… Read the restJeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier who is accused of sex trafficking, had an unusual dream: He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.
Mr. Epstein over the years confided to scientists and others about his scheme, according to four people familiar with his thinking, although there is no evidence that it ever came to fruition.
Mr. Epstein’s vision reflected his longstanding fascination with what has become known as transhumanism: the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Critics have likened transhumanism to
He could have founded a race of super…whatevers
Jul 31st, 2019 5:28 pm | By Ophelia BensonGuest post: Is that an appropriate thing to ask?
Jul 31st, 2019 4:50 pm | By Ophelia BensonOriginally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Can you affirm my gender at 3 p.m. Tuesday?
The “gender affirming” bit is key. It seems to be what all of these fights are about, or at least most of them.
Yaniv wants these spas to give her treatments that will supposedly “affirm” her in her gender. (I’m more than a little suspicious that this is Yaniv’s only or even her main motive, but let that go for now.)
Trans women athletes want to compete with cis women because it will “affirm” their gender to be in the “women’s” event. (Again, I’m being charitable and assuming that they’re not motivated by a desire to win awards and scholarships.)
Same for arguments about … Read the rest
Can you affirm my gender at 3 p.m. Tuesday?
Jul 31st, 2019 3:01 pm | By Ophelia BensonPink News rushes to the defense of J Yaniv:
Jessica Yaniv says she has received huge backlash from journalists and on social media for asking salons to give her a Brazilian wax as a trans woman, with some calling it “sexual assault.”
Is that true? For asking? Not for suing when turned down? Can it really be called “asking” when the response to “no” is a lawsuit? Looks more like demanding, to me.
Although there has been a focus on Yaniv’s requests for a Brazilian wax, she told PinkNews that the coverage “has not been fair nor accurate,” and that she was in fact requesting many different services which would be “gender-affirming” for her.
And we can be completely … Read the rest
The bigotry, hatred, intolerance, and xenophobia that is hurled at us
Jul 31st, 2019 12:19 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe churchy people who run “the National Cathedral” in DC have issued a rebuke of Trump. (What actually is “the National Cathedral”? Is that just the name it gave itself? We’re not supposed to have a federal cathedral, surely. But anyway.) Mostly I don’t publicize what churchy people say, but given that presidents are expected to do things there (again, why?), this one is of interest.
… Read the restThe escalation of racialized rhetoric from the President of the United States has evoked responses from all sides of the political spectrum. On one side, African American leaders have led the way in rightfully expressing outrage. On the other, those aligned with the President seek to downplay the racial overtones of his attacks,
Tchau, rainforest
Jul 31st, 2019 11:39 am | By Ophelia BensonYesterday we read about forest fires in the western US reducing the ability of forests to regrow and continue to sequester carbon; today it’s Brazil’s turn.
… Read the restDeforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.
The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.
Clearance so far in July has hit 1,345 sq km, a third higher than the previous monthly record under the current monitoring system by the Deter B satellite
Providing care
Jul 31st, 2019 11:21 am | By Ophelia BensonMeanwhile, about the Uighurs…
… Read the restChina has detained an estimated 1 million to 2 million Uighur Muslims in the region of Xinjiang, and millions more live one step away from detention under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party.
Why it matters: It has been two years since the internment camps first came to light internationally, and a series of reports from Xinjiang have made vivid the scale of the abuses. Yet foreign governments and corporations are content to pretend it isn’t happening.
“If right now, just about any other country in the world [were] found to be detaining over 1 million Muslims of a certain ethnicity, you can bet we’d be seeing an international outcry,” says Sophie Richardson,
He assures us he is “the least racist person in the world”
Jul 31st, 2019 10:51 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s latest contribution to the conversation:
CNN’s Don Lemon, the dumbest man on television, insinuated last night while asking a debate “question” that I was a racist, when in fact I am “the least racist person in the world.” Perhaps someone should explain to Don that he is supposed to be neutral, unbiased & fair,……..or is he too dumb (stupid} to understand that. No wonder CNN’s ratings (MSNBC’s also) have gone down the tubes – and will stay there until they bring credibility back to the newsroom. Don’t hold your breath!
The “dumb (stupid}” is a nice touch, especially the mismatched brackets.
Anyway, no worries, it’s all political correctness run mad.
