, so just let transwomen take over women’s sports? Then what? Bigger fights than changing rooms and rape crisis centres and refuges for women and and and.
And so it goes. All the things listed as being ‘more important’ in this comment have also been dismissed by people as having to wait until other ‘more important’ things are dealt with. I have been hit with this when trying to discuss climate change – but there’s a war on! Ever since we sort of forgot about the war(s), I haven’t heard this one. Now it’s the economy – poor people need jobs. Yes, and they need a livable climate.
Women’s issues have always taken back seat to “more important” (read: important to men) issues. We might argue that, if the issue of transwomen in women’s sports isn’t so important, then they should just pass by with a shrug and work on those more important issues, because if it isn’t important, then let the silly, trivial women have their sports while we serious minded people work on important things. The fact that they spend so many posts, so many blogs, so many videos on this topic suggests that it isn’t considered unimportant…it’s only the women that are unimportant.
Donald Trump has had a press conference in which he insists that Bolton was fire fired fired dammit! He didn’t resign, I fired him bigly! etc.
Naturally, this lends increasing credibility to Bolton’s version, in which he offered to resign but Trump said ‘let’s discuss this tomorrow’ all so Trump could fire him at a safe distance.
Hilariously, forgotten the names of Barron and Melania Trump. When talking about e-cigarrettes, he said “…and that’s how the first lady got involved. She’s… got a son, together, that is a beautiful young man, and she feels very very strongly about it. She’s seen it, we’re both reading it, lotta people are reading it…”
The hesitation after “she’s… got a son” is what cracks me up. After failing to recall their names (or more generously, forgetting that it would be appropriate to refer to them by name), he clearly interrupts himself to say ‘together’ to make it clear that he was involved, which was only necessary thanks to his clunky phrasing.
I’ve been labelled a TERF by some on Twitter because I reject the notion women and transwomen share a social class. I don’t think they have much in common at all. I certainly don’t think the same movement should be expected to fight for the distinct needs of both groups or that the same organisations should be required to cater to both groups’ needs. That makes me a TERF, apparently. OK. I guess that’s the definition of TERF: someone who doesn’t believe women and transwomen are part of the same social class. Got it.
Then who the blue fuck are the people all the above shit applies to? The ones who like being told to kill themselves. The ones who celebrate when trans people off themselves.
Those people may exist. Every flavour of shitty person does. There may even be TERFs who believe those things. I’ve never encountered them though. I’ve bumped into some shitty people who, like me, have been labelled TERFs. I’ve yet to encounter any who get off on trans people killing themselves though.
Yes; there are some very dark things going on. Somehow, the importance of agreeing that biological sex is unrelated to being a man or woman has overridden everything else on which there is significant agreement. It’s considered so vital to being a fair and loving human being that failure to accept it puts you in the same category as Nazis and the KKK.
I mean, put aside who’s right and who’s wrong for a minute and look at the basic situation regarding violence:
Group T is being beat up by angry men who insist on gender conformity.
Group G is against angry men, violence, and gender conformity.
Angry men who insist on gender conformity hate both Group T and Group G and won’t listen to either.
Group T directs most of its fury towards Group G because Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence.
Even if they’re right about the sex vs. gender dispute, it’s irrelevant to the major problem — safety and the freedom to be gender nonconforming. Group T G simply doesn’t belong in the same category as the violent macho men. They don’t want Group T dead. It’s not a mealy- mouthed platitude to point out that all the common ground binds them together when it comes to the larger picture.
Group T simply doesn’t belong in the same category as the violent macho men.
Oops, I meant to write ‘Group G’ here.
Though Group T, while it certainly shouldn’t be placed together with ‘violent macho men,’ can make it difficult sometimes for people to discern the difference.
I certainly don’t think the same movement should be expected to fight for the distinct needs of both groups or that the same organisations should be required to cater to both groups’ needs
Apparently the TRAs don’t think this, either, because they don’t seem to think women’s groups should fight for the needs of women at all, or cater to the needs of women. They should fight for the needs (or perceived needs) of trans, and cater to the needs of trans. Anything else is bigotry.
It all comes down to the argument of sex vs. gender. If trans women ARE women, then women’s groups which include trans women and fight for and cater to their needs are fighting and catering to women.
It’s a battle then won or lost through terminology. And the choice of terms depend on the conclusions regarding an intellectual evaluation of sex vs gender, an evaluation which seems overinfluenced by analogies and emotional hot buttons.
Sastra – when you say @ 31 “Group T directs most of its fury towards Group G because Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” I take it you mean “because it thinks Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” or “because [according to them] Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” as opposed to Group G actually is encouraging and inciting the violence?
I don’t think it really does all come down to the argument of sex vs. gender. Even if you think that gender is all powerful and can negate sex, the bodies still remain. The bodies don’t change because The People Believe.
I think it’s more that it comes down to magical thinking, yes or no. Can the power of thought overrule the material reality of bodies? Or no?
I think 36 is closer than 34 because it’s very clear indeed that gender is being deliberately co-opted and corrupted to achieve political goals rather than to describe reality. The term used to describe the artificial constructs of expectation ascribed to men and women. That’s a description of reality, alright, because it’s how most people even now seem to think about women and men, consciously or otherwise. It’s a description of the reality of people being idiots about how women in particular should behave and feel about how they behave.
But the currently more fashionable presto-changeo idea that gender is somehow more authentic than sex doesn’t just fly in the face of reality, it makes no sense at all. You know perfectly well, Sastra, where we’ve seen arguments like those before and how well they worked out.
Yes, the “Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” was supposed to be part of a sloppy syllogism, a conclusion derived from the premises which doesn’t fit.
I think the sex vs. gender debate basically equates biological sex with the body. From what I’ve seen many of the atheist TRAs don’t invoke mysticism — they downplay the importance of sex/body. Classifying people according to biology is only useful if one is specifically referring to a biological process like reproduction. It’s irrelevant and for the most part so variable it’s useless. Even people in ancient societies thought that. And it’s not dimorphic: there’s intersex.
Instead, the reasoning goes, what really matters personally, socially, and politically, is gender. Gender is how you behave, think, feel. And it’s not dimorphic, either. Any sex might think as a woman; they might think as a woman following traditional gender roles; they might think as a woman who rejects gender roles. A biological female who likes to wear makeup and sequins might be a man. How? He experiences makeup and sequins the way a non- gender conforming man would. And the only way to know or check this is internally, with the mind. What does he know about himself?
This part is rather confused, I think. It’s supposed to be liberating.
It seems to me then that, at least for some people who are trans or support the ideology, it’s not that the mind overrules the body — it outranks it. They’re still biologically male or female, but who cares? It never mattered. It’s up to individual internal recognition when it comes to being a man, a woman, both, neither..
I suspect they find this plausible because they’re finding it analogous to the idea that biological sex isn’t important when it comes to what you like. A girl could like cars. A boy could like dolls. Someone who insists a female MUST be a girl and a male MUST be a boy is just like someone who insists girls must play with dolls and boys must play with cars. Or, of course, girls must like boys and boys must like girls.
They’re lumping the whole thing together and labeling it “control.”
Sastra, in my comment, I was referring to the fact that statements including the word “woman” as the descriptor – “Women’s Health” “Women’s Shelter” “Women’s Issues” are considered verboten. We must become people, because not all women are…whatever. Some men can get pregnant. Some women have penises. To say “women” without referencing trans or acknowledging trans or avoiding the word women is considered bigoted and violent. So, yeah, they don’t really think these places should be fighting for women, but instead should center trans. They may claim they think trans are real women, but if they thought that, there would be no fuss about the word “women”.
They want all women’s groups to center themselves on trans. Because women (I REFUSE to call myself cis-) are privileged. Privileged people do not need to be fought for, only fought with.
I see — yes. If a trans man has to go to a “Women’s Health Center” to get help for his manly period, the embarrassment and frustration is too high a price to pay for keeping the sign.
Are they doing the same at the “Men’s Health Center” (assuming they exist)? What would be the replacement? For either?
PZ has announced that he has a new grand-niece and says that ‘she’s a real sweetling’. There’s a little devil sat on my shoulder daring me to ask how he knows the baby is a girl. Obviously there are no visual clues and even if they’ve run tests to identify the chromosomes we know that chromosomes are not indicative of anything but the old, outdated, transphobic system of adhering to a strict binary.
Were it not for my reluctance to involve an innocent child in things, I’d be starting a shit-storm around about now.
This Texas school district has a very precise and sex-specific dress code, including many details regarding hair, that applies to four-year-olds. This particular little boy, who is black (and that’s probably important), was told that his shoulder-length hair was too long. A distraction, somehow.
This is where the story takes a bizarre turn. The grandmother spoke to the principal:
“He told me that I could either cut it, braid it and pin it up, or put my grandson in a dress and send him to school, and when prompted my grandson must say he’s a girl. ”
Wow. So much to unpack. It is OK for girls but not boys, to have hair a bit longer. And it is OK for a boy to pretend to be a girl, rather than fail to comform to the male dress code, but if he does so, he must conform to the female dress code.
I might guess that, to this principal, trans status is all about stereotypes, and all about pretending, and he’s OK with that, so long as stereotypes are adhered to.
It’s shades of the theocracy in Iran. There you can’t be gay, but you can be trans. In the US you can’t be gender non-conforming, but you can be trans and conform to the gender expectations of your ‘new’ sex.
People with fucked up reasoning have things in common that supercede race, religion and nationality.
My impression is that the principal wasn’t sincerely offering a trans option, but using a good old fashioned sexist insult. Could have said the same thing in 1919. But it’s hard to tell.
Sastra, that was my impression, too. It’s similar to a phrase I’ve heard a million times from parents to small boys when they cry: ‘If you want to act like a girl you can start wearing dresses’.
PZ put up an interesting new post. https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/09/16/biology-is-always-more-complicated-than-you-expect/
In it, he says something I agree with:
The first sign of a biased dilettante is when they try to reduce biological phenomena to a single parameter that exhibits a straightforward linear effect. It’s true of IQ, and it’s also true of testosterone. This is an excellent video that discusses the complex relationship of testosterone levels to athletic performance.
[video that I'm not watching because I'm packing for a trip to Ayers Rock / Uluru]
Why, it’s almost as if there are a thousand parameters, each nudging performance this way or that, and acting in a combinatorial fashion!
You don’t say! So why then are we told that testosterone blocking is enough to completely erase any competitive advantage held be trans women over actual women in sport? A puzzler.
Yeah, I saw that too and was equally puzzled. It doesn’t seem to be the gender critical who insist on testosterone level as a qualification for men to compete in women’s sport, it’s the trans people who – presumably – lobby the sport regulation bodies on exactly that issue.
I have no particular intention of watching the video because I strongly suspect it of being a waste of time and my rage levels are already high in the gigamews today but if anyone can bear to watch it and report back here, I’d be grateful.
Slate has a favorable review of a new book by neuroscientist Gina Rippon, “Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds”
Our host has blogged about some of Rippon’s prior talks and interviews. Has anyone read this book?
I plan to read it soon. It appears that she has changed the title from “The Gendered Brain”, probably a good move. I look forward to hearing what other people think of it.
A couple of minor observations in this gender/trans whatever it is going on.
First, the latest batch of young transwomen are HUGE. I haven’t seen one lately under 6′.
Second, I realized that these ‘all gender’ bathrooms have another flaw, especially ones that don’t have urinals and full partitions. If an occupant is much over 6′, and they stand facing the toilet, they have a pretty good view of the stalls on either side.
I find both of these observations extremely annoying, though I’m not sure why the first one is.
Sex toys are oftentimes geared toward cisgender and heteronormative people. Cute Little Fuckers aims to do away with that and instead focuses on sex toys that are gender-inclusive. That means these toys are for everyone, including folks who are transgender, queer, intersex, non-binary, genderqueer, cisgender, male, female and more.
How are vibrating bits of silicone gender-inclusive? I’m glad you asked:
Each monster has its own name, pronouns and likes.
I note that she says she has not had any luck getting stories from male detransitioners. I wonder how skewed the demographics are. It seems female gender dysphoria is now a significant majority of the cases, and thus likely of the detrans cases, but even so, I can’t recall hearing any stories of male detransitioners at all. Anyone else have any links or information about this?
Just got a note in my news that Mattel has a new gender neutral doll. It’s billed as a doll for everyone, and the article says that Mattel is betting on how the country is going, even at the risk of offending a substantial portion of the population.
At this point, I don’t think I want to see the news anymore. Between Trump and trans, I am just about at the end of my rope. (Hey, they both begin with “tr” – coincidence? Or conspiracy?)
The gender neutral doll actually makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not like Barbie and Ken had genitals anyway, so letting kids dress up dolls whichever way they like seems kind of healthy.
Hey, remember Richard Dawkins? Seems like he or whoever manages his Twitter feed managed to step in it again, promoting an evangelical Christian conference because it attacks “social justice warriors.”
It occurred to me that some people here might have failed to notice The News at Kate, Kate Smurthwaite’s YT channel. That would be a shame, Kate is brilliant, perhaps best known for ranting entertainingly on Sunday morning religious shows in the UK (lots of that on YouTube too, treat yourself).
In all the other news, it’s easy to lose sight of the announcement that the Supreme Court has scheduled the Louisiana abortion law case for oral argument next term.
As many here likely recall, this is the case where the Fifth Circuit more or less openly defied a 2016 Supreme Court decision, Whole Women’s Health, which struck down a virtually identical Texas statute. The 5th’s reasoning was pretty much: Kennedy has been replaced by Kavanaugh, so it’s open season on the right to choose.
Roberts voted with the liberal justices to reinstate the trial court’s injunction while the case worked its way through the system. And some commentators are noting that the Supreme Court basically had to take the case, if only to overrule the 5th, unlike many situations where the Court can just decline to hear a case and wait for a better one or simply punt. So you couldn’t necessarily read anything into the decision to hear the appeal.
And I thought so, too, until I read this Mark Joseph Stern piece at Slate. He points out that, in situations where a lower court has just blatantly got it wrong, and the Supremes don’t have anything further to say on the subject, they do what’s called a “summary reversal.” Basically, there’s no oral argument, and just a brief, unsigned decision per curiam (“by the court”) that says the legal equivalent of “no — look at what we said in this other case, dummies.”
So the fact that the Louisiana case is set for oral argument is itself troubling. Even worse, the Court also agreed to hear Louisiana’s argument that the plaintiff clinic lacks standing — the implication being that only pregnant women wanting abortions can challenge these laws. Stern explains pretty well why this is dangerous, and this comment is long enough, so I refer you all to his piece.
Basically: they’re coming after abortion rights. I’m sure Susan Collins will be saddened and furrow her brow when a woman’s right to choose is torpedoed by nominees she approved.
I found some more stupid from a professor of philosophy who, by virtue of her training, should really fucking know better. There are several people ’round these parts more knowledgeable in feminism than I, so I’ll leave in-depth, point-by-point rebuttal to them. I’ll just hit the high(low)lights.
Let’s begin with misunderstanding what 2nd wave feminism was talking about when dividing sex and gender. (Emphasis mine.)
The second-wave feminists I learned from in the 1980s were working to drag the (mis)conception of gender as a rigid biological binary into the light, where it began disintegrating. In so doing, however, they raised the stakes: once we know we’re dealing with a social construct, we see how important our attitudes and practices really are. Such things determine what gender is, who is and who is not a woman, and so on.
This excerpt might look innocuous, but the bit I bolded reveals that the author missed the point. Or the point missed her. Whichever. Feminists were not demonstrating that gender is incorrectly conceived as a binary. In fact, the entire point of the analysis was that gender is a binary, a binary that stifles human flourishing.
It may feel desperately important to reinforce the old idea that there are, as a matter of unalterable biological fact, exactly two human sexes (no vagueness, no complexity, no dynamism): after all, once we stop reinforcing it, it will no longer be true. As de Beauvoir put it: “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.
This means the “natal woman” is a creature of ideologically motivated pseudo-science, rather than unalterable biological fact.
That is so far from what Simone meant that I have to believe the author hasn’t read the source. Shorter de Beauvoir: one’s culture dictates the role of females, and that culture involves systematic inculcation and indoctrination into the binary system of gender—those adult human females who are made part of that system are known as “women”.
Ultimately, the millennial conception of gender and romantic fluidity is the true descendant of the challenge that second-wave feminists posed to fixed gender roles.
The Third Reich’s absolute dictatorship is the true descendant of the Athenian dream of democracy. What? It’s just as sensible as what I quoted.
I’d love to have Jane Clare Jones tear this article a new one. Or two.
A study analysed three and a half million English language books published between 1900 and 2008 to identify the adjectives most frequently applied to men and women.
Women were described by their bodies, men by their thoughts and behaviour.
The analysis also showed that negative verbs associated with body and appearance appear five times more often for female figures as for male ones.
As the article points out, this corpus is exactly the sort of thing used to train neural nets, so this bias is being built in to the AI systems that are supposed to make objective decisions about us.
During the analysis they created categories for for adjectives such as relating to body, behaviour, feeling etc. It’s interesting that (in the diagram from the linked article) they chose the colour pink to illustrate the feeling category.
I see that Donnie still doesn’t pay his bills. He’s currently stiffing the Scottish government to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds after a Scottish court ruled that the Trump Organization had to pay the government’s legal costs after Trump’s failed attempt to block the development of a wind farm on the grounds that it would spoil the view from his golf club and deter players from using the club.
Hilariously, after telling a Scottish parliamentary committee that onshore wind farms would destroy Scotland’s tourist industry, he went on to state that he had no need to call on expert witnesses to verify that claim with actual evidence because
“I am the evidence,” he said. “I’m an expert in tourism. I have won many, many awards …
How unlike Trump to make such a claim! And yet for some reason or other he still lost. It was almost as though he wasn’t believed.
Latsot, I know just enough about computers and software to be a danger to myself and others. Even so, I’ve been having this discussion with others in my circle for a while now. It’s amazing how many people who are well educated and knowledgeable in their own field just don’t get this. They seem to regard to entire corpus of literature, art, law, science and healthcare as perfect and inviolable, rather than an expression of our society and culture complete with warts and cancers. It’s slightly scary how blind people are to this.
On a related note, the NZ Ministry of Health, District Health Boards and most health providers have used shared databases since the mid 1990s. A researcher looking at Māori health outcomes trawled the 20 or so years of available data to see if there were indicators as to why Māori health outcomes remain stubbornly worse than white peoples. The answer was depressing. Everyone presenting at primary health care with early onset ‘lifestyle’ illnesses (heart, type 2 diabetes etc) gets given the same advice. Loose weight, get excercise, cut back on alcohol, eat healthy, stop smoking. Māori tend to get sent home at that point, while white people tend to be given medication and further tests.
They were at pains to say this was clearly not intentional racism. It was unconscious incipient racism, but racism nonetheless and it harms ultimate health outcomes. It is but one example of why we shouldn’t use existing datasets to train software incapable of human insights.
Rob, it’s a big problem. All sorts of data sets are biassed, sometimes in subtle ways, and if you train a neural net with it, you’ll incorporate those biases.
We’ve seen this with police systems – used heavily in the US and a little here – for predicting crime to plan the deployment of people and resources. Historically, the police have arrested more black people than white, some areas have a higher population of black people… So the system spits out those locations as priorities. And this appears to be vindicated by arrest figures since if you go looking for crime, you’re going to find it. So the cycle reinforces itself.
There are similar results elsewhere. One that’s finally getting some attention is the fact that most medical studies have been carried out on men and there’s an assumption that women’s organs and systems behave in the same way. We already train doctors this way, it’s asking for trouble and trouble has been found. If we train AI systems the same way, it’s even worse because neural nets can’t explain their ‘reasoning’ (and therefore identify a bad step or assumption) and… well, they sound all sciency and people have a tendency to believe their conclusions.
If you believe the press, we’re in an emerging, innovative world of artificial intelligence. But most of the software used is based around ideas that emerged in the 60s with a kind of heyday in the 80s and 90s. All that’s changed is the dramatic drop in the cost of data and computing power. We haven’t got better at AI, we can just throw a lot more resources at a problem now.
Starting at age 5, many girls stop believing their gender can do or be anything. Join us in closing the Dream Gap.
I’m pretty certain they mean that girls and women can do or be (almost) anything they want, but the phrasing is unfortunate. Girls will always be female; their sex will always be female, and to the extent that “gender” means “sex”, their “gender” will always be female, not “anything”, as the gender identity crowd might have us believe. But the ad is clumsily trying to refer to girls feeling socially imposed limitations because they are girls. I might have have simply said “girls” rather than “their gender”.
Everyone needs to read Natasha Chart’s amazing speech outside the Supreme Court the other day. She and other speakers were drowned out by transactivists.
The were arrested for loitering… in their front yard. (Guess the family’s skin colour! Guess the officer’s!) That’s bad enough, but then it gets nasty:
When the young men, who are black, were released from jail, they were greeted by family members on that same lawn where they were arrested. Kevin Mincey, the family’s lawyer, said that’s when officer Storace, who is white, showed up and decided to re-arrest them as well as several other members of their family.
Tomorrow is apparently International Pronouns Day. Not a celebration of a part of speech, but rather a navel-gazing festival where everyone picks their own special words for other people to use to refer to them, under pain of social ostracizing or worse. International, no less, so it must apply to languages other than English.
To save you the clicks: it shows you a list of pronoun sets, each of which takes you to a copy of that wonderful article “Pronouns are Rohypnol” by Barra Kerr. Excellent article.
Post eaten? Meanwhile, having a poke around there, the source seems *quite* conservative, and this probably explains the alarming headline. The city of Portland did not ban urinals in any sense, they removed urinals from a major municipal building. Same principle, smaller scale.
Pro Publica managed to get their hands on some very interesting Trump documents. Apologies if I missed these being brought up elsewhere.
Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.
Thanks to mentions in B&W, I decided to have a look at some Derrick Jensen. Just started Endgame Vol. 1. For those of you who, like me, are new to his ideas, here’s a link to the “twenty premises” upon which this work is based:
Still early in the book, but it is quite interesting. He crystalizes some things I’ve been thinking regarding humans and the environment of for years, but interconnects them more completely and pushes well beyond my own, tentative and incomplete ideas on these things. The basic premis is that civilization is bad for the living planet as a whole and for the humans caught in it or subjected to it. Civilization, because of its inherent unsustainability, is doomed to crash, and it is better to crash it sooner ourselves than to keep going and have it crashed for us, as the latter result will be much more destructive than the latter. It sounds a lot like the difference between crash-landing a plane running out of fuel as opposed to letting it run out of fuel at 30,00 feet. (My analogy, not his.) A lot to absorb, but challenging and provocative. It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to unknown once you’ve been told it, but also hard to figure out what to do with the knowledge once one knows it.
The most frightening thing about it is I don’t think he’s wrong.
Further regarding Jensen. I’m thinking he might be slightly romanticizing and valourizing indigenous, non-civilized (as in non-urbanized) cultures. After all, they’re still made up of humans. I don’t think any culture is immune to some degree of ignorance, short-sightedness or greed, as individuals within them will surely exhibit varying amounts of each at various time, though they might not have as much impact on their environment as cultures with higher populations and more advanced technology. Given the right circumstances, even small numbers of humans with comparatively simple technologies can have a big impact on the ultimate fate of large, naive, low-birthrate species. I’m sure that diprotodons, elephant birds, and moas might have a word or two to say regarding their own experiences with the ecological sustainability of the lifeways of the first human inhabitants of Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand…
Thanks for the information on Jensen. His work sounds intriguing. It reminds me of a Christopher Hitchens essay claiming that agriculture was the worst invention of humanity. Jensen has obviously gone much further in his analysis. I’ll have to check him out.
YNNB, I tend to agree. I’ll look the books up because they sound interesting though. I am unconvinced that Civilisation and Culture (which Jensen appears to conflate in places) are inherently bad and unsustainable. I’ll agree that they have exhibited much of the negative effect he attributes to them in the past. As with all evolutionary bottle necks, the real question is whether we can move on. The idea of cultures abandoning technology and intellectual pursuit and returning to a ‘state of grace’ has been explored in science fiction as an aside. Not a pathway I would take.
Just to go all old-skool on you, Dylan Moran has some things to say about religion and what if Jesus were a woman, as well as many other brilliantly rambly things:
So, I know ‘her emails’ is now old news, but this Vox article is the clearest admission I’ve yet seen from the media that they fucked up accurately and fairly reporting the issue in the lead up to the 2016 elections.
There are some good graphics that illustrate just how biased the reporting was.
Also of note, and I’m sure recognised by many here, the latest investigation (by a Pompeo led State Department at Trump’s instruction) still reached the conclusion that it was no big deal and that previous Republican’s had done the same and indeed advised Clinton to use a private server. Also worth noting that that State Department investigation attempted, arguably, to skew the investigation by retroactively reclassifying some previously unclassified emails as confidential or secret and using analysis of the new classification as a basis to determine whether actions years ago were appropriate. Still no wrong doing on Clinton’s part, although 38 former and current SD employees now have black marks on their records. That seems extreme and lacking in natural justice.
It has to be said that the court papers show the fathers character may be questionable at best, but that doesn’t mean his concerns are not valid. The article is almost painfully even handed and explanatory.
Yeah, more specifically, the court’s prior findings establish that, among other things, the father committed fraud, emotionally abused his stepdaughters, lied to the Army about being gay to obtain a discharge, lied about his education and many other aspects of his background, failed to comply with court rulings, was a vexatious litigant, and “will say or do anything to get his way.”
Does that make his “concerns” invalid? No. But it seriously damages his credibility. So all of the talk about how the child is perfectly happy to identify as James when he’s with his father should be taken with a truckload of salt — even if it’s true (and it may be, as there are witnesses other than the father who say so), it may be because the child is terrified to displease the father.
Frankly, I’m appalled that a jury is deciding this matter. This really should not be a job for ordinary citizens.
Screechy, if even half of what is alleged about the guy is true he’s a complete shit and his ex is well shot of him. Does him being a shit invalidate the apparently reputable experts who testified? Worth noting that all sides agree the child is healthy, happy and appears to be free from anxiety, regardless of which parent they are spending time with. That suggests to me (as someone who was a football in a messy divorce) that both parents are doing a good job of insulating the child from their personal conflict as much as possible and providing a loving relationship.
I totally agree this is not a job for a jury.
I did note that the mothers lawyer used the line about the child only identifying as James after being brought to appointments by the father as if that were some sort of slam dunk proof. After all, the child only identifies as Luna when the mother drops them off. Same difference.
Jennifer Gunter seems to have embraced the faith. btw, I’m Astrange1. got on Twitter a month or so ago bc I couldn’t take following links from here without responding to them.
It looks like Trump is sending troops back into Syria. Has he decided to send protection after having had a change of heart over abandoning the Kurds? Not exactly, although it appears that the troops will be giving protection….to the eastern Syrian oil fields, chiefly the Conoco gas plant.
Oh, and Trump appears to want to satisfy his friend Erdogan by encouraging the Kurds to relocate from their territories along the border with Turkey. Oddly, he’s suggested in a tweet that the Kurds head for the oil fields. The cynical bastard deserted them last week but now seems to want to use them as a buffer between the oil and the US troops protecting it, and Syrian-backed militia.
I hate to think of trans people being bullied online or off but…
There are no sources. There are no explanations about how the data was captured or analyzed. There’s quite a lot of mystifying stuff, such as the Pyramid of Transphobia being topped with “trans genocide”. Click and you get some quotes about trans people being murdered or being denied medical treatment. That does not seem to me the same thing as genocide and doesn’t demonstrate that those things happen more to transgender people. They’re just (unattributed) quotes. The entire pyramid is more than a little (more than a lot) dubious; it implies that trans genocide is an inevitable result of negative attitudes toward trans people without the slightest bit of evidence. It’s begging the question like you wouldn’t believe.
There are graphs with weird arbitrary labels which don’t look like they’re showing much meaningful and there are clear instances of p-hunting. There’s no definition of what is considered a transphobic comment or analysis of the context in which these comments were used, even though that’s the entire basis of the report.
It’s a mess and that’s a shame because a proper analysis of abuse which showed its sums would be helpful to everyone, especially trans people. This is not helpful unless you’re a person who wants your beliefs validated and is desperately willing to overlook the lack of documented process or evidence.
I really liked this letter. The writer sounds frustrated and angry. She makes strong arguments and blunt statements, without bothering with conciliatory language. I liked the breadth of scope. Nicely done.
Holms, you’re getting quite the reputation over there. This, from the thread you linked to in #101
abbeycadabra says
October 28, 2019 at 1:42 pm
@16 Siggy
I feel it is relevant to point out that Holms is such a virulent transphobe that he got banned from Pharyngula for refusing to stop spouting TERF talking points. “There are only two sexes!” directly in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary is such a behavior, and the subsequent bad-faith motte-and-bailey redefining of “sex” over and over to exclude each factual objection is another.
Note the rather insidious opening line to Siggy. If that isn’t a non-too subtle hint for Siggy to follow PZ’s lead and ban you from that blog, then I’m a chimpanzee called Brenda. Colour me surprised, though, to learn that you have been presented with ‘overwhelming’ evidence that there are more than two sexes. Dearest Abbey isn’t being dishonest there, is (s)he?
Seems that the jury awarded the mother sole custody, but the judge overruled it and awarded joint custody. Other highlights:
— no finding of abuse by either parent
— mother’s demand that father embrace and affirm child’s identity as a girl denied
— parents must agree on future medical decisions (i.e. puberty blockers)
— both sides enjoined from publicly discussing the case (some criticism made of the father here for his publicity-seeking efforts)
— family counseling ordered
Appears to be a sensible resolution based on what I’ve heard. Perhaps a recipe for future litigation when they can’t agree on puberty blockers, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is the right course of action.
I don’t recall having paid a lot of attention to “Mattress Girl,” the Columbia University student who strapped her dorm mattress to her back when going around campus as a protest/performance art piece because her rapist was still allowed on campus. I had (and still have) no reason to doubt that she was raped, but it seemed a rather unproductive reaction that only gave credence to the usual trope that victims who speak up are attention-seeking.
Well, she’d like everyone to know now that she’s been talking to some conservatives and libertarians, and gosh, some of them are really nice. This profile from The Cut is appropriately skeptical.
Many of us will not be surprised to learn this:
Since 2016, Sulkowicz has identified as gender fluid, and she sometimes uses they/them pronouns. When I ask what to use for this article, she texts me, “Lol I’m not clear about it either,” before settling on she/her.
She no longer wants to be an artist, except maybe a con artist:
She has been working on a memoir that draws on her diaries from Mattress Performance, and last month, she started a full-time, four-year master’s program in traditional Chinese medicine. There, she’ll learn skills from acupuncture to herbalism, which have been her “personal healing modality” for years.
And let’s throw in a classic anti-feminism trope while we’re act it:
In explaining the arc of her life since Mattress Performance, Sulkowicz invokes something surprising. “As I became more and more feminist,” she recalls, “I think I got to a point where I was literally just straight up hating men. I just hated men, I wished all men would die.”
What changed her? You will regret asking:
But embarking on her political journey made her want to understand them, so she jumped into the belly of the beast, reading the book that “had always been framed to me as the book that all dudes read and then they became yucky”: Neil Strauss’s The Game, considered the bible of pickup artists.
Sulkowicz liked the book and considers Strauss’s story to be an echo of her own.
Ugh. I don’t think she’s doing this as some new performance art piece or hoax. It seems to me like garden-variety attention-seeking. The market value of being Mattress Girl was probably diminishing unless she could pull some kind of second act.
I just upgraded to the latest version of Firefox and the first post I made to B&W today generated a notification that a number of social media trackers installed in the site had been disabled. These all appeared to be from Facebook and Sharethis. I don’t know if the presence of these things is something either of us can control, but thought I’d mention it. Maybe some of the more web savvy commentators can clarify.
