It’s a glorious huge park with lots of old growth forest in the far southwest corner of Seattle, next to a small ferry terminal for ferries that go to Vashon Island, about a 15 minute trip.
Remind me again why I’m living in the midwest, instead of beautiful places like that? Oh, yeah. I was dragged here at the tender age of 10, and my every effort to get back to the coast has been stymied, often by my own actions.
In a comment recently I made a passing reference to the former Washington Post reporter who was told by her supervisors that she couldn’t report on sexual assault stories because of her own past assault.
She said the Post then barred her from writing about Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice. She said Cameron Barr, the Post’s managing editor, told her she had “‘taken a side on the issue'” of sexual assault by talking about her own experience publicly, while Steven Ginsburg, the Post’s national editor, told her that “it would present ‘the appearance of a conflict of interest'” for her to report on sexual misconduct.
Sonmez said the ban was later extended so that she could not cover sexual misconduct at all, and that she was frequently taken off stories.
I had forgotten about this part:
The paper also put her on leave in January 2020 after she tweeted a link to a story about a 2003 rape allegation against Kobe Bryant hours after he died. She was cleared to return to work after intense criticism of the suspension from Post colleagues.
Nothing must interfere with the canonization of St. Kobe!
There’s a story in Sports Illustrated about the oldest and youngest Olympic athletes (https://www.si.com/olympics/2021/07/23/youngest-oldest-olympians-tokyo-games), and I find it slightly curious. First off, I find some of the stories pretty inspiring: a 12 year-old Syrian girl qualifies for the Olympics in table tennis; a 52 year-old Georgian (shooting) competing in her 9th (!) Games, and who competed for the Soviet Union in 1988; several others… They profile 6 young athletes, ages 12-19, and 5 older athletes, ages 44-66(!). Am I reading too much into it to think that they might have intentionally omitted a certain 43 year-old athlete from New Zealand? Surely 6 & 6 would have been a more natural way to present the story?
Re-reading the story in detail, it’s clear this is not about all of the very youngest & oldest (e.g., a 62 year-old equestrian is mentioned, but not profiled), but still – shouldn’t we be reading about the stunningly brave weightlifter hefting the weights while holding back the sands of time?
The T wars have suddenly come into my personal field of vision. My s-i-l told me recently that she is “nonbinary.” She’s never been “nonbinary” before. What rot!
And then a player on my softball team mentioned that their middle child is transgender. (“Their” child b/c both parents play on the team.)
I have a significant and longstanding relationship with my s-i-l, so I couldn’t let T “talking points” go unanswered, as if I agreed with them. We have enough mutual respect that she understands my position is thought out and considered, not just knee-jerk.
I don’t have that kind of relationship with the softball people. Saying anything would spoil the recreation. Also, both parents are good people who want the best for their children. Am I being too chicken?
We must have IMPARTIALITY on the subject of sexual violence. Both sides, I tell you.
I call to mind those studies of college men. If the word “rape” wasn’t used, but the questions described actions or behaviors that were coercive, or taking advantage of a drunk partner, and so on, a surprising (well, maybe not) number of men would readily admit having done, or seeing nothing wrong with, all kinds of behaviors that were not consensual sexual contacts. IOW, lots of men who see themselves as “good guys” who would never rape a woman, are in fact sexual assaulters, if not rapists, in actuality. How come the men are so sure of their objectivity in the context of covering stories about sex crimes? They likely don’t even have any realistic awareness of their own biases.
maddog @ 8 – I don’t think there is such a thing as too chicken in this situation. I don’t think anyone is required to challenge friends or family or co-workers personally. I guess there could be exceptions, like a sibling who is encouraging an offspring to go the medical route – maybe there one should try to save the offspring, but mostly, no.
But if they’re just peddling the ideology…then I think people probably should push back. But situations differ, and so do temperaments, and so on.
2019 essay by Kitty Robinson, “On Hurting Trans Women”, is excellent. She talks about how people feel hurt, and how transwomen feel hurt, and then she gets to the heart of the matter: what about my pain? What about my boundaries?
Benjamin Boyce interviews Aaron Kimberly, a trans-man, primarily about Canada’s proposed law preventing “conversion therapy”. Touches on WoLF, AGP, ROGD. Content warning: Morgane Oger.
Buzzfeed article about online harassment, with information from the Anti-Defamation League. “LGBTQ+” people were, according to their data, harassed more than other “identity groups”. The article mentions sexual harassment, harassment of specific ethnic groups, religious groups, and racial groups.
What’s not mentioned? Women. Neither as a whole or as a subset of other groups, nor as the target of misogynist harassment.
A good performance means they’re going to claim that there is no inherent advantage anyway – we know they will claim that no matter what Laurel’s results are – and Laurel will unfairly take the acclaim of whatever position away from the competitor that would otherwise have placed there. Oh and unless Laurel finishes dead last, every woman finishing lower will have lost one position on unfair terms.
Luckily, there is hope that Laurel will not win, or even place particularly well. The current leading light in that weight division is a world record holder aged 21, Li Wenwen, while Laurel is 43 in a sport where performance peaks at about 25.
Alabama governor Kay Ivey recently got fed up with the state’s worst-in-the-nation vaccination rate, and her sharply-worded comments gained national and even international coverage. She is running for reelection, and her declared and potential opponents are slamming her for “shaming” unvaccinated people. Some are even stating they are proudly among the unvaccinated. The latest act in the bizarre circus that is Alabama politics.
Ivey’s comments were literally the least she could do. State “Auditor” Zeigler is among those quoted in the article; he’s done nothing but offer political opinions having nothing to do with his supposed actual job. I suppose “exploring a run for governor” gives him even more justification to pontificate.
“I believe the people of Alabama need to ask Governor Kay Ivey why she is pushing an experimental vaccine so hard and yet she stayed silent about the lifesaving, inexpensive treatments that were made known in March of 2020,” Odle charged.
I wonder if by “inexpensive treatments” he means masks, hydroxychloroquine, bleach, or cocaine.
Well, it appears I’ve finally been banned on Friendly Atheist, presumably for arguments I was making on a post about transgenderism. And what I’m guessing is 5 years of comments have all been marked as “spam” and completely erased. There’s no trace of me left. It is as if my very existence is being denied. Heh.
I’m not sure who banned me; it could have been a new moderator, or one of the other people who post articles on the site. I’ve written to ask, and questioned the spam designation elsewhere. I’m not terribly surprised, but do wonder why the absolute blackout, and not even a suspension or, best compromise, making any trans-related comment of mine only viewable when clicking (to avoid triggering the sensitive.) I’m assuming Foxglove was somehow involved, but so far this morn they don’t seem to have noticed. They would and will use it to grandstand, of course.
I’ve been very, very careful with what I’ve said re Trans on FA. No personal attacks on others; no “misgendering” or discussions on hot button topics like bathrooms; no signs of my being angry, hurt, frustrated. And my arguments were all focused on the highest level — on basic concepts from which all else derives. Gender Identity Theory. I did that partly because that’s where the heart of the issue lies, and partly because I figured it would bore those who wanted to attack on the more personal level. My overall purpose was to persuade, of course, but my practical purpose was to help others understand the opposition, and hopefully recognize that disagreement isn’t hate.
I went out with a bang. Here’s the last thing I was allowed to post:
Glad to hear he’s better.
I, too, got the Moderna shots. I’ll be masking up again, and waiting for them to come out with an effective booster.
These “personal choices” the covidiots are making manage to escape the personal area, and it’s equally frustrating and frightening.
And here’s the last thing I wrote on the trans topic:
No, an idea can be theoretically testable and still suffer from conceptual problems. For example, the existence of God. Atheists can come up with miracles which would be hard to explain without God — the stars rearranging themselves into the words “I am God” and observed by all, say — but there’s still contradictions in a definition with the Omnis, and still a lot of vague hand waving and incoherence. These conceptual problems might take precedence, for a definitive miracle still leaves us with a confusing understanding of its source.
For those who endorse GIT, the very “central point of transgenderism” is Gender Identity. If this central point falls apart under any sort of genuine skeptical or critical examination, that’s not good.
(Edited to add: And there would still be a serious problem regarding what I put as the third point: “Gender Identity, not sex, is what makes someone a man, woman, both, or neither.” Replacing sex with gender requires its own support, and brings in a lot of conflicts involving rights.)
I suspect he means hydroxychloroquine. He could mean bleach, true. He definitely doesn’t mean masks; he’s likely anti-mask (freedom!!!), and masks are a prevention rather than treatment (although that distinction I’m sure would be lost on him).
Ivey is the “least bad” Republican candidate, a situation that points out a problem with primary elections. I can’t vote for her in the Republican primary and still make my choices in the Democratic primary for other offices. I’d rather the party apparatus decide which candidates to field. Ivey isn’t their ideological ideal, but she’s the incumbent and she’s popular. Of course, this being Alabama, a Democrat is unlikely to defeat any of the Republican candidates, including the idiots.
What I find particularly annoying is that there is no way for anyone on that site to cross check what I actually wrote with what others say I wrote (spewing hatred, making threats, hitting out at transgender people, etc. etc.) That’s always been a source of amusement to me: I’ll write something like my above example on claims and the burden of proof, and a frothing chorus immediately jerks itself into a song and dance about bigotry and Not Letting People Be Who They Really Are. I answer everyone but Foxglove (whom I consider abusive, with likely Narcissistic Personality Disorder) so there’s even a record of my responses. Or would be, if someone hadn’t wiped out thousands of comments.
It will be interesting to see if and when people notice, and what they say. It’s very unlikely that anyone will voice any support for me, but very likely that I will have support. I’ve been upvoted many times over the years. What a toxic situation.
A Catholic priest has been banned by a Manitoba archdiocese from speaking publicly after accusing residential school survivors of lying about sexual abuse to get more money from court settlements, and after he joked about shooting those who wrote graffiti on churches, among other comments.
The statements were made over weeks of services at St. Emile Roman Catholic Church in Winnipeg, and were included in videos on its Facebook page.
During a July 10 mass Father Rhéal Forest — who was temporarily placed at St. Emile while the parish’s regular pastor, Father Gerry Sembrano, was on vacation — said residential school survivors lied about being sexually abused so they would receive more money during the settlement process with the federal government.
“If they wanted extra money, from the money that was given to them, they had to lie sometimes — lie that they were abused sexually and, oop, another $50,000,” Forest said.
“It’s kind of hard if you’re poor not to lie,” he continued, adding that all of the Indigenous people he knew during his 22 years working up north liked residential schools.
We’ve been talking about sexualizing of women in sports, and I think the caption used for this photo, while well-intentioned, is an example of infantilizing women in sports.
This sweet little gal from Lexington, Kentucky just took home the gold medal in fencing and kicked that Russians booty! The first time ever a male or female from USA has ever gotten a gold medal in fencing. What a huge accomplishment!
The woman, somehow unnamed, is Lee Kiefer. She is 27, so I don’t think she fits the description of “little gal”. She has an extraordinarily impressive record of accomplishments in fencing, including 4× NCAA champion and a ton of international medals. She defeated her opponent, Inna Deriglazova, a similarly highly-accomplished fencer, by the close score of 15-13. I fail to see that as a “booty”-kicking, nor do I see any reason to refer to a “booty” in this context. Fencing is not a dance contest, or anything where style or appearance is subjectively judged; it’s a combat sport where participants compete directly against each other. It’s strenuous, requiring great speed and reflexes. It’s not “dainty” or “cute”. I think the person who posted the picture was going a bit overboard based solely on this woman’s appearance.
It is also incorrect that Kiefer is the first fencer from the USA to win a gold medal. Mariel Zagunis won the gold in individual saber in 2004 and 2008. Kiefer is the first to win gold in individual foil. It’s an easy mistake to make for people unfamiliar with fencing, I’m sure, but it’s irritating.
Apparently, Hubbard was unable to lift a single weight at the competition in the Olympics:
Schadenfreude.
Stephanie Barrett competed some days ago, and was eliminated in the round of 32, which I think was the first round of competition. Hubbard gets called “the first openly trans competitor”, but Barrett competed earlier. I suppose the fact that it was rather difficult to find out that Barrett is actually male might make him “secretly trans” and thus a different category, but I don’t know.
Abigail Shrier’s book is excellent, as is some other examples of her writing. I knew fairly early on in the book that I had some significant disagreements with her politically, but such disagreements don’t mean that everything she writes must be disparaged or discarded. I highly recommend the book.
Since reading the book, I started following her blog, which I find to be an interesting mix of viewpoints, some of them political. Her most recent blog post is largely in support of JD Vance, but mostly in support of some sort of “non-judgmental” politics. She claims that Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris were all “cackling finger-waggers” who lost, while Donald Trump and Joe Biden were not, and won. JD Vance is similarly called non-judgmental.
Two things stand out to me. The primary problem is I don’t think any of these “non-judgmental” people are actually non-judgmental. I think people make judgments all the time, wag fingers all the time, it’s just a question of degree, but most particularly of targets. Anti-intellectualism is judgmental. Anti-elitism is judgmental. Anti-liberal is judgmental. Sometimes the truth is going to hurt. I do not think that Clinton, Warren, or Harris said anything particularly troubling except to criticize people for stupid behavior.
The other thing, it is very strange to say, is that the three examples Shrier chose are all women, and are described as “cackling”. It appears they are being described as witches. Where are the judgmental men? Are they also “cackling”?
I do not agree with her assessment of Vance as non-judgmental. I just don’t think the target of his judgments are the conservative less-educated working-class population. I also do not agree that being somehow non-judgmental is any sort of key to election success, but I don’t know what is.
It’s interesting – back when Ron did his warning speech at the start of Women in Secularism 2 I was way to the “left” of him on feminism, but now he’s some distance to the “left” of me on TWAW.
A blog post worth reading: “Pregnant women”. The quotes are part of the title. The first paragraph:
I have nothing to say here about pregnant women. My title refers to the words “pregnant women,” a phrase not henceforth to be uttered in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. The permissible phrase is “pregnant people,” so as to include, for example, trans men carrying unborn babies.
Debbie Hayton has a good blog post about Stephanie Barrett, the TiM who competed in Olympic archery at the end of July. This article was written before Hubbard competed.
Yikes, I had never heard of this. Prostitutes are forced into taking drugs? I read this Ovarit thread yesterday:
[–] Althea 32 points (+32|-0) 20 hours ago
They know it’s not the same thing. How many “sex work is work” types, male or female, would advise their daughters/nieces/younger sisters to get summer jobs as prostitutes? How many of them would advise their sons/nephews/younger brothers, regardless of their own sexual orientation, to become rent boys for gay men?
[–] shewolfoffrance 31 points (+32|-1) 20 hours ago
I mean, I worked in retail before, and the customers were awful, but they never strangled me or tried to make me do illegal drugs with them. And my manager didn’t groom me online when I was underage, so that was nice.
[–] Jade 12 points (+12|-0) 16 hours ago
or tried to make me do illegal drugs with them
A lot of people overlook this as well.
I know for a fact that prostituted women aren’t “doing it just to support their drug habit”, but I have seen with my own eyes how 19 year olds start developing a booze or coke habit to be able to do it. It’s the other way around.
And that is without factoring the women who can “work” sober but are pressured daily into taking illegal drugs with the “customer” because they want a “fun girl” who “parties”.
[–] shewolfoffrance 5 points (+5|-0) 15 hours ago
As if her “manager” would back her up she refused a client’s “offer” of drugs.
[–] Jade 5 points (+5|-0) 15 hours ago
I’m going to be very honest here and say that I did see this in the golden age of a now decaying stripclub. Dancers were instructed to report on drug offers and the offered was indeed kicked out. Dancers who didn’t report and were caught with drugs were also fired on spot. Don’t be mistaken, this was less about “protecting the dancer” than it was about preventing the Council to access the CCTV, see drugs being passed on and used, and revoking the club’s license, costing the owner hundreds of thousands £££.
But yes, the norm is to be permissive of even more than just coercion to taking drugs.
New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard became the first openly transgender women’s Olympian on Monday to compete based on gender identity, but the key may be “openly.”
Canadian archer Stephanie Barrett, who finished her events last week, finds herself at the center of a fracas over whether a transgender athlete’s privacy rights outweigh the public’s right to know that a female competitor was born male — and how many such athletes may be flying under the radar in Tokyo.
It’s irritating when someone who calls themselves “Talalalalala” (sic) tells a story about having Terry Pratchett sign a book for them and saying how Pratchett implicitly affirmed their gender ID when signing their book, but then says they no longer have the book. Right. So I think they’re lying when the story is so flattering to them, and lying about Pratchett as well. But on Twitter no one needs proof about anything as long as it affirms transness, and of course it gets lapped up and retweeted by those who think they’re such critical thinkers.
What are they talking about? Nobody is more judgmental, more “cackling,” more finger-wagging than DJT. So the supposed “absence” of judgmentalism, cackling, and finger wagging does not account for DJT’s victory.
I agree; I just think the targets of DJT’s judgmentalism are the people it’s “acceptable” to be judgmental about. It’s roughly the same argument about how we should listen to the Trump voters, be understanding of them, and so on. Nobody seems to give a crap about advising Trump voters to listen to those who disagree with them, just the other way around. I don’t really think that any politicians are “non-judgmental” in an absolute sense.
Link to an open access article in the British Medical Journal’s Journal of Medical ethics. Here’s the abstract:
To be, or not to be? The role of the unconscious in transgender transitioning: identity, autonomy and well-being
Abstract
The exponential rise in transgender self-identification invites consideration of what constitutes an ethical response to transgender individuals’ claims about how best to promote their well-being. In this paper, we argue that ‘accepting’ a claim to medical transitioning in order to promote well-being would be in the person’s best interests iff at the point of request the individual is correct in their self-diagnosis as transgender (i.e., the distress felt to reside in the body does not result from another psychological and/or societal problem) such that the medical interventions they are seeking will help them to realise their preferences. If we cannot assume this—and we suggest that we have reasonable grounds to question an unqualified acceptance in some cases—then ‘acceptance’ potentially works against best interests. We propose a distinction between ‘acceptance’ and respectful, in-depth exploration of an individual’s claims about what promotes their well-being. We discuss the ethical relevance of the unconscious mind to considerations of autonomy and consent in working with transgender individuals. An inquisitive stance, we suggest, supports autonomous choice about how to realise an embodied form that sustains well-being by allowing the individual to consider both conscious and unconscious factors shaping wishes and values, hence choices.
How many “sex work is work” types, male or female, would advise their daughters/nieces/younger sisters to get summer jobs as prostitutes? How many of them would advise their sons/nephews/younger brothers, regardless of their own sexual orientation, to become rent boys for gay men?
Similarly, how many trans activists are a) not trans themselves, b)would never date a trans individual of whatever flavour, and c) would oppose transitioning for a son or daughter?
Federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu has sent a letter to her Alberta counterpart saying she shares concerns about the province’s plan to lift all of its COVID-19 health restrictions.
In the letter, addressed to Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro, Hajdu says she agrees with the Canadian Paediatric Society’s description of the move as an “unnecessary and risky gamble.”…Last week, the province ended contact tracing and said close contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19 are not required to isolate. Starting Aug. 16, those infected will no longer need to quarantine.
Shandro and Premier Jason Kenney have said Alberta’s chief medical health officer, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, came up with the plan to remove restrictions and has been clear about her reasoning. The government says the decisions are based on science and data.
Similarly, how many trans activists are a) not trans themselves, b)would never date a trans individual of whatever flavour, and c) would oppose transitioning for a son or daughter?
a) Many; b) Many, I’m sure; c) I don’t know, most of them seem to be very gung-ho about transitioning, and care little about the intactness of people’s bodies; why not sacrifice their own children on the altar of trans ideology?
Oh? The current guidelines aren’t OK, because they allow men to lower their testosterone levels to below 10 nmol/l and then call themselves women? Because the most important thing is fairness for women, and allowing men into women’s sports is not fair for women?
No. “The other important thing to remember is that trans women are women. You have got to include all women if you possibly can.”
That the TRA here is an elected official may mean there are consequences for said TRA. Elderly people are not exactly sympathetic to someone picking on an elderly man.
Decent article that talks partly about DSDs. The headline is not quite correct; the Polish athlete who lodged the complaint has quite a few areas of concern besides speed. The Olympic rules disallows people with these high testosterone levels from middle distances, but not sprints.
I’m in the middle of Material Girls, and she talks a fair amount about DSDs. Thorny subject.
No. They found remains that contain cultural trappings that can be labeled masculine and feminine from the time, along with DNA that identified sex but the sex didn’t necessarily match the trappings. It has maybe something to do with “gender expression” if loosely defined, but absolutely nothing to do with “gender identity”. There was no such thing as a “non-binary” person then, and, other than via self-identification, there still isn’t. “Gender nonconformity” is not “non-binary”.
Someone commented on a recent B&W post and brought in a quote I liked, but now I can’t find it and don’t remember whose comment it was, so I’m hooping someone will be able to recognise it from the scraps of it that I remember. It was about how satisfying, how delicious it is to engage in cruelty, scorn and such while also being praised for being moral; I believe it was in relation to yet another pile-on from the TRA crowd.
To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ― Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow
Ok this is odd – I found the Project Gutenberg Crome Yellow [sic – I think ‘Crome’ is a house name] because I wanted to see the context, but ctrl f says it’s not there.
This page says that the quote is indeed by Aldous Huxley, but from the Introduction to The Easton Press edition of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1934), signed July 24, 1933.
Specifically, he comes out as G. Perhaps he’s B. But not L, not T, and not +. (And I have no idea if he’s Q, because I don’t know what that means anymore.)
WaM — now that’s funny, because of course Robin is a minion, that is, a literary tool, not even supposed to be a real person. He’s like Hercule Poirot’s Hastings, or Captain Nemo’s crew, or, if you like, the apostles at the Last Supper — he’s just put there to ask the readers’ questions for them, so that Batman can answer in order to keep the plot moving ahead. So sure, Robin is as “+”, or as “Q” (and you can keep working backwards as far as you are comfortable in that alphabet soup) as you like. But, like any obedient “+”, he’s not believable.
Good point about him being a minion. I honestly don’t know much about Robin beyond the campy show from the ’60s, but it doesn’t seem out of character for him to be gay. Of course as a fictional character he can be anything the writers choose to make him (as I recall, they chose to make him dead a few years back).
But anyway, aside from being annoying, this tendency to refer to individuals as being, or coming out as, “LGBTQ+” is bad writing. It’s like saying “I drive an ROYGBIV Corvette” when my (fictional) Corvette is monochromatically red.
Sigh. Simplistic and full of assumptions. Comments on a few of the bullet points (why are they in descending order?) below.
10) You don’t trust mainstream media and academia because you believe they’ve fallen prey to extremist ideology.
He assumes that “extremist ideology” means far-left. He assumes “don’t trust” is a pervasive characteristic across all issues. Some of us don’t trust certain mainstream media and certain parts of academia on certain issues because they have fallen prey to ideology, extremist or not, that is problematic.
8) You think the word feminist excludes/antagonizes men.
There are many versions of feminism. It depends what you mean. Some do hold that feminism is a movement for women, and by definition does not include men. Feminism can’t control how men react to it, and some men will feel antagonized; why should that not be the case? The oppressor class made uncomfortable, isn’t that usually true? And if he doesn’t see feminism as referring to an oppressed class seeking liberation from an oppressor class, then see the previous point.
6) You believe it’s a strategic error to work with (insert left-leaning group) even if you agree with their aims.
It may be a strategic error to work with some group on the left or the right that agrees with you on some issues but not in general. It’s worth discussing and thinking about, rather than dismissing the concept out of hand.
5) You’re afraid “cancel culture” will be coming for you next, even though you try to be respectful of all.
Cancel culture he describes as “a fabricated term that’s an attempt to dismiss often valid concerns raised about harmful behavior”. That’s quite a silly characterization, even though I dislike the term. What behavior? What makes it harmful? Why should people lose their jobs, be banned from events or venues, have their books delisted or pulped? Valid concerns about “harmful” behavior should lead to discussion, not actions like these.
4) You fail to see the harm in questioning the validity of transgender identity.
He’s claiming scientific backing, and likening disagreements to “flat Earth” views. Sorry, no. The way to deal with “flat Earth” views is via evidence, not badgering and silencing. Science does not support the claims of transgender ideology, and an honest discussion would show this, but instead it’s deemed “harmful” to question the validity. He says, “Let’s accept people’s self-identification when it isn’t harming us or others”; well, that’s the point, isn’t it? That it is in fact harming us and others? But he won’t allow discussion on this topic because there is “harm” even in questioning it.
Re Robin: the character started off as a minion, but has gone much farther than that. He’s had solo comics, and his role has been played by several people (Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, others) over the years (that is, the comic book “real” person portraying “Robin” in the comic book has changed, due to death or unavailability of the previous “Robin” person). Several Robins went off to solo crimefighting careers under new names. The comic book world is extremely complicated these days. So, under the circumstances, it is not at all strange to develop his personal story this far.
(In the comics, Batman has been, with a couple of temporary exceptions, always Bruce Wayne. Go figure.)
I do agree that its ridiculous for him to come out as “LGBTQ+” rather than “gay” or “unsure of his sexuality”, and I absolutely love the “ROYGBIV Corvette” analogy, that’s perfect.
4) You fail to see the harm in questioning the validity of transgender identity.
“You fail to see the harm in questioning the validity of religion.”
And how many times have humanists insisted that religion involves truth claims, not just general exhortations to “be good” or “this is what I, as an individual, choose to believe because it makes me feel better and/or be a better person?” The words “harm” and “validity” don’t go together. Christianity is not more likely to be true if it helps some of its adherents refrain from stealing. Satan is not more likely to be possessing the souls of children because, if true, that’s really bad.
Nor is God more likely to exist because, if we’re wrong, we’ll suffer great harm. For it has just occurred to me that this argument is basically a transgender version of Pascal’s Wager.
I’m not sure what the point of this “academic” article is:
Kathy Dury, “LGBTQ…Z?”
Abstract
In this essay, I draw the discourses around bestiality/zoophilia into the realm of queer theory in order to point to a new form of animal advocacy, something that might be called, in shorthand, loving animals. My argument is quite simple: if all interdicts against bestiality depend on a firm notion of exactly what sex is (and they do), and if queer theory disrupts that firm foundation by arguing that sexuality is impossible to define beforehand and pervades many different kinds of relations (and it does), then viewing bestiality in the frame of queer theory can give us another way to conceptualize the limitations of human exceptionalism. By focusing on transformative connections between humans and animals, a new form of animal advocacy emerges through the revolutionary power of love.
Is the point to expand the Queer umbrella? “You too can be Queer, if you have sex with animals!!”
Or is the point to promote a new form of animal advocacy? “Animal advocacy is important, and let me suggest a new type: have sex with animals!!”
“I realize that I’m not the LGBTQIAS (the “s” stands for “straight”) hall monitor, but while everyone and their abba has decided that queerness is more about haircuts and pronouns than who you bone, actual queer people are still second class citizens under the law.”
This is part of a longer thread taking the micky out of an auction house that tragically misnamed a painting, but the last one really gave me a (wry) laugh.
An article in The Atlantic about unnecessary medical procedures pushed by doctors for various reasons. Often enough the doctors think they are actually helping the patient. “Gender affirming” surgeries were not mentioned, but they were the first thing I thought of when I saw the article. It is really difficult to prevent these procedures.
Have you ever written about “Multiple Systems”? It’s like transgender, except that it’s not, say, a teenage girl claiming that she’s a boy inside, but rather a teenager (or “adult”) claiming that he, or she, has multiple persons inside, AKA headmates, and that if you try to integrate the various multiple persons (which you condescendingly call “personalities”), you are committing literal murder.
Twitter’s new popup, log in or sign up. Making the site unnavigable was just the reason I needed to quit going there. I didn’t miss facebook when they did this either. Like a paywall only worse. Good riddance.
A thought crossed my mind:. Marion Miller, in Scotland, who was actually charged with a crime for the suffragist ribbon photo sharing, was supposed to be in court on July 20. I can’t find any update. Does anyone know what happened?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes a good piece on Unherd about the situation for Afghan women, noting that “[i]n today’s perverse American culture, however, more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights — to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space — are either removed or under serious threat.” Hemant Mehta completely misses the point, which is entirely unsurprising. I like very much what AHA has to say in her essay.
There’s nothing friendly about it. Just another sexist shit man venting at a woman for expressing a view he doesn’t like. Frankly I decide Hemant was a phony also-ran in the movement a long time ago and haven’t bothered with him since. I never understood why anyone took him seriously.
The British Journal of Sports Medicine is stating that testosterone levels alone do not sufficiently account for determination of unfair advantage in women’s sports. I think that’s a sensible point. However, this appears to be widely interpreted as exonerating athletes like Caster Semenya and possibly trans athletes. This is a bad, and to my understanding incorrect, interpretation. High testosterone levels are an indication of being male (but not the only indication), and being male is a disqualification for women’s sports, advantage or not, although it’s almost always an advantage to have gone through male development.
I can’t read anything beyond the beginning, but this article is poorly worded even up to that point, because it refers to “women with DSDs”; in this case, “people with DSDs” would be better, at the very least because some of these people are males who appear female. I am concerned also that the focus on testosterone will result in this correction being used to justify normal males competing in female competitions without any sort of medical intervention. I also could imagine it being used to justify exogenous testosterone use. I don’t know if this article actually gets into these points.
Guess who has a take on the bar clash? PZ. Unsurprising, but what caught me off guard was just how bad his take was. The first sentence says it all:
#IStandWithMeb and the latest TERFy nonsense
The contretemps du jour on Twitter is an attempt by TERFs to take over a trans-inclusive bar in Edinburgh (Meb is the bartender who politely threw them out).
Setting aside the usual silly not-at-all-a-slur, going to a bar for drinks food and a chin wag is now “an attempt to take over a bar”.
Jeez. I see what you mean. The first para is as if he’s taken stupid-pills.
The contretemps du jour on Twitter is an attempt by TERFs to take over a trans-inclusive bar in Edinburgh (Meb is the bartender who politely threw them out). Marion Millar, a notorious transphobe who is currently awaiting trial for hate crimes against trans people, was one of the organizers who “innocently” (yeah, if you believe that you’re pretty darned gullible) booked a night out with the girls at Doctors, a pub in Edinburgh.
While she was hoping to get a few days of quiet rest before her court appearance, she’s being hounded again. Someone Tweeted her address. Remember that Marion has children, some of them vulnerable. She reported it to Police Scotland, who decided they would do absolutely nothing about it.
The person who tweeted the address later tweeted this:
I’ve deleted my tweet due to the unnecessary and manic responses I’m receiving from TERFs. However, posting information that is freely available on the internet by the search of someone’s name is not doxxing.
I need hardly point out that doxxing is not about posting new or previously unavailable information, it’s about intimidation, bullying, harassment or violence. This person either wanted to frighten Marion (they succeeded) or wanted someone else to frighten, harass or do violence to her or her children. Or perhaps they wanted to score cheap TRA points and didn’t bother to think about (or didn’t care about) the consequences. Either way, it absolutely is doxxing.
So (at least) two absolutely disgusting things here:
1. Someone posted this information in the hope that or not caring that something bad would happen to Marion or her children. This person then absolved themselves of all guilt about any consequences and cast themselves as the victim, because of the rightfully outraged response.
2. Police Scotland doesn’t think this is a crime or that they should do anything about it. This despite taking action against Marion in the first place for the crime of ribbons and turning up mob-handed to eject her friends from a pub. And despite their extreme rapid response to David Paisley when he was scared by the above ribbon. It’s very difficult to believe that this lack of response is anything other than a punishment, perhaps for Marion’s initial refusal to be arrested (because she had to look after her children) and the negative feedback Police Scotland have received for their inexplicable actions.
Police Scotland have become enforcers of an ideological position. This is horrifying. They’re going to make us rebuild that wall, at this rate. The truly terrifying thing is that it would be better to be on this side, for once.
I was chatting on a Twitter thread about where people are getting the various lies about the Marion Millar thing and I remembered PZ’s post quoted an article and I went to look and…. You’ll never guess who it’s by….
OK, you probably guessed. It’s notCursedE.
notCursedE is vile. An absolute horror show. A horror show featuring an evil shadow of a trainwreck of a morally defunct misogynist. There is absolutely no low to which he won’t gladly plummet. Absolutely nothing is off the table in pursuit of his desire to masturbate in women’s toilets.
That’s PZ’s source.
I shouldn’t be surprised, of course. I didn’t think for a second that PZ would have checked the source in any way, since it agreed with his ‘position’. And notCursedE does have a knack of wheedling his way into (formerly) semi-respectable people’s discourse.
But if you ever reach the point where you’re using notCursedE as a source, you’ve hit bottom, burst through and kept on diving. Fuck you, PZ.
Iraan, a small oilfield town of 1,200 people in west Texas, has been struck so hard by the coronavirus pandemic that the entire town has essentially shut down, including the school district and local businesses.
I feel my life has been better not being aware of notCursedE, but then again some poor sod has to be so that they can warn the oblivious like me. latsot, if you ever do get like that, how about I just come over and slap you about with a kipper until you see sense?
And, boom goes the dynamite: Lin Wood, Sydney Powell, and other MAGA lawyers sanctioned for “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.” Ordered to pay the state of Michigan and City of Detroit’s legal fees, complete ethics training at their own expense, and referred to their respective bar associations for discipline.
And what a wonderful boom it was – I’ve been waiting for that. I did see someone asked a member of law twitter (might have been @questauthority) why to a lay person this read as though a federal judge had walked up to the sanctioned attorneys and needed them in the ‘nads. He replied that was basically exactly what had happened. Lin Wood is going to have an absolute meltdown given his God complex.
She systematically demolished their arguments, pointing out all the ways they continued to lie throughout the proceeding, and found them liable under each of the three sources of sanctions liability. It’s 110 pages of taking them to the woodshed.
Sure enough, Lin Wood is indeed having a meltdown. Blaming it all on Communism and then calling for a general strike. Many people are mocking him, but for those who can be bothered, Popehat has at least three cutting tweets on the topic.
I’m writing to ask you a question which has been recently on my mind. It concerns the phenomenon of these so-called „TERF wars” and the question is how mainstream are they in your countries.
I would say that here (in Poland) it’s marginal. Yes, there have been some incidents. To give you an example: a couple of months ago one Urszula Kuczyńska lost her position of an MP assistant because of her “terfy” views (her crime was to publicly criticize the use of the phrase “uterus havers” instead of “women”). However, her left-wing political party “Together” occupies a really marginal place in our political scene, with more or less 2-3% of voters choosing them, so they are a political plankton with little influence. Indeed, I’m not aware of anything of this sort here which couldn’t be described in exactly these terms, i.e., as a fringe incident.
On the other hand, my impression is that in the anglosphere the “terf wars” became a significant factor in the mainstream discussions and legislative solutions (but please, correct me if I’m wrong). And here is my question: is this a specifically Anglo-Saxon phenomenon? How about other countries – France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Greece? Fringe incidents or a part of the mainstream? I sincerely do not know, hence the question.
(Hm … as a follow-up question: if it’s specifically Anglo-Saxon, then what the hell is wrong with you, dear Anglo-Saxons?)
I think that as in other places the issue isn’t that central, until it is. Most of life goes on without having anything to do with who is or is not transgender…until something happens that forces it on everyone’s attention. I think those occasions are steadily increasing.
I think that as in other places the issue isn’t that central, until it is. Most of life goes on without having anything to do with who is or is not transgender…until something happens that forces it on everyone’s attention.
So much is happening behind the scenes, outside of the public eye. With institutional capture, you end up with policy by stealth. In the UK, look how much of Stonewall’s “inclusive” agenda has been enacted without public debate, vote, or oversight. Changes to policing; hospital policy; prison policy; the elimination of single sex spaces for women. How much of that could have been accomplished in plain sight, using plain language? How much of the public would have agreed to any of that if they’d had a say? Very little. It sounds dramatic, but it’s a real life conspiracy.
Ophelia #118: yes, I understand this and surely you are right that “most of life goes on without having anything to do with who is or is not transgender”. Just to clarify, in the fragment of my previous comment about the TERF wars going mainstream in the anglosphere, I had in mind the following phenomena in particular:
Major news outlets (e.g. NYT, Guardian – not some fringe brochures or obscure internet sites) publishing discussions/polemics on the topic.
Bitter internal fights in major political parties, like Labour in the UK (no, Polish “Together” party does not count) and in the editorial offices of major newspapers (e.g., Guardian), sometimes ending with firing or sacking the “culprit”.
Cancellations of lectures/presentations at major universities,
Official regulations designed to deal specifically with the issue of trans people’s access to single sex (gender?) shelters (UK, US), sometimes with the funding of such shelters made dependent on their policy in this respect,
The approach of the police to hate speech incidents (Scotland)
The list is surely not complete (moreover, not Bruce #119 is probably right about much of the stuff happening behind the scenes). Anyway, that’s roughly what I had in mind when I wrote about going mainstream. At the moment I associate this just with the anglosphere and I do not really know what to think: is it just some strange Anglo-Saxon fad, with the rest of the world mostly (and blissfully) ignoring this? Or is it something more than that?
I know that this blog has a fair share of international readers/commenters and that’s why I asked.
Germany and Spain are starting to have these “gender” conflicts. I vaguely recall seeing reports from elsewhere in Europe. I don’t know about other places.
A captain at the Wayne County, Georgia, Sheriff’s Office who promoted anti-vaccination propaganda on his Facebook page has died from COVID-19.
Capt. Joe Manning died this week at the age of 57 after what Sheriff Chuck Moseley described as a brief battle with COVID-19. “Captain Manning was an integral part of our family and our hearts are broken,” Moseley said. “Our love and prayers go forward to his family.”
Manning, who is survived by his wife, three children, and eight grandchildren, frequently posted anti-vaccine messages on his Facebook page. On August 14th, for instance, Manning posted a meme that stated, “If we lose on vaccines we will completely lose our right to sovereignty over our own bodies.” Manning encouraged people to stock up on the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, frequently used to deworm horses, and increasingly being taken by people in a misguided attempt to treat or prevent COVID-19.
I have recently taken an almost obsessive interest in the study of cults. I have thus far been reading Cults Inside Out by Rick Ross, Losing Reality by Robert Lifton, and Cults in our Midst by Margaret Singer [1]. Rather than write a separate summary or review of each book, I will try to make a synthesis of what I take to be some of the main points. “Cult apologists” often dismiss the cult label as a pejorative to stigmatize new or unconventional religions. All the authors are therefore careful to stress that cults are defined by their behavior rather than their beliefs, and while many cults are religious in nature, almost any cause, ideology, or belief system can form the basis of a cult. There are cults based on political ideologies, philosophies, business plans, health fads, alternative lifestyles, self-help programs, meditation techniques, martial arts etc. Even abusive and controlling relationships can be understood as a kind of “Cult of One” (cf. Ross) and display much of the same dynamics as larger cults.
Robert Lifton provided what still seems to be the most widely accepted definition of a “destructive cult” [2] based on 3 main criteria (my formulation):
1. The group is centered around a charismatic leader (or, in some cases, a small ruling elite) with little or no meaningful accountability. The leader is believed to possess some unique insight or knowledge and increasingly becomes the subject of worship until – no matter what the group was initially supposed to be about – the “cause” mutates into “whatever the leader says”.
