There is a a great Portuguese pub there (apparently Portuguese pubs are a thing; there’s an interestingly laid out one in Newcastle). The city archives are in a lovely 18th c building, and there’s a statue somewhere of Queen Wulfrun, one of the very few statues in the country of named women who are not Queen Victoria.
The screenshot captures a trans activist claiming that “straight cis” people don’t have to deal with being forced to perform sexually for the entertainment of men, under threat of violence.
I can understand a person making that claim [women are not punished for refusing to display sexuality for men’s entertainment] in general, simply because it is common for people to do so. However, how the fuck can you make that claim while quoting a graphically illustrated example of exactly that?? I just cannot see how the connection was not made. Even goddamn Trump wouldn’t be stupid enough to claim “no X exists” while quoting a photo of X (probably, who knows).
Stinson has been busy telling many commentators that they didn’t read her actual tweet carefully. Even if that is so, Stinson is still clearly missing the obvious and glaring point that straight cis women are routinely forced to deal with male expectation of sexual entertainment and anger/violence when they don’t play ball (and often even when they do).
Personally, if I were Stinson, I would be hoping to keep my head down until about 20 years after the internet goes down for the last time. Somehow I think they are just going to keep doubling down and claiming to be misunderstood.
The text says dialogue should be encouraged even with those who think differently from the Church, but it’s hard to have a conversation with people who intuitive reject your very identity.
I read the document, and found it a lot of theological mumbo jumbo, but I did think it represented a request for dialog. It correctly noted the distinction between sex and gender, and it correctly described the erosion of that distinction as has become popular. Contrary to Hemant, I didn’t think it denied the existence of anyone, it just disagreed with the claims some people make about themselves: that trans people can change sex, that intersex people are some kind of different sex. None of this should be “stunning”.
To be sure, there is plenty to disagree with in this paper, and I share Hemant’s view that a Vatican call to “dialog” is usually in effect a call to accept the Vatican position. But, in “stopped clock” fashion, they get some things correct.
So Bill Maher declared on his show the other night that he’s a “squish” on the subject of abortion rights because his mother was warned that her pregnancy with him was high risk.
Why, just think, if abortion laws had been different then…. oh, I can barely get the words out….. people, THE WORLD WAS ALMOST DEPRIVED OF BILL MAHER! I know, bodily autonomy and reproductive choice are important and all, but think about the implications for smug mediocre late night comedy hosts!
Usually when people try to make this argument, they have the humility to try to argue about some hypothetical fetus that would have been the next Einstein or Beethoven, or if they’re feeling their own cleverness, try to turn it on their opponent (“what if YOU had been aborted? Huh? Huh? Gotcha!”). It takes a real grade-A narcissist to actually utter out loud the sentiment that your own existence is so important that it would have justified overriding your own mother’s right to control her body. But I repeat myself.
Anyway, one of his guests, Rep. Katie Porter, embarrassed Maher in front of his own audience. It was lovely. Also a nice little trip down memory lane — I still recall that blogger who went by The Raving Atheist who went down the anti-choice rabbit hole, beginning with the whole “gosh, *I* was almost aborted!” thing.
FYI, Megan Murphy’s lawsuit against Twitter was dismissed yesterday. Above link is to a blog post summarizing the decision; the actual order is here
Helpful context: a “demurrer” is an objection to a complaint; it’s the California state court version of what is called a “motion to dismiss” in federal courts and in some other states. So the order providing that the demurrer is “sustained without leave to amend” means that judgment will be entered in favor of Twitter; Murphy’s only viable recourse is an appeal. Because the issues here appear to be entirely legal rather than factual the appellate court would review “de novo” without any deference to how the trial court ruled.
But it appears to be a well-reasoned opinion to me, by which I mean not necessarily that Twitter’s policy is correct or was correctly applied in this instance, but simply that Twitter has statutory immunity. You can’t sue Twitter for its editorial decisions any more than you can sue Opehlia for deleting a comment or banning a commenter entirely at B&W.
An interesting take on the supposed ‘surge’ in homophobic/transphobic and racist crimes in Britain, particularly on what is neccessary to have an incident recorded as a hate crime.
[A]s last year’s Home Office report made abundantly clear, large increases ‘are due to the improvements made by the police in their identification and recording of hate-crime offences and more people coming forward to report these crimes rather than a genuine increase’.
So, what are these improvements? According to the College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance,
Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate
Sorry, wut? Reducing hate crime is not appropriate? It gets worse. How does the police decide what constitutes a hate crime? Easy; if the person reporting it says so, even without evidence that a crime has either actually taken place, or that a crime was actually linked to a phobic or racist cause.
Police are obliged to record not only criminal actions but also all non-crime hate incidents. A non-crime hate incident is literally any event that is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility towards a so-called protected characteristic. […] As the Operational Guidance makes clear (emph. mine): ‘The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception [sound familiar? AoS]. Evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incidents.’ […] The only real basis for establishing that a hate crime took place is that somebody reported it to the police. Examples of ‘racist’ hate incidents recorded by police over the past few years, for instance, have included failing to clean up dog poo, aggressive beeping of a car horn, and a speech by Amber Rudd – none of which is racist or criminal.
The writer concludes that
What we are witnessing is not a surge in hate crime, but a surge in fear of hate crime, and a fear of the supposedly hateful masses who are always on the verge of committing it.
Wow, can you even imagine what that rate would look like if women started reporting hate crimes toward the protected characteristic of sex using the same criteria? (Wondering if it’s possible to determine what percentage of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ were reported by males–hypothesis being that women are used to this kind of behaviour directed at us, and know what the police’s reaction is likely to be, no matter what protected characteristic we report about, so we don’t bother.)
During an interview earlier this week with reporters from Time magazine, the president showed them a letter from [Kim Jong-un] …. Sarah Sanders intervened when a photographer took a photograph of it.
The reporter then asked a question about Robert Mueller, and…
“Excuse me,” Mr Trump said. “Under Section II — well, you can go to prison instead, because, if you use, if you use the photograph you took of the letter I gave you…confidentially, I didn’t give it to you to take photographs of it. So don’t play that game with me.”
So either the letter is a fake which he daren’t have published in case anybody notices, or he’s petty enough to imprison a journalist for mentioning Mueller. My money’s on….both.
The Vatican called off a women’s soccer match against Austria because of a protest by some of the Austrian players against the Catholic Church positions on abortion. The protest included drawings of female reproductive organs. The Austrian team management apologized, saying they remain committed to sport without discrimination on the basis of “gender, sexual orientation, … or other characteristics.” Sex was not mentioned. The abortion issue is of course about sex rather than “gender”, as was the protest. Ironically, I think the Catholic Church would agree, despite the wording of the statement from the Austrian team management.
They caught the man who shot her, leading to the death of the baby, but let him go. Then they arrested and charged her because she ‘brought the foetus unnecessarily into a fight’ and the foetus was ‘depending on her for safety’.
latsot, just came to link that. We knew something would happen soon. The comments from the authorities arresting her are abominable. I can only hope that picking this incident instead of a woman seeking an abortion will be their undoing.
I saw that – only it’s not a man, it’s another woman, and the story is that the woman charged pushed the aggression and the shooter was protecting herself. I decided I just didn’t want to try to sort it out.
First, the asinine self defense handling in this state. If two unarmed guys rob your house, you can deliberately shoot one, and you’ll avoid charges, but the other robber can be charged with murder. So I put very little credence in self defense claims like this.
Second, no way is this manslaughter. Yellowhammer Fund addresses this, Moon addresses this. Even if the pregnant woman is responsible, it’s an injury to herself, not a killing of anyone.
Highlight how ‘very important’ meeting with world leaders is – check. Name-drop very important people to reinforce his own importance – check. Flirt like a love-sick schoolboy with his mega-crush, the lovely Mr. Kim – you betcha!.
Donald J. Trump
(@realDonaldTrump)
After some very important meetings, including my meeting with President Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon). While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!
“If he sees this”????? What, because Trump has no other means of communicating with Kim than Twitter? It’s Twitter or nothing? He can’t phone or write directly? He can’t communicate via the Secretary of State? He’s on an ice floe hundreds of miles from land and all he has is this one last remaining tweet?
Oh come on Ophelia, you know he can’t just write messages on the back of the toilet door like any other love-sick schoolboy, he’s the President of the United States!
Sort of a bad news/good news story; it’s been reported in the NYT and also at Slate. The bad news is that a New Jersey judge rules that a 16-year-old boy shouldn’t be tried as an adult for sexual assault because he’s a good kid with good grades and an Eagle Scout. The good news is that the court of appeal reversed.
Still frustrating to see a judge (unsurprisingly, a 70-year-old male judge) engage in the same dumb arguments: this isn’t “traditional” rape because there was only one guy and no weapon involved, why didn’t the victim go to the police right away, etc.
And there’s a big problem I can see: initially the victim and her parents weren’t asking for charges, they just wanted the perpetrator and his friends to stop circulating the video of it. (Yes, that’s right, he was dumb enough to video it — and text it to his friends with the message “when your first time having sex was rape.” But hey, Eagle Scout honor student!) So the police actually instructed the kids to delete the video, and now nobody has a copy of it. I don’t know enough about criminal law to say how that’s going to play out — the state actually directed the destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence, but on the other hand, the defendant himself had a copy too that he also chose to delete so maybe it’s not Brady material.
In a statement, the FoH reiterated that homeopathy “should be seen as a complementary treatment rather than an alternative to conventional medicine,” adding that both “can work very well together.”
Well, yes, in the sense that Bob Dylan and I can work very well together to write a song. I’ll sit on the sofa sipping a beer while Bob does the actual songwriting.
One of Alphabet’s businesses, Jigsaw, has a culture so hostile to women that they clubbed together to stock a secret kit in the women’s bathrooms with mascara, moisturiser and so on because women had to go to there to cry so often.
The way they tried to fix the culture problem was…. interesting. I mean, the investigation did reveal a lot about the cause of the problem…. Just not in the way they intended. Here’s what they did:
They put together a kangaroo court of 6 employees who had to interview all (60 or so) team members – including each other – to find out what the problems were. Right, and the staff members were going to be completely candid, weren’t they, knowing that they individually and the whole team were certain to be punished for saying anything bad.
Of course, nothing has changed since they issued the report, they’ve churned about half of their employees since last year and things are still far worse for women than they are for men.
“My Fair Lady”…yeah, I’ve never seen it, it looked horrible just from photos or previews. Plus hello Audrey Hepburn wasn’t a singer and how about casting actual singers in musicals eh?
I liked My Fair Lady. I do wish Julie Andrews had been in it, but Hepburn and Nixon did a good job. I’ve never seen the stage version (musical or play), but I’d like to.
“Accidentally validated certain gay marriages” is not in any way what CofE did. A transwoman married to a woman is a man married to a woman, and thus a mixed-sex marriage. A transman married to a woman is a same-sex marriage. It’s a silly “gotcha” to play with words and pretend that the church’s opposition to same-sex marriages, carefully spelled out, is really to the phrase “gay marriage” and anything anyone might mean by that (but they “accidentally” missed one, ha ha).
You lucky US taxpayers have already spent $108m on Trump’s visits to golf clubs he owns, with him benefiting from the visits and likely getting up to all sorts of sleazy backdoor shenanigans while he’s at it.
At least when we had a similar scandal here in the UK it was the most British thing ever: an MP was told off for charging the taxpayer for having his moat cleaned.
It’s been quite a couple of weeks for the government attorneys on the census cases. Sort of a Homer-and-the-frozen-yogurt situation:
The Supreme Court issued a decision that blocks the citizenship question! That’s bad for us.
But it means we’ll be done with defending this difficult-to-defend case! That’s good!
Uh-oh, Trump just tweeted that the case isn’t over? And the judge is making us call in from our vacation to explain WTF is happening? That’s bad!
Hey, the Attorney-General is putting together a new team of unprincipled hacks willing to take on this dogshit case for career advancement, so I’m getting out of the case! That’s good!
But hey, they’re not going to be nekkid, so it’s all ok, right?
Mancuso said there would be no nudity at the resort. On the course, he said, the caddies would wear pink miniskirts and what he called “a sexy white polo.” Afterward, however, the golfers and the dancers would return to another venue — the cabaret itself — for what he described as a “very tasteful” burlesque show, which could involve nudity.
Oh. Well, at least the Trumps are distancing themselves from this.
In a statement, the Trump Organization confirmed the event is happening and said it was for a “worthwhile cause” — a Miami children’s charity. A spokeswoman said the company had not approved the tournament’s advertisements before they were published.
Trump still owns Doral — and all his other businesses — while in office, but he has given day-to-day control to his sons Don Jr. and Eric.
Oh. But hey, these are rich people, they deserve the best.
Mancuso said the strip club did not intend to send a political statement by choosing Trump’s resort. Rather, he said, the choice was for luxury. These golfers are VIPs, Mancuso said. “They deserve a VIP environment.”
And what kind of luxuries does the club itself offer?
It offers packages that claim to combine hotel rooms at Doral with services at the strip club: a $1,000 “VIP Upgrade,” for instance, includes three days at the hotel and “1/2 Hour VIP Room + Bottle @ Club.”
Can’t imagine what you could do with a bottle and half an hour.
But hey, at least they’re not treating the women like objects, right?
“If you enroll before the 10th [of July], you are able to pick out your caddie girl,” he said. “Everybody that enrolled after the 10th, they’re going to have an auction” that night.
And now the judge handling the Maryland census case has denied the motions to substitute government counsel in that case as well. As with the NY judge, they can re-file, but among other things the Court warned the government: “Defendants must realize that a change in counsel does not create a clean slate for a party to proceed as if prior representations made to the Court were not in fact made. A new DOJ team will need to be prepared to address these, and other, previous representations made by the withdrawing attorneys at the appropriate juncture.” This coming after a long string of quotes from government filings in the case which argued — successfully — that because Secretary Ross was the decision-maker, the Court should not consider statements made by the President about the citizenship question.
In other words: if you’re going to come into court now and tell me that the President overruled the Secretary of Commerce, and that’s his right, so that’s why we’re changing positions now…. that’s going to have consequences. Because if the President is now the decision-maker, a whole bunch of evidence I previously excluded as irrelevant is going to come in.
The TRAs will be celebrating tonight. A doctor has been fired from his job as a disability benefits assessor for stating that he would not address a hypothetical 6ft, bearded male as ‘madam’. Although the doctor states that his Christian beliefs are the reason for his stance, he gets it spot-on in describing transgenderism as delusional, and ‘a fantasy about oneself’.
I was out looking at birthday cards, and I came across this one:
Animal 2: We unicorns need to stick together.
Animal 1: Is that a plunger on your head?
Animal 1 is a unicorn. Animal 2 is a horse with a plunger on its head. It was perhaps identifying as a unicorn and demanding that actual unicorns accept it as one of them and stand up for its rights. But a plunger on its head doesn’t make a horse a unicorn.
The National Post is framing this story as a “right vs left,” “free speech” thing and, I think missing the whole gender critical aspect. It’s mentioned, but is not the main point of the story, which, since it also mentions Meghan Murphy, it should be. Boiling it down to right vs left simplifies it too much. The GC slant would be a much more fruitful avenue of exploration.
I saw that. I’ve also been following the Twitter reporting by one lone woman on the Yaniv lawsuit. It’s all so gruesome I’ve been putting off posting about it.
With the pubication ban on J.Yaniv’s tribunal procedure, more details emerge. Doesn’t paint JY in any better light than he was seen before. It’s worse in fact. I was not as aware of his racism as I was of his creepy , stalker pervism regarding girls and tampons. https://www.thepostmillennial.com/the-truth-about-jessica-yaniv-is-beginning-to-emerge/
Looking back, I wonder if Oger turned on Yaniv because Oger knew he was going to try a run for office, and decided he should try to extricate himself so that JY’s behaviour couldn’t be used against him in any future campaign(s).
Mind you, Oger’s defunding of the Vancouver rape shelter is bad enough all on its own. I hope his opponents use it against him, whether they are from within the NDP or from outside it, should he win the nomination he seeks.
So a news story about about allegedly anti-pride posters:
One poster displayed a homophobic slur along with an inflammatory statement.
The other listed a number of “facts” — some of which were dubious — and painted transgender people in a negative light. It also had a rainbow-coloured biohazard symbol.
The signs looked new and were undamaged by the elements, and Pierce suspects they were posted to coincide with Pride celebrations.
“It really disappoints me to see something like that in my city,” she said in a phone interview as she waited for the parade to start. “It really, really does.”
Pierce said she ripped the posters down as soon as she saw them.
The original poster is not shown, just described . Given the response of some TRAs to facts, I would doubt the dubiousity claimed without knowing what the poster actually said.
Yes, it reminds me of the whole “cartoons of Muhammad” thing, where “oh there are these cartoons, but we can’t show them to you because they’re awful (and someone might kill us if we do).” Or some guy in the backwoods saying, “Yeah, Bigfoot was right here<' and the camera pans helpfully across the now Big-footless scene.
-Include trans women under the umbrella “adult human females”
-Believe that “feminism” that doesn’t include ALL women actually doesn’t help ANY women
I wouldn’t have taken her word for it.
When I first came across the original story, there was a single comment; someone was asking what the offending posters said. I now can’t find that comment. Given that some inside the CBC think that “Drag Kids” is a good idea would make me not take their word for it either, since straightforward GC questions and statements of fact are termed “transphobia” and conflated with right wing extremism like the content of the offending posters.
There is a movie out next month, “Adam”, based on a book of the same name by Ariel Schrag. The movie did well at Sundance. The book is described as an adult version of “young adult” fiction, a coming-of-age story with a heck of a lot of sex.
The protagonist, Adam, is a young man with a crush on a lesbian. He gets mistaken for a trans man, and decides to go with it. There are a number of trans characters, who I understand are portrayed by trans actors. There is sketchy behavior by a number of people; it’s fiction, after all. Sundance reviews indicate it’s very funny.
The movie is being called transphobic. Objections include: characters treat trans status as a costume they can take off; characters change their mind about sexuality and trans status; female characters refer to themselves as both trsnsmen and lesbians.
Here is a link to one Facebook post about it (mostly Tumblr screenshots), but there are lots of other complaints.
I don’t think I’d bother with the film otherwise, but maybe I’ll try to watch it. A film that disputes the trans ideology in some way, even if it has problems, might be worth watching.
The next shunning: FTB severs ties with The Atheist Experience because they had as guest a youtuber (known as Rationality Rules) who made a video noting that sex and sexual dimorphism exist, and grant trans women physical advantages over women. Some of the usual suspects are being ridiculous in the comments.
Mano Singham is definitely the last bastion of thoughtfulness over there.
Related to this, remember HJ Hornbeck? He had a temperate, thoughtful reaction to that event.
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HAHA GOOD JAPE! Okay, what actually happened: sixteen out of hist last seventeen posts have been about that episode, and the exception was to ineptly bash Kathleen Stock.
A former medical student who raped an unconscious woman “availed himself of an opportunity” he could not resist due to the stress of “leading an exemplary life,” his lawyer has argued.
….
Initially, defence lawyer Dale Fedorchuk asked the judge to send his client to jail for 90 days on weekends, but on Thursday, he submitted a new position of about nine months in jail.
Fedorchuk said people who are held to high standards like his client make human errors, giving the examples of Bill Cosby and Tiger Woods.
Shrivastava’s actions were a case of “drunken stupidity,” argued Fedorchuk, who said his client was “faced with an opportunity, tempted in that moment” and made “a stupid decision to cave to temptation.”
Look, I’m sure that it’s a tricky situation trying to argue for leniency for a client who’s been convicted of a terrible crime. I’m not even going to fault the guy for asking for such a low sentence, assuming that it’s within the realm of plausible outcomes.
I would suggest, though, that comparing your client to SERIAL RAPIST Bill Cosby is not the smartest move. Nor is it particularly appealing to promote the notion that unconscious women are “tempting.” In other words, the next time your client has access to an unconscious woman, he’ll totally WANT to rape her, but he’ll do his best to resist. (Can’t make any guarantees, though. No doubt helpless women are like potato chips — it’s hard to stop at just one.)
