there’s an interesting story brewing regarding an origins of life conference being held/sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. A Dr. Jennifer Glass noticed that the conference listed 14/14 male speakers, and very nicely pointed it out to the organizers and provided a lengthy list of women and minorities who work in that area. The organizer responded by saying, (my paraphrase) well, we’re looking for researchers who argue that God-oops-I-mean-the-intelligent-designer-did-it, and gosh, we don’t see any women doing that kind of work, so it’s not our fault, you should take your complaints to women scientists for making different choices. Then — without asking her permission — they amended their program to add a segment on “bias and disparity in origins research” and listed her as a discussant. When she objected, they (initially) said screw you, we’re inviting you, and if you choose not to attend we’ll leave an empty chair for you, so your name stays on the program. (They have since backed down.) Trying to find a good synopsis — it’s not well-threaded, but Glass’s twitter feed has the info starting maybe here
It makes you wonder how Giuliani will carry through on this threat without laying out classified material in Court.
“I would volunteer to do that case for the president. I would love to have Brennan under oath,” Giuliani said. “We will find out about Brennan, and we will find out what a terrible job he did.”
This article is causing a lot of friction on a friend’s FB page and has likely cost me a friend or two. That seems odd to me, because it’s a well-argued piece regarding single-sex spaces and burden of proof, not a polemic. It does feature a provocative headline; I think some of the vitriol is from people who saw nothing past the headline and the picture.
Gerlich has been targeted by continuous pile-on campaigns to silence her for the past two years. She was hounded out of her job, banned from the 2016 Wellington Zinefest, and had a petition signed by 120 people calling for her to be barred from access to the media and academic research. Comments threatening violence have been left on her blog, such as ‘I hope you get hit by a truck, bitch.’
“A transgender lecturer orchestrated a smear campaign against academics across the UK in which universities were described as dangerous and accused of ‘hate crime’ if they refused to accept activists’ views that biological males can be women, it can be revealed.
“Natacha Kennedy, a researcher at Goldsmiths University of London who is also understood to work there under the name Mark Hellen, faces accusations of a ‘ludicrous’ assault on academic freedom after she invited thousands of members of a closed Facebook group to draw up and circulate a list shaming academics who disagreed with campaigners’ theories on gender.
“The online forum, seen by The Times, also revealed that members plotted to accuse non-compliant professors of hate crime to try to have them ousted from their jobs. Reading, Sussex, Bristol, Warwick and Oxford universities were among those deemed to have ‘unsafe’ departments because they employed academics who had publicly disputed the belief that ‘transwomen are women’ or questioned the potential impact of proposed changes to gender laws on women and children.
“Ms Kennedy said that the list was necessary so students could avoid accepting a place on a ‘dangerous’ course.
“Aimee Challenor, the former Green Party candidate who used her father as her election agent even though he was facing charges of raping and torturing a ten-year-old girl, for which he was later jailed, was among those who responded to Ms Kennedy’s post of August 14 to the Trans Rights UK Facebook group, with suggestions of who to blacklist. All the named academics were women.”
Not in the sense of having a personal emotional reaction, no, I don’t. (Though obviously that may differ for people who were personally affected.)
But I don’t object to remembrances and other reflections on the day. There were examples of heroism that day that should not be forgotten. And I think it’s very important and useful to reflect from time to time on what 9/11 meant, because that has probably changed and will continue to change over the years as it recedes into history. Questions like: in what ways did we, either personally or collectively, overreact, and can we avoid that next time? What does it mean that we will soon have a generation of voters who weren’t even born on 9/11/01? Etc.
Obviously I’m not on board with those who want to use this day as just an excuse to wave the flag or bash Muslims.
chigau – what do you mean? That’s a very cryptic, and odd, question.
For my subjective response – I do care in some sense but I also think it can seem horrendously self-centered for USians to treat it as The Worst Tragedy when there have been so many other worse tragedies that have happened to people outside the US. Or even inside it in the case of Puerto Rico.
In some ways I was more upset by Katrina, because the miserable deaths were almost all of poor people who hadn’t had the resources (working cars, gas, money for a place to stay) to get out of New Orleans. People died of dehydration while we watched on tv.
Anyway. Was your question intended as an accusation? As a “why aren’t you talking about it?”?
Not so much an accusation … maybe an observation of how We™ seem to do big, obvious memorials only on decades. 17 years is not as significant as 10 or 20.
I think there’s a fair amount of noise about this one every year so far. It was a huge shock, for a country that escaped in-country violence during WW2.
This article was, er, “pointed out” to me recently. Much as I dislike the Catholic Church, I think the article gets a lot of things right. If you ignore the religious trappings, it is saying that: your body is fine as it is; you can be masculine or feminine or however you like without pretending to be the opposite sex; you are deserving of respect and dignity; medical care is about healing, not destroying perfectly healthy parts of a body; there is no such thing as a “boy brain” or “girl brain”. So, quite reasonable. But it was trotted out to “prove” that such positions are right wing.
Compared with the achingly beautiful carved mammoth you highlighted recently, this South African drawing on rock might not be such a visual delight, but then it is c73,000 years old, which I think makes it a tad special.
And hot on the heels of the racist Williams cartoon, here’s a French college blacking-up photographs of its students in an attempt to attract Americans wanting to study overseas.
The Church of England is considering getting into the payday loans business by possibly adding the failed Wonga company to its £8.3 billion investment portfolio.
What was that thing in the Bible about usuary being naughty?
Police have just announced the all-clear. It wasn’t Novichok, a woman in a restaurant was taken ill with similar symptoms.
Oddly, initial (unconfirmed) reports said that the woman and her dining partner were Russian. I know it’s a popular tourist spot, being a very attractive and historic town with a magnificent cathedral, but it sure seems to attract a lot of Russians. Nothing to do with the military bases and sort-of secret government facilities in the area, of course.
I don’t know that I would consider six Russians over a period of many months a huge number! As I mentioned somewhere the other day, Salisbury is one of the places I chose when I had a 7 day rail pass this one time, and I found it well worth the voyage. (What were the others, you don’t ask? Oxford; Cambridge and Ely; Norwich; Dorchester; Chester; Howletts Zoo near Canterbury and then Canterbury.)
There was a brief comedy series here called Funny Girls. Skits done largely by New Zealand female comics, with a fairly heavy dose of female perspective. They explore both the empowerment side of feminism and the sacrifices and downsides of choosing non-traditional roles. They look at how women can be both great supporters of each other and also undercut themselves and other women. If you can track it down it’s funny, sad, bitter and sweet by turns.
Here is a song skit based on the concept of walking home at night…
This article is worth your time — a retrospective report on the rape of a Texas high school student in 2006. (I’m not going to bother calling it an “alleged” rape.)