There was an article I saw yesterday or today regarding Women’s Liberation Front finding common cause with the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom. Politics does make strange bedfellows, and given the lack of left-wing organizations dealing with these issues such as men in women’s sports, I don’t blame them.
Then I saw a petition about keeping men out of women’s sports. It was from Alliance Defending Freedom. And I saw an article promoting the petition. It was from Life Site News. That’s a really tough bridge to cross. I’m not ready, personally, to associate with these organizations, even in the small act of signing a petition for a good cause, because of how many horrible causes they promote. I can’t do that. For WoLF, if they can achieve the policy goals through their combined efforts, I applaud them, but I can’t do that myself. Damn this whole mess.
I know. I won’t click on ANYthing at Life Site News, let alone share or sign. I’ve read one or two things at Heritage Foundation, but I don’t think I shared them either. Damn this whole mess indeed.
I’ve been told that that point of agreement we have with such political groups should be taken as evidence that gender critical feminism is in the wrong. I asked them if they supported TPP seeing as how Trump opposed it. Strangely, they never replied.
No word yet on whether or not Spencer disputes the authenticity, but it’s good news either way. If it’s genuine, then Spencer’s polite facade has been stripped away for good. If it’s fake, then Milo is so desperate for attention/money (they’re pretty much the same to him) that he’s resorted to lying about his fellow travellers.
And either way, the neo-Nazis are fighting among themselves.
“But the political parties must also reform themselves. Their processes for choosing a presidential candidate should not be a free-for-all. Trump was able to waltz into the Republican primaries in 2016 with no long-standing membership of the party and no experience of public office. Similarly, independent Senator Bernie Sanders fades in and out of the Democratic Party as the electoral season dictates. These practices must be brought to an end.”
Indeed. Trump should never have been able to run except as Monster Raving Loony party candidate.
CNN has learned from those closest to Weinstein that he isn’t sorry about his alleged misconduct. He’s combative, maintains he is innocent of any crime and is planning for a career comeback post-trial. His attorneys have maintained that any sexual contact between Weinstein and his accusers was consensual.
Here’s his lawyer. Of course she has to say stuff like this:
“I think he does see life after this,” Rotunno said. “I think that’s a very positive thing. I think if I was looking at the evidence we are all looking at, I would see life after this as well. I do think I’m one of the people who has said all along if we win this case, I think that he can come back even stronger.”
But then:
But there are other moments when Weinstein contemplates a future behind bars and “he’s frightened,” according to his friends.
“The way he comes off sometimes is he tries to look like he’s not [scared] and tries to act like he’s walking around, just casually, but he’s not,” one of the friends said. “He’s afraid.”
Remember those conversations we’ve had about the normalisation of choking a woman during sex, even without prior consent or working through the obvious safety issues?
Grace Millane was a young British tourist to NZ. She was found buried and was murdered. I’m sticking with murdered, rather than the legally polite ‘allegedly’. It is an agreed fact that Grace and her killer hooked up via Tinder. There is CCTV footage of them around town, clearly having a good time. Grace went back to her killers apartment. They had sex. The killer alleges that Grace then died during a ‘perfectly normal sex act’. This hasn’t been detailed as yet (the trial started this morning), but involved some sort of choking or strangulation.
Normal my F***ing arse.
The defence case is that the killer panicked when he realised Grace was dead and disposed of her body. The Crown case is that he applied dangerous and deadly force and after killing Grace did a series of Google searches to work out exactly how to dispose of her body and clean-up the apartment. He watched porn and arranged another Tinder date at 8am. As the Crown Prosecutor says, hardly the actions of someone upset and distraught at having accidentally killed a young woman.
The point of my rant, other than the consequences for poor Grace, is that this ‘normalisation’ of an uncaring, dangerous and inherently misogynistic attitude towards another person seems to have taken deep root in society. Misogyny needs to be stripped from our gardens, root and branch. No tolerance.
I’m not really answering your question, but here’s a privacy suggestion for everyone:
Definitely use Firefox rather than Chrome, or – better still – Tor (https://www.torproject.org/). The Tor browser anonymises browsing by routing web traffic through three random relays, encrypting it each time. This makes browsing a little slower, but a lot safer; sites won’t have access to your true IP address, browser footprint and more. It has other privacy features which you can read about on the site.
If you use Firefox, Chrome (Windows or Android) or Opera, you can install the Privacy Badger extension from The Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) which blocks tracking cookies and other trackers.
The EFF are the good guys and I trust them. They have various other privacy tools available at https://www.eff.org including HTTPS Everywhere, which tries to force sites to use encrypted traffic. They also have a surveillance self-defense guide which is extremely good. It contains a good how to/getting started guide here: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module-categories/tool-guides
The EFF is a non-profit organisation which relies on donations to help make the web safer. If you use their tools, please consider making a small donation if you can (note: I am not affiliated with the EFF).
I have a background in privacy research so if anyone around these parts has questions about this kind of stuff, I can have a stab at answering them.
Yeah, even Dan Savage, who’s about as pro-kink a media figure as it gets, has essentially told readers that “breath play” (as the euphemism goes) is just too risky.
One bit of good news: a federal court in New York has just invalidated the Trump Administration’s proposed new rules expanding the so-called “Conscience Provisions” (a.k.a. the “rights” of medical providers to refuse to provide care that conflicts with their religious beliefs).
The opinion is here but is very dense. Haven’t seen a good summary/explainer yet.
Because this is invalidating a proposed new rule that had not yet taken effect, it’s fairly unlikely that the appellate court would issue a stay pending appeal — that’s usually done to preserve the status quo while the appellate court rules, and here the status quo is the Obama Administration’s rules. So there’s a decent chance that even if this decision is ultimately overturned, there will be a new administration in place.
Latsot @124, thanks for the tips. Up until now I’ve avoided Tor for fear of not being techy enough to implement it correctly. I’m getting tired of being ‘product’ though, so your info is great.
And Latsot @128, no I think you had it right the first time. Kink shaming has become less acceptable than strangling women without consent. Breath play my shiny metal arse. Grace Milane had so much pressure applied to her throat she bled through her nose. The pathologist apparently says this is because of the excess pressure of blood pooling in the head, unable to get back past the ‘obstruction’. From the article…
…a post mortem examination found she had a bruise on the left side of her neck, as well as others on her chest and inner-upper arms.
So, Slate has a really, really shitty sex advice column called How To Do It. It presents a real dilemma for me: from Slate’s point of view, a click is a click, so they can’t tell that I sometimes read it just for the train wreck value as opposed to actually thinking the authors give good advice.
(Why is it shitty? Well, aside from the issue I’m about to complain about, I’m reminded of something Dan Savage once said when asked if he had any advice for young people who want to be sex advice columnists. After noting that he wasn’t interesting in encouraging competition, he said the one mistake that he noticed in most of the college newspaper sex columns was that the authors are constantly making it all about their own sex lives. Everything is about them and their personal sexual history and their kinks etc. and not about helping out readers. Anyway, “How to Do It” is a textbook example of that — the male co-author really wants you to know that he’s had a lot of dick in his life.)
But here’s why I brought it up.
In a column Dated October 10, 2019, a reader wants to know if it’s ok for her to just flat-out ask potential dates their penis size. The author responds by commiserating with her about how men will lie about it, but otherwise just offers advice on how to go about filtering for size, and ends with a you go, girl!:
I want to also encourage you to continue to openly fish for big dick via your profiles. Why not ask guys if they’ve got what you want? If it’s off-putting, great. You’re filtering out the dick not up to your standards from the jump. Saves everyone time. I believe there’s nothing wrong with coming across as slutty or overexperienced, and anybody cool and/or hung will respect you as a woman who knows what she wants. Be proud of that.
Ok, fine, whatever — if something is important to you, sure, put it in your profile and ask about it. Fine. I basically agree with that, whether it’s size or hair color or religion or whatever.
I’m sure you can see where this is likely going. To be fair, the two columnists don’t flat-out call the writer a bigot, and oh-so-graciously acknowledge that it’s ok to have a preference when it comes to type of genitals…. BUUUUUTTTT… maybe she doesn’t need you to touch “her” penis? Shouldn’t you give people a try? Maybe you should grow as a person, and get to KNOW people as human beings instead of being so obsessed with genitals. “[I]nquiring about the contents of prospective sex partners’ underwear will turn a lot of people off. He’d be doing it to filter certain people out, but I think he’d more often be filtering himself out for asking the question in the first place” Etc.
I’m just amazed by the lack of recognition of the double standard.
Perhaps this is old news, but I just came across it, and I don’t recall it being discussed here.
Apparently ContraPoints and Buck Angel have revealed themselves to be insufficiently woke according to their fellow trans people, for “binary privilege” and “transmedicalism” respectively. Summary here
My only comment is that this stuff must be exhausting.
Nice, even military veterans are turning against Trump. Normally the military seems to be a reliable conservative vote in most nations, but I guess the veterans are that special subset of the military with spiralling medical bills. They really feel the neglect.
This goes on a lot more than most people think; a man used stalkerware on his ex-girlfriend’s phone to gain access to her car’s systems. He could start and stop the engine, lock and unlock the doors, roll the windows up and down, mess with the heating and air conditioning etc.
Of course, he could also track the car’s location. He could already track the woman’s phone’s location and – presumably – access her messages and notifications.
Spyware and other types of digital stalking get surprisingly little press. I’m willing to bet that has something to do with the fact that it is almost always something men do to women. The lack of press coverage is especially awful since stalkerware is now a factor in the majority of partner abuse cases.
In a previous job I read a lot of case studies about digital stalking and have some horrific stories to tell. They are all about bad endings due to men spying on women or parents spying on their children. Bad, that is (of course) for the women and children.
I was listening to a recent episode of the NPR show This American Life, titled “Small Things Considered”. The first act was about short children being given growth hormone, not because of a hormone deficiency, but because they were short and the parents wanted them to be taller.
Natural growth hormone was determined to have horrendous side effects; artificial growth hormone is too new to have reasonable data on long-term effects, but there are some expected problems. It is extremely expensive, so typically only wealthy people go this route, although for some reason some insurance companies cover it. There is no serious life consequence to being below average height. After all, in any group some people will be below average. But these parents bought into the social stereotypes.
What is worse, and what was the impetus for the show (an alarmed doctor contacted the show and was interviewed anonymously), is that some pediatric endocrinologists are pushing these treatments. “You don’t want your kid to be a Hobbit, do you?” A doctor they talked to referred to it as “cosmetic endocrinology”.
What was going through my head while listening to this was those pediatric endocrinologists who prescribe puberty blockers, another drug with unknown long-term effects, and also cross-sex hormones, based on scant information about the patients, and pushing stereotypes. I can’t say I have a good impression of pediatric endocrinologists right now.
An all-trans hockey team, mixed sex. The experience level varies greatly, but two played hockey professionally. Those two, one male and one female, both played for women’s hockey teams; how interesting. I think it’s lovely that such a team exists, and perhaps there could even be mixed sex league with trans players, but that is quite different from having men play on women’s teams.
The article seems to advocate quietly in favor of breaking down sex segregation in sports. That would obviously reduce opportunities for women, but I wonder also about trans-identified males. A McKinnon wouldn’t be a “champion” if he had to compete against other males; would he support combining the competition, at the cost of his medals and records? I highly doubt it. Would he even have bothered with identifying as a woman, then?
Maybe we should start refer to the trans ideology as “Trans Religion” and the core trans beliefs as “Trans Doctrine”, as in “I do not believe in the popular Trans Religion with its doctrine that a woman is anyone who feels like a woman and that pronouns have magical powers of destruction.”
I bring this up as I just noticed the Atheist Community of Austin show Godless Bitches now features a trans host.
JFC
And speaking of whacky beliefs, anyone else run into Quantum Mysticism, or is that a Backwoods Pacific Northwest phenomenon?
I do believe my head is going to explode now that I’ve run into two individuals, a tree service guy and a construction dude, who believe they know more about Quantum Physics than, well, anybody.
Ok, that’s probably an unfairly harsh summary of what is a fairly thoughtful and data-driven article. But I remain struck by how little examination there is of the underlying premise that “fewer babies bad, moar babies good,” and that the only question is to figure out what’s stopping people from reproducing more and fixing it.
Seven paragraphs in, we finally get the “to-be-sure” graf:
Declining fertility typically accompanies the spread of economic development, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. At its best, it reflects better educational and career opportunities for women, increasing acceptance of the choice to be child-free, and rising standards of living.
But that is immediately followed by:
At its worst, though, it reflects a profound failure: of employers and governments to make parenting and work compatible; of our collective ability to solve the climate crisis so that children seem a rational prospect; of our increasingly unequal global economy. In these instances, having fewer children is less a choice than the poignant consequence of a set of unsavory circumstances.
The only attempt to resolve this question of whether it is choice or “unsavory circumstances” is to cite a single survey series that shows a growing gap between the number of children people say they want and the number they actually have. But I question whether people answer those kinds of surveys accurately. There’s enormous social pressure on people, especially women, to say that they want (more) children. Declaring that gosh, you’d really like to have more children, but your economic situation just doesn’t permit it right now, is often the polite way out of a conversation. (One thing I didn’t appreciate until my friends started having kids is how much pressure there is to have a SECOND child. After all, you don’t want your kid to be a — gasp! — “only child,” do you? The prejudice against only children is truly striking. And I live in a secular, blue area, so this isn’t some religious quiverful stuff.)
Interesting article, thanks. I had read a related article recently, and both articles took it as obvious that a declining world population was a bad thing. That is, if the population declines for reasons, those reasons are clearly problems because they caused population decline. It seems out of the question to cheer the reduction in the number of people in the world. Rather than thinking about how to manage with an aging, declining population, they are concerned about avoiding it.
It’s something that jumps out at me in Orwell’s writing – he takes it for granted (and it comes up often) that declining population is terrible and must be reversed. Of course he wrote in the aftermath of The Great War and then during the next one, and the death tolls were enormous. But he also wrote about spreading suburbia and the despoliation of the countryside, so you’d think he’d make the connection.
Yes, I can see how a sudden and drastic population decline would be a problem — a massive increase in the ratio of retirees-to-workers would strain retirement benefits and resources generally. But we’re not talking about some Children of Men scenario, but a gradual drop-off. Can anyone really say that the world would be a terrible place if the global population in 2100 is 10 billion instead of 30? Or 100?
Further to me @122 re the trial of the killer of Grace Millane.
Guy’s been found guilty of murder after a jury deliberation of 5 hours. It seems that when you lie about having had a dead girl in your apartment, when you last saw her, whether you noticed that she was dead, and instead there is evidence that you took photos of her naked dead body, watched porn, stuffed her in a suitcase and buried her in the woods, then cleaned up your apartment and went on a tinder date (where you tell the next girl a story about knowing someone who accidentally choked a girl during sex); no-one believes you’re innocent.
I expect there’ll be an appeal, but for now the world is a slightly safer place.
Rob @ #154 – Good news. I haven’t been actively following the trial, but I have come across the odd report here and there. Something I noticed was that every report told me about the victims sexual preferences (real or alleged, who knows) as if those had any bearing on whether or not guy had murdered her. That list of things that make guy look like a murderer? I think I heard the one about how he went on another date while the body was in his apartment. Which is the one thing that (at a stretch) might be plausible if he was trying to pretend that someone else came along and killed her while he was gone.
I really want to be pleased that the the-victim-was-not-a-nun-defense didn’t work. I’m just worried that it might have worked if the perpetrator hadn’t consistently acted like some kind of fictional serial killer. And it pisses me off that only the first of those two things seemed to be worth reporting.
But then PZ seems to think that spiders have sexes and that their biology determines which one they are. This is such a crazy and forbidden idea that perhaps he really does think spiders have plumage.
latsot, there are four comments on his post; one suggesting the spider pictured is disgusted (at PZ?), one saying the spider is abused, mine questioning whether spiders have feathers, and one asking if spiders can fly. Not a sycophant in sight.
No doubt OB will cover Trump’s early-morning 55 minutes of ranting on Fox and Friends today, but this part sums the orange buffoon up perfectly:
Trump on Yovanovitch: “She wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy. She is in charge of the embassy. She wouldn’t hang it. It look a year-and-a-half, two years to get the picture up. She said bad things about me … This was not an angel* this woman, okay?”
Yep, this is the US president, live on national television, after basically making an unscheduled phone call and taking over the programme for just shy of an hour. His vanity knows no bounds.
*there’s that ‘no angel’ thing again, his new favourite go-to insult when he’s got nothing real to accuse people of.
Catwhisperer, the defence lawyer was in a very tight bind. Since it was an undisputed fact that his client had killed Grace the choice was murder or manslaughter. New Zealand is a small country and a pretty young tourist vanishing while celebrating her birthday was big news for a long time. There was no hope of getting a jury of functioning adults who hadn’t seen at least some news reports. So instead he chose to make an initial statement emphasising that Grace was not at fault and they would not be attacking her choices or preferences. So far so good. The defence team then walked right up to the line by demonstrating that Grace had experimented with mild choking with partners in the past, although at least one witness testified that she was very cautious and had both safeword and tap out signals prearranged and didn’t trust any old person to do that with.
I’m pretty sure that in another time (not that long ago) or with a less sympathetic victim, a defence team would have engaged in scorched earth slut shaming.
At the end of the day, maybe Grace did ask to be choked, but as the prosecutor or judge pointed out (I forget which), a person cannot consent to be murdered and consent to be choked ends on loss of consciousness. Bedsides, there was a mountain of behaviour from Grace’s killer that didn’t add up to a distraught and panicked accidental death.
The RSS feed for comments here appears to be broken. Rather than seeing comments, I’m seeing blog posts, but with an author of one of the comments listed. This is just over the last day or two. It may be something broken on my end, but I thought I’d check. Has anyone else experienced a problem?
A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus – a procedure that does not exist in medical science – or face charges of “abortion murder”.
As this is the second time that Ohio legislators have been told by obstetricians and gynecologists that the procedure does not exist then it’s probably safe to say that the bill is a back-door way of banning surgery to remove ectopic pregnancies altogether. I’m sure their ‘logic’ will be to leave it in the hand of God. I’m equally sure that the reality will be the unnecessary deaths of many women.
I attempted to visit during the downtime of your blog, and came back again to see that it was fine. I figured you made an edit of some sort to the site which caused a bit of downtime.
…And then I saw the change you made. No more ‘categories’ pulldown menu directly over the previous article button! That goddamn categories menu clashed with my cursor more times than I can count, but now my foe is defeated and I am victorious.
I promised Ophelia that I’d write a review of Kate Smurthwate’s York gig and entirely failed to deliver.
That was partly because my first thought was “it was really good, you should definitely go to the next one if you can” which is a fairly piss-poor review. My second thought was to treat it like I used to peer review papers when I was an academic but I was well known for being harsh, perhaps unnecessarily so. So much so, apparently, that I was once at a committee meeting for some conference or other and eventually realised that the “right fucking bastard” reviewer everyone else was complaining about was me. Forgive me for holding fellow scientists to an impossibly high standard while I use the uproar to try to sneak under the fence with my mediocre work.
Anyway, I should probably do neither of those things and just say what happened.
Kate’s gig took place in the immediate aftermath of some Facebook misogyny so braying that it was simultaneously almost impossible to believe and entirely expected. Kate gets called “bitch” a lot on Facebook and other sundry internet places so she called her tour “Bitch”, intending to talk about that. Facebook was entirely sanguine about the bitch-calling business but decided that Kate’s calling her own gig “Bitch” violated their community guidelines so they refused to advertise the York one even though Kate had paid them to do that. Consequently, the show wasn’t well-advertised.
Yeah. Like I said, almost impossible to believe but at the same time entirely expected. It’s why I went to the show. I’ve seen Kate perform before and am a big fan of her telling off religious idiots on those Sunday morning god shows we don’t seem able to rid ourselves of so I would probably have gone to the gig anyway but I hadn’t heard about it until Facebook STREISAND’D it. York is half an hour south of where I live so the ticket sold itself.
The show was upstairs in The Artful Dodger, a pub that, to be fair, Fagin himself would feel comfortable doing business in. There was an excellent dog who seemed to live there. I think he was trained to stare at people playing the fruit machine, basically daring them to put more money in. When they ran out of money he came to be stroked by me. He was no Bullseye but he cheered me up no end. I’d forgotten that all pubs in York smell of the river when it has been raining, which is to say they smell of sewerage and not-Bullseye distracted me from that with his antics.
The pub was fairly rancid and the beer wasn’t good, but the gig was upstairs, through a portcullis. The upstairs was kind of Downton Abbey but with cheap electric heaters in violation of every health and safety rule ruled. It was nice, but there weren’t a lot of people there, presumably because of the Facebook business. There was quite a lot of trying to make the projector work. Part of me wanted to point out that in the hundred or so computer science conferences I’ve been to and the hundreds more CS meetings, the projector never worked either and you’re usually better off without the bugger. But it being sorted out was fun and friendly. People teetered around on a ladder pressing buttons, that alone was worth the price of the ticket.
Then the gig started with a support act, Andrea Louise Watson (@andanina) who was very good. She was introduced as someone who had been to one or more of Kate’s stand-up classes. I don’t know whether Kate is a good teacher but Andrea was funny. Highlights included a story about how – when she had to slam on her brakes – she was most worried about whether her vibrator would roll to the front of the car. It probably isn’t the sort of story even I would tell in front of my elderly mother, but Andrea’s mother was there in the front row obviously and rightly proud of her daughter. If Andrea does other gigs, go and see her if you can.
Then it was Kate’s turn. She was very animated. She said some things that many people in the audience didn’t seem to know how to react to. It wasn’t calculatedly ‘edgy’ stuff, it was anecdotal, all the time referring back to the hateful idea that women aren’t supposed to say that kind of thing. It was fun to watch people try to decide whether or not it’s OK to say it. A big part of the routine was Kate putting on a bitch dress – as defined by the likes of Disney and Facebook. It hammered home the point in the way Kate always does.
It was a good gig. From my perspective better because it was small, gathered around the health-and-safety-violating electric heaters. Kate probably had an entirely different perspective because she presumably wasn’t paid as much as she should have been for a solid performance which she obviously and rightly enjoyed.
Kate is as smart and funny as any other comic I’ve seen and she’s not fucking about. Her anecdotes aren’t jokes, they’re descriptions of having fun and the hostile reactions people seem to have about, mostly, female sexuality.
All the stars, go and see Kate if you can. Andrea too.
A conservative judicial nominee is being criticized for making statements critical of fertility treatments and surrogacy. What she’s quoted as saying sounds mostly reasonable to me: commodification of gestation, that sort of thing. I’m troubled by the association with opposition to abortion; those are different issues. The argument is made (by some quoted in the article) that a judge who has personal disagreements with a plaintiff can’t judge fairly; I think that’s absurd.
Interesting; thank you. I see she opposed “a California statute that protects the right to assisted reproductive technology like in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and gestational surrogacy.” How can there be a right to gestational surrogacy? Maybe that’s just sloppy wording and the statute isn’t that bonkers, but if it is…it’s awful.
It’s the old problem of training bias in machine learning and the general impossibility of predicting problems or understanding the conclusions made by AI systems. AI isn’t going to kill us all by making terminators as people like Elon Musk (and even Stephen Hawking) have excitedly claimed but it has every chance of plunging us into a surveillance nightmare and crippling our financial systems. And not even necessarily because evil people are trying to do that; it’s even more likely that we’ll sleepwalk into it because we haven’t stopped to ask whether we should be using poorly-understood algorithms for this kind of stuff.
This article takes a very slightly more nuanced approach than the usual garbage-in-garbage-out take, asking whether these are algorithms that really deserve to be built, given the potential threat to little things like freedom, safety, ability to feed ourselves and so on.
This is a point that was really well articulated by Cindy Cohn at last year’s launch party for the EFF/McSweeney’s book on privacy. Cindy went on to point out that the Chinese state had overcome its problems with algorithmic bias in facial recognition for people of African descent by convincing an African nation to share its drivers’ license database with Chinese researchers, who used this as training data — which means that black people in China can be identified and rounded up just as well as Chinese people can. This is hardly a victory for human rights!
Well quite. We’re too often blinded by the obvious flaws in AI systems that we don’t stop to ask ourselves why we’re building them in the first place and whether we should.
The second wave of algorithmic accountability is well-summarized in The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence, an essay by Julia Powles (previously) and Helen Nissenbaum, who wrote, “Which systems really deserve to be built? Which problems most need to be tackled? Who is best placed to build them? And who decides?”
As I say when I give talks about this stuff, widespread CCTV coverage isn’t as big a problem as a lot of people think. It’s as creepy as hell and we should think very hard about where to deploy it, how to use it and why, but if it’s being used to monitor a vulnerable area or used after a crime to gather evidence, then it might be a reasonable trade-off. Where it gets seriously harmful is when you add in automatic face recognition and/or automatic licence plate recognition because it becomes so much easier for authorities to create a narrative that makes an individual they don’t like or anyone of unapproved sex or colour look guilty. Guilty of what? Well, it doesn’t matter. You can make up the crime to fit the ‘evidence’ all at the click of a mouse. It’s one thing to say that latsot was at the scene of a crime, quite another to look backward and forward across however many cameras it takes to make me look guilty.
In some areas of the US local police forces have a deal with Amazon that lets them access footage from those horrible ‘smart’ video doorbells, to keep the footage forever and to share it with (and sell it to) whomever they like for whatever purposes they see fit. Again, it’s one thing for a householder to volunteer footage from their camera, quite another for police to swoop in and take whatever they like.
The article mentions the case of an Indian credit scoring system which lowers the score of people who are politically active. How easy would it be for a government to deny credit or healthcare or insurance to undesirables, in perpetuity? The opportunities for abuse are unlimited.
Here’s a slightly less sinister case, but a good example of how we’re blithely allowing algorithms to take over functions they have no business taking over: Because Facebook is genuine proper cartoon-super-villain evil, some of its employees have a problem. Family members take them to task about their role in The Evil and ask awkward questions. There are two possible ways to deal with this situation, guess which one Facebook chose:
1. Stop being and doing evil.
2. Write an algorithm to provide workers with approved answers to awkward questions about why they are working for an evil corporation.
How can there be a right to gestational surrogacy?
Shit, yeah. We can hope that it means a right for women to be surrogates if they want to be rather than that people have a right to force women to have babies for them but…look in sheer, blank system error at the world we live in and tell me you’re not already half convinced it’s the latter.
Phrasing things as having a “right to sex” or a “right to surrogacy” is a claim to someone else’s body. Not the body of any specific person, but still, it is a claim to someone’s body. The right to ask? Sure, but that’s less snappy.
The odious Giliell took her kids to see Frozen 2. One of the songs is a duet, Show Yourself, by the character Elsa and an unseen female. Desperate to insert her wokeness into everything, Giliell interprets the scene:
If that ain’t a “coming out” song I don’t know what it is. She’s always been torn, and different and now she’s singing a duet with a female voice who holds the answer and who is supposed to show herself. I am not quite sure what she’s coming out as, but I think that “queer” definitely counts.
Queer? Hmmmm. Commentor M. Smith put it perfectly.
The other voice in “Show Yourself” is her mother, so unless you want to get really Freudian, I reckon it was more of a “the power was inside you all along” thing.
Latsot @171, that’s interesting (as always). I’m not guessing how Facepalm behaved. For one it’s too predictable to be a fun game and secondly it’s just depressing. They’re genuine proper cartoon-super-villain evil in that really unfunny kind of way.
And now a moment of wtf from a commenter in PZ’s latest post on trans anything:
Silentbob
… Although theoretically gay people would then have the same right to marry someone of the so-called opposite sex, that right obviously favours heterosexual people.
It is now canon on Pharyngula, a biologist’s blog, that there is no sex binary.
This stuff gets more and more difficult to parse every week. Perhaps I should identify as Theoretically Gay but I can’t work out whether that would favour heterosexual people or whether that’s good or bad
Oh and something I should have mentioned in my previous comment: the topic of PZ’s post is that there is to be no further dissent on his blog regarding trans theory. Not even an exaggeration.
An Indian woman alleges that she was gang raped by two men. She filed charges, and on the day of a court hearing, she was grabbed by five men – including the two accused rapists – and beaten, stabbed, doused in kerosene and set alight. She died.
Become Jesus Christ, the famous man on Earth – in this highly realistic simulation game. Pray like Him for getting superpower, perform famous miracles like Him from Bible like casting demons, healing and feeding people, resurrection and more in “I am Jesus Christ”.
Thank goodness it is realistic.
I know the game hasn’t been released yet but the sequel practically writes itself:
Famous Man 2: The Second Coming.
The cinematic trailer is going to be great. Personally, I’m picturing Jesus armed with a nail gun shooting an outline of silver nails around the pope who is supplicated in prayer against the Sistine Chapel door. Then Jesus pulls a vial of holy water from his utility belt of thorns, bites off the cork and throws it toward the pope. We see it spinning over and over…. and then fade to black. There’s a voiceover saying “Vengeance is mine sayeth The Lord” in that proper growly movie trailer voiceover voice. Then the credits come up and a satanic voice says “No, I cast you out, motherfucker.”
Trump’s judges continue to chip, chip, chip away at abortion rights. Lower courts are essentially ignoring existing precedent, and the Supreme Court won’t step in because the conservative justices are fine with it, and the liberal ones don’t want to force the issue and generate nationwide binding precedent.
According to Mother Jones, conservatives are “going after the kids” in regard to trans issues. Not protecting the rights of girls, not protecting kids from unnecessary and potentially devastating medical intervention. And it must be “conservatives”, because they are of course the only people who challenge gender ideology; indeed who even call it an ideology. What an infuriating article.
Here’s one of those stories where my reaction is (1) this shit should never have been happening; but (2) it’s good that it’s being fixed.
An atheist nurse in Canada was diagnosed with a substance abuse problem. In order to keep his job, he was required to follow his assigned doctor’s recommendations — which included Alcoholics Anonymous. The nurse offered to participate in secular alternatives, but was told that the union only allowed 12-step programs. He stopped going to AA (while using alternative treatments, apparently with success), was fired, and sued for human rights violations.
His case just settled, and part of the agreement is that his employer (the agency in charge of Vancouver-area hospitals and clinics) will no longer require participation in 12-step programs.
The linked article already has over 1,000 comments. I can just imagine. People get really, really angry online when you question AA.
Grumbling in public. I learned that what used to be the Montgomery Women’s March will henceforth be called the March For Our Rights. As some of the organizers are key activists for reproductive rights, I am reminded that a year or so ago the Lady Parts Justice League changed their name to Abortion Access Front. Women can’t have anything for themselves anymore.
Re the Montgomery Women’s March, the last one was January of this year, and the one for next year is in the planning stage under the new name. I don’t see anything public I can provide about the new name.
For those interested, here is Douglas Murray being interviewed by Kim Hill on RNZ. Full interview is about 47 minutes. I only caught the end my self, so have just started listening from the beginning. I’m not a Murray fan. Based on the little I’ve heard so far, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get to the odd kernel of truth. He does manage to cloud those kernels with an overlay of ‘your view bad, my view good’.
And if you want to hear Kim Hill reading listener feedback (often entertaining, especially if you’ve listened to the interviews), the link is below (from 6:00). There’s a good comment from shortly after 08:04 or thereabouts. The comments run through to about 10:30.
One of the inmates has been given a blog over at the asylum. One of the early posts makes what I consider a good point: harming people as a punishment is inhumane and needs to be binned yesterday, even for the worst of crimes such as murder.
