Dec 31st, 2019 4:49 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Katelyn Burns explains the Maya Forstater ruling for readers of The New Republic:
But a closer look at the case reveals that it doesn’t have much to do with a belief that “there are only two sexes in human beings … male and female,” as Forstater claims (and growing bodies of science dispute). In practice, Forstater was seeking legal cover to disregard the already established rights of trans people in the U.K.
What rights? What rights of trans people was Maya “seeking legal cover to disregard”?
Hers was a familiar argument—one that for too long has dominated mainstream coverage of trans rights.
What rights are those though?
A passage from employment judge James Tayler’s ruling explained it perfectly: “The claimant
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Tags: Trans dogma
Dec 31st, 2019 3:56 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump spends a very hefty percentage of his time on the golf course – hefty as in around 20%.
In one way that’s a good thing, because while he’s golfing he’s not shit-tweeting or Putin-kissing or world-destroying. In another way it’s contemptible, because he decided to take on this formidable job and he’s not even giving it his full attention. (An even heftier percentage of his time is taken up with watching Fox News.)
CNN has collected some figures.
According to CNN’s tally, he has spent at least 252 days at a Trump golf club and 333 days at a Trump property as President.
This year alone, he spent at least 86 days at a golf club, despite a
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Tags: Trump
Dec 31st, 2019 11:37 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oddly enough women don’t see Ivanka Trump as a diversity hire.
CES, the eading consumer-electronics trade show, is facing criticism after picking Ivanka Trump to serve as its keynote speaker next month in Las Vegas, after years of being accused of overlooking the role of women in technology.
I find that pretty disgusting and I’m not even a woman in technology.
She has no knowledge or experience or credentials in the field, and she also has no knowledge or experience or credentials in any other field. All she’s ever done is parlay her corrupt father’s celebrity and money into money and celebrity for herself.
“This is a terrible choice on so many levels but also – what an insult
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Dec 31st, 2019 11:15 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Joan Smith points out some implications of the Cyprus outrage:
This sequence of events is a stain on the Cypriot justice system, but what lies behind it is a hugely disproportionate anxiety about false accusations. Indeed it is one of the principal myths that undermine rape investigations, even though the idea that there are high levels of false allegations is unsupported by evidence. In the UK, a handful of widely publicised cases that ended in acquittals or a decision not to proceed to trial has tainted the entire system for investigating rape. Many people do not understand that a decision not to prosecute reflects an assessment of the available evidence, and does not mean the victim was lying.
The Crown
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Dec 31st, 2019 10:52 am |
By Ophelia Benson
New rule for women: don’t report gang-rape, because if you do you could find yourself convicted of lying.
The UK government is to raise concerns with the authorities in Cyprus over the fairness of a trial in which a British teenager was found guilty of lying about being gang-raped.
A judge ruled on Monday that the 19-year-old wilfully indulged in public mischief in claiming she was raped by a group of Israeli males aged between 15 and 22 while she was on holiday in Ayia Napa in July.
The ruling by Michalis Papathanasiou at Famagusta’s district court in Paralimni was immediately and strongly condemned by the defence team and rights groups. They claimed the trial was full of legal
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Dec 31st, 2019 10:35 am |
By Ophelia Benson
What is transphobic? Saying that a man competing against women in sport is unfair is transphobic. We’re told.
https://twitter.com/DaveDavidDave_/status/1212053730176184322
Advantage? What advantage? What advantage could that doctor in the middle possibly have?… Read the rest
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Dec 30th, 2019 4:35 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Dallas News:
Since my younger daughter is only 11, I didn’t expect the weight of the letter she brought me that night around 11 p.m., hours after I’d put her to bed.
In glittery red ink, the same she used for her Christmas list, her words sank my heart. At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.
Her
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Dec 30th, 2019 11:37 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Princess Ivanka gets another fawning interview with people who should know better:
[T]hings got worse at the end of the interview when Brennan went to extreme lengths to portray her as a moderating force in her father’s White House.