2. The group uses certain highly coercive persuasion techniques – known as “thought reform” or (in everyday speech) “brain washing” – to gain undue influence and control over its members, the end result being that the members become increasingly dependent on the leader and end up making decisions that are clearly not in their own best interest, but consistently in the best interest of the leader.
3. The leader uses his/her influence over the members in harmful ways, ranging from financial exploitation and the extraction of unpaid labor to medical neglect, criminal acts, sexual exploitation, violence, terrorism, mass-suicide, mass murder etc.
One common myth is that only people who suffer from other major problems join cults. While it is certainly true that people going through a difficult period in their lives are especially vulnerable to recruitment by cults, no one is immune. In fact, cults are usually not interested in “damaged goods”, but are mainly looking for healthy, intelligent, resourceful individuals who can do useful work for the group and bring in a steady stream of cash. The Church of Scientology famously specializes in recruiting celebrities – hardly a notoriously weak group – and Aum Shinrikyo (infamous for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway) disproportionally recruited scientists.
Nobody deliberately joins a cult. Indeed, another common feature of destructive cults is the use of deceptive recruitment techniques. More often than not potential members are first recruited into a “front group” with no obvious connection to the cult. The first encounter might be a perfectly innocent looking course, lecture, or seminar on some interesting topic, a political meeting, a personality test, a therapy session, a yoga class etc. Only after luring potential recruits more deeply into its web does the group start gradually revealing its true nature as well as its more eccentric doctrines. E.g. scientologists go through years of “auditing” and indoctrination before hearing a single word about Xenu the evil galactic overlord.
Expressions like “thought reform”, “mind control” and “brain washing” conjure up associations to all sorts of science fiction-like techniques for “reprograming” people’s brains and turning them into mindless robots or zombies (Winston Smith, Darth Vader, the Winter Soldier, Peeta Mellark, Dreykov’s Widows etc.). By comparison the real thought reform process is almost disappointingly mundane (or at least that’s my impression). Some cults do indeed employ more “exotic” techniques like hypnosis (in itself not all it’s cracked up to be in popular fiction), guided imagery (to instill false memories), hallucinogenic drugs, various methods for inducing hyper-ventilation and dizziness (to be re-interpreted as spiritual epiphanies) etc. Cult leaders like Jim Jones also bolstered their credibility by performing what appeared to be miraculous healings and by appearing to have access to uncannily accurate information about total strangers, seemingly through direct revelation from God. However, by far the most common (and almost certainly the most effective) techniques are all familiar from non-cultic setting, e.g. (non-verbal) social cues, deference to authority, conformity and peer-pressure, overwork, sleep-deprivation etc. What’s different about the thought reform process is both the intensity and the coordinated nature of the persuasive effort as well as the recruit’s own ignorance that any such effort is going on.
After the initial encounter the next step is usually trying to lure the potential recruit to a more isolated setting free of external influences. The recruit is met with “love bombing” and made to feel special, chosen, part of an exclusive elite on a mission of cosmic significance. By observing the other members, the recruit quickly hones in on what the expected behaviors are and learns to model his/her own behavior on theirs. Since no explicit orders or instructions are given, everything feels voluntary and even spontaneous. What follows is a systematic process of destabilizing and breaking down the recruit’s sense of self by inducing shame and guilt (the “unfreezing phase”). Depending on the particular teachings of the group this may take the form of confessing your “sins”, confronting your inner demons, or overcoming the “excuses” that are “holding you back” and preventing you from “taking control” of your life etc. The details are irrelevant, since anything other than total surrender and obedience to the leader will be turned back against you and re-framed as sinful, pathological, excuses, signs of weakness, lack of commitment etc. Through endless attacks and confrontations combined with intense peer-pressure, physical and mental exhaustion, sleep-deprivation etc., the recruit is finally reduced to a state of helplessness and dependency. In this state the recruit learns to parrot back whatever the group wants him/her to say (the “changing” phase). This in turn is met with social reward and re-interpreted by the group as a cathartic experience, a sign of progress, proof of finally “getting it” etc. (the “refreezing” phase).
To prevent backsliding, cults do everything in their power to monopolize the time and attention of their members and cut them off from other perspectives or sources of information. This can include anything from geographical isolation to demands that members shun friends or family members that are critical of the cult. Another method is simply keeping the members engaged in endless cult-led activities, which has the double benefit of limiting communication to other cult members while simultaneously keeping everyone too busy to think too deeply or carefully about anything. Most cults also develop an internal jargon that encourage circular reasoning and reliance on thought-terminating clichés while at the same time making it significantly more difficult to have an intelligible conversation with outsiders. Finally, cult members learn to fear and demonize everyone outside the cult, engage in self-censorship, and only trust information coming from the leader. Ironically, one common perception is that people join cults because they’re too “trusty”, or “naïve”, or “gullible”. On the other hand, most cults are into all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories and quite often see themselves as the only people on the planet who have not been “brainwashed”, “taken the blue pill”, “drunk the Kool-Aid” etc. It’s the “sheeple” and the “systemites” outside the group who are living in the Matrix while the enlightened few on the inside are the ones who have taken the red pill, had their eyes opened and see the world as it really is. Apparently extreme distrust, suspicion, and cynicism (especially of the selective kind) can be manipulated as easily as trust, naivety, and gullibility.
I don’t think any of the authors specifically mentions cognitive dissonance or justification spirals, but it’s clearly implied in various places. Once a concession to the cult has been made, you have a stake in defending it: “If this were a con game, only an idiot could fall for it. But I’m not an idiot, so it can’t be a con game”; “If this were immoral, only a despicable person would do it. But I’m not a despicable person, so it can’t be immoral”. The same justifications used to rationalize concessions a,b,c make it very hard to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconsistent or hypocritical even to yourself (practically the definition of cognitive dissonance). On your path over to the dark side, you never “cross a line” where things instantly and abruptly change from “definitely ok” to “definitely not ok”, and before you know it you have gone all the way to x,y,z and burned all bridges behind you, and now there is no longer any “face-saving” way of turning back. There is also the closely related Sunk Cost Fallacy: More misery may be easier to accept than the realization that all those former sacrifices were in vain.
[1] I have also been watching Jonestown – Terror in the Jungle, The Jonestown Massacre- Paradise Lost, and Going Clear – Scientology and the Prison of Belief, all available for free on YouTube.
[2] It has become a bit of a cliché to talk about how a certain group or movement (trumpists, QAnon, TRAs etc.) is “just like a cult”. Others are quick to identify the various ways in which said group/movement does not meet the formal definition of a cult and conclude that any comparison is therefore fallacious in principle. As Timothy Snyder has pointed out we see something similar in the case of “fascism”. There are people eager to portray everything about the current surge of authoritarianism as just “like the 1930s”, while others argue that since what we’re seeing now is not like the 1930s in every way, there are no lessons to be learned from the history of fascism that are at all relevant to our current situation. The latter clearly doesn’t follow. A movement can display cultish or fascistic traits to a lesser or greater extent, and the differences can be as enlightening as the similarities.
Gavin Grimm, assigned female at birth but identifying as a man, was refused access to the boys’ bathroom at his Virginia high school. Grimm sued, and now the Gloucester County School Board must pay $1.3m for breaking gender discrimination law after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear its appeal.
Over on Why Evolution is True Jerry Coyne has put up another GC post, this one highlighting Abigail Shrier’s criticism of schools allowing kids to transition without informing the parent(s). Trans issues are coming up more often, and I’m discerning a shift from “there seems to be some problems here” to “wtsf.”
I didn’t take any pictures/video because wheelchair… crowd… small space… I would have been filming people’s groins. But Menno was filming most of it and there will be footage appearing today, I’m sure.
It was a good event, a lot of seriously good speeches and quite a lot of chanting crammed into an hour. There was a counter-protest, which involved some people with a megaphone shouting and then trying to push into the crowd (I don’t know why, they could just have gone round the side and walked in without pushing, but that’s what they chose to do). I spoke to a lot of enthusiastic witches and stroked a lot of dogs (familiars).
The National Women’s Hockey League, a North American professional sports league, is changing its name to Premiere Hockey Federation. Up front is the point that they want their players to be known for their skill and talent. They also want to be open to people of various gender identities. I suspect this means they are open to women and to men to claim not to be men. A quote in the article is about how removing the word “women” from the title and the W from the logo is empowering. Warning, risk of concussions from smacking yourself in the head.
I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but today was the sentencing. He’ll be out in 2 years for strangling a woman to death in yet another ‘sex game gone wrong’.
A tearful Western University-affiliated professor says she refuses to take the COVID-19 vaccine and compares herself to Socrates – “who was executed for asking questions” – as she contemplates being fired by the school, which has made vaccination mandatory.
…
“I am facing imminent dismissal, after 20 years on the job, because I will not submit to having an experimental vaccine injected into my body,” Ponesse says in the video. “My school employs me to be an authority on ethics. And I’m here to tell you it’s ethically wrong to coerce someone to take a vaccine.”
…
Her video is being promoted online by a little-known group whose website, among other things, recommends the livestock deworming drug ivermectin as “a suitable candidate for early out-patient treatment of COVID-19.” Health Canada officials warn against using it, noting: “Canadians should never consume health products intended for animals.”
…
Without providing any evidence to support her claims, Ponesse questions in her video the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines – which clinical trials have shown helped reduce the number of infections, serious illness and death among the vaccinated – by saying she had “read medical journals” and “consulted with professors of science and medicine” who have told her “there are serious questions about how safe the vaccines really are.”
Data from the Public Health Agency of Canada contradicts that viewpoint.
…
“Among the vaccinated population, this vaccine campaign has essentially ended the pandemic,” Dr. Chris Mackie, the London area’s top doctor, said in July as local cases among unvaccinated residents started spiking.
Last month, Western officials announced the school was making COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for anyone to access the campus, eliminating the option of regular testing for students and staff “who simply choose not to be vaccinated” against the virus. Western and its colleges were one of the first post-secondary schools in Canada to make such a move.
The Free Press also includes a hand “Fact Check” with this story.
FACT CHECK
Ethics professor Julie Ponesse of Western University’s Huron University College made several remarks about the COVID-19 vaccine that don’t square with publicly available opinions from experts through Health Canada. Here are her comments, and theirs:
“It (the vaccine) has not yet been shown to be effective.” – Ponesse
“People who have received two doses will have better protection against both getting the virus and getting sick from the virus.” – Dr. Kumanan Wilson, internal medicine physician, The Ottawa Hospital.
“I don’t have to watch the news to find out if COVID vaccines are safe. I read medical journals and I consult my colleagues who are professors of science and medicine. I’ve heard from doctors that there are serious questions about how safe these vaccines are.” – Ponesse
“Research and testing have shown the ingredients in the COVID-19 vaccines to be safe. They leave the body shortly after vaccination, like with all vaccines. And as with all vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines teach the body’s immune system to recognize and attack the virus that causes COVID-19 and helps to protect you if you’re exposed to the virus in the future.” – Dr. Ayesha Raza, family physician at Centre Francophone de Toronto.
“I’m here to teach (my students) that it is ethically wrong to impose an experimental medical procedure as a condition of employment.” – Ponesse
“The COVID-19 vaccines were rigorously tested during their development and carefully reviewed by Health Canada. After people have received the vaccines, real-world effectiveness and safety are monitored. Any safety concerns are expected to be very rare.” – Dr. Upton D. Allen, Chair in Infectious Diseases Research at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children
Pardon the length. The personal, local angle drew my interest. This professor only joined the Huron faculty years after I was there, so I have no personal connection or familiarity with her, or her teaching.
I’m wondering if I’d have more respect for the ethics professor and her self-comparison to Socrates if she wrote that she’d researched the Covid vaccine, found that it was both safe and effective, but nonetheless chose to refuse it on the principle that “it is ethically wrong to coerce someone to take a vaccine.”
We’re in the final week and a bit of a federal election canpaign here in Canada. While out on a grocery shopping expedition, my wife and I saw a group of People’s Party of Canada supporters at a major intersection. (PPC is a recently created party, founded by a former Conservative Party cabinet member/failed Conservative leadership candidate Maxime Bernier, and is designed to appeal to those who think the Conservatives are too left wing.) On a number of theis signs were two slogans: NO VACCINE PASSPORTS. NO MORE LOCKDOWNS. The irony of these slogans being used in a federal campaign is that vaccine passports and lockdowns are a provincial matter.
Just to get a bit more sense of where they’re coming from, here’s there platform regarding global warming and environment. If it wasn’t the actual platform of an actual party seeking actual power, it would be hilarious. It’s like climate denial bingo.
ISSUE
The Liberal government is spending billions of dollars at home and abroad to fight global warming—or “climate change” as it is now called to account for every natural weather event and its opposite.
In order to lower greenhouse gas emissions, it has imposed taxes and countless regulations, it subsidizes inefficient and costly “green technology,” and it is blocking the development of oil resources crucial to our prosperity.
It is an undisputed fact that the world’s climate has always changed and will continue to change. Until twelve thousand years ago, much of Canada was under ice, and it is thanks to natural climate change that we can live here today.
There is however no scientific consensus on the theory that CO2 produced by human activity is causing dangerous global warming today or will in the future, and that the world is facing environmental catastrophes unless these emissions are drastically reduced. Many renowned scientists continue to challenge this theory.
The policy debate about global warming is not grounded on science anymore. It has been hijacked by proponents of big government who are using crude propaganda techniques to impose their views. They publicly ridicule and harass anyone who expresses doubt. They make exaggerated claims to scare people. They even manipulate school children, getting them to pressure their parents and to demonstrate in the streets.
FACTS
Climate change alarmism is based on flawed models that have consistently failed at correctly predicting the future. None of the cataclysmic predictions that have been made about the climate since the 1970s have come true. No new ice age. No steady warming in direct relation with increases in CO2 levels. No disappearance of polar ice caps. No exceptional rise in ocean levels. No abnormal increase in catastrophic weather events. No widespread crop failure and famine.
In fact, CO2 is beneficial for agriculture and there has recently been a measurable “greening” of the world in part thanks to higher levels. Despite what global warming propaganda claims, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is an essential ingredient for life on Earth and needed for plant growth.
OUR PLAN
Given the uncertainties over the scientific basis of global warming, and the certainties about the huge costs of measures designed to fight it, there is no compelling reason to jeopardize our prosperity with more government interventions.
A People’s Party government will:
Withdraw from the Paris Accord and abandon unrealistic greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.
Stop sending billions of dollars to developing countries to help them reduce their emissions.
Abolish the Liberal government’s carbon tax and leave it to provincial governments to adopt programs to reduce emissions if they want to.
Abolish subsidies for green technology and let private players develop profitable and efficient alternatives.
Invest in adaptation strategies if problems arise as a result of any natural climate change.
Prioritize implementing practical solutions to make Canada’s air, water and soil cleaner, including bringing clean drinking water to remote First Nations communities.
That reads like a gop position paper. And I guess that’s the difference between Canada and the USA—in Canada, those ideas are fringe; here, they can get you elected president.
Despite what global warming propaganda claims, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is an essential ingredient for life on Earth and needed for plant growth.
Water is essential too, despite what you may have heard from all those flood mitigation extremists.
Just read Jane Clare Jones essay on sex denialism, ‘Smashing the Binary’: Notes on the Historicization of Sex, wherein, in the course of “smashing” one binary, sex denialists end up creating another in its place.
The place I want to start this unpacking is with the perhaps surprising admission that I agree with the sex denialist claim that sex isn’t binary. If we start from the mathematical roots of the concept, ‘a binary’ is a formulation of absolute difference in which there are only two possible options; in mathematical terms 0 and 1, in Aristotelian logic, what we would call a contradiction, that is, A and not-A.33 The sex denialist literature is entirely committed to the thought that for sexual difference to be empirically meaningful, it must conform to the
structure of a pure logical contradiction. The texts are littered with claims like “the physical distinction between men and women is not absolute” (Whittle 2002, 7), “sex differences are not all that clear-cut” (Hubbard 1996, 161), it’s impossible to “draw a hard line between the sexes” (Hines 2020, 709), “there is no natural dividing line between the sexes,” (Rothblatt 1993, 110) and there is not “two exclusive types: female and male.” (Kessler 1990, 709) On the basis of the fact that sexual difference does not present itself in the form of an absolute logical contradiction, the sex denialist then concludes that the perception of human sexual dimorphism is false, and is, hence, a historical artefact. Whereas, the truth, I would argue, is that sex denial itself is an artefact produced by the belief that empirical differences must manifest as a perfect logical contradiction to be meaningful.
It should be evident to anyone who stops to think about their experiences of the empirical world that there are pretty much no differences we routinely cognise that have the form of a pure binary contradiction. Most natural and man-made phenomena have fuzzy edges and exhibit anomalies. Streams turn into rivers. Day shades into night. Yellow becomes green becomes blue. It is wrong to conclude from this that the difference between night and day is a historical artefact, or that the existence of green demonstrates that yellow may as well be blue. That is, the fact that there are liminal states, or a small number of anomalies or ambiguous cases between any cognisable difference is entirely as we would expect for any empirical phenomenon, and has no bearing on whether our concepts are grasping a generally meaningful empirical regularity. The irony of all this is that the impression that the existence of anomalies negates the meaningfulness of concepts is, indeed, an artefact produced by the conceptual framing. Fausto-Sterling takes herself to be battling against “the idealised, Platonic, biological world,” in which “human beings are divided into two kinds: a perfectly dimorphic species,” (Five sexes revisited, 19-20) but the point is that the biological world isn’t a manifestation of Platonic ideas, and Platonic idealism is an, at best partial, theory about the way concepts work. What is, however, eminently Platonic is the assumption that only phenomena which manifests as an idealised, absolute binary would be meaningfully distinct, when it is evidently the case that conceptual discrimination works perfectly well with fuzzy edges and anomalies all the time.
Despite what global warming propaganda claims, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is an essential ingredient for life on Earth and needed for plant growth.
Water is essential too, despite what you may have heard from all those flood mitigation extremists.
Yeah, there are a whole bunch of whoppers in there, with veritable armies of straw on the march.
-I’ve heard no scientists claim that climate doesn’t change over time naturally.
-I’ve heard no scientists claim that only humans have ever caused climate change.
-I’ve heard no scientists claim that CO2 is not essential to the habitability of Earth; in fact, without greenhouse gases, Earth would be a frozen waste.
-My favourite is how “Until twelve thousand years ago, much of Canada was under ice, and it is thanks to natural climate change that we can live here today,” as if Canada has been covered in ice for almost all Earth’st 4.5 billion year history!
No, the poison is in the dose. Water is essential to life, but it is possible to drink too much water and die from it. “Floods” and “drowning” are two more instances of having too much of what is normally a good thing. It’s possible to have too much oxygen, resulting in dangerous fires (see the Apollo 1 fire). They’re parroting common denialist talking points, some of which are wilfull misconstructions of actual facts. Are they really that stupid, really that evil, or both?
They’re the type who won’t admit the house is on fire until the clothes they’re wearing have ignited. Pulling the fire alarm any time before then is “alarmist.” Fire insurance, fire extinguishers, fire exits, fire drills, and fire departments are all Socialist, Big Government, anti-capitalist red tape and scaremongering that needlessly, maliciously picks the pockets of rugged, steely-eyed, noble, Randian captains of industry. Protection from this “fire” booogeyman is just a pretext for government intrusion on, and interference with, the rights of productive enterprise. Free markets alone should decide whether or not we need to concern ourselves with so-called “fire safety.” Yet these are the same assholes who, once human-induced climate change is finally so obvious that even they see it, will demand some huge, heroic, risky, profitable-for-someone, untested, untried feat of geoengineering to save their asses, even though, until then, they will have demanded that we continue on with the “business as usual” path that brought us to global disaster in the first place. They will insist on prioritizing a solution that lets them carry on doing the same thing.
An orchestra has fired (or perhaps failed to renew) about half its members, several of long standing, with the goal of increasing diversity. The Musician’s Union is understandably furious. The move seems wrongheaded to me.
Well, at least one TRA finally comes up with evidence.
They write:
These are the WHRC demands. I regard them – if they were enforced – as a warrant for genocide. When liberal journalists say I exaggerate the threat to trans people, they need to read this carefully.
And then they provide the Submission to Women and Equalities Committee on Reform of the Gender recognition Act by the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, UK. withh highlights in yellow of the genocidal plan!!
“Transgenderism is a social and historical construction…and will increase or decrease as the result of social forces.”
“The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 should be repealed.”
Seriously, though, when someone announces with a flourish “To those who thought I was exaggerating—BEHOLD!” and it’s even more obvious they’re exaggerating, it’s hard to know where to look.
Wow. “Exaggerating” is putting it mildly. Roz is fabricating an entire story having nothing to do with the highlighted sections (or any other). If I stand on my head and squint, maybe I can see: “making things more difficult for people to achieve legal recognition as a member of the opposite sex” = “killing off trans people”? Is that it? Or maybe “rejecting trans ideology” = “inducing trans people to kill themselves” = “killing off trans people”?
I finally bit the bullet and got myself an account on Twitter, and then decided “ in for a penny, in for a pound” and asked some of the Greek Chorus bewailing the document what, specifically, they saw as advocating violence. Here’s one thing that was getting their undies in a twist:
The forces that construct transgenderism include …The normalization of men’s cross dressing by medical professionals who until the last few decades understood this practice to constitute the sexual paraphilia of transvestism, has popularized and encouraged the practice.
They saw this as the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (along with all other GC people) as officially declaring a determination to
1.) Turn cross dressing into a mental illness again
2.) Make it illegal
No other interpretation. That passage also means that GC people are in favor of strict gender conformity, with women and men forced to wear feminine and masculine clothes, respectively. Gender critical people really want to enforce gender.
They also tied it up to Bathrooms,of course. A man being taken to jail for wearing a dress must first have been beaten up in the bathroom or there’s apparently little point getting worked up about it.
Their reasoning, as far as I can tell, is this. If transgender people are reclassified in some way, the category ‘trans people’ will no longer exist. Hey presto, all trans people have been eliminated!!2! Never mind that even if we accept that this reclassification is an affront to all trans people and a burden added to their lives due to a lack of official recognition, the trans people still exist.
They just can’t tell episteme from ontology any more.
Erickson, the adult, is male. McKinney, the juvenile, is female, but she identifies as male. She claimed to have been mocked over being transgender; none of the articles I’ve seen indicate what that might mean, and of course mockery doesn’t justify murder.
Leftists claimed that “oppressive society” and “a world designed to kill us” had driven McKinney to violence, alleging that he doesn’t deserve to be punished for his crimes because it wasn’t his fault that he committed the acts.
“Trans genocide” is the conjoined twin of “suicidal ideation” in standard transperbole. With the dual messages of “If you don’t get what you want, you have to kill yourself” , and “the whole world wants you dead,” it’s a wonder there aren’t more such shooters out there, acting in “self defence.”
This is the story about a man who left his wife’s bed to visit a vulnerable woman, whom he strangled to death. He used the sex-game-gone-wrong defence and was sentenced to four years. He’ll be out in two. Fun fact: he was training to be a police officer. Of course he was.
When the sentencing story appeared in our local paper, several men fell over themselves to to defend the murderer. One claimed that “many women can’t orgasm without being strangled” and implied that this was just one of those little accidents that could happen to anyone, like dropping something on your foot. A previous story about the trial had several comments blaming the victim (she had children, what was she doing having sex? What was she doing with a married man? etc.)
Buried my fifteen-year old cat this morning. Symmetry in life and death: we found her on a road as a kitten, and I found her in the alley before breakfast. Great way to start the day.
Boys no longer need to declare themselves girls to steal girl’s prizes. All they have to do is claim they have no one to play with.
An angry backlash has erupted after an all-boys netball team won a state title in Queensland by beating sides made up of female players in the decider.
The Queensland Suns Under-17 team was comprised entirely of boys and won the Under-18s championship in Brisbane this week, beating regional female teams en route to the trophy.
They didn’t just beat the girls’ team, they whipped them good and proper 46-12.
But, according to Queensland Netball, this is all AOK because “They (the boys) are really desperate to play and I think they played beautiful netball as did all of the girls teams”. So sayeth the woman who leads Qld Netball.
The boys’ coach was disappointed that not everyone welcomed males into a female competition.
“At the very core of this, our boys just want to play and they copped the brunt of these comments and behaviours and were made to feel unwelcomed and unsupported.”
No mention of the girls who may have felt unwelcomed and unsupported in their own sporting competition. Won’t somebody think of the boys????
I have never heard of netball, so I looked at the Wikipedia article about it. It was developed as a women’s alternative to basketball, and was even called “women’s basketball” for a time. There are men’s leagues, but they are few and less popular. Then there was this tidbit:
An all-transgender netball team from Indonesia competed at the 1994 Gay Games in New York City.[43] The team had been the Indonesian national champions.[43] At the 2000 Gay Games VI in Sydney, netball and volleyball were the two sports with the highest rates of transgender athletes participating.[44] There were eight teams of indigenous players, with seven identifying as transgender.[44] They came from places like Palm Island in northern Queensland, Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea.[44] Teams with transgender players were allowed to participate in several divisions including men’s, mixed and transgender; they were not allowed to compete against the cisgender women’s teams.[44]
There was, possibly still is, a Mens Netball Competition in NZ. Netball is hugely popular in New Zealand. The women play a fast, agile, and powerful game. I remember decades ago when the mens league got started a top womens team played a mens team. they won, but described it as very tough. They said the power and flatness of the mens passes was incredible. In 2019 the mens team beat the Fiji women’s team and in 2020 they beat the silver ferns (NZ women team). If you don’t have specific women leagues for most sports, you will not have women at elite level at all.
Anyone in a debate or discussion who is unwilling or unable to present their opponent’s position accurately and honestly, cannot be trusted for accuracy and honesty in their own position either. They are trying to avoid any genuine discussion, have something to hide, or both.
Article in The Atlantic by Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Much of the academic work in personality and social psychology on the topic of authoritarianism has focused on right-wing authoritarianism, sometimes going so far as concluding that there really wasn’t any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism. Satel describes new work by Thomas Costello at Emory (et al), who realized that the existing metrics for authoritarianism were inadequate for studying left-wing authoritarianism. I’ve mentioned reading material by Robert Altemeyer on right-wing authoritarianism before, so this was quite interesting to me. A few excerpts:
Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”
In the research that led to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his colleagues developed an “F-scale” to measure fascist attitudes; Altemeyer later drew on that research to create a scale measuring right-wing authoritarianism by assessing certain personality traits—including feelings of aggression, willingness to submit to authority, and a quality that he called “conventionalism”—not strictly related to a subject’s political conservatism. Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarian (RWA) scale remains “the gold standard for conceptualizing and evaluating all kinds of authoritarianism,” Costello told me. But when Altemeyer later turned his attention to left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), he erroneously assumed it would be identical to the right-wing variety. His LWA scale barely identified any subjects. He either had set the threshold too high or was measuring the wrong attitudes.
Costello and his colleagues started fresh. They developed what eventually became a list of 39 statements capturing sentiments such as “We need to replace the established order by any means necessary” and “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views.” Subjects were asked to score the statements on a scale of 1 to 7. They showed a trait that the researchers described as “anti-hierarchical aggression” by agreeing strongly that “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom.” By agreeing with statements such as “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech,” they showed an attitude called “top-down censorship.” And they showed what the research team called “anti-conventionalism” by endorsing statements such as “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.”
This makes a lot of sense to me, that authoritarianism on the left might warrant somewhat different definitions and metrics. I’m on the fence about the metrics chosen, or maybe it’s the descriptions.
The article discusses some informed speculation about why it is difficult for academics to notice and study authoritarianism on the left. The main point, which seems compelling, is that academia is heavily populated with leftist political sympathy, and authoritarianism is difficult to notice with one’s “own” ranks.
I think it’s abundantly clear that there is authoritarianism on the left, and maybe this new research direction will lead to better understanding of how it works.
Having been a left wing authoritarian up ’til last summer I knew damn well what it looked like but I should’ve become concerned when other people seemed to be singing from my hymn sheet that I had previously thought were the “good guys”. You can’t be a Token Evil Teammate when the rest of the team is tainted.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State posts a cartoon in which a parishioner asks a pastor for a religious exemption, and the pastor refuses to give one. Good so far. The parishioner is a stereotypical white woman named Karen. I noticed in the comments that at least a couple of people picked up on this. Really, AU had to go with “Karen”? She had to be female, had to be named, and the name had to be “Karen”?
Apparently October is LGBT+ History Month. This is on addition to LGBT+ Pride Month in June, various national or international days or of remembrance or awareness or visibility for bisexual or pansexual or aromantic or asexual or intersex or transgender people. There are a few things for women, too, somewhere in there. Why transgender people need a separate HIV testing day, why the other HIV testing day doesn’t work for them, I don’t know.
Any recommendations for meditations on death/end of life stuff? I’m game for recommendations but for the moment am avoiding searching directly for mental health reasons (upcoming procedure scares me).
Oh good. He’s a very rewarding read/listen in any case. In the late 16th century most people didn’t write eloquent diary-like thinking aloud essays, so he’s kind of fascinating for that reason as well as many others.
PZ has a post about some new book and author he dislikes, and he dislikes it at least in part because the author repeatedly attributes various stances to ‘the left’ that seem hasty, or worse. I have no interest in the book or the author, but one sentence of PZ’s grabbed me:
“Why should I read something that has declared people like me to be bad by stuffing words in our mouths?”
A friend and I got into a discussion on gender ideology. I’m sure many of us have had the experience of having so much ground to cover and being unsure where to go first. I think I managed well enough. One entry route with some is medical overreach, and I shared Abigail Shrier’s new blockbuster article. My friend had already seen an article by a woman challenging her daughter’s “affirmative” therapy.
I recommended several books, and was asked which to read first. I suggested Stock’s “Material Girls”. I thought that book, with its clear and thorough argumentation and its somewhat more conciliatory tone, might be a good starting point for someone used to proclaiming broad support for affirmation and using “preferred pronouns”. (It was a “pronouns” comment that started our conversation.) We’ll see. My friend seems open to seeing reason.
Material Girls is a good choice, but some have apparently found it a little dry and impenetrable. I’m not sure why. I tend to recommend Trans because I like the way it basically says “look, let’s get this out of the way for starters: all this stuff is nonsense” and then proceeds to say why. All depends on the audience, of course.
I suspect it’s seen that way because it’s heavy on detailed reasoning and trying to present opposing views fairly. Those are things I liked about the book, but I could imagine people finding that approach less emotionally appealing.
I have a copy of Trans, but haven’t got to it yet.
Yet, the reality is that female athletes are often much more susceptible to injuries than males. They’re up to eight times as likely to experience an ACL tear, for example. They’re also more at risk for injuries like ankle sprains, stress fractures, (some research suggests women may be up to three times more likely to develop stress fractures than men), shoulder problems and even concussions.
Much of this boils down to biology, in this case the female anatomy. Women generally have wider pelvises, so their thigh bones angle down more sharply than men’s, putting more pressure on the inside of the knee. Women’s ligaments also tend to be more lax than men’s, so they rupture more easily. What’s even more astonishing is that women’s menstrual cycles also play a role—and although people rarely talk about it, it’s a major factor that women of all ages should be aware of. Progesterone levels are highest in a woman’s mid-luteal phase, or days 19-24 of her cycle. This causes ligaments to become even looser, which increases the risk of ACL injuries.
Yesterday I was made aware of this excellent article by Dr Em from March: Woke Blokes and the Abuse of Women. She applies Lundy Bancroft’s book about abusive men to male “trans allies”.
Bancroft convincingly argues that it is values which cause abuse. Not personality, or mental disorders, or a childhood history of abuse, or alcohol or drugs. Those factors only exacerbate an existing problem – the value system of the man – and can make him more dangerous. ‘Their value system is unhealthy not their psychology.’
Not a stupid question. Googling “how to embed links” turns up a lot of results. I tried to explain it here but just got an embedded link even though I separated all the pieces, so I’M no use.
Blood Knight — email me at my burner gmail address, nothpj@gmail.com, and I’ll email you the little template I use. [If I paste it into a comment it will of course just embed a link.]
Some of you may recall I mentioned my granddaughter being sexually assaulted at school, age 12. This has left her with a fear of men, of going out, and has filled her head with nightmares, night terrors, and suicide ideation. She has been self-harming.
She has also been attending mental health therapy as an outpatient with fortnightly counselling with a Social Worker/Counsellor using talking therapies and less frequent sessions with a psychiatrist. Sometimes I will attend these meetings as the only constant male figure in her life (dad gone before she was born, mother in stable lesbian relationship)
That’s the crude background, here is the story.
A fortnight ago she had a short one on one session with the counsellor, then finished the session with my partner, her grandmother, as her mother was in the hospital.
GD was staying with us while the mother was hospitalised, and wanted to talk to us. She said that she was worried about my reaction to what she had to say, but told us that she thought she was trans. She was worried about my reaction because I “argue with trans people”. I explained that I don’t argue with trans people because they’re trans, but only when they are trying to take away the rights of women. And, I assured her she would still be loved and protected if trans.
Itried to understand why she thought she was trans, and the closest we got to was mum tries to make her wear frilly dresses, and she hates frilly dresses. So we talked about gender non conforming, about David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Prince, et al. And we left it at that.
Fast forward 2 weeks, and time for another session, mum is still in hospital, so I attend.
As soon as we sat down, the counsellor opened with “I’ve made you a trans flag”, and “Have you chosen a name yet?” No “have you given any more thought to …”, just straight into the affirmation.
The counsellor assumed I needed education about trans issues and produced the “genderperson” picture.
I asked why putting intersex between male and female proves sex is a continuum, but she just muttered about how it is. I asked how we know a person is trans, but she didn’t really know much about that.
All in all, she knew little about the subject, yet here she was, doing her best to affirm the choice of a confused 13-year-old girl, who is yet to have her first period. A girl who hates frilly dresses, but who has all the compassion for the less fortunate than herself, that which we used to refer to as “the mothering instinct”. We were walking city streets one day when she saw a teenage boy being verbally bullied by 4 or 5 others, and we insisted we followed to make sure he was OK , not physically harmed as well.
I did not want to cause a scene in what is a safe space for GD to talk, but boy was I getting angry.
As we left I gave the counsellor a list of three books, “Material Girls”, “Trans”, and “Irreversible Harm” as suggested reading. I hope the next time we see each other she will have read at least one of them. Or am I overly optimistic?
A bit all over the shop, I know, but I just felt like getting this off my chest. Angry that instead of being helped overcome her existing issues, she is being pushed down a path that will lead to an even worse outcome.
Oh no no no no no that’s horrible. I HATED wearing dresses of any kind as a child (and still do for that matter, have never worn them since gaining adulthood). I’m gender nonconforming in a lot of ways and it all works out – there’s no need to “transition.” As the book says, “it gets better.” I hope she can listen to you.
From my perspective, Roj, you handled it about as well it could possibly be handled. I am impressed that you were able to get the counselor to listen and to receive the list of books; that seems really promising. Best of luck getting through to your granddaughter.
I’ve read “Material Girls” and “Irreversible Damage”, but not “Trans” yet. I recommended the two I’ve read, plus Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender”, to a friend recently. Some recent traffic from trans “allies” supports my thoughts that “Material Girls” was a good suggestion.
The daughter of a friend was sexually assaulted a few years ago, and shortly thereafter decided that she is trans non-binary. I couldn’t figure out what to say to my friend, and I’ve largely avoided talking about the topic directly with him. This happened as I was still developing my own understanding of the trans ideology issue.
This is going to sound overdramatic but aren’t we in a sort of End Times? Even without climate change and its associated disasters we’ve got labor and supply chain shortages everywhere, medical care is massively overstrained, disease, utter lack of public trust in anything… The illusion of western civilization “The Privileged Ape” is disintegrating.
Yeah, not overdramatic at all. I wasn’t optimistic about the future before that cursed day in November 2016, but that’s when the end time mood turned permanent, and it has not been been lessened by the Trump faction’s temporary setback in the last election. Trump himself will not live forever, but Trumpism and its contempt for facts and democratic norms is not going away in our lifetime. And of course the Left’s decent into wokism, identity politics. and cancel-culture is not helping to say the least.
Not that it matters that much with respect to climate change, since the one thing every government as well as every major political party throughout the industrialized world, can agree upon, is that any actually doing what’s necessary to keep the planet somewhat habitable is crazy-talk and can be dismissed as absurd a priori. And even the green parties, who were closer to taking the problem seriously than anyone else, seem to have collectively decided that keeping the planet habitable is less important than forcing women to allow infinitely entitled, aggressive, porn-crazed male fetishists into their spaces.
As I mentioned in another comment, it’s reached the point where my heart sinks into my stomach whenever someone announces that they’re expecting children, and everyone treats it as a happy occasion, while I can’t help thinking “Another contribution to over-population and another child with nothing to look forward to other than going down with the ship and paying the ultimate price for our stupidity and evil”.
(Of course we all know the usual objections about how people have always predicted the end of the world, and they have all been wrong. But what matters from the point of view of reason is how you get to the conclusion and not the conclusion itself. The doomsayers of the past usually relied on things like ancient prophecy and divine revelation. Today, all the “optimistic” scenarios presented by scientists presuppose that governments all over the world will in the very near future start collectively implementing policies that are currently further outside the Overton Window than the belief that 2+2=5.)
A heartbreaking article from 4W, described as “how one feminist PhD student at Duke found herself cancelled by both the illiberal left and the Christian right”:
All the damn requirements to mouth the words, to use the terminology, to say the phrases, under pain of being unable to complete the degree you’ve been working on for years. All the similarities between the “woke” religion and conservative Christianity. Is there any place that will allow criticism of both “woke” left and Christian right in the same thesis?
I’d certainly hope so, because they’re basically the same thing (one minus a god). Honestly while I have my doubts about a “god shaped hole” being a thing there probably is something like a “religion shaped hole” in most humans, especially when they’re lonely.
In memory of Paddy Moloney, I’m listening to Joni singing The Magdalene Laundries. For some reason YouTube’s algorithm thinks I want an ad about how the rosary connects you with god.
Edinburgh University union members can self-identity as a race and gender that they are not and can identify as disabled if they are not. It doesn’t say whether disabled members can identify as able bodied.
It strikes me that a survival instinct coupled with the ability to comprehend the inevitability of death is one of the least helpful genetic co-morbidities evolution could have cursed us with. One or the other Nature, one or the other.
Foundation Beyond Belief shared a set of photos from Atheists United from one of the Women’s March for Reproductive Rights events earlier this month. Prominent among them was the first picture showing a sign saying “trans women too!” I have no idea what other signs there were, and none of the other pictures jumped out at me as being trans-oriented. This march is about women, and women’s reproductive rights. The sign, to make reference to “trans” people, could have said “trans men too!”, but no, it didn’t. The makers of the sign didn’t stop to think that reproductive rights are strongly related to biology, and that transwomen have nothing in common with women in the area of reproductive biology. It’s all “transwomen are women!”, and the march is about women, therefore of course transwomen should be included don’t ya know. This is why sex matters, and why referring to people as “transwomen” rather than “trans-identified males” or similar can be confusing. (Yes, I’m extrapolating from one silly sign, but I think I’m justified.)
