Synonyms
What we now say when we mean “shut up, bitch.”
Updating: Oh look there’s more.
Very adult, very thoughtful, very progressive and feminist and reasonable and fair-minded.
Also the other David.
Than “Ok Karen” and an eyeroll. Yes, I think so too.
Updating 2:
Skepticism done well, yes indeed – you can’t get much better skepticism than “Ok, Karen” and an eyeroll emoji.
Looks like Gorski could do with a bit of that good ol’ insolence sending his way (respectfully, of course).
I find it depressing how rapidly a new slur has developed based entirely on race and class.
Not entirely. It is also based on sex. In fact, primarily on sex and race.
I find it depressing not only that the new slur has been developed, but that people who are highly educated professionals, such as an M.D., use such a juvenile answer to people (women) raising important issues. It’s like everyone is suddenly a teenage boy.
He is the last person that I would have expected to fall for this mass hallucination. He has spent years debunking nonsense spouted by cultists and somehow he doesn’t see the parallels between their rhetoric and the TRA/MRAs.
I’m sure it also escapes him how condescending and misogynistic his remarks are. His remarks are on par with Representative Yoho and, like Yoho, he’s offended that people are calling him out for his idiocy. For anyone who denies that male privilege exists, we now have two more examples.
Men with letters at the ends of their names can win arguments instantaneously using only an emoji.
:o)
At least I’ve finally learned what a male Karen is.
Gorski bought into genderist woo some time ago.
Categories like ‘Karen’ are a wonderful invention, possibly not exclusively human. Their use could extend through the great chordate family tree to include the apes and monkeys, though I doubt as far as the reptiles and fish. But I could be wrong on that.
However, once a category has been assigned, it’s end of story and no more need be said. Forget her; she’s a Karen.
My authority on this is based on my membership not only of the category MD, but I also tweet as a PhD. Moreover, I tweet on further as a Senior Hierarch of the Institute of Turds (SHIT).
In addition to the success of the uppity-woman “Karen” meme, let’s not ignore that other dismissive term, “transphobe.” The science is so clear, so well -established, that the only possible explanation for disagreement is an irrational hatred and fear of people who are “different.” Yes. I’m sure that must be it.
Years ago, Orac castigated people who were using the dangerous drug “Lupron” off-label to chemically castrate autistic preadolescents. Given that he’s claiming that an article on therapy for gender dysphoria which avoids “affirmation” and Lupron used as a puberty blocker is “junk science,” I wonder if he no longer considers it dangerous when used off label on children.
Using Lupron off-label to chemically castrate autistic boys stops being barbaric and starts being heroic when the gender fairy beats their wings over it and sprinkles it with trans dust.
Lady Mondegreen @7, he’s certainly not alone among otherwise rational men with a history of sticking up for people. In particular I’ve noted many US lawyers prominent on Twitter strongly castigating JKR. Now, I can understand US 1A lawyers despising UK defamation laws, but the fact that the depth of their analysis seems to be to swallow the TRA line whole and not actually look at what JKR said and what has been said about her leaves me feeling a bit whiplashed after reading some of their comments on other topics.
This Gorski is a researcher for breast cancer ………..I wonder if some of his medical buddies are the ones making money off of removing breasts of real women for transing. Or maybe he has some twisted idea that if all those icky real women had their breasts removed, that would be a way of reducing breast cancer? Either way, I can’t see him being anything but a horror show for his female colleagues to have to deal with.
So, maybe he is just a garden-variety misogynist asshat who needs to take a long walk off a short pier? Usually the less complex answer is the correct one for these guys.
It’s no surprise, really, that Orac is a raging sexist asshole. His profession selects for raging sexist assholes, and he self-selected into the early 2000s online skeptic movement, which was also full of raging sexist assholes. He doesn’t see it that way, of course, for the same reason that fish don’t notice that they are wet.
Hell, he practically revels in his misogyny. He’s “pissing off the right people” (from a later tweet)
Funny thing, though. He’s using “OK Karen” towards Rowling the same way Richard Dawkins used “Dear Muslima” … to dismiss women he thought were too privileged to talk about their rights. Anyone know what side of that flap Orac came down on?