On the topic of immigration, Brennan described Ivanka as “vocal in your opposition” to the inhumane family separation policy her father implemented in April 2018, noting that she described the policy as a “low point.” But Ivanka was not in fact “vocal” in opposition to the policy — in fact, the opposite is the case.
As my colleague Emily Stewart chronicled at the time, Ivanka — supposedly an advocate for women and families in the administration — only spoke out
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Dec 30th, 2019 11:10 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Hey, how about interviewing the people at Ma’s Pie Shop?
I just wish for someone who I feel good about voting for
Honestly, that’s not a realistic wish, unless your bar for “feel good about” is fairly low. (And maybe it is for you, in which case the rest of this post will seem like I’m jumping on you. I’m really just using your post to take aim at a commonly-expressed sentiment that I think is a problem in general, even if it isn’t a problem in your specific case.)
Even if all of politics came down to a simplified one-dimensional ideological spectrum, you would have to be one of the relatively few … Read the rest
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Dec 30th, 2019 10:28 am |
By Ophelia Benson
It’s always worse. Greg Sargent at the Post sums up the new evidence on how bad it is:
If Mitch McConnell is going to pull off his scheme to turn President Trump’s impeachment trial into a quick and painless sham with no witnesses, the Senate majority leader needs the story to be covered as a conventional Washington standoff — one that portrays both sides as maneuvering for advantage in an equivalently political manner.
But extraordinary new revelations in the New York Times about Trump’s corrupt freezing of military aid to Ukraine will — or should — make this much harder to get away with.
Not everything is left v right, Dems v Republicans, Big End v Little End. Much … Read the rest
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2 comments
Tags: Trump
Dec 29th, 2019 4:46 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
You’d think this was satire but apparently it isn’t. Hold the presses: facial recognition technology “misgenders” trans and nonbinary people. You don’t say! How very shocking!
Yet, for all its advances, facial recognition technology—created by training computer vision algorithms on massive datasets of photographs of faces—might have a critical shortcoming: only being able to “see” two genders.
Sexes, you mean. The average differences in male and female faces aren’t a matter of gender but of sex. They’re physical. Vision algorithms don’t know from people’s inner feeling.
New research by Jed Brubaker, Jacob Paul, and Morgan Klaus Scheuerman (lead author) in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Information Science department reveals that many major facial recognition services misclassify the gender of
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Dec 29th, 2019 3:33 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh please.
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron agreed that both of their papers have to do a better job of covering President Donald Trump’s supporters.
Not this crap again. They do cover Trump’s supporters. We hear endlessly about forgotten people in forgotten small towns and their forgotten hatred of immigrants; we hear far more about forgotten small town Murika than we do about big city Murika, where a vastly larger percentage of people live.
Baquet and Baron joined NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday to talk about how the Trump administration has waged war on fact-based reporting, and what news outlets should do to push back against disinformation. When asked
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Dec 29th, 2019 10:12 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump is ratcheting up the crazy and disgusting.
Which they should be able to do very easily – oh yes it’s dead easy to provide abundant housing for non-rich people in a week or two, especially in a system that is categorically hostile to all forms of public housing.
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Dec 29th, 2019 9:44 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Hmm. Science! And skepticism! Science and skepticism! Together! Jonathan Jarry’s Twitter profile:
Science + skepticism for the public. Podcasting, writing & talks.
@McGillOSS
. One half of The Body of Evidence (w/
@DrLabos
). Feelings don’t care about facts.
Sounds good. Yay science, yay skepticism, yay for the public. The slogan makes more sense as “facts don’t care about feelings” but maybe he’s being playful.
Any trends to talk about?
How much time do … Read the rest
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Dec 28th, 2019 11:31 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Psychology Today:
Here’s what really happened: On November 21, Kayum Ahmed, a South African and an adjunct member of the Columbia University Law School faculty, spoke at Fieldston about apartheid. In the Q & A, which was recorded on video, in response to a student’s question, he said that “xenophobic attacks are a shameful part of South African history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators,” and that he uses the same example in talking about the Holocaust. “Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel,” he told them, “today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable.”*
If a speaker had made comments such as these
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