And I’m really irked by the classism that keeps coming up in these cases. Judge Persky didn’t want to ruin the life of a Stanford athlete. That judge in New Jersey went soft on a teenager because he had a bright future ahead of him. We’re told here that Mr. Tempted By Defenseless Women has led an “exemplary” life because… why, exactly? He scored well on the MCATs? Like, if he was a plumber or a grocery store clerk, we’d throw the book at him, but a med student turned biotech grad… well gosh, those are so rare and precious that we can’t let a little rapin’ get in the way.
Fortunately, as noted in the article, the Crown prosecutor seems to be firing back effectively, and the sentencing judge is a woman, so perhaps there will be a reasonable outcome here.
There’s also the point that I saw several women make when this first hit the news, which is that a decent person doesn’t see an unconscious woman and think “TEMPTING OPPORTUNITY,” a decent person goes to see if she’s all right, seeks help, protects her.
I can’t remember if I’ve told this story here before, but: as a teenager, I once spent several hours loitering around a party I wasn’t enjoying, in a sort of unspoken Mexican standoff with another guy, because the girl we both liked was very very drunk and neither of us trusted the other to be left alone with her. Which was actually as it should be — neither of us was some extraordinary gentlemanly white knight, and in fact I was kind of a jerk to her the next day. But it was just understood even back in those supposedly unenlightened days that decent people look out for someone in that condition.
The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal will investigate a complaint against Vancouver Island University to determine whether female employees and students were harassed by an adult male student who favoured diapers and baby talk.
Initially, the tribunal did not accept the human rights complaint filed last July by Katrin Roth, VIU’s former director of human rights and workplace safety. [emphasis mine.]
What happened? Amongst other things, this:
Roth’s 105-page complaint to the human rights tribunal said the man submitted a photo of himself in a diaper as part of an English essay. In the photo, he is pointing to a dirty diaper. He asked the university’s nurse practitioner to change his dirty diapers twice. She refused to the second time.[emphasis mine. Apalled she did it once.]
He wore a soother and asked his English professor to read children’s books to him.
The student communicated in baby talk. For example, he sent an email to an English teacher, beginning with “Hewoh.”
Then he wrote about enjoying the day’s stories, “especially the pee pee part!”
In the same email, according to the complaint, he said: “I sometimes call people poo poo heads,” explaining that he doesn’t like to swear and enjoyed alliteration.
According to the complaint, one woman became so concerned she had her husband accompany her to a night class.
Another became frightened because she felt the man was watching her come and go from the university.
When the English professor reported the student’s conduct to a university official, she was told to grade the assignment with the diaper photo anyway.
The professor later learned the student wanted to file a human rights complaint against her, saying he was being discriminated against.
In the female foeticide post, I’d snarkily suggested that “children are just a social construct,” forgetting I’d heard about this case before. Is the failure of the university in question to just expell this fetishist partly the result of the corporate culture of “student as customer,” that has taken over higher education? Would they put up with an equivalent fetishist who was female targeting male faculty, staff, and students like this?
And what is it about human rights tribunals in British Columbia? Is it something in the water?
A horrifying article about women being choked – sometimes to death – during sex, the apparent acceptance of the ‘sex game gone wrong’ defense for other strangulations of women and the corresponding lenient sentences when that defense is used:
Of all the horrifying things in that article, this horribly aggressive gaslighting stood out for me:
But the next thing I remember is waking up gasping for breath with him on top of me. I’m not sure how long I passed out for. I booked an Uber at 6.30am to get the hell out of there. The next day, I saw the bruises on my chest. We spoke after this and all he said was that, ‘we both got a bit carried away’.
A lot of the cases mentioned seemed to be fairly spontaneous casual sex between people who had just met. I don’t think that’s a situation in which kinks – rather especially ones that involve serious trust and are potentially fatal – should be explored.
And of course the woke media are somewhat complicit:
And sex surveys, advice forums, social media feeds and women’s magazines show the way the practice has become mainstream. “If blindfolds and role play have veered into vanilla territory, there are still plenty of sex moves … like choking,” suggests Women’s Health. “Breath play, the risque new sex practice gripping millennials,” offers Flare. On elitedaily.com, one sex educator was quoted as saying anyone stuck in a sex rut could read up on “how to choke your partner safely”.
and
Gail Dines, the feminist thinker and CEO of Culture Reframed, believes strangulation has been normalised via two main routes. “For the men, it’s pornography and for the women, it’s in women’s magazines,” she says.
Ugh. Yeah, that sounds about right, doesn’t it?
As the article points out, porn and the weird taboo on kink-shaming is only ever going to normalise violence against women. We know how that works, we’ve known it for years and we pretend that having one’s kink shamed is far worse than being strangled to fucking death.
I’ve been seething about that too. I wanted to write something about it but I couldn’t quite work out how to frame it. It was something about consent and how bullshit expectations from porn and media undermine the very concept of consent, let alone the practice.
Then Julie Bindel wrote this about prostitution:
I believe that true sexual consent should be about mutually-wanted intimacy
Yes. Bloody hell, Julie, that is exactly what I wanted to say.
Is the failure of the university in question to just expell this fetishist partly the result of the corporate culture of “student as customer,” that has taken over higher education?
This isn’t new; it’s just the sort of things we see in students now that are new because of the wider acceptance of “kink” and “self identity” by universities.
When my sister was in school in the 1990s, she and another woman student were literally threatened during English class by a male who didn’t like their mildly (and I do mean mild) feminist interpretation of a work they were reading in class, and their statements about some of the difficulties being a woman. He got more and more angry, and actually pulled out a knife to threaten them.
He was expelled, but then was unexpelled the instant his lawyer called. He was then returned to class, in a different section. They decided it would be best for their image not to have him in the class with the two women students he threatened to kill, so they put him in a different section with the same female teacher. She complained that she didn’t want him in her class, but was not given a choice. They said he hadn’t actually threatened her, only the two students.
So making a female teacher grade a paper with a picture of an adult man in a diaper doesn’t surprise me at all. The attitudes toward instructors these days is, well, educational. We have been told that we have to put up with whatever a student needs. If we are allergic to their service animal, tough. Even if it is allergic enough to kill us. If we are scared of big dogs (I am, but service animals don’t worry me because I know they are well trained. But some people aren’t able to make that distinction because emotion doesn’t respond to reason very well), tough. Even if that anxiety is enough to debilitate us, we are told we must have that student in our section. There can be no hint of transferring to another instructor, because that would be considered disability shaming. No…it is simply accommodating competing disabilities.
I look forward to the day a school gets sued over ignoring the employee’s ADA rights…
The 2010 Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Matthew Shepard Act) came up in a book I’m reading. I note that among the protected characteristics is “actual or perceived gender”; this is separate from “gender identity”, another protected characteristic.
Does this in theory open the door for charging a misogynist killer of women with a hate crime? Does this happen? Nearly 2000 women killed last year, were any of those murders considered hate crimes? The hate crime issue always comes up when transwomen are murdered, how about women? (This is not an issue explored in the book, to be clear.)
The fact that the suit apparently sought $250 million was another good clue to its merit. I really really wish the media would stop encouraging people with this shit. Some guy sues his neighbor for not cleaning up after his dog, includes a Dr. Evil-inspired demand for ONE BILLION DOLLARS, and the media breathlessly reports it as if that number means anything. (The absolute best are the whacko pro se litigants — some of them aren’t content with mere billions, but ask for trillions in damages.)
Just started reading it, but it sounds like an extended, more advanced and detailed Sokal excercize/study.
From the introduction:
While our papers are all outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways, it is important to recognize that they blend in almost perfectly with others in the disciplines under our consideration. To demonstrate this, we needed to get papers accepted, especially by significant and influential journals. Merely blending in couldn’t generate the depth necessary for our study, however. We also needed to write papers that took risks to test certain hypotheses such that the fact of their acceptance itself makes a statement about the problem we’re studying (see the Papers section, below). Consequently, although this study does not qualify as being particularly controlled, we did control one important variable: the big-picture methodology we used to write every paper.
Our paper-writing methodology always followed a specific pattern: it started with an idea that spoke to our epistemological or ethical concerns with the field and then sought to bend the existing scholarship to support it. The goal was always to use what the existing literature offered to get some little bit of lunacy or depravity to be acceptable at the highest levels of intellectual respectability within the field. Therefore, each paper began with something absurd or deeply unethical (or both) that we wanted to forward or conclude. We then made the existing peer-reviewed literature do our bidding in the attempt to get published in the academic canon.
This is the primary point of the project: What we just described is not knowledge production; it’s sophistry. That is, it’s a forgery of knowledge that should not be mistaken for the real thing. The biggest difference between us and the scholarship we are studying by emulation is that we know we made things up.
but at this point I’m not willing to take his word for it that these authors acted in bad faith. Maybe they did, but I’m still going to read it. It will be interesting to see how my take compares to his…
I was leafing through the latest Free Inquiry, and I saw Tom Flynn’s column, in which he defended FI from accusations of political bias. Along the way, he mentioned several columnists, including Ophelia (“controversial in some quarters on the left”) and Greta Christina, who I didn’t realize left the publication last year. A footnote about her mentioned her disagreement with dispassionate discussion of certain ideas that “should be taken out into the street and shot”. Yeah, we’ve seen that. I might have agreed with her on that a while back, but seeing viewpoints you value attacked and shut down changes perspective in a hurry.
Here is a weird piece interviewing the woman who is “credited” with originating gender reveal parties.
The main feature of the piece is the reveal that “[t]he child Karuvinidis welcomed with a pink-frosted cake is 10 years old and expresses her gender in nonbinary ways.” And… ugh. I feel awkward commenting on the gender identity of a specific 10-year-old, but I don’t really have anything bad to say about her. The kid is pictured in the article wearing short hair and a suit, and looks pretty sharp. I’m not sure that we need to slap the “non-binary” label on a girl just for doing that, though. And while I stress that any “non-binariness” is a fine thing, I really question the mother’s insistence that it’s totally something that originated with the child:
It started almost immediately after she was born. I made a blue and yellow nursery, not a pink one. You know your child from the moment they are born. For her first birthday, I put a black suit coat on her. You know what your kid is gravitating towards and I knew the whole pink thing wasn’t in the cards.
I definitely take my daughter’s lead. She was born a bio female. She’s still a girl, but at the same time, I just take her lead and she likes what she likes and she’s just a kid. I don’t know what her future holds, I accept her and love her. She’s awesome no matter what.
Again, I’m conflicted because I don’t think nurseries should have to be pink or blue. But then, part of the reason I think that is because I don’t believe that infants give a shit what color their nursery walls are. The notion that the mother “just knew” that this child, her special snowflake, wasn’t one of those boring baby girls who like pink…ugh.
In the big picture, this isn’t that big of a deal. I suspect the kid will end up in whatever identity suits her in the long run. And probably this mother is doing less damage than all the stage parents who insist that their little darling just loves performing and going on auditions and none of that is being done to please the parents, nossir, (or the same scenario for parents who are convinced that they aren’t pushing their child to practice a sport for hours a day, the kid just loves it soooo much).
It’s more amusing than anything. This parent hasn’t changed much. She went from being the kind of person who throws a gender reveal party because she thought it was just too weird to invite friends and family over for a BBQ without a pretext, to being the kind of person who wrings her hands about gender norms and comparing herself to the inventor of gunpowder. From a devoted mommyblogger to the person who has her kid photographed, named, and quoted in a magazine article in which she explains that her mommyblog was just too much a sacrifice of her kids’ privacy. Either way, it’s all about attention and showing off how different she and her family are.
The reporting on the Capital One data breach by hacker Paige Thompson. Daily Mail actually says trans. Fox shows a picture but doesn’t say trans. Every other news outlet I looked at had no picture and said woman throughout. This bullshirt is such a gift to all the sexist men (and those that don’t even know they’re a little bit sexist) that every time I mention male violence against women, they respond with “women are violent too, women commit crimes too.” What made me go looking in this case was the twitter post quoted by Paige that said “I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, forking dropping capitol ones dox and admitting it…” Just sounded like your standard male gamer to me.
Anyway, as the URL suggests, the title is Dear Philosophers, You Can Trust the Feminist Consensus: Gender-Critical Radical Feminism is Bogus
It seems to be all over the place and since today I reached peak procrastination, I finally started to read it.
It’s written by a philosopher to philosophers. We know that because he inserts “dear philosophers” into every other paragraph. It’s also an excellent reason to ask “what is it with all these philosophers” and a house-bankrupting fallacy bingo card.
I won’t go into the fallacies here in any detail, they are far too tedious. But I feel compelled to convey the general dishonesty and I will paste the guy’s mission in writing the article. What’s that lesson we’re all supposed to learn about hubris, again?
First he has a droning preamble about how people might think gender critical people have a point and that we should be able to discuss this stuff in an adult fashion, all the time clumsily telling any of us foolish enough to believe that that we’re naive and wrong. He says he, too, once thought as common swine but lo he had an epiphany and now he’s superwoke. While he was reticent in the past about telling feminists how to feminism because he’s a man, now his post-epiphany status as a member of the wokinati means that he’s practically obliged to do it. He’s doing those misguided women a service, after all.
Then he picks three points we’ve all been talking about (it really doesn’t matter which ones) and says:
I’m going to try to show not just that these are wrong, but that they are baseless, rooted in some combination of conceptual confusion and factual error, and hold together as an ideology only because of the organising power of anxiety, confusion, or hostility to trans people.
Oh rilly? Anyone else here get the feeling that he’s going to completely misrepresent arguments and just say they’re wrong, possibly throwing out a few fallacy bombs in his shambling wake like a fugitive dropping scent bombs to confuse pursuing dogs?
Well spotted, but it’s hardly like we need a spidey-sense at this stage, is it?
Part 1: Do Trans People Reinforce Gender Stereotypes? (No)
Well, if the answer’s no, there’s no need to read further, obviously. But if you did you’d see that he picks an illustration of a point (gleefully from the gendercritical subreddit and claiming that means he – superwoke as is he – is incapable of bias)…. and then of course completely misrepresents it and staples strawmen (transstrawmen?) all over it.
He misrepresents the point of the image and then uses baited language to misrepresent the point of this part of the debate because he wouldn’t be sufficiently insufferable otherwise. The image is this one:
The idea that people transition in order to better fit gender stereotypes is, as best I can tell, just false.
And with that brilliant stroke of logic, that whole argument is bogus now and for all time and we shouldn’t even talk about it. Even though he is talking about it. Shut up, he’s superwoke and allowed and you are neither.
In case you’re worried about spoilers, don’t. He has pages and pages to say on the matter. I’m not an expert on fallacies, really, but he’s setting the bastards off like fireworks. He finishes – I can barely type this – with an appeal to his “dear philosophers” to use the tools of philosophy when discussing this issue, which – he insists – they are not allowed to do because he says so, citing “reasons”.
Part 2: Are People Being Pressured to Transition? (No)
He quotes a comedian (Robert Webb) saying that he was gender non-conforming as a child and that it would be wrong to tell children that because they were non-conforming they must be trans.
Philosopher-dude leaps on this using what seems to be his favourite word: “all”. He turns every argument everyone has ever made into absurdity by quoting a fairly reasonable and innocuous statement like that then saying “well, it’s just not true that all children are being told that!!!!!”
Nobody – not even Robert Webb – ever said anything of the sort. People – including Robert Webb – have said that it might be a bad idea and that’s pretty much it.
Part 3: Does Admitting Trans Women Make Women’s Spaces Less Safe? (No)
He understands the issue here, no doubt about it. He makes it very clear that he knows what the gender critical argument is. But…
Well first he says that “the most respectable” gender critical philosophers aren’t claiming that – his favourite word again – “all” trans women are predators, implying that anyone at all is saying they are.
And there are plenty of people out there making that crude and obviously transphobic argument!
Citation? Nope. He invents some scenarios about how sex segregation might work in bathrooms without ever seeming to understand that…. this already happens. It happens all the time. It has happened throughout all living memory without much difficulty. And to compound matters, he also invents a scenario in which women demand to see people’s ID before they are allowed to use the facilities and if the accused non-women refuse, they are assaulted by their accusers.
This is so transparently bullshit that it looks like satire, which is the very signature of this fallacious crap.
I’m too exhausted to talk about the conclusions and there are dozens of delicious fallacies you can hunt out for yourselves.
This is the standard of argument we get and everyone still rolls over. As Josh said recently, the trans movement has done zero work for this. The LGB and feminist movements did all that work and that’s where we live now. Arse.
Of course I didn’t mean to imply that the work the LGB and feminist communities did was the problem, but the fact that it has been co-opted by some of the more recently-added letters.
I meant to say that we live in a world where that work is always stolen and Josh is right.
I’m pretty sure that’s where we’ve been the whole time. That’s what “woke” me to awareness of the nonsense in the first place. All I wanted was clear definitions of the terms I was expected embrace. “Gender identity” seemed a good place to start, and that led to literally three days of scouring google and JSTOR for something—anything. There was nothing of substance to be found anywhere.
That’s kind of my story too. I was ordered to give a yes or no answer to a stupid question, and I refused to oblige but instead analysed the question and added stipulations. This – on a blog network that boasts of its freedom of thought – was denounced as murderous, evil, monstrous etc etc etc etc etc. It was quite a spectacle.
I’ve heard reference to the FtB Ablogalypse, but I wasn’t around for it. Was this around the same time as accusations of Islamophobia (and general concern trolling) were ratcheting up? It’s depressingly fascinating that such people, who rightly called out the religious for cordoning their faith-based beliefs off from examination, would turn around and do the same with their own beliefs about sex and gender and oppression. Where would I look, were I sufficiently masochistic to want to read through the train wreck?
(I don’t use FB or Twitter or IG or anything, and I’d stopped reading any blogs by ’10, so I missed everything and only started reading again in May. It was shocking to see that most of the freethought space I used to read had gone completely mad. At the risk of sounding corny, finding your blog again felt like finding a solid roof in a rainstorm.)
Another article on Jeffrey Epstein. This time it’s the NY Times, focusing on Epstein’s weird “scientific” interests. Hard to believe that skeptic extraordinaire and great judge of character Lawrence Krauss wasn’t able to see through him.
At least Stephen Pinker comes out of it looking ok.
At the risk of sounding corny, finding your blog again felt like finding a solid roof in a rainstorm.
There are so many atheist blogs I used to read (and occasionally participate in the comments) 2010-2015 that I do not read anymore. The only FTB blog still on my list is the rarely-updated Digital Cuttlefish.
It was summer 2015, July through early August especially. I think accusations of Islamophobia were ratcheting up at the same time, yes.
The trainwreck was very large and spread out, in the sense that lots of people wrote “shock-horror that monster” posts and they were spread out over many days. I don’t much recommend being masochistic enough to look for them. I did a quick Google to see what that would turn up and found a post of my own, after I came back here, that sums up where I think the fracture point was. I like to ask probing questions, and the people who were monstering me see that as monstrous.
It begins here, with the totally-not-loaded-and-not-at-all-inquisitorial question:
“Ophelia. Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no? (Please be aware that ‘yes, but’ or any other kind of ‘sort of’ or ‘maybe’ is an appeal to ‘separate but equal’ and therefore equivalent to ‘no’.)”
The problem with going through it, apart from the masochism of doing so, is also that it was spread out ofer several FTB blogs plus backchannel communication plus facebook snooping. The whole thing took weeks, maybe two or three months.
And incidentally, was the direct for me to switch from reading Greta Christina to Ophelia Benson.
There seemed to be a confusion between moral, practical, and ontological claims, specifically with respect to the proposition “trans [wo]men are [wo]men”. One comment was about the writer’s trans son (i.e., female offspring) and how being confronted by the idea that he was not really a boy would cause real harm. That’s a practical claim, but it’s used to make it impermissible to speak openly about the ontological. The moral claim would be akin to “all men are created equal”. We should treat all as though they be equal. Likewise, we should treat trans [wo]men as though they be [wo]men. The moral claim is then used to silence discussion about the practical and ontological.