BKiSA, I trust things are/have improved. I’ve had relatives suffer that condition. Not nice at all.
Roj, your story makes my blood boil. That poor young thing. That ninny of a counselor. I really do wonder if some/many of them do more harm than good frankly. I’m pretty much convinced that there’s nothing they do for you that a good listener with a sense of discretion wouldn’t achieve.
For what it’s worth, I think you have the right of it. Your GD needs love, security, reassurance and space to find (re-find?) herself. Growing up is tough for all kids and I think especially tough for girls. Even more so when they experience an event like she has. A girl, young woman really, who is very dear to me is struggling with social expectations as well. She’s very pretty, but has taken to wearing baggy and slouchy clothes to hide the fact. Nothing wrong with slouchy baggy clothes, except that it’s a changed behavior that has coincided with developing a figure. She told me a few weeks ago that she didn’t want to have children or get married. I assured her that was fine, but she had plenty of time to decide that. As a society e act very smug that we’re not some ‘backward’ bunch that force girls into set roles and make a big deal about them reaching adult status (where they acquire a new role). In some ways we’re worse than those societies. We’ve removed all the protections and structures young people, especially girls need, but saturate their every waking moment with signals and signs as to how they should behave as sexual beings. It must be bewildering and frightening and it’s hardly any surprise that there are multiple ways to end up a casualty.
I wish you GD all the best. I’m sure you’ll do your best to provide love and assurance.
I’ll be doing much better when I consistently realize I don’t have enough information to predetermine the results of my colonoscopy. Two years ago I had a CT for some pain I had then (I was 35) and the doctor wasn’t concerned with it so we waited a bit. I’m 37 now and a different sort of pain is in evidence and she’s concerned so I’m doing the back end. No real other symptoms that one associates with colon cancer. But, since I suffer chronic anxiety (and I know for sure some of the pain is caused by my brain) I throw logic out the window and just assume I’m full Black Panther even though that’d be not particularly likely.
Apply logic, learn to live for the moment, and just let the test speak for itself instead of going on an anxiety spiral for two weeks. Right now, logic is in command; hopefully he doesn’t get demoted again.
In the complaint, filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lawyers for the former cast member, Suni Reid (who prefers the pronouns they/them), said they were sidelined and eventually let go in September after requesting a gender-neutral space at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles where “Hamilton” was playing.
In the 28-page complaint, Reid, a Black, nonbinary performer who has performed with the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles productions of “Hamilton” since 2017, outlined several other instances of discrimination and harassment by cast members and management over the years, including episodes in which Reid said they were physically threatened or intentionally and repeatedly misgendered.
Various other reports use the term “trans” sometimes to refer to Reid. It may be the case that Reid calls himself “transgender” as well as “non-binary”, but I’m not certain. Reid performs male roles in the play.
I have not seen any details of threats or attacks. I’m curious of those circumstances. I don’t quite understand what a “gender neutral” dressing room would be: a place where both men and women would dress? A place where only people who are “non-binary” would dress? A place where men would dress but is declared “gender neutral” anyway? A third dressing room just so it’s not the same room as the “men’s” and the “women’s”?
I suspect that a male actor playing male roles might be referred to as “he”, regardless of preferences. I imagine any actor playing cross-sex roles might be referred to using pronouns related to the character rather than the actor. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I particularly don’t think it’s a big deal for an “extra-special” person who wants to be referred to by “extra-special” pronouns to be rebuffed in favor of normal English usage.
An unusual mass shooting: five people killed in Norway by bow and arrow. My thoughts immediately turned to firearms control. On the one hand, the gun activists will claim that firearms restrictions are pointless because people will just resort to other weapons, and also that firearms are being unfairly singled out ahead of other lethal weapons. On the other, imagine the carnage if the attacker had been armed with a gun, even just a pistol.
A 37 year old Danish citizen living in Kongsberg has been arrested and confessed the actual deeds. Apparently the suspect already had a long criminal record and was under a restraining order after threats against his own parents. The Police also confirms having recieved several anonymous tips from individuals worried about his behavior. The suspect is a known convert to Islam with a history of posting what appears to be threatening videos online, but I don’t think anything definitive has yet been confirmed regarding the motive, or whether we’re talking about an act of Terrorism.
From Glinner’s site, more details on the same story Skeletor posted. A boy wearing a skirt entered a girl’s restroom in a school and raped a girl. The father complained of a cover-up at a school board meeting. The father was accused of making up the assault and was arrested. The boy was arrested for the assault and released pending a hearing. A few days later he was arrested again on another sexual assault charge.
Thank you. I’d seen the story, and when Skeletor mentioned it I tried to find something non-Fox-like and couldn’t, so I decided to wait. The less-Foxish news outlets sometimes catch up, but god damn they should be on it from the outset. They should be getting there before Fox, not after.
The Uprising tells the story of the unprecedented behind-the-scenes effort that amassed irrefutable evidence of differential treatment of men and women on the MIT faculty in the 1990s. Featuring biologist Nancy Hopkins, the film chronicles the experiences of marginalization and discouragement that accompanied Hopkins’ research and highlights the steps a group of sixteen women faculty members took to make science more diverse and equitable at MIT.
I know a number of regulars here are women in academic science, and I expect the experiences described here are familiar.
Over on FTB, the blogger by the name of Intransitive has a post on the Loudoun matter. The take isn’t just bad, it’s fucking dire:
…The clowns in Loudon, Virginia, are claiming a “boy in a skirt” sexually assaulted a girl in a school washroom, this not long after Transgender students were finally “permitted to use” (read: no longer prevented from using) the correct washroom.
– A girl and her father made the accusation that a boy in a skirt raped the girl… police concur, and charged the boy. Weirdly, Intransitive is sceptical of the detail that the rapist was wearing a skirt, and only that detail. We wouldn’t want to admit that men can rape while wearing a skirt, would we. More on this:***
– The vote to change the toilets etc. to self-identity rather than sex took place on 2021-08-18. Far from being “not long after” this, the rape actually predated that vote by nearly three months: 2021-05-28. I wonder if this order was reversed out of terrible research skills (all it took me was some googling), or as part of a deliberate lie to paint this episode as a conservative story ginned up in response to the policy change.
Thankfully, the Loudon County Public School District is acting professionally, not releasing information until legally permitted to do so after the cops finish their investigation (which infers the rightwing media, TERF trash and other bigots are breaking the law with their propaganda).
– The police investigated for about six weeks, then laid charges against the attacker on 2021-07-08, over three months ago. The school superintendent said then that no attack occurred. The opposite of the truth, either through dishonesty or ignorance. In the eyes of a TRA, this is considered a virtue – a noble restraint against hastily giving out information before the investigation was complete, despite the police presenting their case three months ago.
– Intransitive does not know the difference between infer and imply.
– And no, reporting that this attack took place is not against the law. No identifying information was leaked.
Smith has since been arrested for inappropriate behaviour at a school board meeting.
– Yes, pretty understandable given the school superintendent had just lied to the guy about whether his daughter had been attacked or not. This jab reeks of character assassination.
– Speaking of arrests, guess who else was arrested? The attacker. Twice, both times for rape.
…the teen boy accused of assaulting the girl was wearing an ankle monitor from a previous assault in May. That means cops already knew who he is, they know his gender identity. If the attacker were actually Trans and NOT a cis hetero male, do you really believe the cops would keep their mouths closed? They aren’t exactly known for being pro-Trans advocates.
– Stupidity confirmed. The point of this saga is not to brand trans people as rapists, it is to point out that rapists can and will make use of relaxations of toilet / dressing room / etc. sex restrictions.
– No reporting that I have seen has claimed that the attacker was trans, they have claimed that he wore a skirt. The defensiveness fairly leaps of the page.
It wouldn’t shock me if the fifteen year old boy’s “skirt” was his jacket tied around his waist.
:)
The defensiveness is staggering.
***
In recent years, Taiwan had several attempted assaults and multiple attempts to hide cameras in washrooms, or attempted “upskirting” women on the street. ALL of them involved cisgender heterosexual men, one dressing up to lurk in a toilet. But to those with hate speech and agendas, the perpetrators being cishetero binary is irrelevant.
Intransitive omits that the man “dressing up to lurk in a toilet” dressed up as a woman to aid his lurking in the toilet. Why so coy? And again with the severe point-missing – yes, it really is irrelevant that the men involved in those acts are heterosexual and “cis”. Because the point is not that trans people are sexual criminals, its that relaxing laws pertaining to sex segregation play into the hands of the sexual criminals.
BKiSA, glad to hear it. I got good news from my husband’s biopsy this week: not cancerous. But…it looks like my dog is likely to die. He now has sepsis and anemia, and if he does live, will need another surgery. He had a couple of good days, leading us to hope, but today…our home is like a tomb right now as we wait for news from the vet. He has been such a happy, friendly, and active fellow, he didn’t deserve this…but, then, who does?
Good grief I fall behind fast, for some reason I only get about 1 in 20 of the miscellany posts in my RSS feed.
BKiSA :-) :-) :-)
Holmes, yeah, well PZ is a moral coward. In my opinion he genuinely believed that supporting the oppressed, including women, was the right thing to do, then when things started going south he tried to split the difference and please everyone and when that didn’t prevent the schism and he was left with arseholes he was so addicted to the fame of who he is that he can’t self immolate by telling them they’re wrong on even one issue. He’s now irrelevant to everyone else but ‘his*’ horde.
Iknklast, great to hear the good news about your husband, but terribly sorry to hear about your dog. My mates dog of 10 years died abruptly from sepsis recently. Very upsetting. You do get attached to the little buggers.
Colin Powell has died. In itself, that news doesn’t much affect me one way or the other. He seemed like a decent person overall, but in the most important act of his life he allowed himself to be used by the hawks itching to invade Iraq.
What’s noticeable about the news, though, is that the headlines are saying that he died of covid complications despite being vaccinated. What gets buried is this fact:
He had multiple myeloma, according to NBC News. It is a type of blood cancer that hurts the body’s ability to fight infections.
I expect the anti-vaxxers to use his death to further their cause, when in fact it’s a perfect illustration of why everyone who can get vaccinated should.
Update. We are euthanizing at 1:00 p.m. He is suffering too much, and we need to help him. I wish there really was a dog heaven; he would be in it for sure.
I’m so sorry. That decision is the hardest part of having animal companions. It is a relief to know you can relieve their suffering, but it’s always so wrenching to be faced with that choice. They leave terribly large, furry holes in your heart.
I’m going to the London one, the geology there being less demanding for wheelchairs than Edinburgh’s, since this is a mobile demonstration (I don’t fancy trying to keep up with everyone going up the Royal Mile).
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has promised to abolish prostitution in the country, saying it “enslaves” women.
Speaking at a three-day congress of his ruling Socialist Workers’ Party on Sunday, Sánchez vowed to move ahead with a pledge to outlaw prostitution that was part of his leftist party’s election manifesto in 2019. The manifesto called prostitution “one of the cruelest aspects of the feminization of poverty and one of the worst forms of violence against women.”
Prostitution has boomed in Spain since the practice was decriminalized in 1995; a 2011 U.N. report cited Spain as the third-biggest capital of prostitution in the world, behind Thailand and Puerto Rico, and it has made a name for itself as the brothel of Europe. Recent estimates put revenue from Spain’s domestic sex trade at $26.5 billion a year, with as many as 300,000 people working in the industry.
Most of the prostitutes in Spain these days are foreign, brought in under fraudulent circumstances. The current system outlaws pimping, which sounds good but leads to further abuse.
That has created a legal loophole where businesses are able to obtain a license to establish clubs that may function as brothels but can’t hire sex workers directly; the sex workers are made to “rent” the rooms they work in — a situation that means they don’t have the legal benefits and protections of other workers.
My wife tells me that they’re also charged for food and clothes. Basically it’s an old fashioned company scrip system.
WaM, that’s interesting thanks. Are they actually going to put properly funded policies into place that protect the women currently in protitution and lift them out of potential poverty finding gainful employment for them, while at the same time reducing local and tourist demand for their services? Or, is this just going to be an exercise in waving a slogan around, while driving the whole industry underground and making these women’s lives even more miserable?
Make no odds, I’d like to see prostitution in nearly all forms and circumstances gone (what I would accept would require us to be living in a utopia essentially). I just have a deep seated suspicion and fear that the ‘solution’ will be another simple minded reaction that just makes things worse somewhere and for the people who need most help and compassion.
Modern prostitution has become a huge trans-national industry. Even in New Zealand a lot of prostitutes come from overseas. Many arrive on holiday visas. Pre-covid it was not uncommon for Eastern European and asian women to be denied entry because they were coming in on a holiday visa, but with no return flight, no obvious itinerary, little luggage. Red flags all over the place. I recall seeing an episode of Border Control (not sure if it was the NZ or Aus version) where one young woman had literally thousands of condoms in her bag. They were a ‘gift for a friend’ apparently. I suspect the fate of young Romanian and Albanian girls in Europe are much worse.
It looks like Margaret Atwwood has fallen afoul of the purity police and has been deemed a TERF by some members of Team Barramundi. It seems to be connected with the Star piece by DiManno linked to above by latstot. Atwood recommends DiManno’s opinion article, saying “She’s not a Terf.” TRAs beg to differ and call her out. GC call Atwood out for using TERF, but at the same time see just how close Atwood is to getting it and getting peaked.
Ceri Black, one of the founders of LGBA Ireland, has received a phone call from Northern Irish police asking her to attend an interview under caution regarding tweets. They told her this was due to complaints from (of course) David Paisley. Paisley was the one who reported Marion Millar for tweeting about ribbons. As Ceri has said, if your activism consists of reporting mothers to the police, you really have to ask yourself some questions.
The police told Ceri that if she didn’t attend a meeting voluntarily, they would arrest her. Since they were going to be interviewing her under caution regardless, she’s opted not to attend voluntarily and told them to arrest her in front of her kids (and, I shouldn’t wonder, cameras) if they wish.
PZ says “Rosie DiManno is wondering why we can’t say ‘woman’ anymore, which is a rather self-contradictory thing to declare in a big bold headline that got published in a major metropolitan newspaper.” But it is only self-contradictory if we take the article heading in the strictest sense, i.e. that Rosie is claiming the word ‘woman’ is literally banned from publication. She isn’t and a quick glance at her article shows this. PZ knows this is not what Rosie argues, and I know he knows it, as he quotes and comments on a passage where the clarification is made. PZ is thus being deliberately misleading.
And TRAs in general will uncritically accept this as proof that GC feminists think the word ‘woman’ is banned from public use.
I feel this is obvious and doesn’t need stating but…
If you feel the need to lie to defend your position you are emphatically *not* one of the Good Guys. No matter what your position and who you ally yourself with this is true.
Yeah, PZ is always playing games like that, these days. Perhaps he always did, I’m not sure. My memory tells me that he used to do it with wit for the purposes of ridicule, rather than it being the basis of his entire argument.
Either he changed or I was wrong about him all along. I’m not sure I care which, to be honest, and I’m certainly not inclined to go and look through his pre-idiocy period work to find out.
But it is only self-contradictory if we take the article heading in the strictest sense, i.e. that Rosie is claiming the word ‘woman’ is literally banned from publication.
I suspect PZ was doing that all along, but it didn’t seem to matter that the jab was cheap given the target was deserving of rebuttal and ridicule for other reasons. Now that he has taken to arguing against reason, the justification of ‘the person deserves it anyway’ no longer provides cover and it is now obvious that it is just a cheap snipe.
I am a transgender woman who began my transition in 2011 and completed it in 2014, with my gender reassignment surgeries. I believe in trans rights and protections against discrimination in employment, housing, health care and education based on gender identity, as was the intent of Bill C16.
What I don’t believe in is some of the new, more radical, and in my view more toxic forms of activism that have sprung up over the last decade.
This type of activism advocates for the censorship and de-platforming of any woman who voices concern about the effect the expanding of trans rights has or may have on the right to maintain single-sex spaces where vulnerable women can find safety, support and healing.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of these positions or arguments against trans inclusion. However, I disagree with the tactics that amount to slander and defamation by some trans activists, who immediately label and vilify anyone raising those concerns or arguments, as we saw with the Canadian feminist writer Meghan Murphy when she spoke at the Toronto Public Library two years ago.
This writer goes on to site women’s concerns over males abusing self-ID to gain access to women’s spaces, and that such concerns are legitimate, and ought to be heard.
As misinformation campaign against transgender rights intensifies, Ottawa must act
The federal government needs to turn to Supreme Court to counter anti-transgender activism
There is an increasingly public campaign underway to strip transgender Canadians of their constitutional and human rights. The newly re-elected Liberal government needs to make countering it a priority.
Canada’s gender minorities currently benefit from a wealth of legal protections.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees to “every individual” equality “before and under the law” and freedom from discrimination “based on … sex.”
Both courts and human rights tribunals have long recognized that anti-transgender discrimination is a form of sex-based discrimination because it targets people who experience discontinuity between the sex they were assigned at birth and the sex with which they identify. This means that governments cannot act in a way that unfairly disadvantages transgender Canadians without running afoul of the charter’s equality provisions.
Federal and provincial human rights legislation extends these protections to the private sector. For example, the Alberta Human Rights Act prohibits landlords in the province from refusing a prospective tenant on the basis of that person’s “gender, gender identity, and gender expression.” And the Ontario Human Rights Code similarly prohibits employers in provincially regulated industries like retail from targeting employees for harassment because of their “gender identity [or] gender expression.”
But these protections are under attack.
Across the country, anti-transgender rights advocates are trying to convince Canadians that guaranteeing equality to gender minorities is not only unconstitutional, but it also discriminates against and harms cisgender women — that is, women who were assigned female at birth. And their misinformation campaign, disguised as a defense of women’s “sex-based rights,” has become especially intense in the past year.
The national organization “Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights” (caWsbar) is representative of the arguments being made against transgender-inclusive laws and policies.
They falsely claim that the charter’s equality provision covers cisgender but not transgender women because it lists “sex” and not “gender” as a protected ground. They then argue, on this basis, that the inclusion of “gender” in human rights legislation is unlawful; indeed that governments have a duty, instead, to preserve and promote sex segregation.
Translating these assertions into action, four anti-transgender rights groups staged protests in Edmonton and Calgary on May 2 and June 13, respectively, against efforts to uphold the rights of transgender women.
Under the leadership of groups like caWsbar and We the Females, protests have also occurred at prisons across the country (most recently on Sept. 18) against Correctional Service Canada’s policy of taking transgender inmates’ gender identities into account when deciding where to house them.
It is clear that this piece is actually a load of misinformation and well poisoning itself. Calling organizations dedicated to protecting wome’s sex-based rights “anti-transgender” is a tell. “Assigned at birth” is another. (The head-tilted byline photo is just icing on the cake. )This item is suggestring that these groups, are seeking the right to harass and persecute trans identified people by removing existing charter protections. Their primary focus is actually the protection of the rights, health and safety of women and girls. At least Dalwood has the courtesy to include links to caWsbar’s and We the Females sites, allowing readers to see for themselves what their beliefs and goals are (though the link to caWsber is through the phrase “falsely claim.” Baby steps.)
Good comment there: “This whole piece is so ridiculous, but I didn’t burst out laughing till the book title. Imagine literally calling a book ALL ABOUT ME especially when no one has ever fucking heard of you.”
Apropos of nothing, I just saw a TV commercial depicting (animated) a dancer twirling Star Wars style light sabers. Some of the dance moves were quite acrobatic. I thought, it’s a good thing light sabers are not real, or the dancer would have cut off her own legs. Another poor design choice for light sabers is the flashlight-button activation. If you are on manual operation, it’s hard for hands to compress a button for extended periods. Oops, all of a sudden your weapon disappears in the middle of a fight because of hand fatigue. If you’re on automatic, you’re as likely to chop yourself to pieces as the opponent. Light sabers are stupid weapons.
What bothers me more than the toggle activation is the lack of hand guard / cross guard. Every time they clash and hold blades together, either one of them could just slide their blade down to the other person’s grip and slice all their fingers off. Given how weightless the blades are, this would take no more than a twitch of the wrist.
Just goes to show that the majority of the requirement to making it to Knight rank is consistently surviving practice duels without getting anything cut off.
The FDA has approved a change in the risk assessment for a major acne drug that can potentially cause birth defects. Previously, patients were classed as male, female with reproduction potential, or female without reproduction potential. Now they will be classed as person who can become pregnant or person who cannot become pregnant.
It is unclear to me if there is any distinction under the old prescription protocol between male and non-reproductive female. If not, it’s probably not a big deal to make this change. But it seems like yet another loss of sex category for the sake of trans ideology.
So that Loudon County bathroom assault story has taken a significant change.
Apparently the perpetrator did not gain access to the girls’ bathroom by being or posing as trans or nonbinary; he and the victim had met in that bathroom previously to have sex, and agreed to meet there again on the day of the assault. From there, it’s an all too sad and common story — girl doesn’t want to have sex that day, boy decides that isn’t an acceptable answer.
But it does not appear to be a trans story at all. (I mean, I suppose you can stretch and say “but this proves that sexual assaults can happen in bathrooms,” but I don’t think anyone has ever doubted that. This is a story that could have, and probably did, take place in the 1950s.)
I don’t think it’s been confirmed whether the assailant was wearing a skirt, either. And, as we know, the “inclusive” rules were actually codified until months after this assault.
The trans advocates look at this and say “It isn’t even a trans person, you’re trying to claim trans people are dangerous”, while others are saying the “inclusive” rules make it easier for boys to gain access to the girls’ bathroom. A student seeing a boy in the girls’ room would be able to complain or kick him out, but wait, maybe he claims to be a girl.
A student seeing a boy in the girls’ room would be able to complain or kick him out, but wait, maybe he claims to be a girl.
Well, yes, that’s the hypothetical that keeps getting cited, but it doesn’t fit this situation. I feel comfortable assuming that the school has rules against students (of any gender) having sex on school property (restrooms or elsewhere), yet this couple had violated those on multiple previous occasions. If any other students witnessed or were aware of these previous encounters, they had a perfectly “acceptable” basis on which to complain to school authorities; they weren’t cowed into silence by fear of being called transphobic, or helpless because there wasn’t a rule being violated. Also, since this assault began with a planned meeting — which I hope I don’t have to explain is not victim-blaming on my part, she has every right to meet up with a guy and choose not to have sex with him — presumably this could just have easily happened in a broom closet or wherever if the bathrooms weren’t an option. (Or they could have met in the boys’ bathroom, where it’s unlikely that any teenage boys would have objected to the presence of a girl.)
Sure, people have whatever arguments they had to support their positions before this incident came up. These revelations don’t negate anybody’s position on the overall issue. But they do pretty conclusively negate the claim that this particular story was an example that supports anyone’s position. You can’t say “see! this is exactly the kind of thing we’ve been warning about!” and then not acknowledge that “ok, it turns out this actually was not the kind of thing we’ve been warning about.”
I’d also note that there was a previous walkback of sorts on this story: the claim that the school didn’t involve the police until the victim’s father made a scene at the principal’s office was incorrect. There was a school resource officer, who is an actual police officer assigned to that school, who had opened an investigation. It’s possible that the father misunderstood the explanation, but the reporting by the Daily Wire was misleading at best.
That, unfortunately, is going to be a recurring problem I think. If you find yourself on the “same side” as conservatives on a hot-button cultural issue like this, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but it does mean that some caution has to be exercised in relying on reporting from conservative outlets, because they don’t lie and mislead any less on the issues where you agree with them.
It’s the right that has been pushing the trans angle on the rape in Loudoun County. We have a gubernatorial election going on, and the Republican (Youngkin) has been blowing all the dogwhistles he can (electoral integrity, CRT, whispering about abortion, and so on). One of the major issues in the campaign is education, and particularly what rights parents have to control their children’s education. In part the debate has centered around Toni Morrison’s book Beloved. During McAuliffe’s first term* a woman from Loudoun County claimed that the book gave her son nightmares and so he shouldn’t have to read it; later she got the state legislature to twice pass a law that would give parents the right to refuse to read some assignments, but both times McAuliffe vetoed the bill. Loudoun County is especially important in this election because it’s a large, affluent DC exurb that’s been trending blue in recent elections.
I went to a McAuliffe rally last night a few blocks from my house, and most (all?) of the speakers mentioned the book. Our local congressman even brought his own copy. Another note of interest–all of the speakers, including several county and state officials and candidates, a Senator and former VP candidate, and President Joe himself, referred to abortion and birth control as women’s issues.
*In Virginia, governors can’t serve consecutive terms, but they can come back in a later election.
Wonder what the situation was when this student raped/assaulted another girl at a different school as we understand is the case.
On a different topic, just about finished John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism”. Definitely good stuff, but ultimately he concludes that there’s no point engaging with these people at all. Better to try going around them than engage in any kind of dialogue. Plus just learn to be fine with being called a racist.
In an Oct. 7 news release, the sheriff’s office outlined the allegations, saying a 15-year-old male student had “forced the victim into an empty classroom where he held her against her will and inappropriately touched her.”
Just reading about how the Chicago Museum of Art “fired” all its museum guards (fired in quotes because they are volunteer), ending years of association with the museum because they are white women…and older. Horrors!!! Yep, if you’re interested, the individual in charge is a pronoun person…she/her to be exact. Don’t worry; while I saw this first from Fox, I found a number of other sources covering it as well. It’s stirring up quite a controversy.
Not guards but docents. I don’t think you could have volunteer guards – too much responsibility. I started out at the Zoo as a volunteer (I didn’t even intend to use it as a stepping stone to working there, I just wanted to be a volunteer at first), and there were strict limits on what we could do, specifically it had to be risk-free. The union was (rightly) very wary of the whole idea. Unpaid guards would be untenable.
Sorry, I meant guides. I must have typed it wrong and autocorrect decided what I wanted. I knew they were docents, and some of the stories referred to them as guides. None of them called them guards.
Apparently the perpetrator did not gain access to the girls’ bathroom by being or posing as trans or nonbinary; he and the victim had met in that bathroom previously to have sex, and agreed to meet there again on the day of the assault. From there, it’s an all too sad and common story — girl doesn’t want to have sex that day, boy decides that isn’t an acceptable answer.
But it does not appear to be a trans story at all. (I mean, I suppose you can stretch and say “but this proves that sexual assaults can happen in bathrooms,” but I don’t think anyone has ever doubted that. This is a story that could have, and probably did, take place in the 1950s.)
Hmm. The people on Ovarit are all still sticking with the narrative that it’s a trans story. I don’t know which anonimos on the internet to believe, here or there. (And the official media aren’t being very helpful.) So I don’t know what happened.
I’d heard a skirt mentioned in the context of “accidental” fellatio but never really thought the trans angle was important – except for the respective news outlets doing (or failing to do) the reporting.
Also jeezus, why would anyone voluntarily do sexual things in a school restroom? My experience has always been that they were only marginally cleaner than a McDonald’s bathroom. Just gross.
It’s electoral politics. The Republicans in Virginia are pushing that angle to scare parents into voting for Youngkin. It’s not enough that the boy raped the girl; he has to be turned into an avatar for all that they see is wrong with the world.
I suspect that the mainstream media isn’t reporting on the skirt because they can’t get independent confirmation. It’s not in the police report.
[Transphobes] tend to be very tentative, and wrap themselves in the cloaking device of civility because they get banned hard otherwise, but we get an occasional TERF hijacking threads here. If you must, here’s the latest example. My defense is a great collection of eloquent readers who thoroughly shred TERFy arguments
Beginning at comment 14, kathleenzielinski draws the usual analogy between people claiming a different race and those claiming a different sex and ends:
So how are these cases different?
The next comment, by usual suspect abbeycadabra begins:
Fuck you SO MUCH.
and ends
Fuck you, fuck this, and fuck off.
Eloquent indeed. It’s so reminiscent of the kind of discourse we get around here when someone disagrees. Remember that time silentbob did a flyby and we all told him to fuck off SO MUCH?
I don’t have a link to the video handy, but it’s basically a handful of us on an otherwise uncrowded bus. There is some gleeful singing of that penis song and menno leading a chorus of “the TERFs on the bus say Stonewall Out.”
It’s about 30 seconds long. There is plainly no hate. Compare some good natured singing to the protests outside the LGBA conference or the WPUK meeting the other day…
Anyway, the crowdfunder for my legal defence will be up shortly.
The book cited is Feminism and the Mastery of Nature by Val Plumwood. Here’s Jone’s summary:
Notably, in the course of her discussion Fausto-Sterling makes passing reference to “the philosopher Val Plumwood” and claims she agrees with Plumwood’s analysis that binary hierarchies are pernicious “because their use makes invisible the interdependencies of each pair.” (21) Plumwood is an ecofeminist, influenced, as am I, by the sexual difference feminism of Luce Irigaray. Her central text, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), is, as the title suggests, an analysis of the centrality of the patriarchal dualism of reason (idea/mind/culture/masculine) over nature (body/matter/feminine) to the domination and exploitation of the environment, and the bodies of women. Congruent with the key insight of sexual difference feminism, Plumwood indicts the elevation of reason over nature – which we can denote as patriarchal idealism – as the “logical structure” that “forms a major basis for the connection between forms of oppression” providing an “integrated framework for the critique of both human domination and the domination of nature.” (1993, 1-2) As in
Irigaray’s work, Plumwood recognises that the motive of patriarchal idealism is the denial of our dependency on the material world, and, by association, on the body of the mother. This is the conceit by which the patriarchal male subject constructs himself as an immaterial, and invulnerable, mind, dissociated from the matter of the body, with all the animal dependence and mortal vulnerability that entails. And this dualistic dependency-denial is then, Plumwood rightly diagnoses, critically implicated in generating the constant, unacknowledged appropriation of the environment and “the whole sphere of reproduction and subsistence,” which is “treated as a limitless provider without needs of its own.”47 (21)
Among other things, it’s a powerful critique of the foundational ideas of Plato and Descartes, which helped shape the Western, instrumentalized, master/slave relationship between humans and nature, the cost of which becomes daily more obvious. Had I come across Plumwood’s ideas thirty years ago, I might have stayed in philosophy. One of the things that I have appreciated reading this work is that she doesn’t write in a way that appeals to, and is only understandible by, other philosophers.
Also featuring some other people you’ll probably recognise (and hosted by Birdy Rose).
I don’t know what the news is yet, because I’m watching it right now. DJ Lippy and Aja are there, so there’s probably stuff about the #ComeOutOfStonewall stuff.
The news is the police have decided not to arrest her; instead they are sending the complaints to the Prosecution Service for further consideration. Ceri thinks the most likely outcome is that the PS drops it. She and her solicitor are strategizing about the Person who made the malicious complaints, and how to make him stop siccing the police on women who disagree with him.
The police are sending the case directly to the NI prosecution service, who will decide whether or not to prosecute.
It’s unlikely that they will pursue it further (but they might).
There are several other complaints about her Twitter account but she can’t find out what they were without submitting an FOI or…. being interviewed by police under caution!
Watch the link for the full statement and much more but be warned, just about everyone is in tears by the end of Ceri’s statement.
Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert.
Bright Green Lies investigates the change in focus of the mainstream environmental movement, from its original concern with protecting nature, to its current obsession with powering an unsustainable way of life. The film exposes the lies and fantastical thinking behind the notion that solar, wind, hydro, biomass, or green consumerism will save us from climate change. Tackling the most pressing issues of our time will require us to look beyond the mainstream technological solutions and ask deeper questions about what needs to change.
They call this change in direction “solving for the wrong variable.” The new goal is not to save the planet, but to save civilization, the cultural technology that has brought about the ruin of the planet in the first place. Swapping out all the coal, oil, and natural gas for solar, wind and hydro will still leave us on a gutted planet heading for disaster, just a slightly different, but equally fatal disaster of our own making. It’s a kinder, gentler omnicide. All these “green” , “renewable” energy sources still require loads of fossil fuel inputs, and intensive, extractive, toxic, and polluting industrial activity. Episode #572,895 of We Are So Fucked.
I think vaccines might partly be to blame there… the planet/species’ long term survival is much better when most “civilized” humans don’t make it to adulthood.
Also, since I’m here again, I think this is what annoyed me most:
They tend to be very tentative, and wrap themselves in the cloaking device of civility
Actually, ‘they’ were obviously just being civil.
Latsot, when you have convinced yourself that your opponent is pure evil, the only way to rationalise their non-evil acts is to assume that they are in service to something evil; a fair cloak to hide the foul. PZ has gone from being a decent person capable of nuanced thought, to an unabashed Manichean simpleton.
Via Feminist Current, Why some Korean women are boycotting Squid Game. The article discusses feminist objections to the misogynistic portrayal of women in the Netflix show, as well as the misogynistic reaction to women trying to raise concerns about these portrayals.
As the show is from Netflix, I can’t help but consider whether Netflix employees would walk out over a severely misogynistic show produced by the network. I somehow doubt it.
Well they shouldn’t be walking our over something like that in any case. Netflix employees shouldn’t get any sort of veto power over content.
On another note, apparently the terms “marginalized” and “vulnerable” are now verboten under American Medical Association guidance, so hopefully we can cease referring to autogynephiles as “most vulnerable and marginalized” groups.
But they did walk out over Chappelle, hence my comment.
I am of two minds about what they should or shouldn’t do, morally, but I suspect that there wouldn’t be any sort of threatened walkout over misogynistic content.
Apparently one of the lesbians interviewed in the Guardian article on the “cotton ceiling” is a seriously nasty bit of work and a genuine transphobe. Lily Cade, the porn star, has been accused of raping other lesbians and has now published violent screeds and threats directed at trans people .
Apparently she was a TRA in 2015 — and then radically changed. TRAs think GCs took advantage of a traumatized young woman and “recruited” her. My guess is she may have been raped by one or more TW and went off the deep end. Don’t know.
It doesn’t negate the story or impact the rest of the testimony, but the paper should probably say something about this particular witness not being reliable.
@Sackbut: Acknowledged, and yeah, unless there’s some #MeToo thing not involving a transwoman I can’t imagine a walkout.
In other news, though a Virginia governor’s race doesn’t really affect me in a noticeable way I hope the national Democratic party has learned something about pandering to the gender goblins and KenDiAngelo cult: don’t do it.
As a resident of Virginia, I’m very much affected by the results. Trans issues didn’t play much of a role here; it was more about white backlash. Trumpkin promised to protect “electoral integrity” and to stop teaching CRT in the schools (if he can ever find it), and of course he stoked people’s fear of crime, not just in the schools. Looks like the Dems also lost the House of Delegates, though they still control the Senate (barely). Even worse, we lost a pretty good AG. Virginia’s decided to rejoin the south, I guess.
(Odd bit of recent history: Virginia, which always has its gubernatorial elections the year after the presidential elections, tends to elect a governor from the opposite party of the president. The one exception was in 2013, when McAuliffe won.)
Wow, that’s a name I didn’t expect to bump into again. I remember Lily from a TRA tantrum from about then, which was also roughly when I peaked. Hell, it may even have been the precipitating event for me, which may explain why I remember it.
The reason she caused a stir back then was that she refused to have sex with a trans woman. She was and possibly still is in the porn industry shooting lesbian scenes exclusively, and a trans woman that was also in porn wanted to collaborate in a shoot with her. Lily reminded the person that she was a lesbian, interested exclusively in the female body.
The reaction from TRA quarters was as swift and venomous as you’d expect, and is the reason her innocuous ‘no’ was heard around the web at all. I encountered it on one of the early FTB bloggers that later went the way of The Orbit Obscurity, Dana Hunter or Lousy Canuck I think.
*googling*
Well how about that, it was Lousy Canuck. You’ll find a conversation about Lily Cade – and some familiar faces – further down with the help of ctrl-f.
Sorry you’ve got to deal with the new governor, just generally trying to avoid falling into the trap of nationalized politics. Were schools being only sporadically open a factor? Some guy from The Atlantic wrote as much. I just find it hard to believe that a state that went to Biden by ten points and had high turnout went to the Republicans because of a white backlash. There had to have been quite a few Biden/Youngkin voters or he wouldn’t have won.
So what changed? There’s the culture war in schools angle (probably especially the Loudoun county rape) and then people having yet another year of dealing with COVID-19. Lots of reasons probably that are harder to boil down into punditry. Just don’t want to fall into the “all Trump voters are irredeemable racists and that’s why he won” angle.
I agree that there’s rarely one factor that explains election results, which in fact was why I reacted to your post–I think that gender issues played at most a marginal role in this election. Granted, I’m no Nate Silver or Larry Sabato, but I’ve read a lot (including a Facebook post from an actual political science professor which has disappeared from my feed), heard a bit, and seen a bit, so what follows are the blatherings of a semi-informed voter.
First, the electorate isn’t static. From what I’ve seen, there were some Biden-Youngkin voters, but most of them seem to have been moderate-to-conservative whites who would normally vote Republican but couldn’t stomach Trump. More noticeably, though, turnout was substantially higher in red districts and lower in a lot of blue areas.
Second, McAuliffe ran a bad campaign. He tried running against Trump, but most voters were astute enough to realize that Trump wasn’t actually on the ballot, and he made a huge gaffe in one of the debates when he said that parents shouldn’t have a role in what schools teach their children (as often happens with such gaffes, he actually had a good point, but he expressed it inartfully).
Third, Youngkin ran a smart campaign, touching on Trumpian themes without sounding Trumpian (kind of in the way that Reagan put a happy face on Goldwater-style reactionary politics). He used McAuliffe’s gaffe effectively in his ads, promised tax cuts, talked about ballot security without claiming that last year’s election was stolen, and yes, used CRT as a racist dogwhistle. And he mostly skirted more contentious issues like abortion.
Fourth, there’s a lot of anger out there. Some of it is legitimate–prices are rising (most noticeably gasoline), some goods are still scarce, the pandemic drags on (schools are open, but with mask mandates), and the Loudoun County schoolboard badly mishandled the rape case. But the CRT issue also touches on a lot of white resentment, about perceptions of rising crime, about changes in school curriculum, and (this being Virginia) about the removal of Confederate monuments and renaming of streets and schools. A lot of this resentment is aimed at northern Virginian liberals who moved in from out of state–people like McAuliffe (and me).
Finally, I think the Republicans were either smart or lucky in nominating a Black woman for Lt. Governor and a Cuban immigrant for AG–it shielded them against charges of racism or sexism.
Anyway, that’s my attempt at punditry. That and a quarter won’t get you much of anything these days.
The guy in the video is on LinkedIn with a job description of storyteller and evangelist. I think it’s legitimate. The second video in the thread is equally disturbing. There’s a possibility that they are describing themselves for the benefit of vision impaired people in the audience, but even that is a stretch; I listen to the radio and have no need to hear descriptions of the journalists.
I did think it might be just a joke – “It’s the thing nowadays to tell you lots of stuff about ourselves so okay, I have a ponytail blah blah” – not a critical or dissenting joke but just a mild self-tease as a way to connect. It could be, no?