… Read the rest“Everybody’s called a racist now,” Trump said in
Fox named to administer hen house
Jul 31st, 2019 10:26 am | By Ophelia BensonA rabid opponent of federal land management has been put in charge of…federal land management. Of course he has.
… Read the restInterior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday signed an order making Wyoming native William Perry Pendley acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau’s holdings are sweeping, with nearly one out of every 10 acres nationally, and 30% of minerals, under its dominion, mostly across the U.S. West.
Pendley, a former midlevel Interior appointee in the Reagan administration, for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands. He has written books accusing federal authorities and environmental advocates of “tyranny” and “waging war on the West.” He argued in
A small number of influential actors
Jul 31st, 2019 9:36 am | By Ophelia BensonA reminder to consider the likely impacts:
The “unregulated roll-out” of gender self-identification in Scotland has taken place with weak or non-existent scrutiny which could be putting women and girls at risk, according to new research.
University of Edinburgh academics Dr Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn argue that decision-making on sex and gender identity issues has been directed towards the interests of a specific group, “without due regard” for the wider population.
Published on Monday in the university’s journal Scottish Affairs, the study claims that policy makers have been over-influenced by those lobbying for the rights of trans people to the “detriment” of women and girls.
Why is that? Why has it been so quick and easy? I … Read the rest
Guest post: This is the standard of argument we get
Jul 31st, 2019 8:37 am | By Ophelia BensonOriginally a comment by latsot at Miscellany Room 3.
Have we done this one yet? So many of these things turn up in my labyrinthine feeds that I sometimes have trouble keeping track.
[Answer: no, we haven’t. I saw it last week and made a couple of attempts to read it but found it way too long for purpose as well as excruciatingly annoying so I turned my back on it.]
Anyway, as the URL suggests, the title is Dear Philosophers, You Can Trust the Feminist Consensus: Gender-Critical Radical Feminism is Bogus
It seems to be all over the place and since today I reached peak procrastination, I finally started to read it.
It’s written by a … Read the rest
Now we’re Cotton Mather
Jul 30th, 2019 4:24 pm | By Ophelia BensonOh good grief. I thought I was going to leave the subject for today but then I saw this piece at Inside Higher Ed, fatuously titled Taking Trans Lives Seriously. Because what, there are all these people making a big joke of trans lives? Are we supposed to take trans lives more seriously than any other kinds of lives? (Of course; stupid question.)
It is not permissible to debate in some academic parlor game the lives of people who are oppressed and murdered, writes Mark Lance.
“Some academic parlor game” says a professor of philosophy at Georgetown. Anyway people aren’t “debating the lives” of trans people in the way he wants us to think: debating whether they deserve to … Read the rest
Less carbon sequestered
Jul 30th, 2019 3:33 pm | By Ophelia BensonMaybe it will help if we rake the forest floors?
The CBC reports a forestry professor has found that:
… Read the restcertain tree species are having a tough time growing back in areas that have been affected by wildfires due to warming temperatures — a discovery that could have major implications for both the forestry sector and long-term climate change targets.
Among Stevens-Rumann,’s work was a 2017 study of nearly 1,500 sites charred by 52 wildfires in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Her research found that lower elevation trees had a tough time naturally regenerating in areas that burned between 2000 and 2015 compared with sites affected between 1985 and 1999, largely due to drier weather conditions.
More recently, a 2019 study
A nationally recognized expert
Jul 30th, 2019 12:32 pm | By Ophelia BensonChase Strangio is a staffer at the ACLU:
Chase Strangio is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project and a nationally recognized expert on transgender rights.
Strangio is also a trans man.
Strangio makes a melodramatic claim:
We die because we are told we can’t live. We die because people oppose the premise of our existence. We die because you want us to. Call me dramatic. Mock me. Threaten me but I am going to fight for my people to live. NO matter what you do.
Obligingly, I did call that claim melodramatic. That’s because it is. Trans people don’t flop over and die because people tell them things, and they are not told they … Read the rest
And by “least” I mean “most”
Jul 30th, 2019 8:03 am | By Ophelia BensonHmmyeahno.
Trump to reporters this AM: “I’m the least racist person there is anywhere in the world.” Fact check: False.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 30, 2019
I can think of less-racist-than-Trump people without even resorting to Google.