I’m glad I haven’t paid attention to any of this shite until now. *shudder*
Yeah, Greta did not come out of that looking good. Her post on “Here’s why Ophelia is a monster and why you’re not allowed to argue” pretty much set the tone for everything that’s followed.
Ah funny you should mention “a confusion between moral, practical, and ontological claims,” Nullius. I made exactly that distinction when I eventually answered that stupid peremptory question, and the result was simply a lot of sneering at my pretentiousness. That may have been the “ok I’m out of here” moment.
“As a trans woman, I deeply appreciate cis people coming to bat for me. We can’t carry this battle on our own. There are far more cis people with flawed understandings of our lives, perspectives, and needs than there are trans people. Jason, you specifically have addressed these needs and concerns and I thank you.
If you’ll notice, a lot of trans voices have dropped out of Ophelia Benson’s comment threads. That’s telling.
One final thing. I’m a woman. No ifs, ands, or buts. If you have to trow out “ontological” qualifiers in your “yes” answer to our existence, that’s telling, too.”
No ifs ands or buts, not qualifications, no questions, no analysis, no thought, just an arbitrary statement that is the opposite of reality.
There were a few record-scratching moments in quite a short amount of time, but they mostly boiled down to the “yes or no” question. Ophelia wanted to know what the question meant before answering it and that turned out to be forbidden.
Just… forbidden.
We’re kind of used to that now but at the time it was unexpected, at least to me. I had expected arguments to be heated, but not… forbidden. And I hadn’t expected how quickly and substantially people in that community – especially people at FtB – would turn on Ophelia. It wasn’t just a regular shunning, they made a spectacle of it. The same community that still defends racists and rapists went to fucking town on someone who wanted to understand what the question was before answering it.
For quite some time after The Unpleasantness I held on to the idea that some senior people at FtB, including PZ, were silently appalled at what had happened and wished it had not. But I was talking bollocks, I really have no idea now why I thought that. The evidence is not on my side there.
Anyway, there’s a lot more freedom and thought here than you’re likely to find in other ironically-named blog networks and we don’t thank Ophelia enough for doing this thankless work. So to contradict myself, thanks, Ophelia!
Well PZ did tell me in secret that he was silently appalled at what was happening and that he badly wanted me to stay…but he never did anything to make it possible, and before long did the opposite, so that was pretty contemptible.
It occurred to me that some people might not know what I meant by a “record scratching” moment. I was going to attempt a humorous explanation but that thing happened where I realised even I wasn’t so interested in the chemical properties and historical significance of vinyl as to bother.
So instead, here’s George Hrab singing optimistically about young people.
It isn’t the best version, but it’s his official one. I first saw it at TAM London, back when the JREF was coo….. Christ, this happens a lot, doesn’t it?
Ophelia, I don’t mean to dredge up unpleasantness or drag you into old conversations. It’s just that I have this habit of getting really obsessive about new (to me) topics. Mea maxima culpa.
A lot of the rhetoric being used just makes no sense to me. Like, my brain throws an IllegalArgumentException when I try to read half the stuff, and a NullReferenceException for the other half. How am I supposed to parse arguments when the terms don’t even refer? Aaaaargh …
No it’s ok, after all this time it’s kind of interesting to revisit a little of it. It’s so much worse than I remembered…the craziness, the malice, the refusal to listen. Kind of interesting. And yes about the not making sense. Don’t I know it.
Ophelia wanted to know what the question meant before answering it and that turned out to be forbidden. Just… forbidden. We’re kind of used to that now but at the time it was unexpected, at least to me. I had expected arguments to be heated, but not… forbidden.
I’m trying to figure out when and how and why the discourse cracked. Like …
How did we decide that following someone on Twitter is an endorsement? When did humans stop being sexually dimorphic? Why are people folks? Why does “lived experience” enjoy epistemic priority over empirical data? Why are we equating speech and violence? Why are people folks? Why are kafkatraps rhetorically okay? When did Foucault become respectable? Why are actual scientists suddenly telling me I have ineradicable magic gender dust? How did words lose all meaning? Why are people folks?
While I generally like David Futrelle, he’s not above a but of unthinking TERF bashing now and then and his commentariat includes some of the most tedious people on the planet.
For example, I was once slit open in the comments there from arsehole to breakfast time for saying the surely innocuous:
Holy cocksucking Christ
Not because it might offend hypothetical Christians, but because it might offend people who suck hypothetical cocks. I’m still not sure why it upset people, Jesus had as much right to suck cocks as anyone else, but they didn’t like it at all and I flounced.
Anyway, the TERF-bashing. Futrelle has a piece which begins with the somewhat unfair:
Can “Gender Critical” feminists — a.k.a. TERFs — talk about anything without turning the discussion into an excuse to bash trans women?
Unfair in particular because the target of his post was taken from the Gender Critical Feminist subreddit. I haven’t been there and I have no idea what goes on there, but it seems to me that out and out saying that “this is what TERFs talk about all the time” is a little bit disingenuous. A heap of selection bias smothered with lashings of delicious conformation bias sauce.
Anyway, the post is fairly stupid but the comments – holy cocksucking christ – the comments. It’s like watching a fight develop from absolutely nowhere at a bus stop in Gateshead. People are whipping themselves into ever more histrionic bouts of fury over something that… well…. might be at least the ghost of a good point in the first place.
TERFs are automatically also SWERFs! They seem to want women to not be exploited, the idiots! And so on.
Compiler writer solidarity. *fist bump* Very cool to know this about you. Compiler development was my job for nearly twenty years. (Not Java; I only worked with Java after my compiler days were over.)
I try as hard as anyone, I guess, to acknowledge people’s lived experience. That it’s not in itself scientific evidence doesn’t mean it isn’t worth paying attention to. Emotional arguments can be valid arguments and dispassionate ones can be bullshit, we know that. The (excellent) Good Place’s treatment of the Trolley Problem was the best piece of sitcom I’ve ever seen and one of the best bits of satire ever. The (effectively) devil (awesomely Ted Danson) puts a moral philosopher at the switch in an actual trolley car, forcing him make the usual escalating decisions in real time with the actual deaths and blood-splatter. Brilliant stuff.
Anyway, despite all that, there’s this. I don’t believe a word of it, do you?
Forget, if you can, the flippant conflation of those critical of some aspects of gender theory with those who hate (in the first paragraph, in a throw-away style) and focus on whether you’ve ever met or heard about a single person who has ever had the feelings and inclinations Michaea B claims to have had before his magical transformation into someone who didn’t have those feelings after all.
I mean, people are weird. I myself do things for a living that probably can’t be done. I love a cat I have every reason to hate, we’re all idiots. But does Michea B’s story ring true to anyone? I mean, anyone?
And why should we care if it does?
I do like the idea of getting rid of the “phobia” part of accusing people of not liking stuff.
That article is … revealing? Michea B hated trans people, as in felt antipathy toward and held animus against trans people. So therefore that’s the mental state from which comes all critique of trans dogma. It reminds me of a lot of interactions I’ve had with Christians. They, too, they say, were once angry at God or hated God because they wanted to sin, so they understand how I feel and why I deny God. Both look like projection to me.
I’ve never hated any group before. I don’t even know what that would feel like. So the assumption that my arguments, questions, or positions are rooted in hatred just leaves me confused. (Which is one of the handful of emotional states I am familiar with.)
The (excellent) Good Place’s treatment of the Trolley Problem was the best piece of sitcom I’ve ever seen and one of the best bits of satire ever. The (effectively) devil (awesomely Ted Danson) puts a moral philosopher at the switch in an actual trolley car, forcing him make the usual escalating decisions in real time with the actual deaths and blood-splatter. Brilliant stuff.
While that episode was totally hilarious, I’m not sure Chidi Anagonye is the best example of dispassion being bullshit. That was more his prime failing (crippling indecisiveness) being put to the test, which really made the scene more about how Michael was resisting the ethics lesson by retreating to his comfort zone. (I.e., torturing Chidi by forcing him to make serious decisions quickly.) Chidi’s a weird character, anyway. He apparently treats Kant as a prophetic source of revealed wisdom. Which also reflects his indecisiveness. Despite his vast knowledge of Ethics, he is overwhelmed by the anxiety of making his own ethical decisions, so he leans on Kant. He even leans on Eleanor at some points.
Honestly, he may be one of the most well written characters I’ve seen on the small screen.
Yes, that’s the genius of that scene and sort of my point. Chidi believes that knowledge about different theories of ethics is what’s required to be ethical but in fact that contradictory knowledge is what prevents him from doing anything, which sometimes results in objectively bad stuff happening and is why he’s in the Bad Place to begin with. When he ignores his dispassionate knowledge and does what he feels is right, he ends up doing good.
I don’t watch much TV but I’m glad I found The Good Place. It is absolute brilliance.
Of course, that he does good when he he doesn’t deliberate could be seen from an virtue ethics perspective. Studying ethics for years has cultivated most virtues in him. The last virtue he needs to cultivate is what you might call “sensitivity to danger”, where the extreme of excess is anxiety and the extreme of deficiency is obliviousness.
The more I think about that show, the better it gets.
I think you plausibly have the Euthyphro backward. It seems likely that Chidi’s anxiety was prior to his ethical expertise. Remember, young Chidi couldn’t even pick players for soccer, and grown Chidi can’t pick between dry-erase and paper! He reads, to me, as someone who catastrophizes all decision-making. The resulting anxiety motivated his study of ethics. Like, if he could only learn enough, he could avoid making the wrong choice.
“If you’ll notice, a lot of trans voices have dropped out of Ophelia Benson’s comment threads.”
I can barely remember which of you fuckers* I like, I’m supposed to be keeping track of which of you are trans? That sounds like something a (gasp) TERF would do!
I’m supposed to be keeping track of which of you are trans?
Well exactly. Did anyone really notice that? And “a lot”? There were a lot of trans voices (voices? are voices more important than people? I’m not sure) here before and now there aren’t? How many constitutes “a lot”?
And so what if that’s true, anyway? People don’t tend to frequent blogs that say things they don’t like, it doesn’t mean those things aren’t true. We don’t seem to see many creationists or Trump fans around here either, strangely enough.
Interesting summary of an interview of J. Yaniv by a YouTube transwoman, described as a trans activist in the article. Sounds like the interviewer did a reasonable job, challenging the many lies. In the interview, Yaniv brandished a taser and bragged that it was illegal; the day after the interview, Yaniv was apprehended, his apartment searched, and the taser confiscated. I note that this article refuses to use any pronouns for Yaniv, awkwardly using “Yaniv” or “Yaniv’s” in all cases. The article has a link to the video, which I did not watch, but I did see the Post-Millennial news item about the arrest and apartment search.
Yes, I watched some of that. Only a little, because it’s boring. Also because Blaire White’s constant pawing of Their hair got on my nerves. Yet another of those things that actual women Do Not Do.
Yesterday the news of Yaniv’s visit from the cops was only on social media, today it’s in some of the regular kind.
PZ has lost his mind again but not on the trans issue, this time. I sometimes get some of his posts in my feed because of an algorithm I wrote a few years ago which has apparently developed sentience. It’s either that or a really stupid bug I can’t be bothered to hunt down.
I know which I think is more likely, you can choose to fear my algorithm or my shitty programming skills/laziness.
I usually ignore those posts of his that do turn up because they tend to be about spiders (I get my spider-related news elsewhere) or are exhausting in their weirdly cultish acceptance of matters trans, which has been discussed here from time to time.
The gist is that a band played some songs. It’s a thing with this band that people come on stage at the end and maraud about, sounds fun. On this occasion one idiot started doing a nazi salute to the rhythm of the song. I’m hardly in favour of that sort of thing and if I were a member of the band I expect I might have tried to get the idiot off the stage. I might have manhandled him. I would probably have tried to get security to escort the charming fellow out of the building and I wouldn’t have minded too much if the door hit him on the arse on the way out.
That’s not what happened, though. The bass player punched him in the face then beat him with his guitar. PZ is elated about this. He says very earnestly that it’s the way to deal with nazis. Beating them with a fucking guitar. Committing a very serious physical assault.
I started writing a comment there and I knew it wasn’t worth it so I gave up. For one thing, PZ did something he does quite often these days which was to forestall any dissent. You know the kind of thing “and before you say I’m wrong, actually it’s YOU who’s wrong.” Right there in his post. The “wrong thing”, though, was about frozen peaches, not…. well, beating people with sticks.
Anyway. I don’t particularly advocate punching people if you can help it. I don’t weep when people with a long record of disgusting behaviour and a promising future of the same are punched, although I’d be horrified if they were seriously hurt. I didn’t enjoy it when RIchard Spencer was punched for his nazitude, for example, but I didn’t mind and my pearls remained unclutched.
But this was a random idiot who stood on a stage for a few seconds and did a stupid, dickish, deplorable thing. For which he was severely beaten with at least one fist and at least one guitar. He might very well be a terrible person with a history of awfulness and a calendar loaded with abuse. But nobody knows that, least of all PZ who wasn’t even there.
Or he might have been a random dickhead who thought his actions might be funny. What he did was either hateful or thoughtless and those two categories clearly overlap. But seriously? Beat the guy with a plank of wood because it was so important to send that message in that moment? Not have him taken off stage and thrown out then come back to the mic to talk about what happened? I’m not suggesting the idiot be allowed to explain his behaviour, on your fucking way sunshine, but…
PZ is positively brimming with satisfaction at this violence, gloating at it. What the actual fuck is wrong with the guy? Or is it just me and it’s somehow OK to beat idiots with guitars in public?
We were talking on another post about whether we humans might have some innate reactions to unfairness and for satisfaction regarding justice. I wildly speculated that if we do, they might easily be skewed in the direction of horribleness. Ya think?
Anyway, I dragged my frustration here not to bash PZ in particular but because this is another symptom that he is losing the capacity of reason. Or I am, this could go either way.
For one thing, PZ did something he does quite often these days which was to forestall any dissent. You know the kind of thing “and before you say I’m wrong, actually it’s YOU who’s wrong.”
Argh, I hate that. Slap me upside the head if I ever do it.
I did, in the end, reply in PZ’s comments. I couldn’t not do it. There are quite a lot of people I know – friends, family, people I’ve worked with – who could easily have been goaded up onto that stage, done something idiotic, been beaten with a plank of fucking wood and had some bellend on the internet cheer about it.
I myself was young once – this was back before the old king died – and I did some absolutely awful things, some of which I’ve reported here. For the most part I didn’t get the comeuppance that’s due other than feeling shit about it for forty years. I probably wouldn’t mind if someone turned up to hit me with a guitar but I think I’d want them to explain my acts and the context and why a beating seemed like a good idea.
PZ has lost all capacity for reason. That post was at least as hateful as any I’ve ever seen.
I haven’t watched the clip, but I wonder if the Nazi salute is really so familiar to young Americans that PZ’s horde can be sure that’s what he was doing as opposed to a random dance move. Maybe they can, and even if they can’t maybe he was, but I wonder.
Say to the Israelites: ‘A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period. 3 On the eighth day the boy is to be circumcised. 4 Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over. 5 If she gives birth to a daughter, for two weeks the woman will be unclean, as during her period. Then she must wait sixty-six days to be purified from her bleeding.
I was vaguely aware of “churching”, but I hadn’t known that having a girl makes a woman twice as unclean as having a boy. What a fantastic surprise.
The worms have turned on that PZ thread, his views are not universally admired.
PZ himself responded thusly:
If you’re arguing about “proportional responses”, and you think hitting someone with a guitar (an incident that produced no police response or hospital reports) is excessive compared to promoting genocide, then I think your sense of proportion is way off.
Saying that the guy was an ignorant dumbass is also no excuse. The ranks of neo-Nazis are filled with ignorant dumbasses — that’s their recruitment pool.
This is idiotic on the face of it and some people explain why.
PZ’s brain has gone wrong. Nobody rational could possibly equate someone doing a nazi salute at a gig with promoting genocide.
…(an incident that produced no police response or hospital reports)…
That’s such a terrible response, I had to go check for myself. Not that I thought you were lying, but in that parenthetical aside, PZ – ally of abused women, #metoo and so forth – implies that an incident can’t be cause for concern if it is not reported to police.
The ecologists have spoken! And as we all know, they know more about language than linguists / grammarians, more about athletic advantage than sports doctors and researchers, more about sex than developmental biologists. Iknklast, I think they want your pearls of wisdom!
I suspect I’m missing some kind of in-joke. But I’m not a great fan of death threats, especially when I’m the one threatened with death. I haven’t had a proper death threat for a few years, I’d almost forgotten how much they shit me up, even when I don’t think they’re credible (as in this case, I don’t think it’s a real death threat).
Latsot, I admire both your ethical convictions (for entering that discussion surely knowing what would ensue) and your tenacity for sticking it out and calling PZ on his bullshit multiple times in that thread. I am slightly concerned that you are displaying masochistic tendencies.
So the crowd there must be cool with Trump having exhorted his followers to beat up protesters at his rallies then. Same sort of thing. Protesters at Trump’s rallies are as much of a threat to attendees as an isolated Nazi (or asshole) at a concert is. If you go on about what the individual “represents,” the movement they may or may not be a part of, what the salute “means” then you’ve lost sight of the person you are beating. And you are beating a person, whatever sorts of thoughts or ideas may or may not be inside his head. Breaking that head because of the “true meaning” of the Nazi salute just puts you in the same category as those who dehumanize their opponents. Like Nazis. If the Nazi/asshole is actually threatening actual injury (not potential, future, hypothetical injury “because Nazis”) then you can defend yourself. But beating up some guy who gives a salute because there are camps at the border, and Trump is a fascist wannabe, is no better than beating someone up because he gave you the finger. The finger isn’t actually hurting you. Neither is the salute. It’s not “actual violence.” The person saluting should be marked out and argued against, but the jesture itself does not merit assault as a response.There were alternatives to assault that should have been pursued. “Righteous” violence is still violence.
Elizabeth Warren is calling out the Trump administration for rolling back protections for the trans community.
I’m having some trouble determining exactly what these protections are supposed to be. From the article, I get the impression that the protections:
– Allow patients to withhold information about their biological sex;
– Forbid doctors from accessing information listed under a patient’s previous names;
– Demand that doctors use biologically incorrect pronouns when talking with other people about the patient;
– Require doctors to provide medically unnecessary procedures and medications if they are desired for “affirming gender”.
Maybe there are other aspects of this rollback that are actual problems? Maybe there’s a religious exemption that allows doctors to refuse any care to trans people? The items I noticed in the article seemed like good policy to jettison, but maybe there were other things I missed.
Israel has decided not to allow Reps. Tlaib and Omar into the country. This comes shortly after the alleged President claimed that Israel would be showing “great weakness” if they were allowed in.
I hadn’t known that having a girl makes a woman twice as unclean as having a boy.
Plus, it means you can’t be in the cool club of the #boymom.
I shit you not. I do admire the writer’s nice piece of juxtaposition here:
Self-identified boymoms don’t think the term is particularly limiting, either for boys or the parents who raise them. “I think in a society that’s all about being genderless I think it’s a good thing because we do have gender, we are different,” Powers says. “Boys learn differently than girls and I’m okay with saying that. Yes, individually, all of our kids are different, but generally, I know that my son has way more energy right now than a little girl his age and he needs to get that out because he’s a boy.”
But perceived gender differences in children are less biological than they are prescribed by widely held stereotypes. A 2005 study from psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde found that, for example, boys and girls perform the same in math up until high school, where boys might gain an advantage simply because girls are overlooked due to assumptions about how they’re less proficient in math. “There just simply aren’t cognitive differences or learning differences between boys and girls,” says Christia Spears Brown, professor and associate chair of developmental, social, and health psychology at University of Kentucky and author of the book Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes. “People have looked and they cannot find them.”