The “Caucasian” thing irks me, too. What is this, early twentieth-century racial theory? Natalia and Nic are Caucasoid, as opposed to Mongoloid, Negroid, or any of the other super-scientific sub-species of Homo sapiens sapiens.
In March, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a bill (SB 228/HB 3) that bans trans students from participating in school sports.
Nope. The bill says:
A student’s gender for purposes of participation in a public middle school or high
school interscholastic athletic activity or event must be determined by the student’s sex at the
time of the student’s birth, as indicated on the student’s original birth certificate.
But we knew that. The ACLU knows that. They just insist that requiring students to participate in teams according to their sex is the same as banning them from participation in any and all sports.
That’s a smart tactic, finding a girl who wants to play on the boys’ team. Who can object, if she’s good enough? Personally I think that so-called boys’ teams should be open to anyone in the school who qualifies, while girls’ teams should be restricted to biological girls.
I can see reasons to keep teenagers separated by sex for sports, because teenagers, but in general I agree with your point that it’s the girls’ teams that must be single sex, and the boys’ teams could be open.
Mike @314
I found the combination rather strange. The video, and the later video with the Indian woman, sounded so very much like every corporate rally meeting I’d been subjected to, except for these weirdly detailed self-descriptions. But I do suppose that an operating system company could easily have a security advocate to promote their security features and products and best practices.
I think there are some potential problems with making the boys teams open since it relegates the girls team to B-status. I can easily Imagine how such a change will be taken to imply that if a girl is really any good, she should be able to qualify for the boys/open team, while those who “only” play on the girls team are all second rate.
I don’t think that will be the case. Take tennis as an example, and the Williams sisters in particular. In the earlier days of their careers at about 2000, they issues a challenge: they will take on any man… whose rank is lower than 200. A male player took up their challenge, he was ranked 203. He took them both on, one set against each sister, and crushed them 6-1, 6-2. The Williams sisters revised their challenge: any man outside of 350. The guy that took them on disagreed, and said that they would lose to any man ranked 600 or better.
Yet no one that knows anything at all about tennis would regard the Williams sisters, Serena in particular, as anything less than tennis superstars.
Also, I would point you towards chess. Obviously this is not a physical game and so sexual dimorphism is not at play, yet the professional players are ranked in an open league and a women’s league. All players are in the open league, only women are in the women’s league. The reasons for the sex segregation are probably social.
Well now what do trans women have to say to that? Surely these AFAB who identify as trans women are appropriating the trans womanhood of actual trans women? Surely???
In an interchange on the topic I saw a few months ago, the woman was raked over the coals by trans advocates for daring to make such a claim. As often seems to be the case in this area, it was impossible to tell if she was serious or being deliberately provocative.
Football player Aaron Rodgers is in trouble because he was required to get a COVID vaccine, but he didn’t, and he lied about it. (He apparently obtained homeopathic “treatment” of some sort, rather than getting a vaccine.) The details of the complaints or of his situation are not particularly of interest to me, but a sarcastic meme about the situation caught my eye (I haven’t found a public share of the image.)
Rodgers is portrayed as having a blonde blunt bob haircut, and he is dubbed “Kaaron Rodgers”. Yes, of course; a blonde white woman named Karen with a blunt bob haircut is the perfect prototype for someone who complains, who refuses to follow the perfectly reasonable rules and wishes to be given special privilege.
Yeah, I see how the name “Kaaron” fits so well, but otherwise, really? Can we please dispense with that damned “Karen” stereotype? Men complain, too. Black people and Asian people complain, too. Women not named Karen complain, too. If the stereotype were “Sambo” or “Leroy” or “Clem” or “Shlomo” something, people would be all over it as being inappropriate, but “Karen” is somehow deemed funny.
A very woke friend of mine, whose views test my patience but we enjoy doing fun things together (cooking, music-making, and more), complained about some White woman who gave him trouble entering my building; I didn’t see the incident, but his understanding was that it was probably based in racism, since he is non-White. He called her “Karen”. I called him out on that, but he insisted that if it had been a man, he would have called him “Jimbo”, and this is no different (because White women are just as privileged as White men, amirite?). Yet in actual fact, I’ve never heard him or anyone else ever call a White man “Jimbo”. Maybe they would reserve that for White trans men?
Oh, I’ve heard it/read it as a name too, just not as the male “Karen”.
(There’s a scene in the first Prime Suspect in which the…prime suspect is in a lineup and has to say “Karen” and then repeat it. I always hear that in my head when the Karen trope is under discussion.) (It’s creepy because he was calling her to offer her a ride preparatory to murdering her.)
I’ve never come across “Jimbo” in that context, either. But I’ve only ever once known anyone for whom it was used as an affectionate alternative to James. I’ve otherwise only seen it used as a slightly demeaning or patronising form of James. There’s that kind of vibe to it, but I can’t see how it would work as an alternative to Karen.
Just saw a “Silver Alert” for the first time the other night; had to look it up to figure out exactly what that was. How about instead of Ace Week we have a “Silver and Amber Alert Awareness Week”? That way people actually know what the hell is going on and can provide better informed assistance.
The NPR comedy news show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me broadcast from Austin a while back. Their into was something like: “We wanted to broadcast from a foreign country. So we chose Texas. But we thought that would be too difficult, so we chose Austin, because it’s near Texas.”
Austin isn’t red, but it’s still in Texas, and still subject to state law. Heck, it’s where the abominable state legislature meets, and where the awful governor works. Having to endure Senate campaigns of Ted Cruz and others like him, even if nobody you know would ever vote for him, is agony. I live in Alabama, I have similar experiences.
GW, no, I know, and I quite liked what I saw of Austin when I was there for the American Atheists conference in whatever it was…2013 I think. Quite liked it but still wouldn’t want to live there, because of the climate first of all, and Texas in general running a close second, despite the redness of Austin.
I was more hopeful when I misread it as UT Austin. University of Austin is a so-far nonexistent university “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”. Not a bad sentiment, but heavily weighted toward the Intellectual Dork Web types (Bari Weiss, Boghossian, etc.) (University of Austin).
I take these online surveys for small fun and small profit. Occasionally a survey asks if I’m male or female; usually with one or more “other” options. Sometimes the question is labelled “gender”, sometimes it just asks “are you…”. I answer “male”, as it’s what I’d answer if they asked for my “sex” and didn’t have all this other options.
A survey today asked for my “gender” and gave choices: masculine, feminine, non-binary, other, prefer not to answer. No way am I answering “masculine”. I would have said “other” if they gave me a space to write in “genders are narcissistic nonsense and I refuse to play that game” or some such, but they didn’t, so I just said “prefer not to answer”.
For a study I’m conducting at work, I have to take a random sample of teachers from respondents to a survey who expressed interest in participating. After taking the sample, I wanted to check to make sure that the sample is at least somewhat representative of all the respondents, including in terms of sex (these are K-12 teachers, so they skew female; we want to make sure that we have at least a few men). But there was no field in the original survey asking for “sex” or even “gender”; all I had to choose from was the field “Preferred pronouns”, with the options being “He/Him/His”, “She/Her/Hers”, “Not Listed” (with space to write in), or “Prefer not to answer”. Fortunately very few said “their pronouns” weren’t listed (and there weren’t any written in).
At some point I’m going to have to write a report with the demographics included. I’m tempted to list “Sex”, but I suspect I’ll get pushback.
tl;dr: On the door of a girls’ dressing room in a high school, some girl (or possible staff or faculty?) posted a sign “AFAB (assigned female at birth) only”.
Some angry person in the school took a photograph, put it on the internet, and wrote about how awful it was and that he or she was going to speak about it with a guidance counselor. Some man in the comments (I assume a man, because the profile says “:trans: | She/Her”, though at this point who the hell knows any more) wrote: “Knowing the proper terms but still transphobic, how is that even possible?”
Subsequent Ovarit thread is about how the trans cult wants to make it impossible to name women, by any term whatsoever, even by terms that the trans cult made up. Episode number 100,000 or so. Ugh.
It’s not open access, but what you can see there is about 3/5 of the article.
The picture caption (from the paper edition): “After receiving both COVID-19 vaccine doses, pregnant and lactating people have a robust protective response.”
And the last sentence in the article begins: “People carrying male fetuses…”
That gives a total of four times in an article about 200 words long plus a picture caption.
I figured the original should have been “people carrying TBAMAB (to be assigned male at birth) fetuses” to be consistent.
But how can you know what they will be assigned? Surely that assignment must be arbitrary, because the only alternative is that you’re defining people by what’s between their legs, and we’ve long been told that that’s unforgivably reductive and essentialist.
People carrying male fetuses had fewer antibodies after SARS-CoV-2 infection and passed fewer antibodies across the placenta than those carrying female fetuses.
Holms, It’s a bit like one of the Destiny Church people here in NZ who organised a protest gathering against lockdowns and then came down with Covid a few days later.
“I’m really not sure where I caught it”
Are you vaccinated? “[laughs] I’m not going to answer that.”
Was taken to ambulance by hospital and then discharged a couple of days later “I’ve been sicker, it’s like a cold or mild flu.”
These people are just so full of shit. It basically boils down to utter selfishness and ‘you’re not the boss of me’ for most, with a solid dose of delusion and conspiracy stupidity for some. If these same people had been told they couldn’t have the vaccine, they’d be just as upset, albeit with more reason.
I have a lot of respect for Taslima Nasreen, but I did find this tweet ill judged. I can understand her underlying concerns about financial independence and the risk of cultural entrapment, but publicly questioning an independent and intelligent woman’s decision on such a personal matter feels off.
Quite shocked to learn Malala married a Pakistani guy. She is only 24. I thought she went to Oxford university for study, she would fall in love with a handsome progressive English man at Oxford and then think of marrying not before the age of 30. But..— taslima nasreen (@taslimanasreen) November 9, 2021
Well, the Judge’s phone going off while the Prosecutor was talking was an interesting moment for sure. Especially since the ring tone was the music used by Trump coming on stage at some of his rallies.
Instead of a name? How the heck is that supposed to work?
“Hey, um, excuse me,” *spies coworker* “Hey, Ted, could you tell, uh, zer that I would like to ask zer a question? Uh, ze doesn’t have a name on zer name badge, so I didn’t know how to get zer attention.”
Nick of Wessex has a DSD and has been vocal on social media about the facts that this doesn’t make people with DSDs ‘intersex’ and that gender identity extremists should stop using them to pretend that sex is a spectrum.
He runs an online store selling jewellery he makes. This has been targeted a number of times by trans activists and he has always managed to rebuild. Now they have gone after his suppliers and it looks like it’s game over. He’s going to have to wind down the business because the suppliers have been pressured by the trans activists to drop him as a client. He’s been unable to find alternative suppliers.
I’m sure he’d like to liquidate that stock as quickly as possible so if you have any jewellery needs, you could check it out.
Nick has lost his main source of income and has had to cancel a holiday. He’s a nice man and he’s doing nothing but look out for the interests of people with DSDs. And he’s been deprived of his income because he’s one small voice disagreeing with a bogus argument for an idiotic claim that isn’t even needed to short up an already incoherent ideology. And somewhere, people are celebrating a job well done. Makes me furious.
Anyway, have a look at his store if you’re in the market for jewellery and tell people about this, if you can. The full story is at his Twitter feed, here: https://twitter.com/CCSDvoice
I expect this will be the first in a series of columns, to be followed by:
— Uber driver is hurt that would-be passengers cancel the “ride” when they find out the vehicle is a tandem bicycle. “You were fine with me transporting you to your destination, what difference does it make how I do it?”
— Tennis instructor can’t understand why people refuse to pay when he shows up for lessons with a set of golf clubs. “I don’t get it, I’m wearing a cute tennis outfit and I totally look like I can teach them tennis. People are so superficial!”
I suppose the refreshing thing is that for once it’s a trans man complaining about the “cotton ceiling.”
My New York Times newsletter included an invitation to a subscriber-only online event (via Slack), “Can We Have Healthy Online Relationships?”. Headlining the conversation are Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and drag queen Latrice Royale. That’s Reddit, which jettisoned a bunch of highly popular radical feminist and gender critical discussion forums without so much as a warning; Reddit, employer (maybe ex, maybe not anymore) of Aimee Challenor. And a drag queen. Those are the people they wish to have as participants in a conversation about healthy online relationships. A man hostile to women, and a man pretending to be a woman. Also in the conversation are Katie Bilowitz (co-founder of a vaccine-related Facebook group) and Claudia Lo (who apparently has much experience moderating online communities).
I don’t hold much hope for anything other than an infuriating conversation. I don’t think I’ll bother. I’m not a Slack user, anyway.
The headline on the event page is Can We Find Real Community Online? The headline from the video ad is “Can We Have Healthy Online Conversations?”, and notes that the host will be technology writer Shira Ovide. The headline in the email description is “Can we have healthy online relationships?” The subject of the email is “Can we have civil conversations on the Internet?” Those are related topics but not the same thing by any means. Maybe they needed more than one topic, I don’t know. I wish they’d make up their mind.
The description from the email is below. Someone needs to review how to use commas.
With the internet’s reputation for insidious trolling, misinformation and political spats, it may seem surprising that healthy conversations can happen online.
What can we learn about civil dialogue from a drag queen and a C.E.O.? And how can we foster the growth of more online communities where everyone feels welcome?
Join me as I welcome the Reddit co-founder, Steve Huffman; former ‘‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’’ contestant Latrice Royale; the co-founder of the Facebook group Vaccine Talk, Kate Bilowitz; and longtime community moderator, Claudia Lo for a virtual discussion about the forces behind the most productive conversations occurring on the internet.
Ahead of the event, we’ll invite you to take part in our own online community on Slack, where you can talk with fellow subscribers about the changing role of technology in your life.
I hope to see you there! R.S.V.P. today.
The text from the event page:
Technology writer Shira Ovide talks with the people trying to make online spaces better for all of us.
You probably know the worst parts best: The trolling, the misinformation, the spats that quickly become political and escalate out of control. But conversations that happen on the internet can also be civil and informative.
There’s the Facebook group Vaccine Talk, which uses a mix of rules and active moderation to create a culture of fact-based information sharing. There are forums on Reddit that take on heated topics while steering clear of insults. And Twitter recently launched a new product to support healthy conversations called “Communities.”
What can we learn from the spaces where fruitful conversations happen? What are these groups doing that is working so well? Is true belonging and connection possible on the internet?
In this Times virtual event, Shira Ovide, who writes the subscriber-only newsletter On Tech, will explore the forces behind the internet’s healthiest communities and look for lessons on what makes them work. She will talk to Steve Huffman, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit; Kate Bilowitz, the co-founder of Vaccine Talk; and Claudia Lo, a longtime community moderator and design researcher. She will also speak to Latrice Royale, a former contestant on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” about how drag performers manage conversations in their often unruly communities.
Ahead of the event, you are invited to join our own online community on Slack, where you can talk with fellow subscribers about the changing role of technology in your life.
And just in case anyone was wondering what Milo Yiannopoulos was up to. It’s this…
Let's check and see how things are going for Milo Yiannopoulos now that he's "ex-gay" and Christian. Oh, he's hawking Catholic iconography on the Church Militant's YouTube shopping network? Well, obviously things are going great. pic.twitter.com/T7OkB1SCsu— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 15, 2021
Too delicious to be true. I guess even grifters have to eat.
A New York man who pleaded guilty to rape and sexual abuse for assaulting four teenage girls during parties at his parents’ home will not face jail time after a judge Tuesday sentenced him to eight years probation.
Niagara County Court Judge Matthew J. Murphy III said he “agonized” over the case of 20-year-old Christopher Belter, who was accused of committing the crimes when he was 16 or 17. Belter pleaded guilty in 2019 to felony charges that included third-degree rape and attempted first-degree sexual abuse, as well as two misdemeanor charges of second-degree sexual abuse.
Although Belter faced a maximum sentence of eight years in prison, Murphy concluded that jail time for the man “would be inappropriate” in a ruling that shocked the courtroom.
The article goes on to note that Belter had previously been given “interim probation” while awaiting final sentencing, and proceeded to violate the terms of that probation. So I’m not sympathetic to any arguments about how he’s changed since those “youthful indiscretions.”
I’m so tired of judge’s giving weak sentences based on “youthful indiscretions”! A boy of 16 or 17 should know better; he is almost a legal adult, and if he has no better control than that, what kind of adult man will he be?
Meanwhile, women who have miscarriages go to mail.
I apologize for the apostrophe error in the previous post. I was ambushed and violently assaulted by a roving band of rogue apostrophes and forced to insert one where it did not belong, under threat of being haunted by apostrophes for the rest of my life. I cannot call it a youthful indiscretion, as I am no longer youthful.
Sarah Silverman is right that it shouldn’t be a big deal, and that it feels weird to have someone play a Jew badly. And that the question of who is Jewish enough is a frequent argument among Jews. But people complain about crappy Southern accents and crappy Cockney accents, too. It shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s acting. But Jewish is a religious identity and only sort of an ethnic one. Ashkenazi American Jew from NYC? Orthodox Israeli Jew? Sephardic Jew? Reform Jewish convert with a Southern accent? Apostate former Jew who grew up in France? I think the first one is the main target. That’s not “a Jew”, that’s a Jewish person from NYC, and the task is to be from NYC as well as to be Jewish. I see no reason to insist that only New Yorkers take that role.
A thirty year old Zoomer hardly counts as an adult let alone one of seventeen… Still you’ve got to hold them accountable in some fashion. Why are they allowed to drive/own firearms/have a Twitter account? They sure as fuck can’t be trusted with any sort of responsibility.
Re. my comment at #123 and the resulting guest post, I recently finished reading Steven Hassan’s Combating Cult Mind Control. Like Rick Ross, Hassan is an experienced cult “de-programmer” who, unlike the other authors, has personal experience of being in cult* and even actively applying thought reform to others. While I have some issues with Hassan, I find his book a valuable supplement to the others. Most notably:
• He doesn’t consider the presence of an identifiable leader one of the defining features of a cult, but defines a cult as any group or movement that practices coercive persuasion techniques to gain undue influence. This makes his definition more applicable to things like the Trans Rights movement.
• His “BITE” model (acronym for “Behavior control, Information control, Thought control, and Emotional control”), explicitly invokes cognitive dissonance.
I also finally got around to reading Robert Lifton’s The Psychology of Totalism, but although the study of thought reform in Mao’s China is interesting in its own right, I can’t help finding it of relatively peripheral relevance or applicability to the study of cults. Somewhat surprising considering the central role of the text within the field. Maybe I’m just missing something essential…
* Hassan used to hold a high position within the Unification Church of Sun-Myung Moon, a.k.a. the “Moonies”, until his deprogramming in the 1970s.
(While the other authors seem to accept Lifton’s definition, they too are not entirely consistent on this point. I seem to remember both Singer and Ross extending their analysis of cults to things like MLM schemes and LGAT programs that don’t involve a supposedly infallible leader, but most definitely apply coercive persuasion techniques)
Today [November 9], with news of the killing of Marquiisha Lawrence in Greenville, South Carolina, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation […] has now officially recorded more violent deaths of transgender and gender non-conforming people than any year prior.
At least 45 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been killed this year; HRC Foundation uses “at least” because too often these stories go unreported or misreported. Previously, the highest number of fatal deaths of transgender or gender non-conforming people that HRC Foundation has tracked over a 12 month period was just last year in 2020, when at least 44 transgender or gender non-conforming people were killed.
Okay, 45 murdered trans and ‘gender non-conforming’ people, but already, there are multiple problems with the data. Firstly, we have a numerator, 45, but no denominator – we are not told anywhere in that source, or in Intransitive’s writing, the total number of murders occurring in the nation for that same period, hence we have no idea what proportion of the total these murders comprise (but more on this later). The number 45 is presented as proof of targeted murder, but with no context it cannot be taken to mean any such thing.
Another problem is the incredible vagueness of that population group. Trans is a poorly defined term with many competing definitions, and gender non-conforming is worse still. Depending on who you ask, a trans person is anyone that says they are trans, or perhaps a trans person is anyone that transitions physically; a gender non-conforming person might be any person declares themselves an enby, or any person that defies any gendered expectation at all even unknowingly. Every man that grows his hair long / every woman that keeps her hair short is defying a gendered expectation by that token alone, to say nothing of the vast array of other ways in which we might accidentally break a gendered expectation. And so I suspect the ‘gender non-conforming’ metric in particular is going solely by whether a person has made a social media declaration of specialness, otherwise virtually every person (and hence every person in the murder statistics) would qualify.
Between 1 October 2020 and 30 September 2021, at least 375 trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming people were slain across the world.
[…]
The report stands as the official word on a truly grisly year, detailing a daunting, years-long rise in murders against trans people by seven per cent, compared to the same time period last year.
Over the course of a year, out of all of the people that were murdered in that year, 375 were trans or non-binary or gender non-conforming. The problems of the first figure are repeated: no denominator to provide proportionality, and those same barely defined terms. Intransitive himself seems to notice the first of those problems, as he says:
I’m sure there’s at least one ignorant apologist for violence that will say, “It’s only 375 people!”
It’s not “only 375”. Transgender and Non-Binary people account for approximately one in every three hundred people. [Good job linking to a dead archive page btw] If the general population were murdered at the same rate, that would be 13,200 in the US alone, and 112,500 worldwide.
Does anyone see a new problem here? Those figures looked suspiciously round to me, and quite unlikely to be a real world murder figure. I poked at them a little and discovered that 13,200 is the product of 44 and 300, while 112,500 is the product of 375 and 300. I was right, these weren’t real murder figures at all, they were simply the trans murder figures multiplied by the 1-in-300 population proportion. Incidentally, Intransitive seems to have used the wrong US figure – 44, instead of the record-breaking figure of 45 – but the difference is minor so I will put it down as merely a mathematical typo.
No real world general population data are presented yet in the post. Intransitive scaled the figures for murdered trans people in USA and the world up to the general population, but still has not compared these figures with any actual data. Given the claim being made, you’d think this would be not only relevant, but vital to the point.
Intransitive concludes:
Imagine the uproar if 100,000 people of any specific group were mass murdered in those numbers, there would be outrage and people labelling it genocide. (Unless they’re Iraqis or Afghanis, then the 100,000 aren’t counted as people.)
It is apparent that Intransitive has become muddled here. The figure of 112,500 was obtained by multiplying the number of known murdered trans people by 300 to scale this figure up to the total global population, not a population subgroup, yet Intransitive is clearly thinking about this figure in terms of ethnic subgroups.
Most importantly though is the fact that Intransitive has reached the conclusion, that trans people are being deliberately targeted for murder, without once comparing those murder figures to the general population murder data. I thought he was going to when he scaled the number of murdered trans people up to the general population, but no, not even then. He skips that step, which seems indispensable to me, and simply declares that the up-scaled figures are indicative of deliberate targeting of trans people for murder.
Fine, I guess I’ll do the most important part of his post for him.
The number of intentional homicides in USA is 21,570, obviously well above the figure obtained by multiplying the number of murdered people reported to be trans by their proportion of the population. Also, apparently this is a surge of “almost 30%” over the previous year, while the homicides against trans people only increased by one 44th, or 2.3%.
The number of international homicides globally was 464,000 in 2017, the most recent I could find. This crushes the figure equivalent figure for trans people.
He wrote about trans people being murdered disproportionately, scaled the number of homicides against trans people up to find the general population equivalent figure, but never bothered to look at the actual general population homicide data. I can’t begin to tell you how flabbergasted I was at this. I facepalmed, I rolled my eyes, I laughed, I stared mouth agape at it multiple times over the last week before I managed to write about it. It is a monument to fatuous reasoning.
Another issue is whether the murders were “because trans” or not. As many people have pointed out, such murders are mostly of people doing “sex work,” so causality is more complicated than just “because trans.”
So, taking the numbers in Intransitive’s post at face value, I did some calculations. The population of the US is about 330,000,000. If 1 in every 300 is trans or enby, that’s about 1,100,000. If 45 of them were murdered, that gives you a murder rate of around 4 per 100,000. If that were the murder rate in the general population, there’d be about 13,200 murders per year.
Per Pew Research (which gets its numbers from the CDC), the actual murder rate in the US in 2020* was 7.8 per 100,000, or about 26,000 total. So it looks like trans and enbies are underrepresented among murder victims.
*Not quite the same window as in Intransitive’s post, but I think there’s enough overlap to make them comparable.
It’s harder to get worldwide numbers, but if there were 375 trans and enbies murdered over the course of a year, with a world population of 7.9 billion, that works out to about 1.4 per hundred thousand, or about 112,500 per year (aside to Holms: it looks like his calculations were correct, but check my math). The most recent worldwide statistics I can find are from the UN for 2017, when they estimate that there were about 464,000 homicides, or 6.1 per 100,000.
So again, if the estimates for both rates of enbies and trans in the general population and homicides among them are accurate, it looks like they’re well underrepresented as homicide victims. (But I don’t much trust the statistics cited.)
Help me out here. I don’t get the vagueness of ‘gender non-conforming’. Couldn’t that be an obviously lesbian woman or gay man? Couldn’t it just mean a person who doesn’t dress or act in the typical way – maybe even only seldom, but just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? I mean, the definition is just so loose as to be useless as a victim category in the circumstances argued by intransitive. Every murder is reprehensible. So is misusing murders to argue your case.
Also, the numbers really don’t appear to support intransitives claims, even when accepted at face value.
Yes, motive is never visible in statistics like these, which means the only recourse they have is to compare the subgroup murders to the baseline expected. And yet they always forget that step.
There are certainly some measures by which I could presumably be considered gender non-conforming. Although these days I tend to dress in a traditionally male fashion, some years ago I had very long hair which was usually braided and I often wore clothes belonging to my then girlfriend, which could certainly have been considered somewhat feminine. I wore a little makeup very occasionally, but this was in the 80s and as one woman or another applied it before a night out, it’s safe to say my motive was not gender expression.
The reason that my hair is now short is obvious from my picture: I don’t care about it and leave it more or less to its own devices as you can plainly see. The same is true of my clothes, I just tend to wear whatever’s practical, with fucking great boots, especially if it comes in black. My point being that I don’t care at all about gender expression. Having long, braided hair was fun for a while, but these days I can’t be arsed. Same with a bit of gender-bending clothing and a lick of the makeup brush. I wouldn’t be against the idea these days, but it all just seems like a bit too much effort. And, of course, I can get away without making that effort because I happen to be male.
On the other hand (I think that’s three, now) I’ve never liked participating in team sport and I hate watching it. I’m not interested in cars or DIY. I’m an introvert. I despise bullying and displays of one-upmanship. I never assert myself for the sake of it. I try always to prioritise other people. I’m shy. I tend to exaggerate my failings and failure (partly, I admit, for comic or dramatic effect) and I’m enormously critical of my achievements. I have more admiration for people in support roles than for leaders. I’ve managed large and small teams, but I’ve always considered that management exists to help the managed do their jobs. I’ve stubbornly resisted playing politics or climbing ladders in favour of doing the job I think needs doing, regardless of whether it’s recognised or celebrated. I’ve sucked up insults and passed up opportunities for the sake of things more important than I.
These are not usually considered masculine traits, but I doubt many people would consider me gender non-conforming because of them. You can see where I’m going with this.
On the forth (or so) hand, of course, I’m a super geek. I’m one of those annoying ones who is such a geek they’ve come out the other side and use low technology in an elegant way to do things other people are doing with high technology. This truly is next-level geeking, which is usually considered a masculine trait. I was a promising martial artist. I’ve worked as a welder and as a nightclub bouncer. I worked as a scientist for many years and at heart I’m an engineer, a tinkerer. You’d be lucky to find an emotion anywhere inside me, if you don’t count constant incandescent rage. I like sci-fi. Among my hobbies are lock-picking and knife throwing (an especially inconvenient passtime for the wheelchair bound)..
All ‘masculine’ stuff.
I’m like everyone else. I’m a mixture of stuff that’s coded masculine and stuff that’s coded feminine. But I guarantee that:
1. Nobody would call me gender non-conforming if they met me now, but
2. Some would if I still had long. braided hair and wore blouses.
And it’s that superficial. That’s the part that really pisses me off. Being considered gender non-conforming these days has nothing to do with not conforming. It has everything to do with presenting an image of not conforming, without really ever doing it. Bowie and Boy George thought: fuck convention, away with it! It doesn’t apply to me! THAT is being gender non-conforming. Dying your regulation asymmetrical hair an approved shade of blue is absolutely fuck all, is what it is.
I am gender non-conforming. I altogether reject much of the behaviour and attitude attributable to my sex. I bullishly do what seems like the right thing with whatever’s in front of me, without considering for a heartbeat what boxes it will tick or how it will be perceived.
And I’m certain that most people do the same because doing elsewise is no way to live at all.
So to answer your (I’m guessing rhetorical anyway) question, Rob: yes, it’s all that fucking stupid.
Being considered gender non-conforming these days has nothing to do with not conforming. It has everything to do with presenting an image of not conforming, without really ever doing it.
A petulant person has decided that a well-liked official has done this one thing that offended him, and therefore this official must be removed from office. Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before.
In this case, the offended person is Donald Trump, and the official is Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama, who has the highest popularity rating of any Southern governor, and who informed the Trump organization back in June that their intended use of a state-owned memorial park for political purposes was illegal and would not be permitted to take place. Or, rather, she said that it appeared to be illegal, and the Trump people should talk to the commissioners of the park, and the commissioners nixed the rally. Not Ivey’s decision, but Trump blames Ivey anyway. Trump is seeking to endorse a different candidate in the upcoming Republican primary.
I suppose it’s too much to hope we can manage to get a Democrat elected here.
I was just at a talk by Gloria Steinem this afternoon. During the Q&A, the first question asked was basically – what about the men? Not transmen in this case, but actual men. A woman he got pregnant when he didn’t want to. Gloria gave the exact right answer, in my opinion: You have a responsibility for birth control if you don’t want to be a father; don’t put it all on the woman. So two questions later, a woman asked what about the men, using a slightly different story about a sister who got pregnant and the man didn’t want anything to do with it; she tried to sell the argument by positing a child growing up without a father. Gloria’s answer? The exact same thing. If a man doesn’t want a child, he is responsible for his own choices.
I can’t believe (I guess I can) that people in this audience were suggesting a man should be able to demand a woman get an abortion; I find that as unacceptable as a man demanding a woman not get an abortion. Dude, you want the baby, you carry it. You don’t want it, stay out of the sack, or put on a condom.
Good for her! I assume her talk was similarly on point. About abortion?
Jessica Taylor wrote that she’s constantly asked “What about the men?” when she talks about women’s shelters, violence against women, and so on. But she founded and runs a men’s charitable organization, and she has not once ever been asked “What about the women?” in all the many times she’s spoken about that organization.
Those people that put the question of abortion in terms of a child being raised with only a single parent, and worse yet characterising that as some horrible thing, are showing some very blinkered thinking. I am betting that almost universally the people making such arguments were raised by both parents, and are looking at the question from that viewpoint – thinking about childhood with one parent in terms of their own (two parent) childhood. This would be horrible specifically because they were raised with a mother and father, and would be bereft without either one.
I was raised by a single parent, and that’s just not how it is. I can agree that two parents would have meant more financial stability, but I do not view my life as one of being bereft of a parent. You don’t miss someone if you never really know them in the first place.
I just can’t quite bring myself to believe that the PZ of years ago would have used “karen”. I think he’d have either spotted the misogyny or listened when women pointed it out. But now it seems just fine. It looks as though he’s bought into the whole fetid narrative about white women having all the power and spoiling everything for everyone else. I suppose he kind of has to, since so many of those horrible TERFs that so plague him seem to be white women.
Holms @ 392, I was also raised by a solo parent. I agree, more financial stability and security would have been nice, as would a father figure – it may (or may not) have saved me a few beatings. Still, I’d far rather have one parent who loved me, than two where one was disinterested or abusive.
latsot @ 393, JFC on a pogo stick. What the hell has happened to that man? yes, another rhetorical question. Explicit rather than implicit this time.
A stable two-parent home is a privilege that many do not have; doesn’t mean that a single parent can’t raise a fully functional child, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to spread the load.
Silentbob, if you’ve seen my comments at Mano’s, you know that the term ‘Karen’ as a generic epithet annoys me. It’s actually a proper name, and not restricted to white women. Or was.
I care not one whit what demographic coined the term. I care that PZ and Mano have adopted it.
I’m not part of the wannabe herd, so I haven’t.
I’ll save your keyboard from your puke and not quote Silent Bob.
The presenter talks about the decline of “public intellectuals” and the rise of “thought leaders”, with references to declining confidence in institutions, increased number of think tanks, and the increasing reliance on internet media.
“Maybe we should just eliminate LGB and accept people are just trans. It’s unfair to push them into believing being gay is natural or right when clearly they’re just confused by their gender. Nothing to do with sexuality.”
“Maybe it’s the other way round – maybe conversion therapy IS pressuring people that being gay is okay when actually they are trans. It’s the difference between someone being their true self as your daughter, or you convincing them they’re just your gay son.”
I’m not sure he knows what a joke is. As in, yes, I think that he said these statements as a kind of reductio ad absurdum, but — paradoxically — he probably also believes them to a certain (great?) extent.
I’m reminded of when Trump said “I was being sarcastic when I suggested drinking (or injecting?) bleach to cure corona!” Except that there I think that the case was even simpler: he was 100% serious when he first said the thing about the bleach.
I dunno. It strikes me as (poor) satire, trying to imply that LGB and T belong together by ham-handedly reversing the argument for removing T from the set. Satire is of course different from joking, but maybe the author doesn’t understand this.
This article might be of interest to those who study epidemics and inequality (in all it’s forms). It describes the critical period over which NZs covid elimination strategy failed and why.
I just had to fill out a form before getting my COVID booster.
It asked for my “sex assigned at birth” — I put “male”, of course. I considered crossing out “assigned at birth” and instead writing something like “observed at birth” or “determined from ultrasound”, but I think I worried that crossing out the words on the form would have the potential of preventing me from receiving the booster.
Then it asked also for my “gender identity” — it gave a bunch of options: M, F, NB, I think GF (genderfluid), some other things, “rather not say”, and GNL — “gender not listed (please provide in the blank space)”. I selected GNL, and wrote in: “Gender doesn’t exist. I reject this religion.”
There was a spot for GNL people to write in special pronouns; of course I left that blank, despite having selected GNL.
I forget whether they had an option “rather not say” also for sex. I hope not, because if they’re taking statistics to see who had reactions to the booster, sex is rather important.
I worried that the clerk would tell me: “Sir, there’s a problem with your form”, but he just said: “Go over there to the woman administering the shots”, and everything was fine. So I’ve got my booster now.
I’m actually not 100% sure they were doing ultrasound tesing when I was in utero (1983-1984), so I just did a bit of research, and came up with nothing — but this led me to the Wikipedia page on “Gender Reveal Parties”. I first learned about that ridiculous practice from The Daily Show, a bit over a year ago, when Trevor Noah criticized the practice for being stupid and causing forest fires and other damage, and also, he said, “Because we know so much more about gender now than a decade ago, when the practice started. In fact, it turns out that the woman who invented Gender Reveal Parties, to announce that she was supposedly pregnant with her daughter — it turns out now that that child is a boy.”
That was when I stopped watching Trevor Noah. He totally bought into the trans narrative, and (as far as I remember) didn’t criticize the parties at all for encouraging harmful sex stereotypes.
Anyway, I read the Wikipedia page on Gender Reveal Parties just now, and it said: “An early example was recorded in the 2008 posts of then-pregnant Jenna Karvunidis on her ChicagoNow blog High Gloss and Sauce announcing the sex of her fetus via cake. […] In 2019, […] [s]he expressed regret at having helped start the trend, learning how the LGBT and intersex communities feel, and finally revealing the daughter they announced back in 2008 to be a gender-nonconforming individual who wears suits while still identifying as female.”
I didn’t check up on Wikipedia’s sources, but if Wikipedia is correct, I’m even more annoyed with Trevor Noah. Never mind the point that Karvunidis seems to be “an early example”, and not necessarily the “inventor” of the phenomenon, but seriously, this child doesn’t even claim to be a boy; she fucking wear suits, and therefore you call her a boy? This is infuriating.
A former friend, deep into trans ideology, had a gender reveal party a few years ago that included a cake with the message “gender is a social construct”. He was too attached to the ideology to allow discussion about what he really meant by that, and it was he who blocked me after I posted an article critical of trans ideology.
Kathleen Stock is a brave hero of reason. Chapter in Material Girls on total immersion in fiction & need to keep hold of reality is truly excellent. You can feel genuine, heartfelt, deep sympathy for Ophelia, but you snap back to reality when you need to find the theatre loo.
For a moment I thought he meant you when he wrote “Ophelia”.
Nice, PZ was caught being publicly idiotic on twitter by Emma Hilton and Jane Clare Jones. Unfortunately I am not twitter adept, or my browser hates it or something, so I can’t string them together. Here’s a sample though
Resources for victims of domestic violence and sexualized violence: (1) For men; (2) For LGBTQ2S. (If you read the fine print, you find that this also includes women.) (3) For children.
I’m not sure whether anyone has posted this in the comments, I’ve fallen a bit behind in keeping up with them all lately, but here’s @LabelFreeBrands comparing the responses to JKR and Dawkins on their evil TERFitude:
In my response to “It’s a huge honour for him,” I mentioned a song I wrote in the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre. I didn’t think t was appropriate to include a link to it in my comment, but I’ll share it here. This is a link to a 1992 recording of it that my friend and songwriting partner posted to his Soundcloud account.
OK, Liddle is an idiot and I can’t think of a single reason anyone would go to watch him speak in the first place. And I’m all for not going to a talk or even dramatically (but not too disruptively) leaving a talk in disgust if you feel like it. I’m all for peacefully (and not too disruptively) protesting a talk you don’t like.
But, of course, students are declaring they are not safe because a visitor to the university said some words. They’re safe being taught how to be prostitutes as though it’s a job at McDonalds, but they are not safe because a known idiot said some words, even if they didn’t hear them.
Butterflies and Wheels inhabit my brain. I saw an article about a man attacked by otters, and I thought, likely story, it was probably a group of trans otters, and now the statistics will get all messed up.
I’m sharing it not so much for the main points of the article, how a white appearance makes white people feel “safe” in expressing racist sentiments to your face, but rather for the matter-of-fact assertions throughout the article that the author is Black, that these other people she speaks of are Black because of Black ancestry, and they just look white, they pass for white, they present as white. No question is raised regarding what any of that means.
Hypodescent mostly seems relevant, in my experience, in reference to Black people in the US. A book I read on the topic included anecdotes of American Black people who traveled abroad, encountered people of mixed racial background, and were confused about why these other people did not consider themselves Black (as they, the travelers, did). I find interesting the attitude of the author of the linked article, which is very common in my experience, that of course these people are Black, it’s not even a question, and if they look white they either acknowledge being Black or they are passing, there is no alternative worth considering.
That was a fascinating video. It pulled in so many concepts. People “identifying” arbitrarily; it being “cool” or “better” to not be white; cultural rather than ethnic markers for race; people “passing”; people of mixed racial background (one of which Is Black) being declared Black. Very interesting, thanks for the link.