But be prepared to be angry at how the authorities failed. Even today, the WaPo only refers to the perpetrators as “the football player” and “the soccer player,” no doubt afraid of being sued.
There’s a follow-up story about how many people, both strangers and former classmates, came forward to tell Amber that they believe her and (in the case of the classmates) apologize. I won’t say it’s a “happy” ending, but it does provide a slightly less terrible coda.
Via a social media post I found this article about a male-bodied trans woman going to a women’s jail due to the claimed female identity. Since I had never heard of ‘Life Site News’ before, I side-eyed it a little and followed through to the source it quotes from: a Daily Mail article. And since the Daily Mail is a Murdoch outlet, I side-eyed that too and looked around for confirmation in more reputable sources, and found the same incident reported in The Guardian,The Times (paywalled), The Telegraph, and NY Post.
Anyway. What was the conviction that required jail time? In his pre-trans days, he raped two women. And why am I bothering to bring this up in the first place? Because while in women’s prison, he indecently assaulted four more women. “Specifically, Wood allegedly exposed himself to one inmate, put a second inmate’s hand on his breast and made “inappropriate comments about oral sex,” pushed himself “indecently” against a third prisoner, and kissed a fourth on the neck [presumably against her will].”
University of Manchester Students Union have banned clapping, cheering and other noisy displays of appreciation at its events in favour of ‘jazz hands’ as per BSL because noisy applause can cause issues for autistic and deaf people.
On the one hand, I don’t see how this can be effectively enforced since applause* is often a spontaneous reaction, but on the other hand, I have no desire to be on the same side of an issue with Piers Morgan.
*Although laughter isn’t specifically mentioned in the article, it is both noisy and one of our most spontaneous reactions.
It’s true that many autistic people are triggered by noise. Then again, they also tend to be triggered by crowds and all that goes with that environment. So, it seems like something of an excessive imposition on the operation of ‘normal’ society to ban a normal activity to ease the situation for a very few people who are more likely than not to avoid the situation simply because of the crowd setting anyway.
So…. I generally find Evan Urquhart at Slate to be a reasonable voice on trans issues, and I don’t really take issue with the core premise of this article, i.e. that if you’re against sexist stereotypes, you should be against using them on trans men as well. But there’s some irritating aspects to the piece.
First, there’s the familiar hyperbole and strawmanning — treating articles that ask the rather reasonable question of how to decide whether and when minors should be allowed to transition as if they are screeds against self-determination at any age.
Second, there’s the screwy notion that the real problem that trans people face isn’t the hordes of conservatives who want to declare them all mentally ill and/or beat the shit out of them, it’s feminists who are insufficiently deferential to the claims of trans activists.
But mostly, what irks me is Urquhart’s strange confidence that sexist stereotypes against cis women are broadly condemned in our culture:
There’s a word for a system where women are kept powerless for their own good, where protection of women’s virtue and innocence means restricting them and barring them from public life: patriarchy. Imagine if the Economist or the Wall Street Journal published an argument that women or girls were being influenced by their peers to spend profligately, and therefore we must consider denying them bank accounts. I think people would recognize that for the outdated sexist claptrap it was.
I haven’t seen any articles about denying women bank accounts, but I sure read plenty about how millennials (usually with an emphasis on women) are spending too much money on avocado toast to be able to afford houses, and before that it was think pieces about how Sex and the City was causing young women to spend all their income on shoes. I’ve lost count of all the columns that tsk-tsk educated young women who are deferring marriage and children, because don’t they know that they have biological clocks? Someday you’ll want BAAAABIES and discover it’s too late, so start pumping them out now like a good little brood mare!. And we’re currently deep in the throes of a public debate in which Republicans, having mostly realized that it’s no longer cool to call women dirty lying sluts, are resorting to the fallback position that Dr. Ford thinks she’s telling the truth, but the poor confused dear thing is confused/brainwashed by the Democrats and doesn’t really know what happened to her at fifteen.
But hey, we’d really better do something about sexism, because now it’s affecting, you know, people who matter, like Urquhart!
Remember Jed Rubenfeld, half of the Yale Law professor couple who were allegedly warning students that Kavanaugh liked “a certain look” in his female clerks? Seems that Rubenfeld is under a Title IX investigation for various creepiness towards female students.
A Sociology GCSE course book has had to be pulled. Hmm, I wonder what was wrong with it.
From page 94;
“In Caribbean families, the fathers and husbands are largely absent and women assume the most responsibility in childrearing. […] The family system is also characterised by child-shifting, that is, the passing of children to other relatives or acquaintances if the parents find themselves unable to take care of them.
Transwxmxn: Why won’t women just let us into their spaces? What are they afraid of?
Women: Generally because you’re not women, but when you specifically want access to our safe spaces such as refuges for women who are victims of violence and rape we have to protect those women over your feelings; because those women fear and want to avoid men in any guise; and because we have no idea of the motives of any individual demanding access.
TW: We’re not sexual predators, no transwoman wants to assault or hurt women. It has never happened and unless you can point me to a single case then you’re just a fucking TER….what’s that?
Don’t worry, people have taught machines to discriminate against black people, too. Many police forces in the US and some in the UK use software to predict where crimes are likely to happen. They train this software with historical data which is already biassed because the police are racists. So the software predicts that crimes will happen in predominately black areas…
This is the problem (one of the many problems) with using machine learning indiscriminately.
PZ addressed the banning of ‘terfs’ in a lengthy post, and I can’t tell you how miserable a showing it is.
Oh for crying out loud, PZ! The word ‘woman’ means adult human female. Women do NOT have penises.
No, women don’t stop being women if they lose their ovaries any more than you stop being a man because your dick gets lopped off. Your sex is defined according to which of the two reproductive classes you were born into – you KNOW this really but you’ve drunk the ideological kool-aid and are in denial.
Thankfully, there are still some like Angelos who haven’t.
ALL SWANS ARE WHITE! If you find a black swan, we’ll just use our definition to exclude them from the category of swans. It’s an argument as old as Aristotle, and you would think that a skeptic would be familiar with the dangers of an argument from false premises. You don’t just get to blithely wave away counter-examples by referring to a cherry-picked definition.
I’ll grant that there are no doubt some intersexed people with basically female bodies plus a penis, but it strikes me as strange that these few atypical people mean we can’t describe the concept of sex. People with no legs exist, yet we still describe Homo sapiens as a bipedal species, and no one rebuts this by asking “wait so people without legs are not human??”
I also don’t accept the automatic equating of “female” with “woman”, of confusing sex with gender.
…He said, while conflating sex with gender. Or more precisely, redefining ‘woman’ as a gender word while leaving ‘female’ as a sex word.
It also baffles me that anyone would do that: are they in the habit of checking the genitalia of every person they meet? […]
Isn’t this just the most asinine question…? No PZ, we do not check peoples groins to determine their sex… because it is unnecessary. In virtually all cases where we meet someone, their sex is readily apparent even while clothed.