“It’s the same for [energy], boys are slightly more active as infants but it’s not a very big difference,” Brown says. “The problem is when you have a baby [and] you presume that they’re going to be really energetic and be focused on trucks and enjoy math, then parents really do, and I would say subconsciously, reinforce [that] from infancy.”
I admit I’m a sucker for that formulation of “Uniformed idiot: ‘well obviously we all know that X is true.’ Actual expert: ‘X is not true.'”
Newspapers are often home to the worst of the language purists, so it’s nice to see an article about language change in the popular press from someone who actually understands linguistics:
I recently read Martin Duberman’s book “Has the Gay Movement Failed?”, and I wanted to share my thoughts. I hope it’s OK to provide them here.
Duberman is an excellent writer. The prose is clear and engaging. The author backs up everything he claims with reasoning and evidence, and he does not shy away from giving opinions. He is clearly an expert. Some of his arguments I found compelling, others not, but all were at least clearly laid out.
He does stake out some unorthodox opinions. He opposes the institution of marriage. He favors reducing age of consent or eliminating the concept. He is very much a socialist, and favors a highly intersectional approach to gay rights that focuses on economic inequality.
I was attracted to the book because of a generally positive review that indicated Duberman questioned the “born this way” narrative for both sexuality and “gender identity”. This aspect is not a major focus of the book, to be sure. Duberman holds to the view that people are naturally much more bisexual than they admit even to themselves. He thinks sexuality is more fluid and changeable than is usually claimed. Stating that sexuality is fixed at birth is not only incorrect, he says, but a strategic error. The main arguments he gives against innate sexuality is that studies have thus far been unable to find a mechanism; not so much claiming that it isn’t innate, but saying he’s not convinced that it is
The discussion of transgenderism is perhaps the weakest aspect of the book for me. Aside from disagreeing with the emphasis on an innate “gender identity”, Duberman doesn’t seem willing to challenge any of the trans ideology. He’s picky about evidence in other cases but not these. He doesn’t give much of an indication of support for the rights of women, other than nominal support for feminism, and certainly no indication that he understands the conflicts between those rights and trans ideology. He doesn’t even explain why he thinks there is no such conflict.
Overall, I found the book informative and worthwhile. It contained lots of great history that was new to me. Some of the arguments on various issues I found compelling.
Leon Haughton likes honey in his tea. Which is why during his Christmas visit to relatives in Jamaica, he made his regular stop and bought three bottles from a favorite roadside stand before heading home to Maryland.
It was a routine purchase for him until he landed at the airport in Baltimore. Customs officers detained Haughton and police arrested him, accusing him of smuggling in not honey, but liquid meth.
Haughton spent nearly three months in jail before all charges were dropped and two rounds of law enforcement lab tests showed no controlled substances in the bottles.
By then, Haughton, who according to his lawyer had no criminal record, had lost both of his jobs as a cleaner and a construction worker.
I’d say that the entire case is a comedy of errors, except that comedy is supposed to be funny, and nobody actually screwed up — this is literally the way the system is “supposed” to work.
He was initially detained because a drug-sniffing dog alerted, and then a “field test” came back positive. Both dogs and field tests are notoriously unreliable — they arguably shouldn’t even be “probable cause” under the 4th Amendment to search somebody, let alone to arrest.
Then you have the problem of the Maryland crime lab not being able to test liquids or honey (seriously!). Plus he’s a noncitizen permanent resident, so ICE had placed a hold on him and likely would have launched deportation proceedings even if the state authorities released him.
claims to debunk what it calls the fallacious “I identify as an attack helicopter” argument.
Ever heard these arguments? Of course you have. They are some of the oldest transphobic tropes, trotted out again and again despite being rebutted over and over.
Rebutted, eh? I’ve got to see this:
The difference has to do with gender itself. Whereas it is not plausible that being a tiger has to do with how the brain represents itself to itself, belonging to a particular gender (man vs woman) is plausibly explained by how the brain represents itself to itself. That is, belonging to a particular gender or not has to do with how you identify. Thus, being a woman or a man just is about how your brain sees itself which is why trans women are women and trans men are men.
Oh. So it turns out to be “it’s just different because it just is” again. What a surprise.
The author also constantly uses the pretending to confuse gender and sex bait and switch because of course she does.
TSA rules are that a pat-down should be done by someone of the same sex. Thus, a trans-identified male gets patted down by a male officer. The ACLU is bothered by this, and thinks female officers should be required to do the pat-down in such cases. The ACLU would be better off pushing to reduce or eliminate pat-downs, I think.
@195, but where does that line of reasoning leave those non-binary and ‘other’ identifiers who quite seriously list all sorts of nonsensical stuff as their gender (or in some cases genders)? How exclusionary to limit gender to just male and female, and humans only at that.
Sackbut @197, hard to follow the ACLU’s reasoning isn’t it? As you say, the whole pat down thing is clearly just way over the top in the vast majority of cases anyway, but the reasoning applied seems to fly in the face of trans dogma anyway. If a trans-man is a man, it follows that the pat down should be performed by a man, surely. To turn around and say that the tran-man is a man, but really has a woman’s body so should be patted down by a woman to avoid embarrassment for the trans person suggests that the ACLU and trans people are actually acknowledging the fallacy of their own argument. Not to mention they are now displacing the trans persons embarrassment at having a person of the ‘opposite’ sex patting them down onto the TSA officer. Imagine the embarrassment of a female TSA officer having to publicly pat down what appears to be a male.
Interesting that the issue is around trans men (i.e. biological females). I wonder if that’s because a good percentage of trans women (biological males) would actually quite get off having a women pat their junk and so aren’t bothered at all.
This one is a Mother Jones interview with Stuart Pivar, who described himself as a close friend of Epstein, until he realized what Epstein was up to. Though he still continued to engage in some fairly gross apologetics for him, so I take the claimed separation with a grain of salt. (Pharyngula readers may recall that Pivar once sued PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot.”)
Some notable excerpts. Those dinners with scientific stars:
There were lavish dinner parties with the likes of Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould during which Epstein would ask provocatively elementary questions like “What is gravity?” If the conversation drifted beyond his interests, Epstein was known to interrupt, “What does that got to do with pussy?!”
Ha ha. Let’s get back to the important topics, amiright? Hmm — one wonders what the women scientists at the party thought of such…. ha, just kidding, obviously there weren’t any women scientists present. Which should have been a red flag to these distinguished male scholars, shouldn’t it? How come they didn’t wonder why Epstein didn’t cultivate any distinguished women scholars? It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the social company of women, after all.
As I said, Pivar’s claim that he stayed away rings a little hollow, given his attitude towards Epstein’s behavior:
What’s the difference between the punishment which befalls a murderer and a serial murderer? It’s the same. If Jeffrey Epstein was found guilty of fooling around with one 16-year-old trollop, nobody would pay any attention. The trouble is, what he did was quantitative and not qualitative.
What Jeffrey did is nothing in comparison to the rapes and the forceful things, which people did. Jeffrey had to do with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again. And if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed—except he made an industry out of it. And why did he make an industry out of it? Because Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man. For some reason that doesn’t get understood. Did you ever hear of nymphomania?
Ah yes, it was just 16-year-old “trollops,” they don’t count for anything. Why, everybody fucks one from time to time, you just shouldn’t make a habit of it, and anyone who does is obviously just ill, not evil!
He didn’t struggle with it. He was in a position financially to yield to it, big time. But nevertheless, he could not help himself. I’ve seen him do things which he couldn’t—couldn’t help himself, he was afflicted with it. If he had tuberculosis it wouldn’t be called a perversion, would it? Because he coughed too much?
Oh, indeed. Quite an apposite comparison. “(cough, cough) Oh, I’m so sorry, I seem to have gotten my penis in your teenaged vagina. Ooopsie.”
Anyone who did one thing, let us say, to some 16-year-old trollop who would come to his house time after time after time and then afterwards bitch about it— why, no one would pay attention. Except Jeffrey made an industry out of it.
The nerve of those 16-year-olds!
There are plenty of people with satyriasis like there are plenty of nymphomaniacs, except very few of them have the money to, let us say, treat themselves to sex three times a day with young girls. That was what he had to do. Other people, there are plenty of cases, presumably, if you want to read up on the subject—it’s called satyriasis, right? It’s the male version of—did you ever meet a nymphomaniac?
Ah, yes. “Treat yourself” to sex with young girls, just, you know, in moderation!
It goes on from there, often in circles. Pivar repeats himself, lectures the writer on how he should have talked to a psychologist about satyriasis, and read Kraft-Ebbing’s work on sexual perversion, threatens to sue the writer, etc.
Sorry to be unclear. I used “trans-identified males” because that’s a common term to refer to male persons who identify as trans (and thus identify as women). I avoided using “transwomen” to steer clear of the confusion I apparently caused.
Thus: TSA wants male bodies patted down by males, regardless of “gender identity”.
The difference has to do with gender itself. Whereas it is not plausible that being a tiger has to do with how the brain represents itself to itself, belonging to a particular gender (man vs woman) is plausibly explained by how the brain represents itself to itself. That is, belonging to a particular gender or not has to do with how you identify. Thus, being a woman or a man just is about how your brain sees itself which is why trans women are women and trans men are men.
This doesn’t even begin to “rebut” the analogy. It is, in fact, a blatant petitio principii employed in order to escape a self-made trap.
Why is it not plausible that being a tiger has to do with how the brain represents itself to itself? (Assuming arguendo that the brain in fact does represent itself to itself.) Looking back in the article, we find that being a tiger is (for the author’s purposes) a matter of being able to interbreed. So a creature is a tiger if it is capable of interbreeding with tigers. (Never mind that this definition is terrible, as it cannot identify a tiger prototype. Just try to answer how we can know that the things this animal is interbreeding with are in fact tigers.) So the reason we can say that identifying as a tiger is nonsensical is that it is a matter of observable, material reality whether a creature can interbreed and produce viable offspring with tigers. To reiterate: biological facts determine the validity of an identity.
This, of course, does not go to the question of whether it is plausible that a brain represents itself to itself as a tiger brain. It does, however, provide a means of determining the validity of an identity, a means that the author has to immediately dodge and special-plead away in order to get his desired result. The rest of the paragraph is a redefinition of gender so as to fit his agenda. Specifically, “Thus, being a woman or a man just is about how your brain sees itself which is why trans women are women and trans men are men.” Saying that “X just is Y” is philosopher-speak for saying that all there is to X is Y.
Unfortunately, the notion that being a woman just is about your brain seeing itself as a woman-brain is the very thing at issue. So using it as a non-discharged assumption is logically invalid; it is begging the question.
Is this explanation in danger of blowing up to in infinite regression? And assuming that brains even do this at all, is the brain capable of misleading itself about itself? Or of being mistaken? The brain certainly has a representation of the body at its disposal, but it can go wrong. Why could it not go wrong within the brain’s “representation” of itself as well?
Perhaps the author of this “refutation” could use their proprioception to realize that they have pulled this argument out of their own backside.
Is this explanation in danger of blowing up to in infinite regression?
You ain’t seen nothin’. I have a feeling that “transphilosophr” is a fan of Kierkegaard, which really isn’t a good place to be.
Quoth Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death:
The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.
It is my honest belief that Kierkegaard was philosophy’s most successful troll. So successful that people don’t even realize that they’ve been trolled.
Looking back in the article, we find that being a tiger is (for the author’s purposes) a matter of being able to interbreed. So a creature is a tiger if it is capable of interbreeding with tigers.
So by the authors reasoning the existence of tiger/lion hybrids (ligers and tigons) is proof positive that lions are tigers – or tigers are lions.
Animals A and B both belong to the same species if they can breed and produce viable offspring. There are exceptions to this but roughly that’s how it goes.
So it would be a violation of the principle of charity to say that we must conclude that lions are tigers.
A father is trying to prevent his daughter (who has already changed gender on her birth certificate, and has begun hormone treatment) from transitioning. As reported in the National Post :
In written arguments filed with the B.C. Court of Appeal, the father and his supporters take the position that a lower court delivered a “rush to judgment” in siding with his child, who as a minor is incapable of appreciating the potential consequences of a “still experimental treatment.” Further, they argue that previous court orders compelling the father to refer to his child using only male pronouns amount to “totalitarian interference.”
“The state cannot compel parents to forget their daughters and remember sons in their stead,” said a filing by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a conservative advocacy organization with intervener status in the case.
But the child, his mother and their supporters state in court filings that the father, together with anti-trans activists, have recklessly used him as an unwilling poster child in a campaign to promote “conservative gender ideology” and that the father has shown nothing but “disdain for judicial process” by repeatedly referring to him as female.
They argue that while the father may want to frame the case as a clash of rights, the focus needs to remain on what’s best for his child — and that B.C. law is settled regarding young people’s authority to decide on their own medical treatments.
The dispute started last year when the child, who has identified as male since age 11, was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and referred by a psychologist to the gender clinic at B.C. Children’s Hospital. The clinic concluded it was in the child’s best interests to proceed with hormone therapy to transition from a female body to a male one. The child and his mother signed a consent form that outlined the risks, including that testosterone treatment in young adolescents is still fairly new and “long-term effects are not fully known.”
The father went to court to try to block the treatment from proceeding, but in February B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gregory Bowden ruled that the child was “exclusively entitled” to consent to treatment under the B.C. Infants Act and that there should be no further delay, citing a previous suicide attempt.
Bowden went on to declare that the child must also be referred to as male or using male pronouns and that any attempt to persuade the child to abandon treatment or references to the child as a girl or using female pronouns “shall be considered to be family violence.”
The largest study of same-sex sexual behavior finds the genetics are complicated, and social and environmental factors are also key.
The authors of the study are understandably concerned about unwarranted extrapolation from their work, or using it to justify discrimination.
To me, this underlines what Martin Duberman called a strategic error on the part of gay rights activists. It simply should not matter if sexuality is innate and fixed, any more than for musical taste or cuisine preference or desire to raise children. Discrimination on the basis of sexuality is wrong regardless.
It simply should not matter if sexuality is innate and fixed, any more than for musical taste or cuisine preference or desire to raise children. Discrimination on the basis of sexuality is wrong regardless.
I came around to this way of thinking some time ago myself. I came to see the “they can’t help it, they were born that way” argument as flawed. Whether or not sexual attraction is hardwired and inborn is irrelevent. As far as rights go, one’s sexuality shouldn’t matter, even if it were completely a matter of taste and choice.
I agree it’s ultimately a bad argument and that the better argument is that it’s the individuals human right to be attracted to whomever they want and be in a relationship with whomever thy want (age and other consensual factors considered).
I guess the ‘can’t help it’ argument was made in part by people who genuinely believed it (or rationalised it thus) or by people who were just heartily sick of having to argue for their rights (again and again). Bad argument is still bad argument. On the flip side, that argument probably did help move some anti-gay people over the ick factor and onto accepting while it wasn’t their thing, well fair enough. Hopefully we can move onto better arguments now.
It is interesting though that they set the bar as low as a single same sex experience. I wonder if they had set the bar at exclusively same sex for whole of life, would the same result hold? No doubt someone will seek to answer that question. The required data set would be huge, given that only 27,000 out of 403,000 people admitted to one or more same sex experiences.
Not on Twitter myself, but I check in to see what others are posting. I just learned a new term that suggests that there are more subtle and insidious ways that Twitter is censoring and manipulating conversations. I give you Deboosting: https://twitter.com/hatpinwoman/status/1167260354449162240
This can be more insidious than banning because people know when they’ve had their accounts suspended or shut down. With deboosting, your signal gets lost without your knowledge; you’re wasting your energy talking to an empty room you think is full of listeners. I read a number of GC feminists asking each other if they were getting likes or retweets on posts. Numbers on the same post varied depending on who was asking. Sounds like this was why.
“Black Knigthing” – MGTOWS, incels and MRAs talk about the many different ways to take advantage of transgender policies to access, harass and harm women, joke about the dream of being predators in women’s prisons and lament that the opportunity to identify into the girls’ dressing room wasn’t there when they were younger.
I’m not certain that is a great start, to say the least, in a post about bias, motivated reasoning and blithe assumptions, but here we are.
I honestly can’t bring myself to do a point-by-point rebuttal, as much as I enjoy those. I will say that there is a lot of disingenuous bait-and-switching going on in his definition of biological sex and many words are put in the mouths of gender critical feminists that I’ve never seen there before.
PZ wouldn’t tolerate such disingenuity – and in at least one case, outright lying – in any other place, but he does here with the sort of righteous indignation we’ve come to expect.
His paragraph beginning “I know what biological sex is” is ghastly. He starts with a definition he uses in the lab and then presto-change switches to suggest it’s gender critical types who are using that definition with people. What the actual?
But anyway, I promised no PBPR so I’ll stop now.
EXCEPT TO SAY: (no, really, I’ll take my own advice for once and stop).
“many words are put in the mouths of gender critical feminists” reminded me:
Some of my favorite things to read are rebuttals and critical reviews. This article is, as stated in the title, a critical review of a book that advocates legalization of the sex trade and rejects the Nordic Model. The review does a great job of deconstructing the straw man arguments that don’t represent actual gender critical feminist positions.
I learned that I am not a TERF, nor are most if not all of you from what I can tell. Because apparently TERFs are just thinly disguised right-wing religious types, who want it to be legal for people to be fired for failing to conform to gender stereotypes, who condone harassment and trying to get people fired and de-platformed.
Not a single alleged TERF (or “gender critical feminist,” which the author advises us is just a euphemism akin to white nationalists calling themselves “race realists”) is actually given a chance to state her views in the article. We’re just told that Julia Beck was lying when she testified before the House that transgender women do not face greater rates of violence. The evidence backing up that accusation? A trans woman was killed in D.C. 24 hours previously. No mention of how many trans women are killed over a more meaningful time frame, and whether or not the rate is statistically different from rates of murder of cis women. The mere anecdote is sufficient. Meanwhile, the fact that trans woman Karen White raped several female prisoners is dismissed because “I don’t agree that White is representative of all trans women.” Anecdotal evidence for me but not for thee.
No mention of the attempts of radical trans activists to de-platform or ruin the careers of gender critical feminists, other than a passing reference to the supposed tragedy that Kathleen Stock is still being published despite a joint statement — a Joint Statement, I tell you! — by some committee that doesn’t like her. We’re told that TERFS have taken over the UK, and are hoping to conquer America too but are being thwarted. (Curious that a group of supposedly religious right-wing nutballs is doing better in the U.K. than in the states. Almost makes you question the underlying premise!)
No mention of barbed wire baseball bats. Of “Die TERFs” and similar slogans. Nope, there are good folks and bad folks in this discussion, and the bad folks’ views aren’t even worth dignifying with discussion or evidence.
I made my way through Ron Lindsay’s blog post for CFI, Gender, Identity, and Women’s Sports. My impression was that he was trying very hard to achieve a “compromise” without really seeing the problem or understanding the arguments. He rejects the argument about male physical development in puberty by saying it’s only a few people. Yes, and only a few people get the medals and set the records and represent their country in international competition. His comment about philosophers “trapped into thinking” certain “wrong” things about terminology is insulting to the philosophers who have made careful and clear arguments about these issues. Why not consider if the trans activists and the “woke” liberals have been “trapped into thinking” things that are incorrect? And why turn an issue about oppression of women into a taxonomy problem?
I hope CFI is honest enough to allow opposing views to be posted.
quiet…
Everyone’s busy exploring Wolverhampton.
I’ve been there; it doesn’t take long.
There is a a great Portuguese pub there (apparently Portuguese pubs are a thing; there’s an interestingly laid out one in Newcastle). The city archives are in a lovely 18th c building, and there’s a statue somewhere of Queen Wulfrun, one of the very few statues in the country of named women who are not Queen Victoria.
This is dumbfounding.