The cultural marker questions were particularly interesting. There is this idea that racial “identity” informs one’s speech pattern, accent, taste in music, and food preferences. Yet someone with the right background, devoid of the right preferences, is of that ethnicity, while someone of the wrong background, and fully immersed and knowledgeable, is not of that ethnicity.
I found this graph fascinating, and very sad at the same time.
The difference in death rates from COVID between Republicans and Democrats is becoming even more striking. pic.twitter.com/e1gvgwIY4M— Michael Olesen (@maolesen) December 15, 2021
She made up the sport. Other people came up with some way to play a sport that, in the books, involves flying on broomsticks and chasing magical flying balls, and their issue is based on the stupid ignorant ranting of TAs. You’d think that maybe if they read what she actually wrote they’d tell the activists to stuff it, but they seem to have trouble telling the reality of their Earthbound sport from the fiction of the Harry Potter books anyway.
Happy solstice to all denizens of the B&W blog! Winter solstice, to those of us identifying as residents of the northern hemisphere. How I wish I could simply identify as the opposite; I would have midsummer now, instead of the oppressive darkness caused by the combination of a very short day and a ridiculously heavy cloud cover.
There’s been a lot of ridiculously heavy cloud cover over Seattle lately too – ridiculously even for Seattle, which is notoriously grey in winter – along with earlier dark than most of the US, though much less so than Norway. Sunday the clouds parted and there was much blue sky for most of the day, and it was like a giant party in my head. (I actually like winter, but the dark this time has been getting to be a bit much.)
Seattle and Trondheim are both situated on a west coast, so I think it’s not too surprising if we have similar weather patterns. We are much farther north, but on the other hand we have the Gulf Stream to keep us warm(ish) in winter, which helps a lot.
We also had a brief glimpse of the sun yesterday, before the clouds moved in once more. A couple weeks ago, we had a cold snap with some snow on the ground. It made a world of a difference! It’s just so much lighter when there is snow. Now, the weather is warmer, all the snow is gone, and the gloom is back. But we’re heading to the mountains for the Christmas holidays, a change from traditions but one I am looking forward to. There will be a generous snow cover, for one thing.
Dr Oz is running for US Senate in Pennsylvania. He has many failings, but the key super important new issue, according to a writer at Daily Kos, is that he dared to support JK Rowling. He said she was “very brave”. She is.
During the hearing for his violation, Verainer was dressed like an elf, wearing a green and red dress, red and white thigh-high stockings, and a festive sweater. He was allegedly sucking his thumb throughout.
At a previous court appearance for his 2016 abuses, Verainer had adorned pig-tails and had been sucking on a pacifier, later also having a large stuffed doll.
In both instances, he had been referred to by “she/her” pronouns by the court, after stating he identified as a 5-year-old girl.
Of course they went along with his “identity” as female, but not his “identity” as a small child. Why is that? Anyone?
This is interesting. Trump says that the COVID vaccines works, and that the Americans that have died of COVID this year are responsible for their own deaths, because, he says, they didn’t get vaccinated..
A week before Christmas, my wife and I went to a musical performance at the local, main, professional theatre. It was supposed to be a “welcome back” after a year’s closure and renovations. In the week since, we’ve broken daily case count records for the entire pandemic locally, provincially and nationally (though mercifully, hospitalizations and deaths have not spiked alongside cases). Toilet facilities are now “All Gender”, featuring individual, completely enclosed toilet stalls, and a communal hand-washing area. It could have been worse. In the past there were usually line-ups outside the women’s washrooms, but never the men’s. Maybe this will even things out? I’m also wondering if some future renovation will end up re-segregating these facilities by sex, if and when the genderism fad blows over and saner heads prevail.
During the opening number, each of the performers gave a little “Gee, it’s great to be back, nice to see you all” speech, written, I’m guessing, with input from each of them. One of of these little speeches ended with “My pronouns are they/them.” As if this was something Vitally Important for the audience to know. They/them was a male, with beard and moustache, but broadcasting “Their “Non-Conforming status through a combination of nail polish, and a deep blue, glittery headband with jeweled center-piece. Still just one entity though, no plurality or duality present. That one little line felt intrusive, contrived, self-centred, and self-indulgent. “They” had an excellent voice, but that little bit of gender-snowflake grandstanding left me feeling cold and unappreciative of his performance. The theatre gets to show how Progressive it is, but so what? As far as this show and this performer was concerned, IT DOESN’T MATTER AND I DON’T CARE. Please, just SHUT THE FUCK UP. “All Gender” washrooms was political statement enough. Had this been a movie, it would have been a moment better left on the cutting room floor. Sigh.
Yes somebody you’re not going to be chatting to, and not going to be talking about in “their” presence, really doesn’t need to say anything about “their” customized pronouns.
You know, political slogans used to be meaningful, even if they could be used by showoffs and grifters to get some kind of reward. No pasaran, viva la huelga, vive la résistance, black lives matter, sisterhood is powerful, solidarity forever – they’re all about something beyond the self. Way beyond the self. “My pronouns are” is so diametrically opposed to that you’d think someone would eventually notice.
Most recently the phrase “Every Child Matters” has been added to the Canadian conciousness. Something this theatre has been doing for years is to include a few lines regarding Land Acknowledgement in the program of each current show. This time the program was online only (likely to reduce points of contact) and has a whole page outlining Treaty history in our area. The newly renovated lobby also has a commemorative display of 215 orange feathers hanging from the underside of the stairway going up to the balcony. They represent the initial 215 unmarked graves discovered in Kamloops on the grounds of the residential school. To keep this accurate and updated, they will need longer stairways and many more feathers…
To which I sarcastically say: No kidding! You don’t say! Do you think maybe this might have some people believing the lie that they can change sex, too?
Matt Osborne is from my own state of Alabama, and he, a political scientist, often has insightful commentary on state politics. This letter is inspired by a comment from an Alabama Democratic state party official: “How are we going to talk to voters with a straight face after setting a quota for non-binary party officials?”
Very, very true. The Alabama Democratic Party (ADP) has a complicated set of quotas intended to ensure the demographics of the party apparatus is close to that of the state, but which has become an absolute circus. Recent turmoil in the party was not over policy and candidates, but over representation. There was a fractious change of leadership in 2019, and since then there has been significant improvement, in my view, in the direction of the party, but the quotas and emphasis on representation are in the bylaws and remain a force. It is not in the least surprising that the party apparatus has added trans ideology to its mindless list of “inclusive” causes, along with the trans-related quotas. I don’t know if they have added quotas for men-who-claim-to-be-women, or if such men take precedence over women in the choices for “women” seats, but it’s unfortunately possible. Even with the renewed focus on policy, I’m afraid that these quotas are going to bite the Democrats on their, er, asses even worse in the upcoming elections. Bad times ahead this year.
Doug Jones wasn’t getting support from the ADP, and he worked behind the scenes to push the change of party leadership. I wish he had won, but if his legacy within the state is a better-functioning party, I’m glad for that. There’s a long way to go, though, and crap like this doesn’t help.
Another lead from Glinner about a legal article an attorney posted on his LinkedIn page, which was censored by LinkedIn as “hate” speech. IMO, the lawyer — former judge — has a point.
Religion News Service article about the nonbeliever exodus from Patheos. They are forming a platform called Only Sky. The article mentions no media outlets in existence that specializes in the needs of the Nones; that can’t be right, unless they are making some fine distinction that disqualifies FtB, Skepchick, The Orbit, and several other attempts at having a communal site for atheist writers. Maybe they are all defunct?
Also mentioned is that Patheos is changing their “brand” and will not allow atheist writers to be critical of religion; writers are in general expected to focus on how to live a good life within their world view, not on criticizing the views of others. So I’m not at all surprised the atheists left.
I agree there. I guess I’m a bit surprised that the article implies Only Sky brings something new to the table, something that wasn’t true of other atheist blog networks, and it isn’t clear to me what that might be. A voice for the Nones who are not atheists? I doubt it. Something more “media outlet” than “blog network”? If so, I’m wondering what that is.
So now I’m reading the article (fun concept! I didn’t get around to it yesterday) and I see what you mean.
The changes come amid new surveys showing the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated has exploded in recent years, rising to 29% of the U.S. population, up from 19% in 2011. These “nones,” a catchall for a host of groups, including atheists, agnostics, humanists and just plain secularists, have established multiple service and advocacy organizations to serve this growing segment of the population. But there is no media platform solely dedicated to those who are not part of traditional religions.
Yes I think FTB et al. fit that description. Then again I know nothing about Only Sky; maybe it’s a more platformish platform – less homemade, so to speak.
OnlySky is supposed to be more than a blog network. Adam Lee of Daylight Atheismwrote:
OnlySky will have a different look and feel from what you’re used to on Patheos. Instead of a network of blogs, it will be a media site with news, opinion columns, podcasts and video. Think Vox or the Atlantic. It’ll feature voices from across the secular spectrum, some you may already know (not just from Patheos!) as well as some new ones.
Some of my favorite bloggers are moving there (plus a few I don’t care for at all) so I think it would be worth a look. It hasn’t been launched yet, though.
Speaking of blog history, the Lawyers, Guns & Money podcast has started a series on The Oral History of the Blogosphere. They’re more focused on the political blogosphere, so I wouldn’t expect them to get into atheist/skeptic stuff, but still interesting if you remember (or still follow) that world. Episode 1 was with Matt Yglesias, #2 with Dan Drezner came out recently.
From the guest letter, quoting some of the guidance given to judges:
Transgender, nonbinary, agender, genderqueer and other gender-nonconforming attorneys experience issues with their forms of identification when their photos do not necessarily match their gender expression in court on a particular day.
Some transgender attorneys were assumed by court staff to be defendants on prostitution charges simply due to their gender expression, specifically clothing and makeup.
Have they considered not dressing as caricatures of women?
I hope Ophelia will forgive me for the shameless plug.
I’ve signed up for various wheelchair distance events in 2022 including the Leeds and Sheffield half marathons, the Middlesbrough 10k and (hopefully) the Great North Run.
I’m raising money for nia (https://niaendingviolence.org.uk/), a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.
A strange Daily Kos article talks about a fringe group of physicians being promoted on Fox News who are suggesting ivermectin as a “front line” treatment for Covid. The “second line” treatment includes a set of drugs that are used (off label, I am pretty damn sure) for androgen suppression in trans-identified males. DK makes the point that Fox thinks these medications are dangerous and terrible for use for “gender affirming” care, but suddenly they are fine for Covid. It seems to me that both Covid and “gender affirmation” are off-label uses of the medications.
I’m certainly not making an argument for treating COVID with ivermectin, but let’s not get hung up on whether or not something is “off label.” My understanding is that there’s nothing necessarily bad about “off-label” uses of medication. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t allowed to promote “off label” uses of their products, but doctors are free to prescribe “off label,” and frequently do.
I think there can be multiple reasons why a drug that is (in the U.S.) FDA-approved for treating condition A might not have approval for treating condition B. Obviously one reason might be that it really isn’t an effective treatment for B. But it could also be that it will eventually be approved for B, there hasn’t been time to gather the evidence and go through the regulatory process. Or the maker decided that it isn’t worth their time and money to go through the process to get it approved for B — it might be a relatively small market compared to A, and since physicians can prescribe off-label, it may be that everyone is happy with that status quo: the manufacturer can make and sell it, and promote its use for A, while anyone who wants to take or prescribe it for B can do so.
Had to click round randomly (finding Fuente’s slick sophistry hard to take right now) and read the comments (see to be uniformly scathing)
Did catch enough in the section on sports to know this should have someone knowledgeable do a take down:
– seems to imply that some women in WNBA could play in NBA
– is sure that Williams sisters could beat male tennis players ranked in top 50
Usual JKR bashing – Fuente can’t imagine why she would want to comment on this issue (seems to contradict himself later saying it is better to discuss than not, but seems bewildered that she didn’t immediately cave when people criticised her.)
I had downloaded that podcast but not listened to it yet. You’ve probably spared me the time.
The tennis thing is just nonsense. It instantly brands you as someone who doesn’t know tennis. Early in their careers, the Williams sisters made some noises about competing against the men. Karsten Braasch, a German player then ranked #203, offered to play them, and beat Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. After that they stopped making those kinds of challenges, and have been pretty clear in recent years that they don’t claim to be able to compete with the top men. There have been other examples over the years of similar formal and informal matches. Yes, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the 70s, and that was a good and important victory for the fledgling women’s tour — but it was important precisely because Riggs was an old man who shouldn’t have been able to beat top women, but in fact had previously crushed Margaret Court. (I don’t give much credence to the conspiracy theories that Riggs threw the match against King, I assume she beat him fair and square.)
Anyway, at every level (pros, college, etc.), there is a huge gap between the best men and the best women, and anyone who’s spent any time around the game knows it. So anyone who comes to a discussion about women’s sports with “I think Serena can beat the men” is not someone worth my time.
– is sure that Williams sisters could beat male tennis players ranked in top 50
Swanalien, even the Williams sisters in their prime did not make so bold a claim when they challenged a male player and bragged that they would win. They issued the challenge to any male player outside the top 200, the challenge was taken up by the 203rd ranked male player, who won with ease. They then revised their challenge to any male player outside the top 350.
I’m in a weird place… on the one hand I think SCOTUS blocking of the vaccine mandate for large workplaces is bullshit but on the other hand it’s hard to argue that using OSHA to put one in place is within the scope of what the agency is designed to do. But this is where we are when Congress is fucking useless and all we have is the imperial presidency.
Glinner has a post about a man in prison for assaulting a 14-year-old girl. The man identifies as a woman, and has apparently altered his appearance. He is subjected to assault in the prison, from staff and other prisoners. News articles are leaving out his crime and framing the assaults as “transphobia”. Glinner’s take is unsympathetic toward the pedophile and angry at the news media for making this about his mistreatment.
It is my understanding that pedophiles are treated badly in prison, and nothing I read in the article Glinner links to convinces me that this isn’t like any other abuse of a pedophile. I do not condone assault of prisoners for any reason, including this case. I agree with Glinner that the news media is omitting important information, but I also think the news media is playing favorites here. They could be reporting about prison rape and assault, and decrying the abuse of prisoners, even unsympathetic ones, but no, they have to turn this into a transgender story. There are many other stories about prison assault that they aren’t telling.
Apropos of nothing particular, I ran across this story on YouTube, about a police sergeant, who was about to deploy pepper spray on a suspect in custody, who was restrained (pulled on the back of the belt) by another officer. The sergeant did desist from deploying the pepper spray, but turned on the other officer. The police cam footage shows the sergeant putting his hands to the restraining officer’s neck. The story never once acknowledges that the junior officer was a woman officer; it certainly looks like a woman officer to me. I wonder if the sergeant would have put hands to the officer’s throat if it weren’t a woman. Somehow I doubt it. Police officers have serious problems with domestic violence and misogyny.
My relatively quick reading gives me several impressions.
The authors did try to make a distinction between criticism of religion, which they acknowledge must be allowed in a free society, and prejudice against or hostility toward Muslims. Ultimately, though, they concluded that it is difficult to tease those concepts apart, and therefore somehow criticism of the religion of Islam needs to be considered a problem. I don’t agree. Criticism of ideas, including religions, must be protected. If it’s difficult in some cases to make fine distinctions, then it’s difficult, but don’t come down against criticism.
There was a fair amount of whatabouttery: criticism of Islam was compared to criticism of other (e.g. non-Christian) religions, and people are less familiar with those religions so had little criticism to offer. Among the points being pressed was whether Islam was supposed to be taken literally (especially more so than other religions). This issue is a familiar one to many of us; people claim a religion is not really supposed to be taken literally, despite the fact that so many of the clergy and the adherents actually do take it, or key points, literally. Nowhere in the report was the actual truth of the question raised, it was apparently just assumed that no, it’s not to be taken literally. But it doesn’t matter if Islam is more literal than other religions so much as it matters that Islam is literal; we are allowed to talk about a problem without having to decide it’s the single worst problem.
The fact that Muslim women are typically identifiable in Western society by the wearing of head scarves, and that people were using the proliferation of head scarves as an indication of the proliferation of Muslims, was criticized as prejudice against women and mocking of Muslim dress. To be fair, sometimes it is. But there is a problem of lack of truly free choice in the wearing of head scarves, and there is nothing wrong with using identifiable characteristics of a group as a marker indicating the presence of a group. What one does with that information is another issue.
The report does, I think, a decent job of addressing racial coding of Islam in the eyes of Britons.
It seems a well-done report, but hampered by a desire to stamp out criticism of Islam along with prejudice against Muslims. It would be interesting to see a report on “islamophobia” by an organization unafraid to criticize Islam and other religions: Campaign for Free Expression, perhaps, or Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.
Our new Republican governor here in Virginia, champion of limited government and parental choice, has decided the Stasi had the right idea:
In the interview, Youngkin also touted a tip line for parents to report to the state any school officials they find to be behaving objectionably — including teaching “divisive” subjects. Youngkin has issued an executive order and is backing legislation that seeks to ban concepts such as critical race theory, an academic construct about the history of systemic racism.
“We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations,” Youngkin said, “help us be aware of … their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia, and we’re going to make sure we catalogue it all. … And that gives us further, further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.”
This is how he intends to keep “divisiveness” out of schools.
In a move that goes beyond email signatures and corporate bios, an American company is putting pronouns in their company name. The chocolate manufacturer will now be known as “Her/She”.
Skeptic magazine (yes, Shermer, but bear with me) is having trans stuff as their cover feature in an upcoming issue. They’ve posted an article by Carol Tavris from it:
It’s not going to please trans activists. Some of the other stories listed on the cover likely won’t as well, but it looks like they’re going to have people from both sides weighing in.
It’s nice to see more cracks in the “there is nothing to debate!” wall.
The victim’s family has said her attackers are connected to a family in which a teenage boy died by suicide last November. They say the boy was stalking and pursuing the victim for a long time but when his advances were rejected, he took his life.
The woman is married and has a 3-year-old son.
“He fell in love with her… He used to keep calling and asking her to leave her husband and be with him. She would always refuse,” the victim’s sister told an Indian news outlet. After the boy’s suicide, his family had reportedly threatened the woman several times, prompting her to move recently.
Of course the woman is to blame for being stalked, and rejecting her stalker, thus causing his suicide. But if she had given in to him, how do you think her husband’s family would’ve reacted? (And how will his family react now that she’s committed the crime of being raped?)
An opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed by English professor Angie Kirk, Biological Gender in Fair Competitive Sports Policy, seems reasonable and well put. She makes good points about biological reality, fairness, language, and women’s rights.
I learned of this opinion piece via a link in a Daily Kos article by Marissa Higgins, English professor fired off a vehemently anti-trans op-ed in a big news outlet. Let’s talk about it. This one was, as you might expect, not reasonable or well put. Higgins says that calling trans-identified males “biological males” is “a warning bell if I’ve ever heard one”. She calls Kirk “biological essentialist” and fails to address the biological facts of the matter. She also makes the common and inappropriate Appeal to Intersex.
I don’t see why Kirk’s measured and clear essay would be called “vehement”, except in the case that any disagreement with trans ideology is automatically “vehement”. Probably the Daily Kos piece gets tossed on the enormous pile of bad faith responses to reasonable disagreements. But Kirk’s article is good and worth reading.
A recent twiiterfitter tried to “win” the debate by pointing me to the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, you know, the guy who coined the term “transsexual”. Interestingly, upon “educating myself”, I found this.
For the curious, I recently stumbled across this article on Joe Rogan, published back in 2019. I found it had many of the points I recently made, better than I made them, along with some counterpoints worth considering.
I’m among the curious. Thanks for that, and for the other article.
There was a New York Magazine article about the Spotify backlash that I commented on a few days ago but may have been lost to the mists of time. I thought you and others might find it of interest.
Thank you for that comment and for pointing it out. You make good points about allowing mobs to dictate acceptable norms and legitimising the hecklers’ veto, especially when that veto is a demand that backroom executives arrogate to themselves the power to decide what the rest of us can see and hear and read, ostensibly for our own good. It is a bit astounding that so many self-described leftwing people are championing corporate censorship, as explored by the Daily Beast, giving a leftist rebuke to this instinct.
There has been much hubbub over the attempts to remove Maus and various other books from school libraries and curricula. The backlash has caused, at least in my window on the digital world, a great many memes declarations against censorship and against banning books. It seems assumed that books are wonderful, that the best way to get people to read a book is to try to ban it, and that the people doing the banning are uniformly conservative.
As we know well, not all attempts at banning books are from conservatives. While looking for some discussion of this point, I came across this short and apropos WSJ opinion piece by Thomas Spence from September: ‘Banned Books Week’ Isn’t Actually Interested in Banned Books, with a subhead of “If it were, conservative writers like Abigail Shrier and Ryan T. Anderson would be on the list.” It talks specifically about the attempts to hide or prevent the sale of “Irreversible Damage” and “When Harry Became Sally”, and also more generally. Spence has a dog in this fight; he’s president of Regnery Publishing, a conservative publishing house. But the general point that book banning is not strictly a conservative action is a good one. (He is focused on liberal censorious actions against books he considers conservative, but he misses actions against books by liberals of different opinions.)
I feel like collecting many of these “anti-banning” memes and statements and playing them back the next time someone wants to remove a new gender-critical title, or heck, even just a novel by JK Rowling or some other person who has been declared off-limits. It sometimes seems like Left and Right are fighting over the Harry Potter books: “I want to ban them because witchcraft!” “No, I want to ban them because transphobe!” In all the controversy over Maus, CRT, and books with so-called “LGBTQIA+” characters, I haven’t seen any “woke” liberals stand up against the banning of Harry Potter by conservatives.
Here is an absolutely bonkers tale of a family’s dissolution catalysed by gender ideology — initially as a complicating factor in the separation itself, and then as a legal instrument of torture for the father. I’ve read of similar stories in Canada, but this one hits particularly hard.
I didn’t read all of this article about the potpourri of laws coming out of Florida, but this bit struck me:
A case in point: 11-year-old Cooper Solomon and his mother, Jennifer, a nurse. Cooper, who attends a Miami elementary school, was born male and identifies as male but his gender expression is female, which means “he’s a boy who likes girl things,” Solomon told me. He wears dresses. He is “happy, healthy and successful in school,” she says.
He also feels welcomed, she notes. The day she read the class a book called “Jacob’s New Dress,” hands shot up in the air and one classmate shouted, “That’s like Cooper.” No biggie — “It was normalized,” Solomon says.
So Cooper likes wearing dresses? Good for him! And his classmates are accepting of it? Even better! No one should be subject to bullying just because they prefer to wear unconventional clothes.
But why not tell the kids “Cooper’s a boy. And it’s ok for boys to wear dresses. Dresses aren’t ‘girl things’, they’re ‘people things’. Just like dolls and toy cars and pink and blue.”?
The suits were judged a little too big, giving an “unfair advantage”, even though the exact same suits were just fine in a different event a few days ago.
When was the last time that men were penalized a sports competition because of the cut of their uniform? How often does that happen? It happened to women a couple of times at the Summer Games just last year, if I recall correctly. I can’t recall it ever happening to men, so I doubt it’s nearly as frequent.
The bit of extra room in the thigh gives an “unfair advantage”, but the sports world can’t manage to understand that having an adult male body confers a significantly larger “unfair advantage” in most sports.
NPR had an article about the suit controversy, and noted how minutely detailed the uniform regulations are. They also noted that women’s uniforms are far more regulated than men’s, and that women had to add a large number of panels to their uniforms with recent regulation changes, purportedly to make them fit more aerodynamically, but also (some claimed) to highlight the athletes’ figures.
Adele is today at the centre of an extraordinary row between transgender rights activists and feminists after she took a stand against the ultra-woke ‘genderless’ Brit Awards by declaring: ‘I love being a woman’.
Her speech while collecting Artist of the Year at the 02 Arena in London sparked uproarious cheers from the audience and viewers at home took to social media to say: ‘Thank GOD she has said it’.
The Brits axed separate male and female prizes for best solo and best international acts in 2022 to avoid upsetting several artists, including former Brit winner Sam Smith, who identifies as non-binary. Collecting the award Adele said: ‘I understand why the name of this award has changed. But I really love being a woman and being a female artist I do I’m really proud of us’.
But some Adele fans have vowed to boycott her music claiming she offended non-binary people and branded her a TERF – a derogatory term for a feminist who excludes the rights of transgender women also thrown at the singer’s friend JK Rowling.
One LGBTQ activist said: ‘Please, no, ADELE can’t be a TERF. That last comment, though ambiguous, could be perceived as TERF-Y. Please no’. Another critic said: ‘I love Adele but that ‘woman’ comment seemed like a bit of a dig, non binary artists deserve better’. Paul M Rodriguez Jr said he had ‘lost a lot of respect for Adele’ and would ‘not spend a cent on her music’, adding: ‘What sux I really liked her’.
But women’s rights groups have praised her stance. A spokesman for charity Safeguard Women & Girls said: ‘Yes, women are part of society, 50% actually. @Adele you make every woman I know proud. You’re an inspiration to many of what can be achieved’.
Oh, brave new world, that has such women people in it!
Twitter – so I don’t have an account, I just leave a tab open and browse the timeline of people I’m interested in. As of this morning, I can read about 2-4 tweets and a pop-up appears requiring me to sign in to view more. I can refresh the screen, scroll down to the next batch of tweets and read a couple more before the pop-up returns.
Is this happening to anyone else? any work arounds? I’m really not keen to create an account.
Thanks Ophelia. I always use a Private browser window anyway and grab a direct link as you suggest. Weirdly, todays issue didn’t affect safari on iOS. In any event I had to reboot my computer (thanks Parallels!) and after that everything has been working fine. Twitter is weird. Way too much code going on that website.
Yes, this is a business decision Twitter has made, to give no-account users enough rope to addict themselves with and then cut off the supply in order to nudge them into creating an account and joining the funhouse 24/7. I am of course not privy to the details, but I suspect they are creating shadow-accounts based on browser fingerprinting — even for private browsers, whose main benefit is that the fingerprinted profiles created from them are slightly more difficult to associate with a real-world identity than a normal browser.
Anyway, these shadow-accounts are presumably given a certain amount of browsing time, measured in number of tweets loaded or some other proxy, before the spigot is turned down to the lowest setting, allowing you to see a handful of tweets before being inexorably prompted to sign up or sign in. Because the shadow-accounts do not see the advertisements (at least not yet), whereas actual accounts do.
Your new browser will only take you so long before it too will reach the hard limit, in a week or a month or however long some Twitter executive has decided is long enough to sink the hook and reel you in. If you really want to swimming in the waters without getting gutted, you’ll need to shell out, either for a truly private browsing experience or a VPN which lets you cycle your internet traffic through different countries, possibly even while spoofing different browser and OS setups out of which fingerprints are made. (Or possibly both.)
I suspect at some point the engineers will rejigger their ad system to show the advertisements to the shadow-accounts, perhaps after they have mined them long enough to build up a decent advertising profile to sell to the advert market. Since the GDPR, European advertisers are having to build such a system anyway, an ecosystem with profligate digital profiles only distantly-connected to a real-live human being on the other end; when enough advertisers get comfortable with the notion of cutting the cord of a real account, there’ll be nothing but inertia to keep Twitter and Facebook and any other social media company from simply creating shadow-accounts for every browser without anyone needing to sign up at all.
Good article about Rowling and the Harry Potter books by Sam Leith at Unherd: Harry Potter fans need to grow up. I note in particular this section:
That is to say: evil is held to reside ineradicably in the person so sorted. The extent to which this has become general is shown on the reaction to the now notorious Harper’s letter — signed, among many others, by J. K. Rowling — which offered some pretty unexceptionable bromides on free speech. The debate centred not on the arguments made in the letter but on the people who signed their names to it. The question not was it the right argument, but were they the right people? Was the Dark Mark upon them? One signatory who had freely endorsed the contents of the letter, presumably having at least skim-read them, immediately withdrew their support and apologised on the express grounds that they never would have signed had they known who else was signing. Wrong team. Expelliarmus.
it’s striking that an audience primed to take a binary goodies vs baddies worldview has turned with some decisiveness on the author of that worldview when it decided (most dramatically over her gender-critical comments on Twitter) that she’s on the other team.
Our cultural and political moment now looks very much like one with a sorting-hat view of the world: the hat peers deep into your soul, and after no more than a minute – though usually instantly – it assigns you an identity. If you’re Slytherin, that’s that.
That’s what I disliked about the first book and why I stopped reading it at that point.
The accounting firm Mazars has fired the Trump Organization as a client after saying that a decade’s worth of statements of ex-President Donald Trump’s financial condition “should no longer be relied upon,” the New York Attorney General’s office revealed in a court filing Monday.
Mazars, which for years prepared Trump’s income tax returns and financial statements used to obtain loans for his company, told the Trump Organization’s top lawyer Alan Garten that it would no longer represent the company due to the lack of reliability of the financial statements in a letter last Wednesday.
The letter was cited by AG Letitia James’ office on Monday as it asked a state judge to order the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr. and his sister Ivanka Trump, and others to comply with subpoenas seeking documents and testimony.
Sure, priests diddling kids, mistreatment of pregnant women, opposition to abortion, not providing proper medical care, you think all those are problems for the Catholic Church. But you’re missing what really matters: getting the baptism script right.
A priest resigned earlier this month after his diocese discovered the baptisms he had performed were invalid because he had changed a single word while performing the sacrament.
Fortunately the church hierarchy is on top of things.
“It is with sincere pastoral concern that I inform the faithful that baptisms performed by Reverend Andres Arango, a priest of the Diocese of Phoenix, are invalid,” Bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix Thomas J. Olmsted announced in a letter last month.
“This determination was made after careful study by diocesan officials and through consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome,” he wrote.
So what was this priest’s horrendous sin?
Arango, who has been practicing as a priest for more than two decades, used the phrase “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” instead of “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Olmsted said.
The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2020 clarified that using “we” during the first sacrament was not valid.
At least we now know Jesus’s pronouns. But the scandal may go further.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many baptisms Arango performed. He also practiced in San Diego and Brazil.
Still, the miscreant is appropriately penitent, and remains in good standing.
In a letter to his parish, Arango wrote: “It saddens me to learn that I have performed invalid baptisms throughout my ministry as a priest by regularly using an incorrect formula. I deeply regret my error and how this has affected numerous people in your parish and elsewhere.”
He said he resigned, effective Feb. 1, so he could “dedicate my energy and full time ministry to help remedy this and heal those affected.”
“I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience my actions have caused and genuinely ask for your prayers, forgiveness, and understanding,” he wrote.
The Diocese of Phoenix said Arango “has not disqualified himself from his vocation and ministry” and “remains a priest in good standing.”
And the church is right on top of things for all those poor, innocent victims:
Those who believe they or their children were baptized by Arango can fill out a form online to be properly baptized. Subsequent sacraments, including marriage, may need to be repeated by those who had invalid baptisms performed by Arango, according to the Diocese of Phoenix.
Though it strikes me as odd that an omni-omni deity can’t perform his duty because of a small error. I can just imagine Him sitting on His throne in Heaven, watching the proceedings, all ready to give His blessing to the little one and subject it to an eternity of torment, exclaiming when he’s blocked by the faux pas, “Dammit! Borked again!”
There is an expression in my mother tongue that translates as “Adam’s clothes” – or, alternatively, “Eve’s clothes” – and is commonly understood to denote the absence of any physical garments. This appears to be conclusive scientific* proof that the very first humans** were in fact trans-dressed and what they were wearing was widely accepted as a legitimate kind of clothing from the very beginning. The white, Western idea that wearing “clothes” – or being fully “dressed” – has anything to do with vulgar physical fabrics is a recent cultural invention and inextricably linked to cultural imperialism, Western hegemony and white supremacy, i.e. the stereotypical “dressed” person is not just imagined to be cis-dressed (i.e. covered in garments), but also white, Christian and middle-class. This whole weird fixation on physical fabrics is also kind of obscene, not to mention creepy as hell, to be honest.
It is disheartening to see such a stunning and brave performance by our first ever openly trans-dressed emperor be met by yet more bigotry, hatred, and literal violence against one of the most vulnerable and oppressed minorities in our society. There’s a direct path from denying the very existence of trans-dressed individuals through statements like “The emperor is naked!” to rounding them up by the millions and sending them to the gas chamber. Their blood is literally on this child’s hands, and we need to remind everyone of this ugly truth whenever the brat opens its mouth for the rest of its life.
* Pseudoscience is science! It’s in the name!
** Those who argue that Adam and Eve were not historical figures only provide further proof (as if any were needed!) of their cis-historical bigotry. Being an historical figure was never about crude, physical existence!
I’m not up on my Catholic theology — are there any supposed consequences if one of those “improperly baptized” people has already died? Is baptism a requirement for entrance to heaven? Can they baptize a dead person retroactively as the Mormons do?
“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Olmsted said.
Well if Jesus was officiating at the event, you’d think he would have spoken up at the time.
The ad in question talks about Lia (previously William) Thomas, with pictures and information of him prior to “transition”; Higgins is aghast that anyone would dare to use that information, including in the context of this ad, where it is relevant to the points being made.
The article contains the usual rejection of any gender-critical issues, and “transwomen are women” and other slogans. I do wish to point this bit out, though:
The hysteria about protecting women’s sports is smoke and mirrors. Want to really support women’s sports? Get women’s teams more funding; more opportunities for travel, training, and coaching; and truly invest in the infrastructure needed to make sports sustainable, safe, and accessible for all girls and women who want to play.
There are plenty of barriers when it comes to getting involved in sports, especially at a competitive or career level—the price of private leagues or individual coaching, for example, or the time commitment on the part of parents when it comes to travel leagues. The choice to take youth out of the classroom and into homeschooling to maximize practice time. The history of sexual abuse and assault in girls sports. The pressure and burnout and mental health struggles that can come with unfair amounts of pressure. Body image and weight issues. How about Republicans tackle even one of these points with the same amount of effort they’re putting into disparaging trans girls?
Oh, right. That would mean actually caring about (cisgender) women and girls and not just using them as political pawns.
I have some amount of agreement with her point that this politician, like many other Republican politicians, likely doesn’t really care about the rights and welfare of women and girls. The issues she mentions are good ones.
That, however, doesn’t make the issues inherent in gender ideology disappear. The suggested increase in team funding won’t make it more likely for women to win championships (and endorsements and scholarships) against male competitors. Heck, it might provide even more men with lucrative opportunities.
I note that she phrases the conflict as between “transwomen” and “(cisgender) women”. If she’s so strongly embedded in trans ideology, she should recognize that “nonbinary” people who are female, and trans-identified females (“transmen”), are on the right-hand side of that comparison, just as “nonbinary” people who are male are on the left-hand side. This is about single-sex spaces, not gender identity at all.
I don’t know much theology, but I think you need your baptism card stamped to get through the gates (unless you’re born in a time or place where that wasn’t an option).
About those truckers who may or may not cause the Apocalypse by insisting on their individual freedoms in the face of a pandemic, here is an opinion piece I have found interesting and informative. In particular, the analysis of the two emerging social classes rings true for me (a Reality-born outcast currently on a Virtual mercenary tour).
I do not think it is a coincidence that, as the Virtual class came to full flower and the Virtual economy collapsed in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis (itself caused by Virtuals), the Virtual world’s mores shifted entirely away from a more traditional class-based analysis to one of historical privilege hierarchies. This allows a Virtual who must get by on two or three part-time academic jobs summing to below the national median wage to feel morally superior to a Real tradesman making two or three times what said Virtual earns; the Real tradesman, despite having access to no real levers of power except for those he’s built himself, is an avatar of a privileged upper class, his values and language and very existence offensive to those that upper class has oppressed. (Note that many Real tradesmen are not white, or are not men, or are not white men, but, in the Virtual collapsing of categories, the ideal Real tradesman is in fact a white man.)
It doesn’t seem to matter that the Virtual religion is being shouted from the boardrooms of the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world, that its evangelists have spread it to virtually every campus, nearly every media outlet, and nearly every Western government. Those barbaric Reals, as evinced and exemplified by the recalcitrant truckers, are the ones making the world an unsafe and unruly hellscape. They must be shown their place.
A survey asking people what gender they consider themselves had options for “man”, “woman”, “transgender”, and a fill-in box for “self-identity”. The lack of boxes for “cisgender”, “nonbinary”, and “agender” caused the uproar. In the professors’ words:
“We were told that these responses, like our survey questions, were TERF-y. We were told that we ‘othered’ trans students and made them feel un-seen by creating a box labeled ‘other.’ We were told that the wording of the question in which we asked what gender respondents ‘consider’ themselves, rather than what gender they ‘are’ was transphobic.”
Is there an argument to be made that we didn’t actually win the Cold War? It certainly looks like the powers that defined it are quite capable of threatening Western civilization (perhaps moreso in the case of China).
Blood Knight… I think as history unfolds, it will turn out that we did indeed win the Cold War. The anti-war, anti-Putin protests across Russia are tremendously heartening. Putin may have the machinery of the government and the military under his personal control, but he won’t live forever. The arc of the moral universe is long…
Lately IMO, PZ’s posts have been rather anodyne on the spectrum of sex stuff, which has me wondering if, after his exchange with Emma Hilton and others, his department head had a little chat with him about how it might reflect badly on the University of Minnesota at Morris if he made himself a laughingstock with respect to his actual profession.
That PZ’s spectrum of sex claims must be known to his students, and that those who might dare to disagree with him about it won’t because he is their instructor, is shameful, IMO.
I find my way here so seldom. Thanks for having me.
That’s Lincoln Park!
(According to an image search, anyway).
It is indeed!
It’s a glorious huge park with lots of old growth forest in the far southwest corner of Seattle, next to a small ferry terminal for ferries that go to Vashon Island, about a 15 minute trip.
Remind me again why I’m living in the midwest, instead of beautiful places like that? Oh, yeah. I was dragged here at the tender age of 10, and my every effort to get back to the coast has been stymied, often by my own actions.
In a comment recently I made a passing reference to the former Washington Post reporter who was told by her supervisors that she couldn’t report on sexual assault stories because of her own past assault.
She’s suing WaPo and the editors.
I had forgotten about this part:
Nothing must interfere with the canonization of St. Kobe!
We must have IMPARTIALITY on the subject of sexual violence. Both sides, I tell you.
There’s a story in Sports Illustrated about the oldest and youngest Olympic athletes (https://www.si.com/olympics/2021/07/23/youngest-oldest-olympians-tokyo-games), and I find it slightly curious. First off, I find some of the stories pretty inspiring: a 12 year-old Syrian girl qualifies for the Olympics in table tennis; a 52 year-old Georgian (shooting) competing in her 9th (!) Games, and who competed for the Soviet Union in 1988; several others… They profile 6 young athletes, ages 12-19, and 5 older athletes, ages 44-66(!). Am I reading too much into it to think that they might have intentionally omitted a certain 43 year-old athlete from New Zealand? Surely 6 & 6 would have been a more natural way to present the story?
Re-reading the story in detail, it’s clear this is not about all of the very youngest & oldest (e.g., a 62 year-old equestrian is mentioned, but not profiled), but still – shouldn’t we be reading about the stunningly brave weightlifter hefting the weights while holding back the sands of time?
