Miscellany Room 2
Not actually new; just tweaking the date.
Time for a new one.
An item or two I want to look into further.
https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1064565119101865989
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1064556378054905856
We have never in American history seen an administration with such contempt for the Constitution, from Trump's launch with blatant violations like emoluments & the first Muslim Ban, to this continuing assault on @acosta & @cnn — and so the First Amendment. https://t.co/7TNdfpVirH
— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) November 19, 2018
Okay four. We live in interesting times.
Thanks for creating this! Copied from the off-topic location:
NPR had a piece on composer Missy Mazzoli and a new effort to highlight the work of “women and non-binary people” in classical music. The article asks the question “what is a woman?”, with no answer and no hint that asking the question is controversial. The list being compiled is called “200 Greatest Songs by Women+”; women don’t get their own list, I suppose. No mention is made of whether female people (that is, women) who identify as men are included in the “+”.
Arghh!
Oh, for fuck sake. I shan’t link to it because…well, just because, but PZ has a post up about orang utans being sold into prostitution. Orang utans! Shaved, perfumed, lipsticked, for the sexual gratification of loggers and plantation workers.
What the fuck is wrong with
peoplemen? I mean, where the available choice is a shaved orang stolen from the jungle, a 10-year-old girl sold by her own gran, or a wank, who the everloving fuck wouldn’t opt for onanism?I saw that post, AoS. It made me so angry I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to walk into my classroom and teach my students for fear of what I might say. But, it did stand me in good stead over lunch when I had to abuse the character in the novel I’m writing.
President Dumpster Fire on the Saudi Prince’s possible foreknowledge of the plan to assassinate a journalist: “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.” No recognition, of course, of the fact that either answer would be grounds for calling for the Prince to step down, at a minimum. (If your people have gone so rogue that they’re killing innocents without your permission, you’re shit at leading.)
I was blogging that at the same moment. It’s DISGUSTING.
Rewire is usually a good source for news and opinion regarding reproductive rights. Recently they’ve gone sharply into trans ideology advocacy, and this article was a doozy. They are opposing “conversion therapy” for trans kids, by which they mean therapy that doesn’t rush kids toward lifelong medical treatment, surgery, and sterility. They get everything backwards in this mess of an article.
I wrote to them once about a previous article, but never received a response.
I don’t understand why Rewire is invested in trans advocacy in the first place. If they must be, why aren’t they on side of not sterilizing kids, not destroying kids’ sexual function.
https://rewire.news/article/2018/11/21/the-rejection-of-conversion-therapy-for-trans-kids-isnt-motivated-by-politics-its-motivated-by-science/
This cracker from Michelle Wolf
https://twitter.com/michelleisawolf/status/1065110176863264768
Oh, good one.
The #BeBest is a wonderful touch
Some incoherence for a Wednesday. https://www.salon.com/2018/11/21/letting-go-of-the-no-gender-utopia/
Saying “gender is sexy” is a slap in the face to women everywhere. Do these people even hear themselves?
More on the enslaved orangutan–her name is Pony; she is now living in a refuge and seems to have recovered from her ordeal.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/26/orangutan-was-shaved-made-to-wear-jewellery-and-used-as-a-prostitute-8179714/?ito=social
The Miami Herald just published a huge story on the Epstein case and how he managed to get such a sweetheart deal.
I seem to recall that at least one Famous Skeptic was an Epstein pal and defender, but since I’m not sure my memory is accurate I won’t say which one I’m thinking of.
Krauss.
Yep, that’s who I was thinking of. Some quick Googling reminds me that Krauss defended Epstein, saying that as a scientist he couldn’t believe the allegations because he had only seen Epstein in the company of women over 18.
Well, then. I’ve never seen a Catholic priest molest anyone, so I guess that whole scandal can be dispensed with.
Krauss’s wife also complained that Epstein was being persecuted for his “lifestyle.”
Oh, lord. That’s right up there with Trump saying he denied it THREE TIMES.
Today in “how to be a complete asshole”, I give you Rep Thomas Massie, who apparently thinks food isn’t a human right…
https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1068136393237557254
Ugh, more of Neil deGrasse Tyson being allegedly awful.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/11/two-more-women-accuse-neil-degrasse-tyson-of-sexual-misconduct/
Who knew that stripping to a string vest and offering cheese to an acquaintance after pressuring them to drink a bottle of wine constituted sexual abuse? It’s everyone, ever, isn’t it?
Yeah, that, that and that. It was so weirdly specific, wasn’t it? If I remember correctly, Krauss said something like “sure… Epstien surrounded himself with beautiful women BUT BUT BUT they were totally older than 18” as if that made it OK. And as if “surrounding himself with” didn’t mean “trafficking and raping”.
Abuser defends abuser, we’ve seen this before. What will it take to simply believe what women are telling everyone? Our local paper published no fewer than five long articles last week about an apparently genuine case of a woman falsely accusing a man of rape. Dime-a-dozen cases of actual rape get a paragraph at best, written by junior reporters alongside cases of border dispute and dogs shitting in the wrong gardens.
A local woman was murdered by her husband recently. It turns out that he was gay and met several men for sex using the evil internet so it is a story that must be mentioned in every news cycle. It’s every bit about him, not the woman he murdered. Her corpse is at best a vehicle to talk about her murderer. It drives me fucking insane.
latsot’s comment about underreporting of violence against women reminded me of this recent story.
The sequence of events goes like this:
1. In 2017, a food critic does a bunch of reviews of various burger joints across America, and ultimately writes an article naming a particular restaurant in Portland as America’s Best Burger.
2. In early 2018, the restaurant closes. A local newspaper does an interview with the owner, who claims that the best burger article led to an influx of new customers which “overwhelmed” the restaurant and caused it to close (contrary to all known principles of business and economics).
3. Food Critic does his own interview with the owner, and publishes a navel-gazing piece on The Awesome Power That Food Critic Wields And With It Must Come Great Responsibility, along with various interviews on NPR and other major outlets. The article contained a vague reference that the owner “asked me not to reveal the details of that story, but I can say that there were personal problems, the type of serious things that can happen with any family, and would’ve happened regardless of how crowded Stanich’s was, and that real life is always more complicated and messier than we want it to be.” But otherwise it accepted the premise that the article caused the closure.
4. A second local paper does some, you know, journalism, and discovers that the reality is indeed more than a wee bit more complicated and messy. The restaurant had been managed for 19 years by the owner’s wife, who was diagnosed with breast cancer, was abused by the owner — at one point, he strangled her in front of their teenaged son — and finally left him. The owner has a history of violence towards women, filed a frivolous lawsuit against an employee, failed to pay spousal support, falsely accused his ex of lying about her cancer, repeatedly violated the terms of his probation (including contacting the ex), and had his driver’s license suspended. You know, those kind of “personal problems” that “can happen with any family.”
5. Food Critic and his editors issue various contradictory statements about what, exactly, they knew about the owner’s history when they published the second piece, eventually admitting that they knew at least some of it.
But hey, can’t let the pesky details of spousal abuse get in the way of a good narrative about the Food Critic’s emotional journey!
*incoherent burst of swears*
A teacher has been fired because, during a virtual reality exercise, he called out to students to keep watch over the student wearing the helmet. In doing so, he used the wrong pronoun for the student, thus violating the school’s transgender policy.
https://www.nbc12.com/2018/12/06/west-point-high-teacher-fights-dismissal-following-transgender-controversy/
Hemant Mehta criticizes a transgender strategy article by a right wing “culture wars” group. Rather than address the real problem, valid arguments used disingenuously, he criticizes the valid arguments. Well, he dismisses them, let’s put it that way.
So gender critical people get called right wing because right-wingers use some similar arguments, and then when it turns out the right-wingers don’t actually believe the arguments, it must mean gender critical people are also arguing in bad faith. Yeah, sure.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2018/12/09/anti-trans-group-admits-bathroom-bill-fear-mongering-was-largely-contrived/
This pretense that it’s all right-wing is getting harder to maintain by the day.
Sakbut:
Hemant has always been desperate to suck up to people peddling the dubious benefits of the status quo and he’s always been very unhappy at people who upset his particular apple cart.
How long ago was his famous post in which he said he wasn’t going to do that any more? 10 years? 15 years? I lose track. But what I do know is that he was back defending ‘both sides’ and again demanding civility from the left within about a month. His epiphany, which he spent so much time and effort describing when it was all theoretical and about himself, lasted no time at all in practice.
So my point is that I’m not surprised that he turns out to be an insufferable wanker on this issue too.
This is cute:
Spoken like a man. Not everyone else as a matter of fact. Nearly everyone else, yes, but some men do follow women into restrooms to spy or assault.
Of a certainty. I mean, men hassle other men in toilets all the time.
A particular memorable occasion that happened to me, a man, was this:
I was in the Free Trade Inn, which at the time was a fairly rough pub in Newcastle. A very big man followed me into the toilet and made a point at looking at my penis and said:
“You’ve got a small cock”.
I agreed because it hardly seemed worth fighting over and there was no doubt he had several other mates in the pub and was attempting to start some violence, I don’t know why. It didn’t end there. He followed me out of the toilet and spent quite a long time telling everyone else in the pub about my tiny penis and trying to incite some violence.
So I suppose my point is that males are horrible in male spaces. What in earth makes anyone think they’ll be better in female spaces?
Yeah, men never attack women and girls in bathrooms. That Google search I just did for “man attacks women in bathroom”that returned over 18 Million hits – just total crap. Oh, near the bottom of the first page…
https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/casper-resident-found-guilty-of-sexually-assaulting–year-old/article_d039caa4-acb2-5717-a70c-0a64f6cfc75f.html
Perpetrator was Michelle Martinez, aka Miguel Martinez…
Point is, even if it’s rare, it happens. It’s simply part of a wider pattern of male against female violence.
Please remove any sharp objects from your vicinity before reading this enraging story of a white male fraternity boy getting a sweetheart plea bargain in a rape case. He will spend no time in prison, not have to register as a sex offender, and his criminal record will be wiped clean if he can manage not to get through three entire years of probation.
Why such a great deal? Because the prosecutor recently lost a rape case, and god forbid a prosecutor should have to go through that trauma again. Why, it might mess up that ADA’s “conviction rate”* that she’ll brag about when she runs for elected office some day.
Oh sorry, of course it isn’t that, it’s that an acquittal would mean that the defendant gets to avoid punishment, whereas under the plea deal he… uh…. shit.
Ok, I don’t actually know if this particular ADA has political ambitions. And many prosecutors’ offices are overworked (and underpaid) and pressured to clear cases, and trials do take up a lot of resources. But at some point you have to be willing to walk away from a lousy deal, and risk losing a trial, or else what good are you doing? Frankly — and I don’t like this kind of reasoning, because it treats the flaws of the system as if they are virtues, but in this case it might be true — an acquittal at least would have been expensive for this defendant and his family.
*Here’s a little tip from your pal Screechy. Lawyers who brag about their “win rates” are almost always full of shit. Most criminal cases plead out, and most civil cases settle, so what counts as a “win”? Well, a lot of prosecutors count pleas like this as “wins” because, hey, they secured a conviction.