A professor of biology appears not to know about sexual dimorphism.
The fact is that “woman” is a rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity — I accept the reality of girls’ names, women’s styles, women’s manner of speaking, women’s traditional roles, women’s typical careers, women’s make-up — all the signals that people use to mark their gender. I don’t freak out when a girl is named “Mike”, when a woman is a fighter pilot, when a man uses eye shadow, when anyone uses vocal fry, when a woman interrupts a man. We’re seeing people break out of the stereotypes we impose on men and women in many ways, and I think that’s a great step forward. Let’s treat people as individuals rather than representatives of only two allowed gender classes.
It’s funny, every single advocate of that brand of trans theory has a core straight out of the gender critical playbook without realising it, and here is PZ’s. In the paragraph above, ‘woman’ denotes a sex – female – and the rest is a bunch of shit unfairly lumped with womanhood. Yes, there are many stereoptyes involved. Yes, it is good and proper to oppose them, because to accept them is to place each sex in a behavioral straitjacket.
And yet PZ accepts that such things are part of womanhood, saying that individual freedom lies in being able to choose our gender by declaration. Yet that is but to say that people get to choose their straitjacket.
That portion is the worst of the post, but none of it is particularly good.
Yeah that post finally did it for me reading his blog. OTOH I feel like going out in a blaze of glory and get banned on my first and only comment, which would be along the lines of:
Are you asking the spiders whether they identify as M or F or just making unwarranted assumptions and putting them in tubes together against their chosen gender? Inquiring minds want to know.
Have you seen the latest ‘artwork’ to (dis)grace the White House walls? It’s an oil painting of Trump sat at a table enjoying drinks with Nixon, both Bushes, Reagan, Lincoln. It’s horrible.
Zach Weinersmith (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic) and his brother Greg Weiner (PhD in Government) have an interesting web comic going about government: Laws and Sausages. The most recent installment leads into a discussion about Title IX and transgender students.
So it’s business as usual then: don’t give women opportunities because they haven’t already been given opportunities. Obviously there’s something wrong with them, otherwise people would be giving them opportunities all the time.
On a vaguely related note: I don’t know the first thing about directing films, but it doesn’t seem as though it would be *that* hard. Plus, you get a free chair and monocle. I’ve run projects costing tens of millions and it was great: there were all these helpful people everywhere looking busy. Presumably they did stuff. I certainly wouldn’t know, I was too busy lying to the people with the money about what we were actually making.
I’ve been looking at Laws and Sausages since it began. I have learned exactly two things from it.
1. I have absolutely no idea how the US government works in principle or in practice.
2. I have even less idea of how my own (UK) government works.
I don’t even really know how to find out, which worries me. It’s the sort of thing I should know. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s homework. I have half a dozen computers on my desk, several of which are dedicated full time to crawling around the web finding stuff out. But I don’t know what I should tell them to ask to find out how the government works.
Bang on cue, right in the middle of the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder, and of Trump’s refusal to condemn the act, Trump is at one of his rallies praising Greg Gianforte for his assault on reporter Ben Jacobs prior to Trump’s election.
As the headline pretty much says, a company removed its games from the gaming site gog.com because of what they said was “hate speech”.
It is downright sociopathic to demean our friends and allies in this way. There is absolutely nothing funny about it.
they said.
This was GOG’s tweet:
Classic PC games #WontBeErased on our watch. Yeah, how’s that for some use of hashtags?
GOG’s specialty is selling old games. Sometimes they have to tweak them to run on newer operating systems. Hence the ‘pun’.
Insensitive, sure. Hijacking a political tag for commercial purposes is hardly cool. Although I’m not sure what the ‘use of hashtags’ part is supposed to mean, I might be missing something there.
The paradigm [i.e. that one’s sex is determined by one’s reproductive potential and nothing else] is somewhat similar to saying that automobiles come in two forms: cars and trucks. This is a worldview that is easily challenged by the existence of SUVs and station wagons—neither of which would suddenly disappear, even if government officials tried to make up a definition that excluded them.
oh god, the stupid. Does this person know how babies are made?
Right, I’m just off to register my genitals. Do you think I’ll have to dip them in a pot of ink and slap them on a piece of paper, like when you have your fingerprints taken?
Or is it more like when the X Men have to register their super powers?
The orange one is deploying 5,200 troops, with tanks, air-support, the works (basically, combat-ready) to the southern border to add to the 2,100 National Guard troops he sent in April. Because of course he has.
Mr Trump tweeted on Monday: “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border.
“Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process.
“This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”
Why we’re doomed. Profiles of 12 young people who probably won’t be voting.
I want to murder each and every one of them.
Samantha is upset that Democrats weren’t able to make 49 > 51 and stop the Kavanaugh nomination. I guess she thinks Democrats will “fight harder” if Bob Menendez loses his seat.
Reese is … too fickle to vote? Too afraid of making the wrong choice? It’s not entirely clear. (This is a recurring theme, by the way — the idea that you have to have fucking Ph.Ds in history, economics, and political science to be worthy of voting. Goddamnit, old white people vote because a man yelling on the radio told them the scary brown people are coming. Stop holding yourselves to ridiculous standards that your fellow citizens don’t.)
Tim hates mailing stuff; it gives him anxiety. Ah, well, then, Timmy, we wouldn’t want you to experience any anxiety. The anxiety of people who fear they will lose their health care, their right to control their bodies, or have their children taken away from them and locked in cages, pales in comparison to your trauma. Good to know that you’re “leaning” towards voting, you know, if it’s close.
Megan also has issues with mailing stuff — it’s so hard to find printers and stamps! (I have some sympathy for her point that it’s difficult for people who move around a lot; we really ought to make it easier to register and vote. But hey, I’m sure both political parties want that, right? It’ll just happen on its own.)
Drew is miffed that the Democratic Party doesn’t cater enough to his preferences. Yeah, it’s almost as if parties pay more attention to demographic groups that FUCKING SHOW UP TO VOTE! But hey, you’re sure showing them! When the Democrats lose more elections to right-wing whackos, their response will surely be to move to the left. Uh huh. Any day now.
Laura just doesn’t have the time and energy, and apparently can’t do anything without asking Mommy and Daddy for help. She regrets not voting in 2016 and she’s totally gonna vote in 2020, you know, when she’s studied up enough. She’s set a goal to learn about, like, society and stuff.
Aaron was a Bernie supporter who voted for Hillary in 2016 but has “felt bad” about it for the last two years. Because…? He only wants to vote for candidates who “excite” him. I presume that he only goes outside when the weather is nice, only works when he feels like it, and has never had to make a tough decision in his life. Apparently the opportunity to elect a black governor in Georgia — the first black woman governor in ANY state — isn’t exciting enough for him.