The T wars have suddenly come into my personal field of vision. My s-i-l told me recently that she is “nonbinary.” She’s never been “nonbinary” before. What rot!
And then a player on my softball team mentioned that their middle child is transgender. (“Their” child b/c both parents play on the team.)
I have a significant and longstanding relationship with my s-i-l, so I couldn’t let T “talking points” go unanswered, as if I agreed with them. We have enough mutual respect that she understands my position is thought out and considered, not just knee-jerk.
I don’t have that kind of relationship with the softball people. Saying anything would spoil the recreation. Also, both parents are good people who want the best for their children. Am I being too chicken?
I call to mind those studies of college men. If the word “rape” wasn’t used, but the questions described actions or behaviors that were coercive, or taking advantage of a drunk partner, and so on, a surprising (well, maybe not) number of men would readily admit having done, or seeing nothing wrong with, all kinds of behaviors that were not consensual sexual contacts. IOW, lots of men who see themselves as “good guys” who would never rape a woman, are in fact sexual assaulters, if not rapists, in actuality. How come the men are so sure of their objectivity in the context of covering stories about sex crimes? They likely don’t even have any realistic awareness of their own biases.
Screechy@5:
I’m sure Ophelia wrote about that at the time….
maddog @ 8 – I don’t think there is such a thing as too chicken in this situation. I don’t think anyone is required to challenge friends or family or co-workers personally. I guess there could be exceptions, like a sibling who is encouraging an offspring to go the medical route – maybe there one should try to save the offspring, but mostly, no.
But if they’re just peddling the ideology…then I think people probably should push back. But situations differ, and so do temperaments, and so on.
I completely agree with this >> https://mobile.twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1418496088861024260
The various attempts to politicize the trans debate always appear suspect to me, it can’t be neatly aligned with the us vs. them of partisan politics.
2019 essay by Kitty Robinson, “On Hurting Trans Women”, is excellent. She talks about how people feel hurt, and how transwomen feel hurt, and then she gets to the heart of the matter: what about my pain? What about my boundaries?
https://medium.com/@kittyit/on-hurting-trans-women-a4a0ef1ef8d4
Benjamin Boyce interviews Aaron Kimberly, a trans-man, primarily about Canada’s proposed law preventing “conversion therapy”. Touches on WoLF, AGP, ROGD. Content warning: Morgane Oger.
Bullying in the Trans Community
Buzzfeed article about online harassment, with information from the Anti-Defamation League. “LGBTQ+” people were, according to their data, harassed more than other “identity groups”. The article mentions sexual harassment, harassment of specific ethnic groups, religious groups, and racial groups.
What’s not mentioned? Women. Neither as a whole or as a subset of other groups, nor as the target of misogynist harassment.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/antidefamationleague/here-are-the-shocking-numbers-behind-americas-online
The Olympics are underway, and that means we are about to see Hubbard cheat with full official sanction on Monday, 2nd August I’m not sure what to hope for. A poor performance means the entire TA movement will declare that this proves there is no advantage to trans women in female leagues. Expect to see their usual strawman of the GC position (i.e. “GC people think all trans women are guaranteed to win every women’s sporting event!”) paraded before the masses and declared falsified.
A good performance means they’re going to claim that there is no inherent advantage anyway – we know they will claim that no matter what Laurel’s results are – and Laurel will unfairly take the acclaim of whatever position away from the competitor that would otherwise have placed there. Oh and unless Laurel finishes dead last, every woman finishing lower will have lost one position on unfair terms.
Luckily, there is hope that Laurel will not win, or even place particularly well. The current leading light in that weight division is a world record holder aged 21, Li Wenwen, while Laurel is 43 in a sport where performance peaks at about 25.
Today’s Jesus and Mo is taking a look at the dress code for women in the sports. With a twist, of course.
Ha! Brilliant.
Meghan Murphy writes about “preferred pronouns”:
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2021/07/28/the-problem-with-preferred-pronouns/
Alabama governor Kay Ivey recently got fed up with the state’s worst-in-the-nation vaccination rate, and her sharply-worded comments gained national and even international coverage. She is running for reelection, and her declared and potential opponents are slamming her for “shaming” unvaccinated people. Some are even stating they are proudly among the unvaccinated. The latest act in the bizarre circus that is Alabama politics.
Ivey’s comments were literally the least she could do. State “Auditor” Zeigler is among those quoted in the article; he’s done nothing but offer political opinions having nothing to do with his supposed actual job. I suppose “exploring a run for governor” gives him even more justification to pontificate.
https://www.alreporter.com/2021/07/30/vaccinations-becomes-an-alabama-gubernatorial-race-issue/
I wonder if by “inexpensive treatments” he means masks, hydroxychloroquine, bleach, or cocaine.
Well, it appears I’ve finally been banned on Friendly Atheist, presumably for arguments I was making on a post about transgenderism. And what I’m guessing is 5 years of comments have all been marked as “spam” and completely erased. There’s no trace of me left. It is as if my very existence is being denied. Heh.
I’m not sure who banned me; it could have been a new moderator, or one of the other people who post articles on the site. I’ve written to ask, and questioned the spam designation elsewhere. I’m not terribly surprised, but do wonder why the absolute blackout, and not even a suspension or, best compromise, making any trans-related comment of mine only viewable when clicking (to avoid triggering the sensitive.) I’m assuming Foxglove was somehow involved, but so far this morn they don’t seem to have noticed. They would and will use it to grandstand, of course.
I’ve been very, very careful with what I’ve said re Trans on FA. No personal attacks on others; no “misgendering” or discussions on hot button topics like bathrooms; no signs of my being angry, hurt, frustrated. And my arguments were all focused on the highest level — on basic concepts from which all else derives. Gender Identity Theory. I did that partly because that’s where the heart of the issue lies, and partly because I figured it would bore those who wanted to attack on the more personal level. My overall purpose was to persuade, of course, but my practical purpose was to help others understand the opposition, and hopefully recognize that disagreement isn’t hate.
I went out with a bang. Here’s the last thing I was allowed to post:
And here’s the last thing I wrote on the trans topic:
So abusive. Tch.
I suspect he means hydroxychloroquine. He could mean bleach, true. He definitely doesn’t mean masks; he’s likely anti-mask (freedom!!!), and masks are a prevention rather than treatment (although that distinction I’m sure would be lost on him).
Ivey is the “least bad” Republican candidate, a situation that points out a problem with primary elections. I can’t vote for her in the Republican primary and still make my choices in the Democratic primary for other offices. I’d rather the party apparatus decide which candidates to field. Ivey isn’t their ideological ideal, but she’s the incumbent and she’s popular. Of course, this being Alabama, a Democrat is unlikely to defeat any of the Republican candidates, including the idiots.
Good grief, Sastra.
No Thinking Allowed, it seems.
@Ophelia;
What I find particularly annoying is that there is no way for anyone on that site to cross check what I actually wrote with what others say I wrote (spewing hatred, making threats, hitting out at transgender people, etc. etc.) That’s always been a source of amusement to me: I’ll write something like my above example on claims and the burden of proof, and a frothing chorus immediately jerks itself into a song and dance about bigotry and Not Letting People Be Who They Really Are. I answer everyone but Foxglove (whom I consider abusive, with likely Narcissistic Personality Disorder) so there’s even a record of my responses. Or would be, if someone hadn’t wiped out thousands of comments.
It will be interesting to see if and when people notice, and what they say. It’s very unlikely that anyone will voice any support for me, but very likely that I will have support. I’ve been upvoted many times over the years. What a toxic situation.
Infuriating.
Can I guest post it? Get the word out a little since they locked the word up?
@Ophelia;
Sure.
Ok then.
[…] Originally a Miscellany Room post by Sastra. […]
@Ophelia;
Thanks. Could you please remove the little aside about Foxglove? That’s a little personal.
Done. Sorry about delay, was reading about Hillbilly Elegy dude.
How to undo reconciliation:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/rheal-forest-residential-schools-1.6121886
A photo shared on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10218624990402645&set=a.1076563241006
We’ve been talking about sexualizing of women in sports, and I think the caption used for this photo, while well-intentioned, is an example of infantilizing women in sports.
The woman, somehow unnamed, is Lee Kiefer. She is 27, so I don’t think she fits the description of “little gal”. She has an extraordinarily impressive record of accomplishments in fencing, including 4× NCAA champion and a ton of international medals. She defeated her opponent, Inna Deriglazova, a similarly highly-accomplished fencer, by the close score of 15-13. I fail to see that as a “booty”-kicking, nor do I see any reason to refer to a “booty” in this context. Fencing is not a dance contest, or anything where style or appearance is subjectively judged; it’s a combat sport where participants compete directly against each other. It’s strenuous, requiring great speed and reflexes. It’s not “dainty” or “cute”. I think the person who posted the picture was going a bit overboard based solely on this woman’s appearance.
It is also incorrect that Kiefer is the first fencer from the USA to win a gold medal. Mariel Zagunis won the gold in individual saber in 2004 and 2008. Kiefer is the first to win gold in individual foil. It’s an easy mistake to make for people unfamiliar with fencing, I’m sure, but it’s irritating.
Lets politicize the CDC now >> https://mobile.twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1421500171100336137
Cruz and his toxic partisanship.
Apparently, Hubbard was unable to lift a single weight at the competition in the Olympics:
https://www.news.com.au/sport/olympics/what-time-does-transgender-weightlifter-laurel-hubbard-compete-tonight/news-story/428139b691228ebc9c65c14c0a9fda40
Schadenfreude.
Stephanie Barrett competed some days ago, and was eliminated in the round of 32, which I think was the first round of competition. Hubbard gets called “the first openly trans competitor”, but Barrett competed earlier. I suppose the fact that it was rather difficult to find out that Barrett is actually male might make him “secretly trans” and thus a different category, but I don’t know.
Abigail Shrier’s book is excellent, as is some other examples of her writing. I knew fairly early on in the book that I had some significant disagreements with her politically, but such disagreements don’t mean that everything she writes must be disparaged or discarded. I highly recommend the book.
Since reading the book, I started following her blog, which I find to be an interesting mix of viewpoints, some of them political. Her most recent blog post is largely in support of JD Vance, but mostly in support of some sort of “non-judgmental” politics. She claims that Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris were all “cackling finger-waggers” who lost, while Donald Trump and Joe Biden were not, and won. JD Vance is similarly called non-judgmental.
Two things stand out to me. The primary problem is I don’t think any of these “non-judgmental” people are actually non-judgmental. I think people make judgments all the time, wag fingers all the time, it’s just a question of degree, but most particularly of targets. Anti-intellectualism is judgmental. Anti-elitism is judgmental. Anti-liberal is judgmental. Sometimes the truth is going to hurt. I do not think that Clinton, Warren, or Harris said anything particularly troubling except to criticize people for stupid behavior.
The other thing, it is very strange to say, is that the three examples Shrier chose are all women, and are described as “cackling”. It appears they are being described as witches. Where are the judgmental men? Are they also “cackling”?
I do not agree with her assessment of Vance as non-judgmental. I just don’t think the target of his judgments are the conservative less-educated working-class population. I also do not agree that being somehow non-judgmental is any sort of key to election success, but I don’t know what is.
“Cackling” – jeez. That’s how deeply ingrained this shit is: even women themselves do it.
Ronald Lindsay writes a reasonable essay for CFI: Transgender Athletes and Justice in an Imperfect World.
Maybe views are shifting a little, and maybe the situation at the Olympics brings needed attention.
It’s interesting – back when Ron did his warning speech at the start of Women in Secularism 2 I was way to the “left” of him on feminism, but now he’s some distance to the “left” of me on TWAW.
A blog post worth reading: “Pregnant women”. The quotes are part of the title. The first paragraph:
Debbie Hayton has a good blog post about Stephanie Barrett, the TiM who competed in Olympic archery at the end of July. This article was written before Hubbard competed.
https://debbiehayton.com/2021/08/03/the-olympics-shambolic-gender-rules/
Yikes, I had never heard of this. Prostitutes are forced into taking drugs? I read this Ovarit thread yesterday:
[–] Althea 32 points (+32|-0) 20 hours ago
They know it’s not the same thing. How many “sex work is work” types, male or female, would advise their daughters/nieces/younger sisters to get summer jobs as prostitutes? How many of them would advise their sons/nephews/younger brothers, regardless of their own sexual orientation, to become rent boys for gay men?
[–] shewolfoffrance 31 points (+32|-1) 20 hours ago
I mean, I worked in retail before, and the customers were awful, but they never strangled me or tried to make me do illegal drugs with them. And my manager didn’t groom me online when I was underage, so that was nice.
[–] Jade 12 points (+12|-0) 16 hours ago
or tried to make me do illegal drugs with them
A lot of people overlook this as well.
I know for a fact that prostituted women aren’t “doing it just to support their drug habit”, but I have seen with my own eyes how 19 year olds start developing a booze or coke habit to be able to do it. It’s the other way around.
And that is without factoring the women who can “work” sober but are pressured daily into taking illegal drugs with the “customer” because they want a “fun girl” who “parties”.
[–] shewolfoffrance 5 points (+5|-0) 15 hours ago
As if her “manager” would back her up she refused a client’s “offer” of drugs.
[–] Jade 5 points (+5|-0) 15 hours ago
I’m going to be very honest here and say that I did see this in the golden age of a now decaying stripclub. Dancers were instructed to report on drug offers and the offered was indeed kicked out. Dancers who didn’t report and were caught with drugs were also fired on spot. Don’t be mistaken, this was less about “protecting the dancer” than it was about preventing the Council to access the CCTV, see drugs being passed on and used, and revoking the club’s license, costing the owner hundreds of thousands £££.
But yes, the norm is to be permissive of even more than just coercion to taking drugs.
A pretty good article about Stephanie Barrett from the conservative newspaper Washington Times.
Canadian Olympic archer triggers clash over transgender transparency
It’s irritating when someone who calls themselves “Talalalalala” (sic) tells a story about having Terry Pratchett sign a book for them and saying how Pratchett implicitly affirmed their gender ID when signing their book, but then says they no longer have the book. Right. So I think they’re lying when the story is so flattering to them, and lying about Pratchett as well. But on Twitter no one needs proof about anything as long as it affirms transness, and of course it gets lapped up and retweeted by those who think they’re such critical thinkers.
Guardian article:
What do many terrorists have in common? They abuse women
Not explicitly mentioned, but what come to my mind are violent attacks and threats by trans allies against women. “Misogyny, whatever their ideology.”
@ sackbut #37
What are they talking about? Nobody is more judgmental, more “cackling,” more finger-wagging than DJT. So the supposed “absence” of judgmentalism, cackling, and finger wagging does not account for DJT’s victory.
@maddog #47
I agree; I just think the targets of DJT’s judgmentalism are the people it’s “acceptable” to be judgmental about. It’s roughly the same argument about how we should listen to the Trump voters, be understanding of them, and so on. Nobody seems to give a crap about advising Trump voters to listen to those who disagree with them, just the other way around. I don’t really think that any politicians are “non-judgmental” in an absolute sense.
Retweeted by la scapigliata:
https://mobile.twitter.com/theedijester/status/1423184628274319367
Link to an open access article in the British Medical Journal’s Journal of Medical ethics. Here’s the abstract:
Similarly, how many trans activists are a) not trans themselves, b)would never date a trans individual of whatever flavour, and c) would oppose transitioning for a son or daughter?
Alberta is ready to become Florida north:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/federal-health-minister-pens-letter-to-alberta-asks-for-science-behind-plan-to-lift-covid-19-rules-1.6130917
Yikes.
Alberta’s already kind of the Texas of Canada, right? Oil sands people?
@50:
a) Many; b) Many, I’m sure; c) I don’t know, most of them seem to be very gung-ho about transitioning, and care little about the intactness of people’s bodies; why not sacrifice their own children on the altar of trans ideology?
This just in:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jul/30/ioc-admits-guidelines-for-transgender-athletes-are-not-fit-for-purpose
Oh? The current guidelines aren’t OK, because they allow men to lower their testosterone levels to below 10 nmol/l and then call themselves women? Because the most important thing is fairness for women, and allowing men into women’s sports is not fair for women?
No. “The other important thing to remember is that trans women are women. You have got to include all women if you possibly can.”
Old man doesn’t take TRA guff:
https://twitter.com/LabelFreeBrands/status/1423342144459198466
That the TRA here is an elected official may mean there are consequences for said TRA. Elderly people are not exactly sympathetic to someone picking on an elderly man.
Gender test demanded for 200-meter silver Olympic medalist because she ran too fast, says former athlete
Decent article that talks partly about DSDs. The headline is not quite correct; the Polish athlete who lodged the complaint has quite a few areas of concern besides speed. The Olympic rules disallows people with these high testosterone levels from middle distances, but not sprints.
I’m in the middle of Material Girls, and she talks a fair amount about DSDs. Thorny subject.
1,000-Year-Old Remains May Be Of A Highly Respected Nonbinary Warrior, Study Finds
No. They found remains that contain cultural trappings that can be labeled masculine and feminine from the time, along with DNA that identified sex but the sex didn’t necessarily match the trappings. It has maybe something to do with “gender expression” if loosely defined, but absolutely nothing to do with “gender identity”. There was no such thing as a “non-binary” person then, and, other than via self-identification, there still isn’t. “Gender nonconformity” is not “non-binary”.
This research paper about the grave site is interesting…
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology/article/woman-with-a-sword-weapon-grave-at-suontaka-vesitorninmaki-finland/33A89DB1D7E4900F017833D87C997D3D
Someone commented on a recent B&W post and brought in a quote I liked, but now I can’t find it and don’t remember whose comment it was, so I’m hooping someone will be able to recognise it from the scraps of it that I remember. It was about how satisfying, how delicious it is to engage in cruelty, scorn and such while also being praised for being moral; I believe it was in relation to yet another pile-on from the TRA crowd.
Can anyone point me to it?
It sounds very familiar but then we see so much of it that it naturally would. If you remember the exact wording of a bit that might help.
Here’s the quote:
To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ― Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow
Well done, thank you!
Ah you’re the source, heh.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/guest-post-no-trace-left/#comment-2882912
Ok this is odd – I found the Project Gutenberg Crome Yellow [sic – I think ‘Crome’ is a house name] because I wanted to see the context, but ctrl f says it’s not there.
The passage is a meme.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1999/1999-h/1999-h.htm
Annoying. I can’t find it. I’m sure he did write it, I’d just like to know where, so that I can read the context around it.
Huh, you’re right. The quote is widely attributed to Huxley and where a source is given, it’s always Crome Yellow. But it ain’t in there.
It’s annoying me now, too. I’ll look into it further when I have more time.
https://wirkman.com/vmemes/zeal-in-mischief/
This page says that the quote is indeed by Aldous Huxley, but from the Introduction to The Easton Press edition of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1934), signed July 24, 1933.
Thank you. Puzzle solved at last! I guess “Crome Yellow” was swapped in because it’s only two words.
Headline in the Guardian: “Batman’s sidekick, Robin, comes out as LGBTQ+ in new comic”.
Specifically, he comes out as G. Perhaps he’s B. But not L, not T, and not +. (And I have no idea if he’s Q, because I don’t know what that means anymore.)
WaM — now that’s funny, because of course Robin is a minion, that is, a literary tool, not even supposed to be a real person. He’s like Hercule Poirot’s Hastings, or Captain Nemo’s crew, or, if you like, the apostles at the Last Supper — he’s just put there to ask the readers’ questions for them, so that Batman can answer in order to keep the plot moving ahead. So sure, Robin is as “+”, or as “Q” (and you can keep working backwards as far as you are comfortable in that alphabet soup) as you like. But, like any obedient “+”, he’s not believable.
Peter N,
Good point about him being a minion. I honestly don’t know much about Robin beyond the campy show from the ’60s, but it doesn’t seem out of character for him to be gay. Of course as a fictional character he can be anything the writers choose to make him (as I recall, they chose to make him dead a few years back).
But anyway, aside from being annoying, this tendency to refer to individuals as being, or coming out as, “LGBTQ+” is bad writing. It’s like saying “I drive an ROYGBIV Corvette” when my (fictional) Corvette is monochromatically red.
Roy Speckhardt in The Humanist: Signs You’re Being Co-Opted by the Far Right
Sigh. Simplistic and full of assumptions. Comments on a few of the bullet points (why are they in descending order?) below.
10) You don’t trust mainstream media and academia because you believe they’ve fallen prey to extremist ideology.
He assumes that “extremist ideology” means far-left. He assumes “don’t trust” is a pervasive characteristic across all issues. Some of us don’t trust certain mainstream media and certain parts of academia on certain issues because they have fallen prey to ideology, extremist or not, that is problematic.
8) You think the word feminist excludes/antagonizes men.
There are many versions of feminism. It depends what you mean. Some do hold that feminism is a movement for women, and by definition does not include men. Feminism can’t control how men react to it, and some men will feel antagonized; why should that not be the case? The oppressor class made uncomfortable, isn’t that usually true? And if he doesn’t see feminism as referring to an oppressed class seeking liberation from an oppressor class, then see the previous point.
6) You believe it’s a strategic error to work with (insert left-leaning group) even if you agree with their aims.
It may be a strategic error to work with some group on the left or the right that agrees with you on some issues but not in general. It’s worth discussing and thinking about, rather than dismissing the concept out of hand.
5) You’re afraid “cancel culture” will be coming for you next, even though you try to be respectful of all.
Cancel culture he describes as “a fabricated term that’s an attempt to dismiss often valid concerns raised about harmful behavior”. That’s quite a silly characterization, even though I dislike the term. What behavior? What makes it harmful? Why should people lose their jobs, be banned from events or venues, have their books delisted or pulped? Valid concerns about “harmful” behavior should lead to discussion, not actions like these.
4) You fail to see the harm in questioning the validity of transgender identity.
He’s claiming scientific backing, and likening disagreements to “flat Earth” views. Sorry, no. The way to deal with “flat Earth” views is via evidence, not badgering and silencing. Science does not support the claims of transgender ideology, and an honest discussion would show this, but instead it’s deemed “harmful” to question the validity. He says, “Let’s accept people’s self-identification when it isn’t harming us or others”; well, that’s the point, isn’t it? That it is in fact harming us and others? But he won’t allow discussion on this topic because there is “harm” even in questioning it.
Re Robin: the character started off as a minion, but has gone much farther than that. He’s had solo comics, and his role has been played by several people (Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, others) over the years (that is, the comic book “real” person portraying “Robin” in the comic book has changed, due to death or unavailability of the previous “Robin” person). Several Robins went off to solo crimefighting careers under new names. The comic book world is extremely complicated these days. So, under the circumstances, it is not at all strange to develop his personal story this far.
(In the comics, Batman has been, with a couple of temporary exceptions, always Bruce Wayne. Go figure.)
I do agree that its ridiculous for him to come out as “LGBTQ+” rather than “gay” or “unsure of his sexuality”, and I absolutely love the “ROYGBIV Corvette” analogy, that’s perfect.
“You fail to see the harm in questioning the validity of religion.”
And how many times have humanists insisted that religion involves truth claims, not just general exhortations to “be good” or “this is what I, as an individual, choose to believe because it makes me feel better and/or be a better person?” The words “harm” and “validity” don’t go together. Christianity is not more likely to be true if it helps some of its adherents refrain from stealing. Satan is not more likely to be possessing the souls of children because, if true, that’s really bad.
Nor is God more likely to exist because, if we’re wrong, we’ll suffer great harm. For it has just occurred to me that this argument is basically a transgender version of Pascal’s Wager.
Sackbut,
Thanks. Every now and then I stumble on a good one.
Ugghh that Speckhardt piece is terrible.
I’m not sure what the point of this “academic” article is:
Is the point to expand the Queer umbrella? “You too can be Queer, if you have sex with animals!!”
Or is the point to promote a new form of animal advocacy? “Animal advocacy is important, and let me suggest a new type: have sex with animals!!”
Let’s hope it’s a parody.
I doubt it. Hypatia is a serious journal.
It was a sour joke.
Straight.
It means straight.
@latsot, I actually saw the term LGBTQIAS somewhere recently, where the “S” stood for “straight”. I can’t remember where.
Ah yes, it was here
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2018/she-chafed-at-the-assumptions/
“I realize that I’m not the LGBTQIAS (the “s” stands for “straight”) hall monitor, but while everyone and their abba has decided that queerness is more about haircuts and pronouns than who you bone, actual queer people are still second class citizens under the law.”
This is part of a longer thread taking the micky out of an auction house that tragically misnamed a painting, but the last one really gave me a (wry) laugh.
Spark of thread here…
An article in The Atlantic about unnecessary medical procedures pushed by doctors for various reasons. Often enough the doctors think they are actually helping the patient. “Gender affirming” surgeries were not mentioned, but they were the first thing I thought of when I saw the article. It is really difficult to prevent these procedures.
Have you ever written about “Multiple Systems”? It’s like transgender, except that it’s not, say, a teenage girl claiming that she’s a boy inside, but rather a teenager (or “adult”) claiming that he, or she, has multiple persons inside, AKA headmates, and that if you try to integrate the various multiple persons (which you condescendingly call “personalities”), you are committing literal murder.
https://meeresbande.tumblr.com/but-multiplicity-isnt-real
Twitter’s new popup, log in or sign up. Making the site unnavigable was just the reason I needed to quit going there. I didn’t miss facebook when they did this either. Like a paywall only worse. Good riddance.
A thought crossed my mind:. Marion Miller, in Scotland, who was actually charged with a crime for the suffragist ribbon photo sharing, was supposed to be in court on July 20. I can’t find any update. Does anyone know what happened?
Marion Millar: Court date delayed for Scottish woman charged with hate crime
TRAs are claiming the Taliban are GC for only targeting biological females.
No examples though.
Newsweek is reporting that at least one of the widely-shared videos of chaos at the Kabul airport is actually from an American football game in Texas in 2019.
I figured that some of the videos would be falsely attributed. I was surprised that one was from the US, though.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes a good piece on Unherd about the situation for Afghan women, noting that “[i]n today’s perverse American culture, however, more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights — to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space — are either removed or under serious threat.” Hemant Mehta completely misses the point, which is entirely unsurprising. I like very much what AHA has to say in her essay.
Yes, I read Ayaan’s piece this morning. Hemant says she “whines” – what’s friendly about that?
There’s nothing friendly about it. Just another sexist shit man venting at a woman for expressing a view he doesn’t like. Frankly I decide Hemant was a phony also-ran in the movement a long time ago and haven’t bothered with him since. I never understood why anyone took him seriously.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/caster-semenya-tokyo-olympics-testosterone-11629382859
The British Journal of Sports Medicine is stating that testosterone levels alone do not sufficiently account for determination of unfair advantage in women’s sports. I think that’s a sensible point. However, this appears to be widely interpreted as exonerating athletes like Caster Semenya and possibly trans athletes. This is a bad, and to my understanding incorrect, interpretation. High testosterone levels are an indication of being male (but not the only indication), and being male is a disqualification for women’s sports, advantage or not, although it’s almost always an advantage to have gone through male development.
I can’t read anything beyond the beginning, but this article is poorly worded even up to that point, because it refers to “women with DSDs”; in this case, “people with DSDs” would be better, at the very least because some of these people are males who appear female. I am concerned also that the focus on testosterone will result in this correction being used to justify normal males competing in female competitions without any sort of medical intervention. I also could imagine it being used to justify exogenous testosterone use. I don’t know if this article actually gets into these points.
Guess who has a take on the bar clash? PZ. Unsurprising, but what caught me off guard was just how bad his take was. The first sentence says it all:
Setting aside the usual silly not-at-all-a-slur, going to a bar for drinks food and a chin wag is now “an attempt to take over a bar”.
The rest is as stupid.
Good god. I really doubt that “meb” was polite about it.
And what’s a “trans-inclusive bar”? Do most bars tell trans people to get out? I really doubt it.
I could go on but won’t.
Jeez. I see what you mean. The first para is as if he’s taken stupid-pills.
notorious transphobe?
hate crimes against trans people?
a night out with the girls?
It doesn’t sound like him.
More news on Marion Millar, I’m afraid.
While she was hoping to get a few days of quiet rest before her court appearance, she’s being hounded again. Someone Tweeted her address. Remember that Marion has children, some of them vulnerable. She reported it to Police Scotland, who decided they would do absolutely nothing about it.
The person who tweeted the address later tweeted this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E9iTu9EXsBo1NFH?format=jpg&name=large
Then deleted their account.
It reads:
I need hardly point out that doxxing is not about posting new or previously unavailable information, it’s about intimidation, bullying, harassment or violence. This person either wanted to frighten Marion (they succeeded) or wanted someone else to frighten, harass or do violence to her or her children. Or perhaps they wanted to score cheap TRA points and didn’t bother to think about (or didn’t care about) the consequences. Either way, it absolutely is doxxing.
So (at least) two absolutely disgusting things here:
1. Someone posted this information in the hope that or not caring that something bad would happen to Marion or her children. This person then absolved themselves of all guilt about any consequences and cast themselves as the victim, because of the rightfully outraged response.
2. Police Scotland doesn’t think this is a crime or that they should do anything about it. This despite taking action against Marion in the first place for the crime of ribbons and turning up mob-handed to eject her friends from a pub. And despite their extreme rapid response to David Paisley when he was scared by the above ribbon. It’s very difficult to believe that this lack of response is anything other than a punishment, perhaps for Marion’s initial refusal to be arrested (because she had to look after her children) and the negative feedback Police Scotland have received for their inexplicable actions.
Police Scotland have become enforcers of an ideological position. This is horrifying. They’re going to make us rebuild that wall, at this rate. The truly terrifying thing is that it would be better to be on this side, for once.
Damn you, Holms, you made me go and read the PZ thing.
I feel the world is no better for my having read it. Black, black clouds are broiling over County Durham.
What. A fucking. Prick.
On this topic, it is clear that he is being intentionally malicious. Any lie is fine, if it is a lie for team trans.
He misspelled “thought”.
Are you fucking kidding me?
I was chatting on a Twitter thread about where people are getting the various lies about the Marion Millar thing and I remembered PZ’s post quoted an article and I went to look and…. You’ll never guess who it’s by….
OK, you probably guessed. It’s notCursedE.
notCursedE is vile. An absolute horror show. A horror show featuring an evil shadow of a trainwreck of a morally defunct misogynist. There is absolutely no low to which he won’t gladly plummet. Absolutely nothing is off the table in pursuit of his desire to masturbate in women’s toilets.
That’s PZ’s source.
I shouldn’t be surprised, of course. I didn’t think for a second that PZ would have checked the source in any way, since it agreed with his ‘position’. And notCursedE does have a knack of wheedling his way into (formerly) semi-respectable people’s discourse.
But if you ever reach the point where you’re using notCursedE as a source, you’ve hit bottom, burst through and kept on diving. Fuck you, PZ.
Yes I noticed that yesterday. I just don’t have the strength to…
Seriously, Ophelia, if I ever get like that, you can turn off the life support.
Meanwhile, in Texas:
But hey, they’ve got their freedom.
I feel my life has been better not being aware of notCursedE, but then again some poor sod has to be so that they can warn the oblivious like me. latsot, if you ever do get like that, how about I just come over and slap you about with a kipper until you see sense?
Deal.
And, boom goes the dynamite: Lin Wood, Sydney Powell, and other MAGA lawyers sanctioned for “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.” Ordered to pay the state of Michigan and City of Detroit’s legal fees, complete ethics training at their own expense, and referred to their respective bar associations for discipline.
Oh really?!
And what a wonderful boom it was – I’ve been waiting for that. I did see someone asked a member of law twitter (might have been @questauthority) why to a lay person this read as though a federal judge had walked up to the sanctioned attorneys and needed them in the ‘nads. He replied that was basically exactly what had happened. Lin Wood is going to have an absolute meltdown given his God complex.
It really doesn’t get much worse than that.
She systematically demolished their arguments, pointing out all the ways they continued to lie throughout the proceeding, and found them liable under each of the three sources of sanctions liability. It’s 110 pages of taking them to the woodshed.
Aargh, autocorrect. ‘kneed’ also ‘lawtwitter’.
Sure enough, Lin Wood is indeed having a meltdown. Blaming it all on Communism and then calling for a general strike. Many people are mocking him, but for those who can be bothered, Popehat has at least three cutting tweets on the topic.
I’m blessed to have no idea who notCursedE even is.
This mess sounds to me as if Pharyngula has become the erstwhile Slimepit.
maddog: do all you can to remain ignorant.
While I’m here, is anyone else going to this:
https://twitter.com/ForwomenScot/status/1423614835581980672/photo/1
(Women’s rights demo, 2nd September 11am Scottish Parliament)?
I booked my train tickets yesterday!
Hello again,
I’m writing to ask you a question which has been recently on my mind. It concerns the phenomenon of these so-called „TERF wars” and the question is how mainstream are they in your countries.
I would say that here (in Poland) it’s marginal. Yes, there have been some incidents. To give you an example: a couple of months ago one Urszula Kuczyńska lost her position of an MP assistant because of her “terfy” views (her crime was to publicly criticize the use of the phrase “uterus havers” instead of “women”). However, her left-wing political party “Together” occupies a really marginal place in our political scene, with more or less 2-3% of voters choosing them, so they are a political plankton with little influence. Indeed, I’m not aware of anything of this sort here which couldn’t be described in exactly these terms, i.e., as a fringe incident.
On the other hand, my impression is that in the anglosphere the “terf wars” became a significant factor in the mainstream discussions and legislative solutions (but please, correct me if I’m wrong). And here is my question: is this a specifically Anglo-Saxon phenomenon? How about other countries – France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Greece? Fringe incidents or a part of the mainstream? I sincerely do not know, hence the question.
(Hm … as a follow-up question: if it’s specifically Anglo-Saxon, then what the hell is wrong with you, dear Anglo-Saxons?)
I think that as in other places the issue isn’t that central, until it is. Most of life goes on without having anything to do with who is or is not transgender…until something happens that forces it on everyone’s attention. I think those occasions are steadily increasing.
So much is happening behind the scenes, outside of the public eye. With institutional capture, you end up with policy by stealth. In the UK, look how much of Stonewall’s “inclusive” agenda has been enacted without public debate, vote, or oversight. Changes to policing; hospital policy; prison policy; the elimination of single sex spaces for women. How much of that could have been accomplished in plain sight, using plain language? How much of the public would have agreed to any of that if they’d had a say? Very little. It sounds dramatic, but it’s a real life conspiracy.
Ophelia #118: yes, I understand this and surely you are right that “most of life goes on without having anything to do with who is or is not transgender”. Just to clarify, in the fragment of my previous comment about the TERF wars going mainstream in the anglosphere, I had in mind the following phenomena in particular:
Major news outlets (e.g. NYT, Guardian – not some fringe brochures or obscure internet sites) publishing discussions/polemics on the topic.
Bitter internal fights in major political parties, like Labour in the UK (no, Polish “Together” party does not count) and in the editorial offices of major newspapers (e.g., Guardian), sometimes ending with firing or sacking the “culprit”.
Cancellations of lectures/presentations at major universities,
Official regulations designed to deal specifically with the issue of trans people’s access to single sex (gender?) shelters (UK, US), sometimes with the funding of such shelters made dependent on their policy in this respect,
The approach of the police to hate speech incidents (Scotland)
The list is surely not complete (moreover, not Bruce #119 is probably right about much of the stuff happening behind the scenes). Anyway, that’s roughly what I had in mind when I wrote about going mainstream. At the moment I associate this just with the anglosphere and I do not really know what to think: is it just some strange Anglo-Saxon fad, with the rest of the world mostly (and blissfully) ignoring this? Or is it something more than that?
I know that this blog has a fair share of international readers/commenters and that’s why I asked.
Germany and Spain are starting to have these “gender” conflicts. I vaguely recall seeing reports from elsewhere in Europe. I don’t know about other places.
Yet more chickens coming home to roost.
I have recently taken an almost obsessive interest in the study of cults. I have thus far been reading Cults Inside Out by Rick Ross, Losing Reality by Robert Lifton, and Cults in our Midst by Margaret Singer [1]. Rather than write a separate summary or review of each book, I will try to make a synthesis of what I take to be some of the main points. “Cult apologists” often dismiss the cult label as a pejorative to stigmatize new or unconventional religions. All the authors are therefore careful to stress that cults are defined by their behavior rather than their beliefs, and while many cults are religious in nature, almost any cause, ideology, or belief system can form the basis of a cult. There are cults based on political ideologies, philosophies, business plans, health fads, alternative lifestyles, self-help programs, meditation techniques, martial arts etc. Even abusive and controlling relationships can be understood as a kind of “Cult of One” (cf. Ross) and display much of the same dynamics as larger cults.
Robert Lifton provided what still seems to be the most widely accepted definition of a “destructive cult” [2] based on 3 main criteria (my formulation):
1. The group is centered around a charismatic leader (or, in some cases, a small ruling elite) with little or no meaningful accountability. The leader is believed to possess some unique insight or knowledge and increasingly becomes the subject of worship until – no matter what the group was initially supposed to be about – the “cause” mutates into “whatever the leader says”.
2. The group uses certain highly coercive persuasion techniques – known as “thought reform” or (in everyday speech) “brain washing” – to gain undue influence and control over its members, the end result being that the members become increasingly dependent on the leader and end up making decisions that are clearly not in their own best interest, but consistently in the best interest of the leader.
3. The leader uses his/her influence over the members in harmful ways, ranging from financial exploitation and the extraction of unpaid labor to medical neglect, criminal acts, sexual exploitation, violence, terrorism, mass-suicide, mass murder etc.
One common myth is that only people who suffer from other major problems join cults. While it is certainly true that people going through a difficult period in their lives are especially vulnerable to recruitment by cults, no one is immune. In fact, cults are usually not interested in “damaged goods”, but are mainly looking for healthy, intelligent, resourceful individuals who can do useful work for the group and bring in a steady stream of cash. The Church of Scientology famously specializes in recruiting celebrities – hardly a notoriously weak group – and Aum Shinrikyo (infamous for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway) disproportionally recruited scientists.
Nobody deliberately joins a cult. Indeed, another common feature of destructive cults is the use of deceptive recruitment techniques. More often than not potential members are first recruited into a “front group” with no obvious connection to the cult. The first encounter might be a perfectly innocent looking course, lecture, or seminar on some interesting topic, a political meeting, a personality test, a therapy session, a yoga class etc. Only after luring potential recruits more deeply into its web does the group start gradually revealing its true nature as well as its more eccentric doctrines. E.g. scientologists go through years of “auditing” and indoctrination before hearing a single word about Xenu the evil galactic overlord.
Expressions like “thought reform”, “mind control” and “brain washing” conjure up associations to all sorts of science fiction-like techniques for “reprograming” people’s brains and turning them into mindless robots or zombies (Winston Smith, Darth Vader, the Winter Soldier, Peeta Mellark, Dreykov’s Widows etc.). By comparison the real thought reform process is almost disappointingly mundane (or at least that’s my impression). Some cults do indeed employ more “exotic” techniques like hypnosis (in itself not all it’s cracked up to be in popular fiction), guided imagery (to instill false memories), hallucinogenic drugs, various methods for inducing hyper-ventilation and dizziness (to be re-interpreted as spiritual epiphanies) etc. Cult leaders like Jim Jones also bolstered their credibility by performing what appeared to be miraculous healings and by appearing to have access to uncannily accurate information about total strangers, seemingly through direct revelation from God. However, by far the most common (and almost certainly the most effective) techniques are all familiar from non-cultic setting, e.g. (non-verbal) social cues, deference to authority, conformity and peer-pressure, overwork, sleep-deprivation etc. What’s different about the thought reform process is both the intensity and the coordinated nature of the persuasive effort as well as the recruit’s own ignorance that any such effort is going on.