I expressed my agreement, but also pointed out that this clashed with a comment made earlier on PZ’s space; the comment being an open endorsement of summary beatings for the fascists, i.e. the far right.
Apparently pointing out logical inconsistency is a bad thing, because I was immediately banned.
Also, disagreeing with a blog owner is a) belligerent and b) tactically foolish. The former is obvious – any pushback is bad in the eyes of a narcissist – but the latter is quite interesting. The reasoning was not stated outright, but was strongly implied: posting on someone’s blog is a tactical error because that person can simply hide or edit any disagreeing comment.
Pretty revelatory if you ask me.
Oh and as to the subject of my comment. Apparently, the points ‘harm as punishment is never justified’ and ‘summary beatings are can be justified’ don’t contradict at all! The reasoning ran as follows: those are two completely different things.
You missed the part where the blogger said it was self evident that anyone who disagrees must suffer from a traumatic brain injury. I didn’t, in my comment there. We’ll see if I get TERF’D out too.
“Oh and as to the subject of my comment. Apparently, the points ‘harm as punishment is never justified’ and ‘summary beatings are can be justified’ don’t contradict at all! The reasoning ran as follows: those are two completely different things.”
I guess you could consider the beating up of nazis as political violence with the goal of denying them access to public spaces rather than punishment.
I always thought it was sad when people declared that they personally had no use for religion, but intended to send their kids to church anyway because it was important for their children’s moral instruction. It seems like a failure of imagination to say that you can’t figure out how to teach morality to your kids without dragging in a god in whom you don’t even believe. So it’s encouraging to see that Millennials — the oldest of whom are raising kids of their own now — are less likely to return to church. (This is in addition to the fact that some of them were never raised religious to begin with.)
Hey, Holms, apparently I’m your BFF. How do I know this? Giliell says so on abbeycadabra’s blog:
I had a similar occurrence with his BFF latsot this week. I hadn’t noticed that he was still following me from back in the days before a certain ex blog on FTB went full out TERF.
He commented on something irrelevant to gender or trans issues and acted as if nothing ever happened I told him that I didn’t appreciate him acting all friendly in that instance when he was a massive transphobe and hung out with people who are more than assholes towards me and that I’d like him to unfollow me (which of course he did not do until I blocked him).
He became all huffy and puffy claiming he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be friendly and that maybe I was the asshole?
He seriously believed that his light and friendly tone in that interaction meant I was not allowed to take his history on trans issue or our personal history into account.
It’s using friendliness and being nice as weapons against others and i agree, I’d much rather be kind.
Hi bestie!!!!
What actually happened doesn’t closely resemble Giliell’s account but I won’t defend myself against nonsensical accusations.
Apart from the one where I’m accused of “weaponising friendliness”. What kind of tortured martyr bullshit complex does someone need to have to decide that a friendly person is an aggressor? Is it really so difficult for Giliell to accept that I was genuinely being friendly and didn’t realise that they pre-hated me so much that friendliness is violence? Seriously, Giliell, I haven’t spent more than three minutes of my life thinking about you. A lot less time than you spend thinking about yourself, obviously.
Hey man, we still on for that weekend thing? Quick note, you’ll have to remind me where you live, what nation/continent that is on, what your name is, details like that, normal BFF stuff.
Anyway, what I really appreciate about Giliell’s post is that she clearly articulates that in order to comment on her blog, you not only have to refrain from disagreeing with TRA theory on her blog, you also have to refrain from disagreeing with it *anywhere*, no matter what the conversation may actually be about. Thought purity is the rule there.
latsot, Holms, bearing in mind Abby’s statement regarding brain damage*, with the clear implication that such a malady negates any argument the sufferer might offer, you might enjoy this bit from PZ today, talking about Rush Limbaugh’s dismissal of Greta Thunberg
However, flatly declaring her ill to avoid addressing the problems she presents is not questioning her — if you want to criticize her, go ahead, discuss the evidence against global climate change.
I’m sure that Abby will be able to tell you that it’s different in this case because it’s…erm…different in this case.
*not that I’m saying Greta is brain damaged, of course. Hang on, what am I thinking? This isn’t FTB where the leapers to false conclusions and masters of bad-faith interpretations live. This is B&W, where the people understand context and nuance.
Is there a reason this site is using a certificate for “slowerthandirt.com”/”slowerthandirt.org” rather than its proper domain name? Seems kinda sketchy.
Like, for real, though. Getting a proper Let’s Encrypt cert is rather easy.
I was a long-time contributor at Affinity, I had some wonderful private emails with Caine. Although we never met, we shared quite a lot of both our struggles via email, and so her death hit me hard. I was pleased that the blog was to continue. I even felt an “affinity” developing with Carol (Voyager) and Gilliel.
Then, one day, I wrote one comment, on another blog. Giliel saw it and I was TERFed at once. No appeal, just pack your bags and go.
Even had it been done to another, and not to me, I would have been furious at Gilliel as one of Caine’s firmest rules was “If it was on another blog, it doesn’t get litigated here”. How quickly people change when you give them the keys to the palace.
I believe the downward slide began when Ed Brayton left, and I still follow him at Patheos. Mano and Marcus are the only two now worth reading, and even Marcus can be an ass hat when he comments elsewhere.
Wherein PZ pretends he doesn’t know why GC feminists refer to “biological sex”. He scoffs, saying “OF COURSE sex is biological, what else would it be?” while refusing to acknowledge that people refer to “biological sex” because so many people are conflating sex with gender or not as it suits them. We now need to qualify terms that were previously widely accepted because the waters are being muddied by people who claim they only want crystal clear waters, the very crystalist.
It’s amazingly childish, especially when he himself – a biologist – blurs the distinction between sex the descriptor of biological reality and sex the thing best done (as I’m certain all my partners past and present would agree) in the dark.
He says things like this:
I’m still trying to wrap my head around “biological sex”. Is non-biological sex what you get when you stuff a Hitachi magic wand into a Fleshlight? Biology doesn’t have much to do with that.
He goes on for a while in this vein.
And he explains his extraordinary take on Jo Swinson before writing condescendingly about binomial and binary distributions. It’s bullshit of the exact sort he’s been critical of for decades; presto-changeo shifts in definition and conflation of things that never ought to flate and an ending that I won’t spoil. You’re definitely going to want to see it for yourselves.
I won’t go on. Even though this is as rich a vein of bullshit as i’ve seen in the posts of any creationist, I’m not selfish; there is a lot to dissect in that post.
And yes, that PZ post, wow. I facepalmed too hard to read it fully, but in addition to the (probably) wilful equivocation between the meanings of ‘sex’, there is also the silly pretense that someone else is confused regarding bimodal/binary distribution.
Sex is bimodal if we define it as every unique permutation of sexed anatomy that has ever been discovered (you may think I am exaggerating, but I have had that exact definition thrown at me on… Intransitive’s blog, I think). On the other hand, it is binary if we look at it as a reproductive strategy inherent to our species. Which is what it is.
Increasingly, my impression is that they make headway with people that don’t know better by intentionally obscuring what is known and accepted through deliberate dishonesty.
PZ has completely lost the plot. His underpants are upon his head, pencils in his nose. Nothing about that post makes any sense at all. I’m struggling to find a fallacy he doesn’t employ in that one single post.
We’ve known for years that he’s prepared to throw people of integrity and integrity itself under any bus he can locate but this post is deranged beyond even that.
Plus, he’s lying. He’s just fucking lying. He knows why people have to say “biological sex” and he’s lying about what they mean about it.
So I was looking through a nearby community college’s spring course listing.
NEW! A Transgender Experience: A Comprehensive Discussion
Explore concepts that illuminate the complexities of gender identity. Topics in this newly expanded course include history, terminology, etiquette and policy advocacy. Through tales of personal experience, film depictions, lecture and discussion, the facilitator will debunk myths and provide information about the range of trans identities and experiences. Gain comfort talking about trans issues and explore how these issues are relevant to you in your communities. Leave class with new understanding and a list of resources.
One of FTB s new bloggers has already got the hypocrisy down pat.
As much as I try to recognize societally-embedded feelings of classism and ableism, there are also times where I have to wonder out loud or to my partner, “what the hell did you just say?”
So far, so woke. Alert to all the -isms. Alert to all the -ism’s, but apparently not understanding what they actually mean. That’s the only way I can imagine that a person thinks that criticizing the stupid things that others say can be classist or ableist, but can also – in the very same post, no less – casually drop this little beauty:
[…] sometimes I’d rather just watch a snow leopard spaz out over a branch […]
Fucking spaz out! Possibly the most offensive of all ableist terms, just casually tossed in there.
Mind you, the blogger has three posts up as of now, and to be honest the quality of writing is terrible. A sample sentence;
The amount of strollers from which these stares come from above…
It must be from the bottom of a barrel from where these new bloggers are being scraped from below. ;-)
I call it viewpoint reinforcement. Or perhaps viewpoint immersion. Get as many people on a platform as possible repeating the same dross, telling each other how wise and scholarly they are, and eject those with incompatible views. By doing so they convince themselves that they are the mainstream and that dissent is the fringe – a neat reversal.
So I was watching (and commenting on) Benjamin Boyce’s latest video, which was part of a discussion with Jane Clare Jones. The thing that I found frustrating is/was the seeming inability of Boyce and many commenters to understand the distinction between the “masculine” as idealized by binary, oppressive patriarchy and the masculine (as in the set of tendencies and traits naturally more prevalent to males). Even after JCJ said explicitly that it is important to distinguish between the masculine and the patriarchal masculine.
Why is this so difficult, I wonder. Is it simply a failure to adopt the principle of charity and take understanding as one’s primary goal rather than rhetorical victory?
Upon a quick reread, I see that I took his wording to be stronger than it really was. I wish he would come out and say it, rather than leaving it as an implied support of conviction.
I recently finished Why Truth Matters, and enjoyed it very much. It talks a lot about philosophy and philosophers.
The atheist movement, and then even more the gender-critical pushback against gender ideology, have led me to read many more books and articles on philosophy and by philosophers. I have come to appreciate the logic and precision, and, perhaps more important, to recognize that there is great disagreement among philosophers and lots of crap peddled under the banner.
It’s funny; twenty-year-old me deliberately avoided philosophy, even going so far as to change my mind about taking linguistics courses in college because they moved Linguistics from Foreign Language to Philosophy. My (somewhat estranged) brother is a philosophy PhD, and his wife an ABD and former lecturer in the subject, so I verbally respected the field without any real understanding of what was involved. I’m glad to have at least a little genuine appreciation now. Some of the best and clearest material on topics of concern to me comes from those trained in philosophy.
I see Stefan Molyneux is e-begging, claiming that people have to support him because what he’s said makes him unemployable. I struggle to find a shred of compassion or generosity for the asshole.
The misogyny? That can’t be it. The racism? Maybe. The white nationalist fascism? Again, maybe. I’d have to plump with him demonstrating himself to be an A Grade ignorant moron with a grotesquely overinflated ego, who also happens to be a racist misogynistic arse. I mean, who wouldn’t want to give him a highly paid, powerful position that get constant praise for no real work with a CV like that?
… The March For Our Rights 2020 Montgomery, Alabama (formerly known as The Women’s March) on Saturday, February 1, 2020 in historic downtown Montgomery.
The 2020 Alabama Legislative session begins on February 4th. Join us as we send a message to our elected officials that we will NOT allow them to take away our rights (again)! We dare defend our right to abortion care & access, affordable healthcare & Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and LGBTQ+ rights & protections. …
So, not about women’s rights anymore; rather about everybody’s rights. I understand the broad spectrum of rights curtailed by the Alabama legislature, but I think there is still value in a march about women’s rights.
There is, of course, the issue of rights conflict. The Alabama legislature has introduced a bill to require that student athletes at public schools compete according to sex, or, as it’s being phrased, “gender at birth”. This measure supports the rights of women and girls, but conflicts with the demands of trans activists. People on the pro-woman side of this and related issues will not be welcome at the march.
Virginia just passed the ERA, making it the 38th state to ratify the amendment. That puts it over the 3/4 threshold established in the Constitution, but there are still a couple of hurdles. First, Congress put a time limit on ratification, and the deadline passed long ago; second, five states have since rescinded their approval, meaning that, if those rescissions are valid, it’s still five states shy. The Constitution is silent on both issues, and the courts haven’t ruled, so this is probably going to the Supreme Court.
I see Stefan Molyneux is e-begging, claiming that people have to support him because what he’s said makes him unemployable. I struggle to find a shred of compassion or generosity for the asshole.
The misogyny? That can’t be it. The racism? Maybe. The white nationalist fascism? Again, maybe. I’d have to plump with him demonstrating himself to be an A Grade ignorant moron with a grotesquely overinflated ego, who also happens to be a racist misogynistic arse. I mean, who wouldn’t want to give him a highly paid, powerful position that get constant praise for no real work with a CV like that?
Well, whaddya know? For all of her pronunciations on all things vaginal, it turns out that G. Paltrow doesn’t know what a vagina is. It took the 90-year-old Betty Dobson to educate her.
[Dobson] lets Gwyneth speak about the holy of holies for a bit. Then she leans forward and tells her: “The vagina is the birth canal only. Ya wanna talk about the vulva – that’s the clitoris, the inner lips and all that good shit around it.” The high priestess of the pudenda is shook. “I thought the vagina was the whole thing?”
Which I suppose leads us to the all-important question; just which of her lady-bits do her candles really smell of?
Nina Paley had a great blog post about the Left eating itself, and people reducing everything to sound bites and refusing to read books. She references a controversy at Spinster I apparently missed, the condemnation of Sheila Jeffreys and Political Lesbianism.
Basketball legend Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash. He had been accused of rape some years ago, and his defense centered around consent; the case was settled without going to trial. Amid all the praising memorials were some writers reminding people of the rape case, including Felicia Sommez of the Washington Post. She was suspended for her troubles. It does appear that WaPo is getting some appropriate grief about the suspension.
Sackbutt, I read about this earlier today and was quite appalled. I understand people being discomforted at being reminded that a sporting hero had a questionable (at best) moment in his life. However, the job of journalists (and the right of anyone) is to remember the good and bad of any notable figure when they die. That’s part of putting the person into context. It seems possible that Sommez has been disciplined for the screenshot of her email inbox, but since all it did was to show examples of the abusive emails she has been receiving, I struggle to see the point. while senders full names are shown, email addresses are not.
Apparently it’s ok to abuse female reporters sometimes.
How to talk someone out of bigotry. To me, it reads very much like how to convert an atheist. There’s no consideration for the possibility that the other person is not exhibiting bigotry at all, maybe they have valid concerns, maybe they’re even right, maybe (gasp!) you’re wrong.
Did anyone else catch the Glinner post on Pharyngula? It was nothing special, just the usual sandbagging shitshow, but I found it nice that one of the worst commentators at least made a frank admission when responding to someone else:
TERF is a slur, a word employed to inspire threats of violence as well as actual violence
This is a bad thing how? It’s an insult, you aren’t supposed to like being called it. Much like “transphobic fuckhead waste of human genetic material, better suited for fertilizer than breathing” is an insult. Funnily enough, it describes the same group, too.
I wonder if he even realises that he conceded the point.
Oops, foolish me hitting post so soon. But I won’t fisk the whole thing; suffice to say the whole thing was a mess, a series of embarrassing admissions and outright lies The above was just the opening salvo.
And reversible? How – by definition – can blocking puberty be reversible?
But… why would it matter that it’s reversible anyway, since Sorrens maintains that ‘children young enough to believe in Santa Clause’ are to fully believed when they say they’re in the wrong body? If those kids are automatically right, why would reversibility matter?
You’re right, Holms, it’s a mass of self-contradicting lies.
The article actually shows the gist of the Vatican letter accurately. Along with some religious verbiage, the letter asserts the reality of biological sex, states that one cannot change one’s sex, and encourages parents to advise kids that there is nothing wrong with their bodies. From this, the article’s author somehow gets the idea that parents are to reject their children. One wonders if all other forms of disagreeing with children’s claims about themselves constitute rejection.
I dislike agreeing with the Catholic Church and the other religious organizations that signed the letter, but they are largely in the right here.
Seen on Twitter: a link to this 1941 Harper’s article discussing a macabre sort of parlour game — Who Goes Nazi? It’s not hard to recognize a young Donald Trump and even a Steven Miller type among the pseudonymous partygoers.
It’s probably a couple of years too late for a “Who Goes Trump” version — by now, we basically know what type of person is going to go Trumper.
I see the #SilentSham deal has been overturned and undone by the Judge. Says that Silent Sam always belonged to the UNC and there was no basis for the suit bought by NC SCV.
An example of sustained pressure and research by citizen activists, lawyers and the student newspaper paying off.
My wife is taking part in an event coming up at our library. A local human rights group is having a series of readings of works written by persecuted and imprisoned writers. She asked me to print out the piece she’s chosen to read. Call me melodramatic, but I found a little too much similarity between what is described in it and what I see reported here on B&W….Too many willing recruits ready to build the world described in the second half of this poem.
It provides essentially two things. One, public school student athletes must compete only on teams and activities designated for their sex or that are mixed-sex. Two, public school facilities and resources cannot be used for non-school events that violate the sense of item one.
I think the bill is poorly worded (for instance “biological gender” is an odd phrase), and I don’t see the point of item two. It’s also obvious that this is a “rile up the Republican electorate” bill like so many of the bills filed in Alabama. And it isn’t original; most of these things come out of one right-wing organization or another, and get filled in multiple states, and this looks like an earlier Tennessee bill.
Here is an article on the bill that I think captures the kind of rhetoric being used to oppose it and support it.
The headline talks about banning transgender athletes from teams, although the bill just directs that students be placed on teams by sex. An opponent is quoted as saying the bill “targets transgender and gender non-conforming youth”, although there is no language in the bill about gender-nonconforming people. Also the claim is made that there are very few trans athletes and none at an elite level, which is both false and misleading.
A proponent of the bill referred to people “born and raised with the benefit of testosterone in their system”; this obviously is talking about trans-identified males, and the name of the bill (GIRL Act) clearly shows the main purpose is keeping girls’ teams single-sex, but the bill text is about both sexes. The testosterone issue I think is simplistic, but there might have been other context.
As you might imagine, local civil rights groups are very much up in arms about this, and are making many inaccurate or misleading claims like the ones mentioned above.
Following up, here is an excellent letter from a woman supporting the Alabama bill (that says students should compete on teams according to sex). The woman was at one of the hearings, and had prepared remarks, but needed to discuss some of the proceedings with her daughter (a student athlete and also in attendance), and thus missed her opportunity. Her prepared remarks, her description of the hearing, and her amplification of the issue are all quite well done.
So the local college has purchased a new system to track housing applicants and in the configuration/customization phases have proposed many terms applicants can self select for sex/gender, but have seen fit to exclude the terms “male” or “female”.
Living in the dorms is a requirement for freshmen at this college and this system will be used to match applicants to roommates. Also, this college is struggling with dropping enrollment.
I thought you had someone for the techy stuff, Googling suggests it could be as simple as insertion of some PHP code, depending on what level of WP you are using.
1. The concept of gender is being wrongly discussed and defined which has confused millions of people
2. Telling children and adults that they are born in the wrong body is abusive and biologically impossible
3. You can’t challenge the gender role binary by upholding the gender role binary
4. Biological sex is real, important and remains a protected characteristic in law
5. Gender ideology has some repressive and homophobic ideas within it
6. Issues around gender present serious dilemmas for safeguarding
7. Gender ideology, like any other ideology, does not have to be accepted or supported by anyone else
About the author:
Psychologist specialising in victim blaming and self blame following sexual violence. International independent specialist researcher and writer for http://www.victimfocus.org.uk – Founder of VictimFocus, The VictimFocus Charter and VictimFocus Academy. Founder and Chair of The Eaton Foundation, the first male mental health centre in the UK. Known to some as ‘that woman with the fringe who talks about victim blaming and feminism all the damn time’.
Just came across a Zuby update. Apparently he’s been suspended from Twitter. Someone by the Twitter handle of Pronoun Enforcer responded to his “Don’t be annoying” tweet by saying:
“I’m like 95% sure i’m sleeping with more women than you and this is terrible advice.”
Zuby’s response to this (which was apparently what got him into trouble with Twitter) was “OK dude…”
And yet, a couple of questions later, it just flat-out asks “What is your gender?” Maybe it’s just assumed that gender is based on identity. But then it lists as an option “transgender,” which I didn’t think was a gender category?
I must admit, I am tempted to put down “two-spirit,” as I am fond of both gin and whisky.
Saw a poster in a local bookstore advertising an International Women’s Day march. Looks like it’s being organized by an inclusive, intersectional Women’s Events Committee. The graphic at the top of the poster has a drawing of three people wearing sweat-shirts. One shirt shows the circle/slash NO symbol over TERFS + SWERFS; another declares that “Sex work is real work” (this one has some cute little hearts to lighten the mood). The third shirt says “Forget Ford! #not a leader”(refering to Ontario Premier Doug Ford). So nothing in the graphic specifically FOR WOMEN. It’s the invasion of the umbrella women!
So the poster is immediately disinviting GC feminists and anti-prostitution feminists in favour of men who think they’re women.
Ya see, I think this attitude is a prime symptom of the problems with our political discourse. The thinking that gets us here is very tribal and, in the Durkheimian sense, religious. In that respect, such cognition should be avoided. Treating someone who thinks ddifferently ad not merely mistaken but instead as morally bankrupt is what gets us our polarized society.
Yeah Nulius, I know what you mean, but honestly Morgan is a loathsome individual. If it makes you feel better I have close friends who vote for the National Party, which I do not. I just don’t feel the need to like agreeing with misogynist, racist entitled wanna be parts who think they’re better than everyone else.
Well that fits in nicely with the Pope cancelling his balcony-waving sessions to stop people gathering and spreading the virus. You’d think God could provide disease control at his own events.
You might know her as the producer of the animated version of Tim Minchin’s Storm (always worth another watch: https://youtu.be/HhGuXCuDb1U)
She also writes columns all over the place. I’ve known her since TAM London, which she organised and produced, back in the days when the Skeptic movement still had a veneer of respectability.
Blurb:
King’s memoir begins with the murder of her father when she was 12, and details family life in the 1980s estate where they lived, addressing issues such as alcoholism, truancy, agoraphobia and the chaos of the aftermath of loss. It is also about “imaginative freedom, and the liberating power of a scientific view of the world” the publisher said.
Wadeson said: “Learning to Think is not only an extraordinary story, it is a remarkable, visceral piece of writing. Tracy has an astonishingly powerful voice and the material resonates in so many ways. This is a book about fear, superstition and faith, about what comes with poverty and trauma, but also about how we find happiness, the importance of science, and ultimately about learning to think for oneself. It is mesmerising, shocking, brilliant.”
Nothing good I’m guessing. As Ken white and many others involved in the ‘justice’ system have pointed out, this is also a terrifying prospect for anyone in a prison (both inmates and staff). In case anyone says that serves prisoners right, worth remembering that if you’re poor (and especially black), you can spend months or years in prison in the US while awaiting trial. It’s just shit all around.
I think our local health unit has made a rather big mistake, and it’s all around one word. They’ve opened what they’re calling a COVID-19 Assessment Centre at a local arena. What do you think would be happening at such a facility? If you answered “testing for COVID-19,” you’d be wrong. On the website the health unit is saying
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT THERE WILL BE NO TESTING DONE AT THE LONDON COVID-19 ASSESSMENT CENTRE
“Assessment Centres are out-of-hospital clinics where people can be seen by a healthcare provider for COVID-19 related concerns, rather than have them visit an Emergency Department, Urgent Care Centre or their family doctor’s office.”
They should have called them INFORMATION Centres. How many people who are aware of the existence of these centres, but not their actual mandate, are going to show up assuming assessment=testing? Unless they are diligent in enforcing proper spacing between those lined up to be seen, these are just going to turn into places where people will congregate and share the virus.
Hmm. I suppose the idea is to add a level of triage, so as to reduce the strain on facilities at the next levels. “Information” wouldn’t quite be right, because people would think it’s just pamphlets & stuff that you can get online.
Also if it’s in a big space it probably thins out the contagion. I’ve been pondering this issue of needing medical help but fearing contagion at the place where the help is. Clever London.
There are now more than 1,000 cases in Canada. My city of London has declared a state of emergency. The number of confirmed cases here jumped by 6 overnight, for a total of ten active. Given that official figures always lag actual numbers of cases, we can expect more. The local health unit is no longer going to issue a media release for each new case, but provide a daily summary. The store where I work has now closed until further notice. I’m hoping that things were shut down here soon enough to avoid the worst of it. Time will tell.
In the meantime we’re safe at home, with enough food for a couple of weeks at least, if things get really bad and grocery stores are closed. I’ve got stuff I can do for work to keep earning money while the store is closed. My camera store is going to be launching a blog in the near future, and my boss likes the way I write, so he’s looking at me to help supply content. Others in my company have been laid off, so I’m lucky. I’m glad not to be going into the mall; I was getting nervous that I was entering a “hot zone” every morning. Maybe overdramatizing, but with the lag between “confirmed” cases and the real numbers of individuals actually already infected, I think a little paranoia wasn’t completely unjustified…
Very strange. Just a matter of waiting things out and seeing what happens.
Some Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) nurses are refusing to conduct Covid-19 swabs because they haven’t been provided with N-95 masks. They’ve been told that surgical masks are protection enough.
So, NZ has just ordered entertainment and hospitality businesses closed with immediate effect. Everyone to go into lockdown from Wednesday for minimum period of 4 weeks. Supermarkets, petrol stations, medical centres, logistics companies and lifeline utilities only businesses that are allowed to remain open. We have maybe 2-4 weeks of work that can be done from home, then we start making some unpalatable choices.
We have 102 cases spread all over the country. So far all but 2 are travellers or immediate family of travellers, but the other two appear to be community spread with no known link to a traveller. This is our last ditch attempt to nip the spread in the bud.
An update on the Christchurch massacre from March last year. The shooter has just plead guilty to 52 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of committing a terrorist attack. His sentencing will be scheduled for sometime after the current Covid19 lockdown has been lifted so that victims and their families have the ability to attend and be with each other.
Of those talking heads who spent nearly four years saying we should believe women and railing against Trump’s talking about grabbing ’em by the pussy without waiting, what percentage do you bet will turn hypocrite to smear Reade and defend Biden for actually doing it? (If the story even gets any prime air time. A quick google search shows no hits on the big three news networks.)
I see a great many jokes being made about a “baby boom” during the year following this pandemic self-isolation period. I get it, lots of people are bored and have private time, and so have sex. And yes, there probably will be a “baby boom” from this. That’s troubling. I don’t imagine most couples are saying, “I’m bored, so let’s commit to make a drastic change to the course of our lives, agree to a minimum quarter million dollar expenditure in uncertain economic times, and plan to be responsible for another human being for decades.” Contraception is widely available, as is emergency contraception. Abortion is less available, but still an option. It is disturbing that the automatic assumption of the result of “stress sex” or “boredom sex” is babies. I wish childbirth as the result of deliberate decision were more common than it seems to be.
Btw, Kathleen Stock has just announced she’s no longer speaking at feminist events, and it sounds as if she’s just bowing out of movement feminism altogether (including GC.) Had time to think while recovering from The Virus. She’s sick of the pressure.
Reminds me of the exodus of people from movement Atheism. In that instance, it was due to the discovery of a strong streak of racism and sexism within the movement. In feminism, it is becoming apparent that there is a strong streak of sexism yet again.
A positive thought: I had to go out to get groceries today (booze counts as groceries right?) and many of the people out were walking their dogs. The dogs seemed so happy, as they always do. The dogs are doing great right now. They’re getting lots of walks, having lots of time at home with their people. I’m happy for the dogs. And the cats too.
We’ve been advised not to let dogs or cats outside our ‘bubble’, because there is apparently some evidence that they can be a vector for the virus. Maybe that’s just an abundance of caution. In any case, out for a walk today my other and I were accosted by a strikingly looking young cat that desperately wanted some love and attention. It was very vocal and kept running between our legs and walking practically on our feet until we stopped. At that point it practically rubbed its fur off on our shins. It took all the will in the world not to tuck it under my arm and keep walking.
As an aside, I believe NZ has now done over 2,200 tests per million of population. Not a huge actual number I know, but we’ll in excess of the 313 per million Vox reported for the US. People are saying we’re not doing enough testing. I guess it just reaches a point where the authorities don’t care about cases anymore, they care about ventilators. Or not. Some politicians don’t seem to care about anything except money.
Ok, thought I’d post something I came across on a website which is responding angrily to an Idaho bill restricting women and girl’s sports to women and girls:
Why isn’t there legislation to keep the “female sex” out of male athletic teams? Why do I suspect it’s because these Republicans don’t have sexual fantasies about male athletes the same way they sexualize girls?
I haven’t read the details of the Idaho bill, but an Alabama bill did specify that athletes, male or female, are to compete on teams according to sex. I think the need for restrictions is almost entirely on the part of women’s sports, so it would be reasonable to have a one-sided bill, but the small number I’ve looked at are not one-sided.
Meanwhile, a dispatch from the Everyday Sexism department:
My beloved (and indefinitely dark) event venue, which as a nonprofit arts institution is helmed by a board of directors, has received a spike in charitable donations in the wake of COVID.
A board member introduced an emergency motion to put those donations into a fund to support the out-of-work staff, some of whom are struggling really badly right now.
The whole plan was apparently well-thought-out, with funds ready to go right away. Good stuff all around. Seven of the ten board members approved; the motion passed easily. Good good.
Here’s the ridiculous part: all seven of the fors were women and all three of the againsts were men. The men did NOT like the decision, so they decided there’s no way in hell the women’s votes really count, and they were just straight-up refusing to honour it! This is scandalous behaviour and there’s no way in hell such a vote would EVER have been disgregarded like that if it weren’t for the (perhaps subconscious, but nevertheless there) sex bias.
Our regular Board President, a woman, is on leave right now and her interim stand-in prez is a man. This is the mess that ensues in her absence…
(Today she had to come back from leave to clean shit up. Needless to say, upon her return, the motion is now accepted and funds are already being prepped for distribution. Happy ending, phew!)
I’m impressed at the detail and the many supporting references. I am also surprised that this is the first bill I’ve seen that specifically restricts males from participating in teams for females, but not the other way around. Given the references and arguments, I think they’ve built a good case.
But of course no one is going to look at the arguments, because they don’t matter, it’s just transphobia, don’tcha know.
Are ALL transwomen/transactivists insane, or is this something special? I’m interested in a second 3rd, 4th, whatever) opinion on a thread I’m in.
Background: I’ve known “Foxglove” a TIM for at least several years, starting in Pharyngula and now on to Hemant Mehta’s place at Friendly Atheist. She was eloquent and funny, and we liked each other. A few months ago she discovered I was GC on one of the many threads involving transgenderism. My comments weren’t particularly many, and I tried to keep in mind it was a blog, not a chat room. She’s become increasingly irate and nasty, and when I privately came to the conclusion she’s a malignant narcissist, I just started Gray Rocking her (short, dull responses to disengage.)
She disappeared for a while and — well. If anyone has time/interest/inclination could you roll your eyes down this and give your opinion?. I know, it’s partly ideology, partly character — but is this unhinged?
It’s not in order written, but starts here ( be sure not to miss the 11 part Essay) :
Preliminary thoughts – hell yes that’s unhinged. Settling down to write a book on someone else’s blog is unhinged all by itself, even if the content is not Narcissistic Injury Explosion. But it is, so that’s two ways it’s unhinged.
So I thought. The last thing she wrote was how I “ crossed a huge, big line that people absolutely should not cross: you advocated violence against transgender women–i.e., against me.” I’ve no idea, unless it’s more guff about how not accepting trans ideology eventually leads to dehumanization and murder. Of course, not being human myself, I might have magic powers.