Screechy, I read this the other day and spent a couple of minutes cursing. Note that that Judge has done that sweetheart thing before:
Also not the first trouble for Baylor U:
Still, the way Betsy de Vos is shafting Title IX, I’m sure that no University ever fear that sort of thing again.
[…] going to let Screechy take over […]
A 4000 year old game board, in case you’re interested.
https://boingboing.net/2018/12/11/4000-year-old-game-board-carv.html
#32
Check out the Royal game of Ur some time – another 4,000 year old game with a translated cuneiform rulebook!
Yeah, but this one looks more like pac-man.
So, this was an ok response to a silly article by some gay conservative whining that conservatives are more oppressed than guys. But I couldn’t help noticing this little aside by the Deadspin writer:
Perhaps this is some kind of sarcasm I’m missing, but: “more fun” than gay? Presumably, something WAY more fun than dull old “cis hetereosexual.” Way to dispel the idea that some of these new “gender identities” are just attempts to be cooler than thou.
I’m reminded of an article under discussion here a while back, in which the interviewee was asked about her “intersectionality”, and she rattled off a bunch of gender buzzwords; the interviewer responded “Nice!”
I’m also reminded of a young teen girl explaining to her mother “It’s not cool to be normal”. Directly, just like that.
Somewhat related: I’m watching people take an online political spectrum test, and they are genuinely proud of being further in some direction than some other person, or of being near some famous person, rather than simply treating the results like a cholesterol test. I think people are modifying their answers to get the desired result. It’s more “cool” that way.
Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s Treasurer, convicted of sex abuse in Australia.
Time for some Tim Minchin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtHOmforqxk
Finally!
Today in Hollywood Misogyny: the Les Moonves investigation uncovers allegations that Moonves punished Cybill Shepherd for rejecting his advances, and CBS paid $9.5 million to hush up sexual harassment by the star of a mediocre drama; also, Sondra Locke dies and The Hollywood Reporter’s initial headline (before fixing it out of some capacity for shame) described her as the “embittered ex of Clint Eastwood.”. To be fair, “woman who Clint Eastwood abused and blackballed from the industry” is a little unwieldy to fit in a headline….
Priest criticises boy for comitting suicide….at the boy’s funeral, and implies that the kid might be in Hell.
Sensitive bugger, no?
Rubbing more salt into the wound was
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46578619
A black teenage boy “identifies” as a 35-year-old white man.
https://youtu.be/GaB5AVNg14c
Hah!
The RSS feed links at the side have stopped working for me. I still get the actual feed to my RSS reader, just clicking on the link now asks me for a download. Firefox just updated, so maybe it’s to do with that, but thought I’d mention it in case it’s something broken at your end.
Thanks Rob.
The chief Palestinian negotiator on his latest meeting with Jared Kushner:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomgara/saeb-erekat-kushner-last-meeting-jerusalem-embassy
It did not go well.
Via Kevin Drum’s blog at Mother Jones, I was alerted to this report.
In a nutshell: astronomers have to submit proposals to get time on the Hubble Telescope. Historically, not only do women make up significantly less than half of the principal investigators (PIs) of proposed studies, but they have a lower acceptance rate: last time, it was 13% acceptance for women but 24% for men.
But hey, I’m sure the Michael Shermers and James Damores of the world would have explanations for this. Couldn’t possibly be gender bias. Women just don’t do starry. Or men evolved to be better at astronomy because prehistoric man used celestial navigation while on overnight hunts of sabre-toothed tigers or whatever.
Well, they decided that the newest round of applications would be double-blinded: the reviewers would not know the names or genders of the PIs. And what do you know? This time women had a higher success rate (8.7%) than men (8.0%).
The report cautions that “it would be premature to draw broad conclusions, but the results are encouraging.”
I think that the result is alarming, in the sense that clearly there has been a systematic bias in the past. It would be encouraging if they continue with the double blind process and look at other ways to correct the systematic imbalance that is surely present in the Universities and Institutions involved.
Screechy, Rob
In the turgid worlds of academic computer science, bioinformatics, chemical engineering and social science (which are the only ones I have much experience of) it is exceedingly common, when writing a grant proposal, to find a high profile male to add as the principal investigator even if he ends up having little or nothing to do with the project, should it eventually be funded.
It’s a self-fulfilling process, of course. You pick the men because they have a lot of successful projects (mostly successful because of other people) and in doing so add yet another successful project to their CV.
I always tried to avoid doing that when I was in direct control of building the proposal (which is as much a political effort as a technical one, I am only really suited to the latter) and tried my hardest to promote young researchers with less experience, whiteness and maleitude. But that took way more work and was even then somewhat less successful than using the easy route.
Thankfully I tended to be in positions where my performance was only partly judged on my funding hit rate. Most academics in those fields were not so lucky, so it’s easy to see why they so often take the easy path. Not at all easy to condone, but easy to understand.
A shelter is suing for the right to discriminate against transgender people, and it’s clearly religious bigotry. Except that the shelter is for women, and they don’t admit men, a group that includes trans-identified-males aka transwomen. So it doesn’t seem to me like religious rules at all, just looking out for their female clientele.
Wasn’t that how a women’s rape crisis center in Vancouver got shut down? They wouldn’t admit men, and the trans activists went after them?
I hope the shelter is successful, but I doubt they will be.
https://www.inquisitr.com/5214979/christian-homeless-shelter-discriminate-transgender/
The Vancouver shelter had to defend against a lawsuit; I think it won. Plaintiff was Morgane Oger I think.
I see Mattis has gone…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/donald-trumps-america/109535681/trump-says-defence-secretary-james-mattis-is-retiring
Creepiest Christmas portrait ever?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/21/trump-portrait-you-couldnt-create-a-creepier-yuletide-scene-if-you-tried
Interesting phenomenon on Twitter right now: people who said in 2016 that they would have happily voted for a woman if she was likeable like Elizabeth Warren, not that awful Hillary Clinton, are now tweeting that Elizabeth Warren is unlikeable and haven’t the Democrats learned anything?
I think it got kick-started with a Politico article citing Warren’s supposed Hillary problem. I can understand people not supporting Warren for whatever policy or personality based reasons are important to them, but there’s really not much similarity between them other than both being white women of the same generation. The comparison is just lazy. Or worse.
Worse seems quite likely.
Peter Beinart at The Atlantic agrees. Since he cites a scientific study showing that voters react negatively to ambition and assertiveness in women candidates but positively to the same language for a man, I’m sure all the pro-science dudebros will be on board with this and not just react based on their feelings.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1080919143807803392
Ugh. Thank you.
PZ misrepresents Ophelia, horde howls “TERF”.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/01/05/deep-disappointment/
One poster defends Ophelia and her position, horde injects venom. There’s no discussion of the issues raised, it’s all “you are a bigot”.
Complete with a comment wishing spiky shaped object rape on the sole defender. I remember when comments about rape with a pineconeor a porcupine were common on PZ’s blog. The a small number of commentators drew a line in the sand and made clear that was unacceptable. Apparently it’s back in vogue to wish rape on uppity feminists if they are sufficiently terfy. Also, the screaming irrational denial that a man transitioning to a trans women carries male privilege with them! Apart from some very public and obvious examples, I’ve read first hand accounts from trans women baldly stating that they are aware they carry much of that privilege over with them.
Yeah, the formerly frowned-upon spikey rape business is back on the cards for alleged TERFs and nobody else.
The indignation at the idea of people with male bodies having some sort of male privilege! Those people are trans, god damn it, whether anyone knows it or not, and so are automatically oppressed.
See also weird criticisms that “Ophelia doesn’t do her philosophical stuff any more”.
Oh rilly? Well that definitely means she is focusing on being a TERF full time. Jesus.
There are quite a lot of things to object to about PZ’s post. I won’t address them all here.
The first is the weirdly aggressive opening. “I’ve been told.” The only reason for PZ to say that is to distance himself from any prior association. This is disappointing to say the least; he doesn’t phrase his criticisms of Sam Harris that way, for example. It’s a shunning rather than a criticism. He later says “this person”. That might be OK if he were trying to protect “that person” but he links to b&w. He’s not fooling anyone.
Then he cites a small part of Ophelia’s response to the tweet in question as the response. That is disingenuous on the face of it even without looking at the history of Ophelia’s posts. That might be understandable from a random fly-by criticizer, but it’s not acceptable from PZ. Despite their differences, PZ knows Ophelia to be a reasonable, thoughtful person who wields logic in the proper way: with passion and with knowledge of the subject. The least he could do is give the benefit of the doubt, read up on a few more posts and then explain his concerns without the weird shunning.
I can only conclude that his framing here is deliberate and he’s making a clear statement about siding with the clamour rather than wondering whether the issue might not be quite so settled as he imagines.
It’s hard to believe he doesn’t realise that in general people with male bodies are far more privileged than people with female ones, regardless of how they identify. He’s a smart guy, I don’t think he can possibly think that. But that’s what he seems to say. I don’t think anyone has argued that trans people don’t face discrimination or that it sucks when you don’t fit in with expectations or norms of other kinds. But that’s entirely beside the point, isn’t it? We can easily sympathize with people who struggle to fit in for whatever reason, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept simultaneously vague and specific rules about the division of privilege in society without reference to evidence, does it.
Perhaps the worst part is when PZ claims that Ophelia regards trans people as mentally ill. I haven’t seen anything that suggests she does and I’d be amazed if anything of that sort turned up. Presumably he gets that from the quoted word “delusion”. He didn’t have the same difficulty with “The God Delusion” and I’m pretty certain he’s used that word and others like it to refer to the religious, without ever meaning to imply that they are mentally ill. We are all delusional to some degree. Only some people are mentally ill.
The weirdest part is where he accuses Ophelia of projection. She’s reacting to the use of “cis” as shorthand for being unworthy of participating in discussions about trans issues. That is demonstrably a real thing, there are countless examples. But PZ claims Ophelia sees “cis” as an expression of contempt because she herself uses “trans” as a term of contempt. That is neener-neener schoolboy bullshit.
I’ve kept on reading Pharyngula despite the way FTB treated Ophelia. I thought PZ wasn’t such a bad guy despite it all until (after I brought it up) Ophelia reminded me of a few things he did and notably didn’t do at that time. I still kept reading – with a skeptical eye and reduced priority – even given his blithering posts on trans issues.
I’m done now. If this post were just wrong or stupid, I might stick around. But the shunning and the this-personing and the out-of-context quotes and in-bad-faith arguments are too much for me.
I’m tempted to comment on Pharingula every time PZ says blithering things about trans issues. Especially super-much-moreso this time.
I probably won’t (sorry, Ophelia). A few years ago I’d have plunged into that cesspool and hang the consequences.
I’m still not concerned about the consequences, but even I have learned over the years to pick my battles.
So I’ll probably just troll the bugger on twitter for a while and have done with it. It’s the modern doing nothing.
Oh, gee, is it still 2015?
Worse: it’s still 2015.
Eh?
Just an expression of frustration.
Ah.