The screenshot captures a trans activist claiming that “straight cis” people don’t have to deal with being forced to perform sexually for the entertainment of men, under threat of violence.
https://twitter.com/anyabike/status/1137715937833095170?s=09
Ya I saw that, followed it down a rabbit hole of who is Bex Stinson oh gawd etc etc etc.
I can understand a person making that claim [women are not punished for refusing to display sexuality for men’s entertainment] in general, simply because it is common for people to do so. However, how the fuck can you make that claim while quoting a graphically illustrated example of exactly that?? I just cannot see how the connection was not made. Even goddamn Trump wouldn’t be stupid enough to claim “no X exists” while quoting a photo of X (probably, who knows).
Hm, actually I may have overlooked ‘straight and cis’, so my comment is not applicable, oh well. Oh and while Stinson has deleted that tweet, the twitter feed is full of some of the most biting snark I have ever seen. “‘I’ll tell my rapists they were doing it wrong. Thanks for the info” fukken zinged.
Stinson has been busy telling many commentators that they didn’t read her actual tweet carefully. Even if that is so, Stinson is still clearly missing the obvious and glaring point that straight cis women are routinely forced to deal with male expectation of sexual entertainment and anger/violence when they don’t play ball (and often even when they do).
Personally, if I were Stinson, I would be hoping to keep my head down until about 20 years after the internet goes down for the last time. Somehow I think they are just going to keep doubling down and claiming to be misunderstood.
Well, whenever I reported abuse, I was told it wasn’t abuse, so maybe I was missing something…
No. Just…no.
Friendly Atheist gets histrionic in regard to a “stunning” (er, not at all) report from the Vatican.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/06/10/vatican-releases-new-anti-trans-document-trashing-the-concept-of-gender-theory/
I note this bit:
I read the document, and found it a lot of theological mumbo jumbo, but I did think it represented a request for dialog. It correctly noted the distinction between sex and gender, and it correctly described the erosion of that distinction as has become popular. Contrary to Hemant, I didn’t think it denied the existence of anyone, it just disagreed with the claims some people make about themselves: that trans people can change sex, that intersex people are some kind of different sex. None of this should be “stunning”.
To be sure, there is plenty to disagree with in this paper, and I share Hemant’s view that a Vatican call to “dialog” is usually in effect a call to accept the Vatican position. But, in “stopped clock” fashion, they get some things correct.
Whatever happened to that Stangroom fella?
He appears to be tweeting some sense at least. unusual in this day and age.
https://twitter.com/PhilosophyExp/status/1137814359197880320
https://twitter.com/PhilosophyExp/status/1137769200892698624
https://twitter.com/PhilosophyExp/status/1137651348990771200
https://twitter.com/PhilosophyExp/status/1137046697148932096
So Bill Maher declared on his show the other night that he’s a “squish” on the subject of abortion rights because his mother was warned that her pregnancy with him was high risk.
Why, just think, if abortion laws had been different then…. oh, I can barely get the words out….. people, THE WORLD WAS ALMOST DEPRIVED OF BILL MAHER! I know, bodily autonomy and reproductive choice are important and all, but think about the implications for smug mediocre late night comedy hosts!
Usually when people try to make this argument, they have the humility to try to argue about some hypothetical fetus that would have been the next Einstein or Beethoven, or if they’re feeling their own cleverness, try to turn it on their opponent (“what if YOU had been aborted? Huh? Huh? Gotcha!”). It takes a real grade-A narcissist to actually utter out loud the sentiment that your own existence is so important that it would have justified overriding your own mother’s right to control her body. But I repeat myself.
Anyway, one of his guests, Rep. Katie Porter, embarrassed Maher in front of his own audience. It was lovely. Also a nice little trip down memory lane — I still recall that blogger who went by The Raving Atheist who went down the anti-choice rabbit hole, beginning with the whole “gosh, *I* was almost aborted!” thing.
Shockingly, women of the alt-right are discovering that racist dudes also tend to be sexist.
FYI, Megan Murphy’s lawsuit against Twitter was dismissed yesterday. Above link is to a blog post summarizing the decision; the actual order is here
Helpful context: a “demurrer” is an objection to a complaint; it’s the California state court version of what is called a “motion to dismiss” in federal courts and in some other states. So the order providing that the demurrer is “sustained without leave to amend” means that judgment will be entered in favor of Twitter; Murphy’s only viable recourse is an appeal. Because the issues here appear to be entirely legal rather than factual the appellate court would review “de novo” without any deference to how the trial court ruled.
But it appears to be a well-reasoned opinion to me, by which I mean not necessarily that Twitter’s policy is correct or was correctly applied in this instance, but simply that Twitter has statutory immunity. You can’t sue Twitter for its editorial decisions any more than you can sue Opehlia for deleting a comment or banning a commenter entirely at B&W.
Huh. I figured it was a long shot, but…
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/6/16/18681116/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-town-golan-heights-trump-heights
WTF!!
*scowl*
Hello.
My first foray into the misc room.
Thank you for having me.
An interesting tweet about the foreseeing of internet fake news…
https://twitter.com/20thcenturymarc/status/1133395241837506561
Trump finally catches up with (a minute part of) reality and declares Fox News is fake news.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-fox-news-poll-fake-news-joe-biden-2020-election-us-a8963786.html
But still insists that the Central Park Five are guilty.
https://twitter.com/ZackFord/status/1141079200687939586
“On both sides.” Again.
“We’ll leave it at that.” ASSHOLE.
An interesting take on the supposed ‘surge’ in homophobic/transphobic and racist crimes in Britain, particularly on what is neccessary to have an incident recorded as a hate crime.
So, what are these improvements? According to the College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance,
Sorry, wut? Reducing hate crime is not appropriate? It gets worse. How does the police decide what constitutes a hate crime? Easy; if the person reporting it says so, even without evidence that a crime has either actually taken place, or that a crime was actually linked to a phobic or racist cause.
The writer concludes that
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/19/homophobia-is-not-on-the-rise/
Wow, can you even imagine what that rate would look like if women started reporting hate crimes toward the protected characteristic of sex using the same criteria? (Wondering if it’s possible to determine what percentage of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ were reported by males–hypothesis being that women are used to this kind of behaviour directed at us, and know what the police’s reaction is likely to be, no matter what protected characteristic we report about, so we don’t bother.)
Trump appears to have directly threatened a Time journalist with jail over Trump’s love letter from Mr. Kim.
Clumsy fingers…sorry.
The reporter then asked a question about Robert Mueller, and…
So either the letter is a fake which he daren’t have published in case anybody notices, or he’s petty enough to imprison a journalist for mentioning Mueller. My money’s on….both.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/06/24/vatican-cancels-womens-soccer-game-due-to-opponents-pro-choice-protest/
The Vatican called off a women’s soccer match against Austria because of a protest by some of the Austrian players against the Catholic Church positions on abortion. The protest included drawings of female reproductive organs. The Austrian team management apologized, saying they remain committed to sport without discrimination on the basis of “gender, sexual orientation, … or other characteristics.” Sex was not mentioned. The abortion issue is of course about sex rather than “gender”, as was the protest. Ironically, I think the Catholic Church would agree, despite the wording of the statement from the Austrian team management.
Alabama woman charged with manslaughter of unborn baby while actual shooter goes free:
https://boingboing.net/2019/06/27/alabama-woman-charged-with-man.html
They caught the man who shot her, leading to the death of the baby, but let him go. Then they arrested and charged her because she ‘brought the foetus unnecessarily into a fight’ and the foetus was ‘depending on her for safety’.
latsot, just came to link that. We knew something would happen soon. The comments from the authorities arresting her are abominable. I can only hope that picking this incident instead of a woman seeking an abortion will be their undoing.
I saw that – only it’s not a man, it’s another woman, and the story is that the woman charged pushed the aggression and the shooter was protecting herself. I decided I just didn’t want to try to sort it out.
It’s local news here. More nonsense in this screwed up state.
This article quotes from an excellent statement from Yellowhammer Fund:
https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2019/06/woman-indicted-in-shooting-death-of-her-unborn-child-charges-against-shooter-dismissed.html
This is a great opinion column on the case by journalist Josh Moon:
https://www.alreporter.com/2019/06/27/opinion-if-were-indicting-people-who-fail-to-protect-children-republican-lawmakers-should-be-terrified/
Two issues spring to my mind.
First, the asinine self defense handling in this state. If two unarmed guys rob your house, you can deliberately shoot one, and you’ll avoid charges, but the other robber can be charged with murder. So I put very little credence in self defense claims like this.
Second, no way is this manslaughter. Yellowhammer Fund addresses this, Moon addresses this. Even if the pregnant woman is responsible, it’s an injury to herself, not a killing of anyone.
On another topic, just saw a picture of last night’s debate. Guess who is almost impossible to see in this picture?
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/debate-viewers-struggle-with-concept-of-president-without-glaring-personality-disorder?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Borowitz_062719&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9e4283f92a40469fa8f72&cndid=24406983&esrc=NYR_BOROWITZ_BLOG&utm_term=TNY_Borowitz
Trump scores a Twitter hat-trick.
Highlight how ‘very important’ meeting with world leaders is – check. Name-drop very important people to reinforce his own importance – check. Flirt like a love-sick schoolboy with his mega-crush, the lovely Mr. Kim – you betcha!.
I feel queazy.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/28/trump-kim-jong-un-meeting-south-korea
“If he sees this”????? What, because Trump has no other means of communicating with Kim than Twitter? It’s Twitter or nothing? He can’t phone or write directly? He can’t communicate via the Secretary of State? He’s on an ice floe hundreds of miles from land and all he has is this one last remaining tweet?
Oh come on Ophelia, you know he can’t just write messages on the back of the toilet door like any other love-sick schoolboy, he’s the President of the United States!
Besides, Kim goes to a different school.
Stonewall UK is being accused of supressing the concerns of women’s groups about self ID in its report to the government about the GRA.
Found this retweeted by lascapigliata; https://mobile.twitter.com/TJVRD/status/1146154404950761472
The letter responding to Stonewall by FOVAS (Female-Only, Violence and Abuse Survivors): https://fovas.wordpress.com/response-to-stonewall-2/
Sort of a bad news/good news story; it’s been reported in the NYT and also at Slate. The bad news is that a New Jersey judge rules that a 16-year-old boy shouldn’t be tried as an adult for sexual assault because he’s a good kid with good grades and an Eagle Scout. The good news is that the court of appeal reversed.
Still frustrating to see a judge (unsurprisingly, a 70-year-old male judge) engage in the same dumb arguments: this isn’t “traditional” rape because there was only one guy and no weapon involved, why didn’t the victim go to the police right away, etc.
And there’s a big problem I can see: initially the victim and her parents weren’t asking for charges, they just wanted the perpetrator and his friends to stop circulating the video of it. (Yes, that’s right, he was dumb enough to video it — and text it to his friends with the message “when your first time having sex was rape.” But hey, Eagle Scout honor student!) So the police actually instructed the kids to delete the video, and now nobody has a copy of it. I don’t know enough about criminal law to say how that’s going to play out — the state actually directed the destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence, but on the other hand, the defendant himself had a copy too that he also chose to delete so maybe it’s not Brady material.
Ophelia’s favorite royal is in the news again!
My favorite part is this:
Well, yes, in the sense that Bob Dylan and I can work very well together to write a song. I’ll sit on the sofa sipping a beer while Bob does the actual songwriting.
Oops, I posted about the New Jersey judge before seeing this comment.
I’m just going to bed, looking for something soporific on the TV, and found “My Fair Lady”…
holy festering shitballs …. I did NOT remember how fucking horrible this thing is
More corporate culture shittery from Google.
One of Alphabet’s businesses, Jigsaw, has a culture so hostile to women that they clubbed together to stock a secret kit in the women’s bathrooms with mascara, moisturiser and so on because women had to go to there to cry so often.
The way they tried to fix the culture problem was…. interesting. I mean, the investigation did reveal a lot about the cause of the problem…. Just not in the way they intended. Here’s what they did:
They put together a kangaroo court of 6 employees who had to interview all (60 or so) team members – including each other – to find out what the problems were. Right, and the staff members were going to be completely candid, weren’t they, knowing that they individually and the whole team were certain to be punished for saying anything bad.
Of course, nothing has changed since they issued the report, they’ve churned about half of their employees since last year and things are still far worse for women than they are for men.
“My Fair Lady”…yeah, I’ve never seen it, it looked horrible just from photos or previews. Plus hello Audrey Hepburn wasn’t a singer and how about casting actual singers in musicals eh?
I liked My Fair Lady. I do wish Julie Andrews had been in it, but Hepburn and Nixon did a good job. I’ve never seen the stage version (musical or play), but I’d like to.
I haven’t either but we had a record of the Julie Andrews one when I was a kid so I sort of feel as if I had.
Mind you there’s also the film of “Pygmalion” with Wendy Hiller who is genius.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/07/06/the-anti-lgbtq-church-of-england-accidentally-validated-certain-gay-marriages/
“Accidentally validated certain gay marriages” is not in any way what CofE did. A transwoman married to a woman is a man married to a woman, and thus a mixed-sex marriage. A transman married to a woman is a same-sex marriage. It’s a silly “gotcha” to play with words and pretend that the church’s opposition to same-sex marriages, carefully spelled out, is really to the phrase “gay marriage” and anything anyone might mean by that (but they “accidentally” missed one, ha ha).
Just when you thought nobody could possibly be a worse choice for the next leader of the UK Conservative party…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/114071239/uk-pm-contender-jeremy-hunt-christians-most-persecuted-religious-group
Now I don’t know who I want to win.
You lucky US taxpayers have already spent $108m on Trump’s visits to golf clubs he owns, with him benefiting from the visits and likely getting up to all sorts of sleazy backdoor shenanigans while he’s at it.
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/08/tee-time-for-taxpayers.html
At least when we had a similar scandal here in the UK it was the most British thing ever: an MP was told off for charging the taxpayer for having his moat cleaned.
Ah I remember the moat cleaning. Sounds so innocent, so arthurian, from over here.
Urgent viewing:
https://i.imgur.com/eyy55Tg.mp4
Moat aint gonna clean itself. There were claims for refurbishing dovecotes, too, as I recall.
An amusing game here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mps-expenses-scandal/could-you-have-beaten-the-claims-system-quiz/
It’s been quite a couple of weeks for the government attorneys on the census cases. Sort of a Homer-and-the-frozen-yogurt situation:
The Supreme Court issued a decision that blocks the citizenship question! That’s bad for us.
But it means we’ll be done with defending this difficult-to-defend case! That’s good!
Uh-oh, Trump just tweeted that the case isn’t over? And the judge is making us call in from our vacation to explain WTF is happening? That’s bad!
Hey, the Attorney-General is putting together a new team of unprincipled hacks willing to take on this dogshit case for career advancement, so I’m getting out of the case! That’s good!
Uh-oh, the judge just denied the request to change counsel That’s bad!
But the judge’s order says we can still get out if we re-submit with the proper documentation of our reasons! That’s good!
And we have to consent to the court’s continuing jurisdiction over us for purposes of sanctions. Uh, that’s bad.
Wow. What a soap opera.
I especially like the bit where the judge says that “we don’t expect it to get in the way” is not a good enough reason for the withdrawals.
From today’s Washington Post:
Strip club to host golf tournament at Trump resort in South Florida
But hey, they’re not going to be nekkid, so it’s all ok, right?
Oh. Well, at least the Trumps are distancing themselves from this.
Oh. But hey, these are rich people, they deserve the best.
And what kind of luxuries does the club itself offer?
Can’t imagine what you could do with a bottle and half an hour.
But hey, at least they’re not treating the women like objects, right?
Oh.
STRIPPING
FOR A CHILDREN’S CHARITY
OK THEN
And now the judge handling the Maryland census case has denied the motions to substitute government counsel in that case as well. As with the NY judge, they can re-file, but among other things the Court warned the government: “Defendants must realize that a change in counsel does not create a clean slate for a party to proceed as if prior representations made to the Court were not in fact made. A new DOJ team will need to be prepared to address these, and other, previous representations made by the withdrawing attorneys at the appropriate juncture.” This coming after a long string of quotes from government filings in the case which argued — successfully — that because Secretary Ross was the decision-maker, the Court should not consider statements made by the President about the citizenship question.
In other words: if you’re going to come into court now and tell me that the President overruled the Secretary of Commerce, and that’s his right, so that’s why we’re changing positions now…. that’s going to have consequences. Because if the President is now the decision-maker, a whole bunch of evidence I previously excluded as irrelevant is going to come in.
The TRAs will be celebrating tonight. A doctor has been fired from his job as a disability benefits assessor for stating that he would not address a hypothetical 6ft, bearded male as ‘madam’. Although the doctor states that his Christian beliefs are the reason for his stance, he gets it spot-on in describing transgenderism as delusional, and ‘a fantasy about oneself’.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/10/christian-doctor-lost-job-government-department-refusing-identify/
Innnteresting about the excluded evidence.
I was out looking at birthday cards, and I came across this one:
Animal 2: We unicorns need to stick together.
Animal 1: Is that a plunger on your head?
Animal 1 is a unicorn. Animal 2 is a horse with a plunger on its head. It was perhaps identifying as a unicorn and demanding that actual unicorns accept it as one of them and stand up for its rights. But a plunger on its head doesn’t make a horse a unicorn.
Seems analogous to something.
Remind me to say “Is that a plunger on your head?” in response often.
Snort
Relevant
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-last-unicorns/
More
GestapoBorder Guard hellhttps://twitter.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/1151229577727021056
Oh, godddd
Profile of Jen Gunter, Goop fighter.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/smart-living/meet-goops-number-one-enemy/ar-AAEpIqO?li=AAggFp5&ocid=mailsignout
https://twitter.com/genderisharmful/status/1151233014938009601?s=19
Wikipedia has removed the category “transgender serial killers”. Not allowed to track such things.
Looks like Lindsay Shepperd is the latest casualty to fall in Twitter battle against the mighty J. Yaniv:
https://nationalpost.com/news/free-speech-activist-lindsay-shepherd-on-her-twitter-ban-your-instincts-should-not-be-to-celebrate
The National Post is framing this story as a “right vs left,” “free speech” thing and, I think missing the whole gender critical aspect. It’s mentioned, but is not the main point of the story, which, since it also mentions Meghan Murphy, it should be. Boiling it down to right vs left simplifies it too much. The GC slant would be a much more fruitful avenue of exploration.
I saw that. I’ve also been following the Twitter reporting by one lone woman on the Yaniv lawsuit. It’s all so gruesome I’ve been putting off posting about it.
More on the Shepherd ban : https://www.thepostmillennial.com/breaking-twitter-silences-canadian-free-speech-activist-lindsay-shepherd/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
Looks like Morgane Oger is running for the NDP nomination in Vancouver Centre:
https://www.votemorganeoger.ca/how_to_vote
With the pubication ban on J.Yaniv’s tribunal procedure, more details emerge. Doesn’t paint JY in any better light than he was seen before. It’s worse in fact. I was not as aware of his racism as I was of his creepy , stalker pervism regarding girls and tampons. https://www.thepostmillennial.com/the-truth-about-jessica-yaniv-is-beginning-to-emerge/
Looking back, I wonder if Oger turned on Yaniv because Oger knew he was going to try a run for office, and decided he should try to extricate himself so that JY’s behaviour couldn’t be used against him in any future campaign(s).
https://www.gendertrending.com/2019/04/21/morgane-oger-provided-cover-for-sexual-predator-joanathan-yaniv-because-feminists-made-him-do-it/
Mind you, Oger’s defunding of the Vancouver rape shelter is bad enough all on its own. I hope his opponents use it against him, whether they are from within the NDP or from outside it, should he win the nomination he seeks.
Oh, for sure, I thought all along that Oger’s tut-tut at Yaniv was all about self-protection.
So a news story about about allegedly anti-pride posters:
The original poster is not shown, just described . Given the response of some TRAs to facts, I would doubt the dubiousity claimed without knowing what the poster actually said.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/disgusting-posters-ripped-down-ahead-of-pride-celebration/ar-AAECea1?li=AAggFp5&ocid=mailsignout
My god that’s a pathetic excuse for a news story – talking in shock-horror about the posters without actually giving any real information about them.