Foxglove is a piece of work. If I hadn’t decided a while back to avoid the bizarre drama s/he seemed to be creating from nothing, it’s mandatory now. I think my lack of response has driven her mad.
Plus, I still get *likes* and nobody’s crying to Hemant to remove me for my nonstop hatred. It’s unbearable.
Cardinal Pell freed by the Australian High Court. Apparently they believe the witness was credible, but doubt other aspects of the evidence presented. Make of that what you will…
I’d be curious to know how often the Austrialian High Court overturns a case, not on an issue of law or constitutional principle, but on the sufficiency of the facts.
Sastra, I just skimmed that thread – too long for a working day. That was both unbelieveable and unsurprising. I know that seems contradictory, but as long as you view the statement with two slightly different mindsets, not so.
Sorry you’ve been targeted like that. It strikes me that you have always been at pains to be a careful and honest commentator on trans issues. It seems you’ve failed the purity test though. Notably, no one was able to give an even remotely coherent answer to your simple and appropriate question though.
Sastra, that “you advocated violence” thing – been there. One of the Pharyngula loonies announced that I had blood on my hands – because of my opinions.
Thanks Ophelia, Rob. It’s good to have a reality check.
When you left FTB, I’d been offline for a while and couldn’t figure out what the problem had been. I was also unaware of how trans ideology had morphed into the idea that science had done away with the two sexes by introducing a science-based gender identity — and that failure to agree was a form of murder. I guess I assumed something must have happened behind the scenes among the BlogRoyalty, and surely it was all a Big Misunderstanding.
There’s no way I could get through all of that, but for what it’s worth, I copied and pasted the whole thing into a word counter so that I could at least get some meta-knowledge. It came out over a whopping 11,000 words. Reading time from start to finish would be over 40 minutes.
The word “attack” and its variants appears 37 times. “Violence” appears 19 times. The word “reality” appears 28 times and “real” an additional 43 times. “Woman” and “women” appear a combined 100 times. Oddly, for an atheist website, the word “soul” appears nine times. “Hate” appears 14 times. “Bigot” and its variants (bigots, bigotry) appear 18 times. And of course there’s that one paragraph that consists almost entirely of just the word “argue” repeated 59 times in a row!
Real, reality, woman, soul, violence, attack, argue, hate, bigot. That really paints the picture, doesn’t it. You don’t think I’m a “real” woman and I perceive it as a narcissistic injury — a delusion of personal violent attack that will cause me to go off the rails and accuse you of bigotry and hatred.
Naturally, although the word “gender” got 123 nods, “sex” only got six. And even though “woman” and “women” counted 100 mentions, “female” only appeared twice. I wonder why that is.
The author threw the word “fact” around a lot — 36 times, in fact — and yet the word “science” never came up. Not even once. Go figure.
Oh man, Sastra, the replies to you over there are universally weak! “You’re just wrong, period.” “You really hate trans people, don’t you.” And then the whole thread moves on to attacking their opponents as mindless “sheep.” Without so much as a flinch of self-awareness.
Props to you for keeping your cool and remaining so courteous and composed. I would absolutely lose my shit. I almost lost my shit on your behalf just reading that vacuous nothingness.
That’s the problem when a supposedly progressive website prioritizes being “friendly” over the hard work of critical thinking (it’s right there in the blog title): when you turn your brain off and just feel the good vibes, maaaan, it’s very easy to be misled by bad actors. That’s why all those hippie-granola California/Portlandia types keep getting sucked into cults and persuaded by superficial arguments like anti-vax which feel “nice” on the surface but are deeply unscientific and irrational upon critical inspection. There’s nothing rational about prioritizing “friendly” at all costs. It’s actually kinda cowardly, and kinda narcissistic.
I think the word “friendly” in the blog title doesn’t really set the tone or describe the blog. It’s Hemant’s moniker, and he himself is genial. I would not, however, say that the regulars as a whole prize being “friendly at all costs.” It can be a bit like Pharyngula in there. Though Foxglove, thank goodness, is an extreme.
I started reading it regularly when I followed Ed Brayton to Patheos. I’ve known him for 25 years, starting out on IRC together. The religious debate rooms there taught me patience, dealing with fundamentalists for over a decade.
I got into atheism I guess around 10 years ago or so? I started out reading B&W I think about a year or so before FTB was formed, whenever that was.
Personally I was never a fan of Hemant tbh. I never found him particularly intellectually interesting. Sort of like a Sam Harris but who blogs. Popular, yes, but not, you know, especially brilliant. And recently I came across him again over his total batshit cultishness w/r/t trans. Which I think is quite shockingly unthinking for someone who purports to promote critical thinking for a living. He argued that alarm bells regarding pediatric transition were just evil right-wing scaremongering. I told him he was being disingenuous; I said there are plenty of scientists and people on the left who have publicly aired concerns about transing kids; he censored me for it. Freethought my ass.
I lost count of the number of ways Foxglove’s essay is dishonest about halfway through the first installment. That dishonesty is either unconscious, which makes it unhinged from reason or deliberate, which makes the personal attacks on you even more unhinged.
This passage jumped out at me (it wasn’t alone):
Which is precisely the reason that you make this argument. It certainly makes it easier to win an argument when you get to define your opponent’s position.
Says Foxglove, defining their opponent’s position and declaring victory.
Thanks again for appreciated feedback, latsot and Artymorty.
@Arty; I’m not sure you would have been arguing with Hemant himself. There are several co-bloggers on FA, and it’s usually Beth or Val that posts on transgender issues. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Hemant do so. He may of course be in total agreement with them, or may not. The fact that you were censored for making a reasonable point, however — which I take to mean kicked off and banned — counts in favor of it.
Besides, don’t want to deny your personal experience. ;)
I knew when I began commenting on the issue that I stood a good chance of being banned. That’s one reason I was always very, very careful to say nothing which could be held up as an attack ( the other reason being that I don’t do that as a matter of principle.) If Hemant — who I met at a his very first convention — decides to expel me, so be it. But I’d be chagrined if he did so at the behest of a poisonous piece of work like Foxglove.
Hemant has written some of the posts about transgender issues, but I agree that most are written by co-bloggers.
I used to participate in the now-defunct forum on Friendly Atheist back when I was starting to learn about movement atheism; eventually I became a moderator. It’s just as well the forum got canned; Hemant was not a presence there, so it wasn’t really connected to the blog. I think the forum format is somewhat easier for substantive conversations, but only for those who are actually motivated to have such conversations.
Hemant got a lot of guff about his moniker, often from religious people who thought he (or other forum participants) should be more “friendly” (that is, uncritical). It’s an inherent problem in names, I suppose.
The forum died before trans issues came to the fore. I shudder to think what it would have been like there with trans arguments in the mix; my tenure would have been short, by my choice or theirs.
Wow, that’s not just an essay, it’s a rant. And it starts off by affirming the gender critical position, though Foxglove did not notice:
We’ll start here—by considering the separate cases of Cisgender Joe and Transgender Jane. When they were born, they both got an “M” on their birth cert. Now Joe has always been fine with that. He’s always lived his life as an “M”, he’s always been comfortable with that little label, and he’s never had anything to complain about in that aspect of his life. He’s always got on fine.
Jane, however, from a very early age, felt that something was askew. She simply didn’t match the expectations that everyone around her held for her. She grew up in circles where she met with no understanding or support, so that as she moved on into her teens, her discomfort blossomed into a crisis. Then she began to meet others like her, especially online, and she began to understand—to understand what was going on inside her, to understand what she was. Eventually, she gained the courage to take the plunge: she began living authentically, living as the “Jane” she’d always been.
Right at the outset, we see that the identity crisis arises as a result of friction with societal expectations placed on a person for their sex. The solution being, attack the notion that we should expect people to have personalities within a certain range for each sex, and the friction – and resulting gender flip – goes away.
As is commonly the case, scratch a TRA to discover a hidden gender critic.
Secondly, I’ll tell you honestly that I think before long I’m going to finally get so fed up with you that I will go to Hemant and ask him to ban you. I’m tired of coming to a place that should be a friendly place and encountering someone like you who thinks they have the right to attack my character and motivations any time they want to.
Meanwhile, how many times did Foxglove make a statement about your state of mind / intent? Crikeys.
Yes, I noticed that, too — in that post, and others. But since I’ve been gray-rocking Foxglove, I don’t directly quote anything he says. All this sturm and drang about my “attacks” on him have therefore mostly been extrapolated from what I’ve said to others, and from what the Sastra-in-his-head has said to his paranoia imagination. A state of affairs encouraged and fostered by an ideology which equates disagreement on dubious factual claims with a taste for genocide and inflicting gratuitous pain.
And thanks for the feedback. Reading the Contra Sastrum is like gaping at a nasty car wreck. How sad — but look, the steering wheel is in the tree!
When you left FTB, I’d been offline for a while and couldn’t figure out what the problem had been. I was also unaware of how trans ideology had morphed into the idea that science had done away with the two sexes by introducing a science-based gender identity — and that failure to agree was a form of murder. I guess I assumed something must have happened behind the scenes among the BlogRoyalty, and surely it was all a Big Misunderstanding.
It took me way too long to believe what was happening, myself. Nothing happened behind the scenes that wasn’t identical to what was happening in front. They wanted to keep some of it secret but by then I wasn’t complying. Behind the scenes I was saying wait, this can’t work, we can’t have half the bloggers writing long venomous posts attacking one of the bloggers and expect that blogger to stick around so wtf? But Ed was adamant that no we were not going to have any rules about not writing long venomous posts attacking one of the bloggers, and he was staying out of it and didn’t care and fuck you. It surprised me. So much about that whole thing surprised me.
But Ed was adamant that no we were not going to have any rules about not writing long venomous posts attacking one of the bloggers, and he was staying out of it and didn’t care and fuck you. It surprised me. So much about that whole thing surprised me.
This surprises me less. It’s not that Ed isn’t a kind and compassionate person, but that, like me, his general approach to controversy was likely influenced by IRC debate rooms. Back then,in the 90’s, there was a kind of Wild West attitude towards monitoring what was acceptable. Invective and insult were fine as long as the speaker was also in some way making, or trying to make, a rational argument. That, rather than civility, was the key. Otherwise, the IRC debate rooms would have emptied out. Civility was a strategy. So was resilience.
You learned to take it or ignore it: it made you stronger. Focus on topic. Keep it moving.
I know it influenced me, because I was an OP or AOP (chatroom moniter) and that was my attitude. I kicked and banned only trolls, spammers, or the most egregious cases. I probably would have sided with Ed. I don’t think I would now, but considering the matter, it’s how I’m approaching Foxglove’s diatribes. I have no desire to have any authorities stop or prevent these attacks. It would admittedly be nice if any of the other commenters at least argued for some mitigation or restraint,, but it’s not necessary and doesn’t matter. I suck it up, blow it off, move on, and focus on topic. That’s what I learned from the same forum which taught me patience and courtesy.
Interesting. I used to lean somewhat more that way than I do now. When Jeremy washed his hands of B&W it caused me to rethink a little, and I’ve moved some in the direction of discouraging too much rudeness and the like here. I think PZ’s blowhards also gave me a sharper push in that direction.
Then again Trump has pushed me back in the other direction, at least when I’m talking about him.
To put it another way, or amplify…the trouble with the suck it up and build resilience approach is that the result is a shouty unpleasant environment – it’s Pharyngula. Even while I was at FTB I seldom read PZ’s posts because I hated the way the “horde” carried on. It can seem bracing at first, it did to me at first, but over time it gets more and more oppressive.
Agree. One difference between the IRC and Internet blogs, however, is that the latter have a given topic to discuss, and the former has more real time tutoring on effectiveness. What I mean by that is that debate rooms cannot afford to cut off rude debate without risking cutting off debate altogether. It was always open topic (attempts to do it otherwise fizzled out.) People were coming in and leaving constantly in rooms called #atheism or #ChristianDebate. A snarly argument on free will or the Problem of Evil was preferable to a intense discussion of computers or Ginger vs. Mary Ann because there was a general theme to adhere to. Otherwise, there was no reason to /join #atheism or ChristianDebate.
The learning curve involved regulars eventually discovering that courtesy worked better than insults if you wanted a good discussion or a good reputation as debator. Unless you were very clever and amusing, you best strive towards dignity and respect or you’d look like a newcomer … or a kid. Instead of a horde of commenters endlessly egging on towards the lowest common denominator, there tended to be a drift in the opposite direction. We all watched and learned. We knew who was worth paying attention to. So did the debaters and people on the other side.
At least during the glory days of IRC. Which kept shifting to include “ when I first came in,” but eventually moved far enough back that a lot of major players drifted off. Including me. Not because it got too mean-spirited (though that may have been part of it) but because it became too trivial. On #atheism, a split between the atheists who wanted theists to come in and debate and those who wanted a godless sanctuary eventually resolved in favor of the latter. Eventually killed debate period. I had no interest in wasting time on Ginger vs. Mary Ann. Again.
On #atheism, a split between the atheists who wanted theists to come in and debate and those who wanted a godless sanctuary eventually resolved in favor of the latter. Eventually killed debate period.
At least by the time I was active there, Pharyngula was squarely in the latter camp. It was a clubhouse for outspoken atheists (or at least, for atheists who wanted a place to be outspoken, even if they were quiet about it offline). Which is fine, I liked that about it! At a certain point I think you have to be a bit of a masochist to want to have your 53rd debate with a Christian about free will and the problem of evil, or dissecting all the ways the First Cause argument is wrong. Of course, while I don’t shy away from arguments when I come across them, I’ve never been into “debate as sport” — I never joined any school debate teams, and whenever I hear former debate nerds talk about the tactics that win in competitive debate I just feel further vindicated in that decision. Similarly, I was around for the early days of usenet (I still post in one forum), but never hung around the “hot debate” places.
And sometimes you just want to hang out with like-minded people. It doesn’t have to devolve into what you call Ginger vs. MaryAnn discussions, or endless rounds of patting each other on the back for being right. Sometimes you just want to discuss “second-level issues,” like “how do we reduce the influence of religion in society” without having to debate the underlying premise (that we SHOULD reduce the influence of religion) yet again. The discussions about accomodationism, for example, probably dragged on a little too long, but they were useful discussions, and you can’t have those if every thread is being diverted by believers demanding that you debate the underlying premise. Similarly, I’m happy to discuss politics, but I just have no desire to hang out on some hypothetical “friendly to both sides” politics forum and have endless rounds of “is Trump a good president” with even the most polite and articulate Trump supporters you could dig up.
Yes, I can see that. It’s partly a matter of taste, and partly a matter of circumstance. I once wrote “105 Questions for Atheists” (the number kept going up) as a discussion resource for the dal.net #atheism page. It might even still be there. When conversation lagged, we’d link and pick.
A high traffic chat room, though, is somewhat different than a high traffic blog. And my recollection of the problems and benefits might well be flawed. Probably are, in fact. But I was trying to figure out why Ed Brayton, one of the nicest people I never met, wasn’t sensitive to an increasingly difficult situation.
I could ask him, but his health has gone to shit right now, and so I won’t. I think he’s to the point he’s tapping the keyboard with his teeth or something. Not good.
I remember Chris Clarke being a breath of fresh air over there, partly because of the new content he added but mostly for the way he could make biting criticism while remaining collected. I had hoped he would help improve the atmosphere, but instead he was driven away by the toxicity. Toxicity that had been gleefully embraced by PZ over the years, with his frequent encouragement for his comment threads to ‘savage’ any interloper who dared think different. Granted, a fair number of those sorts were obviously nasty themselves, but still.
I distantly recall PZ having a change of attitude towards the venom he had curated, but his efforts to curtail it were both ineffectual and brief. But now, PZ’s threads are dominated by his horrifying trolls because he designed them that way. TRAs took to that place like wasps to old food.
Sadly, they are spreading even to the more reasonable spaces there.
Yeah, PZ has frequently lamented the tone of his comments section over the years, but that always rang hollow. (And I thought that even when I was a regular participant there.) I won’t claim that bloggers have perfect control over their comments section, but they do have a fair degree of it. Especially when it comes to tone and manners — you can’t make dumb commenters insightful and eloquent, but you can force rude ones to knock it off.
I suppose PZ might have been crying crocodile tears all those times, but I actually suspect that he did sometimes sincerely regret what the Horde had become, but didn’t have the energy for the job it would have taken to clean things up. From time to time, he instituted some rules or guidelines (like the “give a new commenter three comments before attacking them as a troll”), but enforcement was half-hearted at best and they never lasted. And of course, as you note, he also seemed to embrace the aggressive nature of the Horde a lot, too. So certainly some mixed messaging.
Yes, when it came to enforcing his attempted rules, I noted that he gave the regulars very wide leeway – rendering the entire attempt useless, as it was the regulars that were responsible for the heavy majority of the vitriol. Couple this with the tendency for newcomers to just leave rather than engage in the comment report system he enacted – and that fact that the system was mediated by some of the very people that needed curtailing – and you have a completely toothless system. Drive by trolls were crushed rapidly, but the horde shambled on.
Meanwhile, in #356 I ended with “they [the horribles] are spreading to the more reasonable spaces” with a particular thread in mind, and that thread has reached its peak:
Not just “no,” but with that ominous now-I-know-what-you-are-too comment at Mano. Well, it would be ominous if I thought that PS was anything but a garden variety Internet Tough Person.
Relatedly, and I realize I will probably regret asking this, but anyone know why Crip Dyke puts an asterisk beside every use of the word “trans”? I was looking for some explanatory footnote in the comment but there wasn’t one, so I assume this is some regular usage of CD’s.
By the way, I love the attempt to use “you were banned at Pharyngula” like it’s some shocking condemnation of a person. I’m not saying it’s a badge of honor or that people should seek it out like the ‘pitters did (still do? Eh, don’t care any more), but the days when it was difficult to get banned there are long gone. Which is fine! Strict moderation policies are often good! But “banned from Pharyngula” is about as damning as “too smutty for the Christian Broadcasting Network.”
Yes, well that particular individual is notable even amongst the Horde for being absolutely batshit insane (in the colloquial sense at least) with an extreme anger management issue. Mano is altogether too soft-hearted. I suspect in the future he will be less tolerant and sadly that means that someone he ends up banning will actually be less obnoxious than PS.
So that particular individual is not simply shown the door because…?
Rhetorical question; I’m not assuming you know. But honestly – people accused of being “TERFs” have the door broken over their heads while the loon literally calling for death to enemies continues to do so. What an absolute shower.
Yes, I seem to recall him somewhere saying that of course he wasn’t going to do any of the nazi/terf murdering, he was just going call for others to do it. Better I suppose than being an actual murderer… yay?
And my assumption, which I have not bothered to confirm, is that the asterisks are a wildcard, so that trans* covers both trans women and men.
.
#363 Sastra
Yes, and not banned. That’s a signal that the commentariat there has gone to the dogs.
Actually, following some links from that Pharyngula comments section, the asterisk is supposed to indicate that trans* covers both transsexual and transgender people.
Actually, following some links from that Pharyngula comments section, the asterisk is supposed to indicate that trans* covers both transsexual and transgender people.
And transfemine, transmasculine, transfemme, transcetera. Like the LGBT… alphabet soup itself, the T keeps splintering into ever more narcissistic subsets. Geek humor: it’s almost like a “recursive” acronym/initialism. Example: GNU, which stands for “GNU is not UNIX.” Ha. Funny, right? No, I’ve never understood the purported humor, either.
Sastra wrote:
I was also unaware of how trans ideology had morphed into the idea that science had done away with the two sexes by introducing a science-based gender identity — and that failure to agree was a form of murder.
That’s exactly how I found my way back here. I checked out of the online atheist/skeptic blogosphere around 2011 when drama was infecting everything. (“Sexual harassment!” “Rapey!” “Racist!” “Sexist!”) I’d mostly ignored the gender-theory stuff. Even when Bill Nye stepped in it with his show, I figured the blow-back was just from right wing religious nutjobs. It was only last year, about this time, actually, that I happened to watch a doc about the Evergreen College affair and read The Coddling of the American Mind.
That spurred research into the efficacy of trigger warnings and safe spaces, which, of course, exposed me to a whole bunch of vocabulary I’d been ignoring. There followed a bunch of youtube searching on pronouns, gender, gender identity, sexual differentiation, and gender identity disorder/dysphoria. Then a slew of hours on JSTOR searching for the same things and related psychological phenomena, etiologies, comorbidities, and treatments. And even more hours digging through philosophy journals for anything vaguely non-gobbledygook explicating the epistemological basis for treating “I feel like an X, therefore I am an X” as an authoritative statement.
The void that stared back at me was an answer all on its own.
So now I’m apparently one of those “anti-SJW bigots” or something, simply because I refuse to convert to Wokism or even recite the Wokecene Creed. On the bright side, it is, at least, a fascinating time to be alive if you’re interested in religion as a phenomenon. We get to see in real time how new religions form, take hold, spread, and gain temporal power. Wheee?
Artymorty wrote:
That’s the problem when a supposedly progressive website prioritizes being “friendly” over the hard work of critical thinking (it’s right there in the blog title): when you turn your brain off and just feel the good vibes, maaaan, it’s very easy to be misled by bad actors. That’s why all those hippie-granola California/Portlandia types keep getting sucked into cults and persuaded by superficial arguments like anti-vax which feel “nice” on the surface but are deeply unscientific and irrational upon critical inspection. There’s nothing rational about prioritizing “friendly” at all costs. It’s actually kinda cowardly, and kinda narcissistic.
If’n you look at ’em, a lot of the responses to Sastra could either have been taken verbatim from skeptic-religious discussions. That nominal atheists could deploy them unironically is depressing, since it reveals the sort of lazy cognition that brought them to their atheism in the first place. Rigorous analysis of evidence and argument was not the genesis of their unbelief; following people who gave them goodfeels was.
. Rigorous analysis of evidence and argument was not the genesis of their unbelief; following people who gave them goodfeels was.
I agree with the first part, to an extent, but as I see it a lot of atheists there became atheists because they were furious at religion. Partly because of the dogma and irrationality, but in good part because of what they see as the judgement and control, the hypocrisy and greed, the narrow-mindedness and bigotry, and, above all, the way it hurts people. They clearly associate the gender critical position with religion. And they associate religion with fascism, bullying, violence, and forcing other people to do what you want. It’s all of a piece.
I commonly hear that, if only Christians were kind, loving, and tolerant, they’d have no problem with Christianity. If that’s the case, then “rigorous analysis of evidence and argument” isn’t going to take place because the Christians aren’t arguing with anyone. Ophelia’s phrase — “Truth matters” — indicates a different approach.
a lot of atheists there became atheists because they were furious at religion. Partly because of the dogma and irrationality, but in good part because of what they see as the judgement and control, the hypocrisy and greed, the narrow-mindedness and bigotry, and, above all, the way it hurts people.
Yeah, that’s basically what I was pointing to. “Boo, religion,” they said. “Yay, atheism,” they said. Well and good enough.
What bothers me is the subset of such people for whom reason is a performance, a ritual, a mere shibboleth that earns social currency. (Nerd moment: Kind of like the Yangs and their holy words in that old Star Trek episode.) They’ll point out Pascal’s Wager and laugh at how badwrong it is, maybe even recite a classic response to it, but ultimately the validity of any argument for or against God’s existence is irrelevant to them. Their nonbelief is as much a matter of faith as the apologist reciting Pascal’s Wager. It’s the dishonesty that gets me, because mouthing the shibboleths gives them default credibility, which they spend on nonsense about genderfeels or whatever other BS.
I commonly hear that, if only Christians were kind, loving, and tolerant, they’d have no problem with Christianity.
What a remarkably silly bit of rhetoric. (Not you. I know you’re talking about what other people say.)
It’s silly. Very silly indeed. Started off as a nice little idea about old ladies attacking young men, but now it’s just got silly.
In back-to-back tweets Friday morning, Trump wrote: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA” and then, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and then, “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”
He’s making about the second amendment. He is agitating the cultists towards firearm violence. He wants violence.
Nice decor. The rug really pulls the room together.
I came across a lengthy rant about the 2016 movie “Anything”, which has a transwoman character played by a man who does not identify as a woman. I am marginally sympathetic to the idea that characters with characteristic X should be played by actors with characteristic X, especially if such actors (and other people) are subject to discrimination. I am, however, of the opinion that the job of an actor is largely to portray something he or she is not.
The particular argument in this rant was that the casting in this movie will lead to deaths. The sequence is as follows: straight men like to have sex with transwomen sex workers. If this actor wins awards, it will make these male clients more aware that they are having sex with other men. The male clients will be angry that they might be seen as gay, and might take it out on the sex workers by killing them.
To prevent this, we are all supposed to maintain the fiction that transwomen are not actually men, and we are never to give a male actor an opportunity to pretend he identifies as a woman; any actor who wants such a part must declare such an identity before auditioning. (My framing.)
Nothing was said about helping prostituted transwomen leave the business, or protect them from abuse by clients. Nothing was said about the myriad other ways clients could become more conscious of the actual sex of these sex workers.
@sackbut;
I’m having trouble understanding the line of reasoning here. If there are straight men who specifically like to have sex with trans women in preference to (natal) women, then it’s presumably because they like the male/female body dynamic involved. They’re not going to discover through a movie or any other means that hey — you mean they’re men? Gender vs. sex probably isn’t a relevant topic in prostitution.
If the sex worker is ‘passing’ and someone who isn’t into trans women finds out, then I can imagine violence, sure. But otherwise, the argument escapes me.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines; Sense8 had a transwoman played by a real woman… And supposedly both of the Wachowskis are transwoman (the fact that they’ve both decided this really calls that into question.
Why is this? Could it be that they wanted all of their characters to be attractive instead of weird looking?
Um, Nomi in Sense8 was played by Jamie Clayton, who is quite openly transgender.
Really? I swear I looked it up at the time because I was curious… Fail.
Great photo, Ophelia! Who made the giant origami swans?
Which is pretty apt, given that a trans woman is also pretending to be something they are not.
Oh look, failed Prime Minister Theresa May has awarded Geoff Boycott a knighthood before the door slammed her in the arse on the way out.
He is not a nice man. He was convicted of punching his girlfriend in the face 20 times (he says she fell over). He’s said on numerous occasions that only black cricketers get knighthoods and that he’d have to put on blackface to get one. Even the Sunday Express says he’s a racist. The BBC continues to employ him, though.
And Theresa May gave him a knighthood.
I already despised the concept and practice of knighthoods but this one sits especially badly. Come on, Theresa, you are already the second worst Prime Minister in UK history (Johnson has already secured first place after a few days in the job) and you’re pulling this shit?
John Bercow, leader of the House of Commons, has announced his resignation.
I watched as the House of Commons was closed for an unwanted vacation yesterday (today?). Interesting stuff. We live in interesting times.
Hypothesis: Every large advance in communications leads to some kind of large societal disruption and the rise of social media is the indirect cause of our current interesting times.
I’m not sure of this as there’s evidence of efforts to undo ‘liberal’ ideals since way before reagan/thatcher, but it does seem to me that masses of people are way more easily herded in odd directions that ever before.
Oh, PZ, what were you thinking?
In order to illustrate his misery over the arrangement of yesterday’s classes, PZ decides to use a soundtrack – The Boomtown Rats’ 1979 song I Don’t Like Mondays, a cheerful little number about the USA’s first school mass-shooting, carried out by 16-year-old Brenda Spencer at Cleveland Elementary School, San Diego.
Nice message for a teacher to send to his students, no?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/09/09/theres-always-that-day/
In the previous Misc. Room, latsot linked to another post of PZ’s, one about Graham Linehan and bias and blithe assumptions.https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/09/05/biased-sources-motivated-reasoning-and-blithe-assumptions-the-terf-story/
Towards the end of the comments there (in which, by the way, several commenters are actually calling out one Povril Sevens for his repeated calls for TERFs to die in fires or commit suicide* – silence from Myers himself, though), the odious Giliell, who has started referring to herself as a trans woman (f-m? fluid? she doesn’t say, but I’m sure it adds woke points) despite stating in the past that she is a mother, dismisses the issue of transwomen in sport with a simply delightful Dear Muslima, with a subtle hint of martyrdom at the end.
There are bigger fights to be fought, so just let transwomen take over women’s sports? Then what? Bigger fights than changing rooms and rape crisis centres and refuges for women and and and.
*not because it’s wrong to say such things, but because it gives the TERF’s ammunition to throw back at them. I shit you not.
@AoS #11:
I have to admit that despite being a child of the 70s and having bought the single at the time, I didn’t know what the song was about until recently. I’m quite prepared to believe that PZ thought it was about mondays.
AoS @11:
And yet the trans athletes haven’t set aside these unimportant pursuits in the name of, oh… working to fight climate change.
It’s only the women’s opposition that is silly, not the trans athletes’ insistence.
Further to AoS @12:
The (currently) latest comment on that Pharyngula thread is from the aforementioned Porivil Sorrens and includes:
Which is charming.
Hats off to Sastra for so patiently engaging with those Pharyngula people. I’ve had to train myself not to read the comments or – if I do – physically restrain myself from hitting the reply button, or I’d be there all week.
Sastra is doing a grand job.
Sastra’s a genius at that, always has been.
PZ is not. Doing a grand job, that is. He popped up earlier in the comments to warn someone off for something fairly footling but appears entirely happy with Porivil Sorrens’ many TERF-death-related posts and the people who – as AoS says – are shushing them because they might make the other people who want TERFs to be dead look bad.
Here’s a hint, pharyngulites, if you’re more worried about propaganda and purity than, you know, truth or having a damn good argument, then you have lost your way. You might want to have a good look at yourselves. But don’t die in any fires or tape any bags to your heads, nobody wants that.
Agreed.
Of course not. If anyone opposed McKinnon, he’d literally die!
I’m a Pharyngula people too, though. I like the others: find them interesting, intelligent, and thought provoking. Though the commenter who wants people to put plastic bags over their heads has some pretty serious anger issues, I think.
I didn’t say much to anyone — partly because I wasn’t addressing the main points in the OP, and partly because iirc PZ has said he doesn’t want to hear things argued against on this topic which have been well settled. Been there; done that; nothing left but cranks. Okay. I don’t agree, but it’s his blog.
The commentariat seems divided between agreeing completely and spoiling for a fight — sometimes both simultaneously. But that’s the way it’s always been.
latsot, #13.
I’ve no doubt he hadn’t a clue, but mumble mumble intent mumble magic, as I believe was the standard pre-pile-on phrase over there for punishing honest mistakes, or more commonly no mistake at all, just deliberate bad-intention readings of perfectly innocent comments. He has been called on it but the last time I looked he hadn’t responded. Probably trying to find a way of interpreting the lyrics to mean something innocent.
She’s probably claiming to be a trans man, or “non binary”, because it’s against The Rules for a woman to claim trans-womanhood–unless she’s claiming to identify as a man who identifies as a woman, which some English woman actually did, for real. And yes, she was serious.
Anyhoo. Whatever. Looks like I’ve misplaced my surprised face.
AoS, 22:
Nod. He does like to clutch his allegedly higher standards to his chest, doesn’t he?
And so it goes. All the things listed as being ‘more important’ in this comment have also been dismissed by people as having to wait until other ‘more important’ things are dealt with. I have been hit with this when trying to discuss climate change – but there’s a war on! Ever since we sort of forgot about the war(s), I haven’t heard this one. Now it’s the economy – poor people need jobs. Yes, and they need a livable climate.