Ugh. Just read that thread now. I’m not sure what’s worse, PZ’s passive-aggressive pretense at sadness, or the Horde’s gleeful piling-on.
Never mind, I know the answer. I already knew the Horde was shitty; the comments section became a game of one-upmanship a long time ago. I had no expectations for them. I still thought PZ was above throwing a supposed friend to the wolves, though. I would have thought that the desertion of The Orbit folks would have taught him that he will never be woke enough for some people.
I’ve been reading PZ’s stuff since before Pharyngula. He’s changed a lot over time and generally for the better. He’s learned a lot and I’ve learned a lot from him. I’ve met him 2 or 3 times and I have no doubt that his heart is in the right place.
But his head seems to be in a wrong place.
An interesting exchange from the comments on that thread:
Person 1. “It matters what people’s genitals look like because (in the US, at least) we are socialized to not want to be nude in front of people with genitals different from our own. ”
Person 2. “Why do trans people have to be the ones to take that bullet?”
Says it all, doesn’t it?
From the *ahem* entirely neutral idea that it’s all about genitals and not about things like safety or assault or intimidation or, you know, fucking statistics to the ones “taking the bullet” being the ones doing the intimidation etc by insisting on access to spaces in which they are not welcome for really good reasons.
The “bullet” of caring about whether women are safe and feel safe? That’s not a bullet, it’s basic awareness.
Special bonus points to the person who said that women can’t really be too worried about penises in changing rooms if they take their male toddlers into the places. Chek. Mate, I guess.
I know I should stop doing this, but here is yet another brilliant comment on that post. Behold:
TERFs are “gender essentialists”? I guess words don’t mean anything any more.
The fact that their “arguments” are so shit is a major part of why I couldn’t stay on the train any longer, as is the core principle that it’s right and good to order people to say they see X when in fact they see Y.
There was a trans-identified male murdered recently in town, and the “say her name” memes have sprung up. There were (so far) 39 (officially declared) homicides in town last year, nine of which were women, five of which were domestic violence, and no “say her name” efforts that I can recall seeing.
There was a trans-identified male reportedly attacked in a bar by two women recently, and it’s all over the news. There is scant coverage of harassment and attacks on women by men claiming to be women, and some of that coverage blames the women.
Seems vastly disproportionate, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does, and it also seems tragically, shamefully accepting of “normal” murders of women.
Here’s a thread reader with a link to a talk (well, excerpts of a talk) by Johanna Olson-Kennedy, gender medicine bigshot at Children’s Hospital, Los Angeles.
It’s quite appalling. This woman, who’s performed double mastectomies on girls as young as 13, claims nobody ever regrets “top surgery,” and, if they do decide later they want breasts, “they can go buy them.”
Her contempt for parents is striking as well.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1083169480837087232.html
I see Boghossian may lose his job over (many) fake science papers.
http://en.brinkwire.com/health/professor-faces-getting-sacked-after-writing-20-spoof-scientific-papers/
Ya I’ve seen that – it was reported in the CHE and Inside Higher Ed. The papers weren’t fake-fake though, they were hoaxes, in the tradition of the Sokal hoax. I’m not sure he should get in trouble for that, even though he’s an obnoxious twerp.
I actually came across one of those Boghossian papers yesterday, while I was looking for something else. (I didn’t know he was behind it).
The title made me gasp–
“Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”
–then I noticed it had been retracted. But, holy shit, how did it get accepted in the first place?
Awful he may be, but I think Boghossian has a point here.
Ya. Even twerps can have a point!
As if she hadn’t already gone through enough, Vyckie Garrison of No Longer Quivering (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/) needs help.
https://www.gofundme.com/vyckie-garrison-urgent-divorce-fund
Having escaped the Quiverfull movement and remarried, it turns out that her new husband is also abusive and she’s had to escape again. She’s not safe.
Well if Piers Morgan hates it….
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/15/gillette-metoo-ad-on-toxic-masculinity-cuts-deep-with-mens-rights-activists
Yahama has a new line of acoustic pianos (that is, with strings) that can have their sounds augmented or changed to that of other instruments. The name for this line:
TransAcoustic.
They have something similar in a guitar line.
https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/pianos/transacoustic/index.html
Ha!
Who knew that keeping the Catholic Church happy resulted in shit advice about taking the pill? I didn’t…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/well-good/teach-me/110134719/women-have-been-advised-to-take-the-pill-wrong-for-decades-experts-say
I didn’t until seeing this story lately. *tears hair*
I don’t think this was intentional on Trump’s part, but all the stories about the fast food caused most of the media to miss out on the other story about the Clemson football team’s visit to the White House: a lot of the “Clemson football team” didn’t go.
As The Root explains:
Good for them.
Proof that women have it easier than men https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/albbca/life_on_easy_mode/
This is disgusting. Several students suspended from Warwick University for having on-line discussions about assaulting and raping specific women at the university have had their suspensions reduced on appeal and will be returning.
The original suspensions were to last until the women had completed their studies but that has been curtailed by the reduced suspensions. One woman intended to stay on to study for her masters degree but no longer feels safe enough to do so.
Because education for women is just a luxury while for men it’s a necessity?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jan/31/women-terrified-as-students-can-return-after-messages
Snap. I was just reading about that on Twitter.
It’s reported that the two won’t be returning to Warwick University after all. It sounds as though the backlash to the original report of 31st. Jan. caused a re-think, though it’s not clear whether the university reversed its decision or the men themselves decided not to return.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/05/warwick-university-says-threat-pair-wont-return
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/vaccinations-jump-500-in-antivax-hotspot-amid-measles-outbreak/
“Demand for measles vaccines leapt 500 percent last month in Clark County, Washington—a hotbed for anti-vaccine sentiment that has now become the epicenter of a ferocious measles outbreak.”
Anti-vax until it bites them. Still, better late than never.
#88 latsot
That post is blank as far as I can see. “Life on easy mode” followed by comments talking about whatever it is they can see. Do I have to have a reddit account?
Holms:
No, I don’t have a reddit account and I can see it fine. It’s late, I’ll investigate tomorrow.
South Dakota, no bastion of liberal thought:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/lgbt-rights/transgender-rights/south-dakota-legislatures-transphobia
One bill (HB 1225) would have transgender athletes compete on teams in accordance with their sex (phrased as “sexual identity noted on the student’s certificate of birth”, which seems garbled to me). Nobody (at the ACLU, at least) seems to care about how this affects female athletes.
One bill (HB 1108) prohibits discussion of gender dysphoria in grades K-7 (roughly, until students turn 13).
One bill (HB 1205, incorrectly linked in the article) establishes a parental right :
This last one failed, which is touted as a victory by the ACLU. It’s a very sad state of affairs that parents are deemed vulnerable to legal action for refusing to subject their children to unnecessary medication (with severe effects) or surgery, for a condition that might well be social contagion, and that is very likely to disappear within a few years.
The last bill, the one that failed, strikes me as the most reasonably worded and the most necessary. Unfortunately, it’s already out, and the others are likely on their way out.
Donnie referencing the Trail of Tears to mock Elizabeth Warren? Of course he did.
Junior joining in the racist fun? You bet.
Savage!!!
https://www.indy100.com/article/donald-trump-jr-native-american-genocide-instagram-twitter-reaction-8772101
I saw Senior’s tweet. Missed Junior’s. AARRRRRRRGHHHHHHH
Yep, that
appleturd didn’t fall far from thetreearse.Since we were talking a while back about upskirting and criminality in the UK, I’ll put this here: https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/12/upskirting-illegal-in-uk/
It seems that upskirting has been prosecuted in the past under the offense of “Outraging Public Decency”. That’s unsatisfactory to say the least because prosecution depends on the particular act’s supposed lewdness (rather than the fact that it’s an assault. I’m guessing the lewdness could quite easily be played down by a lawyer) and whether or not there were people around to see it and be outraged (again, rather than the fact that it’s an assault).
The new law seems like a better approach, but the proof will be in how it’s applied in practice.
‘Fun’ fact: I’m sure it has been mentioned on B&W that there was a previous attempt to pass an upskirting law in the UK. It was introduced as a Private Member’s Bill, which (roughly) is a form of legislation designed to get no-brainer laws rubber stamped to avoid tedious, time-consuming and expensive parliamentary process. It was blocked by one Christopher Chope. The blocking means that it has to go through the full process.
This is the same Christopher Chope who also recently blocked a PMB specifically outlawing FGM.
When asked why about either, it seems that he invariably slams the phone down, but his claim is that these issues haven’t received sufficient parliamentary scrutiny despite the facts that a) they have and b) more discussion would be necessary before the rubber-stamping. He claims he does this on a matter of principle, but this principle hasn’t stopped him not blocking PMBs about MP pay rises and so on.
A photo posted publicly on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10219260625573289&id=1438838577
It asks the question “Do you feel like someone is using the wrong bathroom?” and provides a Don’t and Do list. According to these, you are not to observe or challenge this person in any way, just ignore this person and go about your business.
That’s it. No helping someone who may have wandered into the wrong restroom. No vigilance in the presence of a potential predator. No alerting authorities so they can shoulder the embarrassing task of checking that someone is in an appropriate place.
Women have lost a first line of defense if asking questions has become uncouth; even worse if such questions are illegal.
Sackbut,#100, well, of course that’s just good manners. If you enter a women’s public loo and spot a 6’4″ wall of muscle with a full, long beard and a voice that makes Barry White sound like a castrato in comparison, just minding her own business and drying her dick under the hot-air hand-dryer, you’d have to be a complete transphobe to assume that she doesn’t look like she belongs in there. I mean, nothing in that scenario suggests that she is anything but a 100% biological woman.
Sackbut, that has been our school policy for at least three years. I’m glad our building has a single unit bathroom that can be locked, and no one else will be in there with me. As someone who has been abused physically, emotionally, verbally, and sexually by men, I do not feel like I should have to use the bathroom with a male-bodied stranger.
The totally not racist GOP in West Virginia held an event in the statehouse and had a charming poster on the wall showing the Twin Towers on fire on 11 September bearing the caption “’Never forget’ – you said”. Under the image is a picture of Ilhan Omar with the words “I am the proof you have forgotten”.
The House Rules Committee is to decide whether action will be taken against Mike Caputo. Who is Mr. Caputo? He’s the Democratic state lawmaker who tried to get into the chamber to protest the image and kicked a door during an argument, allegedly injuring a security guard.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ilhan-omar-911-attack-poster-twin-towers-democrat-a8804221.html
I’ve been following the story of the Colorado high school wrestler, male, who forfeited a match at the state championship rather than wrestle a girl, citing religious reasons. I figured it has some relevance to the issue of transwomen and women’s sports. I saw this today:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/mar/04/girls-should-not-pay-the-price-when-boys-are-too-uncomfortable-to-play
I agree. Funny how that principle often doesn’t come into play when the boys choose to infiltrate the girls’ league.