Anna also finds mail confusing and post offices scary.
Thomas used to think it was immoral to vote, because that was giving his approval to “the system.” Well, the system sure is all broken up about your disapproval, dipshit. I’m sure that if voting rates plunge another 10%, “the system” will voluntarily disband in sadness and usher in the fucking Age of Aquarius or whatever the modern version of hippie utopia is. Now Thomas is willing to vote if it affects him personally as a teacher at CUNY, but I guess just helping to protect the rights of other people isn’t sufficiently thrilling for him to, as he puts it, take five minutes out of his day.
Jocelyn also has trouble with stamps. She complains that she has a chronic illness, and that it was easier to get her medical marijuana card than to register to vote. Somehow I bet her chronic illness doesn’t stop her from going to buy pot.
Maria doesn’t like politics because the Catholic Church used to tell her how to vote. She also feels strongly about women’s reproductive rights. But….?
Nathan is 28 years old, but can’t figure out how to register and vote, because apparently sites like vote.org don’t exist or are blocked in San Diego. He might vote if, like, you put it all on Instagram or something. I’m not sure how Nathan manages to feed and clothe himself.
Prove me wrong, 20-somethings. Actually show up or, you know, FIND A GODDAMN STAMP. Put on your big boy or big girl or big genderqueerperson pants and accept that voting isn’t about your personal fulfillment, and that sometimes you have to choose between two options that don’t fill you with joy and excitement.
I hate being of a progressive and liberal bent precisely because I get associated with waste of space boiled lettuce like these pathetic useless fuckwits. Give me a drink and I’ll tell you exactly what I think of them.
I actually popped in to say that we must all try to be more understanding of Mr. Trump’s estrangement from honesty, because he really tries to tell the truth.
US President Donald Trump says he always tries to tell the truth when he can, despite how the media portrays him.
“I do try,” he told ABC News in an interview aired on Thursday. “I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth.”
A college professor is being attacked for liking a picture on Facebook.
“What you’re liking is vandalism,” Archer says.
“No, I’m not,” Kohen responds. “Your argument is that anything I like on Facebook represents an endorsement by me of the thing ― not the post, but the thing ― that is happening in the world?”
There’s a new £50 note being issued soon. One of those new plastic ones that spring clean out of your hand and away on the breeze if you try to fold them. Anyway, the Bank of England is accepting nominations for who should be featured on the note. It has to be a British scientist.
You know what’s going to happen here. The nominations are going to be Dawkins, Hawking, Cox (Cox has already nominated and argued for Hawking) with the more historically minded going for the likes of Crick, Darwin, of course (deserving but has already been on a note), Faraday, Halley, Higgs, Jenner, Dirac…. Well you get the idea. Deserving scientists all (although note that I didn’t say deserving of what) but obvious choices for an obvious reason.
And thousands of other people guilty of doing science while female.
I’ve only met one of those on this list (guess who and no even I’m not *that* old) and I’d love to see her on a note. Also, some of these people (including her) are alive and therefore not eligible but fuck it: a) a lot of people are marauding around on places like Twitter nominating people who are alive and b) it’s worth finding out about all the people on that list regardless, if you don’t already know about them.
But if you do one thing I instruct you to this year, vote for someone who is not an obvious suspect and preferably not a man. You don’t even have to be British, any bugger can vote. If your browser tells you you can’t… see me.
Also, as a personal favour to me, whatever you do, don’t pick Tim Berners-Lee. We…. have some history. I would hate to have to punch holes in any £50 note I inexplicably managed to get hold of. Especially not these new ones, they are quite hard to kill.
And anyway, just vote for Mary Anning. Particularly if you have ever been to the Natural History Museum in London.
Oh and for fuck’s sake don’t vote for Kevin Warwick either. I realise this is now turning into a list of British scientists who I have either got or tried to get in a headlock at some point or another, but don’t let that influence your vote. Assuming you don’t want me to get you in a headlock too.
I second the choice of Mary Anning. I first learned of her via John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles was surprisingly (for the time) insistent about how astonishing she was.
She does a good job of reminding everyone – because everyone seems to need reminding – that misogyny is at least as much of an issue as is racism, homophobia etc.
Copied from another thread:
there’s an interesting story brewing regarding an origins of life conference being held/sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. A Dr. Jennifer Glass noticed that the conference listed 14/14 male speakers, and very nicely pointed it out to the organizers and provided a lengthy list of women and minorities who work in that area. The organizer responded by saying, (my paraphrase) well, we’re looking for researchers who argue that God-oops-I-mean-the-intelligent-designer-did-it, and gosh, we don’t see any women doing that kind of work, so it’s not our fault, you should take your complaints to women scientists for making different choices. Then — without asking her permission — they amended their program to add a segment on “bias and disparity in origins research” and listed her as a discussant. When she objected, they (initially) said screw you, we’re inviting you, and if you choose not to attend we’ll leave an empty chair for you, so your name stays on the program. (They have since backed down.) Trying to find a good synopsis — it’s not well-threaded, but Glass’s twitter feed has the info starting maybe here
Thank you – I’m reading her Twitter now. Amazing! It’s Templeton though…
By the way, it might be handy to have a permalink to this thread somewhere on the menu or sidebar. I guess I can just bookmark it separately.
I’ll second the permalink request.
Have you see this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-is-creating-a-list-of-political-enemies-former-joint-chiefs-chairman-mike-mullen-says/2018/08/19/36df9b64-a3b6-11e8-97ce-cc9042272f07_story.html?utm_term=.19c28c78abfd
It makes you wonder how Giuliani will carry through on this threat without laying out classified material in Court.
I have now; thank you.
[…] H/t Rob at Miscellany Room […]
This article is causing a lot of friction on a friend’s FB page and has likely cost me a friend or two. That seems odd to me, because it’s a well-argued piece regarding single-sex spaces and burden of proof, not a polemic. It does feature a provocative headline; I think some of the vitriol is from people who saw nothing past the headline and the picture.
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/08/16/penises-dont-kill-people-people-penises/
Yes that’s a good one – I’ve been meaning to get to it. The second author is a friend and a regular commenter here.
Oops, there goes the Arctic ice. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-first-time-on-record
Look, all that Arctic ice is just water that was sitting there uselessly when it could have been used to put out the California wildfires. Duh.
Or fill California swimming pools. Let’s be sensible here.
Or watering golf courses owned by corrupt real estate investors/phony college swindlers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/22/saudi-arabia-seeks-its-first-death-penalty-against-a-female-human-rights-activist
https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/the-liberal-censors-extend-their-reach/
Well, this makes a nice change: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/25/arrival-of-pope-francis-in-ireland-brings-mixed-emotions
Irish PM tells Pope that it’s time to move the Catholic church from the centre of society.