Women’s issues have always taken back seat to “more important” (read: important to men) issues. We might argue that, if the issue of transwomen in women’s sports isn’t so important, then they should just pass by with a shrug and work on those more important issues, because if it isn’t important, then let the silly, trivial women have their sports while we serious minded people work on important things. The fact that they spend so many posts, so many blogs, so many videos on this topic suggests that it isn’t considered unimportant…it’s only the women that are unimportant.
@Ikn:
yep.
Donald Trump has had a press conference in which he insists that Bolton was fire fired fired dammit! He didn’t resign, I fired him bigly! etc.
Naturally, this lends increasing credibility to Bolton’s version, in which he offered to resign but Trump said ‘let’s discuss this tomorrow’ all so Trump could fire him at a safe distance.
https://www.axios.com/trump-john-bolton-resignation-north-korea-venezuela-3aa5bd8e-5d32-4f6f-a474-c277a1d3d345.html
Hilariously, forgotten the names of Barron and Melania Trump. When talking about e-cigarrettes, he said “…and that’s how the first lady got involved. She’s… got a son, together, that is a beautiful young man, and she feels very very strongly about it. She’s seen it, we’re both reading it, lotta people are reading it…”
The hesitation after “she’s… got a son” is what cracks me up. After failing to recall their names (or more generously, forgetting that it would be appropriate to refer to them by name), he clearly interrupts himself to say ‘together’ to make it clear that he was involved, which was only necessary thanks to his clunky phrasing.
https://www.axios.com/trump-john-bolton-resignation-north-korea-venezuela-3aa5bd8e-5d32-4f6f-a474-c277a1d3d345.html
Oof, edit fail.
“Hilariously, he also appears to have forgotten the names of…”
Fascinating things I’ve learnt about TERFs today:
TERFs love when trans people think about suicide
TERFs love being told to kill themselves
TERFs encourage trans suicide and celebrate it
I’ve been labelled a TERF by some on Twitter because I reject the notion women and transwomen share a social class. I don’t think they have much in common at all. I certainly don’t think the same movement should be expected to fight for the distinct needs of both groups or that the same organisations should be required to cater to both groups’ needs. That makes me a TERF, apparently. OK. I guess that’s the definition of TERF: someone who doesn’t believe women and transwomen are part of the same social class. Got it.
Then who the blue fuck are the people all the above shit applies to? The ones who like being told to kill themselves. The ones who celebrate when trans people off themselves.
Those people may exist. Every flavour of shitty person does. There may even be TERFs who believe those things. I’ve never encountered them though. I’ve bumped into some shitty people who, like me, have been labelled TERFs. I’ve yet to encounter any who get off on trans people killing themselves though.
Am I TERFing wrong?
Yes. The role all who oppose trans dogma is to meekly accept all slanderous claims made about you.
@ thewatersfine:
Yes; there are some very dark things going on. Somehow, the importance of agreeing that biological sex is unrelated to being a man or woman has overridden everything else on which there is significant agreement. It’s considered so vital to being a fair and loving human being that failure to accept it puts you in the same category as Nazis and the KKK.
I mean, put aside who’s right and who’s wrong for a minute and look at the basic situation regarding violence:
Group T is being beat up by angry men who insist on gender conformity.
Group G is against angry men, violence, and gender conformity.
Angry men who insist on gender conformity hate both Group T and Group G and won’t listen to either.
Group T directs most of its fury towards Group G because Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence.
Even if they’re right about the sex vs. gender dispute, it’s irrelevant to the major problem — safety and the freedom to be gender nonconforming. Group
TG simply doesn’t belong in the same category as the violent macho men. They don’t want Group T dead. It’s not a mealy- mouthed platitude to point out that all the common ground binds them together when it comes to the larger picture.Oops, I meant to write ‘Group G’ here.
Though Group T, while it certainly shouldn’t be placed together with ‘violent macho men,’ can make it difficult sometimes for people to discern the difference.
Apparently the TRAs don’t think this, either, because they don’t seem to think women’s groups should fight for the needs of women at all, or cater to the needs of women. They should fight for the needs (or perceived needs) of trans, and cater to the needs of trans. Anything else is bigotry.
@iknklast:
It all comes down to the argument of sex vs. gender. If trans women ARE women, then women’s groups which include trans women and fight for and cater to their needs are fighting and catering to women.
It’s a battle then won or lost through terminology. And the choice of terms depend on the conclusions regarding an intellectual evaluation of sex vs gender, an evaluation which seems overinfluenced by analogies and emotional hot buttons.
Sastra – when you say @ 31 “Group T directs most of its fury towards Group G because Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” I take it you mean “because it thinks Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” or “because [according to them] Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” as opposed to Group G actually is encouraging and inciting the violence?
I don’t think it really does all come down to the argument of sex vs. gender. Even if you think that gender is all powerful and can negate sex, the bodies still remain. The bodies don’t change because The People Believe.
I think it’s more that it comes down to magical thinking, yes or no. Can the power of thought overrule the material reality of bodies? Or no?
I think 36 is closer than 34 because it’s very clear indeed that gender is being deliberately co-opted and corrupted to achieve political goals rather than to describe reality. The term used to describe the artificial constructs of expectation ascribed to men and women. That’s a description of reality, alright, because it’s how most people even now seem to think about women and men, consciously or otherwise. It’s a description of the reality of people being idiots about how women in particular should behave and feel about how they behave.
But the currently more fashionable presto-changeo idea that gender is somehow more authentic than sex doesn’t just fly in the face of reality, it makes no sense at all. You know perfectly well, Sastra, where we’ve seen arguments like those before and how well they worked out.
@Ophelia:
Yes, the “Group G is encouraging and inciting the violence” was supposed to be part of a sloppy syllogism, a conclusion derived from the premises which doesn’t fit.
I think the sex vs. gender debate basically equates biological sex with the body. From what I’ve seen many of the atheist TRAs don’t invoke mysticism — they downplay the importance of sex/body. Classifying people according to biology is only useful if one is specifically referring to a biological process like reproduction. It’s irrelevant and for the most part so variable it’s useless. Even people in ancient societies thought that. And it’s not dimorphic: there’s intersex.
Instead, the reasoning goes, what really matters personally, socially, and politically, is gender. Gender is how you behave, think, feel. And it’s not dimorphic, either. Any sex might think as a woman; they might think as a woman following traditional gender roles; they might think as a woman who rejects gender roles. A biological female who likes to wear makeup and sequins might be a man. How? He experiences makeup and sequins the way a non- gender conforming man would. And the only way to know or check this is internally, with the mind. What does he know about himself?
This part is rather confused, I think. It’s supposed to be liberating.
It seems to me then that, at least for some people who are trans or support the ideology, it’s not that the mind overrules the body — it outranks it. They’re still biologically male or female, but who cares? It never mattered. It’s up to individual internal recognition when it comes to being a man, a woman, both, neither..
I suspect they find this plausible because they’re finding it analogous to the idea that biological sex isn’t important when it comes to what you like. A girl could like cars. A boy could like dolls. Someone who insists a female MUST be a girl and a male MUST be a boy is just like someone who insists girls must play with dolls and boys must play with cars. Or, of course, girls must like boys and boys must like girls.
They’re lumping the whole thing together and labeling it “control.”
Sastra, in my comment, I was referring to the fact that statements including the word “woman” as the descriptor – “Women’s Health” “Women’s Shelter” “Women’s Issues” are considered verboten. We must become people, because not all women are…whatever. Some men can get pregnant. Some women have penises. To say “women” without referencing trans or acknowledging trans or avoiding the word women is considered bigoted and violent. So, yeah, they don’t really think these places should be fighting for women, but instead should center trans. They may claim they think trans are real women, but if they thought that, there would be no fuss about the word “women”.
They want all women’s groups to center themselves on trans. Because women (I REFUSE to call myself cis-) are privileged. Privileged people do not need to be fought for, only fought with.
@iknklast;
I see — yes. If a trans man has to go to a “Women’s Health Center” to get help for his manly period, the embarrassment and frustration is too high a price to pay for keeping the sign.
Are they doing the same at the “Men’s Health Center” (assuming they exist)? What would be the replacement? For either?
PZ has announced that he has a new grand-niece and says that ‘she’s a real sweetling’. There’s a little devil sat on my shoulder daring me to ask how he knows the baby is a girl. Obviously there are no visual clues and even if they’ve run tests to identify the chromosomes we know that chromosomes are not indicative of anything but the old, outdated, transphobic system of adhering to a strict binary.
Were it not for my reluctance to involve an innocent child in things, I’d be starting a shit-storm around about now.
Oh no, not assigned niece at birth.
That’ll be his grand-anab, then :-))
https://people.com/human-interest/texas-school-accused-discrimination-boys-hair/
This Texas school district has a very precise and sex-specific dress code, including many details regarding hair, that applies to four-year-olds. This particular little boy, who is black (and that’s probably important), was told that his shoulder-length hair was too long. A distraction, somehow.
This is where the story takes a bizarre turn. The grandmother spoke to the principal:
“He told me that I could either cut it, braid it and pin it up, or put my grandson in a dress and send him to school, and when prompted my grandson must say he’s a girl. ”
Wow. So much to unpack. It is OK for girls but not boys, to have hair a bit longer. And it is OK for a boy to pretend to be a girl, rather than fail to comform to the male dress code, but if he does so, he must conform to the female dress code.
I might guess that, to this principal, trans status is all about stereotypes, and all about pretending, and he’s OK with that, so long as stereotypes are adhered to.
It’s shades of the theocracy in Iran. There you can’t be gay, but you can be trans. In the US you can’t be gender non-conforming, but you can be trans and conform to the gender expectations of your ‘new’ sex.
People with fucked up reasoning have things in common that supercede race, religion and nationality.
@sackbut:
My impression is that the principal wasn’t sincerely offering a trans option, but using a good old fashioned sexist insult. Could have said the same thing in 1919. But it’s hard to tell.
Sastra, that was my impression, too. It’s similar to a phrase I’ve heard a million times from parents to small boys when they cry: ‘If you want to act like a girl you can start wearing dresses’.
PZ put up an interesting new post.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/09/16/biology-is-always-more-complicated-than-you-expect/In it, he says something I agree with:
You don’t say! So why then are we told that testosterone blocking is enough to completely erase any competitive advantage held be trans women over actual women in sport? A puzzler.
Yeah, I saw that too and was equally puzzled. It doesn’t seem to be the gender critical who insist on testosterone level as a qualification for men to compete in women’s sport, it’s the trans people who – presumably – lobby the sport regulation bodies on exactly that issue.
I have no particular intention of watching the video because I strongly suspect it of being a waste of time and my rage levels are already high in the gigamews today but if anyone can bear to watch it and report back here, I’d be grateful.
Enjoy Uluru, Holms, I’m jealous.
Just got a news alert on my phone that Merriam-Webster added the nonbinary they.
Thankfully, my month of teetotaling is over tomorrow.
Hey it’s already tomorrow in Australia, so go for it.
Slate has a favorable review of a new book by neuroscientist Gina Rippon, “Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds”
Our host has blogged about some of Rippon’s prior talks and interviews. Has anyone read this book?
I plan to read it soon. It appears that she has changed the title from “The Gendered Brain”, probably a good move. I look forward to hearing what other people think of it.
A couple of minor observations in this gender/trans whatever it is going on.
First, the latest batch of young transwomen are HUGE. I haven’t seen one lately under 6′.
Second, I realized that these ‘all gender’ bathrooms have another flaw, especially ones that don’t have urinals and full partitions. If an occupant is much over 6′, and they stand facing the toilet, they have a pretty good view of the stalls on either side.
I find both of these observations extremely annoying, though I’m not sure why the first one is.
@44
Dang. I thought we got over this in the 1960’s.
Sex toys aren’t gender-inclusive now.
Except for these ones:
How are vibrating bits of silicone gender-inclusive? I’m glad you asked:
Sounds legit.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stranovich/cute-little-fuckers/
It’s good hearing from detransitioners. Here is a video from one of several YouTube channels that focus on their stories.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=ZTIFhQ09vlE
I note that she says she has not had any luck getting stories from male detransitioners. I wonder how skewed the demographics are. It seems female gender dysphoria is now a significant majority of the cases, and thus likely of the detrans cases, but even so, I can’t recall hearing any stories of male detransitioners at all. Anyone else have any links or information about this?
Can’t figure out whether to laugh or vomit.
Just got a note in my news that Mattel has a new gender neutral doll. It’s billed as a doll for everyone, and the article says that Mattel is betting on how the country is going, even at the risk of offending a substantial portion of the population.
At this point, I don’t think I want to see the news anymore. Between Trump and trans, I am just about at the end of my rope. (Hey, they both begin with “tr” – coincidence? Or conspiracy?)
I Googled and there are lots of news stories on it – so it’s lashings of free advertising if nothing else!
Back from the Rock, photos later. Work today :\
The gender neutral doll actually makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not like Barbie and Ken had genitals anyway, so letting kids dress up dolls whichever way they like seems kind of healthy.
Hey, remember Richard Dawkins? Seems like he or whoever manages his Twitter feed managed to step in it again, promoting an evangelical Christian conference because it attacks “social justice warriors.”
HAhahahahahahaha that’s hilarious.
It occurred to me that some people here might have failed to notice The News at Kate, Kate Smurthwaite’s YT channel. That would be a shame, Kate is brilliant, perhaps best known for ranting entertainingly on Sunday morning religious shows in the UK (lots of that on YouTube too, treat yourself).
https://www.youtube.com/user/KateSmurthwaite
Rest assured that there are plenty of excellent rants on subjects that will be close to the hearts of many here.
In all the other news, it’s easy to lose sight of the announcement that the Supreme Court has scheduled the Louisiana abortion law case for oral argument next term.
As many here likely recall, this is the case where the Fifth Circuit more or less openly defied a 2016 Supreme Court decision, Whole Women’s Health, which struck down a virtually identical Texas statute. The 5th’s reasoning was pretty much: Kennedy has been replaced by Kavanaugh, so it’s open season on the right to choose.
Roberts voted with the liberal justices to reinstate the trial court’s injunction while the case worked its way through the system. And some commentators are noting that the Supreme Court basically had to take the case, if only to overrule the 5th, unlike many situations where the Court can just decline to hear a case and wait for a better one or simply punt. So you couldn’t necessarily read anything into the decision to hear the appeal.
And I thought so, too, until I read this Mark Joseph Stern piece at Slate. He points out that, in situations where a lower court has just blatantly got it wrong, and the Supremes don’t have anything further to say on the subject, they do what’s called a “summary reversal.” Basically, there’s no oral argument, and just a brief, unsigned decision per curiam (“by the court”) that says the legal equivalent of “no — look at what we said in this other case, dummies.”
So the fact that the Louisiana case is set for oral argument is itself troubling. Even worse, the Court also agreed to hear Louisiana’s argument that the plaintiff clinic lacks standing — the implication being that only pregnant women wanting abortions can challenge these laws. Stern explains pretty well why this is dangerous, and this comment is long enough, so I refer you all to his piece.
Basically: they’re coming after abortion rights. I’m sure Susan Collins will be saddened and furrow her brow when a woman’s right to choose is torpedoed by nominees she approved.
Fark, yes, I just saw headlines about this.
I found some more stupid from a professor of philosophy who, by virtue of her training, should really fucking know better. There are several people ’round these parts more knowledgeable in feminism than I, so I’ll leave in-depth, point-by-point rebuttal to them. I’ll just hit the high(low)lights.
Let’s begin with misunderstanding what 2nd wave feminism was talking about when dividing sex and gender. (Emphasis mine.)
This excerpt might look innocuous, but the bit I bolded reveals that the author missed the point. Or the point missed her. Whichever. Feminists were not demonstrating that gender is incorrectly conceived as a binary. In fact, the entire point of the analysis was that gender is a binary, a binary that stifles human flourishing.
That is so far from what Simone meant that I have to believe the author hasn’t read the source. Shorter de Beauvoir: one’s culture dictates the role of females, and that culture involves systematic inculcation and indoctrination into the binary system of gender—those adult human females who are made part of that system are known as “women”.
The Third Reich’s absolute dictatorship is the true descendant of the Athenian dream of democracy. What? It’s just as sensible as what I quoted.
I’d love to have Jane Clare Jones tear this article a new one. Or two.
Interesting and unsurprising: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/07/after-analyzing-3-5-million-bo.html
A study analysed three and a half million English language books published between 1900 and 2008 to identify the adjectives most frequently applied to men and women.
Women were described by their bodies, men by their thoughts and behaviour.
The analysis also showed that negative verbs associated with body and appearance appear five times more often for female figures as for male ones.
As the article points out, this corpus is exactly the sort of thing used to train neural nets, so this bias is being built in to the AI systems that are supposed to make objective decisions about us.
During the analysis they created categories for for adjectives such as relating to body, behaviour, feeling etc. It’s interesting that (in the diagram from the linked article) they chose the colour pink to illustrate the feeling category.
I see that Donnie still doesn’t pay his bills. He’s currently stiffing the Scottish government to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds after a Scottish court ruled that the Trump Organization had to pay the government’s legal costs after Trump’s failed attempt to block the development of a wind farm on the grounds that it would spoil the view from his golf club and deter players from using the club.
Hilariously, after telling a Scottish parliamentary committee that onshore wind farms would destroy Scotland’s tourist industry, he went on to state that he had no need to call on expert witnesses to verify that claim with actual evidence because
How unlike Trump to make such a claim! And yet for some reason or other he still lost. It was almost as though he wasn’t believed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/08/trump-organization-rejects-legal-bill-after-losing-windfarm-court-battle
Latsot, I know just enough about computers and software to be a danger to myself and others. Even so, I’ve been having this discussion with others in my circle for a while now. It’s amazing how many people who are well educated and knowledgeable in their own field just don’t get this. They seem to regard to entire corpus of literature, art, law, science and healthcare as perfect and inviolable, rather than an expression of our society and culture complete with warts and cancers. It’s slightly scary how blind people are to this.
On a related note, the NZ Ministry of Health, District Health Boards and most health providers have used shared databases since the mid 1990s. A researcher looking at Māori health outcomes trawled the 20 or so years of available data to see if there were indicators as to why Māori health outcomes remain stubbornly worse than white peoples. The answer was depressing. Everyone presenting at primary health care with early onset ‘lifestyle’ illnesses (heart, type 2 diabetes etc) gets given the same advice. Loose weight, get excercise, cut back on alcohol, eat healthy, stop smoking. Māori tend to get sent home at that point, while white people tend to be given medication and further tests.
They were at pains to say this was clearly not intentional racism. It was unconscious incipient racism, but racism nonetheless and it harms ultimate health outcomes. It is but one example of why we shouldn’t use existing datasets to train software incapable of human insights.
Rob, it’s a big problem. All sorts of data sets are biassed, sometimes in subtle ways, and if you train a neural net with it, you’ll incorporate those biases.
We’ve seen this with police systems – used heavily in the US and a little here – for predicting crime to plan the deployment of people and resources. Historically, the police have arrested more black people than white, some areas have a higher population of black people… So the system spits out those locations as priorities. And this appears to be vindicated by arrest figures since if you go looking for crime, you’re going to find it. So the cycle reinforces itself.
There are similar results elsewhere. One that’s finally getting some attention is the fact that most medical studies have been carried out on men and there’s an assumption that women’s organs and systems behave in the same way. We already train doctors this way, it’s asking for trouble and trouble has been found. If we train AI systems the same way, it’s even worse because neural nets can’t explain their ‘reasoning’ (and therefore identify a bad step or assumption) and… well, they sound all sciency and people have a tendency to believe their conclusions.
If you believe the press, we’re in an emerging, innovative world of artificial intelligence. But most of the software used is based around ideas that emerged in the 60s with a kind of heyday in the 80s and 90s. All that’s changed is the dramatic drop in the cost of data and computing power. We haven’t got better at AI, we can just throw a lot more resources at a problem now.
Barbie ad:
I’m pretty certain they mean that girls and women can do or be (almost) anything they want, but the phrasing is unfortunate. Girls will always be female; their sex will always be female, and to the extent that “gender” means “sex”, their “gender” will always be female, not “anything”, as the gender identity crowd might have us believe. But the ad is clumsily trying to refer to girls feeling socially imposed limitations because they are girls. I might have have simply said “girls” rather than “their gender”.
A Fox News poll is showing growing support for impeachment. https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/support-for-impeachment-reaches-highest-level-in-fox-news-poll/ar-AAIxqas?li=AAggNb9&ocid=mailsignout
Is that like impalement, but with fruit instead of a pail?
Oregon Zoo tweets x-rays of its animals: https://twitter.com/OregonZoo/status/1182019298467860480
Everyone needs to read Natasha Chart’s amazing speech outside the Supreme Court the other day. She and other speakers were drowned out by transactivists.
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/full-text-of-natasha-charts-speech-outside-the-supreme-court/
Here’s a relatively banal (compared to Trump) example of infuriating misconduct:
https://kywnewsradio.radio.com/articles/news/family-fights-back-after-loitering-arrest-outside-their-home
The were arrested for loitering… in their front yard. (Guess the family’s skin colour! Guess the officer’s!) That’s bad enough, but then it gets nasty:
Murica!
WHAAAAAAAAAT???
Neil deGrasse Tyson is going on Ben Shapiro’s podcast, because of course he would.
Tomorrow is apparently International Pronouns Day. Not a celebration of a part of speech, but rather a navel-gazing festival where everyone picks their own special words for other people to use to refer to them, under pain of social ostracizing or worse. International, no less, so it must apply to languages other than English.
https://pronounsday.org/
But then there is this delightful parody, appearing like a UK variant of the previously mentioned site:
https://www.pronounsday.co.uk/
To save you the clicks: it shows you a list of pronoun sets, each of which takes you to a copy of that wonderful article “Pronouns are Rohypnol” by Barra Kerr. Excellent article.
Oh for fuck sakes:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/portland-bans-urinals-in-195m-gender-neutral-remodel-of-government-building/
Post eaten? Meanwhile, having a poke around there, the source seems *quite* conservative, and this probably explains the alarming headline. The city of Portland did not ban urinals in any sense, they removed urinals from a major municipal building. Same principle, smaller scale.
It was in the spam folder.
Pro Publica managed to get their hands on some very interesting Trump documents. Apologies if I missed these being brought up elsewhere.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-never-before-seen-trump-tax-documents-show-major-inconsistencies
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38345.The_Beastly_Baby
“A calmly horrific tale about a most unpleasant infant everyone is trying to get rid of.”
Sound familiar?
Heh yes all too.
Thanks to mentions in B&W, I decided to have a look at some Derrick Jensen. Just started Endgame Vol. 1. For those of you who, like me, are new to his ideas, here’s a link to the “twenty premises” upon which this work is based:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame_(Jensen_books)
Still early in the book, but it is quite interesting. He crystalizes some things I’ve been thinking regarding humans and the environment of for years, but interconnects them more completely and pushes well beyond my own, tentative and incomplete ideas on these things. The basic premis is that civilization is bad for the living planet as a whole and for the humans caught in it or subjected to it. Civilization, because of its inherent unsustainability, is doomed to crash, and it is better to crash it sooner ourselves than to keep going and have it crashed for us, as the latter result will be much more destructive than the latter. It sounds a lot like the difference between crash-landing a plane running out of fuel as opposed to letting it run out of fuel at 30,00 feet. (My analogy, not his.) A lot to absorb, but challenging and provocative. It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to unknown once you’ve been told it, but also hard to figure out what to do with the knowledge once one knows it.
The most frightening thing about it is I don’t think he’s wrong.
Further regarding Jensen. I’m thinking he might be slightly romanticizing and valourizing indigenous, non-civilized (as in non-urbanized) cultures. After all, they’re still made up of humans. I don’t think any culture is immune to some degree of ignorance, short-sightedness or greed, as individuals within them will surely exhibit varying amounts of each at various time, though they might not have as much impact on their environment as cultures with higher populations and more advanced technology. Given the right circumstances, even small numbers of humans with comparatively simple technologies can have a big impact on the ultimate fate of large, naive, low-birthrate species. I’m sure that diprotodons, elephant birds, and moas might have a word or two to say regarding their own experiences with the ecological sustainability of the lifeways of the first human inhabitants of Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand…
Thanks for the information on Jensen. His work sounds intriguing. It reminds me of a Christopher Hitchens essay claiming that agriculture was the worst invention of humanity. Jensen has obviously gone much further in his analysis. I’ll have to check him out.
YNNB, I tend to agree. I’ll look the books up because they sound interesting though. I am unconvinced that Civilisation and Culture (which Jensen appears to conflate in places) are inherently bad and unsustainable. I’ll agree that they have exhibited much of the negative effect he attributes to them in the past. As with all evolutionary bottle necks, the real question is whether we can move on. The idea of cultures abandoning technology and intellectual pursuit and returning to a ‘state of grace’ has been explored in science fiction as an aside. Not a pathway I would take.
Just to go all old-skool on you, Dylan Moran has some things to say about religion and what if Jesus were a woman, as well as many other brilliantly rambly things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceROVTVVCF8
The if-jesus-were-a-woman bit (paraphrasing):
Jesus said “I’M THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD!”
If it had been Jesusina, she’d have said “Well….I’m *quite* bright….”
So, I know ‘her emails’ is now old news, but this Vox article is the clearest admission I’ve yet seen from the media that they fucked up accurately and fairly reporting the issue in the lead up to the 2016 elections.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/22/20924795/hillary-clinton-emails-new-york-times-state-department
There are some good graphics that illustrate just how biased the reporting was.
Also of note, and I’m sure recognised by many here, the latest investigation (by a Pompeo led State Department at Trump’s instruction) still reached the conclusion that it was no big deal and that previous Republican’s had done the same and indeed advised Clinton to use a private server. Also worth noting that that State Department investigation attempted, arguably, to skew the investigation by retroactively reclassifying some previously unclassified emails as confidential or secret and using analysis of the new classification as a basis to determine whether actions years ago were appropriate. Still no wrong doing on Clinton’s part, although 38 former and current SD employees now have black marks on their records. That seems extreme and lacking in natural justice.
You may already have seen this. Very interesting.
https://thetexan.news/dallas-custody-battle-over-alleged-transgender-seven-year-old-will-resume-next-week/
It has to be said that the court papers show the fathers character may be questionable at best, but that doesn’t mean his concerns are not valid. The article is almost painfully even handed and explanatory.
Rob,
Yeah, more specifically, the court’s prior findings establish that, among other things, the father committed fraud, emotionally abused his stepdaughters, lied to the Army about being gay to obtain a discharge, lied about his education and many other aspects of his background, failed to comply with court rulings, was a vexatious litigant, and “will say or do anything to get his way.”
Does that make his “concerns” invalid? No. But it seriously damages his credibility. So all of the talk about how the child is perfectly happy to identify as James when he’s with his father should be taken with a truckload of salt — even if it’s true (and it may be, as there are witnesses other than the father who say so), it may be because the child is terrified to displease the father.
Frankly, I’m appalled that a jury is deciding this matter. This really should not be a job for ordinary citizens.
Screechy, if even half of what is alleged about the guy is true he’s a complete shit and his ex is well shot of him. Does him being a shit invalidate the apparently reputable experts who testified? Worth noting that all sides agree the child is healthy, happy and appears to be free from anxiety, regardless of which parent they are spending time with. That suggests to me (as someone who was a football in a messy divorce) that both parents are doing a good job of insulating the child from their personal conflict as much as possible and providing a loving relationship.
I totally agree this is not a job for a jury.
I did note that the mothers lawyer used the line about the child only identifying as James after being brought to appointments by the father as if that were some sort of slam dunk proof. After all, the child only identifies as Luna when the mother drops them off. Same difference.
Jennifer Gunter seems to have embraced the faith. btw, I’m Astrange1. got on Twitter a month or so ago bc I couldn’t take following links from here without responding to them.
https://twitter.com/DrJenGunter/status/1186844626528813057?s=09
A workmate informed me of a tweet that is going crazy, saying he thinks it will be the craziest thing I’ll see all day.
https://twitter.com/iHartEricka/status/1185662250561998848
He’s right, holy shit that’s idiotic. I found these meme replies to the thing, I’m sure there are many more.
It looks like Trump is sending troops back into Syria. Has he decided to send protection after having had a change of heart over abandoning the Kurds? Not exactly, although it appears that the troops will be giving protection….to the eastern Syrian oil fields, chiefly the Conoco gas plant.
Oh, and Trump appears to want to satisfy his friend Erdogan by encouraging the Kurds to relocate from their territories along the border with Turkey. Oddly, he’s suggested in a tweet that the Kurds head for the oil fields. The cynical bastard deserted them last week but now seems to want to use them as a buffer between the oil and the US troops protecting it, and Syrian-backed militia.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/24/us-military-syria-tanks-oil-fields
This is showing up a lot: https://www.brandwatch.com/reports/transphobia/
It’s an expensive-looking analysis of online transphobia, written credulously about by the BBC here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50166900 and many others elsewhere.
I hate to think of trans people being bullied online or off but…
There are no sources. There are no explanations about how the data was captured or analyzed. There’s quite a lot of mystifying stuff, such as the Pyramid of Transphobia being topped with “trans genocide”. Click and you get some quotes about trans people being murdered or being denied medical treatment. That does not seem to me the same thing as genocide and doesn’t demonstrate that those things happen more to transgender people. They’re just (unattributed) quotes. The entire pyramid is more than a little (more than a lot) dubious; it implies that trans genocide is an inevitable result of negative attitudes toward trans people without the slightest bit of evidence. It’s begging the question like you wouldn’t believe.
There are graphs with weird arbitrary labels which don’t look like they’re showing much meaningful and there are clear instances of p-hunting. There’s no definition of what is considered a transphobic comment or analysis of the context in which these comments were used, even though that’s the entire basis of the report.
It’s a mess and that’s a shame because a proper analysis of abuse which showed its sums would be helpful to everyone, especially trans people. This is not helpful unless you’re a person who wants your beliefs validated and is desperately willing to overlook the lack of documented process or evidence.
I saw this a few days ago and don’t remember it being mentioned here.
https://twitter.com/RadFemPirate/status/1187101506090295297
Once more into the breach…
https://freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot/2019/10/26/two-cents-on-pansexuality/No shouting yet…
latsot, #100. That’s got to be deliberate. He’s taking the piss, inviting pushback so he can get more people banned from twitter.
Holms, #101. My favourite line from that thread, in comment #4:
Oh, I’m so complex and special and interesting. I’m just soooo unique.
What a twonk.
@102 agreed
I came across this today:
An Open Letter to the Friend Who Thinks I Hate Transgender People, by Cathoel Jorss.
I really liked this letter. The writer sounds frustrated and angry. She makes strong arguments and blunt statements, without bothering with conciliatory language. I liked the breadth of scope. Nicely done.
Holms, you’re getting quite the reputation over there. This, from the thread you linked to in #101
Note the rather insidious opening line to Siggy. If that isn’t a non-too subtle hint for Siggy to follow PZ’s lead and ban you from that blog, then I’m a chimpanzee called Brenda. Colour me surprised, though, to learn that you have been presented with ‘overwhelming’ evidence that there are more than two sexes. Dearest Abbey isn’t being dishonest there, is (s)he?
A decision was issued in that Texas custody case
Seems that the jury awarded the mother sole custody, but the judge overruled it and awarded joint custody. Other highlights:
— no finding of abuse by either parent
— mother’s demand that father embrace and affirm child’s identity as a girl denied
— parents must agree on future medical decisions (i.e. puberty blockers)
— both sides enjoined from publicly discussing the case (some criticism made of the father here for his publicity-seeking efforts)
— family counseling ordered
Appears to be a sensible resolution based on what I’ve heard. Perhaps a recipe for future litigation when they can’t agree on puberty blockers, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is the right course of action.