Well, there’s this. Have at it: https://www.thenational.scot/news/17472564.they-do-not-speak-for-us-feminists-hit-back-at-trans-exclusionary-activists-in-open-letter/
For what it’s worth, PZ is uncritically all for it. Terrible, isn’t it, that trans women are being erased from history? These other, less important sorts of women who now need both the label “cis” and an explanation that cis means bad can just shut up and enjoy being erased from history, from currency and from the future. As the article says, nobody is trying to prevent women from using social media but if they’d just stop saying things on there, that would be great. Thank you. Please shut the fuck up now, women. Sorry “cis women, which means bad”.
Yes, the comment thread is young, but there are already some howlers in there. But what more would you expect from the crowd that agrees with the statement “Defining womanhood by conforming to strict biological and physical attributes has been fought against by strong women long before my time.” What the fuck? The point of feminism was never about keeping the cultural role of women confined to the female sex, rather it was and continues to be about eradicating womanhood as a defined role. Who would want to maintain it? And who the fuck would not only want to keep it, but to keep it as an exclusively female prison?? Jesus fucking christ, the stupidity mounts rapidly.
Actually, I know precisely who would want that: patriarchal organisations such as the RCC, Quiverful, conservative Islam, religions in general; traditionalists, chauvinists, MRAs… you know. Conservatives. The letter makes it clear: their vision of feminism clearly shows it to be conservatism.
And PZ is all for it.
Hm, my wording was a tad jumbled, so I will rephrase one part:
The signatories of the open letter appear to view feminism as a movement that wanted to keep womanhood as a role, but wanted to broaden the anatomical range to which it is applied, making it opt-in for either sex. This stands in stark contrast to actual feminism: destroying the very concept of womanhood as a societal role (and in doing so, manhood as a role as well).
It is the conservatives that want to keep womanhood as both a societal role, and one that is specifically linked to femaleness. PZ and co. are against conservatives in their efforts to keep it linked to being female, but otherwise are arm in arm with them by trying to keep societal roles at all.
Aaaaaaand banned! For disagreeing that identity trumps biology, on a biologist’s blog, while the commentariat gets increasingly hyperbolic and detached from reality. One even stated she identifies as never having been male, even before transitioning to female.
Oh well. At least he’s still good on issues unrelated to biological sex.
@Holms:
I used to have quite a lot of expertise in non-biological sex. By which I totally mean genetic algorithms and their ilk, not humping the vacuum cleaner, honest.
I’ll probably get around to getting banned by PZ at some point – it seems like nothing more than a matter of time – but I still have a fairly long list of places I intend to be banned from. I should probably bump Pharyngula up a few slots, though.
Holms spared us some of the comments:
And:
Yeah, you know that’s hornbeck. Of course it fucking is.
Ah yes, Hornbeck…one of the 700 or so bloggers at Freethought blogs. As the quality declined the quantity soared, because there’s nothing like more of bad things to draw the crowds.
Seriously, Ophelia, what are you doing turning old-timers into bigots? Apparently that was your intention all along, you kept it hidden.
The funny thing about that particular comment: those that loathe FTB in general and PZ in particular love to shit out that criticism, and the FTB bloggers and commenters rightly point out that people don’t frequent the blog and then become bewitched, they frequent the blog because it is already fairly congruent with their thinking.
But none of that matters when the person and the blog he frequents are both Bad.
Eet voss mai cunning plannn.
Well I for one am proud to frequent the bad blog,
Well you would, wouldn’t you.
Holms, I thought you tried really hard to be polite and reality based in that thread. I fear I’d get banned for expressing general contempt for the virtual crystal waving that has overtaken both the Horde and PZ.
Man mansplains tampons to women USING MATHS!
https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2019/mar/06/how-many-tampons-do-you-need-this-man-will-explain
http://vt.co/news/us/man-sues-clinic-for-terminating-ex-girlfriends-pregnancy-without-his-consent/
A tweet on the subject:
https://twitter.com/ilyseh/status/1102987819931193344
Twitter link I followed led to this article
https://www.thepostmillennial.com/canadian-sports-experts-embrace-misogynist-practices-to-please-trans-activists%EF%BB%BF/
Which is pretty good at looking at the potential consequences of what the writer calls “trans reverence,” but includes this, which I think is a false characterization of feminist thought (emphasis mine) :
Maybe my reading of feminist thought is rather limited, but I don’t recall ever coming across any writing that claimed “.. that social construction, not biology, has been the only obstacle to women achieving parity with men in every field of endeavor. If only women had the same opportunities, they have claimed, they would perform equally well.” I don’t recall that claim including sports or physiological performance. And that this claim was supposedly made over decades? Am I missing something?
Should two of those paragraphs be indented? Or just one? Or none? I think the ones starting “There are” and “I agree” respectively are quoted passages.
Well I could look at the article, couldn’t I.
Yeah, I guess both should be indented, or something. The first bit is the end of paragraph, the second is the succeeding para. That’ll learn me to post or quote when my grammar-fu is running on fumes.
I went ahead and indented it after I followed the link to confirm.
Here’s a story about the recent crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in Indonesia and Ethiopia that includes interesting information. Seems the top spot at the FAA has been vacant for 14 months. Also that in light of these crashes, Trunp actually tweeted an opinion about aircraft complexity and safety, perhaps as a way to deflect attention away from regulatory laxity. The story ties a lot of things together that you don’t usually see in the standard airplane crash story.
https://www.vox.com/2019/3/12/18262359/boeing-737-max-controversy-faa-trump
And another story about Trump and the 737 crashes:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/12/18261985/trump-boeing-737-max-8-automation-tweet-debunked
” Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who reportedly donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, called the president on Tuesday and lobbied him not to ground the 737 Max planes.”
Six degrees of small world.
My boss is currently away in Africa (Namibia, I think), so his sister is making deliveries to our store in his stead. She came in yesterday asking us if we’d heard about the plane crash in Africa. It turned out her brother was on the next flight out of Addis Ababa after the one that crashed, and that he’d been talking to one of the passengers of the fatal flight just before it left.
My wife and I are going on a trip to Yellowknife, Nortwest Territories, in the near future, so we checked our flight information and confirmed that none of the six flights we’ll be taking there and back are on Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, being as Canada is apparently one of only two countries that has still not grounded that 737 model, pending the outcome of investigation into its latest crash.
Given the reports of “erratic takeoff” followed by crash on both flights, not grounding them seems…oh I don’t know, is “murderous” too strong?
But hey, Boeing gave Trump money, so that settles it.
Canada has grounded the Max 8, and Boeing is now asking the US to ground the entire fleet everywhere. Better late than never, and better before another one falls out of the sky.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-boeing-urges-us-regulators-to-ground-global-fleet-of-737-max-jets/
Came across this piece via Dr FondOfBeetles on Twitter:
Do women exist? – the science of sex, the politics of gender, and the materialist and dialectical thinking needed to distinguish the two
Here’s the link:
https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/2018/12/10/do-women-exist-the-science-of-sex-the-politics-of-gender-and-the-materialist-and-dialectical-thinking-needed-to-distinguish-the-two/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
So, welcome New Zealand to the modern world. There is an active shooter in Christchurch. He has attacked two mosques, Christchurch Hospital and reportedly a number of other sites in the central city. Our office, like most others in the central city is in lock down and we’ve spent the afternoon listening to sirens. Reportedly there are multiple fatalities and injuries at both mosques and elsewhere. I have seen the online manifesto posted by the alleged shooter and I’m not going to share it further. It’s just the usual white supremacist brown people are out breeding us in our own lands bullshit. The guy doesn’t even appear to be a New Zealander. He moved here as a quite out of the way place to ‘train’ and then realised that we were target rich and altogether too friendly with the ‘occupiers’ amongst us. Fuck him, the horse he rode in on and everyone who thinks like him. We will not be cowed and I feel nothing but contempt for such an insecure mentally and emotionally stunted arsehole.
That’s horrible, I’m reading about it now. Looks like at least 49 people have been killed and 20 or more seriously injured. At least four people were involved and – as far as I can tell – four people have been arrested. There is a suggestion that there may be explosives planted as well.
Stay safe, Rob.
And here is a statement from an Australian member of the Senate, Fraser Anning:
https://i.imgur.com/jdVUUg2.png (for some reason, I can’t find any official site of his.)
Totally vile throughout, but perhaps the most egregious part is “The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New ealand in the first place.”
A claim that is the exact opposite of reality: the actual cause of this bloodshed is the group of conservative fanatics that decided to murder a shitload of muslims. We could also say that the cause one step removed from is the constant stream of hate and misinformation promulgated by conservative media outlets, which this dishonest fuck boosts every time he opens his mouth. And he’s a fucking senator!
Words fail me, Rob.
There already people using this horror for political gain and/or justification.
There are people saying it proves gun control doesn’t prevent mass shootings so everyone should have more and more guns.
There are people (even in my sleepy village where people only know about New Zealand because it was in those hobbit movies) saying that while they don’t condone the actions of these terrorists (which they obviously totally do) they are “unsurprised” because of all the acts of violence committed against “us” by “extremist muslims”. Even after I pointed out that this appears to be about the bullshit notion of white genocide rather than retaliation for real or imagined previous acts of terror.
And then there’s the senator from Australia, Fraser Anning, who said among other awful things:
It’s as though we aren’t diminished enough by these awful acts in the first place. It seems like we have to pull together to make ourselves even less through our reaction.
This reaction reminds me very much of a current story in our local paper about two children, brother and sister, aged about 11 and 13, I think, who have gone missing. In cases like these, the overwhelming probability is that they’ve been murdered by family or someone close to the family or they’ve run away from an abusive household. The story is already overwhelmingly tragic regardless of their fate.
So what are the people saying in the comments to this story? What sort of comments is the paper allowing?
Jokes, of course, about how “maybe they’ve gone home”. They have names which are not traditionally English, you see. How fucking droll.
Words fail me, too. I seem to have lots of them, but none are of any use.
There’s a post on the subject now, if you’d like to transfer this there.
While the SPLC is getting some unwanted attention after firing their founder, they posted a link to this article about the military transgender ban:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/dominicholden/trump-transgender-military-ban-policy
I had a little trouble parsing the article because, I think, of drastically different assumptions about reality. They put “biological sex” in scare quotes, they talk about transitioning as if it’s a clear demarcation point, they conflate sex and gender, and they refer to trans people as if their sex is the opposite of what it is.
But the gist of the policy is that people joining the military are being required to follow regulations that pertain to their sex. Those who can’t abide by these rules are kicked out.
I agree with the military spokesperson who didn’t see this as a ban. There are lots of conditions of service. The military need not be required to accommodate every personal issue. Men who wish to wear long hair or dresses may be out of luck. It might even be unfair to them to require that they declare themselves “women” to be allowed such options. They aren’t banned, either.
Still learning about feminism, sex, and gender. Just came across an article I found very useful and informative. Old news I’m sure to most here, but I figure it never hurts to hear a clear, well worded argument:
https://liberationcollective.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/a-feminist-critique-of-cisgender/
OK, am going to post this here to get it off my chest, because if I actually say it to anyone there could be repercussions.