He does say it. You can see him say it, and then go on to say a bunch of racist crap.
President Trump: "I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world…Al Sharpton, now he's a racist. He's a racist."
Full video: https://t.co/nmbeeOLn2i pic.twitter.com/vqWpUOU4L2
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 30, 2019
WATCH: Trump insists he is the ‘least racist person in the world’ as he angrily rails against black leaders https://t.co/a0wcQd6mv9
— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 30, 2019
In order to be granted full rights
Jul 30th, 2019 7:34 am | By Ophelia BensonMore demands for more more more gender reform:
More than 100 LGBT organisations and celebrities are urging the government to reform UK gender identity laws, the BBC has learned.
But what if “gender identity” doesn’t actually mean anything?
But, in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, LGBT groups said the UK was “lagging behind” other countries “in terms of legal equality for trans and non-binary people”.
Is it? How? In what way do trans and non-binary people not have legal equality? What does “legal equality” in that sentence mean?
… Read the restAshleigh Talbot, a transgender woman, says the current process to get legal recognition is too negative.
“It’s an extremely bureaucratic process,” said Ms Talbot.
…
Ms Talbot added
Their dreams as star runners
Jul 29th, 2019 4:21 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe ACLU is worked up over the “right” of male people who claim to be trans to compete against female people in sports, again.
Terry and Andraya are two transgender girls who are following their dreams as star runners in Connecticut. But as athletes on the track, they face harmful discrimination instead of accolades.
We’re fighting alongside Terry and Andraya for our right to live as our authentic selves.
Live as your “authentic selves” all you like; knock yourselves out. But that doesn’t translate to mean you get to live as your physically inauthentic self at the expense of people who are oppressed and marginalized on the basis of their physically authentic bodies, aka girls and women.
A very common toy sold for sensation play
Jul 29th, 2019 3:27 pm | By Ophelia BensonStupidest possible reaction to Karen’s tweet about a woman murdered by a “sex toy” which is to say a spiked wheel shoved up her vagina:
A woman has been killed.
But the take here is that “Kink shaming is bullshit.”
That’s Grade ‘A’ bullshit if you ask me. pic.twitter.com/yJUln3q1Jv
— Karen Ingala Smith (@K_IngalaSmith) July 29, 2019
Strangling women is “breath play” and shoving spiked wheels up women’s vagina’s is “sensation play.”
What is wrong with people?… Read the rest
Open wide, darling
Jul 29th, 2019 3:07 pm | By Ophelia BensonDear god what is wrong with people?
Behold, a “sex toy”:
WTAF? pic.twitter.com/3md4Hko2Pb
— Karen Ingala Smith (@K_IngalaSmith) July 29, 2019
In what universe is that a sex toy???
A man whose wife died during a 48-hour extreme sex session days after they got married has been given a suspended prison sentence.
Ralph Jankus, 52, killed his wife Christel, 49, when he inserted a spiked Wartenberg wheel inside his wife, perforating her bowel.
The wheel is normally used by doctors to check nerve reactions.
They failed to get medical help for four days, by which time nothing could have been done to save her.
How is sticking a wheel with roughly 24 sharp spikes on it … Read the rest
A con man, always looking for a score
Jul 29th, 2019 12:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump has been vomiting out his id for our inspection this morning.
I have known Al for 25 years. Went to fights with him & Don King, always got along well. He “loved Trump!” He would ask me for favors often. Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC. Hates Whites & Cops! https://t.co/ZwPZa0FWfN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2019
… Read the restBaltimore, under the leadership of Elijah Cummings, has the worst Crime Statistics in the Nation. 25 years of all talk, no action! So tired of listening to the same old Bull…Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the
In particular
Jul 29th, 2019 11:20 am | By Ophelia BensonOpen Labour is a group or organization or faction or ______ that aims to make the Labour Party more wonderful. Or something. What they stand for:
We represent Labour’s open Left: a practical, open-minded and tolerant type of democratic socialism. Our ideas and campaigns are based on a simple strategy: creating broad and diverse alliances behind policies which transform society.
We are realistic about public opinion, but we believe that Labour’s democratic left must seek to lead it. This will only happen if our party is vibrant and democratic – if it can include a wide variety of views and groups without intolerance or bigotry keeping members away.
So I guess the rest of Labour is impractical, closed-minded, and … Read the rest