#105, Sackbut, excellent letter. Shared on Twitter fwiw. I was deboosted early on. :)
I don’t recall having paid a lot of attention to “Mattress Girl,” the Columbia University student who strapped her dorm mattress to her back when going around campus as a protest/performance art piece because her rapist was still allowed on campus. I had (and still have) no reason to doubt that she was raped, but it seemed a rather unproductive reaction that only gave credence to the usual trope that victims who speak up are attention-seeking.
Well, she’d like everyone to know now that she’s been talking to some conservatives and libertarians, and gosh, some of them are really nice. This profile from The Cut is appropriately skeptical.
Many of us will not be surprised to learn this:
She no longer wants to be an artist, except maybe a con artist:
And let’s throw in a classic anti-feminism trope while we’re act it:
What changed her? You will regret asking:
Ugh. I don’t think she’s doing this as some new performance art piece or hoax. It seems to me like garden-variety attention-seeking. The market value of being Mattress Girl was probably diminishing unless she could pull some kind of second act.
Siiiiiiiiiiigh.
I didn’t pay attention to her either, because the mattress thing just screamed of look-at-me-ism. Attention seeker seeks more attention.
Maybe she’ll write a book about how unfairly men are treated.
Hey Ophelia
I just upgraded to the latest version of Firefox and the first post I made to B&W today generated a notification that a number of social media trackers installed in the site had been disabled. These all appeared to be from Facebook and Sharethis. I don’t know if the presence of these things is something either of us can control, but thought I’d mention it. Maybe some of the more web savvy commentators can clarify.
Thanks Rob.
Yikes:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1189505264376000512
There was an article I saw yesterday or today regarding Women’s Liberation Front finding common cause with the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom. Politics does make strange bedfellows, and given the lack of left-wing organizations dealing with these issues such as men in women’s sports, I don’t blame them.
Then I saw a petition about keeping men out of women’s sports. It was from Alliance Defending Freedom. And I saw an article promoting the petition. It was from Life Site News. That’s a really tough bridge to cross. I’m not ready, personally, to associate with these organizations, even in the small act of signing a petition for a good cause, because of how many horrible causes they promote. I can’t do that. For WoLF, if they can achieve the policy goals through their combined efforts, I applaud them, but I can’t do that myself. Damn this whole mess.
I know. I won’t click on ANYthing at Life Site News, let alone share or sign. I’ve read one or two things at Heritage Foundation, but I don’t think I shared them either. Damn this whole mess indeed.
I’ve been told that that point of agreement we have with such political groups should be taken as evidence that gender critical feminism is in the wrong. I asked them if they supported TPP seeing as how Trump opposed it. Strangely, they never replied.
Here’s a rare piece of good news. Or, at least, I consider it as such.
Milo Yiannopoulos has released an audio recording of what he claims are comments made by Richard Spencer following the Charlottesville rally. It is exactly the kind of frothing-at-the-mouth racist tirade you would expect Spencer to make, unless of course you were one of the idiotic news editors or cable producers who figured that white men who dress well can’t be vicious neo-Nazis.
No word yet on whether or not Spencer disputes the authenticity, but it’s good news either way. If it’s genuine, then Spencer’s polite facade has been stripped away for good. If it’s fake, then Milo is so desperate for attention/money (they’re pretty much the same to him) that he’s resorted to lying about his fellow travellers.
And either way, the neo-Nazis are fighting among themselves.
Innnteresting.
Here’s a good article about the problems of the American presidency that are laid bare by the Trump administration.
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/once-trump-is-gone-the-u-s-must-completely-reform-the-presidency/11/10/
“But the political parties must also reform themselves. Their processes for choosing a presidential candidate should not be a free-for-all. Trump was able to waltz into the Republican primaries in 2016 with no long-standing membership of the party and no experience of public office. Similarly, independent Senator Bernie Sanders fades in and out of the Democratic Party as the electoral season dictates. These practices must be brought to an end.”
Indeed. Trump should never have been able to run except as Monster Raving Loony party candidate.
Harvey Weinstein hoping for a comeback?https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/04/entertainment/harvey-weinstein-upcoming-trial/index.html
Here’s his lawyer. Of course she has to say stuff like this:
But then:
Good.
Remember those conversations we’ve had about the normalisation of choking a woman during sex, even without prior consent or working through the obvious safety issues?
This…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/117069680/grace-millane-murder-trial-latest-updates
Grace Millane was a young British tourist to NZ. She was found buried and was murdered. I’m sticking with murdered, rather than the legally polite ‘allegedly’. It is an agreed fact that Grace and her killer hooked up via Tinder. There is CCTV footage of them around town, clearly having a good time. Grace went back to her killers apartment. They had sex. The killer alleges that Grace then died during a ‘perfectly normal sex act’. This hasn’t been detailed as yet (the trial started this morning), but involved some sort of choking or strangulation.
Normal my F***ing arse.
The defence case is that the killer panicked when he realised Grace was dead and disposed of her body. The Crown case is that he applied dangerous and deadly force and after killing Grace did a series of Google searches to work out exactly how to dispose of her body and clean-up the apartment. He watched porn and arranged another Tinder date at 8am. As the Crown Prosecutor says, hardly the actions of someone upset and distraught at having accidentally killed a young woman.
The point of my rant, other than the consequences for poor Grace, is that this ‘normalisation’ of an uncaring, dangerous and inherently misogynistic attitude towards another person seems to have taken deep root in society. Misogyny needs to be stripped from our gardens, root and branch. No tolerance.
Yes it does. I’ve been yelled at quite angrily by a woman for pointing out that strangulation is not safe.
Rob @111:
I’m not really answering your question, but here’s a privacy suggestion for everyone:
Definitely use Firefox rather than Chrome, or – better still – Tor (https://www.torproject.org/). The Tor browser anonymises browsing by routing web traffic through three random relays, encrypting it each time. This makes browsing a little slower, but a lot safer; sites won’t have access to your true IP address, browser footprint and more. It has other privacy features which you can read about on the site.
If you use Firefox, Chrome (Windows or Android) or Opera, you can install the Privacy Badger extension from The Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) which blocks tracking cookies and other trackers.
The EFF are the good guys and I trust them. They have various other privacy tools available at https://www.eff.org including HTTPS Everywhere, which tries to force sites to use encrypted traffic. They also have a surveillance self-defense guide which is extremely good. It contains a good how to/getting started guide here: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module-categories/tool-guides
The EFF is a non-profit organisation which relies on donations to help make the web safer. If you use their tools, please consider making a small donation if you can (note: I am not affiliated with the EFF).
I have a background in privacy research so if anyone around these parts has questions about this kind of stuff, I can have a stab at answering them.
#122 and #123
Gah, yes. Somehow kink-shaming has become less socially acceptable than strangling women.
*MORE* socially acceptable. I meant more.
President Supervillain: https://twitter.com/PresVillain
Twitter person puts Trump quotes into the mouth of comic super villain Red Skull, where they fit very well.
@122, 123, 125:
Yeah, even Dan Savage, who’s about as pro-kink a media figure as it gets, has essentially told readers that “breath play” (as the euphemism goes) is just too risky.
One bit of good news: a federal court in New York has just invalidated the Trump Administration’s proposed new rules expanding the so-called “Conscience Provisions” (a.k.a. the “rights” of medical providers to refuse to provide care that conflicts with their religious beliefs).
The opinion is here but is very dense. Haven’t seen a good summary/explainer yet.
Because this is invalidating a proposed new rule that had not yet taken effect, it’s fairly unlikely that the appellate court would issue a stay pending appeal — that’s usually done to preserve the status quo while the appellate court rules, and here the status quo is the Obama Administration’s rules. So there’s a decent chance that even if this decision is ultimately overturned, there will be a new administration in place.
Ah good. I’ll seek out the legal experts at CFI to see if they have a summary or press release.
Latsot @124, thanks for the tips. Up until now I’ve avoided Tor for fear of not being techy enough to implement it correctly. I’m getting tired of being ‘product’ though, so your info is great.
And Latsot @128, no I think you had it right the first time. Kink shaming has become less acceptable than strangling women without consent. Breath play my shiny metal arse. Grace Milane had so much pressure applied to her throat she bled through her nose. The pathologist apparently says this is because of the excess pressure of blood pooling in the head, unable to get back past the ‘obstruction’. From the article…
Goldsmiths? Wasn’t that one of the places where feminists were hounded for supposedly being anti-trans?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7659881/Goldsmith-University-academic-asked-students-call-Mx-Tippy-Rampage.html
And now the Trumpies are tweeting the name of the person they believe to be the original Ukraine whistleblower.
Of course they are.
So, Slate has a really, really shitty sex advice column called How To Do It. It presents a real dilemma for me: from Slate’s point of view, a click is a click, so they can’t tell that I sometimes read it just for the train wreck value as opposed to actually thinking the authors give good advice.
(Why is it shitty? Well, aside from the issue I’m about to complain about, I’m reminded of something Dan Savage once said when asked if he had any advice for young people who want to be sex advice columnists. After noting that he wasn’t interesting in encouraging competition, he said the one mistake that he noticed in most of the college newspaper sex columns was that the authors are constantly making it all about their own sex lives. Everything is about them and their personal sexual history and their kinks etc. and not about helping out readers. Anyway, “How to Do It” is a textbook example of that — the male co-author really wants you to know that he’s had a lot of dick in his life.)
But here’s why I brought it up.
In a column Dated October 10, 2019, a reader wants to know if it’s ok for her to just flat-out ask potential dates their penis size. The author responds by commiserating with her about how men will lie about it, but otherwise just offers advice on how to go about filtering for size, and ends with a you go, girl!:
Ok, fine, whatever — if something is important to you, sure, put it in your profile and ask about it. Fine. I basically agree with that, whether it’s size or hair color or religion or whatever.
Less than a month later, a reader says that although he’s open to dating trans women, he’s not interested in ones with a penis, and is it ok to ask.
I’m sure you can see where this is likely going. To be fair, the two columnists don’t flat-out call the writer a bigot, and oh-so-graciously acknowledge that it’s ok to have a preference when it comes to type of genitals…. BUUUUUTTTT… maybe she doesn’t need you to touch “her” penis? Shouldn’t you give people a try? Maybe you should grow as a person, and get to KNOW people as human beings instead of being so obsessed with genitals. “[I]nquiring about the contents of prospective sex partners’ underwear will turn a lot of people off. He’d be doing it to filter certain people out, but I think he’d more often be filtering himself out for asking the question in the first place” Etc.
I’m just amazed by the lack of recognition of the double standard.
Yeesh.
[…] an item for the Miscellany Room from Screechy […]
Perhaps this is old news, but I just came across it, and I don’t recall it being discussed here.
Apparently ContraPoints and Buck Angel have revealed themselves to be insufficiently woke according to their fellow trans people, for “binary privilege” and “transmedicalism” respectively. Summary here
My only comment is that this stuff must be exhausting.
I was just puzzling over a tweet saying cis people shouldn’t be in charge of trans medical issues, which made me wonder how…
…maybe I’ll do a post.
Nice, even military veterans are turning against Trump. Normally the military seems to be a reliable conservative vote in most nations, but I guess the veterans are that special subset of the military with spiralling medical bills. They really feel the neglect.
This goes on a lot more than most people think; a man used stalkerware on his ex-girlfriend’s phone to gain access to her car’s systems. He could start and stop the engine, lock and unlock the doors, roll the windows up and down, mess with the heating and air conditioning etc.
https://boingboing.net/2019/11/13/digital-misogyny.html
Of course, he could also track the car’s location. He could already track the woman’s phone’s location and – presumably – access her messages and notifications.
Spyware and other types of digital stalking get surprisingly little press. I’m willing to bet that has something to do with the fact that it is almost always something men do to women. The lack of press coverage is especially awful since stalkerware is now a factor in the majority of partner abuse cases.
In a previous job I read a lot of case studies about digital stalking and have some horrific stories to tell. They are all about bad endings due to men spying on women or parents spying on their children. Bad, that is (of course) for the women and children.
I was listening to a recent episode of the NPR show This American Life, titled “Small Things Considered”. The first act was about short children being given growth hormone, not because of a hormone deficiency, but because they were short and the parents wanted them to be taller.
Natural growth hormone was determined to have horrendous side effects; artificial growth hormone is too new to have reasonable data on long-term effects, but there are some expected problems. It is extremely expensive, so typically only wealthy people go this route, although for some reason some insurance companies cover it. There is no serious life consequence to being below average height. After all, in any group some people will be below average. But these parents bought into the social stereotypes.
What is worse, and what was the impetus for the show (an alarmed doctor contacted the show and was interviewed anonymously), is that some pediatric endocrinologists are pushing these treatments. “You don’t want your kid to be a Hobbit, do you?” A doctor they talked to referred to it as “cosmetic endocrinology”.
What was going through my head while listening to this was those pediatric endocrinologists who prescribe puberty blockers, another drug with unknown long-term effects, and also cross-sex hormones, based on scant information about the patients, and pushing stereotypes. I can’t say I have a good impression of pediatric endocrinologists right now.
You can listen to the episode here.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/687/small-things-considered
An all-trans hockey team, mixed sex. The experience level varies greatly, but two played hockey professionally. Those two, one male and one female, both played for women’s hockey teams; how interesting. I think it’s lovely that such a team exists, and perhaps there could even be mixed sex league with trans players, but that is quite different from having men play on women’s teams.
The article seems to advocate quietly in favor of breaking down sex segregation in sports. That would obviously reduce opportunities for women, but I wonder also about trans-identified males. A McKinnon wouldn’t be a “champion” if he had to compete against other males; would he support combining the competition, at the cost of his medals and records? I highly doubt it. Would he even have bothered with identifying as a woman, then?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/sports/for-16-transgender-hockey.html
Maybe we should start refer to the trans ideology as “Trans Religion” and the core trans beliefs as “Trans Doctrine”, as in “I do not believe in the popular Trans Religion with its doctrine that a woman is anyone who feels like a woman and that pronouns have magical powers of destruction.”
I bring this up as I just noticed the Atheist Community of Austin show Godless Bitches now features a trans host.
JFC
And speaking of whacky beliefs, anyone else run into Quantum Mysticism, or is that a Backwoods Pacific Northwest phenomenon?
I do believe my head is going to explode now that I’ve run into two individuals, a tree service guy and a construction dude, who believe they know more about Quantum Physics than, well, anybody.
Wow – that Godless Bitches thing.
It seems Godless Bitches closed down. (I did a bit of Googling.)
You ladies aren’t cranking out enough babies, and the New York Times is on it!
Ok, that’s probably an unfairly harsh summary of what is a fairly thoughtful and data-driven article. But I remain struck by how little examination there is of the underlying premise that “fewer babies bad, moar babies good,” and that the only question is to figure out what’s stopping people from reproducing more and fixing it.
Seven paragraphs in, we finally get the “to-be-sure” graf:
But that is immediately followed by:
The only attempt to resolve this question of whether it is choice or “unsavory circumstances” is to cite a single survey series that shows a growing gap between the number of children people say they want and the number they actually have. But I question whether people answer those kinds of surveys accurately. There’s enormous social pressure on people, especially women, to say that they want (more) children. Declaring that gosh, you’d really like to have more children, but your economic situation just doesn’t permit it right now, is often the polite way out of a conversation. (One thing I didn’t appreciate until my friends started having kids is how much pressure there is to have a SECOND child. After all, you don’t want your kid to be a — gasp! — “only child,” do you? The prejudice against only children is truly striking. And I live in a secular, blue area, so this isn’t some religious quiverful stuff.)
Re #148
Interesting article, thanks. I had read a related article recently, and both articles took it as obvious that a declining world population was a bad thing. That is, if the population declines for reasons, those reasons are clearly problems because they caused population decline. It seems out of the question to cheer the reduction in the number of people in the world. Rather than thinking about how to manage with an aging, declining population, they are concerned about avoiding it.
It’s something that jumps out at me in Orwell’s writing – he takes it for granted (and it comes up often) that declining population is terrible and must be reversed. Of course he wrote in the aftermath of The Great War and then during the next one, and the death tolls were enormous. But he also wrote about spreading suburbia and the despoliation of the countryside, so you’d think he’d make the connection.
Yes, I can see how a sudden and drastic population decline would be a problem — a massive increase in the ratio of retirees-to-workers would strain retirement benefits and resources generally. But we’re not talking about some Children of Men scenario, but a gradual drop-off. Can anyone really say that the world would be a terrible place if the global population in 2100 is 10 billion instead of 30? Or 100?
It’s plainly in part flat-out racism. A lot of people are weirdly terrified that ‘they’ are ‘out-breeding’ us and that’s bad for some reason.
According to a post of PZ’s today, apparently spiders have feathers.
Further to me @122 re the trial of the killer of Grace Millane.
Guy’s been found guilty of murder after a jury deliberation of 5 hours. It seems that when you lie about having had a dead girl in your apartment, when you last saw her, whether you noticed that she was dead, and instead there is evidence that you took photos of her naked dead body, watched porn, stuffed her in a suitcase and buried her in the woods, then cleaned up your apartment and went on a tinder date (where you tell the next girl a story about knowing someone who accidentally choked a girl during sex); no-one believes you’re innocent.
I expect there’ll be an appeal, but for now the world is a slightly safer place.
Rob @ #154 – Good news. I haven’t been actively following the trial, but I have come across the odd report here and there. Something I noticed was that every report told me about the victims sexual preferences (real or alleged, who knows) as if those had any bearing on whether or not guy had murdered her. That list of things that make guy look like a murderer? I think I heard the one about how he went on another date while the body was in his apartment. Which is the one thing that (at a stretch) might be plausible if he was trying to pretend that someone else came along and killed her while he was gone.
I really want to be pleased that the the-victim-was-not-a-nun-defense didn’t work. I’m just worried that it might have worked if the perpetrator hadn’t consistently acted like some kind of fictional serial killer. And it pisses me off that only the first of those two things seemed to be worth reporting.
@AoS #153:
https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?identification=Feather-Legged-Spider
;) Yeah, I know they aren’t feathers.
But then PZ seems to think that spiders have sexes and that their biology determines which one they are. This is such a crazy and forbidden idea that perhaps he really does think spiders have plumage.
latsot, there are four comments on his post; one suggesting the spider pictured is disgusted (at PZ?), one saying the spider is abused, mine questioning whether spiders have feathers, and one asking if spiders can fly. Not a sycophant in sight.
No doubt OB will cover Trump’s early-morning 55 minutes of ranting on Fox and Friends today, but this part sums the orange buffoon up perfectly:
Yep, this is the US president, live on national television, after basically making an unscheduled phone call and taking over the programme for just shy of an hour. His vanity knows no bounds.
*there’s that ‘no angel’ thing again, his new favourite go-to insult when he’s got nothing real to accuse people of.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2019/nov/22/trump-news-today-live-impeachment-hearings-democrats-2020-election-latest-updates
Yes, I just listened to that one, and several others. Gaaaaaaaaaaah
Catwhisperer, the defence lawyer was in a very tight bind. Since it was an undisputed fact that his client had killed Grace the choice was murder or manslaughter. New Zealand is a small country and a pretty young tourist vanishing while celebrating her birthday was big news for a long time. There was no hope of getting a jury of functioning adults who hadn’t seen at least some news reports. So instead he chose to make an initial statement emphasising that Grace was not at fault and they would not be attacking her choices or preferences. So far so good. The defence team then walked right up to the line by demonstrating that Grace had experimented with mild choking with partners in the past, although at least one witness testified that she was very cautious and had both safeword and tap out signals prearranged and didn’t trust any old person to do that with.
I’m pretty sure that in another time (not that long ago) or with a less sympathetic victim, a defence team would have engaged in scorched earth slut shaming.
At the end of the day, maybe Grace did ask to be choked, but as the prosecutor or judge pointed out (I forget which), a person cannot consent to be murdered and consent to be choked ends on loss of consciousness. Bedsides, there was a mountain of behaviour from Grace’s killer that didn’t add up to a distraught and panicked accidental death.
The RSS feed for comments here appears to be broken. Rather than seeing comments, I’m seeing blog posts, but with an author of one of the comments listed. This is just over the last day or two. It may be something broken on my end, but I thought I’d check. Has anyone else experienced a problem?
Oh, for crying out loud.
As this is the second time that Ohio legislators have been told by obstetricians and gynecologists that the procedure does not exist then it’s probably safe to say that the bill is a back-door way of banning surgery to remove ectopic pregnancies altogether. I’m sure their ‘logic’ will be to leave it in the hand of God. I’m equally sure that the reality will be the unnecessary deaths of many women.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/29/ohio-extreme-abortion-bill-reimplant-ectopic-pregnancy
I saw that. It’s one of those things at the “introduced” stage as opposed to the “passed” stage…but still. It takes the breath away.
They won’t be satisfied until they’ve criminalised all women’s medical services, will they?
I attempted to visit during the downtime of your blog, and came back again to see that it was fine. I figured you made an edit of some sort to the site which caused a bit of downtime.
…And then I saw the change you made. No more ‘categories’ pulldown menu directly over the previous article button! That goddamn categories menu clashed with my cursor more times than I can count, but now my foe is defeated and I am victorious.
I didn’t update anything, it was Josh Larios the heroic volunteer webmaster and host who has been keeping B&W running for nigh on a decade now.
I promised Ophelia that I’d write a review of Kate Smurthwate’s York gig and entirely failed to deliver.
That was partly because my first thought was “it was really good, you should definitely go to the next one if you can” which is a fairly piss-poor review. My second thought was to treat it like I used to peer review papers when I was an academic but I was well known for being harsh, perhaps unnecessarily so. So much so, apparently, that I was once at a committee meeting for some conference or other and eventually realised that the “right fucking bastard” reviewer everyone else was complaining about was me. Forgive me for holding fellow scientists to an impossibly high standard while I use the uproar to try to sneak under the fence with my mediocre work.
Anyway, I should probably do neither of those things and just say what happened.
Kate’s gig took place in the immediate aftermath of some Facebook misogyny so braying that it was simultaneously almost impossible to believe and entirely expected. Kate gets called “bitch” a lot on Facebook and other sundry internet places so she called her tour “Bitch”, intending to talk about that. Facebook was entirely sanguine about the bitch-calling business but decided that Kate’s calling her own gig “Bitch” violated their community guidelines so they refused to advertise the York one even though Kate had paid them to do that. Consequently, the show wasn’t well-advertised.
Yeah. Like I said, almost impossible to believe but at the same time entirely expected. It’s why I went to the show. I’ve seen Kate perform before and am a big fan of her telling off religious idiots on those Sunday morning god shows we don’t seem able to rid ourselves of so I would probably have gone to the gig anyway but I hadn’t heard about it until Facebook STREISAND’D it. York is half an hour south of where I live so the ticket sold itself.
The show was upstairs in The Artful Dodger, a pub that, to be fair, Fagin himself would feel comfortable doing business in. There was an excellent dog who seemed to live there. I think he was trained to stare at people playing the fruit machine, basically daring them to put more money in. When they ran out of money he came to be stroked by me. He was no Bullseye but he cheered me up no end. I’d forgotten that all pubs in York smell of the river when it has been raining, which is to say they smell of sewerage and not-Bullseye distracted me from that with his antics.
The pub was fairly rancid and the beer wasn’t good, but the gig was upstairs, through a portcullis. The upstairs was kind of Downton Abbey but with cheap electric heaters in violation of every health and safety rule ruled. It was nice, but there weren’t a lot of people there, presumably because of the Facebook business. There was quite a lot of trying to make the projector work. Part of me wanted to point out that in the hundred or so computer science conferences I’ve been to and the hundreds more CS meetings, the projector never worked either and you’re usually better off without the bugger. But it being sorted out was fun and friendly. People teetered around on a ladder pressing buttons, that alone was worth the price of the ticket.
Then the gig started with a support act, Andrea Louise Watson (@andanina) who was very good. She was introduced as someone who had been to one or more of Kate’s stand-up classes. I don’t know whether Kate is a good teacher but Andrea was funny. Highlights included a story about how – when she had to slam on her brakes – she was most worried about whether her vibrator would roll to the front of the car. It probably isn’t the sort of story even I would tell in front of my elderly mother, but Andrea’s mother was there in the front row obviously and rightly proud of her daughter. If Andrea does other gigs, go and see her if you can.
Then it was Kate’s turn. She was very animated. She said some things that many people in the audience didn’t seem to know how to react to. It wasn’t calculatedly ‘edgy’ stuff, it was anecdotal, all the time referring back to the hateful idea that women aren’t supposed to say that kind of thing. It was fun to watch people try to decide whether or not it’s OK to say it. A big part of the routine was Kate putting on a bitch dress – as defined by the likes of Disney and Facebook. It hammered home the point in the way Kate always does.
It was a good gig. From my perspective better because it was small, gathered around the health-and-safety-violating electric heaters. Kate probably had an entirely different perspective because she presumably wasn’t paid as much as she should have been for a solid performance which she obviously and rightly enjoyed.
Kate is as smart and funny as any other comic I’ve seen and she’s not fucking about. Her anecdotes aren’t jokes, they’re descriptions of having fun and the hostile reactions people seem to have about, mostly, female sexuality.
All the stars, go and see Kate if you can. Andrea too.
Wait, latso?
ffs.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sarah-pitlyk-judge-fertility-treatment_n_5de69777e4b0913e6f865cb6
A conservative judicial nominee is being criticized for making statements critical of fertility treatments and surrogacy. What she’s quoted as saying sounds mostly reasonable to me: commodification of gestation, that sort of thing. I’m troubled by the association with opposition to abortion; those are different issues. The argument is made (by some quoted in the article) that a judge who has personal disagreements with a plaintiff can’t judge fairly; I think that’s absurd.
Interesting; thank you. I see she opposed “a California statute that protects the right to assisted reproductive technology like in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and gestational surrogacy.” How can there be a right to gestational surrogacy? Maybe that’s just sloppy wording and the statute isn’t that bonkers, but if it is…it’s awful.
Apologies that this is a little off the usual subjects but we’ve talked about this kind of thing a couple of times and it might be of interest to some: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/04/fundamental-critique.html
It’s the old problem of training bias in machine learning and the general impossibility of predicting problems or understanding the conclusions made by AI systems. AI isn’t going to kill us all by making terminators as people like Elon Musk (and even Stephen Hawking) have excitedly claimed but it has every chance of plunging us into a surveillance nightmare and crippling our financial systems. And not even necessarily because evil people are trying to do that; it’s even more likely that we’ll sleepwalk into it because we haven’t stopped to ask whether we should be using poorly-understood algorithms for this kind of stuff.
This article takes a very slightly more nuanced approach than the usual garbage-in-garbage-out take, asking whether these are algorithms that really deserve to be built, given the potential threat to little things like freedom, safety, ability to feed ourselves and so on.
Well quite. We’re too often blinded by the obvious flaws in AI systems that we don’t stop to ask ourselves why we’re building them in the first place and whether we should.
As I say when I give talks about this stuff, widespread CCTV coverage isn’t as big a problem as a lot of people think. It’s as creepy as hell and we should think very hard about where to deploy it, how to use it and why, but if it’s being used to monitor a vulnerable area or used after a crime to gather evidence, then it might be a reasonable trade-off. Where it gets seriously harmful is when you add in automatic face recognition and/or automatic licence plate recognition because it becomes so much easier for authorities to create a narrative that makes an individual they don’t like or anyone of unapproved sex or colour look guilty. Guilty of what? Well, it doesn’t matter. You can make up the crime to fit the ‘evidence’ all at the click of a mouse. It’s one thing to say that latsot was at the scene of a crime, quite another to look backward and forward across however many cameras it takes to make me look guilty.
In some areas of the US local police forces have a deal with Amazon that lets them access footage from those horrible ‘smart’ video doorbells, to keep the footage forever and to share it with (and sell it to) whomever they like for whatever purposes they see fit. Again, it’s one thing for a householder to volunteer footage from their camera, quite another for police to swoop in and take whatever they like.
The article mentions the case of an Indian credit scoring system which lowers the score of people who are politically active. How easy would it be for a government to deny credit or healthcare or insurance to undesirables, in perpetuity? The opportunities for abuse are unlimited.
Here’s a slightly less sinister case, but a good example of how we’re blithely allowing algorithms to take over functions they have no business taking over: Because Facebook is genuine proper cartoon-super-villain evil, some of its employees have a problem. Family members take them to task about their role in The Evil and ask awkward questions. There are two possible ways to deal with this situation, guess which one Facebook chose:
1. Stop being and doing evil.
2. Write an algorithm to provide workers with approved answers to awkward questions about why they are working for an evil corporation.
Go on, guess.
@Ophelia, #170:
Shit, yeah. We can hope that it means a right for women to be surrogates if they want to be rather than that people have a right to force women to have babies for them but…look in sheer, blank system error at the world we live in and tell me you’re not already half convinced it’s the latter.
Phrasing things as having a “right to sex” or a “right to surrogacy” is a claim to someone else’s body. Not the body of any specific person, but still, it is a claim to someone’s body. The right to ask? Sure, but that’s less snappy.
This is too funny not to share.
The odious Giliell took her kids to see Frozen 2. One of the songs is a duet, Show Yourself, by the character Elsa and an unseen female. Desperate to insert her wokeness into everything, Giliell interprets the scene:
Queer? Hmmmm. Commentor M. Smith put it perfectly.
. Ouch!
https://freethoughtblogs.com/affinity/2019/12/01/i-watched-frozen-2-and-i-liked-it/
That qualifies for an amused snort.
Latsot @171, that’s interesting (as always). I’m not guessing how Facepalm behaved. For one it’s too predictable to be a fun game and secondly it’s just depressing. They’re genuine proper cartoon-super-villain evil in that really unfunny kind of way.
And now a moment of wtf from a commenter in PZ’s latest post on trans anything:
It is now canon on Pharyngula, a biologist’s blog, that there is no sex binary.
What even IS sex, knowutImean? Pass the bong.
@Holms:
This stuff gets more and more difficult to parse every week. Perhaps I should identify as Theoretically Gay but I can’t work out whether that would favour heterosexual people or whether that’s good or bad
Oh and something I should have mentioned in my previous comment: the topic of PZ’s post is that there is to be no further dissent on his blog regarding trans theory. Not even an exaggeration.
Cis privilege:
An Indian woman alleges that she was gang raped by two men. She filed charges, and on the day of a court hearing, she was grabbed by five men – including the two accused rapists – and beaten, stabbed, doused in kerosene and set alight. She died.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50697139
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-rape-victim-set-on-fire-dies-hospital-uttar-pradesh-a9236851.html
Obviously, women need to identify their way out of this asap.
Something about a war on Christmas: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1198970/I_Am_Jesus_Christ/
The blurb is great:
Thank goodness it is realistic.
I know the game hasn’t been released yet but the sequel practically writes itself:
Famous Man 2: The Second Coming.
The cinematic trailer is going to be great. Personally, I’m picturing Jesus armed with a nail gun shooting an outline of silver nails around the pope who is supplicated in prayer against the Sistine Chapel door. Then Jesus pulls a vial of holy water from his utility belt of thorns, bites off the cork and throws it toward the pope. We see it spinning over and over…. and then fade to black. There’s a voiceover saying “Vengeance is mine sayeth The Lord” in that proper growly movie trailer voiceover voice. Then the credits come up and a satanic voice says “No, I cast you out, motherfucker.”
The gameplay is almost irrelevant at this point.
Trump’s judges continue to chip, chip, chip away at abortion rights. Lower courts are essentially ignoring existing precedent, and the Supreme Court won’t step in because the conservative justices are fine with it, and the liberal ones don’t want to force the issue and generate nationwide binding precedent.
I was just about to do a post on that…as soon as I can ungrit my teeth and unclench my fists.