The other night I attended a regional awards dinner for my profession, which is very heavily ‘male-dominated’. Apparently last year this was noted, and this year the firms and organisations involved made more of an effort to include women–in fact, my company hosted an all-women table, which I believe is something that has never happened before. The organiser of this all-women table was part of a team that was up for a ‘diversity’ award, for their work including women–I’m not directly involved with this team, but it is impressive how many women work on this project, and in this sector of the company in general; in all of my professional lifetime I’ve never seen women involved to so great an extent. Well, they didn’t get the ‘diversity award’–the team that did was recognised for their efforts to’ raise awareness of LGBT+’. Now call me cynical but, while it’s great to support people who might face bullying or discrimination for their sexuality or ‘gender presentation’, I don’t believe anyone was ever formally denied access to my profession for being ‘queer’.
Might be of interest: 85 questions put to Penny Mordaunt, the UK’s Minister for Women and Equalities.
https://medium.com/@MForstater/85-questions-outside-the-minister-for-womens-office-32cf4c084b05
Just to give you a taste of the quality of the answers:
guest – god that’s annoying. Women – meh – who cares, right?
@guest
Yes, it’s enraging that women don’t seem to be considered sufficiently diverse these days. My profession too is known as male-dominated and female-unfriendly (the software business). In all the time I’ve worked in the industry (which is since before the old king died) almost every team has had more men than women and the women have generally been treated with less respect (to put it mildly) than the men.
But that problem is seen as solved even when as in your story, there has to be a whole special effort to include women so we can now focus our attention on the truely oppressed people, right?
Boils my piss.
Thanks Ophelia and latsot, for getting why I’m disturbed about this–and the more I think about it the more pissed off I get. We don’t need special efforts to include ‘LGBT+’ people in my profession–they (we) are subject to various kinds of discrimination and harassment but have never been specifically and legally barred from training or doing it (though I guess in, say, teaching, the church or the armed forces there may be some grounds for supporting this protected group in entering the occupation) and aren’t continually discriminated against and put at a disadvantage in really basic things like how work is organised and how the physical job is done. I do have to say though that latsot’s situation is, in a way, even worse, because women DID used to be the majority in software development, until in an exercise of what a friend of mine refers to as ‘resource hoarding’ they were pushed out of an increasingly lucrative and high-status occupation.
That’s a studied, documented pattern – in which work that was once considered “women’s work” and thus badly paid and not respected undergoes a shift in status and promptly becomes all-male. Secretaries; teachers; computers.
Exactly so. And the heroic efforts by women in the early days of such professions (legal, educational, computational, scientific, mathematical, literary, every other single thing) are spirited away.
Women can’t do computer science despite such people as Ada Lovelace and the many women who did the mathematical and computational heavy lifting at Bletchley Park and its counterparts. Women can’t do astronomy other than the ones who did all the sums for two hundred years. Women can’t do biology or business except for women like Mary Anning who did a brilliant job of both.
I’m deliberately mentioning the women people begrudgingly admit existed, there are so many more that are ignored entirely within computer science alone. Like my friend Jenny. We worked together on a new algorithm for making data centres more energy efficient. She did all the maths, I did the easy bit of turning the maths into an algorithm. Her name is first on the papers we wrote, but guess who gets cited the most? Google, Amazon and HP have used those results, but she didn’t get any credit. I get mentioned from time to time when all I really did was write her work down.
Another friend did some amazing work on parsing language alongside ethnographic behaviour in how GPs speak to patients. It is *amazing* stuff. It is at the heart of how a lot of medically-based privacy rules and practice work in the UK and across Europe. Admittedly, a lot of that work is secret but it’s me – again the second author on the papers – that people occasionally contact for information rather than her.
And these are just two examples from academic computing, which – terrible as it is – is still vastly superior in this respect to it’s commercial counterpart. Women are still being erased from computing. I think we can assume this isn’t an anomaly.
I happened across a real world wake up call in connection with the anti-vaccination madness that is often featured on this blog. I made an unexpected visit to the emergency room of the hospital in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. (My wife slipped on the ice and banged her shin rather hard. Fortunately nothing was broken, but we wanted to get it checked to make sure there was no risk of clotting or anything before we fly out tomorrow. She’s to stay off her feet as much as possible and ice it now and then.) Something I noticed at the triage desk in the emergency department was a notice regarding measles. It advised people with measles symptoms to wear a mask and clean their hands with antisceptic handwash. It noted the huge decline worldwide in measles fatalities worldwide over several decades, from hundreds of thousands in the twentieth century, to tens of thousands in 2016. They note that the numbers were up in 2017 because of the decline in the vaccination rate. The usual mortality rate for measles is .02 %, but in vulnerable communities in the north like the Inuit and Dene, it can be as high as 10%, and usually children under 5 years of age. The last line of the notice, in bold face and highlighted was “Vaccines work!” A case of measles was reported in Inuvik, NT, just this last month, from an unvaccinated child who had been travelling outside of Canada.
YNnB, as if Canterbury didn’t have enough going on, we also have a measles outbreak. Current cases stand at 34 with another 5 under investigation. From what I can glean, the first three cases started amongst a family (two adults and a teenager – all unvaccinated). Given that the news was accompanied by advice to ensure you are vaccinated before travelling overseas, draw your own conclusions. initially spread was amongst school, work, or other traceable contacts. More recently cases have been popping up without obvious contact, meaning the disease is now back in the wild as it were.
In addition to running a huge vaccination campaign targeting children and teenagers as first priority, health authorities have been advising people who are ill to stay home, but contact their doctor or health nurse, or to stay in the medical centre car park and ring reception. A nurse will then come out and assess them (wearing protective gear). The issue being that measles is so damn infectious that you can’t run the risk of having a sick person contaminate the doctor’s waiting room (which is how many people have been infected).
Vaccination rates in NZ are generally high (90-95% for MMR), but you do get clusters of non-immunisers and for the first couple of decades the vaccine was offered the advice was one dose (now it is two doses (12 months and 4 years).
Brunei is making same-sex relations punishable by stoning. The article about this refers to punishments for “LGBT Muslims”. I don’t see that. The draconian punishment is about same-sex relations, not some amalgamation of ways people can be different. In Iran, gay people were made to undergo “sex change” surgery so as to avoid being in a “same-sex” relationship; it’s entirely possible Brunei could do the same.
Link?
Here: https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-26/lgbt-muslims-brunei-face-whipping,-stoning-under-new-laws/10938592
Thank you!
The fix in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH9kODzYBsg
Mitch McConnell blocks a vote in the senate: a non-binding resolution to release the Mueller Report.
That is disturbing but hardly unexpected.
Actual headline from Fox News (I won’t like because Fox News):
“Tucker Carlson: Smollett isn’t innocent. He’s something ‘better’–privileged, famous, and above the law.”
Irony meters as far away as Diego Garcia registered readings that were off the charts.
Well you see he doesn’t have a brassy gilt combover, so it’s TOTALLY different.
https://www.hrc.org/blog/puerto-ricos-governor-issues-order-protecting-youth-from-conversion-therapy
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/03/colorado-bans-ex-gay-conversion-therapy
Human Rights Campaign wrote about Puerto Rico banning “conversion therapy”. American Atheists shared an article about Colorado banning conversion therapy. From the Colorado article, there’s a quote: “There is nothing to ‘fix.’ They should not feel ashamed of who they are.” A comment on the AA post noted that “conversion therapy is torture”. The PR article states: “There is no credible evidence that “conversion therapy” can change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
The Colorado bill seems to be aimed strictly at gay conversion therapy, but both articles ignore differences between providing unnecessary medical interventions (for gay people) and refusing to provide unnecessary medical interventions (for people with gender dysphoria). There really is nothing to fix; kids are not born in the wrong bodies.
I guess I’ve got a bee in my bonnet lately about how inappropriate it is to lump “T” in with “LGB” (to say nothing about all the other letters).
A lot of us have that bee. Much of trans ideology is in tension with LGB rights, to put it mildly.
Holy Fuck!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/27/trump-budget-military-immoral
Mind you, though, Trump doesn’t have a budget. Congress does the budget. Presidents can suggest, but their “budgets” are just notional.
But his intentions are thoroughly disgusting.
PZ has discovered Morgane Oger!
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/03/29/oh-god-peterson-is-such-a-fool/
The waters are very much muddied by Jordan Peterson but someone is bound to mention Oger’s recent activities, it will be interesting to see how PZ reacts.
Well not exactly “interesting” perhaps…
Against my better, worse and indifferent judgement I commented on PZ’s post. I was quite careful about what I said and still managed to write “people” instead of “women” at one point, which rather undermines my point. Sigh.
Anyway, I know I’m goading and I really shouldn’t, but from what I can tell (I didn’t watch his video), PZ is off on one about chromosomes (which is what Peterson was talking about) and not off on one about how Oger had a rape crisis centre defunded, which seems a more important thing.
Oh come on, Ophelia, you know it will be interesting.
He’ll either have to throw women or transwomen under the bus, develop a less stupid way of thinking about this or create a diversion and run away.
We should open a book on which he’ll go for.
For what it’s worth I’ve already been told “fuck you” by a trans woman who was raped for apparently suggesting she should not receive any publicly-funded help. Took about twelve minutes.
Of course I didn’t say any such thing and I’m entirely in favour of publicly-funded rape support services for trans people. What kind of monster would I have to be to think otherwise?
The kind of monster this person has decided I am because I want to defend women having their own spaces in times of crisis, apparently.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for accusations of transphobia and TERFitude and insane misrepresentations of what I said to turn up. Experiment over, I’m not going to engage again. But HOLY FUCK.
goes off to look
Yeah. I’m sticking with “not interesting.”
I meant that PZ’s response, should he give one, will be interesting in the sense that he’ll be pinning something or other to a wall. He hasn’t, as yet.
There are some quite aggressive responses in that thread. I’ve only glanced at them but there seems to be some discussion about whether or not I’m a TERF or just a “fucking transphobe”. I probably won’t go back there because there are only so many miles my eyes can roll.
Oh, ok, fair enough. But yes, still not worth reading it.
Correct.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2184149745229976&id=100009049153465
My reading:
A man (“first man”) committed an unknown slight against a trans-identified male; context implies it was about the man’s use of correct rather than preferred pronouns.
Another man (“second man”) threatened violence if no apology was issued.
It took several questions to determine that the TIM actually preferred female pronouns. If it was in question, why the demand for apology?
The narrator of the story did not at any time wonder what pronouns to use for the first man and the second man. No violent threats or demands for apology on the part of the narrator are apparent.
The second man’s behavior is deemed awesome. It is apparently awesome to threaten violence for pronoun usage. This is only valid when the pronouns refer to someone who would like you to use those of the opposite sex.
Disturbing item from the BBC; Canada is apparently warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and many of the effects already being seen are deemed irreversible.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47754189
Someone, possibly latsot, posted a lawyer’s summary of why the Trump-Russia story is not puffery that needs to go away, but I have lost it. Could they link / post it again in here?
I don’t think it was me.