Yes, it reminds me of the whole “cartoons of Muhammad” thing, where “oh there are these cartoons, but we can’t show them to you because they’re awful (and someone might kill us if we do).” Or some guy in the backwoods saying, “Yeah, Bigfoot was right here<' and the camera pans helpfully across the now Big-footless scene.
Found the original posters on Jennifer Pierce's Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/pierce_jenn?lang=en
So, actual, awful stuff.
But given that she also retweeted this:
I wouldn’t have taken her word for it.
When I first came across the original story, there was a single comment; someone was asking what the offending posters said. I now can’t find that comment. Given that some inside the CBC think that “Drag Kids” is a good idea would make me not take their word for it either, since straightforward GC questions and statements of fact are termed “transphobia” and conflated with right wing extremism like the content of the offending posters.
There is a movie out next month, “Adam”, based on a book of the same name by Ariel Schrag. The movie did well at Sundance. The book is described as an adult version of “young adult” fiction, a coming-of-age story with a heck of a lot of sex.
The protagonist, Adam, is a young man with a crush on a lesbian. He gets mistaken for a trans man, and decides to go with it. There are a number of trans characters, who I understand are portrayed by trans actors. There is sketchy behavior by a number of people; it’s fiction, after all. Sundance reviews indicate it’s very funny.
The movie is being called transphobic. Objections include: characters treat trans status as a costume they can take off; characters change their mind about sexuality and trans status; female characters refer to themselves as both trsnsmen and lesbians.
Here is a link to one Facebook post about it (mostly Tumblr screenshots), but there are lots of other complaints.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=732684200507653&id=100012982398286
I don’t think I’d bother with the film otherwise, but maybe I’ll try to watch it. A film that disputes the trans ideology in some way, even if it has problems, might be worth watching.
The next shunning: FTB severs ties with The Atheist Experience because they had as guest a youtuber (known as Rationality Rules) who made a video noting that sex and sexual dimorphism exist, and grant trans women physical advantages over women. Some of the usual suspects are being ridiculous in the comments.
https://freethoughtblogs [dot] com/pharyngula/2019/07/20/the-atheist-community-of-austin-has-drifted-out-of-sync-with-ftb/
https://freethoughtblogs[ [dot] com/pharyngula/2019/07/21/the-atheist-experience-is-going-away/
Mano Singham is definitely the last bastion of thoughtfulness over there.
Related to this, remember HJ Hornbeck? He had a temperate, thoughtful reaction to that event.
…
..
.
HAHA GOOD JAPE! Okay, what actually happened: sixteen out of hist last seventeen posts have been about that episode, and the exception was to ineptly bash Kathleen Stock.
Hey, welcome to what women feel about womanhood…
Also, maybe somebody should speak to Pippa Whatshisname, banker dude, to tell him he’s doing trans wrong.
Hoo-boy.
Will be interesting to see how this story turns out.
Look, I’m sure that it’s a tricky situation trying to argue for leniency for a client who’s been convicted of a terrible crime. I’m not even going to fault the guy for asking for such a low sentence, assuming that it’s within the realm of plausible outcomes.
I would suggest, though, that comparing your client to SERIAL RAPIST Bill Cosby is not the smartest move. Nor is it particularly appealing to promote the notion that unconscious women are “tempting.” In other words, the next time your client has access to an unconscious woman, he’ll totally WANT to rape her, but he’ll do his best to resist. (Can’t make any guarantees, though. No doubt helpless women are like potato chips — it’s hard to stop at just one.)
And I’m really irked by the classism that keeps coming up in these cases. Judge Persky didn’t want to ruin the life of a Stanford athlete. That judge in New Jersey went soft on a teenager because he had a bright future ahead of him. We’re told here that Mr. Tempted By Defenseless Women has led an “exemplary” life because… why, exactly? He scored well on the MCATs? Like, if he was a plumber or a grocery store clerk, we’d throw the book at him, but a med student turned biotech grad… well gosh, those are so rare and precious that we can’t let a little rapin’ get in the way.
Fortunately, as noted in the article, the Crown prosecutor seems to be firing back effectively, and the sentencing judge is a woman, so perhaps there will be a reasonable outcome here.
There’s also the point that I saw several women make when this first hit the news, which is that a decent person doesn’t see an unconscious woman and think “TEMPTING OPPORTUNITY,” a decent person goes to see if she’s all right, seeks help, protects her.
I can’t remember if I’ve told this story here before, but: as a teenager, I once spent several hours loitering around a party I wasn’t enjoying, in a sort of unspoken Mexican standoff with another guy, because the girl we both liked was very very drunk and neither of us trusted the other to be left alone with her. Which was actually as it should be — neither of us was some extraordinary gentlemanly white knight, and in fact I was kind of a jerk to her the next day. But it was just understood even back in those supposedly unenlightened days that decent people look out for someone in that condition.
Here’s a story about a strange, abusive situation at a British Columbia university:
https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/tribunal-to-investigate-complaint-about-viu-student-with-infantilist-fetishes-1.23187071
What happened? Amongst other things, this:
In the female foeticide post, I’d snarkily suggested that “children are just a social construct,” forgetting I’d heard about this case before. Is the failure of the university in question to just expell this fetishist partly the result of the corporate culture of “student as customer,” that has taken over higher education? Would they put up with an equivalent fetishist who was female targeting male faculty, staff, and students like this?
And what is it about human rights tribunals in British Columbia? Is it something in the water?
A horrifying article about women being choked – sometimes to death – during sex, the apparent acceptance of the ‘sex game gone wrong’ defense for other strangulations of women and the corresponding lenient sentences when that defense is used:
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/25/fatal-hateful-rise-of-choking-during-sex
Of all the horrifying things in that article, this horribly aggressive gaslighting stood out for me:
A lot of the cases mentioned seemed to be fairly spontaneous casual sex between people who had just met. I don’t think that’s a situation in which kinks – rather especially ones that involve serious trust and are potentially fatal – should be explored.
And of course the woke media are somewhat complicit:
and
Ugh. Yeah, that sounds about right, doesn’t it?
As the article points out, porn and the weird taboo on kink-shaming is only ever going to normalise violence against women. We know how that works, we’ve known it for years and we pretend that having one’s kink shamed is far worse than being strangled to fucking death.
Well of course. The man has to go on living with the shame and embarassment of having his kink judged and ridiculed while the woman is safely dead. /s
Oh lord. I very nearly did a post yesterday on one by Beth Rep on the furious reactions she got for objecting to violence as “rough sex.”
I’ve been seething about that too. I wanted to write something about it but I couldn’t quite work out how to frame it. It was something about consent and how bullshit expectations from porn and media undermine the very concept of consent, let alone the practice.
Then Julie Bindel wrote this about prostitution:
Yes. Bloody hell, Julie, that is exactly what I wanted to say.
This isn’t new; it’s just the sort of things we see in students now that are new because of the wider acceptance of “kink” and “self identity” by universities.
When my sister was in school in the 1990s, she and another woman student were literally threatened during English class by a male who didn’t like their mildly (and I do mean mild) feminist interpretation of a work they were reading in class, and their statements about some of the difficulties being a woman. He got more and more angry, and actually pulled out a knife to threaten them.
He was expelled, but then was unexpelled the instant his lawyer called. He was then returned to class, in a different section. They decided it would be best for their image not to have him in the class with the two women students he threatened to kill, so they put him in a different section with the same female teacher. She complained that she didn’t want him in her class, but was not given a choice. They said he hadn’t actually threatened her, only the two students.
So making a female teacher grade a paper with a picture of an adult man in a diaper doesn’t surprise me at all. The attitudes toward instructors these days is, well, educational. We have been told that we have to put up with whatever a student needs. If we are allergic to their service animal, tough. Even if it is allergic enough to kill us. If we are scared of big dogs (I am, but service animals don’t worry me because I know they are well trained. But some people aren’t able to make that distinction because emotion doesn’t respond to reason very well), tough. Even if that anxiety is enough to debilitate us, we are told we must have that student in our section. There can be no hint of transferring to another instructor, because that would be considered disability shaming. No…it is simply accommodating competing disabilities.
I look forward to the day a school gets sued over ignoring the employee’s ADA rights…
The 2010 Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Matthew Shepard Act) came up in a book I’m reading. I note that among the protected characteristics is “actual or perceived gender”; this is separate from “gender identity”, another protected characteristic.
Does this in theory open the door for charging a misogynist killer of women with a hate crime? Does this happen? Nearly 2000 women killed last year, were any of those murders considered hate crimes? The hate crime issue always comes up when transwomen are murdered, how about women? (This is not an issue explored in the book, to be clear.)
File under “utterly unsurprising”: that Covington student’s libel suit against the WaPo was just dismissed.
The fact that the suit apparently sought $250 million was another good clue to its merit. I really really wish the media would stop encouraging people with this shit. Some guy sues his neighbor for not cleaning up after his dog, includes a Dr. Evil-inspired demand for ONE BILLION DOLLARS, and the media breathlessly reports it as if that number means anything. (The absolute best are the whacko pro se litigants — some of them aren’t content with mere billions, but ask for trillions in damages.)
Speaking of WaPo, I liked this article on what is hopefully the decline of the campaign trail “spouse joke” Though Joe Biden is doing his best to keep creepy marriage advice alive.
PZ seems to be making a habit of missing the point. He’s concluded that The Handmaid’s Tale is feminist torture porn!
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/07/26/why-i-havent-been-able-to-watch-the-handmaids-tale/
Don’t know if this has been pointed to before, but I came across this:
https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/
Just started reading it, but it sounds like an extended, more advanced and detailed Sokal excercize/study.
From the introduction:
Just realized that this is a paper that got trashed by PZ
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/05/boghossian-lindsay-and-pluckrose-are-simply-incompetent-hacks/
but at this point I’m not willing to take his word for it that these authors acted in bad faith. Maybe they did, but I’m still going to read it. It will be interesting to see how my take compares to his…
Is that the same paper that was discussed here in the post below and several others?
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2017/a-multi-directional-cacophony-of-gleeful-back-patting/
That’s the one.
Oh, so, I’m late the party. Oh well.
Well there are a lot of parties to keep track of. We can’t be on time for all of them!
I was leafing through the latest Free Inquiry, and I saw Tom Flynn’s column, in which he defended FI from accusations of political bias. Along the way, he mentioned several columnists, including Ophelia (“controversial in some quarters on the left”) and Greta Christina, who I didn’t realize left the publication last year. A footnote about her mentioned her disagreement with dispassionate discussion of certain ideas that “should be taken out into the street and shot”. Yeah, we’ve seen that. I might have agreed with her on that a while back, but seeing viewpoints you value attacked and shut down changes perspective in a hurry.
Here is a weird piece interviewing the woman who is “credited” with originating gender reveal parties.
The main feature of the piece is the reveal that “[t]he child Karuvinidis welcomed with a pink-frosted cake is 10 years old and expresses her gender in nonbinary ways.” And… ugh. I feel awkward commenting on the gender identity of a specific 10-year-old, but I don’t really have anything bad to say about her. The kid is pictured in the article wearing short hair and a suit, and looks pretty sharp. I’m not sure that we need to slap the “non-binary” label on a girl just for doing that, though. And while I stress that any “non-binariness” is a fine thing, I really question the mother’s insistence that it’s totally something that originated with the child:
Again, I’m conflicted because I don’t think nurseries should have to be pink or blue. But then, part of the reason I think that is because I don’t believe that infants give a shit what color their nursery walls are. The notion that the mother “just knew” that this child, her special snowflake, wasn’t one of those boring baby girls who like pink…ugh.
In the big picture, this isn’t that big of a deal. I suspect the kid will end up in whatever identity suits her in the long run. And probably this mother is doing less damage than all the stage parents who insist that their little darling just loves performing and going on auditions and none of that is being done to please the parents, nossir, (or the same scenario for parents who are convinced that they aren’t pushing their child to practice a sport for hours a day, the kid just loves it soooo much).
It’s more amusing than anything. This parent hasn’t changed much. She went from being the kind of person who throws a gender reveal party because she thought it was just too weird to invite friends and family over for a BBQ without a pretext, to being the kind of person who wrings her hands about gender norms and comparing herself to the inventor of gunpowder. From a devoted mommyblogger to the person who has her kid photographed, named, and quoted in a magazine article in which she explains that her mommyblog was just too much a sacrifice of her kids’ privacy. Either way, it’s all about attention and showing off how different she and her family are.
In “whatever identity suits her” – I see what you did there.
Most of my puns are intentional, but not that one!
Finally we have some authoritative guidance on what non-binary means:
https://medium.com/@transphilosophr/being-nonbinary-has-nothing-to-do-with-looking-nonbinary-bef864483a43
* Non-binary people don’t have to ‘look’ non-binary
* Non-binary people don’t have to ‘act’ non-binary
* Non-binary people don’t have to use non-binary pronouns
* Non-binary people don’t have to identify as trans
* They don’t have to suffer from any dysphoria-related conditions
* AMA non-binary people don’t have to have facial hair (who said they did?)
* Non-binary people don’t have to have surgery or hormone treatments
So… that’s pretty much everyone then, as we suspected.
Notably, the article says nothing at all about what conditions are necessary for being non-binary. You’d think there’d be some but nope. Not one.
The reporting on the Capital One data breach by hacker Paige Thompson. Daily Mail actually says trans. Fox shows a picture but doesn’t say trans. Every other news outlet I looked at had no picture and said woman throughout. This bullshirt is such a gift to all the sexist men (and those that don’t even know they’re a little bit sexist) that every time I mention male violence against women, they respond with “women are violent too, women commit crimes too.” What made me go looking in this case was the twitter post quoted by Paige that said “I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, forking dropping capitol ones dox and admitting it…” Just sounded like your standard male gamer to me.
@latsot #105
We’ve arrived at apophatic gender ideology.
Have we done this one yet? So many of these things turn up in my labyrinthine feeds that I sometimes have trouble keeping track.
https://majesticequality.wordpress.com/2019/07/25/dear-philosophers-you-can-trust-the-feminist-consensus-gender-critical-radical-feminism-is-bogus/?fbclid=IwAR32EgDB6GzknOyzCYKVigFhINOGiXMxVSPyCZOyhD8JJ7oq5kanMspKptc
Anyway, as the URL suggests, the title is Dear Philosophers, You Can Trust the Feminist Consensus: Gender-Critical Radical Feminism is Bogus
It seems to be all over the place and since today I reached peak procrastination, I finally started to read it.
It’s written by a philosopher to philosophers. We know that because he inserts “dear philosophers” into every other paragraph. It’s also an excellent reason to ask “what is it with all these philosophers” and a house-bankrupting fallacy bingo card.
I won’t go into the fallacies here in any detail, they are far too tedious. But I feel compelled to convey the general dishonesty and I will paste the guy’s mission in writing the article. What’s that lesson we’re all supposed to learn about hubris, again?
First he has a droning preamble about how people might think gender critical people have a point and that we should be able to discuss this stuff in an adult fashion, all the time clumsily telling any of us foolish enough to believe that that we’re naive and wrong. He says he, too, once thought as common swine but lo he had an epiphany and now he’s superwoke. While he was reticent in the past about telling feminists how to feminism because he’s a man, now his post-epiphany status as a member of the wokinati means that he’s practically obliged to do it. He’s doing those misguided women a service, after all.
Then he picks three points we’ve all been talking about (it really doesn’t matter which ones) and says:
Oh rilly? Anyone else here get the feeling that he’s going to completely misrepresent arguments and just say they’re wrong, possibly throwing out a few fallacy bombs in his shambling wake like a fugitive dropping scent bombs to confuse pursuing dogs?
Well spotted, but it’s hardly like we need a spidey-sense at this stage, is it?
Well, if the answer’s no, there’s no need to read further, obviously. But if you did you’d see that he picks an illustration of a point (gleefully from the gendercritical subreddit and claiming that means he – superwoke as is he – is incapable of bias)…. and then of course completely misrepresents it and staples strawmen (transstrawmen?) all over it.
He misrepresents the point of the image and then uses baited language to misrepresent the point of this part of the debate because he wouldn’t be sufficiently insufferable otherwise. The image is this one:
https://majesticequality.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/gcrf-image.jpg
And with that brilliant stroke of logic, that whole argument is bogus now and for all time and we shouldn’t even talk about it. Even though he is talking about it. Shut up, he’s superwoke and allowed and you are neither.
In case you’re worried about spoilers, don’t. He has pages and pages to say on the matter. I’m not an expert on fallacies, really, but he’s setting the bastards off like fireworks. He finishes – I can barely type this – with an appeal to his “dear philosophers” to use the tools of philosophy when discussing this issue, which – he insists – they are not allowed to do because he says so, citing “reasons”.
He quotes a comedian (Robert Webb) saying that he was gender non-conforming as a child and that it would be wrong to tell children that because they were non-conforming they must be trans.
Philosopher-dude leaps on this using what seems to be his favourite word: “all”. He turns every argument everyone has ever made into absurdity by quoting a fairly reasonable and innocuous statement like that then saying “well, it’s just not true that all children are being told that!!!!!”
Nobody – not even Robert Webb – ever said anything of the sort. People – including Robert Webb – have said that it might be a bad idea and that’s pretty much it.
He understands the issue here, no doubt about it. He makes it very clear that he knows what the gender critical argument is. But…
Well first he says that “the most respectable” gender critical philosophers aren’t claiming that – his favourite word again – “all” trans women are predators, implying that anyone at all is saying they are.
Citation? Nope. He invents some scenarios about how sex segregation might work in bathrooms without ever seeming to understand that…. this already happens. It happens all the time. It has happened throughout all living memory without much difficulty. And to compound matters, he also invents a scenario in which women demand to see people’s ID before they are allowed to use the facilities and if the accused non-women refuse, they are assaulted by their accusers.
This is so transparently bullshit that it looks like satire, which is the very signature of this fallacious crap.
I’m too exhausted to talk about the conclusions and there are dozens of delicious fallacies you can hunt out for yourselves.
This is the standard of argument we get and everyone still rolls over. As Josh said recently, the trans movement has done zero work for this. The LGB and feminist movements did all that work and that’s where we live now. Arse.
Of course I didn’t mean to imply that the work the LGB and feminist communities did was the problem, but the fact that it has been co-opted by some of the more recently-added letters.
I meant to say that we live in a world where that work is always stolen and Josh is right.
[…] a comment by latsot at Miscellany Room […]
Sackbut wrote in #107
I’m pretty sure that’s where we’ve been the whole time. That’s what “woke” me to awareness of the nonsense in the first place. All I wanted was clear definitions of the terms I was expected embrace. “Gender identity” seemed a good place to start, and that led to literally three days of scouring google and JSTOR for something—anything. There was nothing of substance to be found anywhere.
That’s kind of my story too. I was ordered to give a yes or no answer to a stupid question, and I refused to oblige but instead analysed the question and added stipulations. This – on a blog network that boasts of its freedom of thought – was denounced as murderous, evil, monstrous etc etc etc etc etc. It was quite a spectacle.
I’ve heard reference to the FtB Ablogalypse, but I wasn’t around for it. Was this around the same time as accusations of Islamophobia (and general concern trolling) were ratcheting up? It’s depressingly fascinating that such people, who rightly called out the religious for cordoning their faith-based beliefs off from examination, would turn around and do the same with their own beliefs about sex and gender and oppression. Where would I look, were I sufficiently masochistic to want to read through the train wreck?
(I don’t use FB or Twitter or IG or anything, and I’d stopped reading any blogs by ’10, so I missed everything and only started reading again in May. It was shocking to see that most of the freethought space I used to read had gone completely mad. At the risk of sounding corny, finding your blog again felt like finding a solid roof in a rainstorm.)