After the initial encounter the next step is usually trying to lure the potential recruit to a more isolated setting free of external influences. The recruit is met with “love bombing” and made to feel special, chosen, part of an exclusive elite on a mission of cosmic significance. By observing the other members, the recruit quickly hones in on what the expected behaviors are and learns to model his/her own behavior on theirs. Since no explicit orders or instructions are given, everything feels voluntary and even spontaneous. What follows is a systematic process of destabilizing and breaking down the recruit’s sense of self by inducing shame and guilt (the “unfreezing phase”). Depending on the particular teachings of the group this may take the form of confessing your “sins”, confronting your inner demons, or overcoming the “excuses” that are “holding you back” and preventing you from “taking control” of your life etc. The details are irrelevant, since anything other than total surrender and obedience to the leader will be turned back against you and re-framed as sinful, pathological, excuses, signs of weakness, lack of commitment etc. Through endless attacks and confrontations combined with intense peer-pressure, physical and mental exhaustion, sleep-deprivation etc., the recruit is finally reduced to a state of helplessness and dependency. In this state the recruit learns to parrot back whatever the group wants him/her to say (the “changing” phase). This in turn is met with social reward and re-interpreted by the group as a cathartic experience, a sign of progress, proof of finally “getting it” etc. (the “refreezing” phase).
To prevent backsliding, cults do everything in their power to monopolize the time and attention of their members and cut them off from other perspectives or sources of information. This can include anything from geographical isolation to demands that members shun friends or family members that are critical of the cult. Another method is simply keeping the members engaged in endless cult-led activities, which has the double benefit of limiting communication to other cult members while simultaneously keeping everyone too busy to think too deeply or carefully about anything. Most cults also develop an internal jargon that encourage circular reasoning and reliance on thought-terminating clichés while at the same time making it significantly more difficult to have an intelligible conversation with outsiders. Finally, cult members learn to fear and demonize everyone outside the cult, engage in self-censorship, and only trust information coming from the leader. Ironically, one common perception is that people join cults because they’re too “trusty”, or “naïve”, or “gullible”. On the other hand, most cults are into all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories and quite often see themselves as the only people on the planet who have not been “brainwashed”, “taken the blue pill”, “drunk the Kool-Aid” etc. It’s the “sheeple” and the “systemites” outside the group who are living in the Matrix while the enlightened few on the inside are the ones who have taken the red pill, had their eyes opened and see the world as it really is. Apparently extreme distrust, suspicion, and cynicism (especially of the selective kind) can be manipulated as easily as trust, naivety, and gullibility.
I don’t think any of the authors specifically mentions cognitive dissonance or justification spirals, but it’s clearly implied in various places. Once a concession to the cult has been made, you have a stake in defending it: “If this were a con game, only an idiot could fall for it. But I’m not an idiot, so it can’t be a con game”; “If this were immoral, only a despicable person would do it. But I’m not a despicable person, so it can’t be immoral”. The same justifications used to rationalize concessions a,b,c make it very hard to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconsistent or hypocritical even to yourself (practically the definition of cognitive dissonance). On your path over to the dark side, you never “cross a line” where things instantly and abruptly change from “definitely ok” to “definitely not ok”, and before you know it you have gone all the way to x,y,z and burned all bridges behind you, and now there is no longer any “face-saving” way of turning back. There is also the closely related Sunk Cost Fallacy: More misery may be easier to accept than the realization that all those former sacrifices were in vain.
[1] I have also been watching Jonestown – Terror in the Jungle, The Jonestown Massacre- Paradise Lost, and Going Clear – Scientology and the Prison of Belief, all available for free on YouTube.
[2] It has become a bit of a cliché to talk about how a certain group or movement (trumpists, QAnon, TRAs etc.) is “just like a cult”. Others are quick to identify the various ways in which said group/movement does not meet the formal definition of a cult and conclude that any comparison is therefore fallacious in principle. As Timothy Snyder has pointed out we see something similar in the case of “fascism”. There are people eager to portray everything about the current surge of authoritarianism as just “like the 1930s”, while others argue that since what we’re seeing now is not like the 1930s in every way, there are no lessons to be learned from the history of fascism that are at all relevant to our current situation. The latter clearly doesn’t follow. A movement can display cultish or fascistic traits to a lesser or greater extent, and the differences can be as enlightening as the similarities.
https://boingboing.net/2021/08/30/virginia-school-board-pays-1-3m-to-trans-student-it-banned-from-the-boys-bathroom.html
Arrrrggghhhh
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany […]
Over on Why Evolution is True Jerry Coyne has put up another GC post, this one highlighting Abigail Shrier’s criticism of schools allowing kids to transition without informing the parent(s). Trans issues are coming up more often, and I’m discerning a shift from “there seems to be some problems here” to “wtsf.”
Today’s Sinfest was pretty good in a zinger kinda way…
There’s been charges filed against Darren Agee Merager in the Wi Spa incident (so thus ends any speculation that it wasn’t what it looked like)…
BBC news item about yesterday’s event in Edinburgh:
https://twitter.com/shirleysascot/status/1433498826829090817?s=09
I can be spied very briefly in the crowd!
I didn’t take any pictures/video because wheelchair… crowd… small space… I would have been filming people’s groins. But Menno was filming most of it and there will be footage appearing today, I’m sure.
It was a good event, a lot of seriously good speeches and quite a lot of chanting crammed into an hour. There was a counter-protest, which involved some people with a megaphone shouting and then trying to push into the crowd (I don’t know why, they could just have gone round the side and walked in without pushing, but that’s what they chose to do). I spoke to a lot of enthusiastic witches and stroked a lot of dogs (familiars).
Hooray feminist dogs!
A thread to enrage you. https://twitter.com/GreenPartyWomen/status/1434071522872905728
The National Women’s Hockey League, a North American professional sports league, is changing its name to Premiere Hockey Federation. Up front is the point that they want their players to be known for their skill and talent. They also want to be open to people of various gender identities. I suspect this means they are open to women and to men to claim not to be men. A quote in the article is about how removing the word “women” from the title and the W from the logo is empowering. Warning, risk of concussions from smacking yourself in the head.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/sep/07/nwhl-changes-its-name-to-remove-womens-from-title-premier-hockey-federation
Imaging saying “dropping ‘Black’ from the title is empowering.” Fucking fools.
This happened locally to me:
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/19563588.sophie-moss-man-jailed-strangling-woman-death-darlington-flat
I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but today was the sentencing. He’ll be out in 2 years for strangling a woman to death in yet another ‘sex game gone wrong’.
Pillage and ‘date’. Who the fuck are these sick bastards and why is someone with money backing them?
Ethics professor at my former college at Western University refuses to be vaccinated. She apparently compares herself to Socrates.
https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/anti-covid-vaccine-professor-rips-western-university-ahead-of-peoples-party-rally
The Free Press also includes a hand “Fact Check” with this story.
Pardon the length. The personal, local angle drew my interest. This professor only joined the Huron faculty years after I was there, so I have no personal connection or familiarity with her, or her teaching.
@ YNNB #137;
I’m wondering if I’d have more respect for the ethics professor and her self-comparison to Socrates if she wrote that she’d researched the Covid vaccine, found that it was both safe and effective, but nonetheless chose to refuse it on the principle that “it is ethically wrong to coerce someone to take a vaccine.”
Maybe, if she followed that up with “Discuss.”
We’re in the final week and a bit of a federal election canpaign here in Canada. While out on a grocery shopping expedition, my wife and I saw a group of People’s Party of Canada supporters at a major intersection. (PPC is a recently created party, founded by a former Conservative Party cabinet member/failed Conservative leadership candidate Maxime Bernier, and is designed to appeal to those who think the Conservatives are too left wing.) On a number of theis signs were two slogans: NO VACCINE PASSPORTS. NO MORE LOCKDOWNS. The irony of these slogans being used in a federal campaign is that vaccine passports and lockdowns are a provincial matter.
Just to get a bit more sense of where they’re coming from, here’s there platform regarding global warming and environment. If it wasn’t the actual platform of an actual party seeking actual power, it would be hilarious. It’s like climate denial bingo.
https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/global-warming-environment
YNnB,
That reads like a gop position paper. And I guess that’s the difference between Canada and the USA—in Canada, those ideas are fringe; here, they can get you elected president.
Water is essential too, despite what you may have heard from all those flood mitigation extremists.
Just read Jane Clare Jones essay on sex denialism, ‘Smashing the Binary’: Notes on the Historicization of Sex, wherein, in the course of “smashing” one binary, sex denialists end up creating another in its place.
https://janeclarejones.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/smashing-the-binary-september-pdf.pdf
Yeah, there are a whole bunch of whoppers in there, with veritable armies of straw on the march.
-I’ve heard no scientists claim that climate doesn’t change over time naturally.
-I’ve heard no scientists claim that only humans have ever caused climate change.
-I’ve heard no scientists claim that CO2 is not essential to the habitability of Earth; in fact, without greenhouse gases, Earth would be a frozen waste.
-My favourite is how “Until twelve thousand years ago, much of Canada was under ice, and it is thanks to natural climate change that we can live here today,” as if Canada has been covered in ice for almost all Earth’st 4.5 billion year history!
No, the poison is in the dose. Water is essential to life, but it is possible to drink too much water and die from it. “Floods” and “drowning” are two more instances of having too much of what is normally a good thing. It’s possible to have too much oxygen, resulting in dangerous fires (see the Apollo 1 fire). They’re parroting common denialist talking points, some of which are wilfull misconstructions of actual facts. Are they really that stupid, really that evil, or both?
They’re the type who won’t admit the house is on fire until the clothes they’re wearing have ignited. Pulling the fire alarm any time before then is “alarmist.” Fire insurance, fire extinguishers, fire exits, fire drills, and fire departments are all Socialist, Big Government, anti-capitalist red tape and scaremongering that needlessly, maliciously picks the pockets of rugged, steely-eyed, noble, Randian captains of industry. Protection from this “fire” booogeyman is just a pretext for government intrusion on, and interference with, the rights of productive enterprise. Free markets alone should decide whether or not we need to concern ourselves with so-called “fire safety.” Yet these are the same assholes who, once human-induced climate change is finally so obvious that even they see it, will demand some huge, heroic, risky, profitable-for-someone, untested, untried feat of geoengineering to save their asses, even though, until then, they will have demanded that we continue on with the “business as usual” path that brought us to global disaster in the first place. They will insist on prioritizing a solution that lets them carry on doing the same thing.
An orchestra has fired (or perhaps failed to renew) about half its members, several of long standing, with the goal of increasing diversity. The Musician’s Union is understandably furious. The move seems wrongheaded to me.
https://amp.classicfm.com/music-news/english-touring-opera-drops-half-orchestra-diversity/
Well, at least one TRA finally comes up with evidence.
They write:
These are the WHRC demands. I regard them – if they were enforced – as a warrant for genocide. When liberal journalists say I exaggerate the threat to trans people, they need to read this carefully.
And then they provide the Submission to Women and Equalities Committee on Reform of the Gender recognition Act by the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, UK. withh highlights in yellow of the genocidal plan!!
“Transgenderism is a social and historical construction…and will increase or decrease as the result of social forces.”
“The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 should be repealed.”
AND MORE! See here
https://twitter.com/RozKaveney/status/1437387695433601029
Seriously, though, when someone announces with a flourish “To those who thought I was exaggerating—BEHOLD!” and it’s even more obvious they’re exaggerating, it’s hard to know where to look.
lol
But but but Roz you ARE exaggerating.
Wow. “Exaggerating” is putting it mildly. Roz is fabricating an entire story having nothing to do with the highlighted sections (or any other). If I stand on my head and squint, maybe I can see: “making things more difficult for people to achieve legal recognition as a member of the opposite sex” = “killing off trans people”? Is that it? Or maybe “rejecting trans ideology” = “inducing trans people to kill themselves” = “killing off trans people”?
@Sackbut
I finally bit the bullet and got myself an account on Twitter, and then decided “ in for a penny, in for a pound” and asked some of the Greek Chorus bewailing the document what, specifically, they saw as advocating violence. Here’s one thing that was getting their undies in a twist:
They saw this as the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (along with all other GC people) as officially declaring a determination to
1.) Turn cross dressing into a mental illness again
2.) Make it illegal
No other interpretation. That passage also means that GC people are in favor of strict gender conformity, with women and men forced to wear feminine and masculine clothes, respectively. Gender critical people really want to enforce gender.
They also tied it up to Bathrooms,of course. A man being taken to jail for wearing a dress must first have been beaten up in the bathroom or there’s apparently little point getting worked up about it.
#144 Sastra and replies,
Their reasoning, as far as I can tell, is this. If transgender people are reclassified in some way, the category ‘trans people’ will no longer exist. Hey presto, all trans people have been eliminated!!2! Never mind that even if we accept that this reclassification is an affront to all trans people and a burden added to their lives due to a lack of official recognition, the trans people still exist.
They just can’t tell episteme from ontology any more.
I’m not thrilled about linking to the Post Millennial, but this was the only article providing the details I wanted to know.
School shooter who targeted ‘transphobic’ classmates convicted of 46 counts, including murder
Erickson, the adult, is male. McKinney, the juvenile, is female, but she identifies as male. She claimed to have been mocked over being transgender; none of the articles I’ve seen indicate what that might mean, and of course mockery doesn’t justify murder.
From the above linked PM story:
“Trans genocide” is the conjoined twin of “suicidal ideation” in standard transperbole. With the dual messages of “If you don’t get what you want, you have to kill yourself” , and “the whole world wants you dead,” it’s a wonder there aren’t more such shooters out there, acting in “self defence.”
I’ve mentioned this story before, but here is a moving, angry article by the murderer’s ex wife, with more detail than I’ve previously seen:
https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/sophie-moss-rough-sex-defence-louise-pybus-sam-pybus-wife/
This is the story about a man who left his wife’s bed to visit a vulnerable woman, whom he strangled to death. He used the sex-game-gone-wrong defence and was sentenced to four years. He’ll be out in two. Fun fact: he was training to be a police officer. Of course he was.
When the sentencing story appeared in our local paper, several men fell over themselves to to defend the murderer. One claimed that “many women can’t orgasm without being strangled” and implied that this was just one of those little accidents that could happen to anyone, like dropping something on your foot. A previous story about the trial had several comments blaming the victim (she had children, what was she doing having sex? What was she doing with a married man? etc.)
All absolutely hideous.
Buried my fifteen-year old cat this morning. Symmetry in life and death: we found her on a road as a kitten, and I found her in the alley before breakfast. Great way to start the day.
Stupid cat.
I’m sorry, Null.
Oh, I’m sorry. Absolutely shit way to start the day.
That really sucks…
Boys no longer need to declare themselves girls to steal girl’s prizes. All they have to do is claim they have no one to play with.
They didn’t just beat the girls’ team, they whipped them good and proper 46-12.
But, according to Queensland Netball, this is all AOK because “They (the boys) are really desperate to play and I think they played beautiful netball as did all of the girls teams”. So sayeth the woman who leads Qld Netball.
The boys’ coach was disappointed that not everyone welcomed males into a female competition.
“At the very core of this, our boys just want to play and they copped the brunt of these comments and behaviours and were made to feel unwelcomed and unsupported.”
No mention of the girls who may have felt unwelcomed and unsupported in their own sporting competition. Won’t somebody think of the boys????
https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/uproar-as-allboys-netball-team-beats-girls-to-win-state-title/news-story/819d1d0101345dad1aee9ea814102456
Very interesting, Roj.
I have never heard of netball, so I looked at the Wikipedia article about it. It was developed as a women’s alternative to basketball, and was even called “women’s basketball” for a time. There are men’s leagues, but they are few and less popular. Then there was this tidbit:
That was then (20 years ago), this is now.
There was, possibly still is, a Mens Netball Competition in NZ. Netball is hugely popular in New Zealand. The women play a fast, agile, and powerful game. I remember decades ago when the mens league got started a top womens team played a mens team. they won, but described it as very tough. They said the power and flatness of the mens passes was incredible. In 2019 the mens team beat the Fiji women’s team and in 2020 they beat the silver ferns (NZ women team). If you don’t have specific women leagues for most sports, you will not have women at elite level at all.
Anyone in a debate or discussion who is unwilling or unable to present their opponent’s position accurately and honestly, cannot be trusted for accuracy and honesty in their own position either. They are trying to avoid any genuine discussion, have something to hide, or both.
The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left
Article in The Atlantic by Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Much of the academic work in personality and social psychology on the topic of authoritarianism has focused on right-wing authoritarianism, sometimes going so far as concluding that there really wasn’t any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism. Satel describes new work by Thomas Costello at Emory (et al), who realized that the existing metrics for authoritarianism were inadequate for studying left-wing authoritarianism. I’ve mentioned reading material by Robert Altemeyer on right-wing authoritarianism before, so this was quite interesting to me. A few excerpts:
This makes a lot of sense to me, that authoritarianism on the left might warrant somewhat different definitions and metrics. I’m on the fence about the metrics chosen, or maybe it’s the descriptions.
The article discusses some informed speculation about why it is difficult for academics to notice and study authoritarianism on the left. The main point, which seems compelling, is that academia is heavily populated with leftist political sympathy, and authoritarianism is difficult to notice with one’s “own” ranks.
I think it’s abundantly clear that there is authoritarianism on the left, and maybe this new research direction will lead to better understanding of how it works.
Having been a left wing authoritarian up ’til last summer I knew damn well what it looked like but I should’ve become concerned when other people seemed to be singing from my hymn sheet that I had previously thought were the “good guys”. You can’t be a Token Evil Teammate when the rest of the team is tainted.
https://www.facebook.com/58709265392/posts/10166431067430393/
Americans United for Separation of Church and State posts a cartoon in which a parishioner asks a pastor for a religious exemption, and the pastor refuses to give one. Good so far. The parishioner is a stereotypical white woman named Karen. I noticed in the comments that at least a couple of people picked up on this. Really, AU had to go with “Karen”? She had to be female, had to be named, and the name had to be “Karen”?
#160
“Yeah, but where those guys are authoritarian because they’re evil, we’re doing it because we’re on the right side of history!”
Splitting is incredibly common.
Those two lawyers that pointed guns at a passing crowd of protesters may have their law licences suspended.
Excellent.
Apparently October is LGBT+ History Month. This is on addition to LGBT+ Pride Month in June, various national or international days or of remembrance or awareness or visibility for bisexual or pansexual or aromantic or asexual or intersex or transgender people. There are a few things for women, too, somewhere in there. Why transgender people need a separate HIV testing day, why the other HIV testing day doesn’t work for them, I don’t know.
Here is one list.
https://lgbtqa.unl.edu/awareness-days
I declare October also Woman Are Sick of Your Shit Month.
I initially read this as aromaticor asexual….
I initially read this as aromatic or asexual….
My spellchecker almost wrote it that way. I was too clever for it, though.
Any recommendations for meditations on death/end of life stuff? I’m game for recommendations but for the moment am avoiding searching directly for mental health reasons (upcoming procedure scares me).
ACLU conspicuously censors Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s language to erase women:
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610/photo/1
James Billingham is at it again: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/billingham-targets-marion-millar
I done a blog post on it, too.
Blood Knight: I wish I could help. I hope everything goes well.
Re #172, that appears to be the same tweet discussed here:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/without-woman-it-makes-no-sense/
with subsequent discussions about the outrage and the non-apology, including this topic:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/a-mistake-among-the-digital-team/
Blood Knight – Montaigne is quite good on the subject, and well worth reading in general.
Sorry about scary procedure. Good luck. Keep us posted if you can.
Seriously about keeping us posted. I’m worrying.
Thanks for the recommendation; got Montaigne loaded up on Audible.
Oh good. He’s a very rewarding read/listen in any case. In the late 16th century most people didn’t write eloquent diary-like thinking aloud essays, so he’s kind of fascinating for that reason as well as many others.
PZ has a post about some new book and author he dislikes, and he dislikes it at least in part because the author repeatedly attributes various stances to ‘the left’ that seem hasty, or worse. I have no interest in the book or the author, but one sentence of PZ’s grabbed me:
“Why should I read something that has declared people like me to be bad by stuffing words in our mouths?”
My god, the self-blindness!
hey Blood Knight, I’ll add to the best wishes, I’m sure there are many here who will be hoping for the best for you.
A friend and I got into a discussion on gender ideology. I’m sure many of us have had the experience of having so much ground to cover and being unsure where to go first. I think I managed well enough. One entry route with some is medical overreach, and I shared Abigail Shrier’s new blockbuster article. My friend had already seen an article by a woman challenging her daughter’s “affirmative” therapy.
I recommended several books, and was asked which to read first. I suggested Stock’s “Material Girls”. I thought that book, with its clear and thorough argumentation and its somewhat more conciliatory tone, might be a good starting point for someone used to proclaiming broad support for affirmation and using “preferred pronouns”. (It was a “pronouns” comment that started our conversation.) We’ll see. My friend seems open to seeing reason.
Sackbut:
Material Girls is a good choice, but some have apparently found it a little dry and impenetrable. I’m not sure why. I tend to recommend Trans because I like the way it basically says “look, let’s get this out of the way for starters: all this stuff is nonsense” and then proceeds to say why. All depends on the audience, of course.
@latsot
I suspect it’s seen that way because it’s heavy on detailed reasoning and trying to present opposing views fairly. Those are things I liked about the book, but I could imagine people finding that approach less emotionally appealing.
I have a copy of Trans, but haven’t got to it yet.
Horrible:
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/jealous-man-who-wore-fat-suit-to-pose-as-woman-jailed-for-acid-attack/
And rather like the plot of that JKR book that gender identity extremists said would never happen in real life.
This popped up on my Facebook timeline: Women’s sports injuries are nothing to play around with.
But biology doesn’t matter, right?
Yesterday I was made aware of this excellent article by Dr Em from March: Woke Blokes and the Abuse of Women. She applies Lundy Bancroft’s book about abusive men to male “trans allies”.
Update: I’m now in the ER due to chronic constipation and my colonoscopy was scheduled for Friday… Hope I can get sorted out before then.
Oh hell. Fingers crossed. Intestines are such fussy machines!
Should make it to my colonoscopy at least, so immediate emergency sorted.
Stupid question: could anyone point me towards where I could learn how to post links in comments?
Not a stupid question. Googling “how to embed links” turns up a lot of results. I tried to explain it here but just got an embedded link even though I separated all the pieces, so I’M no use.
Blood Knight — email me at my burner gmail address, nothpj@gmail.com, and I’ll email you the little template I use. [If I paste it into a comment it will of course just embed a link.]
Let me tell you, if I may, a 21C story.
Some of you may recall I mentioned my granddaughter being sexually assaulted at school, age 12. This has left her with a fear of men, of going out, and has filled her head with nightmares, night terrors, and suicide ideation. She has been self-harming.
She has also been attending mental health therapy as an outpatient with fortnightly counselling with a Social Worker/Counsellor using talking therapies and less frequent sessions with a psychiatrist. Sometimes I will attend these meetings as the only constant male figure in her life (dad gone before she was born, mother in stable lesbian relationship)
That’s the crude background, here is the story.
A fortnight ago she had a short one on one session with the counsellor, then finished the session with my partner, her grandmother, as her mother was in the hospital.
GD was staying with us while the mother was hospitalised, and wanted to talk to us. She said that she was worried about my reaction to what she had to say, but told us that she thought she was trans. She was worried about my reaction because I “argue with trans people”. I explained that I don’t argue with trans people because they’re trans, but only when they are trying to take away the rights of women. And, I assured her she would still be loved and protected if trans.
Itried to understand why she thought she was trans, and the closest we got to was mum tries to make her wear frilly dresses, and she hates frilly dresses. So we talked about gender non conforming, about David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Prince, et al. And we left it at that.
Fast forward 2 weeks, and time for another session, mum is still in hospital, so I attend.
As soon as we sat down, the counsellor opened with “I’ve made you a trans flag”, and “Have you chosen a name yet?” No “have you given any more thought to …”, just straight into the affirmation.
The counsellor assumed I needed education about trans issues and produced the “genderperson” picture.
I asked why putting intersex between male and female proves sex is a continuum, but she just muttered about how it is. I asked how we know a person is trans, but she didn’t really know much about that.
All in all, she knew little about the subject, yet here she was, doing her best to affirm the choice of a confused 13-year-old girl, who is yet to have her first period. A girl who hates frilly dresses, but who has all the compassion for the less fortunate than herself, that which we used to refer to as “the mothering instinct”. We were walking city streets one day when she saw a teenage boy being verbally bullied by 4 or 5 others, and we insisted we followed to make sure he was OK , not physically harmed as well.
I did not want to cause a scene in what is a safe space for GD to talk, but boy was I getting angry.
As we left I gave the counsellor a list of three books, “Material Girls”, “Trans”, and “Irreversible Harm” as suggested reading. I hope the next time we see each other she will have read at least one of them. Or am I overly optimistic?
A bit all over the shop, I know, but I just felt like getting this off my chest. Angry that instead of being helped overcome her existing issues, she is being pushed down a path that will lead to an even worse outcome.
Oh no no no no no that’s horrible. I HATED wearing dresses of any kind as a child (and still do for that matter, have never worn them since gaining adulthood). I’m gender nonconforming in a lot of ways and it all works out – there’s no need to “transition.” As the book says, “it gets better.” I hope she can listen to you.
From my perspective, Roj, you handled it about as well it could possibly be handled. I am impressed that you were able to get the counselor to listen and to receive the list of books; that seems really promising. Best of luck getting through to your granddaughter.
I’ve read “Material Girls” and “Irreversible Damage”, but not “Trans” yet. I recommended the two I’ve read, plus Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender”, to a friend recently. Some recent traffic from trans “allies” supports my thoughts that “Material Girls” was a good suggestion.
The daughter of a friend was sexually assaulted a few years ago, and shortly thereafter decided that she is trans non-binary. I couldn’t figure out what to say to my friend, and I’ve largely avoided talking about the topic directly with him. This happened as I was still developing my own understanding of the trans ideology issue.
This is going to sound overdramatic but aren’t we in a sort of End Times? Even without climate change and its associated disasters we’ve got labor and supply chain shortages everywhere, medical care is massively overstrained, disease, utter lack of public trust in anything… The illusion of western civilization “The Privileged Ape” is disintegrating.
Yes. It doesn’t sound overdramatic because it just is the truth. I wrote my two most recent Free Inquiry columns about it.
Yeah, not overdramatic at all. I wasn’t optimistic about the future before that cursed day in November 2016, but that’s when the end time mood turned permanent, and it has not been been lessened by the Trump faction’s temporary setback in the last election. Trump himself will not live forever, but Trumpism and its contempt for facts and democratic norms is not going away in our lifetime. And of course the Left’s decent into wokism, identity politics. and cancel-culture is not helping to say the least.
Not that it matters that much with respect to climate change, since the one thing every government as well as every major political party throughout the industrialized world, can agree upon, is that any actually doing what’s necessary to keep the planet somewhat habitable is crazy-talk and can be dismissed as absurd a priori. And even the green parties, who were closer to taking the problem seriously than anyone else, seem to have collectively decided that keeping the planet habitable is less important than forcing women to allow infinitely entitled, aggressive, porn-crazed male fetishists into their spaces.
As I mentioned in another comment, it’s reached the point where my heart sinks into my stomach whenever someone announces that they’re expecting children, and everyone treats it as a happy occasion, while I can’t help thinking “Another contribution to over-population and another child with nothing to look forward to other than going down with the ship and paying the ultimate price for our stupidity and evil”.
(Of course we all know the usual objections about how people have always predicted the end of the world, and they have all been wrong. But what matters from the point of view of reason is how you get to the conclusion and not the conclusion itself. The doomsayers of the past usually relied on things like ancient prophecy and divine revelation. Today, all the “optimistic” scenarios presented by scientists presuppose that governments all over the world will in the very near future start collectively implementing policies that are currently further outside the Overton Window than the belief that 2+2=5.)
A heartbreaking article from 4W, described as “how one feminist PhD student at Duke found herself cancelled by both the illiberal left and the Christian right”:
Caught in the Middle: Inside Academia’s Culture War, by Dr Devin Jane Buckley.
All the damn requirements to mouth the words, to use the terminology, to say the phrases, under pain of being unable to complete the degree you’ve been working on for years. All the similarities between the “woke” religion and conservative Christianity. Is there any place that will allow criticism of both “woke” left and Christian right in the same thesis?
I’d certainly hope so, because they’re basically the same thing (one minus a god). Honestly while I have my doubts about a “god shaped hole” being a thing there probably is something like a “religion shaped hole” in most humans, especially when they’re lonely.
In memory of Paddy Moloney, I’m listening to Joni singing The Magdalene Laundries. For some reason YouTube’s algorithm thinks I want an ad about how the rosary connects you with god.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2b21554c-2adb-11ec-a548-f9bb1ebf6985?shareToken=9376d9d1224043f499c8f388b131a6c3
Edinburgh University union members can self-identity as a race and gender that they are not and can identify as disabled if they are not. It doesn’t say whether disabled members can identify as able bodied.
It strikes me that a survival instinct coupled with the ability to comprehend the inevitability of death is one of the least helpful genetic co-morbidities evolution could have cursed us with. One or the other Nature, one or the other.
Foundation Beyond Belief shared a set of photos from Atheists United from one of the Women’s March for Reproductive Rights events earlier this month. Prominent among them was the first picture showing a sign saying “trans women too!” I have no idea what other signs there were, and none of the other pictures jumped out at me as being trans-oriented. This march is about women, and women’s reproductive rights. The sign, to make reference to “trans” people, could have said “trans men too!”, but no, it didn’t. The makers of the sign didn’t stop to think that reproductive rights are strongly related to biology, and that transwomen have nothing in common with women in the area of reproductive biology. It’s all “transwomen are women!”, and the march is about women, therefore of course transwomen should be included don’t ya know. This is why sex matters, and why referring to people as “transwomen” rather than “trans-identified males” or similar can be confusing. (Yes, I’m extrapolating from one silly sign, but I think I’m justified.)
https://www.facebook.com/foundbb/posts/10159345911160734
BKiSA, I trust things are/have improved. I’ve had relatives suffer that condition. Not nice at all.
Roj, your story makes my blood boil. That poor young thing. That ninny of a counselor. I really do wonder if some/many of them do more harm than good frankly. I’m pretty much convinced that there’s nothing they do for you that a good listener with a sense of discretion wouldn’t achieve.
For what it’s worth, I think you have the right of it. Your GD needs love, security, reassurance and space to find (re-find?) herself. Growing up is tough for all kids and I think especially tough for girls. Even more so when they experience an event like she has. A girl, young woman really, who is very dear to me is struggling with social expectations as well. She’s very pretty, but has taken to wearing baggy and slouchy clothes to hide the fact. Nothing wrong with slouchy baggy clothes, except that it’s a changed behavior that has coincided with developing a figure. She told me a few weeks ago that she didn’t want to have children or get married. I assured her that was fine, but she had plenty of time to decide that. As a society e act very smug that we’re not some ‘backward’ bunch that force girls into set roles and make a big deal about them reaching adult status (where they acquire a new role). In some ways we’re worse than those societies. We’ve removed all the protections and structures young people, especially girls need, but saturate their every waking moment with signals and signs as to how they should behave as sexual beings. It must be bewildering and frightening and it’s hardly any surprise that there are multiple ways to end up a casualty.
I wish you GD all the best. I’m sure you’ll do your best to provide love and assurance.
Thanks Rob,
I’ll be doing much better when I consistently realize I don’t have enough information to predetermine the results of my colonoscopy. Two years ago I had a CT for some pain I had then (I was 35) and the doctor wasn’t concerned with it so we waited a bit. I’m 37 now and a different sort of pain is in evidence and she’s concerned so I’m doing the back end. No real other symptoms that one associates with colon cancer. But, since I suffer chronic anxiety (and I know for sure some of the pain is caused by my brain) I throw logic out the window and just assume I’m full Black Panther even though that’d be not particularly likely.
Apply logic, learn to live for the moment, and just let the test speak for itself instead of going on an anxiety spiral for two weeks. Right now, logic is in command; hopefully he doesn’t get demoted again.
Sorry for the Fox News link, but this is quite a story:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/loudoun-county-father-school-cover-up-bathroom-assault-daughter
Blood Knight:
We all do that, I think, and we’re all about equally terrible at learning not to.
I’m hoping for the best possible outcome.
NYT: Former ‘Hamilton’ Cast Member Files Discrimination Complaint Against Show
Various other reports use the term “trans” sometimes to refer to Reid. It may be the case that Reid calls himself “transgender” as well as “non-binary”, but I’m not certain. Reid performs male roles in the play.
I have not seen any details of threats or attacks. I’m curious of those circumstances. I don’t quite understand what a “gender neutral” dressing room would be: a place where both men and women would dress? A place where only people who are “non-binary” would dress? A place where men would dress but is declared “gender neutral” anyway? A third dressing room just so it’s not the same room as the “men’s” and the “women’s”?
I suspect that a male actor playing male roles might be referred to as “he”, regardless of preferences. I imagine any actor playing cross-sex roles might be referred to using pronouns related to the character rather than the actor. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I particularly don’t think it’s a big deal for an “extra-special” person who wants to be referred to by “extra-special” pronouns to be rebuffed in favor of normal English usage.
An unusual mass shooting: five people killed in Norway by bow and arrow. My thoughts immediately turned to firearms control. On the one hand, the gun activists will claim that firearms restrictions are pointless because people will just resort to other weapons, and also that firearms are being unfairly singled out ahead of other lethal weapons. On the other, imagine the carnage if the attacker had been armed with a gun, even just a pistol.
A 37 year old Danish citizen living in Kongsberg has been arrested and confessed the actual deeds. Apparently the suspect already had a long criminal record and was under a restraining order after threats against his own parents. The Police also confirms having recieved several anonymous tips from individuals worried about his behavior. The suspect is a known convert to Islam with a history of posting what appears to be threatening videos online, but I don’t think anything definitive has yet been confirmed regarding the motive, or whether we’re talking about an act of Terrorism.
From Glinner’s site, more details on the same story Skeletor posted. A boy wearing a skirt entered a girl’s restroom in a school and raped a girl. The father complained of a cover-up at a school board meeting. The father was accused of making up the assault and was arrested. The boy was arrested for the assault and released pending a hearing. A few days later he was arrested again on another sexual assault charge.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/america-wakes-up-to-a-nightmare
Thank you. I’d seen the story, and when Skeletor mentioned it I tried to find something non-Fox-like and couldn’t, so I decided to wait. The less-Foxish news outlets sometimes catch up, but god damn they should be on it from the outset. They should be getting there before Fox, not after.
The Uprising, a short documentary.
I know a number of regulars here are women in academic science, and I expect the experiences described here are familiar.
Trump has now told Republicans not to vote in 2022 if his win in 2020 hasn’t been settled by then.
Excellent.
Procedure is a success… Biopsies taken for the lawls but nothing egregious found. Time to start planning for the future and living for today.
@Blood Knight —
That’s great news!
Very happy about the good news, BKiSA!
Oh whew!
Welcome back to the land of the living! Some celebratory music for you.
Blood Knight in Sour Armor:
Outstanding.
Over on FTB, the blogger by the name of Intransitive has a post on the Loudoun matter. The take isn’t just bad, it’s fucking dire:
– A girl and her father made the accusation that a boy in a skirt raped the girl… police concur, and charged the boy. Weirdly, Intransitive is sceptical of the detail that the rapist was wearing a skirt, and only that detail. We wouldn’t want to admit that men can rape while wearing a skirt, would we. More on this:***
– The vote to change the toilets etc. to self-identity rather than sex took place on 2021-08-18. Far from being “not long after” this, the rape actually predated that vote by nearly three months: 2021-05-28. I wonder if this order was reversed out of terrible research skills (all it took me was some googling), or as part of a deliberate lie to paint this episode as a conservative story ginned up in response to the policy change.
– The police investigated for about six weeks, then laid charges against the attacker on 2021-07-08, over three months ago. The school superintendent said then that no attack occurred. The opposite of the truth, either through dishonesty or ignorance. In the eyes of a TRA, this is considered a virtue – a noble restraint against hastily giving out information before the investigation was complete, despite the police presenting their case three months ago.
– Intransitive does not know the difference between infer and imply.
– And no, reporting that this attack took place is not against the law. No identifying information was leaked.
– Yes, pretty understandable given the school superintendent had just lied to the guy about whether his daughter had been attacked or not. This jab reeks of character assassination.
– Speaking of arrests, guess who else was arrested? The attacker. Twice, both times for rape.
– Stupidity confirmed. The point of this saga is not to brand trans people as rapists, it is to point out that rapists can and will make use of relaxations of toilet / dressing room / etc. sex restrictions.
– No reporting that I have seen has claimed that the attacker was trans, they have claimed that he wore a skirt. The defensiveness fairly leaps of the page.
:)
The defensiveness is staggering.
***
Intransitive omits that the man “dressing up to lurk in a toilet” dressed up as a woman to aid his lurking in the toilet. Why so coy? And again with the severe point-missing – yes, it really is irrelevant that the men involved in those acts are heterosexual and “cis”. Because the point is not that trans people are sexual criminals, its that relaxing laws pertaining to sex segregation play into the hands of the sexual criminals.
Thanks, Holms.
That is more or less exactly how I’d imagined PZ would handle this story if he hadn’t been too cowardly to handle it at all.
BKiSA, glad to hear it. I got good news from my husband’s biopsy this week: not cancerous. But…it looks like my dog is likely to die. He now has sepsis and anemia, and if he does live, will need another surgery. He had a couple of good days, leading us to hope, but today…our home is like a tomb right now as we wait for news from the vet. He has been such a happy, friendly, and active fellow, he didn’t deserve this…but, then, who does?
Keep your fingers crossed for us.
Oh, no, I’m sorry.
Good grief I fall behind fast, for some reason I only get about 1 in 20 of the miscellany posts in my RSS feed.
BKiSA :-) :-) :-)
Holmes, yeah, well PZ is a moral coward. In my opinion he genuinely believed that supporting the oppressed, including women, was the right thing to do, then when things started going south he tried to split the difference and please everyone and when that didn’t prevent the schism and he was left with arseholes he was so addicted to the fame of who he is that he can’t self immolate by telling them they’re wrong on even one issue. He’s now irrelevant to everyone else but ‘his*’ horde.
Iknklast, great to hear the good news about your husband, but terribly sorry to hear about your dog. My mates dog of 10 years died abruptly from sepsis recently. Very upsetting. You do get attached to the little buggers.
* Not really his any more.
Poor pupper…
Ah, iknklast, good and awful news, I’m so sorry to hear the latter.