Found it, leaving it here because I find it a useful reference…
https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/968658623802040320
Cool! A 42.6-year-old fossil whale with legs and hooved feet has been discovered in Peru.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/04/fossil-ancient-four-legged-whale-legs-hooves-discovered
Oh look, Humberside Police have a pedophile working for them:
https://mobile.twitter.com/PankhurstEM/status/1113205781736894464
A few days ago, Trump hired a law firm… to resist handing over his tax returns. Whatever is in them must be absolute dynamite, and this only really strengthens the case that they need to be seen.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/05/trump-hires-law-firm-to-fight-house-democrat-bid-to-get-tax-returns.html
Facebook does something right-ish against the right:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/facebook-bans-faith-goldy-and-dangerous-alt-right-groups/ar-BBVJuZj?li=AAggNb9&ocid=mailsignout
This article was sent to me – it’s generally quite annoying but what made me want to pull my hair out was the trans person at the beginning.
https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/body-hair-removal-women?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=adsales&utm_campaign=PS_Braun&fbclid=IwAR1n2dMZUTjPnZ78iTj-n0MrwyKhoIttio7QxntFuyKyjmZDEKVd76gtSoA
If the pain of hair removal helps with your anxiety, you have a problem. That’s on the spectrum with cutting and other self harm.
Quite apart from the whole performing at being the socially acceptable idea of what a woman is shtick.
WTF is going on in the UK? They’re allowing this one activist, Stephanie Hayden, to abuse the legal system to harass anyone who refers to her as a man.
Good question.
[…] up on a question of Screechy Monkey’s, I learn more about belligerent trans activist Stephanie Hayden, who likes suing […]
latsot–
He never does, and I find his slipperiness interesting. I mean, interesting in a “I used to think this man was intellectually honest” sort of way.
He ignores any and all evidence against the trans narrative, and confines himself to deepitites and obfuscation (the definition of “woman” is not simple, it involves cultural blah blah blah).
I’m convinced he’s very deliberately engaged in providing himself with plausible deniability for when the whole trans delusion goes south. He’ll be able to say that while he never stood up for science, for women, or against the medicalization and mutilation of children, he never said those were good things, exactly.
Adding to LM’s observation, I remember not long ago pointing out that an OB looking between the legs of a delivered infant and writing M or F on the birth certificate is no different to PZ looking down the microscope to see whether a spider has an epigyne or enlarged pedipalps, as a response to the silly assertion that a child is ‘assigned a gender’ at birth, and that the processes are the same: ‘sexing’ an animal by observing external sexed anatomy. He replied with something like ‘yeah but I don’t assign gender to spiders.’
Which is… weird, given that I never said he did, and in fact explicitly stated that this was sexing, with nothing to do with gender. But that was the only comment directly addressed to me iirc; he seems to greatly prefer leaving the arguing to other people. And given the commentary atmosphere he has actively encouraged over the years, there is small wonder that it is pure acid these days.
And then there was the verbal style guide (???) from an ecologist, to really emphasise that he has become ineffably silly on the subject.
I am in broad agreement with the Mondegreen Lady and Holms about PZ’s stance, especially in that he wants to have it all ways and to avoid occupying a position at all costs. He circles the argument like a moth around a light bulb, occasionally bumping into it, then suddenly veers off and crashes straight into the candle flame instead.
I composed the original version of this comment in my head while I was doing something boring. In the end, the boring thing was more interesting than extracting the “and now a miracle occurs” in PZ’s arguments. So while they’re in the same torrent in my head as are the ideas of everyone else wrong on the internet, I will spare you.
THIS TIME.
When I was in college, one student’s wry comment about the task of “sexing” toads led to a spate of NO TOAD SEXING graffiti around campus. It occurred to me that PZ and others are in essence scrawling NO HUMAN SEXING all around, and making no more sense than the toad version.
Sackbut, that reminds me of a girlfriend’s lab partner at Uni (many many moons ago), who was dissecting the female rat in biology and was having trouble identifying the ovaries and uterus. The tutor peered over his shoulder and said ‘but that’s a male’. ‘Oh’, says lab partner, ‘that explains why it bit me when I took the vaginal swab.’
Anorexia — it’s not just for women any more! But now it’s cool because tech bros have given it new branding!
Pretty wild story here: the Edmonton Pride Festival Society puts on an annual Pride Parade. Earlier this year, a group calling itself “Shades of Colour, a community APIRG group that exists to advocate for queer and trans Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour,” issued the following shakedown attempt, uh, I mean “demands”:
“Give us veto power over your event, and give us money.” Shades of Colour apparently disrupted last year’s march with a half-hour protest.
They then showed up an EPFS meeting, there’s some dispute over whether they just intended to speak (they claim) or disrupt the meeting — the EPFS called the police.
The upshot now is that EPFS has cancelled the parade. A representative of Shades of Colour has apparently been referring to this decision as a “violent” act, because words don’t mean anything any more I guess.
Oh yes, I saw that a couple of days ago – not that story, but a Facebook post – and meant to follow it up. Thank you. Wild indeed.
Meme going around, made from a Twitter post:
https://www.facebook.com/1456027077981725/posts/2218712898379802/
The author is rightfully outraged at that disgusting Texas bill calling for the death penalty for women who have abortions, and for the doctors who perform them. The author validly notes that a rapist in that case is somehow missed; no call for the death penalty for him. I’m in agreement, I share the outrage.
Then the author makes a vague comparison with Sharia law in Muslim countries, implying we shouldn’t complain about “sharia law” when these things are going on in our own country. It’s a “Dear Muslima” in reverse.
I hate relative privation arguments. We are capable of being concerned about multiple issues at the same time. The horrors of this Texas bill do not in any way improve the situation for women and religious minorities in Islamic theocracies. Death penalty, torture, long prison sentences, and extra-judicial execution for apostasy, blasphemy, being “immodest”, or simply speaking out, these are awful things. We don’t need to decide which awful thing is the most awful, and only fight against that.
Hmmm, yeah, the source of that is someone who goes by “The SkepDick.” I think we noticed a long time ago that guys like that tend to be indeed dicks.
Mind you the author is Jim Wright aka Stonekettle, and the punchline is “Tell me again about the horrors of ‘sharia law’ in Muslim countries.” I take his point to be not “this is bad so shut up about that” but “if this is fine with you why are you so outraged about that?”. A point about consistency as opposed to comparative horrors.
More cis privilege:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47947117
JEEZUS!
Here’s an excellent article debunking statistics commonly used in transgender activist propaganda.
On the supposed epidemic of murder:
“We’re often told that there’s a transgender murder epidemic: that trans women are the most likely demographic to be murdered, and therefore the most oppressed, and so on.
“I decided to verify this, and GLAAD (which is, remember, an acronym now devoid of meaning. How’s that for symbolism?) gave me the answers. How many homicides of American transgender people were there in 2016?…
“27.
“That’s not a typo. It really is 27. The number of total murders in the US in 2016? 17,250, and disproportionately trending black and male. 27 is 0.15% of murders in the US. In terms of figures, the Williams Foundation did a survey and estimated the number of trans people at 0.6% of the US population. The US population is estimated at 325 million at time of writing, which results in a figure of 1.95 million trans people across America.
“We’ll take 1.95 million Americans. If we figure how many trans people are victims of murder a year as a percentage, that figure is 0.0013%. Per capita,that’s a ratio of 1.3 trans people murdered per 100,000. The murder rate of women in the US is triple that, and of men, quadruple. Even with an extremely conservative estimate of 0.1% of the US population (or 325,000 trans people), we have a murder rate of 8.3 per 100,000. The murder rate of Chicago is twice that conservative figure at 16.02 people murdered per 100,000. In terms of gross numbers — that’s 11,535 murders of male Americans, and 3,292 murders of female Americans in 2017. 27 is usmall potatoes. That is not a murder epidemic — in fact it’s a murder rate per capita lower than Canada. It certainly doesn’t mean that there’s an ‘epidemic of transphobic violence’. That’s not something to campaign about — you’ve got it better than literally everyone else. Even if we use the Human Rights Campaign estimate of 750,000 trans people, which is half the 0.6% number, we get a murder rate of 2.7 per 100,000. That’s not a high murder rate. That’s lower than every other demographic in the US….
“…To add — the majority of those 27 killed? Black prostitutes. No middle-aged white trans women were killed at all (though some did commit murders) yet they are the ones bleating about #StopTransMurders and working in activist organizations. And the sex-work and transgender lobby does not seem to care about those vulnerable prostitutes, beyond using their names and deaths as a political prop.”
She also looks at suicide statistics, assaults in prison, and the supposed targeting of trans people by police. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
https://medium.com/@sue.donym1984/the-transgender-movement-and-bad-stats-a-debunking-compilation-31760947b382
Ophelia #197 – *wordless*
Lady M:
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s homework. And I haven’t managed to find any convincing statistics about violence against trans people. I have no doubt that there is such violence and there shouldn’t be, but I have never been able to match the claimed numbers with actual credible research. The cited numbers don’t seem to add up and nobody seems to agree on how to collect them in the first place.
To be fair, I’m not an academic these days and I don’t officially have access to most academic journals. I don’t tend to let little things like not having access to stuff prevent me from accessing it anyway but my ability to do so takes more effort these days. So I might be missing a lot but I still can’t for the life of me find a credible source for figures about the kind of violence we’re told happens between 100 and 10000 percent more to trans women than to women.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. My amateurish findings are very similar to those in the article cited by Lady M. I haven’t managed to find proper citations for most of the stats that are bandied about and there are a lot of contradictions. The studies that tend to be cited are terribly flawed and the results can’t really be compared with one another.
But worse, most of the stats I’ve seen don’t seem to lead back to even flawed studies. You follow the links down the rabbit hole and they don’t bottom out, they’re made up or at least nor properly documented, let alone properly compiled.
You know what I consistently found? Well, of course you do. Violence against women is always one entire fucktonne greater than violence against any other group. And it is well documented and there are proper, consistent, well-understood ways to record it.
latsot–Well, in the US, men are more likely to be murdered. Though not by domestic partners.
Agreed about the trans stats. Another thing to notice about the murder claims: though the claim is rarely made explicitly, the public is encouraged to believe that the murders that do occur are hate crimes: that hordes of ravening transphobes are out there killing transgender people. Nope. As with most murders, the motives are sad and mundane. There is no epidemic of murderous hate crime against transgender people. That is a lie.
LM, that’s a great article. The suicide section is of particular interest, but I was most surprised by the section on prison attacks (or lack thereof).
https://www.facebook.com/277891192704716/posts/567413947085771/
The image shows a turkey wearing a sign that reads “Don’t shoot! I identify as a hen.” But of course the bird’s self-image doesn’t matter; it’s a turkey, and is treated as a turkey by people.
I see that American Atheists is caught up in trans ideology, too.
https://www.facebook.com/71352317417/posts/10157181979962418/
The text reads:
The image, a picture of Heron Greenesmith, reads “The Christian Right has zero empirical evidence against trans people.”
The comments on the post have been pretty heated, with at least a few people trying to push back against trans dogma, and getting called bigots and the like.
Of course American Atheists (AA) is going to push the science angle, the evidence angle. Unfortunately, the evidence they have is poor and misconstrued. My few experiences in trying to have that discussion ended uniformly badly, with triumphant cries like “They said 40%, it was 38%, therefore anything and everything they said is wrong and the entire report is debunked!” The same kind of blinkers are on display in the comments of the above.