Another article on Jeffrey Epstein. This time it’s the NY Times, focusing on Epstein’s weird “scientific” interests. Hard to believe that skeptic extraordinaire and great judge of character Lawrence Krauss wasn’t able to see through him.
At least Stephen Pinker comes out of it looking ok.
There are so many atheist blogs I used to read (and occasionally participate in the comments) 2010-2015 that I do not read anymore. The only FTB blog still on my list is the rarely-updated Digital Cuttlefish.
Aw, thanks, N in V.
It was summer 2015, July through early August especially. I think accusations of Islamophobia were ratcheting up at the same time, yes.
The trainwreck was very large and spread out, in the sense that lots of people wrote “shock-horror that monster” posts and they were spread out over many days. I don’t much recommend being masochistic enough to look for them. I did a quick Google to see what that would turn up and found a post of my own, after I came back here, that sums up where I think the fracture point was. I like to ask probing questions, and the people who were monstering me see that as monstrous.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/thinking-as-a-value/
It begins here, with the totally-not-loaded-and-not-at-all-inquisitorial question:
“Ophelia. Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no? (Please be aware that ‘yes, but’ or any other kind of ‘sort of’ or ‘maybe’ is an appeal to ‘separate but equal’ and therefore equivalent to ‘no’.)”
And here is another highlight.
The problem with going through it, apart from the masochism of doing so, is also that it was spread out ofer several FTB blogs plus backchannel communication plus facebook snooping. The whole thing took weeks, maybe two or three months.
And incidentally, was the direct for me to switch from reading Greta Christina to Ophelia Benson.
That was a laborious and infuriating read.
There seemed to be a confusion between moral, practical, and ontological claims, specifically with respect to the proposition “trans [wo]men are [wo]men”. One comment was about the writer’s trans son (i.e., female offspring) and how being confronted by the idea that he was not really a boy would cause real harm. That’s a practical claim, but it’s used to make it impermissible to speak openly about the ontological. The moral claim would be akin to “all men are created equal”. We should treat all as though they be equal. Likewise, we should treat trans [wo]men as though they be [wo]men. The moral claim is then used to silence discussion about the practical and ontological.
I’m glad I haven’t paid attention to any of this shite until now. *shudder*
@Holms:
Yeah, Greta did not come out of that looking good. Her post on “Here’s why Ophelia is a monster and why you’re not allowed to argue” pretty much set the tone for everything that’s followed.
Ah funny you should mention “a confusion between moral, practical, and ontological claims,” Nullius. I made exactly that distinction when I eventually answered that stupid peremptory question, and the result was simply a lot of sneering at my pretentiousness. That may have been the “ok I’m out of here” moment.
Like, for instance (what have you gotten me into?) from a comment on
https://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/08/divorce-status/
“As a trans woman, I deeply appreciate cis people coming to bat for me. We can’t carry this battle on our own. There are far more cis people with flawed understandings of our lives, perspectives, and needs than there are trans people. Jason, you specifically have addressed these needs and concerns and I thank you.
If you’ll notice, a lot of trans voices have dropped out of Ophelia Benson’s comment threads. That’s telling.
One final thing. I’m a woman. No ifs, ands, or buts. If you have to trow out “ontological” qualifiers in your “yes” answer to our existence, that’s telling, too.”
No ifs ands or buts, not qualifications, no questions, no analysis, no thought, just an arbitrary statement that is the opposite of reality.
No thanks.
There were a few record-scratching moments in quite a short amount of time, but they mostly boiled down to the “yes or no” question. Ophelia wanted to know what the question meant before answering it and that turned out to be forbidden.
Just… forbidden.
We’re kind of used to that now but at the time it was unexpected, at least to me. I had expected arguments to be heated, but not… forbidden. And I hadn’t expected how quickly and substantially people in that community – especially people at FtB – would turn on Ophelia. It wasn’t just a regular shunning, they made a spectacle of it. The same community that still defends racists and rapists went to fucking town on someone who wanted to understand what the question was before answering it.
For quite some time after The Unpleasantness I held on to the idea that some senior people at FtB, including PZ, were silently appalled at what had happened and wished it had not. But I was talking bollocks, I really have no idea now why I thought that. The evidence is not on my side there.
Anyway, there’s a lot more freedom and thought here than you’re likely to find in other ironically-named blog networks and we don’t thank Ophelia enough for doing this thankless work. So to contradict myself, thanks, Ophelia!
Well PZ did tell me in secret that he was silently appalled at what was happening and that he badly wanted me to stay…but he never did anything to make it possible, and before long did the opposite, so that was pretty contemptible.
And you’re welcome!
It occurred to me that some people might not know what I meant by a “record scratching” moment. I was going to attempt a humorous explanation but that thing happened where I realised even I wasn’t so interested in the chemical properties and historical significance of vinyl as to bother.
So instead, here’s George Hrab singing optimistically about young people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=249QCDt22Zk
It isn’t the best version, but it’s his official one. I first saw it at TAM London, back when the JREF was coo….. Christ, this happens a lot, doesn’t it?
Ophelia, I don’t mean to dredge up unpleasantness or drag you into old conversations. It’s just that I have this habit of getting really obsessive about new (to me) topics. Mea maxima culpa.
A lot of the rhetoric being used just makes no sense to me. Like, my brain throws an IllegalArgumentException when I try to read half the stuff, and a NullReferenceException for the other half. How am I supposed to parse arguments when the terms don’t even refer? Aaaaargh …
#125
Finally someone is speaking my language ;)
No it’s ok, after all this time it’s kind of interesting to revisit a little of it. It’s so much worse than I remembered…the craziness, the malice, the refusal to listen. Kind of interesting. And yes about the not making sense. Don’t I know it.
latsot:
I’m trying to figure out when and how and why the discourse cracked. Like …
How did we decide that following someone on Twitter is an endorsement? When did humans stop being sexually dimorphic? Why are people folks? Why does “lived experience” enjoy epistemic priority over empirical data? Why are we equating speech and violence? Why are people folks? Why are kafkatraps rhetorically okay? When did Foucault become respectable? Why are actual scientists suddenly telling me I have ineradicable magic gender dust? How did words lose all meaning? Why are people folks?
So you’re a Java compiler? :p
I wrote a compiler once. Does that make me a compiler?
Look, I was young and everyone was doing it, don’t judge me.
While I generally like David Futrelle, he’s not above a but of unthinking TERF bashing now and then and his commentariat includes some of the most tedious people on the planet.
For example, I was once slit open in the comments there from arsehole to breakfast time for saying the surely innocuous:
Not because it might offend hypothetical Christians, but because it might offend people who suck hypothetical cocks. I’m still not sure why it upset people, Jesus had as much right to suck cocks as anyone else, but they didn’t like it at all and I flounced.
Anyway, the TERF-bashing. Futrelle has a piece which begins with the somewhat unfair:
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2019/08/01/gender-critical-redditor-trans-women-are-ruining-porn-recommendations/
Unfair in particular because the target of his post was taken from the Gender Critical Feminist subreddit. I haven’t been there and I have no idea what goes on there, but it seems to me that out and out saying that “this is what TERFs talk about all the time” is a little bit disingenuous. A heap of selection bias smothered with lashings of delicious conformation bias sauce.
Anyway, the post is fairly stupid but the comments – holy cocksucking christ – the comments. It’s like watching a fight develop from absolutely nowhere at a bus stop in Gateshead. People are whipping themselves into ever more histrionic bouts of fury over something that… well…. might be at least the ghost of a good point in the first place.
TERFs are automatically also SWERFs! They seem to want women to not be exploited, the idiots! And so on.
Compiler writer solidarity. *fist bump* Very cool to know this about you. Compiler development was my job for nearly twenty years. (Not Java; I only worked with Java after my compiler days were over.)
Fist bump gratefully returned. Not Java for me either.
Hey, do you think we can hijack the whole miscellany room to the topic of compiler writing?
On second thoughts, I think I see another Great Shunning coming along….
I try as hard as anyone, I guess, to acknowledge people’s lived experience. That it’s not in itself scientific evidence doesn’t mean it isn’t worth paying attention to. Emotional arguments can be valid arguments and dispassionate ones can be bullshit, we know that. The (excellent) Good Place’s treatment of the Trolley Problem was the best piece of sitcom I’ve ever seen and one of the best bits of satire ever. The (effectively) devil (awesomely Ted Danson) puts a moral philosopher at the switch in an actual trolley car, forcing him make the usual escalating decisions in real time with the actual deaths and blood-splatter. Brilliant stuff.
Anyway, despite all that, there’s this. I don’t believe a word of it, do you?
https://medium.com/@themicheab/struggling-with-transmisia-as-a-trans-person-6c396aec5d62
Forget, if you can, the flippant conflation of those critical of some aspects of gender theory with those who hate (in the first paragraph, in a throw-away style) and focus on whether you’ve ever met or heard about a single person who has ever had the feelings and inclinations Michaea B claims to have had before his magical transformation into someone who didn’t have those feelings after all.
I mean, people are weird. I myself do things for a living that probably can’t be done. I love a cat I have every reason to hate, we’re all idiots. But does Michea B’s story ring true to anyone? I mean, anyone?
And why should we care if it does?
I do like the idea of getting rid of the “phobia” part of accusing people of not liking stuff.
Well that was a stupid read.
That article is … revealing? Michea B hated trans people, as in felt antipathy toward and held animus against trans people. So therefore that’s the mental state from which comes all critique of trans dogma. It reminds me of a lot of interactions I’ve had with Christians. They, too, they say, were once angry at God or hated God because they wanted to sin, so they understand how I feel and why I deny God. Both look like projection to me.
I’ve never hated any group before. I don’t even know what that would feel like. So the assumption that my arguments, questions, or positions are rooted in hatred just leaves me confused. (Which is one of the handful of emotional states I am familiar with.)
And I’m pretty sure this little slice of nuttery hasn’t been formally linked here yet. Teen Vogue decided to do a little video about “misconceptions” regarding sex and gender. One of the stars is Chase Strangio, whose silly, melodramatic tweet Ophelia featured to a few days ago.
I aim to please ;)
While that episode was totally hilarious, I’m not sure Chidi Anagonye is the best example of dispassion being bullshit. That was more his prime failing (crippling indecisiveness) being put to the test, which really made the scene more about how Michael was resisting the ethics lesson by retreating to his comfort zone. (I.e., torturing Chidi by forcing him to make serious decisions quickly.) Chidi’s a weird character, anyway. He apparently treats Kant as a prophetic source of revealed wisdom. Which also reflects his indecisiveness. Despite his vast knowledge of Ethics, he is overwhelmed by the anxiety of making his own ethical decisions, so he leans on Kant. He even leans on Eleanor at some points.
Honestly, he may be one of the most well written characters I’ve seen on the small screen.
Yes, that’s the genius of that scene and sort of my point. Chidi believes that knowledge about different theories of ethics is what’s required to be ethical but in fact that contradictory knowledge is what prevents him from doing anything, which sometimes results in objectively bad stuff happening and is why he’s in the Bad Place to begin with. When he ignores his dispassionate knowledge and does what he feels is right, he ends up doing good.
I don’t watch much TV but I’m glad I found The Good Place. It is absolute brilliance.
Of course, that he does good when he he doesn’t deliberate could be seen from an virtue ethics perspective. Studying ethics for years has cultivated most virtues in him. The last virtue he needs to cultivate is what you might call “sensitivity to danger”, where the extreme of excess is anxiety and the extreme of deficiency is obliviousness.
The more I think about that show, the better it gets.
I think you plausibly have the Euthyphro backward. It seems likely that Chidi’s anxiety was prior to his ethical expertise. Remember, young Chidi couldn’t even pick players for soccer, and grown Chidi can’t pick between dry-erase and paper! He reads, to me, as someone who catastrophizes all decision-making. The resulting anxiety motivated his study of ethics. Like, if he could only learn enough, he could avoid making the wrong choice.
I did a massive eye-roll at this part:
“If you’ll notice, a lot of trans voices have dropped out of Ophelia Benson’s comment threads.”
I can barely remember which of you fuckers* I like, I’m supposed to be keeping track of which of you are trans? That sounds like something a (gasp) TERF would do!
*–said in the most affectionate sense possible
Received accordingly.
Wouldn’t have it any other way.
Well exactly. Did anyone really notice that? And “a lot”? There were a lot of trans voices (voices? are voices more important than people? I’m not sure) here before and now there aren’t? How many constitutes “a lot”?
And so what if that’s true, anyway? People don’t tend to frequent blogs that say things they don’t like, it doesn’t mean those things aren’t true. We don’t seem to see many creationists or Trump fans around here either, strangely enough.
And now for a skerrick of good news.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/114751896/live-government-announces-abortion-reform
Nothing to see here. Just some Mitch McConnell supporters posing “affectionately” with a cutout of AOC. The guy with the hand in front of “her” throat is just practicing some of that asphyxiation that women love so much.
Ugghh
Interesting summary of an interview of J. Yaniv by a YouTube transwoman, described as a trans activist in the article. Sounds like the interviewer did a reasonable job, challenging the many lies. In the interview, Yaniv brandished a taser and bragged that it was illegal; the day after the interview, Yaniv was apprehended, his apartment searched, and the taser confiscated. I note that this article refuses to use any pronouns for Yaniv, awkwardly using “Yaniv” or “Yaniv’s” in all cases. The article has a link to the video, which I did not watch, but I did see the Post-Millennial news item about the arrest and apartment search.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/50307/watch-trans-activist-responds-allegations-amanda-prestigiacomo
Yes, I watched some of that. Only a little, because it’s boring. Also because Blaire White’s constant pawing of Their hair got on my nerves. Yet another of those things that actual women Do Not Do.
Yesterday the news of Yaniv’s visit from the cops was only on social media, today it’s in some of the regular kind.
It turns out that the transwoman who attacked strangers in a 7/11 with an axe (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2018/not-a-costume-party/), about whom many news sources only mentioned in passing if at all the fact that she was trans, who was placed in a women’s prison against the wishes of other inmates, is now de-transitioning … (https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/trans-woman-de-transitioning-in-jail-as-court-reviews-sentence-over-axe-attack-20190802-p52d5q.html).
A new image of Jupiter, taken by the Hubble telescope: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/hubble-new-portrait-of-jupiter
PZ has lost his mind again but not on the trans issue, this time. I sometimes get some of his posts in my feed because of an algorithm I wrote a few years ago which has apparently developed sentience. It’s either that or a really stupid bug I can’t be bothered to hunt down.
I know which I think is more likely, you can choose to fear my algorithm or my shitty programming skills/laziness.
I usually ignore those posts of his that do turn up because they tend to be about spiders (I get my spider-related news elsewhere) or are exhausting in their weirdly cultish acceptance of matters trans, which has been discussed here from time to time.
Anyway, for some reason I looked at this one (https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/08/09/awesome-band-becomes-awesomer/) which is neither.
The gist is that a band played some songs. It’s a thing with this band that people come on stage at the end and maraud about, sounds fun. On this occasion one idiot started doing a nazi salute to the rhythm of the song. I’m hardly in favour of that sort of thing and if I were a member of the band I expect I might have tried to get the idiot off the stage. I might have manhandled him. I would probably have tried to get security to escort the charming fellow out of the building and I wouldn’t have minded too much if the door hit him on the arse on the way out.
That’s not what happened, though. The bass player punched him in the face then beat him with his guitar. PZ is elated about this. He says very earnestly that it’s the way to deal with nazis. Beating them with a fucking guitar. Committing a very serious physical assault.
I started writing a comment there and I knew it wasn’t worth it so I gave up. For one thing, PZ did something he does quite often these days which was to forestall any dissent. You know the kind of thing “and before you say I’m wrong, actually it’s YOU who’s wrong.” Right there in his post. The “wrong thing”, though, was about frozen peaches, not…. well, beating people with sticks.
Anyway. I don’t particularly advocate punching people if you can help it. I don’t weep when people with a long record of disgusting behaviour and a promising future of the same are punched, although I’d be horrified if they were seriously hurt. I didn’t enjoy it when RIchard Spencer was punched for his nazitude, for example, but I didn’t mind and my pearls remained unclutched.
But this was a random idiot who stood on a stage for a few seconds and did a stupid, dickish, deplorable thing. For which he was severely beaten with at least one fist and at least one guitar. He might very well be a terrible person with a history of awfulness and a calendar loaded with abuse. But nobody knows that, least of all PZ who wasn’t even there.
Or he might have been a random dickhead who thought his actions might be funny. What he did was either hateful or thoughtless and those two categories clearly overlap. But seriously? Beat the guy with a plank of wood because it was so important to send that message in that moment? Not have him taken off stage and thrown out then come back to the mic to talk about what happened? I’m not suggesting the idiot be allowed to explain his behaviour, on your fucking way sunshine, but…
PZ is positively brimming with satisfaction at this violence, gloating at it. What the actual fuck is wrong with the guy? Or is it just me and it’s somehow OK to beat idiots with guitars in public?
We were talking on another post about whether we humans might have some innate reactions to unfairness and for satisfaction regarding justice. I wildly speculated that if we do, they might easily be skewed in the direction of horribleness. Ya think?
Anyway, I dragged my frustration here not to bash PZ in particular but because this is another symptom that he is losing the capacity of reason. Or I am, this could go either way.
Argh, I hate that. Slap me upside the head if I ever do it.
I read the post.
Ick.
I did, in the end, reply in PZ’s comments. I couldn’t not do it. There are quite a lot of people I know – friends, family, people I’ve worked with – who could easily have been goaded up onto that stage, done something idiotic, been beaten with a plank of fucking wood and had some bellend on the internet cheer about it.
I myself was young once – this was back before the old king died – and I did some absolutely awful things, some of which I’ve reported here. For the most part I didn’t get the comeuppance that’s due other than feeling shit about it for forty years. I probably wouldn’t mind if someone turned up to hit me with a guitar but I think I’d want them to explain my acts and the context and why a beating seemed like a good idea.
PZ has lost all capacity for reason. That post was at least as hateful as any I’ve ever seen.
Well done. I see another dissenter followed suit.
Very cool! That’s Voyager levels of detail! Not bad from a few hundred million KM.
This is how that PZ post re beating nazis with guitars worked out in the comments:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/08/09/awesome-band-becomes-awesomer/
More or less what I expected. Ad hom, strawmen exploding all over the place. Cultish adherence to the party line… And no comment from PZ.
What’s especially annoying is the repeated insinuation that I’m blaming mentally ill people for nazism. I know these people can read, they’re liars.
Ugh.
I haven’t watched the clip, but I wonder if the Nazi salute is really so familiar to young Americans that PZ’s horde can be sure that’s what he was doing as opposed to a random dance move. Maybe they can, and even if they can’t maybe he was, but I wonder.
Do y’all think that it is possible that the USA can go back to using the correct colours for political orientation?
Sadly, no. It drives me crazy. The people’s flag is deepest RED, god damn it.
I think the red vs blue was set up the way it is precisely to avoid associating Democrats (or Democratic-voting states) with communism.
I think the colour shift was a
CommiePutin Conspiracy.To be fair the pharyngula crowd have some good arguments.
They have a point, can’t argue with that.
Hurrrr. I haven’t heard that one since the 11 thousandth iteration of “Twatson”…which I always thought PZ’s crowd considered sexist, just as I did.
Oof “Twatsot”, have no fear though, I’m sure the PZ’s progressive and feminist audience will rally against that slur.
*crickets*
I stumbled across this (Leviticus 12:2-8):
I was vaguely aware of “churching”, but I hadn’t known that having a girl makes a woman twice as unclean as having a boy. What a fantastic surprise.
Well you know how females are. Filthy beasts.
The worms have turned on that PZ thread, his views are not universally admired.
PZ himself responded thusly:
This is idiotic on the face of it and some people explain why.
PZ’s brain has gone wrong. Nobody rational could possibly equate someone doing a nazi salute at a gig with promoting genocide.
And then there’s the latest response, #64.
I know. I bit clean through my keyboard when I read that.