Trump reviews Citizen Kane, misses point.
https://lithub.com/erroll-morris-on-the-time-he-filmed-donald-trump-missing-the-point/
Trump continues to be an awful shit. in other news, water is still wet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/business/economy/pay-raises-federal-employees.html?imp_id=93083848
What emergency BTW? I mean, other than the one he’s created by giving money to the rich and spending what was left on bombs and walls.
Oh god. That piece of crap.
He gets worse, because fuck Palestinians.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/31/trump-to-cut-all-us-funding-for-uns-main-palestinian-refugee-programme
A little good news, but I can’t see it going down well with the woke.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/plaque-for-first-modern-lesbian-to-be-reworded-after-complaints
The complaints? The original plaque neglected to mention the lesbian part, merely referring to ‘gender non-conforming’.
Done! Thank you.
vaginal eggs. I’ll leave this here…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/well-good/teach-me/106861472/gwyneth-paltrows-goop-pays-out-220k-in-vaginal-egg-lawsuit
Aha, good news.
Smack over the wrist with a bit of boiled spinach really, but it’s the principle…
The latest trans activist attack on academics.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-goldsmiths-lecturer-natacha-kennedy-behind-smear-campaign-against-academics-f2zqbl222?shareToken=e029d19ff5951230f9b2e6e580d7808b
“A transgender lecturer orchestrated a smear campaign against academics across the UK in which universities were described as dangerous and accused of ‘hate crime’ if they refused to accept activists’ views that biological males can be women, it can be revealed.
“Natacha Kennedy, a researcher at Goldsmiths University of London who is also understood to work there under the name Mark Hellen, faces accusations of a ‘ludicrous’ assault on academic freedom after she invited thousands of members of a closed Facebook group to draw up and circulate a list shaming academics who disagreed with campaigners’ theories on gender.
“The online forum, seen by The Times, also revealed that members plotted to accuse non-compliant professors of hate crime to try to have them ousted from their jobs. Reading, Sussex, Bristol, Warwick and Oxford universities were among those deemed to have ‘unsafe’ departments because they employed academics who had publicly disputed the belief that ‘transwomen are women’ or questioned the potential impact of proposed changes to gender laws on women and children.
“Ms Kennedy said that the list was necessary so students could avoid accepting a place on a ‘dangerous’ course.
“Aimee Challenor, the former Green Party candidate who used her father as her election agent even though he was facing charges of raping and torturing a ten-year-old girl, for which he was later jailed, was among those who responded to Ms Kennedy’s post of August 14 to the Trans Rights UK Facebook group, with suggestions of who to blacklist. All the named academics were women.”
Yeh.
I spent decades in academia (and after) trying to persuade people to take dangerous courses. Evidently I’m doing it wrong.
Argh god – I just saw that on Facebook, via Lady M and a good many other people, before I got here.
I’m really liking the work of Jane Clare Jones. This essay is a comparison of gay rights and trans rights. Absolutely brilliant.
https://janeclarejones.com/2018/09/09/gay-rights-and-trans-rights-a-compare-and-contrast/
@28, that’s really good, thanks for the link.
It is indeed brilliant. I shared about eleventy passages from it with friends on Facebook yesterday – it clarifies so many things.
It’s September 11. Does anyone care?
chigau,
Not in the sense of having a personal emotional reaction, no, I don’t. (Though obviously that may differ for people who were personally affected.)
But I don’t object to remembrances and other reflections on the day. There were examples of heroism that day that should not be forgotten. And I think it’s very important and useful to reflect from time to time on what 9/11 meant, because that has probably changed and will continue to change over the years as it recedes into history. Questions like: in what ways did we, either personally or collectively, overreact, and can we avoid that next time? What does it mean that we will soon have a generation of voters who weren’t even born on 9/11/01? Etc.
Obviously I’m not on board with those who want to use this day as just an excuse to wave the flag or bash Muslims.
chigau – what do you mean? That’s a very cryptic, and odd, question.
For my subjective response – I do care in some sense but I also think it can seem horrendously self-centered for USians to treat it as The Worst Tragedy when there have been so many other worse tragedies that have happened to people outside the US. Or even inside it in the case of Puerto Rico.
In some ways I was more upset by Katrina, because the miserable deaths were almost all of poor people who hadn’t had the resources (working cars, gas, money for a place to stay) to get out of New Orleans. People died of dehydration while we watched on tv.
Anyway. Was your question intended as an accusation? As a “why aren’t you talking about it?”?
Not so much an accusation … maybe an observation of how We™ seem to do big, obvious memorials only on decades. 17 years is not as significant as 10 or 20.
Trivial, really.
Oh, ah, I see. Sorry.
I think there’s a fair amount of noise about this one every year so far. It was a huge shock, for a country that escaped in-country violence during WW2.
This article was, er, “pointed out” to me recently. Much as I dislike the Catholic Church, I think the article gets a lot of things right. If you ignore the religious trappings, it is saying that: your body is fine as it is; you can be masculine or feminine or however you like without pretending to be the opposite sex; you are deserving of respect and dignity; medical care is about healing, not destroying perfectly healthy parts of a body; there is no such thing as a “boy brain” or “girl brain”. So, quite reasonable. But it was trotted out to “prove” that such positions are right wing.
https://lifeteen.com/blog/catholic-church-wants-transgender-community-know/
Compared with the achingly beautiful carved mammoth you highlighted recently, this South African drawing on rock might not be such a visual delight, but then it is c73,000 years old, which I think makes it a tad special.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/science-environment-45501205
And hot on the heels of the racist Williams cartoon, here’s a French college blacking-up photographs of its students in an attempt to attract Americans wanting to study overseas.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/13/white-students-made-to-look-black-on-french-college-website-in-us
Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this one.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-45534283
The Church of England is considering getting into the payday loans business by possibly adding the failed Wonga company to its £8.3 billion investment portfolio.
What was that thing in the Bible about usuary being naughty?
Unconfirmed yet, but two more people seem to be regretting a day trip to Salisbury.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/salisbury_uk_5b9ea8e2e4b046313fbc23c4
Oh gawd. Thank you. Let’s hope it just looks like Novichok but isn’t.
Police have just announced the all-clear. It wasn’t Novichok, a woman in a restaurant was taken ill with similar symptoms.
Oddly, initial (unconfirmed) reports said that the woman and her dining partner were Russian. I know it’s a popular tourist spot, being a very attractive and historic town with a magnificent cathedral, but it sure seems to attract a lot of Russians. Nothing to do with the military bases and sort-of secret government facilities in the area, of course.
Well that’s a relief.
I don’t know that I would consider six Russians over a period of many months a huge number! As I mentioned somewhere the other day, Salisbury is one of the places I chose when I had a 7 day rail pass this one time, and I found it well worth the voyage. (What were the others, you don’t ask? Oxford; Cambridge and Ely; Norwich; Dorchester; Chester; Howletts Zoo near Canterbury and then Canterbury.)