I’m ambivalent about AA these days. Sometimes they seem to reject social justice, sometimes they get into social justice in a ham-handed way, like here. Sometimes they seem to be genuinely trying.
Not here, though. They use scare quotes around the word feminists. They assume feminists who disagree with trans ideology have no evidence to offer, and therefore only make moral arguments. They assume that two groups that happen to agree on one piece of one issue must therefore agree broadly. For an organization devoted to reason and science, they are using very poor reasoning.
Oh lord.
J.Yaniv has a gofundme page to raise money for a bid to enter the Miss BC (British Columbia) pageant:
https://ca.gofundme.com/jessica-for-miss-bc
My guess is that he wants to enter the pageant in order to have access to the change room. Brazen, but logical continuation of his past activities.
@~Bruce:
You are quite wrong. Yaniv clearly states on the gofundme page that:
Of course, when I scrolled down to find out more about why this is a human rights issue and why entering this contest is so important, it didn’t say.
It did say that:
Which is news to me. I hadn’t realised that sex plays no part at all in sexual reproduction. I hope I don’t get pregnant by fucking while fantasising that I’m a woman.
Also, I notice that we’re now up to:
BINGO!
And there is apparently an “anti-LGBTQQIP2SAA community”. I don’t think even I could summon the energy to be anti that many things.
How long do you think it will take until they just go right ahead and shorten it to -W?
At least Yaniv offers the courtesy to give us a translation:
Do the two Qs or the two As ever battle it out as to which comes first? How would you tell? Do you lose woke points if you forget the exact order? (I’ve seen some lists that include “+”, so Yaniv’s list, while exhausting, is clearly not exhaustive). What commitee decides when a letter gets added? Who decides what letter it will be? (we have “2” which stands for “Two Spirit People,” (why not TSP? Or is any given Intersectionality Indicator only allowed one stroke of a keypad?) an example of both cultural appropriation and numerical exceptionalism.
But tell me who will think of the PALNBEL-IVSA?*
*(Paraplegic, Albino, Left-handed, Narcoleptic, Buddhist, Estonian, Lactose-Intolerant, Vegan, Scrimshaw Artists)
Well, there’s going to be some pushback against that. If the glitter-rainbow-alphabet-soup brigade appropriates “W,” there’s not going to be any designator left for the second shittiest Presisident of the United States.
We pasty white geeks who blink in horror at the yellow face when we have to go outside and always have a book at social gatherings in case someone tries to talk to us need abbreviations too! You know what, thinking about that again, G is probably fine. I want another G for geek added to the list. I guess I should start a petition.
Maybe we should just be more abstract and insist on a letter for people who don’t have a letter. It has the added appeal to geeks of being self-referential. But then having a symbol instead of a letter would be appealing because it was deliberately and ironically not self-referential.
Now you see why people like me need a letter so that we can be deliberately excluded for everyone’s benefit.
Remember how well that worked for the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince? It probably didn’t help his case that he used a symbol he made up himself rather than a plain old off-the-shelf one.
That means choosing a letter that nobody else is using or would potentially want to use. I’ve never liked getting “V” in Scrabble, so there’s that. Choosing a letter from someone else’s alphabet gives you a lower likelihood of depriving some Enlish speaking (or at least Latin alphabet-using) someone else a letter for their own particular Identification, but then again , cultural appropriation. Maybe a dash or underscore? It certainly suggests emptiness and vacuity, a space yearning to be filled. Wait. How about a BLANK SPACE! They’re everywhere, yet unobtrusive. Ubiquitous, yet silent. The eternal background, the never ending wallflower. (But at the same time it’s got the BIGGSET key on the keyboard, quietly yet continuously affirming and validating the blank’s specialness, bravery and AWESOMENESS. And on most paper and text documents, the blank’s Pasty Whiteness is the default setting! We get to sneak some Blank (blanc?) Privilege in the back door under everyone’s nose! (Don’t tell anybody!)
Go ahead: DARE TO BE BLANK!
^^^ This short thread is the greatest thing on the internet today. :-)
@Bruce:
I’m going for the tilde, then: ~
It’s one of the four symbols on a standard UK keyboard that only computer scientists ever use.
Tilde it is. Nice. I like it. ~ = Pasty White Geeks. (Doesn’t count if it’s not capitalized). Small, unassuming with a touch of inviting, Iberian, saucy, sinuosness to break up the monotony of the blocky, formal, stand-offish linearity of the dash or underscore. The geometric equivalent of a touch of glitter. Now we sit back and wait for all those royalty cheques to come rolling in.
Well we’ve got you sorted, but I’m not so sure about me. I think I’ve got the Pasty White part down (though my preferred Adjective is “Fishbelly” rather than “Pasty”) but I may not really qualify as a full on Geek. I’ve been bookish and photographic for decades, was quite a space nut as a kid and have a broad range of interests in many subjects. Perhaps I’m a poorly focused Dilettante? Hmmmm. What to use as my Intersectionalty Indicator? The tilde is taken already (bugger). How about an (opening) brace bracket? { (it looks vaguely like my moustache, so somewhat self referential). So { = Fishbelly White Dilettante?
Why thank you. We’re here all week.
This of course suggests you might need to broaden your horizons a bit…. :D
Really good article, “The Colonization of Women’s Sports”. Pulls no punches. I like the bit dismissing the reductionist “we just need to pee” focus on “bathroom bills”.
https://wlrnmedia.wordpress.com/2019/04/26/foul-play-the-colonization-of-womens-sports/
I’m a few days behind on this, but finally got around to reading Slate’s account of how black feminists exposed online fakes that were a precursor to Gamergate and 2016.
Times: Police used ‘violent’ transgender activist for equality training
Maybe someone subscribed to The Times can find out the rest of the details. Not a subscriber myself, but came across this link in my online travels today:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-used-violent-transgender-activist-for-equality-training-x0mktgclw
Actually found a link via Mumsnet to the whole story:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-used-violent-transgender-activist-for-equality-training-x0mktgclw?shareToken=eb3ead96e800f9d8e04d6dba1c8edb8d
Pardon my venting. Please consider questions asked in the following rant as rhetorical, but if any of you have answers to any of them, feel free…
Our provincial (Ontario) Trump-in-training, Doug Ford, brought his government’s first budget down just recently. One of the items was to halve provincial funding to the Southern Ontario Library Service, which undewrites interlibrary loan services throughout Ontario. I’ll bet he was just waiting to do that, after his 2011 exchange with Margaret Atwood over Toronto library cuts. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2011/07/26/doug_ford_blasts_margaret_atwood_over_libraries_says_i_dont_even_know_her.html
Other cuts include those to the 50 Million Tree initiative, funding for midwives, protection for endangered species, Ontario Arts council funding… https://www.flare.com/news/doug-ford-changes-for-ontario/
Ford is mandating that every gas pump in the province bears a sticker showing how much the federal carbon tax will cost drivers: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/ford-government-sticker-gas-pumps-ontario-londoners-mixed-reactions-1.5092229
Why is it that “triggering libs” or “making Lefties’ heads explode” are seen as valid (or even vital?) policy goals for populist know-nothings like Ford and Trump, even if it makes the quality of life worse for everyone, even the “populist’s'” supporters? How are these people able to get large chunks of the electorate to vote for them, against their own interests? It’s like the legislative equivalent of “rolling coal” (a diesel automotive engine modification that creates clouds of black smoke, which costs the driver money as well as efficiency, all in the name of “protest” against environmental regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal ).
Sure as shit, if Ford weathers a term or two as Ontario Premier, he’ll take his smiling, ham-handed, right-wing zombie circus to the federal level.
Final question:
When exactly is that meteorite due again?
I guess apparently there’s a “one free rape” rule in place. I mean, that 14-year-old must have really been asking for it.
Wouldn’t want to ruin his reputation by putting him in a database. Might have trouble meeting the next 14-year-old.
Can’t have him skipping levels. There’s a strict order and progression; he has to collect his awards and merit badges in the correct order.
Well as soon as a database is involved, you’ve got to pay people for typing and everything.
In the news recently, a male power lifter won 9 of 9 events and set 4 records, all in the women’s division. Then I see this:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/may/01/caster-semenya-loses-landmark-legal-case-iaaf-athletics
Caster Semenya, a woman, loses her legal case against IAAF over testosterone levels. She is apparently not sufficiently woman-like to compete.
This can’t be the solution. We can’t possibly decide that an athlete is *right now* woman-like based on one hormone. Nor can it based on self-declaration. It has to be based on sex alone, immutable sex. An athlete should be barred from women’s competition solely for being (and always having been) male, not for being “man-like”.
We could use birth documents, but trans people are busy doctoring those, too.
UK police forces are increasingly demanding that victims of rape and sexual assault hand over their phones and account details under the threat of their cases being dropped if they don’t:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/29/sexual-assault-case-dropped-refused-police-phone-rape
Let’s be entirely clear about this. Someone making an accusation of rape (or any other crime) has a certain burden of evidence. For example, she might have to produce evidence that she was in the same place as the alleged rapist at the same time. In this case, she might choose to allow police to access the location data from her phone service or the police might obtain a warrant to perform a time/location limited search regardless of permission. Even I – a known privacy tinhat – wouldn’t object to that if I were seeking to prosecute and I doubt I’d consider it a violation if it were a known and routine part of any investigation of that sort.
But there might be other sources of the same evidence such as CCTV or witness accounts. Surely the intent is to establish opportunity. If phone location is needed for that, then it ought to be provided at the victim’s discretion, not demanded in advance alongside everything else that’s on her phone before an investigation can even begin.
An accused rapist might claim texts or social media exchanges as exonerating or mitigating circumstances. In that case, it would surely be his responsibility to produce the relevant material and not the victim’s responsibility to hand over her phone. Confronted with these claims, she might or might not agree to disclose some data knowing that it might hurt her case if she doesn’t. But in that case, the police could specify exactly what data was required. For example, social media posts within a timeframe or involving a particular third party. There would be no need for her to hand over her phone for this purpose.
There have been many, many cases of police the world over stealing intimate photographs from people’s phones and sharing them with colleagues, friends and the internet at large. There have also been many cases of police unearthing something dodgy about a victim unrelated to the case at hand and that case disappearing because of it. There are also many, many, many, many cases of women being judged because of the things they say, the things they wear, the photographs they have on their phone and – let’s face it – literally everything else. There’s an equal if not greater number of cases where women have been humiliated in court because of the judgements prosecutors believe (presumably rightly in enough cases to make it worthwhile) that juries will make about them.
This is, of course, another tactic to deter women from reporting rape. It’s also a tactic by police to collect as much information about everyone on the planet as possible without any guarantees that the data will be safeguarded, deleted when no longer required and not shared at large on the internet.
As Privacy International has reported, the UK police don’t even have the proper guidelines to deal with the contents of anyone’s phone, let alone actual rules or procedures or any departments equipped to enforce them.
This could not be more obviously calculated to persuade women to drop charges of rape and sexual assault.