According to Mother Jones, conservatives are “going after the kids” in regard to trans issues. Not protecting the rights of girls, not protecting kids from unnecessary and potentially devastating medical intervention. And it must be “conservatives”, because they are of course the only people who challenge gender ideology; indeed who even call it an ideology. What an infuriating article.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/the-conservative-war-on-transgender-rights-has-reached-a-new-low/
Here’s one of those stories where my reaction is (1) this shit should never have been happening; but (2) it’s good that it’s being fixed.
An atheist nurse in Canada was diagnosed with a substance abuse problem. In order to keep his job, he was required to follow his assigned doctor’s recommendations — which included Alcoholics Anonymous. The nurse offered to participate in secular alternatives, but was told that the union only allowed 12-step programs. He stopped going to AA (while using alternative treatments, apparently with success), was fired, and sued for human rights violations.
His case just settled, and part of the agreement is that his employer (the agency in charge of Vancouver-area hospitals and clinics) will no longer require participation in 12-step programs.
The linked article already has over 1,000 comments. I can just imagine. People get really, really angry online when you question AA.
Oh, good one, thank you. The lock AA has on these things infuriates me.
AA has become a matter of religious dogma in itself. Even questioning whether there is a suitable alternative is cause for figurative heresy charges.
Grumbling in public. I learned that what used to be the Montgomery Women’s March will henceforth be called the March For Our Rights. As some of the organizers are key activists for reproductive rights, I am reminded that a year or so ago the Lady Parts Justice League changed their name to Abortion Access Front. Women can’t have anything for themselves anymore.
WHAT?? Is that true?
Re the name change from LPJL to AAF:
https://www.aafront.org/lady-parts-justice-league-name-change/
Re the Montgomery Women’s March, the last one was January of this year, and the one for next year is in the planning stage under the new name. I don’t see anything public I can provide about the new name.
#182 latsot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IG6ac5m7k4
And, I see that the UK has decided to fuck itself. Countdown to Scotland leaving the Union… place your bets!
For those interested, here is Douglas Murray being interviewed by Kim Hill on RNZ. Full interview is about 47 minutes. I only caught the end my self, so have just started listening from the beginning. I’m not a Murray fan. Based on the little I’ve heard so far, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get to the odd kernel of truth. He does manage to cloud those kernels with an overlay of ‘your view bad, my view good’.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018726945
And if you want to hear Kim Hill reading listener feedback (often entertaining, especially if you’ve listened to the interviews), the link is below (from 6:00). There’s a good comment from shortly after 08:04 or thereabouts. The comments run through to about 10:30.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018726951
I really do suggest adding Hill to your weekly listening habits.
This is only partly true but an excellent song for our times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARr2l4TLDsE
One of the inmates has been given a blog over at the asylum. One of the early posts makes what I consider a good point: harming people as a punishment is inhumane and needs to be binned yesterday, even for the worst of crimes such as murder.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/impossibleme/2019/12/12/justice-demands-you-feel-better/I expressed my agreement, but also pointed out that this clashed with a comment made earlier on PZ’s space; the comment being an open endorsement of summary beatings for the fascists, i.e. the far right.
Apparently pointing out logical inconsistency is a bad thing, because I was immediately banned.
Also, disagreeing with a blog owner is a) belligerent and b) tactically foolish. The former is obvious – any pushback is bad in the eyes of a narcissist – but the latter is quite interesting. The reasoning was not stated outright, but was strongly implied: posting on someone’s blog is a tactical error because that person can simply hide or edit any disagreeing comment.
Pretty revelatory if you ask me.
Oh and as to the subject of my comment. Apparently, the points ‘harm as punishment is never justified’ and ‘summary beatings are can be justified’ don’t contradict at all! The reasoning ran as follows: those are two completely different things.
(beat)
Fucking wow.
I don’t understand how you can be a functioning adult if this is how you describe yourself, even before reading what Holms pointed out.
Holms,
You missed the part where the blogger said it was self evident that anyone who disagrees must suffer from a traumatic brain injury. I didn’t, in my comment there. We’ll see if I get TERF’D out too.
I take it the answer is yes, since I don’t see your comment there.
[…] Holms for the […]
@Holms
“Oh and as to the subject of my comment. Apparently, the points ‘harm as punishment is never justified’ and ‘summary beatings are can be justified’ don’t contradict at all! The reasoning ran as follows: those are two completely different things.”
I guess you could consider the beating up of nazis as political violence with the goal of denying them access to public spaces rather than punishment.
One of those “only in America’ things popped up in my social media…
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/homeowner-says-swastikas-confederate-flags-are-not-racist-others-denounce-them-as-symbols-of-white-supremacy
How about some good news? Study reports that Millennials are showing no signs of returning to religion as they age.
I always thought it was sad when people declared that they personally had no use for religion, but intended to send their kids to church anyway because it was important for their children’s moral instruction. It seems like a failure of imagination to say that you can’t figure out how to teach morality to your kids without dragging in a god in whom you don’t even believe. So it’s encouraging to see that Millennials — the oldest of whom are raising kids of their own now — are less likely to return to church. (This is in addition to the fact that some of them were never raised religious to begin with.)
Hey, Holms, apparently I’m your BFF. How do I know this? Giliell says so on abbeycadabra’s blog:
Hi bestie!!!!
What actually happened doesn’t closely resemble Giliell’s account but I won’t defend myself against nonsensical accusations.
Apart from the one where I’m accused of “weaponising friendliness”. What kind of tortured martyr bullshit complex does someone need to have to decide that a friendly person is an aggressor? Is it really so difficult for Giliell to accept that I was genuinely being friendly and didn’t realise that they pre-hated me so much that friendliness is violence? Seriously, Giliell, I haven’t spent more than three minutes of my life thinking about you. A lot less time than you spend thinking about yourself, obviously.
Wait a minute….
How does Giliell know my pronoun?
Oh that’s an easy one. Only good people get to have bespoke pronouns.
And you know someone is good because they have the fancy pronouns? It all makes sense.
Hey man, we still on for that weekend thing? Quick note, you’ll have to remind me where you live, what nation/continent that is on, what your name is, details like that, normal BFF stuff.
Anyway, what I really appreciate about Giliell’s post is that she clearly articulates that in order to comment on her blog, you not only have to refrain from disagreeing with TRA theory on her blog, you also have to refrain from disagreeing with it *anywhere*, no matter what the conversation may actually be about. Thought purity is the rule there.
latsot, Holms, bearing in mind Abby’s statement regarding brain damage*, with the clear implication that such a malady negates any argument the sufferer might offer, you might enjoy this bit from PZ today, talking about Rush Limbaugh’s dismissal of Greta Thunberg
I’m sure that Abby will be able to tell you that it’s different in this case because it’s…erm…different in this case.
*not that I’m saying Greta is brain damaged, of course. Hang on, what am I thinking? This isn’t FTB where the leapers to false conclusions and masters of bad-faith interpretations live. This is B&W, where the people understand context and nuance.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/12/18/why-hasnt-rush-limbaugh-collapsed-into-deflated-pile-of-canvas-sticks/
So it has come to this: the view that there are exactly two sexes and that sex is an immutable trait in humans is “incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others.” (sec 84, https://drive.google.com/file/d/12P9zf82TicPs2cCxlTnm0TrNFDD8Gaz5/view )
My brain is semi-exploded.
Everything from that paragraph onward is worth reading—if you’re in the mood for dystopian horror.
Is there a reason this site is using a certificate for “slowerthandirt.com”/”slowerthandirt.org” rather than its proper domain name? Seems kinda sketchy.
Like, for real, though. Getting a proper Let’s Encrypt cert is rather easy.
Holms @208.
I was a long-time contributor at Affinity, I had some wonderful private emails with Caine. Although we never met, we shared quite a lot of both our struggles via email, and so her death hit me hard. I was pleased that the blog was to continue. I even felt an “affinity” developing with Carol (Voyager) and Gilliel.
Then, one day, I wrote one comment, on another blog. Giliel saw it and I was TERFed at once. No appeal, just pack your bags and go.
Even had it been done to another, and not to me, I would have been furious at Gilliel as one of Caine’s firmest rules was “If it was on another blog, it doesn’t get litigated here”. How quickly people change when you give them the keys to the palace.
I believe the downward slide began when Ed Brayton left, and I still follow him at Patheos. Mano and Marcus are the only two now worth reading, and even Marcus can be an ass hat when he comments elsewhere.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/12/23/a-science-writer-who-doesnt-understand-the-difference-between-binary-and-bimodal/
Wherein PZ pretends he doesn’t know why GC feminists refer to “biological sex”. He scoffs, saying “OF COURSE sex is biological, what else would it be?” while refusing to acknowledge that people refer to “biological sex” because so many people are conflating sex with gender or not as it suits them. We now need to qualify terms that were previously widely accepted because the waters are being muddied by people who claim they only want crystal clear waters, the very crystalist.
It’s amazingly childish, especially when he himself – a biologist – blurs the distinction between sex the descriptor of biological reality and sex the thing best done (as I’m certain all my partners past and present would agree) in the dark.
He says things like this:
He goes on for a while in this vein.
And he explains his extraordinary take on Jo Swinson before writing condescendingly about binomial and binary distributions. It’s bullshit of the exact sort he’s been critical of for decades; presto-changeo shifts in definition and conflation of things that never ought to flate and an ending that I won’t spoil. You’re definitely going to want to see it for yourselves.
I won’t go on. Even though this is as rich a vein of bullshit as i’ve seen in the posts of any creationist, I’m not selfish; there is a lot to dissect in that post.
So, Rudy Giuliani huh.
Merry Wednesday, and a happy new etc. everyone!
And yes, that PZ post, wow. I facepalmed too hard to read it fully, but in addition to the (probably) wilful equivocation between the meanings of ‘sex’, there is also the silly pretense that someone else is confused regarding bimodal/binary distribution.
Sex is bimodal if we define it as every unique permutation of sexed anatomy that has ever been discovered (you may think I am exaggerating, but I have had that exact definition thrown at me on… Intransitive’s blog, I think). On the other hand, it is binary if we look at it as a reproductive strategy inherent to our species. Which is what it is.
Increasingly, my impression is that they make headway with people that don’t know better by intentionally obscuring what is known and accepted through deliberate dishonesty.
Holms,
PZ has completely lost the plot. His underpants are upon his head, pencils in his nose. Nothing about that post makes any sense at all. I’m struggling to find a fallacy he doesn’t employ in that one single post.
We’ve known for years that he’s prepared to throw people of integrity and integrity itself under any bus he can locate but this post is deranged beyond even that.
Plus, he’s lying. He’s just fucking lying. He knows why people have to say “biological sex” and he’s lying about what they mean about it.
So I was looking through a nearby community college’s spring course listing.
The jerkface in me wants to take the class.
I say go for it. And, of course, tell us all about it.
One of FTB s new bloggers has already got the hypocrisy down pat.
So far, so woke. Alert to all the -isms. Alert to all the -ism’s, but apparently not understanding what they actually mean. That’s the only way I can imagine that a person thinks that criticizing the stupid things that others say can be classist or ableist, but can also – in the very same post, no less – casually drop this little beauty:
Fucking spaz out! Possibly the most offensive of all ableist terms, just casually tossed in there.
Mind you, the blogger has three posts up as of now, and to be honest the quality of writing is terrible. A sample sentence;
It must be from the bottom of a barrel from where these new bloggers are being scraped from below. ;-)
https://freethoughtblogs.com/marissa/2019/12/23/marissa-explains-it-all-2-overheard-at-the-zoo/
Weird. I wonder what the point is of adding so many bloggers of…mediocre talent. Why quantity over quality?
I call it viewpoint reinforcement. Or perhaps viewpoint immersion. Get as many people on a platform as possible repeating the same dross, telling each other how wise and scholarly they are, and eject those with incompatible views. By doing so they convince themselves that they are the mainstream and that dissent is the fringe – a neat reversal.
So I was watching (and commenting on) Benjamin Boyce’s latest video, which was part of a discussion with Jane Clare Jones. The thing that I found frustrating is/was the seeming inability of Boyce and many commenters to understand the distinction between the “masculine” as idealized by binary, oppressive patriarchy and the masculine (as in the set of tendencies and traits naturally more prevalent to males). Even after JCJ said explicitly that it is important to distinguish between the masculine and the patriarchal masculine.
Why is this so difficult, I wonder. Is it simply a failure to adopt the principle of charity and take understanding as one’s primary goal rather than rhetorical victory?
the most recent
>> name of next post buttons
are not existing on my iPad
…..
and
BRNIG BAKC PERVEIW
please
He’s late to the party, but Comey is now openly calling for a conviction in the senate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/james-comey-the-four-stages-of-being-attacked-by-donald-trump/2019/12/30/5542c40a-2b0f-11ea-9b60-817cc18cf173_story.html
Upon a quick reread, I see that I took his wording to be stronger than it really was. I wish he would come out and say it, rather than leaving it as an implied support of conviction.
Some good news for a change:
Biologist Anne Dagg who is in addition to many other things a vocal feminist critic of evolutionary psychology has received the Order of Canada.
https://boingboing.net/2020/01/02/love-of-shopping-not-a-gene.html
Harvey Weinstein just wants to remind everyone that he’s still an asshole. His defense team is circulating a 57-page PowerPoint presentation to journalists containing various defense theories.
It’s like a roundup of all the classics, such as:
1. It’s not rape if there aren’t scars or bruises!
2. She opened the door to him while wearing a nightgown, a.k.a the “you fucked up — you trusted us!” defense
3. Some of the women who were intimidated into silence by his power also spoke politely with him
4. Some famous dude says she’s a lying slut.
5. Hey, Harvey didn’t rape everyone. He left Meryl Streep alone!
6. They’re all dirty sluts.
7. Harvey gives money to charity. Would a rapist do that?
I recently finished Why Truth Matters, and enjoyed it very much. It talks a lot about philosophy and philosophers.
The atheist movement, and then even more the gender-critical pushback against gender ideology, have led me to read many more books and articles on philosophy and by philosophers. I have come to appreciate the logic and precision, and, perhaps more important, to recognize that there is great disagreement among philosophers and lots of crap peddled under the banner.
It’s funny; twenty-year-old me deliberately avoided philosophy, even going so far as to change my mind about taking linguistics courses in college because they moved Linguistics from Foreign Language to Philosophy. My (somewhat estranged) brother is a philosophy PhD, and his wife an ABD and former lecturer in the subject, so I verbally respected the field without any real understanding of what was involved. I’m glad to have at least a little genuine appreciation now. Some of the best and clearest material on topics of concern to me comes from those trained in philosophy.
Thank you.
Thank you back.
I see Stefan Molyneux is e-begging, claiming that people have to support him because what he’s said makes him unemployable. I struggle to find a shred of compassion or generosity for the asshole.
What could he possibly have said that would make anyone reluctant to employ him? [snort]
The misogyny? That can’t be it. The racism? Maybe. The white nationalist fascism? Again, maybe. I’d have to plump with him demonstrating himself to be an A Grade ignorant moron with a grotesquely overinflated ego, who also happens to be a racist misogynistic arse. I mean, who wouldn’t want to give him a highly paid, powerful position that get constant praise for no real work with a CV like that?
https://facebook.com/events/s/the-march-for-our-rights-2020/1024633511238640/?ti=cl
So, not about women’s rights anymore; rather about everybody’s rights. I understand the broad spectrum of rights curtailed by the Alabama legislature, but I think there is still value in a march about women’s rights.
There is, of course, the issue of rights conflict. The Alabama legislature has introduced a bill to require that student athletes at public schools compete according to sex, or, as it’s being phrased, “gender at birth”. This measure supports the rights of women and girls, but conflicts with the demands of trans activists. People on the pro-woman side of this and related issues will not be welcome at the march.
Virginia just passed the ERA, making it the 38th state to ratify the amendment. That puts it over the 3/4 threshold established in the Constitution, but there are still a couple of hurdles. First, Congress put a time limit on ratification, and the deadline passed long ago; second, five states have since rescinded their approval, meaning that, if those rescissions are valid, it’s still five states shy. The Constitution is silent on both issues, and the courts haven’t ruled, so this is probably going to the Supreme Court.
He could run for President….
Oh, God. You’re right. 2036?
This being Alabama, today is jointly Martin Luther King Day and Robert E. Lee Day. Sigh.
https://www.alreporter.com/2020/01/20/today-is-robert-e-lee-day/
Good lord. Brilliant mashup.
Explain to me again why the State has an official holiday commemorating a traitor who lost?
Well, whaddya know? For all of her pronunciations on all things vaginal, it turns out that G. Paltrow doesn’t know what a vagina is. It took the 90-year-old Betty Dobson to educate her.
Which I suppose leads us to the all-important question; just which of her lady-bits do her candles really smell of?
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jan/24/the-goop-lab-review-gwyneth-paltrow-netflix-vagina
Nina Paley had a great blog post about the Left eating itself, and people reducing everything to sound bites and refusing to read books. She references a controversy at Spinster I apparently missed, the condemnation of Sheila Jeffreys and Political Lesbianism.
https://blog.ninapaley.com/2020/01/24/in-defense-of-books/
Basketball legend Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash. He had been accused of rape some years ago, and his defense centered around consent; the case was settled without going to trial. Amid all the praising memorials were some writers reminding people of the rape case, including Felicia Sommez of the Washington Post. She was suspended for her troubles. It does appear that WaPo is getting some appropriate grief about the suspension.
NYT on the suspension:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/business/media/kobe-bryant-washington-post-felicia-sonmez.html
Vox on the reaction to the suspension:
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/27/21100093/washington-post-kobe-bryant-twitter-sonmez-social-media-policy
Sackbutt, I read about this earlier today and was quite appalled. I understand people being discomforted at being reminded that a sporting hero had a questionable (at best) moment in his life. However, the job of journalists (and the right of anyone) is to remember the good and bad of any notable figure when they die. That’s part of putting the person into context. It seems possible that Sommez has been disciplined for the screenshot of her email inbox, but since all it did was to show examples of the abusive emails she has been receiving, I struggle to see the point. while senders full names are shown, email addresses are not.
Apparently it’s ok to abuse female reporters sometimes.
How to talk someone out of bigotry. To me, it reads very much like how to convert an atheist. There’s no consideration for the possibility that the other person is not exhibiting bigotry at all, maybe they have valid concerns, maybe they’re even right, maybe (gasp!) you’re wrong.
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/29/21065620/broockman-kalla-deep-canvassing
A solid take by Jonathan Pie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvm3xeO1lA0&ab_channel=JonathanPie
https://i.imgur.com/qcr4jCg.png
An excellent and detailed take on the Iowa caucus app fiasco by a guy who writes software for progressive political campaigns.
https://threader.app/thread/1224820389387223041
Did anyone else catch the Glinner post on Pharyngula? It was nothing special, just the usual sandbagging shitshow, but I found it nice that one of the worst commentators at least made a frank admission when responding to someone else:
I wonder if he even realises that he conceded the point.
Oops, foolish me hitting post so soon. But I won’t fisk the whole thing; suffice to say the whole thing was a mess, a series of embarrassing admissions and outright lies The above was just the opening salvo.
@Holms:
Porivil Sorrens goes on to say:
Safe? Well, nobody knows whether it’s safe. Safe how?
And reversible? How – by definition – can blocking puberty be reversible?
But… why would it matter that it’s reversible anyway, since Sorrens maintains that ‘children young enough to believe in Santa Clause’ are to fully believed when they say they’re in the wrong body? If those kids are automatically right, why would reversibility matter?
You’re right, Holms, it’s a mass of self-contradicting lies.
“Catholic Bishops Urge Parents to Reject Transgender Children”
https://occupythevatican.com/2020/02/04/catholic-bishops-urge-parents-to-reject-transgender-children/
The article actually shows the gist of the Vatican letter accurately. Along with some religious verbiage, the letter asserts the reality of biological sex, states that one cannot change one’s sex, and encourages parents to advise kids that there is nothing wrong with their bodies. From this, the article’s author somehow gets the idea that parents are to reject their children. One wonders if all other forms of disagreeing with children’s claims about themselves constitute rejection.
I dislike agreeing with the Catholic Church and the other religious organizations that signed the letter, but they are largely in the right here.
Seen on Twitter: a link to this 1941 Harper’s article discussing a macabre sort of parlour game — Who Goes Nazi? It’s not hard to recognize a young Donald Trump and even a Steven Miller type among the pseudonymous partygoers.
It’s probably a couple of years too late for a “Who Goes Trump” version — by now, we basically know what type of person is going to go Trumper.
I see the #SilentSham deal has been overturned and undone by the Judge. Says that Silent Sam always belonged to the UNC and there was no basis for the suit bought by NC SCV.
An example of sustained pressure and research by citizen activists, lawyers and the student newspaper paying off.
Jerry Coyne on sex being mostly binary (or at least bimodal):
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/14/a-defense-of-the-binary-in-human-sex/
I had hopes that the paragraph starting with
would involve a direct reference to PZ, but never mind, it was still good.
My wife is taking part in an event coming up at our library. A local human rights group is having a series of readings of works written by persecuted and imprisoned writers. She asked me to print out the piece she’s chosen to read. Call me melodramatic, but I found a little too much similarity between what is described in it and what I see reported here on B&W….Too many willing recruits ready to build the world described in the second half of this poem.
Mo feels like a woman: https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/lives/
Many of you have heard about the Alabama “anti-trans” bill. You can read the text of the bill here:
https://legiscan.com/AL/bill/HB20/2020
It provides essentially two things. One, public school student athletes must compete only on teams and activities designated for their sex or that are mixed-sex. Two, public school facilities and resources cannot be used for non-school events that violate the sense of item one.
I think the bill is poorly worded (for instance “biological gender” is an odd phrase), and I don’t see the point of item two. It’s also obvious that this is a “rile up the Republican electorate” bill like so many of the bills filed in Alabama. And it isn’t original; most of these things come out of one right-wing organization or another, and get filled in multiple states, and this looks like an earlier Tennessee bill.
Here is an article on the bill that I think captures the kind of rhetoric being used to oppose it and support it.
https://abc3340.com/news/local/proposed-alabama-law-would-ban-transgender-students-from-some-sports-teams
The headline talks about banning transgender athletes from teams, although the bill just directs that students be placed on teams by sex. An opponent is quoted as saying the bill “targets transgender and gender non-conforming youth”, although there is no language in the bill about gender-nonconforming people. Also the claim is made that there are very few trans athletes and none at an elite level, which is both false and misleading.
A proponent of the bill referred to people “born and raised with the benefit of testosterone in their system”; this obviously is talking about trans-identified males, and the name of the bill (GIRL Act) clearly shows the main purpose is keeping girls’ teams single-sex, but the bill text is about both sexes. The testosterone issue I think is simplistic, but there might have been other context.
As you might imagine, local civil rights groups are very much up in arms about this, and are making many inaccurate or misleading claims like the ones mentioned above.
Following up, here is an excellent letter from a woman supporting the Alabama bill (that says students should compete on teams according to sex). The woman was at one of the hearings, and had prepared remarks, but needed to discuss some of the proceedings with her daughter (a student athlete and also in attendance), and thus missed her opportunity. Her prepared remarks, her description of the hearing, and her amplification of the issue are all quite well done.
http://altoday.com/archives/32877-what-i-should-have-said-at-todays-hearing-for-the-girl-act
So the local college has purchased a new system to track housing applicants and in the configuration/customization phases have proposed many terms applicants can self select for sex/gender, but have seen fit to exclude the terms “male” or “female”.
Living in the dorms is a requirement for freshmen at this college and this system will be used to match applicants to roommates. Also, this college is struggling with dropping enrollment.
I can’t imagine what could go wrong.
Good lord.
Not The Evergreen College is it? Enrollment there has notoriously plummeted thanks to some woke follies.
Why is there no Preview?
Because WordPress forced an update which changed a lot of things and I have no techy know-how.
I thought you had someone for the techy stuff, Googling suggests it could be as simple as insertion of some PHP code, depending on what level of WP you are using.
@OB –
Yes, them. Seems like they’re hell bent on woking themselves out of existence.
One thing that might save that very liberal of liberal arts colleges is that their prez just announced retirement.
Found a link to this excellent primer article written by Dr Jessica Taylor on Dr Emma Hamilton’s (@FondOf Beetles) Twitter feed:
https://victimfocus.wordpress.com/2020/02/23/lets-talk-about-sex-and-gender-ideology/
Contents:
About the author:
That is indeed an excellent article, thanks for the link.
Thanks!
Just came across a Zuby update. Apparently he’s been suspended from Twitter. Someone by the Twitter handle of Pronoun Enforcer responded to his “Don’t be annoying” tweet by saying:
“I’m like 95% sure i’m sleeping with more women than you and this is terrible advice.”
Zuby’s response to this (which was apparently what got him into trouble with Twitter) was “OK dude…”
https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1233049839799156737
A number of responses saying “dude” is not misgendering, as it is used by many people to refer to people of either sex.
Oh God, I agree with Piers Morgan. Shoot me now.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/other-sports/119877954/piers-morgan-slams-kiwi-weightlifter-laurel-hubbard-womens-rights-to-basic-fairness-and-equality-are-getting-destroyed
This source is unfamiliar to me, but it alleges that the Trump admin may have brought the new coronavirus to USA through incompetence:
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/a-corrupt-response-and-cover-up-trump-admin-appears-to-have-sparked-coronavirus-outbreak/
And a more reputable source (in that I have heard the name) seems to agree:
https://mobile.twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1233149899446857729
I know, I did a post on it yesterday last thing. The Post and the Times were also reporting it, so quite reliable.
Great Flying Spaghetti Monster! The state bar association is asking this question on a survey:
“Do you identify as a member of the U.S. armed forces?”
Well, I FEEL like I’m a fighter pilot, does that count?
And yet, a couple of questions later, it just flat-out asks “What is your gender?” Maybe it’s just assumed that gender is based on identity. But then it lists as an option “transgender,” which I didn’t think was a gender category?
I must admit, I am tempted to put down “two-spirit,” as I am fond of both gin and whisky.
Ha! I’m sure “identifying as” is all it takes.
Saw a poster in a local bookstore advertising an International Women’s Day march. Looks like it’s being organized by an inclusive, intersectional Women’s Events Committee. The graphic at the top of the poster has a drawing of three people wearing sweat-shirts. One shirt shows the circle/slash NO symbol over TERFS + SWERFS; another declares that “Sex work is real work” (this one has some cute little hearts to lighten the mood). The third shirt says “Forget Ford! #not a leader”(refering to Ontario Premier Doug Ford). So nothing in the graphic specifically FOR WOMEN. It’s the invasion of the umbrella women!
So the poster is immediately disinviting GC feminists and anti-prostitution feminists in favour of men who think they’re women.
https://www.facebook.com/events/219849385706136/
Sigh.
Oh God, I agree with Piers Morgan. Shoot me now.
Ya see, I think this attitude is a prime symptom of the problems with our political discourse. The thinking that gets us here is very tribal and, in the Durkheimian sense, religious. In that respect, such cognition should be avoided. Treating someone who thinks ddifferently ad not merely mistaken but instead as morally bankrupt is what gets us our polarized society.
Yeah Nulius, I know what you mean, but honestly Morgan is a loathsome individual. If it makes you feel better I have close friends who vote for the National Party, which I do not. I just don’t feel the need to like agreeing with misogynist, racist entitled wanna be parts who think they’re better than everyone else.
Apparently the magic healing pools at Lourdes have been closed because of coranovirus.
Hahahahahahaha sorry hahahahahaha
Well that fits in nicely with the Pope cancelling his balcony-waving sessions to stop people gathering and spreading the virus. You’d think God could provide disease control at his own events.
More of that cis privilege for you: apparently, you can abuse women and be protected by the police force if you are a police officer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-51773425
Tracy King is writing a book!
You might know her as the producer of the animated version of Tim Minchin’s Storm (always worth another watch: https://youtu.be/HhGuXCuDb1U)
She also writes columns all over the place. I’ve known her since TAM London, which she organised and produced, back in the days when the Skeptic movement still had a veneer of respectability.
Blurb:
(https://www.thebookseller.com/news/transworld-wins-extraordinary-king-memoir-seven-way-auction-1195789)
Sounds good!
It sounds extraordinary. Thanks for the alert!
What is happening with all those children in cages?
Nothing good I’m guessing. As Ken white and many others involved in the ‘justice’ system have pointed out, this is also a terrifying prospect for anyone in a prison (both inmates and staff). In case anyone says that serves prisoners right, worth remembering that if you’re poor (and especially black), you can spend months or years in prison in the US while awaiting trial. It’s just shit all around.
I think our local health unit has made a rather big mistake, and it’s all around one word. They’ve opened what they’re calling a COVID-19 Assessment Centre at a local arena. What do you think would be happening at such a facility? If you answered “testing for COVID-19,” you’d be wrong. On the website the health unit is saying
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT THERE WILL BE NO TESTING DONE AT THE LONDON COVID-19 ASSESSMENT CENTRE
“Assessment Centres are out-of-hospital clinics where people can be seen by a healthcare provider for COVID-19 related concerns, rather than have them visit an Emergency Department, Urgent Care Centre or their family doctor’s office.”
They should have called them INFORMATION Centres. How many people who are aware of the existence of these centres, but not their actual mandate, are going to show up assuming assessment=testing? Unless they are diligent in enforcing proper spacing between those lined up to be seen, these are just going to turn into places where people will congregate and share the virus.
Hmm. I suppose the idea is to add a level of triage, so as to reduce the strain on facilities at the next levels. “Information” wouldn’t quite be right, because people would think it’s just pamphlets & stuff that you can get online.
Good point.
Also if it’s in a big space it probably thins out the contagion. I’ve been pondering this issue of needing medical help but fearing contagion at the place where the help is. Clever London.
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I present blog favorite Tom Lehrer’s Irish Ballad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47bKTtIwrO4
Hmm…. I’m sure this applies somewhere…
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/groups
There are now more than 1,000 cases in Canada. My city of London has declared a state of emergency. The number of confirmed cases here jumped by 6 overnight, for a total of ten active. Given that official figures always lag actual numbers of cases, we can expect more. The local health unit is no longer going to issue a media release for each new case, but provide a daily summary. The store where I work has now closed until further notice. I’m hoping that things were shut down here soon enough to avoid the worst of it. Time will tell.
In the meantime we’re safe at home, with enough food for a couple of weeks at least, if things get really bad and grocery stores are closed. I’ve got stuff I can do for work to keep earning money while the store is closed. My camera store is going to be launching a blog in the near future, and my boss likes the way I write, so he’s looking at me to help supply content. Others in my company have been laid off, so I’m lucky. I’m glad not to be going into the mall; I was getting nervous that I was entering a “hot zone” every morning. Maybe overdramatizing, but with the lag between “confirmed” cases and the real numbers of individuals actually already infected, I think a little paranoia wasn’t completely unjustified…
Very strange. Just a matter of waiting things out and seeing what happens.
Some Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) nurses are refusing to conduct Covid-19 swabs because they haven’t been provided with N-95 masks. They’ve been told that surgical masks are protection enough.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-nurses-masks-covid19-swabs-exposure-1.5505406
https://globalnews.ca/news/6714284/alberta-nurses-covid-19-masks/
So, NZ has just ordered entertainment and hospitality businesses closed with immediate effect. Everyone to go into lockdown from Wednesday for minimum period of 4 weeks. Supermarkets, petrol stations, medical centres, logistics companies and lifeline utilities only businesses that are allowed to remain open. We have maybe 2-4 weeks of work that can be done from home, then we start making some unpalatable choices.
We have 102 cases spread all over the country. So far all but 2 are travellers or immediate family of travellers, but the other two appear to be community spread with no known link to a traveller. This is our last ditch attempt to nip the spread in the bud.
Good luck NZ.