The latest:
I suspect I’m missing some kind of in-joke. But I’m not a great fan of death threats, especially when I’m the one threatened with death. I haven’t had a proper death threat for a few years, I’d almost forgotten how much they shit me up, even when I don’t think they’re credible (as in this case, I don’t think it’s a real death threat).
Let’s see if PZ does anything about that post.
Ugh. I won’t hold my breath on that one.
Latsot, I admire both your ethical convictions (for entering that discussion surely knowing what would ensue) and your tenacity for sticking it out and calling PZ on his bullshit multiple times in that thread. I am slightly concerned that you are displaying masochistic tendencies.
Hah! He has the commentariat that he wants, he specifically cultivated vitriol for years.
Probably. I’m from the North East of England, masochism is pretty much hard-wired.
So the crowd there must be cool with Trump having exhorted his followers to beat up protesters at his rallies then. Same sort of thing. Protesters at Trump’s rallies are as much of a threat to attendees as an isolated Nazi (or asshole) at a concert is. If you go on about what the individual “represents,” the movement they may or may not be a part of, what the salute “means” then you’ve lost sight of the person you are beating. And you are beating a person, whatever sorts of thoughts or ideas may or may not be inside his head. Breaking that head because of the “true meaning” of the Nazi salute just puts you in the same category as those who dehumanize their opponents. Like Nazis. If the Nazi/asshole is actually threatening actual injury (not potential, future, hypothetical injury “because Nazis”) then you can defend yourself. But beating up some guy who gives a salute because there are camps at the border, and Trump is a fascist wannabe, is no better than beating someone up because he gave you the finger. The finger isn’t actually hurting you. Neither is the salute. It’s not “actual violence.” The person saluting should be marked out and argued against, but the jesture itself does not merit assault as a response.There were alternatives to assault that should have been pursued. “Righteous” violence is still violence.
Also, it helps to throw out the concept of theory of mind.
“Our views are the right ones, so we are justified in our attacks.”
“But what if they believe that they are the ones that are in the right, do they get to do it?”
“…Shut up, nazi defender!”
Steve King opens his mouth, and vile bullshit spews forth.
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/14/1878965/-Elizabeth-Warren-just-called-out-Trump-s-efforts-to-roll-back-protections-for-the-trans-community
Elizabeth Warren is calling out the Trump administration for rolling back protections for the trans community.
I’m having some trouble determining exactly what these protections are supposed to be. From the article, I get the impression that the protections:
– Allow patients to withhold information about their biological sex;
– Forbid doctors from accessing information listed under a patient’s previous names;
– Demand that doctors use biologically incorrect pronouns when talking with other people about the patient;
– Require doctors to provide medically unnecessary procedures and medications if they are desired for “affirming gender”.
Maybe there are other aspects of this rollback that are actual problems? Maybe there’s a religious exemption that allows doctors to refuse any care to trans people? The items I noticed in the article seemed like good policy to jettison, but maybe there were other things I missed.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/15/politics/israel-visit-ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib-intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0OvbLoU7Zr1_75WxsibW_41GCgoT2_T9Pwv1PdZb6gqtdjMr_yIO21nXo
Israel has decided not to allow Reps. Tlaib and Omar into the country. This comes shortly after the alleged President claimed that Israel would be showing “great weakness” if they were allowed in.
latsot@166,
Plus, it means you can’t be in the cool club of the #boymom.
I shit you not. I do admire the writer’s nice piece of juxtaposition here:
I admit I’m a sucker for that formulation of “Uniformed idiot: ‘well obviously we all know that X is true.’ Actual expert: ‘X is not true.'”
Newspapers are often home to the worst of the language purists, so it’s nice to see an article about language change in the popular press from someone who actually understands linguistics:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/15/why-its-time-to-stop-worrying-about-the-decline-of-the-english-language?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1fK7bIdIIWpM5gbYf1Yb6C3Hop7_kCFalh5rT5ZGUmV1XDyxh3ZJgEL1Q#Echobox=1565872225
I recently read Martin Duberman’s book “Has the Gay Movement Failed?”, and I wanted to share my thoughts. I hope it’s OK to provide them here.
Duberman is an excellent writer. The prose is clear and engaging. The author backs up everything he claims with reasoning and evidence, and he does not shy away from giving opinions. He is clearly an expert. Some of his arguments I found compelling, others not, but all were at least clearly laid out.
He does stake out some unorthodox opinions. He opposes the institution of marriage. He favors reducing age of consent or eliminating the concept. He is very much a socialist, and favors a highly intersectional approach to gay rights that focuses on economic inequality.
I was attracted to the book because of a generally positive review that indicated Duberman questioned the “born this way” narrative for both sexuality and “gender identity”. This aspect is not a major focus of the book, to be sure. Duberman holds to the view that people are naturally much more bisexual than they admit even to themselves. He thinks sexuality is more fluid and changeable than is usually claimed. Stating that sexuality is fixed at birth is not only incorrect, he says, but a strategic error. The main arguments he gives against innate sexuality is that studies have thus far been unable to find a mechanism; not so much claiming that it isn’t innate, but saying he’s not convinced that it is
The discussion of transgenderism is perhaps the weakest aspect of the book for me. Aside from disagreeing with the emphasis on an innate “gender identity”, Duberman doesn’t seem willing to challenge any of the trans ideology. He’s picky about evidence in other cases but not these. He doesn’t give much of an indication of support for the rights of women, other than nominal support for feminism, and certainly no indication that he understands the conflicts between those rights and trans ideology. He doesn’t even explain why he thinks there is no such conflict.
Overall, I found the book informative and worthwhile. It contained lots of great history that was new to me. Some of the arguments on various issues I found compelling.
Of course it’s ok, it’s called Miscellany Room for a reason! And thank you, interesting.
Somewhat good news, but the law is still in place and women are still in jail for the crime of being raped.
https://youtu.be/sTJWCiX0PoI
Just learned that Magdalen Berns is moving to palliative care:
https://twitter.com/MagdalenBerns/status/1164200819555782657
I only heard of her and found her work a short time ago. I binge-watched her Youtube videos. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvTTakI97sQ4SkMnsH8r0qQ/videos
Wow. Such brilliant, righteous, ferocity. And also bitingly hilarious.
Damn.
So did I. Damn it.
Such a fierce spirit and such a loss.
Magdalen gets snuffed out and Trump goes on and on.
It’s an uncaring and capricious universe for sure.
Richard Dawkins doesn’t know how lucky he was.:
????!!! They couldn’t find out what was in the damn bottles before he lost both his jobs?
I’d say that the entire case is a comedy of errors, except that comedy is supposed to be funny, and nobody actually screwed up — this is literally the way the system is “supposed” to work.
He was initially detained because a drug-sniffing dog alerted, and then a “field test” came back positive. Both dogs and field tests are notoriously unreliable — they arguably shouldn’t even be “probable cause” under the 4th Amendment to search somebody, let alone to arrest.
Then you have the problem of the Maryland crime lab not being able to test liquids or honey (seriously!). Plus he’s a noncitizen permanent resident, so ICE had placed a hold on him and likely would have launched deportation proceedings even if the state authorities released him.
This article
https://medium.com/@transphilosophr/i-identify-as-an-attack-helicopter-and-other-fallacious-arguments-561246b7151e
claims to debunk what it calls the fallacious “I identify as an attack helicopter” argument.
Rebutted, eh? I’ve got to see this:
Oh. So it turns out to be “it’s just different because it just is” again. What a surprise.
The author also constantly uses the pretending to confuse gender and sex bait and switch because of course she does.
“How the brain represents itself to itself” – as if that’s a real thing.
TSA rules are that a pat-down should be done by someone of the same sex. Thus, a trans-identified male gets patted down by a male officer. The ACLU is bothered by this, and thinks female officers should be required to do the pat-down in such cases. The ACLU would be better off pushing to reduce or eliminate pat-downs, I think.
https://www.propublica.org/article/tsa-transgender-travelers-scanners-invasive-searches-often-wait-on-the-other-side
@195, but where does that line of reasoning leave those non-binary and ‘other’ identifiers who quite seriously list all sorts of nonsensical stuff as their gender (or in some cases genders)? How exclusionary to limit gender to just male and female, and humans only at that.
Sackbut @197, hard to follow the ACLU’s reasoning isn’t it? As you say, the whole pat down thing is clearly just way over the top in the vast majority of cases anyway, but the reasoning applied seems to fly in the face of trans dogma anyway. If a trans-man is a man, it follows that the pat down should be performed by a man, surely. To turn around and say that the tran-man is a man, but really has a woman’s body so should be patted down by a woman to avoid embarrassment for the trans person suggests that the ACLU and trans people are actually acknowledging the fallacy of their own argument. Not to mention they are now displacing the trans persons embarrassment at having a person of the ‘opposite’ sex patting them down onto the TSA officer. Imagine the embarrassment of a female TSA officer having to publicly pat down what appears to be a male.
Interesting that the issue is around trans men (i.e. biological females). I wonder if that’s because a good percentage of trans women (biological males) would actually quite get off having a women pat their junk and so aren’t bothered at all.
Can you stomach another article on Epstein?
This one is a Mother Jones interview with Stuart Pivar, who described himself as a close friend of Epstein, until he realized what Epstein was up to. Though he still continued to engage in some fairly gross apologetics for him, so I take the claimed separation with a grain of salt. (Pharyngula readers may recall that Pivar once sued PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot.”)
Some notable excerpts. Those dinners with scientific stars:
Ha ha. Let’s get back to the important topics, amiright? Hmm — one wonders what the women scientists at the party thought of such…. ha, just kidding, obviously there weren’t any women scientists present. Which should have been a red flag to these distinguished male scholars, shouldn’t it? How come they didn’t wonder why Epstein didn’t cultivate any distinguished women scholars? It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the social company of women, after all.
As I said, Pivar’s claim that he stayed away rings a little hollow, given his attitude towards Epstein’s behavior:
Ah yes, it was just 16-year-old “trollops,” they don’t count for anything. Why, everybody fucks one from time to time, you just shouldn’t make a habit of it, and anyone who does is obviously just ill, not evil!
Oh, indeed. Quite an apposite comparison. “(cough, cough) Oh, I’m so sorry, I seem to have gotten my penis in your teenaged vagina. Ooopsie.”
The nerve of those 16-year-olds!
Ah, yes. “Treat yourself” to sex with young girls, just, you know, in moderation!
It goes on from there, often in circles. Pivar repeats himself, lectures the writer on how he should have talked to a psychologist about satyriasis, and read Kraft-Ebbing’s work on sexual perversion, threatens to sue the writer, etc.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey at the Miscellany […]
@Rob #199
Sorry to be unclear. I used “trans-identified males” because that’s a common term to refer to male persons who identify as trans (and thus identify as women). I avoided using “transwomen” to steer clear of the confusion I apparently caused.
Thus: TSA wants male bodies patted down by males, regardless of “gender identity”.
This doesn’t even begin to “rebut” the analogy. It is, in fact, a blatant petitio principii employed in order to escape a self-made trap.
Why is it not plausible that being a tiger has to do with how the brain represents itself to itself? (Assuming arguendo that the brain in fact does represent itself to itself.) Looking back in the article, we find that being a tiger is (for the author’s purposes) a matter of being able to interbreed. So a creature is a tiger if it is capable of interbreeding with tigers. (Never mind that this definition is terrible, as it cannot identify a tiger prototype. Just try to answer how we can know that the things this animal is interbreeding with are in fact tigers.) So the reason we can say that identifying as a tiger is nonsensical is that it is a matter of observable, material reality whether a creature can interbreed and produce viable offspring with tigers. To reiterate: biological facts determine the validity of an identity.
This, of course, does not go to the question of whether it is plausible that a brain represents itself to itself as a tiger brain. It does, however, provide a means of determining the validity of an identity, a means that the author has to immediately dodge and special-plead away in order to get his desired result. The rest of the paragraph is a redefinition of gender so as to fit his agenda. Specifically, “Thus, being a woman or a man just is about how your brain sees itself which is why trans women are women and trans men are men.” Saying that “X just is Y” is philosopher-speak for saying that all there is to X is Y.
Unfortunately, the notion that being a woman just is about your brain seeing itself as a woman-brain is the very thing at issue. So using it as a non-discharged assumption is logically invalid; it is begging the question.
Is this explanation in danger of blowing up to in infinite regression? And assuming that brains even do this at all, is the brain capable of misleading itself about itself? Or of being mistaken? The brain certainly has a representation of the body at its disposal, but it can go wrong. Why could it not go wrong within the brain’s “representation” of itself as well?
Perhaps the author of this “refutation” could use their proprioception to realize that they have pulled this argument out of their own backside.
You ain’t seen nothin’. I have a feeling that “transphilosophr” is a fan of Kierkegaard, which really isn’t a good place to be.
Quoth Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death:
It is my honest belief that Kierkegaard was philosophy’s most successful troll. So successful that people don’t even realize that they’ve been trolled.
Nullius:
So by the authors reasoning the existence of tiger/lion hybrids (ligers and tigons) is proof positive that lions are tigers – or tigers are lions.
What the author says is (emphasis mine)
So it would be a violation of the principle of charity to say that we must conclude that lions are tigers.
British Columbia again!
A father is trying to prevent his daughter (who has already changed gender on her birth certificate, and has begun hormone treatment) from transitioning. As reported in the National Post :
https://nationalpost.com/news/b-c-s-top-court-to-hear-fathers-case-against-totalitarian-interference-in-childs-gender-transition
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/gay-gene-sex.html
The authors of the study are understandably concerned about unwarranted extrapolation from their work, or using it to justify discrimination.
To me, this underlines what Martin Duberman called a strategic error on the part of gay rights activists. It simply should not matter if sexuality is innate and fixed, any more than for musical taste or cuisine preference or desire to raise children. Discrimination on the basis of sexuality is wrong regardless.
I came around to this way of thinking some time ago myself. I came to see the “they can’t help it, they were born that way” argument as flawed. Whether or not sexual attraction is hardwired and inborn is irrelevent. As far as rights go, one’s sexuality shouldn’t matter, even if it were completely a matter of taste and choice.
Yeah, I’ve never understood why people make that argument.
I agree it’s ultimately a bad argument and that the better argument is that it’s the individuals human right to be attracted to whomever they want and be in a relationship with whomever thy want (age and other consensual factors considered).
I guess the ‘can’t help it’ argument was made in part by people who genuinely believed it (or rationalised it thus) or by people who were just heartily sick of having to argue for their rights (again and again). Bad argument is still bad argument. On the flip side, that argument probably did help move some anti-gay people over the ick factor and onto accepting while it wasn’t their thing, well fair enough. Hopefully we can move onto better arguments now.
It is interesting though that they set the bar as low as a single same sex experience. I wonder if they had set the bar at exclusively same sex for whole of life, would the same result hold? No doubt someone will seek to answer that question. The required data set would be huge, given that only 27,000 out of 403,000 people admitted to one or more same sex experiences.
Not on Twitter myself, but I check in to see what others are posting. I just learned a new term that suggests that there are more subtle and insidious ways that Twitter is censoring and manipulating conversations. I give you Deboosting: https://twitter.com/hatpinwoman/status/1167260354449162240
This can be more insidious than banning because people know when they’ve had their accounts suspended or shut down. With deboosting, your signal gets lost without your knowledge; you’re wasting your energy talking to an empty room you think is full of listeners. I read a number of GC feminists asking each other if they were getting likes or retweets on posts. Numbers on the same post varied depending on who was asking. Sounds like this was why.
From “Radical Snippets”:
https://www.facebook.com/2168139593402018/posts/2361681014047874/
But of course this never happens.
I’m hoping someone is screenshooting this stuff.
Looks like McKinnon’s big talk in London has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Barcode314/status/1167718268464971776
I’m not celebrating this fact, but it would not be unethical if others did.
I see what you did there.
This timeline of NYT columnist hissy-fits is a work of art. (Hissy fit isn’t a gendered term, is it?)
Screechy: It might be, if “hissy” comes from “hysterical”.
PZ is at it again. I haven’t time to read it just at the moment, but judging by the headline, it contains nothing good:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/09/05/biased-sources-motivated-reasoning-and-blithe-assumptions-the-terf-story/
I read it. It begins:
I’m not certain that is a great start, to say the least, in a post about bias, motivated reasoning and blithe assumptions, but here we are.
I honestly can’t bring myself to do a point-by-point rebuttal, as much as I enjoy those. I will say that there is a lot of disingenuous bait-and-switching going on in his definition of biological sex and many words are put in the mouths of gender critical feminists that I’ve never seen there before.
PZ wouldn’t tolerate such disingenuity – and in at least one case, outright lying – in any other place, but he does here with the sort of righteous indignation we’ve come to expect.
His paragraph beginning “I know what biological sex is” is ghastly. He starts with a definition he uses in the lab and then presto-change switches to suggest it’s gender critical types who are using that definition with people. What the actual?
But anyway, I promised no PBPR so I’ll stop now.
EXCEPT TO SAY: (no, really, I’ll take my own advice for once and stop).
“many words are put in the mouths of gender critical feminists” reminded me:
Some of my favorite things to read are rebuttals and critical reviews. This article is, as stated in the title, a critical review of a book that advocates legalization of the sex trade and rejects the Nordic Model. The review does a great job of deconstructing the straw man arguments that don’t represent actual gender critical feminist positions.
https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/02/07/a-critical-review-of-revolting-prostitutes-the-fight-for-sex-workers-rights-by-juno-mac-and-molly-smith/
Well, I learned something from this article at Vox
I learned that I am not a TERF, nor are most if not all of you from what I can tell. Because apparently TERFs are just thinly disguised right-wing religious types, who want it to be legal for people to be fired for failing to conform to gender stereotypes, who condone harassment and trying to get people fired and de-platformed.
Not a single alleged TERF (or “gender critical feminist,” which the author advises us is just a euphemism akin to white nationalists calling themselves “race realists”) is actually given a chance to state her views in the article. We’re just told that Julia Beck was lying when she testified before the House that transgender women do not face greater rates of violence. The evidence backing up that accusation? A trans woman was killed in D.C. 24 hours previously. No mention of how many trans women are killed over a more meaningful time frame, and whether or not the rate is statistically different from rates of murder of cis women. The mere anecdote is sufficient. Meanwhile, the fact that trans woman Karen White raped several female prisoners is dismissed because “I don’t agree that White is representative of all trans women.” Anecdotal evidence for me but not for thee.
No mention of the attempts of radical trans activists to de-platform or ruin the careers of gender critical feminists, other than a passing reference to the supposed tragedy that Kathleen Stock is still being published despite a joint statement — a Joint Statement, I tell you! — by some committee that doesn’t like her. We’re told that TERFS have taken over the UK, and are hoping to conquer America too but are being thwarted. (Curious that a group of supposedly religious right-wing nutballs is doing better in the U.K. than in the states. Almost makes you question the underlying premise!)
No mention of barbed wire baseball bats. Of “Die TERFs” and similar slogans. Nope, there are good folks and bad folks in this discussion, and the bad folks’ views aren’t even worth dignifying with discussion or evidence.
Ah I’ve had that waiting in the “to read” line for the past hour, will read it now before reading all your comment.
Ugh. Too much dishonesty. I don’t have the patience to read the whole thing.
I made my way through Ron Lindsay’s blog post for CFI, Gender, Identity, and Women’s Sports. My impression was that he was trying very hard to achieve a “compromise” without really seeing the problem or understanding the arguments. He rejects the argument about male physical development in puberty by saying it’s only a few people. Yes, and only a few people get the medals and set the records and represent their country in international competition. His comment about philosophers “trapped into thinking” certain “wrong” things about terminology is insulting to the philosophers who have made careful and clear arguments about these issues. Why not consider if the trans activists and the “woke” liberals have been “trapped into thinking” things that are incorrect? And why turn an issue about oppression of women into a taxonomy problem?
I hope CFI is honest enough to allow opposing views to be posted.
Yes, I saw it yesterday and read it and sighed and…decided to keep my trap shut for once.