I can’t believe you missed out on Middlesbrough.
Anyone interested in some cheery news from Katie Hopkins?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/16/katie-hopkins-applies-for-insolvency-to-avoid-bankruptcy-after-jack-monroe-twitter-costly-libel-case
There was a brief comedy series here called Funny Girls. Skits done largely by New Zealand female comics, with a fairly heavy dose of female perspective. They explore both the empowerment side of feminism and the sacrifices and downsides of choosing non-traditional roles. They look at how women can be both great supporters of each other and also undercut themselves and other women. If you can track it down it’s funny, sad, bitter and sweet by turns.
Here is a song skit based on the concept of walking home at night…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jgCBNOAz7V4
One of the main writers and performers is Rose Matefeo, who won 5e best comedy show at the Edinburgh Festival this year.
The stupid just keeps coming:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/19/donald-trump-urged-spain-to-build-the-wall-across-the-sahara
This article is worth your time — a retrospective report on the rape of a Texas high school student in 2006. (I’m not going to bother calling it an “alleged” rape.)
But be prepared to be angry at how the authorities failed. Even today, the WaPo only refers to the perpetrators as “the football player” and “the soccer player,” no doubt afraid of being sued.
Thank you.
There’s a follow-up story about how many people, both strangers and former classmates, came forward to tell Amber that they believe her and (in the case of the classmates) apologize. I won’t say it’s a “happy” ending, but it does provide a slightly less terrible coda.
Looks like Rosenstein’s gone!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/24/rod-rosenstein-resigns-latest-reports-trump-mueller-investigation
This does not auger well.
Except apparently not!
This is ridiculous.
Via a social media post I found this article about a male-bodied trans woman going to a women’s jail due to the claimed female identity. Since I had never heard of ‘Life Site News’ before, I side-eyed it a little and followed through to the source it quotes from: a Daily Mail article. And since the Daily Mail is a Murdoch outlet, I side-eyed that too and looked around for confirmation in more reputable sources, and found the same incident reported in The Guardian, The Times (paywalled), The Telegraph, and NY Post.
Anyway. What was the conviction that required jail time? In his pre-trans days, he raped two women. And why am I bothering to bring this up in the first place? Because while in women’s prison, he indecently assaulted four more women. “Specifically, Wood allegedly exposed himself to one inmate, put a second inmate’s hand on his breast and made “inappropriate comments about oral sex,” pushed himself “indecently” against a third prisoner, and kissed a fourth on the neck [presumably against her will].”
Moderation…! Oh, too many links?
Yes. Thanks for the links – I know about the story and it’s infuriating.
Some good news for a change.
First woman in 55 years to be awarded the Nobel in Physics.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/science-environment-45655151
Not sure what to make of this one; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-manchester-45717841
University of Manchester Students Union have banned clapping, cheering and other noisy displays of appreciation at its events in favour of ‘jazz hands’ as per BSL because noisy applause can cause issues for autistic and deaf people.
On the one hand, I don’t see how this can be effectively enforced since applause* is often a spontaneous reaction, but on the other hand, I have no desire to be on the same side of an issue with Piers Morgan.
*Although laughter isn’t specifically mentioned in the article, it is both noisy and one of our most spontaneous reactions.
It’s true that many autistic people are triggered by noise. Then again, they also tend to be triggered by crowds and all that goes with that environment. So, it seems like something of an excessive imposition on the operation of ‘normal’ society to ban a normal activity to ease the situation for a very few people who are more likely than not to avoid the situation simply because of the crowd setting anyway.
And now they are trying to smear Julie Swetnick by “releasing” details about her sex life.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-on-senate-panel-release-explicit-statement-about-kavanaugh-accusers-sex-life/2018/10/02/714d8abc-c685-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html
Aaarrrgghhh
So…. I generally find Evan Urquhart at Slate to be a reasonable voice on trans issues, and I don’t really take issue with the core premise of this article, i.e. that if you’re against sexist stereotypes, you should be against using them on trans men as well. But there’s some irritating aspects to the piece.
First, there’s the familiar hyperbole and strawmanning — treating articles that ask the rather reasonable question of how to decide whether and when minors should be allowed to transition as if they are screeds against self-determination at any age.
Second, there’s the screwy notion that the real problem that trans people face isn’t the hordes of conservatives who want to declare them all mentally ill and/or beat the shit out of them, it’s feminists who are insufficiently deferential to the claims of trans activists.
But mostly, what irks me is Urquhart’s strange confidence that sexist stereotypes against cis women are broadly condemned in our culture:
I haven’t seen any articles about denying women bank accounts, but I sure read plenty about how millennials (usually with an emphasis on women) are spending too much money on avocado toast to be able to afford houses, and before that it was think pieces about how Sex and the City was causing young women to spend all their income on shoes. I’ve lost count of all the columns that tsk-tsk educated young women who are deferring marriage and children, because don’t they know that they have biological clocks? Someday you’ll want BAAAABIES and discover it’s too late, so start pumping them out now like a good little brood mare!. And we’re currently deep in the throes of a public debate in which Republicans, having mostly realized that it’s no longer cool to call women dirty lying sluts, are resorting to the fallback position that Dr. Ford thinks she’s telling the truth, but the poor confused dear thing is confused/brainwashed by the Democrats and doesn’t really know what happened to her at fifteen.
But hey, we’d really better do something about sexism, because now it’s affecting, you know, people who matter, like Urquhart!
Hmmm yeah I generally don’t find Urquhart a reasonable voice.
Remember Jed Rubenfeld, half of the Yale Law professor couple who were allegedly warning students that Kavanaugh liked “a certain look” in his female clerks? Seems that Rubenfeld is under a Title IX investigation for various creepiness towards female students.
Ugh that piece is creepy – the behavior described is creepy. I’d blog it but I don’t have the stomach for it today. It’s their world.
A Sociology GCSE course book has had to be pulled. Hmm, I wonder what was wrong with it.
From page 94;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-45784222
Transwxmxn: Why won’t women just let us into their spaces? What are they afraid of?
Women: Generally because you’re not women, but when you specifically want access to our safe spaces such as refuges for women who are victims of violence and rape we have to protect those women over your feelings; because those women fear and want to avoid men in any guise; and because we have no idea of the motives of any individual demanding access.
TW: We’re not sexual predators, no transwoman wants to assault or hurt women. It has never happened and unless you can point me to a single case then you’re just a fucking TER….what’s that?
Women: Read it for yourself!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/transgender-prisoner-who-sexually-assaulted-inmates-jailed-for-life
More great news: humans have taught machines how to discriminate against women.
Oh fabulous!