Funny you should ask. The wrong side, mostly.
From what I can remember, I’m pretty sure he was on the right side during the “Elevatorgate”/”Dear Muslima” shitstorm. But then again so were PZ and most of the FTB crowd. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day etc.
Yes, PZ and his Horde were firmly in Camp Watson over Elevatorgate, but nowadays would be castigating Watson for assuming the gender of the
manperson in the elevator. They would, I’m sure, ‘educate’ her that the correct phrase is folks, don’t do that.As for Dear Muslima, the FTB crowd have become masters of the genre. How can Rowling tweet transphobia when there’s a pandemic on? Why are TERFs harping on about female spaces when transwomen are being murdered? etc.
On the one hand, it is surely stupid to say that smaller injustices should be ignored as long as there are larger ones present. On the other, it is important to keep things in perspective so that trivialities are not perceived as injustices. There are two boundaries, then. First, a threshold below which things are too inconsequential to warrant notice. Second, a threshold above which emergency triage reasoning takes over. Where those boundaries lie is, of course, fuzzy.
The TRAs have been pushing successfully to move both lines with respect to their pet cause. Gender dysphoria is per se sufficient to engage triage, and “misgendering” is not inconsequential. Pushing back against this feels like fighting on two fronts because it kind of is.
No, he wasn’t all that much on the right side over Elevatorgate. He was much involved with TAM, which was in the hands of DJ Grothe, who was extremely hostile to Rebecca and the rest of us. I think Gorski mostly looked in the other direction, but he did at times pick fights with one or all of us. He picked a very silly one with me.
And no, PZ and co would not be castigating Rebecca; she is very firmly in the “JK Rowling is an evil TERF” camp. She did a post or video or something recently saying just that.
I’m probably confusing him with somebody else then. Or maybe I just remember him being critical of Dawkins for other reasons (endorsing Bill Maher etc.), and in my memory that has mutated into the idea that he was critical of Dawkins because of “Dear Muslima”.
Ophelia, #19. I was being a little tongue-in-cheek there over the way that PZ and the rest have embraced the whole gender ideology and their castigations of those who make assumptions of gender. Mind you, even though Rebecca is firmly in their camp it only takes one transgression to make an enemy of an ally. That movement is akin to certain historical regimes in the way that words are constantly and ruthlessly policed, and today’s flavour of the month can, with a minor slip of the tongue, become tomorrow’s compost.
Bjarte, it’s all very confusing. For one thing it surprises me to see Orac being so Woke on the trans issue when he was sort of kind of in the anti-Woke camp in the TAM/elevatorgate wars. It’s weird that he’s so defensive of the trans ideology – and in a crude, one-word style of defensiveness at that – when he was so on the offensive when it came to very basic feminism. Feminism is very suspect but claims that men are women require only an “Ok, Karen” to demonstrate their truthyness.
Weird.
It’s weird from a broader cultural perspective but completely expected from the woke. Wokeness capitalizes on confusion by providing single word, and sometimes single syllable, mantras that can alleviate cognitive dissonance.
“Oh, I’m feeling uncertain in my wokeness, because this person is saying things that sound kind of reasonable … Trans women are women! All white people are racist! Healthy at any size! Phew! I feel so much better now.”
Them thought-terminating cliches are powerful. Like, have you ever watched a video of woke students confronting Bret Weinstein at Evergreen? As soon as he started talking sense and sounding reasonable, the woke brigade simply couldn’t handle it. There’s this moment of collective tension … And then a release as they take up a chant. It’s seriously horror-movie creepy.
Ophelia
I guess embracing specific elements of movement wokism doesn’t amount to a general commitment to social justice, equality, fairness etc. any more than embracing specific elements of movement skepticism or atheism amounts to a general commitment to science, reason and critical thinking. Once we let go of the premise that we’re all “in it” for the same kinds of reasons, it’s not really that confusing. In a way, I think it would be more confusing to encounter a TRA bandwagon-rider who wasn’t dismissive of feminism at this point.