And the wider implication is that in time anyone who makes any kind of complaint against anybody at all must have led a blameless life or be afraid to seek justice of any kind.
We British are so easily whipped up into fascist sentiment. What in screaming fuck is wrong with us? That is not a rhetorical question.
Oops, meant to include a link to the Privacy International report I mentioned. Here tis:
https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Digital%20Stop%20and%20Search%20Report.pdf
And there was an “as possible” missing somewhere in there too. I’m livid about this subject and chose to vent before allowing my superhuman retroactive smart-arse inconsistency sense to inform me that there was something wrong with what I wrote and to check it.
Tsk.
[…] a comment by latsot in the Miscellany […]
Believe it or not, I found it, despite that not altogether helpful description.
I believe it.
The Emperor of Japan abdicated.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/01/national/emperor-akihito-begins-abdication-rituals-japan-marks-end-era/#.XMoCYOzF1xA
In a recent post (I married a Russian bot), PZ actually complained that another blog was fractious after it banned his wife for some reason. I don’t know whether to laugh or roll my eyes.
Oh no, not fractious! How unseemly!
But Holms, Mary is lovely, apparently. I’ve obviously never met her or had anything to do with her. She may be. Clearly it’s only those who a fractious/contentious and who hold some non-approved belief or political position who deserve such treatment.
If I may, following up on the Caster Semenya case, Feminist Current posts this excerpt from a Times article:
So, going through male puberty or similar produces advantages, but we’re just going to test for testosterone, and we’re not going to say anything about actual males competing in women’s events. Got it.
Oh, but it’s just work and so empowering…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/112416537/uk-is-europes-biggest-market-for-sex-slaves-romanian-investigators-say
This gentleman is quite annoying: https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/this-transgender-woman-has-a-full-beard-and-she-couldnt-be-h
“widening the bandwidth of how to be a woman”, apparently. By…. putting on a dress.
Some additional information on the Caster Semanya case:
https://www.letsrun.com/news/2019/05/what-no-one-is-telling-you-about-caster-semenya-she-has-xy-chromosomes/
Interesting that none of the large outlets reporting on this mention that she is XY and has testosterone that is not merely above the female average, but is well above what any healthy XX woman has ever produced.
Holms, good article, thanks.
Here’s a related guest post by Claire Graham on Miranda Yardley’s blog that I found helpful:
Caster Semenya: No One Wins
From Reuters via The Guardian (emph. mine):
I’m no conspiracy theorist, but here’s a weird coincidence from the same article, regarding the USA’s man at that very meeting:-
Hmmm! Vast, untapped deposits of oil and gas; an agreement to protect the Arctic and restrict access to said oil and gas is on the table; the USA refuses to sign; Pompeo and Lavrov have a quiet chat; Pompeo heads east. What country lies due east of Finland?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2019/may/07/trump-news-today-live-mueller-report-china-iran-democrats-2020-updates
Innnnteresting.
Pompeo at this same meeting: Calls Canadian claims to the Northwest Passage “illegitimate.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/07/mike-pompeo-canada-northwest-passage-illegitimate
Not exactly a new position. The tanker/icebreaker SS Manhattan became the first commercial vessel to complete the Northwest Passage in 1969.
I’ve just watched the BBC2 quiz show, Eggheads, in a state of horrified fascination. One of the contestants was a transwoman by the name of Jezebelle, and he looked like a parody of a drag queen. He was very proud that he is the current ‘Miss Playhouse’ at the theatre he works at. I even took a couple of photo’s (the original form of screen shots) to send to my daughter. Her response was basically ‘That’s not a woman; that’s a fucking insult to women.’
Sadly, I’m not on social media, so I can’t post a link to the pics and share the joy with you all. I was going to e-mail them to you, Ophelia, but the contact form has no ‘attachment’ button (that I can find, anyway. Typical man!) and I can’t see your e-mail address to send them directly from mine.
You can just email me and I’ll reply?
I saw the very end of that show.
The contestant in question was indeed a parody.
#242; why didn’t I think of that? Sometimes I forget that I’m actually quite intelligent.
Ah, the CAPTCHA thing is asking me to type text to prove I’m human, but not letting me know what to type (no audio either).
If you’d like the pictures, Ophelia, please e-mail me at the address I use when commenting.
Thanks.
A recent tweet by Jessica Valenti, “The men who decide what women can do with their bodies have zero understanding of how those bodies work”, has been meme-ified and is making the rounds. I want to add, “The men who claim they are women also have zero understanding how women’s bodies work”, but that’s a derailing of a useful point. The compartmentalizing is nonetheless maddening.
Isn’t it? It happens all the time, too.
Trump says Green New Deal ‘A hoax like the hoax I just went through’.
As the author says, “The guy sure has a knack for compounding the maximum number of lies into one line.”
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/14/trump-says-green-new-deal-is.html
latsot, I assume he isn’t referring to his hoax presidency.
How to help women in Alabama get abortions: https://yellowhammerfund.org/
I found this retrospective on The Rules interesting. Certainly it captures what I always thought was the paradox of the whole thing: even if The Rules “worked” in the sense of luring some man into proposing to the Rules Gal, wasn’t it kind of counterproductive to marry someone to whom you’ve been putting on a false front the whole time?
Trump’s had his ‘pardon pen’ out on behalf of another friend and supporter, one slimeball by the name of Conrad Black. Well, it was only a $60,000,000 fraud. I actually found this part rather sweet, in a ‘how fucking sweet’ kind of way.
Not sure I entirely believe those final words of Trump’s, mind.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/disgraced-newspaper-mogul-conrad-black-gets-pardon-from-his-friend-trump-20190516-p51o4e.html
Well this is disgusting.
There’s lots more.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/18/bleach-miracle-cure-uganda-us-pastor-robert-baldwin-sam-little
Snap – I just saw a link to that on Twitter.
Also, volley of swears.
Oh, plenty of swears.
Now, I know that Trump has spent a lifetime laundering dirty money, but now it appears he’s going into laundering war criminals as a side hobby.
I thought I could be cynical, but…
…. that is fucking cynical squared. Memorial Day, for crying out loud. A play for military votes, a clear message to brown-skinned people, and a none-too subtle message to the troops regarding their conduct should they find themselves in a hostile nation any time soon, a nation such as, oh, let’s pick one at random, Iran, maybe.
I wasn’t aware that The Guardian did understated comedy.
Controversial!
It won’t be long before he gets around to pardoning police officers for shooting black people (well, the officers actually charged and/or tried, a rare secies indeed), or, as it would actually be seen by the police, declaring that it’s open season on black people.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/18/trump-pardon-us-soldiers-war-crimes-new-york-times
The case of the trans-identified female whose baby was tragically stillborn was under discussion somewhere, but I can’t find it, sorry.
Really good opinion piece about that case at the Women Are Human blog.
https://womenarehuman.com/how-the-gender-identity-movement-led-to-the-death-of-an-infant-endangered-a-womans-life/
What happened when Romania banned abortion. I’m sure you will excuse the spoiler: it didn’t end well.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/16/what-actually-happens-when-a-country-bans-abortion-romania-alabama/
Ben Carson and HUD are under fire for rules that would, according to some outlets (Friendly Atheist and others), allow shelters to deny services to trans people. The rule they point to allows sex-segregated spaces. Of course such segregation doesn’t deny services to trans people, it just requires them to use facilities they may not prefer, and they may choose not to use the shelter. Funny how women who do not want to use facilities shared with men are not seem as being denied services.
Here’s an amusing, possibly interesting, and yet not terribly surprising development: well-known “pick up artist” RooshV has found Jesus, and has announced new rules for his message board (talk about dating ok, talk about premarital sex not). I don’t want to visit, let alone link to, his site, but someone on Twitter captured a screenshot.
I say not terribly surprising because the hatred of women is the common link.
Screechy, someone waved that tweet in front of Popehat. His reply “The way these people reinvent themselves for clicks every few years is so very American”.
Roosh. Golly that seems like another era.
This is a delightful example of a lack of self-awareness from PZ. Granted, it’s the final paragraph of a piece about colonising other planets, but surely the standards he expects of those outside of transdom ought to apply to those within, too.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/05/24/we-should-colonize-mars-because-it-is-inimical-to-human-life-and-therefore-well-evolve-super-fast/
He issued himself a special dispensation on that long ago. They all did, pretty much.
I can’t decide whether this is alarming or just pathetic. The Christian Right are salivating over the prospect of kicking off a new Civil War over abortion rights. Matt Shea is campaigning for the formation of a breakaway state out of Washington (presumably forming a new, theocratic state) on top of a bill he’s introduced to criminalize abortion in the extant Washington state (just in case his breakaway fails?). There is much more lunacy in the article.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/26/abortion-ban-rightwing-christian-figures-civil-war-predictions
He sounds nice.
A set of screen shots of a Twitter thread. The author presents a lot of anecdotes about trans people being mistreated by medical personnel, and uses these anecdotes to argue for special legal protections for trans people.
https://www.facebook.com/272026009656974/posts/1208321986027367/
I am not convinced. I have my doubts that all the incidents happened exactly as stated, but assume for the moment that they did.
Medical personnel are not generally permitted to refuse to treat someone because they find that person disgusting. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of tattoos, political views, cross dressing, or claiming to be something they aren’t. Medical personnel may also treat people in accordance with best medical practice that might not align with what the person demands. Also, if there is any place where recognizing a person has a biological sex is paramount, it’s in medical care.
So, I don’t see that trans people have any particular right to hate crime designation not afforded to other groups of people who might be treated badly in medical care.
But if it’s not a special right just for them what good is it?
The following are a selection of titles of recent B&W posts: Horrifying evidence of a disordered personality; Keyword: me; Outcry; Have they thought it through?; Starve the OBVIOUS ENEMIES; He delights in the abuse of his power; More alarming; Running out of oys; A robust and consistent approach; The only debate to be had.
They have given me an idea for a new game show called, What’s the Story, Trump or Trans? Every one of the titles is not only about one or the other, but could easily be about either topic. Weird how the two seem to echo each other.
The two are basically the same subject.
PZ has a post in which he mentions transphobia.
PZ doesn’t link to the offending video or explain why it is wrong. But he does link to our old friend Hornbeck explaining why Rationality Rules’ (I’m not familiar with his work) apology is wrong. There’s some fairly blatant bullshit in Hornbeck’s reply, regardless of whatever it was that RR actually said.
Here ’tis: https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2019/05/23/rationality-rules-is-a-transphobe/
My favorite part is where RR says that he got a few things wrong but that was ignorance of facts rather than transphobia (he seems sincere to me). Hornbeck has an answer for that:
More evidence that mistakes are now bigotry or at least mines of bigotry ore to be open cast to (and my metaphor is failing me now) be…smelted…into….any point anyone wants it to be….?
I’ll get my coat.
RR might have been a complete arsehole and completely wrong. I don’t know. I don’t know because neither PZ nor Hornbeck linked to the original source.
But what is very clear from PZ’s and Horn’s posts are that claims of transphobia are always true, never up for discussion. We knew it, but these posts make it just a little bit more abundantly clear.