@Screechy:
Don’t worry, people have taught machines to discriminate against black people, too. Many police forces in the US and some in the UK use software to predict where crimes are likely to happen. They train this software with historical data which is already biassed because the police are racists. So the software predicts that crimes will happen in predominately black areas…
This is the problem (one of the many problems) with using machine learning indiscriminately.
PZ addressed the banning of ‘terfs’ in a lengthy post, and I can’t tell you how miserable a showing it is.
I’ll grant that there are no doubt some intersexed people with basically female bodies plus a penis, but it strikes me as strange that these few atypical people mean we can’t describe the concept of sex. People with no legs exist, yet we still describe Homo sapiens as a bipedal species, and no one rebuts this by asking “wait so people without legs are not human??”
…He said, while conflating sex with gender. Or more precisely, redefining ‘woman’ as a gender word while leaving ‘female’ as a sex word.
Isn’t this just the most asinine question…? No PZ, we do not check peoples groins to determine their sex… because it is unnecessary. In virtually all cases where we meet someone, their sex is readily apparent even while clothed.
A professor of biology appears not to know about sexual dimorphism.
It’s funny, every single advocate of that brand of trans theory has a core straight out of the gender critical playbook without realising it, and here is PZ’s. In the paragraph above, ‘woman’ denotes a sex – female – and the rest is a bunch of shit unfairly lumped with womanhood. Yes, there are many stereoptyes involved. Yes, it is good and proper to oppose them, because to accept them is to place each sex in a behavioral straitjacket.
And yet PZ accepts that such things are part of womanhood, saying that individual freedom lies in being able to choose our gender by declaration. Yet that is but to say that people get to choose their straitjacket.
That portion is the worst of the post, but none of it is particularly good.
Yeah that post finally did it for me reading his blog. OTOH I feel like going out in a blaze of glory and get banned on my first and only comment, which would be along the lines of:
Are you asking the spiders whether they identify as M or F or just making unwarranted assumptions and putting them in tubes together against their chosen gender? Inquiring minds want to know.
Snap. I was just reading that, via another source. What a dog’s breakfast.
@Holms,
My thoughts were much the same.
Have you seen the latest ‘artwork’ to (dis)grace the White House walls? It’s an oil painting of Trump sat at a table enjoying drinks with Nixon, both Bushes, Reagan, Lincoln. It’s horrible.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/15/president-trump-new-painting-white-house-republican
He doesn’t know about art, but he knows what he likes.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/15/president-trump-new-painting-white-house-republican
Sorry AoS, I hadn’t seen your post.
Great minds, and whatnot.
Oh dear god.
Zach Weinersmith (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic) and his brother Greg Weiner (PhD in Government) have an interesting web comic going about government: Laws and Sausages. The most recent installment leads into a discussion about Title IX and transgender students.
http://lawsandsausagescomic.com/comic/901
@iknklast:
I got your message re books via O, bought, reading.
Apparently it’s more of a guy thing…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17990502/jason-blum-interview-blumhouse-pictures-women-directors-horror
So it’s business as usual then: don’t give women opportunities because they haven’t already been given opportunities. Obviously there’s something wrong with them, otherwise people would be giving them opportunities all the time.
On a vaguely related note: I don’t know the first thing about directing films, but it doesn’t seem as though it would be *that* hard. Plus, you get a free chair and monocle. I’ve run projects costing tens of millions and it was great: there were all these helpful people everywhere looking busy. Presumably they did stuff. I certainly wouldn’t know, I was too busy lying to the people with the money about what we were actually making.
Isn’t film directing like that?
@Sackbut:
I’ve been looking at Laws and Sausages since it began. I have learned exactly two things from it.
1. I have absolutely no idea how the US government works in principle or in practice.
2. I have even less idea of how my own (UK) government works.
I don’t even really know how to find out, which worries me. It’s the sort of thing I should know. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s homework. I have half a dozen computers on my desk, several of which are dedicated full time to crawling around the web finding stuff out. But I don’t know what I should tell them to ask to find out how the government works.
Does anyone even know?
Bang on cue, right in the middle of the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder, and of Trump’s refusal to condemn the act, Trump is at one of his rallies praising Greg Gianforte for his assault on reporter Ben Jacobs prior to Trump’s election.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/19/trump-praise-for-attack-on-guardian-reporter-criticised-by-downing-street
Powerful response to Rachel McKinnon’s racist idiocy:
https://twitter.com/MarguretCutting/status/1053630636311932928?s=20
https://twitter.com/MarguretCutting/status/1053631284701028352?s=20
Those are good.
More of the usual: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-24-journeyquest-maker-cancels-contract-with-gog-over-transphobic-tweets
As the headline pretty much says, a company removed its games from the gaming site gog.com because of what they said was “hate speech”.
they said.
This was GOG’s tweet:
GOG’s specialty is selling old games. Sometimes they have to tweak them to run on newer operating systems. Hence the ‘pun’.
Insensitive, sure. Hijacking a political tag for commercial purposes is hardly cool. Although I’m not sure what the ‘use of hashtags’ part is supposed to mean, I might be missing something there.
But hate speech? Demeaning? Sociopathic?
Oh brother. Somehow, keeping accurate birth records is now evil.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/trump-defines-gender-hhs/573544/
From #88’s link:
oh god, the stupid. Does this person know how babies are made?
Right, I’m just off to register my genitals. Do you think I’ll have to dip them in a pot of ink and slap them on a piece of paper, like when you have your fingerprints taken?
Or is it more like when the X Men have to register their super powers?
It’s…. probably closer to the ink one, isn’t it?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world-us-canada-46026050
The orange one is deploying 5,200 troops, with tanks, air-support, the works (basically, combat-ready) to the southern border to add to the 2,100 National Guard troops he sent in April. Because of course he has.
That last line is fucking chilling!
Why we’re doomed. Profiles of 12 young people who probably won’t be voting.
I want to murder each and every one of them.
Samantha is upset that Democrats weren’t able to make 49 > 51 and stop the Kavanaugh nomination. I guess she thinks Democrats will “fight harder” if Bob Menendez loses his seat.
Reese is … too fickle to vote? Too afraid of making the wrong choice? It’s not entirely clear. (This is a recurring theme, by the way — the idea that you have to have fucking Ph.Ds in history, economics, and political science to be worthy of voting. Goddamnit, old white people vote because a man yelling on the radio told them the scary brown people are coming. Stop holding yourselves to ridiculous standards that your fellow citizens don’t.)
Tim hates mailing stuff; it gives him anxiety. Ah, well, then, Timmy, we wouldn’t want you to experience any anxiety. The anxiety of people who fear they will lose their health care, their right to control their bodies, or have their children taken away from them and locked in cages, pales in comparison to your trauma. Good to know that you’re “leaning” towards voting, you know, if it’s close.
Megan also has issues with mailing stuff — it’s so hard to find printers and stamps! (I have some sympathy for her point that it’s difficult for people who move around a lot; we really ought to make it easier to register and vote. But hey, I’m sure both political parties want that, right? It’ll just happen on its own.)