This inspires confidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjXc0-WL-mk
Goop (because of course she is) contributor doesn’t believe in “germ-based contagion”, having been “liberated” from that crazy view:
https://www.indy100.com/video/news/goop-contributor-suggests-coronavirus-isnt-real-rZcMK7eQ
She seems to believe that germs only harm you if you believe they do. This comes from her “understanding of the microbiome”, apparently.
Damn. An infected nurse in Italy killed herself to avoid infecting others. Undoubtedly there are or will be others.
https://nypost.com/2020/03/25/italian-nurse-with-coronavirus-kills-herself-amid-fears-of-infecting-others/
Ouch.
U.S. insists on calling COVID-19 “Wuhan virus” in G7 statement on combating its spread; communique scrapped:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/g7-covid-19-coronavirus-wuhan-pompeo-trump-1.5510329
An update on the Christchurch massacre from March last year. The shooter has just plead guilty to 52 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of committing a terrorist attack. His sentencing will be scheduled for sometime after the current Covid19 lockdown has been lifted so that victims and their families have the ability to attend and be with each other.
This was an unexpected development, but welcome.
Good to know.
Jim Wright;
Poor people can’t afford not to work: http://www.stonekettle.com/2020/03/fever.html
… This election is just about the shittiest shit to ever shit a shit.
So, Joe Biden may be more than just “Handsy Uncle Joseph”. Katie Halper put up an excerpt of her an audio interview with Ms. Reade. It’s not pleasant listening.
Jesus. I never wanted Biden but apparently we’re stuck with him, for reasons I will never understand. And now this. Brilliant, just fucking brilliant.
Of those talking heads who spent nearly four years saying we should believe women and railing against Trump’s talking about grabbing ’em by the pussy without waiting, what percentage do you bet will turn hypocrite to smear Reade and defend Biden for actually doing it? (If the story even gets any prime air time. A quick google search shows no hits on the big three news networks.)
I see a great many jokes being made about a “baby boom” during the year following this pandemic self-isolation period. I get it, lots of people are bored and have private time, and so have sex. And yes, there probably will be a “baby boom” from this. That’s troubling. I don’t imagine most couples are saying, “I’m bored, so let’s commit to make a drastic change to the course of our lives, agree to a minimum quarter million dollar expenditure in uncertain economic times, and plan to be responsible for another human being for decades.” Contraception is widely available, as is emergency contraception. Abortion is less available, but still an option. It is disturbing that the automatic assumption of the result of “stress sex” or “boredom sex” is babies. I wish childbirth as the result of deliberate decision were more common than it seems to be.
Btw, Kathleen Stock has just announced she’s no longer speaking at feminist events, and it sounds as if she’s just bowing out of movement feminism altogether (including GC.) Had time to think while recovering from The Virus. She’s sick of the pressure.
https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1243867754765131776
I saw that. Gave me a sad.
Reminds me of the exodus of people from movement Atheism. In that instance, it was due to the discovery of a strong streak of racism and sexism within the movement. In feminism, it is becoming apparent that there is a strong streak of sexism yet again.
Eh?
A positive thought: I had to go out to get groceries today (booze counts as groceries right?) and many of the people out were walking their dogs. The dogs seemed so happy, as they always do. The dogs are doing great right now. They’re getting lots of walks, having lots of time at home with their people. I’m happy for the dogs. And the cats too.
Yes, the dogs I know are very happy. (One I haven’t met couldn’t have pats from some besties.)
We’ve been advised not to let dogs or cats outside our ‘bubble’, because there is apparently some evidence that they can be a vector for the virus. Maybe that’s just an abundance of caution. In any case, out for a walk today my other and I were accosted by a strikingly looking young cat that desperately wanted some love and attention. It was very vocal and kept running between our legs and walking practically on our feet until we stopped. At that point it practically rubbed its fur off on our shins. It took all the will in the world not to tuck it under my arm and keep walking.
As an aside, I believe NZ has now done over 2,200 tests per million of population. Not a huge actual number I know, but we’ll in excess of the 313 per million Vox reported for the US. People are saying we’re not doing enough testing. I guess it just reaches a point where the authorities don’t care about cases anymore, they care about ventilators. Or not. Some politicians don’t seem to care about anything except money.
I think there’s something wrong with the email subscription manager for b&w. I suspect this because:
a) I’m not receiving emails for posts I’m subscribed to, and
b) When I try to manage my subscriptions I get:
WordPress up to its mystifying tricks again, I expect.
Looks like Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne went and got himself arrested:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/some-us-churches-flout-covid-19-restrictions-1.5515436
I wonder if he’ll represent himself; we all know that lawyers are for pansies.
Ok, thought I’d post something I came across on a website which is responding angrily to an Idaho bill restricting women and girl’s sports to women and girls:
Yes. That would have to be it.
I haven’t read the details of the Idaho bill, but an Alabama bill did specify that athletes, male or female, are to compete on teams according to sex. I think the need for restrictions is almost entirely on the part of women’s sports, so it would be reasonable to have a one-sided bill, but the small number I’ve looked at are not one-sided.
Meanwhile, a dispatch from the Everyday Sexism department:
My beloved (and indefinitely dark) event venue, which as a nonprofit arts institution is helmed by a board of directors, has received a spike in charitable donations in the wake of COVID.
A board member introduced an emergency motion to put those donations into a fund to support the out-of-work staff, some of whom are struggling really badly right now.
The whole plan was apparently well-thought-out, with funds ready to go right away. Good stuff all around. Seven of the ten board members approved; the motion passed easily. Good good.
Here’s the ridiculous part: all seven of the fors were women and all three of the againsts were men. The men did NOT like the decision, so they decided there’s no way in hell the women’s votes really count, and they were just straight-up refusing to honour it! This is scandalous behaviour and there’s no way in hell such a vote would EVER have been disgregarded like that if it weren’t for the (perhaps subconscious, but nevertheless there) sex bias.
Our regular Board President, a woman, is on leave right now and her interim stand-in prez is a man. This is the mess that ensues in her absence…
(Today she had to come back from leave to clean shit up. Needless to say, upon her return, the motion is now accepted and funds are already being prepped for distribution. Happy ending, phew!)
Ridiculous, naked sexism on display.
Following up to #319: The Idaho bill can be read here.
https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/billbookmark/?yr=2020&bn=H0500
I’m impressed at the detail and the many supporting references. I am also surprised that this is the first bill I’ve seen that specifically restricts males from participating in teams for females, but not the other way around. Given the references and arguments, I think they’ve built a good case.
But of course no one is going to look at the arguments, because they don’t matter, it’s just transphobia, don’tcha know.
Jesus F Christ-on-a-pogo-stick —
Are ALL transwomen/transactivists insane, or is this something special? I’m interested in a second 3rd, 4th, whatever) opinion on a thread I’m in.
Background: I’ve known “Foxglove” a TIM for at least several years, starting in Pharyngula and now on to Hemant Mehta’s place at Friendly Atheist. She was eloquent and funny, and we liked each other. A few months ago she discovered I was GC on one of the many threads involving transgenderism. My comments weren’t particularly many, and I tried to keep in mind it was a blog, not a chat room. She’s become increasingly irate and nasty, and when I privately came to the conclusion she’s a malignant narcissist, I just started Gray Rocking her (short, dull responses to disengage.)
She disappeared for a while and — well. If anyone has time/interest/inclination could you roll your eyes down this and give your opinion?. I know, it’s partly ideology, partly character — but is this unhinged?
It’s not in order written, but starts here ( be sure not to miss the 11 part Essay) :
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/04/04/anti-lgbtq-religious-liberty-mp-seeks-leadership-of-canadas-conservatives/#comment-4863821539
What the serious fuck.
Not sure that link worked. Try this, where it starts with my question “If someone changes their mind, were they trans?”
http://disq.us/p/28ebc54
Reading now.
Preliminary thoughts – hell yes that’s unhinged. Settling down to write a book on someone else’s blog is unhinged all by itself, even if the content is not Narcissistic Injury Explosion. But it is, so that’s two ways it’s unhinged.
There are more ways. So unhinged.
So I thought. The last thing she wrote was how I “ crossed a huge, big line that people absolutely should not cross: you advocated violence against transgender women–i.e., against me.” I’ve no idea, unless it’s more guff about how not accepting trans ideology eventually leads to dehumanization and murder. Of course, not being human myself, I might have magic powers.
Foxglove is a piece of work. If I hadn’t decided a while back to avoid the bizarre drama s/he seemed to be creating from nothing, it’s mandatory now. I think my lack of response has driven her mad.
Plus, I still get *likes* and nobody’s crying to Hemant to remove me for my nonstop hatred. It’s unbearable.
Cardinal Pell freed by the Australian High Court. Apparently they believe the witness was credible, but doubt other aspects of the evidence presented. Make of that what you will…
Well, fuck.
Cardinal Pell just had his conviction overturned.
I’d be curious to know how often the Austrialian High Court overturns a case, not on an issue of law or constitutional principle, but on the sufficiency of the facts.
Sastra, I just skimmed that thread – too long for a working day. That was both unbelieveable and unsurprising. I know that seems contradictory, but as long as you view the statement with two slightly different mindsets, not so.
Sorry you’ve been targeted like that. It strikes me that you have always been at pains to be a careful and honest commentator on trans issues. It seems you’ve failed the purity test though. Notably, no one was able to give an even remotely coherent answer to your simple and appropriate question though.
Argh!!
Sastra, that “you advocated violence” thing – been there. One of the Pharyngula loonies announced that I had blood on my hands – because of my opinions.
Thanks Ophelia, Rob. It’s good to have a reality check.
When you left FTB, I’d been offline for a while and couldn’t figure out what the problem had been. I was also unaware of how trans ideology had morphed into the idea that science had done away with the two sexes by introducing a science-based gender identity — and that failure to agree was a form of murder. I guess I assumed something must have happened behind the scenes among the BlogRoyalty, and surely it was all a Big Misunderstanding.
Sastra,
There’s no way I could get through all of that, but for what it’s worth, I copied and pasted the whole thing into a word counter so that I could at least get some meta-knowledge. It came out over a whopping 11,000 words. Reading time from start to finish would be over 40 minutes.
The word “attack” and its variants appears 37 times. “Violence” appears 19 times. The word “reality” appears 28 times and “real” an additional 43 times. “Woman” and “women” appear a combined 100 times. Oddly, for an atheist website, the word “soul” appears nine times. “Hate” appears 14 times. “Bigot” and its variants (bigots, bigotry) appear 18 times. And of course there’s that one paragraph that consists almost entirely of just the word “argue” repeated 59 times in a row!
Real, reality, woman, soul, violence, attack, argue, hate, bigot. That really paints the picture, doesn’t it. You don’t think I’m a “real” woman and I perceive it as a narcissistic injury — a delusion of personal violent attack that will cause me to go off the rails and accuse you of bigotry and hatred.
Naturally, although the word “gender” got 123 nods, “sex” only got six. And even though “woman” and “women” counted 100 mentions, “female” only appeared twice. I wonder why that is.
The author threw the word “fact” around a lot — 36 times, in fact — and yet the word “science” never came up. Not even once. Go figure.
@Artymorty;
Whoa.
Oh man, Sastra, the replies to you over there are universally weak! “You’re just wrong, period.” “You really hate trans people, don’t you.” And then the whole thread moves on to attacking their opponents as mindless “sheep.” Without so much as a flinch of self-awareness.
Props to you for keeping your cool and remaining so courteous and composed. I would absolutely lose my shit. I almost lost my shit on your behalf just reading that vacuous nothingness.
That’s the problem when a supposedly progressive website prioritizes being “friendly” over the hard work of critical thinking (it’s right there in the blog title): when you turn your brain off and just feel the good vibes, maaaan, it’s very easy to be misled by bad actors. That’s why all those hippie-granola California/Portlandia types keep getting sucked into cults and persuaded by superficial arguments like anti-vax which feel “nice” on the surface but are deeply unscientific and irrational upon critical inspection. There’s nothing rational about prioritizing “friendly” at all costs. It’s actually kinda cowardly, and kinda narcissistic.
@Artymorty;
Thank you.
I think the word “friendly” in the blog title doesn’t really set the tone or describe the blog. It’s Hemant’s moniker, and he himself is genial. I would not, however, say that the regulars as a whole prize being “friendly at all costs.” It can be a bit like Pharyngula in there. Though Foxglove, thank goodness, is an extreme.
I started reading it regularly when I followed Ed Brayton to Patheos. I’ve known him for 25 years, starting out on IRC together. The religious debate rooms there taught me patience, dealing with fundamentalists for over a decade.
Holy wow, that’s a long time!
I got into atheism I guess around 10 years ago or so? I started out reading B&W I think about a year or so before FTB was formed, whenever that was.
Personally I was never a fan of Hemant tbh. I never found him particularly intellectually interesting. Sort of like a Sam Harris but who blogs. Popular, yes, but not, you know, especially brilliant. And recently I came across him again over his total batshit cultishness w/r/t trans. Which I think is quite shockingly unthinking for someone who purports to promote critical thinking for a living. He argued that alarm bells regarding pediatric transition were just evil right-wing scaremongering. I told him he was being disingenuous; I said there are plenty of scientists and people on the left who have publicly aired concerns about transing kids; he censored me for it. Freethought my ass.
Sastra, I posted this once before a while back, but it seems relevant regarding Foxglove:
Shame & Narcissistic Rage in Autogynephilic Transsexualism
by Dr. Anne Lawrence
http://pfox.org/Shame-Rage.pdf
Sastra,
I lost count of the number of ways Foxglove’s essay is dishonest about halfway through the first installment. That dishonesty is either unconscious, which makes it unhinged from reason or deliberate, which makes the personal attacks on you even more unhinged.
This passage jumped out at me (it wasn’t alone):
Says Foxglove, defining their opponent’s position and declaring victory.
Heh — and now he wants to present it to Hemant, to “decide.”
http://disq.us/p/28g1xrq
Yeah…. what’s he supposed to decide, exactly?
Foxglove doesn’t say but I think the implication is that whatever is to be decided, it should be done on the basis of wordcount.
I haven’t had anything to do with Hemant for years so he might have radically changed his spots, but decision-making wasn’t his strong suit back then…
Thanks again for appreciated feedback, latsot and Artymorty.
@Arty; I’m not sure you would have been arguing with Hemant himself. There are several co-bloggers on FA, and it’s usually Beth or Val that posts on transgender issues. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Hemant do so. He may of course be in total agreement with them, or may not. The fact that you were censored for making a reasonable point, however — which I take to mean kicked off and banned — counts in favor of it.
Besides, don’t want to deny your personal experience. ;)
I knew when I began commenting on the issue that I stood a good chance of being banned. That’s one reason I was always very, very careful to say nothing which could be held up as an attack ( the other reason being that I don’t do that as a matter of principle.) If Hemant — who I met at a his very first convention — decides to expel me, so be it. But I’d be chagrined if he did so at the behest of a poisonous piece of work like Foxglove.
Hemant has written some of the posts about transgender issues, but I agree that most are written by co-bloggers.
I used to participate in the now-defunct forum on Friendly Atheist back when I was starting to learn about movement atheism; eventually I became a moderator. It’s just as well the forum got canned; Hemant was not a presence there, so it wasn’t really connected to the blog. I think the forum format is somewhat easier for substantive conversations, but only for those who are actually motivated to have such conversations.
Hemant got a lot of guff about his moniker, often from religious people who thought he (or other forum participants) should be more “friendly” (that is, uncritical). It’s an inherent problem in names, I suppose.
The forum died before trans issues came to the fore. I shudder to think what it would have been like there with trans arguments in the mix; my tenure would have been short, by my choice or theirs.
This may (or may not) be Foxglove’s final response on this particular thread:
http://disq.us/p/28g77zz
Jeezus. What a tool.
Wow, that’s not just an essay, it’s a rant. And it starts off by affirming the gender critical position, though Foxglove did not notice:
Right at the outset, we see that the identity crisis arises as a result of friction with societal expectations placed on a person for their sex. The solution being, attack the notion that we should expect people to have personalities within a certain range for each sex, and the friction – and resulting gender flip – goes away.
As is commonly the case, scratch a TRA to discover a hidden gender critic.
Dear god, such a lack of self-awareness.
Meanwhile, how many times did Foxglove make a statement about your state of mind / intent? Crikeys.
@Holms;
Yes, I noticed that, too — in that post, and others. But since I’ve been gray-rocking Foxglove, I don’t directly quote anything he says. All this sturm and drang about my “attacks” on him have therefore mostly been extrapolated from what I’ve said to others, and from what the Sastra-in-his-head has said to his paranoia imagination. A state of affairs encouraged and fostered by an ideology which equates disagreement on dubious factual claims with a taste for genocide and inflicting gratuitous pain.
And thanks for the feedback. Reading the Contra Sastrum is like gaping at a nasty car wreck. How sad — but look, the steering wheel is in the tree!
Sastra @ 333 –
It took me way too long to believe what was happening, myself. Nothing happened behind the scenes that wasn’t identical to what was happening in front. They wanted to keep some of it secret but by then I wasn’t complying. Behind the scenes I was saying wait, this can’t work, we can’t have half the bloggers writing long venomous posts attacking one of the bloggers and expect that blogger to stick around so wtf? But Ed was adamant that no we were not going to have any rules about not writing long venomous posts attacking one of the bloggers, and he was staying out of it and didn’t care and fuck you. It surprised me. So much about that whole thing surprised me.
@Ophelia:
This surprises me less. It’s not that Ed isn’t a kind and compassionate person, but that, like me, his general approach to controversy was likely influenced by IRC debate rooms. Back then,in the 90’s, there was a kind of Wild West attitude towards monitoring what was acceptable. Invective and insult were fine as long as the speaker was also in some way making, or trying to make, a rational argument. That, rather than civility, was the key. Otherwise, the IRC debate rooms would have emptied out. Civility was a strategy. So was resilience.
You learned to take it or ignore it: it made you stronger. Focus on topic. Keep it moving.
I know it influenced me, because I was an OP or AOP (chatroom moniter) and that was my attitude. I kicked and banned only trolls, spammers, or the most egregious cases. I probably would have sided with Ed. I don’t think I would now, but considering the matter, it’s how I’m approaching Foxglove’s diatribes. I have no desire to have any authorities stop or prevent these attacks. It would admittedly be nice if any of the other commenters at least argued for some mitigation or restraint,, but it’s not necessary and doesn’t matter. I suck it up, blow it off, move on, and focus on topic. That’s what I learned from the same forum which taught me patience and courtesy.
Interesting. I used to lean somewhat more that way than I do now. When Jeremy washed his hands of B&W it caused me to rethink a little, and I’ve moved some in the direction of discouraging too much rudeness and the like here. I think PZ’s blowhards also gave me a sharper push in that direction.
Then again Trump has pushed me back in the other direction, at least when I’m talking about him.
To put it another way, or amplify…the trouble with the suck it up and build resilience approach is that the result is a shouty unpleasant environment – it’s Pharyngula. Even while I was at FTB I seldom read PZ’s posts because I hated the way the “horde” carried on. It can seem bracing at first, it did to me at first, but over time it gets more and more oppressive.
@Ophelia;
Agree. One difference between the IRC and Internet blogs, however, is that the latter have a given topic to discuss, and the former has more real time tutoring on effectiveness. What I mean by that is that debate rooms cannot afford to cut off rude debate without risking cutting off debate altogether. It was always open topic (attempts to do it otherwise fizzled out.) People were coming in and leaving constantly in rooms called #atheism or #ChristianDebate. A snarly argument on free will or the Problem of Evil was preferable to a intense discussion of computers or Ginger vs. Mary Ann because there was a general theme to adhere to. Otherwise, there was no reason to /join #atheism or ChristianDebate.
The learning curve involved regulars eventually discovering that courtesy worked better than insults if you wanted a good discussion or a good reputation as debator. Unless you were very clever and amusing, you best strive towards dignity and respect or you’d look like a newcomer … or a kid. Instead of a horde of commenters endlessly egging on towards the lowest common denominator, there tended to be a drift in the opposite direction. We all watched and learned. We knew who was worth paying attention to. So did the debaters and people on the other side.
At least during the glory days of IRC. Which kept shifting to include “ when I first came in,” but eventually moved far enough back that a lot of major players drifted off. Including me. Not because it got too mean-spirited (though that may have been part of it) but because it became too trivial. On #atheism, a split between the atheists who wanted theists to come in and debate and those who wanted a godless sanctuary eventually resolved in favor of the latter. Eventually killed debate period. I had no interest in wasting time on Ginger vs. Mary Ann. Again.
Sastra @353:
At least by the time I was active there, Pharyngula was squarely in the latter camp. It was a clubhouse for outspoken atheists (or at least, for atheists who wanted a place to be outspoken, even if they were quiet about it offline). Which is fine, I liked that about it! At a certain point I think you have to be a bit of a masochist to want to have your 53rd debate with a Christian about free will and the problem of evil, or dissecting all the ways the First Cause argument is wrong. Of course, while I don’t shy away from arguments when I come across them, I’ve never been into “debate as sport” — I never joined any school debate teams, and whenever I hear former debate nerds talk about the tactics that win in competitive debate I just feel further vindicated in that decision. Similarly, I was around for the early days of usenet (I still post in one forum), but never hung around the “hot debate” places.
And sometimes you just want to hang out with like-minded people. It doesn’t have to devolve into what you call Ginger vs. MaryAnn discussions, or endless rounds of patting each other on the back for being right. Sometimes you just want to discuss “second-level issues,” like “how do we reduce the influence of religion in society” without having to debate the underlying premise (that we SHOULD reduce the influence of religion) yet again. The discussions about accomodationism, for example, probably dragged on a little too long, but they were useful discussions, and you can’t have those if every thread is being diverted by believers demanding that you debate the underlying premise. Similarly, I’m happy to discuss politics, but I just have no desire to hang out on some hypothetical “friendly to both sides” politics forum and have endless rounds of “is Trump a good president” with even the most polite and articulate Trump supporters you could dig up.
Yes, I can see that. It’s partly a matter of taste, and partly a matter of circumstance. I once wrote “105 Questions for Atheists” (the number kept going up) as a discussion resource for the dal.net #atheism page. It might even still be there. When conversation lagged, we’d link and pick.
A high traffic chat room, though, is somewhat different than a high traffic blog. And my recollection of the problems and benefits might well be flawed. Probably are, in fact. But I was trying to figure out why Ed Brayton, one of the nicest people I never met, wasn’t sensitive to an increasingly difficult situation.
I could ask him, but his health has gone to shit right now, and so I won’t. I think he’s to the point he’s tapping the keyboard with his teeth or something. Not good.
#352 OB
I remember Chris Clarke being a breath of fresh air over there, partly because of the new content he added but mostly for the way he could make biting criticism while remaining collected. I had hoped he would help improve the atmosphere, but instead he was driven away by the toxicity. Toxicity that had been gleefully embraced by PZ over the years, with his frequent encouragement for his comment threads to ‘savage’ any interloper who dared think different. Granted, a fair number of those sorts were obviously nasty themselves, but still.
I distantly recall PZ having a change of attitude towards the venom he had curated, but his efforts to curtail it were both ineffectual and brief. But now, PZ’s threads are dominated by his horrifying trolls because he designed them that way. TRAs took to that place like wasps to old food.
Sadly, they are spreading even to the more reasonable spaces there.
Holms,
Yeah, PZ has frequently lamented the tone of his comments section over the years, but that always rang hollow. (And I thought that even when I was a regular participant there.) I won’t claim that bloggers have perfect control over their comments section, but they do have a fair degree of it. Especially when it comes to tone and manners — you can’t make dumb commenters insightful and eloquent, but you can force rude ones to knock it off.
I suppose PZ might have been crying crocodile tears all those times, but I actually suspect that he did sometimes sincerely regret what the Horde had become, but didn’t have the energy for the job it would have taken to clean things up. From time to time, he instituted some rules or guidelines (like the “give a new commenter three comments before attacking them as a troll”), but enforcement was half-hearted at best and they never lasted. And of course, as you note, he also seemed to embrace the aggressive nature of the Horde a lot, too. So certainly some mixed messaging.
Yes, when it came to enforcing his attempted rules, I noted that he gave the regulars very wide leeway – rendering the entire attempt useless, as it was the regulars that were responsible for the heavy majority of the vitriol. Couple this with the tendency for newcomers to just leave rather than engage in the comment report system he enacted – and that fact that the system was mediated by some of the very people that needed curtailing – and you have a completely toothless system. Drive by trolls were crushed rapidly, but the horde shambled on.
Meanwhile, in #356 I ended with “they [the horribles] are spreading to the more reasonable spaces” with a particular thread in mind, and that thread has reached its peak:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2020/04/01/arming-the-left/One of the worst of the bunch is sliming the best blog over there. (Skip to the forties to see things get truly disgusting)
That’s quite something. Mano asks that loon – much too gently, in my view – to stop telling people they should kill themselves, and loon says no.
Not just “no,” but with that ominous now-I-know-what-you-are-too comment at Mano. Well, it would be ominous if I thought that PS was anything but a garden variety Internet Tough Person.
Relatedly, and I realize I will probably regret asking this, but anyone know why Crip Dyke puts an asterisk beside every use of the word “trans”? I was looking for some explanatory footnote in the comment but there wasn’t one, so I assume this is some regular usage of CD’s.
By the way, I love the attempt to use “you were banned at Pharyngula” like it’s some shocking condemnation of a person. I’m not saying it’s a badge of honor or that people should seek it out like the ‘pitters did (still do? Eh, don’t care any more), but the days when it was difficult to get banned there are long gone. Which is fine! Strict moderation policies are often good! But “banned from Pharyngula” is about as damning as “too smutty for the Christian Broadcasting Network.”
Yes, well that particular individual is notable even amongst the Horde for being absolutely batshit insane (in the colloquial sense at least) with an extreme anger management issue. Mano is altogether too soft-hearted. I suspect in the future he will be less tolerant and sadly that means that someone he ends up banning will actually be less obnoxious than PS.
So that particular individual is not simply shown the door because…?
Rhetorical question; I’m not assuming you know. But honestly – people accused of being “TERFs” have the door broken over their heads while the loon literally calling for death to enemies continues to do so. What an absolute shower.
PS reads B&W.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/09/05/biased-sources-motivated-reasoning-and-blithe-assumptions-the-terf-story/
Start at comment #90. Eventually, even PZ tells it to shut up. Though everyone first reassures PS the rage is totally, totally justified.
#360 Screechy
Yes, I seem to recall him somewhere saying that of course he wasn’t going to do any of the nazi/terf murdering, he was just going call for others to do it. Better I suppose than being an actual murderer… yay?
And my assumption, which I have not bothered to confirm, is that the asterisks are a wildcard, so that trans* covers both trans women and men.
.
#363 Sastra
Yes, and not banned. That’s a signal that the commentariat there has gone to the dogs.
Holmes @364, yes, my recollection from some time ago now is the * is a wildcard to cover the permutations. I’ve used it that way myself.
Actually, following some links from that Pharyngula comments section, the asterisk is supposed to indicate that trans* covers both transsexual and transgender people.
Screechy Monkey wrote:
And transfemine, transmasculine, transfemme, transcetera. Like the LGBT… alphabet soup itself, the T keeps splintering into ever more narcissistic subsets. Geek humor: it’s almost like a “recursive” acronym/initialism. Example: GNU, which stands for “GNU is not UNIX.” Ha. Funny, right? No, I’ve never understood the purported humor, either.
Sastra wrote:
That’s exactly how I found my way back here. I checked out of the online atheist/skeptic blogosphere around 2011 when drama was infecting everything. (“Sexual harassment!” “Rapey!” “Racist!” “Sexist!”) I’d mostly ignored the gender-theory stuff. Even when Bill Nye stepped in it with his show, I figured the blow-back was just from right wing religious nutjobs. It was only last year, about this time, actually, that I happened to watch a doc about the Evergreen College affair and read The Coddling of the American Mind.
That spurred research into the efficacy of trigger warnings and safe spaces, which, of course, exposed me to a whole bunch of vocabulary I’d been ignoring. There followed a bunch of youtube searching on pronouns, gender, gender identity, sexual differentiation, and gender identity disorder/dysphoria. Then a slew of hours on JSTOR searching for the same things and related psychological phenomena, etiologies, comorbidities, and treatments. And even more hours digging through philosophy journals for anything vaguely non-gobbledygook explicating the epistemological basis for treating “I feel like an X, therefore I am an X” as an authoritative statement.
The void that stared back at me was an answer all on its own.
So now I’m apparently one of those “anti-SJW bigots” or something, simply because I refuse to convert to Wokism or even recite the Wokecene Creed. On the bright side, it is, at least, a fascinating time to be alive if you’re interested in religion as a phenomenon. We get to see in real time how new religions form, take hold, spread, and gain temporal power. Wheee?
Artymorty wrote:
If’n you look at ’em, a lot of the responses to Sastra could either have been taken verbatim from skeptic-religious discussions. That nominal atheists could deploy them unironically is depressing, since it reveals the sort of lazy cognition that brought them to their atheism in the first place. Rigorous analysis of evidence and argument was not the genesis of their unbelief; following people who gave them goodfeels was.
[…] a comment by Nullius in Verba at Miscellany Room […]
Nullius in Verba #367 wrote:
I agree with the first part, to an extent, but as I see it a lot of atheists there became atheists because they were furious at religion. Partly because of the dogma and irrationality, but in good part because of what they see as the judgement and control, the hypocrisy and greed, the narrow-mindedness and bigotry, and, above all, the way it hurts people. They clearly associate the gender critical position with religion. And they associate religion with fascism, bullying, violence, and forcing other people to do what you want. It’s all of a piece.
I commonly hear that, if only Christians were kind, loving, and tolerant, they’d have no problem with Christianity. If that’s the case, then “rigorous analysis of evidence and argument” isn’t going to take place because the Christians aren’t arguing with anyone. Ophelia’s phrase — “Truth matters” — indicates a different approach.
iknklast wrote:
Yeah, that’s basically what I was pointing to. “Boo, religion,” they said. “Yay, atheism,” they said. Well and good enough.
What bothers me is the subset of such people for whom reason is a performance, a ritual, a mere shibboleth that earns social currency. (Nerd moment: Kind of like the Yangs and their holy words in that old Star Trek episode.) They’ll point out Pascal’s Wager and laugh at how badwrong it is, maybe even recite a classic response to it, but ultimately the validity of any argument for or against God’s existence is irrelevant to them. Their nonbelief is as much a matter of faith as the apologist reciting Pascal’s Wager. It’s the dishonesty that gets me, because mouthing the shibboleths gives them default credibility, which they spend on nonsense about genderfeels or whatever other BS.
What a remarkably silly bit of rhetoric. (Not you. I know you’re talking about what other people say.)
It’s silly. Very silly indeed. Started off as a nice little idea about old ladies attacking young men, but now it’s just got silly.
Whoops. Didn’t realize my comment got its own thread and that you’d crossposted. My bad.
And dammit, I put the wrong name on there, too, because you Sastra and iknklast have such similar avatar symbols.
*grumble* Not my day. First the colitis; now this.
@Nullius;
That’s okay. Being mistaken for iknklast gives me a happy little feeling.
Mnuchin strives to have the brownest nose of all:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/coming-to-your-1200-relief-check-donald-j-trumps-name/2020/04/14/071016c2-7e82-11ea-8013-1b6da0e4a2b7_story.html
Heh, I have that story open right now, waiting while I get to the Smithfield story.
Jesus christ, this evil shitstain is really going for it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/17/liberate-trump-tweets-support-protesting-against-stay-at-home-orders/
He’s making about the second amendment. He is agitating the cultists towards firearm violence. He wants violence.