Drew is miffed that the Democratic Party doesn’t cater enough to his preferences. Yeah, it’s almost as if parties pay more attention to demographic groups that FUCKING SHOW UP TO VOTE! But hey, you’re sure showing them! When the Democrats lose more elections to right-wing whackos, their response will surely be to move to the left. Uh huh. Any day now.
Laura just doesn’t have the time and energy, and apparently can’t do anything without asking Mommy and Daddy for help. She regrets not voting in 2016 and she’s totally gonna vote in 2020, you know, when she’s studied up enough. She’s set a goal to learn about, like, society and stuff.
Aaron was a Bernie supporter who voted for Hillary in 2016 but has “felt bad” about it for the last two years. Because…? He only wants to vote for candidates who “excite” him. I presume that he only goes outside when the weather is nice, only works when he feels like it, and has never had to make a tough decision in his life. Apparently the opportunity to elect a black governor in Georgia — the first black woman governor in ANY state — isn’t exciting enough for him.
Anna also finds mail confusing and post offices scary.
Thomas used to think it was immoral to vote, because that was giving his approval to “the system.” Well, the system sure is all broken up about your disapproval, dipshit. I’m sure that if voting rates plunge another 10%, “the system” will voluntarily disband in sadness and usher in the fucking Age of Aquarius or whatever the modern version of hippie utopia is. Now Thomas is willing to vote if it affects him personally as a teacher at CUNY, but I guess just helping to protect the rights of other people isn’t sufficiently thrilling for him to, as he puts it, take five minutes out of his day.
Jocelyn also has trouble with stamps. She complains that she has a chronic illness, and that it was easier to get her medical marijuana card than to register to vote. Somehow I bet her chronic illness doesn’t stop her from going to buy pot.
Maria doesn’t like politics because the Catholic Church used to tell her how to vote. She also feels strongly about women’s reproductive rights. But….?
Nathan is 28 years old, but can’t figure out how to register and vote, because apparently sites like vote.org don’t exist or are blocked in San Diego. He might vote if, like, you put it all on Instagram or something. I’m not sure how Nathan manages to feed and clothe himself.
Prove me wrong, 20-somethings. Actually show up or, you know, FIND A GODDAMN STAMP. Put on your big boy or big girl or big genderqueerperson pants and accept that voting isn’t about your personal fulfillment, and that sometimes you have to choose between two options that don’t fill you with joy and excitement.
Excuse me, but FUCKING HELL!
I hate being of a progressive and liberal bent precisely because I get associated with waste of space boiled lettuce like these pathetic useless fuckwits. Give me a drink and I’ll tell you exactly what I think of them.
I know, I know. Arrggh.
The NY Times reports on prosecutors ginning up charges against black voters as intimidation.
But I was assured by a commenter here that “voter fraud crackdowns” only hurt the guilty!
Thank you. God almighty.
A round of applause for an excellent rant, Screechy Monkey.
I actually popped in to say that we must all try to be more understanding of Mr. Trump’s estrangement from honesty, because he really tries to tell the truth.
Fucking pathetic excuse of a human being.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world-us-canada-46061646
A college professor is being attacked for liking a picture on Facebook.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-fortenberry-nebraska-professor-threats_us_5bdb343ee4b01abe6a1c4ca8
There’s a new £50 note being issued soon. One of those new plastic ones that spring clean out of your hand and away on the breeze if you try to fold them. Anyway, the Bank of England is accepting nominations for who should be featured on the note. It has to be a British scientist.
You know what’s going to happen here. The nominations are going to be Dawkins, Hawking, Cox (Cox has already nominated and argued for Hawking) with the more historically minded going for the likes of Crick, Darwin, of course (deserving but has already been on a note), Faraday, Halley, Higgs, Jenner, Dirac…. Well you get the idea. Deserving scientists all (although note that I didn’t say deserving of what) but obvious choices for an obvious reason.
If you feel like voting, you can pick my personal favourite, Mary Anning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning
Or you could choose, say,
Harriette Chick
Eva Crane
Deborah Doniach
Rosalind Franklin
Monica Grady
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan
Wendy Hall
Anita Harding
Joanne Johnson
Ada Lovelace
Elsie Widdowson
Florence Nightingale
And thousands of other people guilty of doing science while female.
I’ve only met one of those on this list (guess who and no even I’m not *that* old) and I’d love to see her on a note. Also, some of these people (including her) are alive and therefore not eligible but fuck it: a) a lot of people are marauding around on places like Twitter nominating people who are alive and b) it’s worth finding out about all the people on that list regardless, if you don’t already know about them.
But if you do one thing I instruct you to this year, vote for someone who is not an obvious suspect and preferably not a man. You don’t even have to be British, any bugger can vote. If your browser tells you you can’t… see me.
Also, as a personal favour to me, whatever you do, don’t pick Tim Berners-Lee. We…. have some history. I would hate to have to punch holes in any £50 note I inexplicably managed to get hold of. Especially not these new ones, they are quite hard to kill.
And anyway, just vote for Mary Anning. Particularly if you have ever been to the Natural History Museum in London.
Oh, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Oh and for fuck’s sake don’t vote for Kevin Warwick either. I realise this is now turning into a list of British scientists who I have either got or tried to get in a headlock at some point or another, but don’t let that influence your vote. Assuming you don’t want me to get you in a headlock too.
Oh, here’s where you vote, btw: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/50-pound-note-nominations
I second the choice of Mary Anning. I first learned of her via John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles was surprisingly (for the time) insistent about how astonishing she was.
I wish I’d been around to know her.
[…] a comment by latsot in Miscellany […]
Julie Bindel rightly telling everyone off about de-platfiorming: https://youtu.be/mH8RndGR6uU
She does a good job of reminding everyone – because everyone seems to need reminding – that misogyny is at least as much of an issue as is racism, homophobia etc.
It’s a shame she’s not there in the studio.
Ophelia, I know this sort of thing interests you; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/07/worlds-oldest-figurative-painting-discovered-in-borneo-cave
40,000 year-old figurative cave art.
Man identifies as younger man.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/08/dutch-man-69-starts-legal-fight-to-identify-as-20-years-younger
What is mere reality to stand in his way?
#109
If he is faking it, it sure travelled far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRzlqFoWo5U
Maureen Brian’s daughter has written about Maureen’s funeral here:
https://www.facebook.com/justine.brian/posts/10161059647815147
I can’t see it because Facebook but I thought some of the rest of you might like to know it’s there.
Still makes me sad, even though I only met her the once.
Oh my. Thank you. It’s an epic in miniature and moving beyond description.
It’s funny as well as heartrending, which seems only right in a farewell to Maureen. Making me blub like a drain, of course, but that’s inevitable.