Ah, hell, things pile up. So sorry about the puppy, iknklast, but glad for the good news from you and BKiSA.
Colin Powell has died. In itself, that news doesn’t much affect me one way or the other. He seemed like a decent person overall, but in the most important act of his life he allowed himself to be used by the hawks itching to invade Iraq.
What’s noticeable about the news, though, is that the headlines are saying that he died of covid complications despite being vaccinated. What gets buried is this fact:
I expect the anti-vaxxers to use his death to further their cause, when in fact it’s a perfect illustration of why everyone who can get vaccinated should.
Meanwhile, a private school in Miami that caters to rich anti-vaxxers is telling teachers not to get vaccinated, and kids who get vaccinated to stay away from school.
Update. We are euthanizing at 1:00 p.m. He is suffering too much, and we need to help him. I wish there really was a dog heaven; he would be in it for sure.
I’m so terribly sorry about your dog. It’s awful, losing a beloved pet. My heartfelt sympathy.
Oh I’m so sorry. Just awful.
My heartfelt condolences…
iknklast;
I’m so sorry. That decision is the hardest part of having animal companions. It is a relief to know you can relieve their suffering, but it’s always so wrenching to be faced with that choice. They leave terribly large, furry holes in your heart.
My condolences, iknklast.
Loosing a dog is heartbreaking.
I’m sure he couldn’t have been luckier with his choice of humans though..
iknklast, damn, that is always so sad. They bring so much to our lives, it is always wrenching to lose such a friend.
On the #ComeOutOfStonewall protests around the UK this Friday.
https://lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/10/this-friday-take-to-the-streets-of-london-belfast-and-edinburgh-to-demand-that-organisations-leave-the-stonewall-diversity-scheme-says-d-j-lippy/
I’m going to the London one, the geology there being less demanding for wheelchairs than Edinburgh’s, since this is a mobile demonstration (I don’t fancy trying to keep up with everyone going up the Royal Mile).
I’m told dinosaurs will be there.
PZ says things about Rosie DiManno’s article about why we can’t say ‘woman’ any more (https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2021/10/15/why-cant-we-say-woman-anymore.html).
PZ:
Also PZ:
Well you see THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE OCCASIONS.
Pedro Sánchez wants to abolish prostitution in Spain.
Most of the prostitutes in Spain these days are foreign, brought in under fraudulent circumstances. The current system outlaws pimping, which sounds good but leads to further abuse.
My wife tells me that they’re also charged for food and clothes. Basically it’s an old fashioned company scrip system.
WaM, that’s interesting thanks. Are they actually going to put properly funded policies into place that protect the women currently in protitution and lift them out of potential poverty finding gainful employment for them, while at the same time reducing local and tourist demand for their services? Or, is this just going to be an exercise in waving a slogan around, while driving the whole industry underground and making these women’s lives even more miserable?
Make no odds, I’d like to see prostitution in nearly all forms and circumstances gone (what I would accept would require us to be living in a utopia essentially). I just have a deep seated suspicion and fear that the ‘solution’ will be another simple minded reaction that just makes things worse somewhere and for the people who need most help and compassion.
Modern prostitution has become a huge trans-national industry. Even in New Zealand a lot of prostitutes come from overseas. Many arrive on holiday visas. Pre-covid it was not uncommon for Eastern European and asian women to be denied entry because they were coming in on a holiday visa, but with no return flight, no obvious itinerary, little luggage. Red flags all over the place. I recall seeing an episode of Border Control (not sure if it was the NZ or Aus version) where one young woman had literally thousands of condoms in her bag. They were a ‘gift for a friend’ apparently. I suspect the fate of young Romanian and Albanian girls in Europe are much worse.
Rob,
No details yet. Hopefully they do it thoughtfully, in a way that protects the women.
It looks like Margaret Atwwood has fallen afoul of the purity police and has been deemed a TERF by some members of Team Barramundi. It seems to be connected with the Star piece by DiManno linked to above by latstot. Atwood recommends DiManno’s opinion article, saying “She’s not a Terf.” TRAs beg to differ and call her out. GC call Atwood out for using TERF, but at the same time see just how close Atwood is to getting it and getting peaked.
Noted by glosswitch (Victoria Smith) here: https://mobile.twitter.com/glosswitch/status/1450479675508248587
Atwood’s own stream here: https://twitter.com/MargaretAtwood/status/1450439725546975232
Ceri Black, one of the founders of LGBA Ireland, has received a phone call from Northern Irish police asking her to attend an interview under caution regarding tweets. They told her this was due to complaints from (of course) David Paisley. Paisley was the one who reported Marion Millar for tweeting about ribbons. As Ceri has said, if your activism consists of reporting mothers to the police, you really have to ask yourself some questions.
The police told Ceri that if she didn’t attend a meeting voluntarily, they would arrest her. Since they were going to be interviewing her under caution regardless, she’s opted not to attend voluntarily and told them to arrest her in front of her kids (and, I shouldn’t wonder, cameras) if they wish.
She speaks about it in the first part of The Mess We’re In, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m6VILKKkfI
Watch the whole thing, it has Ray Blanchford on it and they talk about some interesting stuff to do with AGP.
I don’t believe for a moment that Ceri has tweeted anything hateful about anyone, Paisley included.
Good god.
#241 latsot
PZ says “Rosie DiManno is wondering why we can’t say ‘woman’ anymore, which is a rather self-contradictory thing to declare in a big bold headline that got published in a major metropolitan newspaper.” But it is only self-contradictory if we take the article heading in the strictest sense, i.e. that Rosie is claiming the word ‘woman’ is literally banned from publication. She isn’t and a quick glance at her article shows this. PZ knows this is not what Rosie argues, and I know he knows it, as he quotes and comments on a passage where the clarification is made. PZ is thus being deliberately misleading.
And TRAs in general will uncritically accept this as proof that GC feminists think the word ‘woman’ is banned from public use.
I feel this is obvious and doesn’t need stating but…
If you feel the need to lie to defend your position you are emphatically *not* one of the Good Guys. No matter what your position and who you ally yourself with this is true.
Do better. /s
Holms:
Yeah, PZ is always playing games like that, these days. Perhaps he always did, I’m not sure. My memory tells me that he used to do it with wit for the purposes of ridicule, rather than it being the basis of his entire argument.
Either he changed or I was wrong about him all along. I’m not sure I care which, to be honest, and I’m certainly not inclined to go and look through his pre-idiocy period work to find out.
@249:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction
I suspect PZ was doing that all along, but it didn’t seem to matter that the jab was cheap given the target was deserving of rebuttal and ridicule for other reasons. Now that he has taken to arguing against reason, the justification of ‘the person deserves it anyway’ no longer provides cover and it is now obvious that it is just a cheap snipe.
Yeah, that’s what I mean by “perhaps he always did.”
Either way, I hope I’ve learned to be a bit more discerning now.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1451823327945924608
In any and all settings actually.
Two recent Opinion pieces on CBC.
Trans rights? Yes. Toxic, in-your-face activism? No
I believe this new form of activism creates more, not less, animosity toward the trans community
Jessica Triff · for CBC Opinion · Posted: Oct 23, 2021 4:00 AM ET
This writer goes on to site women’s concerns over males abusing self-ID to gain access to women’s spaces, and that such concerns are legitimate, and ought to be heard.
As misinformation campaign against transgender rights intensifies, Ottawa must act
The federal government needs to turn to Supreme Court to counter anti-transgender activism
Charlotte Dalwood · for CBC Opinion · Posted: Oct 14, 2021 5:00 AM ET
It is clear that this piece is actually a load of misinformation and well poisoning itself. Calling organizations dedicated to protecting wome’s sex-based rights “anti-transgender” is a tell. “Assigned at birth” is another. (The head-tilted byline photo is just icing on the cake. )This item is suggestring that these groups, are seeking the right to harass and persecute trans identified people by removing existing charter protections. Their primary focus is actually the protection of the rights, health and safety of women and girls. At least Dalwood has the courtesy to include links to caWsbar’s and We the Females sites, allowing readers to see for themselves what their beliefs and goals are (though the link to caWsber is through the phrase “falsely claim.” Baby steps.)
https://www.cawsbar.ca/position-statement
https://wethefemales.com/
Ok now?
Yes, great. Thanks!
Welcome!
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/46676/yves-rees-the-challenges-of-being-non-binary
Good comment there: “This whole piece is so ridiculous, but I didn’t burst out laughing till the book title. Imagine literally calling a book ALL ABOUT ME especially when no one has ever fucking heard of you.”
Apropos of nothing, I just saw a TV commercial depicting (animated) a dancer twirling Star Wars style light sabers. Some of the dance moves were quite acrobatic. I thought, it’s a good thing light sabers are not real, or the dancer would have cut off her own legs. Another poor design choice for light sabers is the flashlight-button activation. If you are on manual operation, it’s hard for hands to compress a button for extended periods. Oops, all of a sudden your weapon disappears in the middle of a fight because of hand fatigue. If you’re on automatic, you’re as likely to chop yourself to pieces as the opponent. Light sabers are stupid weapons.
What bothers me more than the toggle activation is the lack of hand guard / cross guard. Every time they clash and hold blades together, either one of them could just slide their blade down to the other person’s grip and slice all their fingers off. Given how weightless the blades are, this would take no more than a twitch of the wrist.
Just goes to show that the majority of the requirement to making it to Knight rank is consistently surviving practice duels without getting anything cut off.
https://www.mdedge.com/dermatology/article/247352/acne/fda-oks-ipledge-change-gender-neutral-language
The FDA has approved a change in the risk assessment for a major acne drug that can potentially cause birth defects. Previously, patients were classed as male, female with reproduction potential, or female without reproduction potential. Now they will be classed as person who can become pregnant or person who cannot become pregnant.
It is unclear to me if there is any distinction under the old prescription protocol between male and non-reproductive female. If not, it’s probably not a big deal to make this change. But it seems like yet another loss of sex category for the sake of trans ideology.
So that Loudon County bathroom assault story has taken a significant change.
Apparently the perpetrator did not gain access to the girls’ bathroom by being or posing as trans or nonbinary; he and the victim had met in that bathroom previously to have sex, and agreed to meet there again on the day of the assault. From there, it’s an all too sad and common story — girl doesn’t want to have sex that day, boy decides that isn’t an acceptable answer.
But it does not appear to be a trans story at all. (I mean, I suppose you can stretch and say “but this proves that sexual assaults can happen in bathrooms,” but I don’t think anyone has ever doubted that. This is a story that could have, and probably did, take place in the 1950s.)
Very interesting, SM.
I don’t think it’s been confirmed whether the assailant was wearing a skirt, either. And, as we know, the “inclusive” rules were actually codified until months after this assault.
The trans advocates look at this and say “It isn’t even a trans person, you’re trying to claim trans people are dangerous”, while others are saying the “inclusive” rules make it easier for boys to gain access to the girls’ bathroom. A student seeing a boy in the girls’ room would be able to complain or kick him out, but wait, maybe he claims to be a girl.
Sackbut,
Well, yes, that’s the hypothetical that keeps getting cited, but it doesn’t fit this situation. I feel comfortable assuming that the school has rules against students (of any gender) having sex on school property (restrooms or elsewhere), yet this couple had violated those on multiple previous occasions. If any other students witnessed or were aware of these previous encounters, they had a perfectly “acceptable” basis on which to complain to school authorities; they weren’t cowed into silence by fear of being called transphobic, or helpless because there wasn’t a rule being violated. Also, since this assault began with a planned meeting — which I hope I don’t have to explain is not victim-blaming on my part, she has every right to meet up with a guy and choose not to have sex with him — presumably this could just have easily happened in a broom closet or wherever if the bathrooms weren’t an option. (Or they could have met in the boys’ bathroom, where it’s unlikely that any teenage boys would have objected to the presence of a girl.)
Sure, people have whatever arguments they had to support their positions before this incident came up. These revelations don’t negate anybody’s position on the overall issue. But they do pretty conclusively negate the claim that this particular story was an example that supports anyone’s position. You can’t say “see! this is exactly the kind of thing we’ve been warning about!” and then not acknowledge that “ok, it turns out this actually was not the kind of thing we’ve been warning about.”
I’d also note that there was a previous walkback of sorts on this story: the claim that the school didn’t involve the police until the victim’s father made a scene at the principal’s office was incorrect. There was a school resource officer, who is an actual police officer assigned to that school, who had opened an investigation. It’s possible that the father misunderstood the explanation, but the reporting by the Daily Wire was misleading at best.
That, unfortunately, is going to be a recurring problem I think. If you find yourself on the “same side” as conservatives on a hot-button cultural issue like this, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but it does mean that some caution has to be exercised in relying on reporting from conservative outlets, because they don’t lie and mislead any less on the issues where you agree with them.
It’s the right that has been pushing the trans angle on the rape in Loudoun County. We have a gubernatorial election going on, and the Republican (Youngkin) has been blowing all the dogwhistles he can (electoral integrity, CRT, whispering about abortion, and so on). One of the major issues in the campaign is education, and particularly what rights parents have to control their children’s education. In part the debate has centered around Toni Morrison’s book Beloved. During McAuliffe’s first term* a woman from Loudoun County claimed that the book gave her son nightmares and so he shouldn’t have to read it; later she got the state legislature to twice pass a law that would give parents the right to refuse to read some assignments, but both times McAuliffe vetoed the bill. Loudoun County is especially important in this election because it’s a large, affluent DC exurb that’s been trending blue in recent elections.
I went to a McAuliffe rally last night a few blocks from my house, and most (all?) of the speakers mentioned the book. Our local congressman even brought his own copy. Another note of interest–all of the speakers, including several county and state officials and candidates, a Senator and former VP candidate, and President Joe himself, referred to abortion and birth control as women’s issues.
*In Virginia, governors can’t serve consecutive terms, but they can come back in a later election.
Wonder what the situation was when this student raped/assaulted another girl at a different school as we understand is the case.
On a different topic, just about finished John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism”. Definitely good stuff, but ultimately he concludes that there’s no point engaging with these people at all. Better to try going around them than engage in any kind of dialogue. Plus just learn to be fine with being called a racist.
BKiSA,
From the Washington Post’s most recent article:
Just reading about how the Chicago Museum of Art “fired” all its museum guards (fired in quotes because they are volunteer), ending years of association with the museum because they are white women…and older. Horrors!!! Yep, if you’re interested, the individual in charge is a pronoun person…she/her to be exact. Don’t worry; while I saw this first from Fox, I found a number of other sources covering it as well. It’s stirring up quite a controversy.
Not guards but docents. I don’t think you could have volunteer guards – too much responsibility. I started out at the Zoo as a volunteer (I didn’t even intend to use it as a stepping stone to working there, I just wanted to be a volunteer at first), and there were strict limits on what we could do, specifically it had to be risk-free. The union was (rightly) very wary of the whole idea. Unpaid guards would be untenable.
Sorry, I meant guides. I must have typed it wrong and autocorrect decided what I wanted. I knew they were docents, and some of the stories referred to them as guides. None of them called them guards.
Stupid autocorrect!
Hmm. The people on Ovarit are all still sticking with the narrative that it’s a trans story. I don’t know which anonimos on the internet to believe, here or there. (And the official media aren’t being very helpful.) So I don’t know what happened.
I’d heard a skirt mentioned in the context of “accidental” fellatio but never really thought the trans angle was important – except for the respective news outlets doing (or failing to do) the reporting.
Also jeezus, why would anyone voluntarily do sexual things in a school restroom? My experience has always been that they were only marginally cleaner than a McDonald’s bathroom. Just gross.
@GW, BKiSA,
It’s electoral politics. The Republicans in Virginia are pushing that angle to scare parents into voting for Youngkin. It’s not enough that the boy raped the girl; he has to be turned into an avatar for all that they see is wrong with the world.
I suspect that the mainstream media isn’t reporting on the skirt because they can’t get independent confirmation. It’s not in the police report.
At Pharyngula, PZ says:
Let’s see, shall we? This is the post he’s referring to: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/10/28/when-you-put-it-that-way-who-wouldnt-want-to-be-pocahantas/
Beginning at comment 14, kathleenzielinski draws the usual analogy between people claiming a different race and those claiming a different sex and ends:
The next comment, by usual suspect abbeycadabra begins:
and ends
Eloquent indeed. It’s so reminiscent of the kind of discourse we get around here when someone disagrees. Remember that time silentbob did a flyby and we all told him to fuck off SO MUCH?
Forgot to link to the post: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/10/29/transphobes-occasionally-dip-a-toe-in-here/
Also, since I’m here again, I think this is what annoyed me most:
Actually, ‘they’ were obviously just being civil. Honestly, PZ, you act like a fucking baby with a dyed blue beard, nobody can bear to look.
In other news, I done a hate crime!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC7UCgtWEAMm_5t?format=jpg&name=large
That was us on the bus to the BBC during the #ComeOutOfStonewall protest in London.
“Hate crime” ffs.
I don’t have a link to the video handy, but it’s basically a handful of us on an otherwise uncrowded bus. There is some gleeful singing of that penis song and menno leading a chorus of “the TERFs on the bus say Stonewall Out.”
It’s about 30 seconds long. There is plainly no hate. Compare some good natured singing to the protests outside the LGBA conference or the WPUK meeting the other day…
Anyway, the crowdfunder for my legal defence will be up shortly.
Just finishing a book cited by Jane Clare Jones in her recent essay “‘Smashing the Binary’: Notes on the Historicization of Sex ” https://janeclarejones.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/smashing-the-binary-september-pdf.pdf
The book cited is Feminism and the Mastery of Nature by Val Plumwood. Here’s Jone’s summary:
Here’s a link to the first chapter: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist2017-18/plumwood.pdf
Among other things, it’s a powerful critique of the foundational ideas of Plato and Descartes, which helped shape the Western, instrumentalized, master/slave relationship between humans and nature, the cost of which becomes daily more obvious. Had I come across Plumwood’s ideas thirty years ago, I might have stayed in philosophy. One of the things that I have appreciated reading this work is that she doesn’t write in a way that appeals to, and is only understandible by, other philosophers.
Ceri has news about her case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDjMCLwuM7o
Also featuring some other people you’ll probably recognise (and hosted by Birdy Rose).
I don’t know what the news is yet, because I’m watching it right now. DJ Lippy and Aja are there, so there’s probably stuff about the #ComeOutOfStonewall stuff.
The news is the police have decided not to arrest her; instead they are sending the complaints to the Prosecution Service for further consideration. Ceri thinks the most likely outcome is that the PS drops it. She and her solicitor are strategizing about the Person who made the malicious complaints, and how to make him stop siccing the police on women who disagree with him.
Update:
Ceri is not going to be arrested!
The police are sending the case directly to the NI prosecution service, who will decide whether or not to prosecute.
It’s unlikely that they will pursue it further (but they might).
There are several other complaints about her Twitter account but she can’t find out what they were without submitting an FOI or…. being interviewed by police under caution!
Watch the link for the full statement and much more but be warned, just about everyone is in tears by the end of Ceri’s statement.
Oops, Ophelia NINJA’D me.
Sorry! Didn’t mean to. Thanks for alerting us to the video.
It’s a good show. I’ve listened to one or two in the past, I don’t know why I’ve never subscribed (until now).
Next on the reading list:
Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert.
They call this change in direction “solving for the wrong variable.” The new goal is not to save the planet, but to save civilization, the cultural technology that has brought about the ruin of the planet in the first place. Swapping out all the coal, oil, and natural gas for solar, wind and hydro will still leave us on a gutted planet heading for disaster, just a slightly different, but equally fatal disaster of our own making. It’s a kinder, gentler omnicide. All these “green” , “renewable” energy sources still require loads of fossil fuel inputs, and intensive, extractive, toxic, and polluting industrial activity. Episode #572,895 of We Are So Fucked.
I think vaccines might partly be to blame there… the planet/species’ long term survival is much better when most “civilized” humans don’t make it to adulthood.
Latsot, when you have convinced yourself that your opponent is pure evil, the only way to rationalise their non-evil acts is to assume that they are in service to something evil; a fair cloak to hide the foul. PZ has gone from being a decent person capable of nuanced thought, to an unabashed Manichean simpleton.
Holms:
Yes, I see a lot of that and I recognised it in PZ here. Also the usual circular reasoning.
Via Feminist Current, Why some Korean women are boycotting Squid Game. The article discusses feminist objections to the misogynistic portrayal of women in the Netflix show, as well as the misogynistic reaction to women trying to raise concerns about these portrayals.
As the show is from Netflix, I can’t help but consider whether Netflix employees would walk out over a severely misogynistic show produced by the network. I somehow doubt it.
Well they shouldn’t be walking our over something like that in any case. Netflix employees shouldn’t get any sort of veto power over content.
On another note, apparently the terms “marginalized” and “vulnerable” are now verboten under American Medical Association guidance, so hopefully we can cease referring to autogynephiles as “most vulnerable and marginalized” groups.
But they did walk out over Chappelle, hence my comment.
I am of two minds about what they should or shouldn’t do, morally, but I suspect that there wouldn’t be any sort of threatened walkout over misogynistic content.
Apparently one of the lesbians interviewed in the Guardian article on the “cotton ceiling” is a seriously nasty bit of work and a genuine transphobe. Lily Cade, the porn star, has been accused of raping other lesbians and has now published violent screeds and threats directed at trans people .
A Twitter thread with screenshots and links
https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1455574098717913096
Apparently she was a TRA in 2015 — and then radically changed. TRAs think GCs took advantage of a traumatized young woman and “recruited” her. My guess is she may have been raped by one or more TW and went off the deep end. Don’t know.
It doesn’t negate the story or impact the rest of the testimony, but the paper should probably say something about this particular witness not being reliable.
@Sackbut: Acknowledged, and yeah, unless there’s some #MeToo thing not involving a transwoman I can’t imagine a walkout.
In other news, though a Virginia governor’s race doesn’t really affect me in a noticeable way I hope the national Democratic party has learned something about pandering to the gender goblins and KenDiAngelo cult: don’t do it.
BKiSA,
As a resident of Virginia, I’m very much affected by the results. Trans issues didn’t play much of a role here; it was more about white backlash. Trumpkin promised to protect “electoral integrity” and to stop teaching CRT in the schools (if he can ever find it), and of course he stoked people’s fear of crime, not just in the schools. Looks like the Dems also lost the House of Delegates, though they still control the Senate (barely). Even worse, we lost a pretty good AG. Virginia’s decided to rejoin the south, I guess.
(Odd bit of recent history: Virginia, which always has its gubernatorial elections the year after the presidential elections, tends to elect a governor from the opposite party of the president. The one exception was in 2013, when McAuliffe won.)
Sarah Ditum has a great article in the New European: The war against JK Rowling: How one woman became a hate figure in the debate on gender and sex.
#297 Sastra
Wow, that’s a name I didn’t expect to bump into again. I remember Lily from a TRA tantrum from about then, which was also roughly when I peaked. Hell, it may even have been the precipitating event for me, which may explain why I remember it.
The reason she caused a stir back then was that she refused to have sex with a trans woman. She was and possibly still is in the porn industry shooting lesbian scenes exclusively, and a trans woman that was also in porn wanted to collaborate in a shoot with her. Lily reminded the person that she was a lesbian, interested exclusively in the female body.
The reaction from TRA quarters was as swift and venomous as you’d expect, and is the reason her innocuous ‘no’ was heard around the web at all. I encountered it on one of the early FTB bloggers that later went the way of The
OrbitObscurity, Dana Hunter or Lousy Canuck I think.*googling*
Well how about that, it was Lousy Canuck. You’ll find a conversation about Lily Cade – and some familiar faces – further down with the help of ctrl-f.
@WAM #299:
Sorry you’ve got to deal with the new governor, just generally trying to avoid falling into the trap of nationalized politics. Were schools being only sporadically open a factor? Some guy from The Atlantic wrote as much. I just find it hard to believe that a state that went to Biden by ten points and had high turnout went to the Republicans because of a white backlash. There had to have been quite a few Biden/Youngkin voters or he wouldn’t have won.
So what changed? There’s the culture war in schools angle (probably especially the Loudoun county rape) and then people having yet another year of dealing with COVID-19. Lots of reasons probably that are harder to boil down into punditry. Just don’t want to fall into the “all Trump voters are irredeemable racists and that’s why he won” angle.
https://news.yahoo.com/gender-unicorn-student-sexuality-check-100000931.html
Woo-hoo! Gender identity, and sexual identity (?), are things that one “achieves”!! At least, that’s what tenth-graders are being taught.
BKiSA,
I agree that there’s rarely one factor that explains election results, which in fact was why I reacted to your post–I think that gender issues played at most a marginal role in this election. Granted, I’m no Nate Silver or Larry Sabato, but I’ve read a lot (including a Facebook post from an actual political science professor which has disappeared from my feed), heard a bit, and seen a bit, so what follows are the blatherings of a semi-informed voter.
First, the electorate isn’t static. From what I’ve seen, there were some Biden-Youngkin voters, but most of them seem to have been moderate-to-conservative whites who would normally vote Republican but couldn’t stomach Trump. More noticeably, though, turnout was substantially higher in red districts and lower in a lot of blue areas.
Second, McAuliffe ran a bad campaign. He tried running against Trump, but most voters were astute enough to realize that Trump wasn’t actually on the ballot, and he made a huge gaffe in one of the debates when he said that parents shouldn’t have a role in what schools teach their children (as often happens with such gaffes, he actually had a good point, but he expressed it inartfully).
Third, Youngkin ran a smart campaign, touching on Trumpian themes without sounding Trumpian (kind of in the way that Reagan put a happy face on Goldwater-style reactionary politics). He used McAuliffe’s gaffe effectively in his ads, promised tax cuts, talked about ballot security without claiming that last year’s election was stolen, and yes, used CRT as a racist dogwhistle. And he mostly skirted more contentious issues like abortion.
Fourth, there’s a lot of anger out there. Some of it is legitimate–prices are rising (most noticeably gasoline), some goods are still scarce, the pandemic drags on (schools are open, but with mask mandates), and the Loudoun County schoolboard badly mishandled the rape case. But the CRT issue also touches on a lot of white resentment, about perceptions of rising crime, about changes in school curriculum, and (this being Virginia) about the removal of Confederate monuments and renaming of streets and schools. A lot of this resentment is aimed at northern Virginian liberals who moved in from out of state–people like McAuliffe (and me).
Finally, I think the Republicans were either smart or lucky in nominating a Black woman for Lt. Governor and a Cuban immigrant for AG–it shielded them against charges of racism or sexism.
Anyway, that’s my attempt at punditry. That and a quarter won’t get you much of anything these days.
https://twitter.com/NuanceBro/status/1456311721795244038\
What the hell is going on in wokeland?
“…I’m a security evangelist at Microsoft…”
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Sorry, carry on.
@305 and 306: This must be parody, no?
The guy in the video is on LinkedIn with a job description of storyteller and evangelist. I think it’s legitimate. The second video in the thread is equally disturbing. There’s a possibility that they are describing themselves for the benefit of vision impaired people in the audience, but even that is a stretch; I listen to the radio and have no need to hear descriptions of the journalists.
I did think it might be just a joke – “It’s the thing nowadays to tell you lots of stuff about ourselves so okay, I have a ponytail blah blah” – not a critical or dissenting joke but just a mild self-tease as a way to connect. It could be, no?
The “Caucasian” thing irks me, too. What is this, early twentieth-century racial theory? Natalia and Nic are Caucasoid, as opposed to Mongoloid, Negroid, or any of the other super-scientific sub-species of Homo sapiens sapiens.
Perhaps they’re both Chechen.
Not really news, the ACLU lying again, but:
I Want to Play Golf with Other Boys. I’m Suing Tennessee for That Chance.
Nope. The bill says:
But we knew that. The ACLU knows that. They just insist that requiring students to participate in teams according to their sex is the same as banning them from participation in any and all sports.
That’s a smart tactic, finding a girl who wants to play on the boys’ team. Who can object, if she’s good enough? Personally I think that so-called boys’ teams should be open to anyone in the school who qualifies, while girls’ teams should be restricted to biological girls.
@Sackbut #312
To be clear I was laughing at the “security” part, not the “evangelist” part.
WaM @313
I can see reasons to keep teenagers separated by sex for sports, because teenagers, but in general I agree with your point that it’s the girls’ teams that must be single sex, and the boys’ teams could be open.
Mike @314
I found the combination rather strange. The video, and the later video with the Indian woman, sounded so very much like every corporate rally meeting I’d been subjected to, except for these weirdly detailed self-descriptions. But I do suppose that an operating system company could easily have a security advocate to promote their security features and products and best practices.
I think there are some potential problems with making the boys teams open since it relegates the girls team to B-status. I can easily Imagine how such a change will be taken to imply that if a girl is really any good, she should be able to qualify for the boys/open team, while those who “only” play on the girls team are all second rate.
#316 Bjarte
I don’t think that will be the case. Take tennis as an example, and the Williams sisters in particular. In the earlier days of their careers at about 2000, they issues a challenge: they will take on any man… whose rank is lower than 200. A male player took up their challenge, he was ranked 203. He took them both on, one set against each sister, and crushed them 6-1, 6-2. The Williams sisters revised their challenge: any man outside of 350. The guy that took them on disagreed, and said that they would lose to any man ranked 600 or better.
Yet no one that knows anything at all about tennis would regard the Williams sisters, Serena in particular, as anything less than tennis superstars.
Also, I would point you towards chess. Obviously this is not a physical game and so sexual dimorphism is not at play, yet the professional players are ranked in an open league and a women’s league. All players are in the open league, only women are in the women’s league. The reasons for the sex segregation are probably social.
State of this: https://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2021/11/05/how-gender-crits-locker-room-panic-rhetoric-greases-the-skids-for-a-broader-right-wing-campaign-against-lesbians-and-gay-men/
It’s profoundly sad. David Futrelle completes his transformation into a lying dickhead.
Whoa! Just a few days ago, I commented on a B&W post: Surely by now there must be some biological females who are “identifying” as transwomen.
Then I saw this on Ovarit just now: https://uploads.ovarit.com/f9cbffe2-db4d-5855-bfe4-6867ceea5cf9.png
“A friendly reminder to all AFAB who identify as transwomen: YOU ARE VALID “
Well now what do trans women have to say to that? Surely these AFAB who identify as trans women are appropriating the trans womanhood of actual trans women? Surely???
In an interchange on the topic I saw a few months ago, the woman was raked over the coals by trans advocates for daring to make such a claim. As often seems to be the case in this area, it was impossible to tell if she was serious or being deliberately provocative.
@318: I need eye bleach after reading that. I shouldn’t have clicked. :-(
Football player Aaron Rodgers is in trouble because he was required to get a COVID vaccine, but he didn’t, and he lied about it. (He apparently obtained homeopathic “treatment” of some sort, rather than getting a vaccine.) The details of the complaints or of his situation are not particularly of interest to me, but a sarcastic meme about the situation caught my eye (I haven’t found a public share of the image.)
Rodgers is portrayed as having a blonde blunt bob haircut, and he is dubbed “Kaaron Rodgers”. Yes, of course; a blonde white woman named Karen with a blunt bob haircut is the perfect prototype for someone who complains, who refuses to follow the perfectly reasonable rules and wishes to be given special privilege.
Yeah, I see how the name “Kaaron” fits so well, but otherwise, really? Can we please dispense with that damned “Karen” stereotype? Men complain, too. Black people and Asian people complain, too. Women not named Karen complain, too. If the stereotype were “Sambo” or “Leroy” or “Clem” or “Shlomo” something, people would be all over it as being inappropriate, but “Karen” is somehow deemed funny.
Ugh.
Here’s one.
A very woke friend of mine, whose views test my patience but we enjoy doing fun things together (cooking, music-making, and more), complained about some White woman who gave him trouble entering my building; I didn’t see the incident, but his understanding was that it was probably based in racism, since he is non-White. He called her “Karen”. I called him out on that, but he insisted that if it had been a man, he would have called him “Jimbo”, and this is no different (because White women are just as privileged as White men, amirite?). Yet in actual fact, I’ve never heard him or anyone else ever call a White man “Jimbo”. Maybe they would reserve that for White trans men?
i.e., White trans “men”.
“Jimbo”??? Puhleeze.
Have you ever heard “Jimbo”?
I don’t think so.
I’ve heard Jimbo as a name, but not as a stereotype.
Oh, I’ve heard it/read it as a name too, just not as the male “Karen”.
(There’s a scene in the first Prime Suspect in which the…prime suspect is in a lineup and has to say “Karen” and then repeat it. I always hear that in my head when the Karen trope is under discussion.) (It’s creepy because he was calling her to offer her a ride preparatory to murdering her.)
I’ve never come across “Jimbo” in that context, either. But I’ve only ever once known anyone for whom it was used as an affectionate alternative to James. I’ve otherwise only seen it used as a slightly demeaning or patronising form of James. There’s that kind of vibe to it, but I can’t see how it would work as an alternative to Karen.
Oh, this is great! Kathleen Stock is getting a new job, at the University of Austin, in Austin, TX!
https://news.sky.com/story/kathleen-stock-professor-who-resigned-over-trans-rights-witch-hunt-joins-new-us-university-12464140
She’s not moving to Austin though. Which is good, because Texas.
Just saw a “Silver Alert” for the first time the other night; had to look it up to figure out exactly what that was. How about instead of Ace Week we have a “Silver and Amber Alert Awareness Week”? That way people actually know what the hell is going on and can provide better informed assistance.
@335: Austin isn’t red: https://www.texastribune.org/2016/11/11/analysis-blue-dots-texas-red-political-sea/
Or did you mean something else?
The NPR comedy news show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me broadcast from Austin a while back. Their into was something like: “We wanted to broadcast from a foreign country. So we chose Texas. But we thought that would be too difficult, so we chose Austin, because it’s near Texas.”
Austin isn’t red, but it’s still in Texas, and still subject to state law. Heck, it’s where the abominable state legislature meets, and where the awful governor works. Having to endure Senate campaigns of Ted Cruz and others like him, even if nobody you know would ever vote for him, is agony. I live in Alabama, I have similar experiences.
GW, no, I know, and I quite liked what I saw of Austin when I was there for the American Atheists conference in whatever it was…2013 I think. Quite liked it but still wouldn’t want to live there, because of the climate first of all, and Texas in general running a close second, despite the redness of Austin.
I was more hopeful when I misread it as UT Austin. University of Austin is a so-far nonexistent university “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”. Not a bad sentiment, but heavily weighted toward the Intellectual Dork Web types (Bari Weiss, Boghossian, etc.) (University of Austin).
I know. For this reason and others, I’m not all that enthusiastic about the whole thing.
Electric Agora has a good Twitter thread about why it’s a pretty futile endeavor in any case.
On a different subject:
I take these online surveys for small fun and small profit. Occasionally a survey asks if I’m male or female; usually with one or more “other” options. Sometimes the question is labelled “gender”, sometimes it just asks “are you…”. I answer “male”, as it’s what I’d answer if they asked for my “sex” and didn’t have all this other options.
A survey today asked for my “gender” and gave choices: masculine, feminine, non-binary, other, prefer not to answer. No way am I answering “masculine”. I would have said “other” if they gave me a space to write in “genders are narcissistic nonsense and I refuse to play that game” or some such, but they didn’t, so I just said “prefer not to answer”.
Yikes. The Sokal Hoax from the other side of the process.
Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published
Timothy Snyder is revisiting his 20 lessons from On Tyranny in a series of short monologues on his YouTube channel. I highly recommend them all:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmY71FGkk5kMwde_TP3KbnQ/videos
The latest episode is on a topic close to my heart, and, I suspect, close to the hearts of most regular readers of B&W, “Believe in Truth”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHkkfB_7X0
Sackbut,
For a study I’m conducting at work, I have to take a random sample of teachers from respondents to a survey who expressed interest in participating. After taking the sample, I wanted to check to make sure that the sample is at least somewhat representative of all the respondents, including in terms of sex (these are K-12 teachers, so they skew female; we want to make sure that we have at least a few men). But there was no field in the original survey asking for “sex” or even “gender”; all I had to choose from was the field “Preferred pronouns”, with the options being “He/Him/His”, “She/Her/Hers”, “Not Listed” (with space to write in), or “Prefer not to answer”. Fortunately very few said “their pronouns” weren’t listed (and there weren’t any written in).
At some point I’m going to have to write a report with the demographics included. I’m tempted to list “Sex”, but I suspect I’ll get pushback.
https://ovarit.com/o/Radfemmery/48469/why-are-you-so-mad-they-used-your-woke-terminology-correctly
tl;dr: On the door of a girls’ dressing room in a high school, some girl (or possible staff or faculty?) posted a sign “AFAB (assigned female at birth) only”.
Some angry person in the school took a photograph, put it on the internet, and wrote about how awful it was and that he or she was going to speak about it with a guidance counselor. Some man in the comments (I assume a man, because the profile says “:trans: | She/Her”, though at this point who the hell knows any more) wrote: “Knowing the proper terms but still transphobic, how is that even possible?”
Subsequent Ovarit thread is about how the trans cult wants to make it impossible to name women, by any term whatsoever, even by terms that the trans cult made up. Episode number 100,000 or so. Ugh.
Chemical and Engineering News (weekly trade publication of the American Chemical Society) has jumped on the erasing women bandwagon.
Article in the Nov. 1, 2021 issue, page 11: “How pregnancy affects COVID-19 vaccine response”
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/cen-09940-scicon8
It’s not open access, but what you can see there is about 3/5 of the article.
The picture caption (from the paper edition): “After receiving both COVID-19 vaccine doses, pregnant and lactating people have a robust protective response.”
And the last sentence in the article begins: “People carrying male fetuses…”
That gives a total of four times in an article about 200 words long plus a picture caption.
KtC @348, I’m guessing if the fetus was female they would have phrased it as “people carrying a future person fetus”. No?
Re #348, #349
I was wondering that myself. I figured the original should have been “people carrying TBAMAB (to be assigned male at birth) fetuses” to be consistent.
But how can you know what they will be assigned? Surely that assignment must be arbitrary, because the only alternative is that you’re defining people by what’s between their legs, and we’ve long been told that that’s unforgivably reductive and essentialist.
“People carrying fetuses with penises”. At least, as soon as the penis develops.
the full last sentence of the C&EN article:
Have you ever seen a more delicious headline?
Politician to miss his anti-vaccine mandate rally because he has COVID
Holms, It’s a bit like one of the Destiny Church people here in NZ who organised a protest gathering against lockdowns and then came down with Covid a few days later.
“I’m really not sure where I caught it”
Are you vaccinated? “[laughs] I’m not going to answer that.”
Was taken to ambulance by hospital and then discharged a couple of days later “I’ve been sicker, it’s like a cold or mild flu.”
These people are just so full of shit. It basically boils down to utter selfishness and ‘you’re not the boss of me’ for most, with a solid dose of delusion and conspiracy stupidity for some. If these same people had been told they couldn’t have the vaccine, they’d be just as upset, albeit with more reason.
I have a lot of respect for Taslima Nasreen, but I did find this tweet ill judged. I can understand her underlying concerns about financial independence and the risk of cultural entrapment, but publicly questioning an independent and intelligent woman’s decision on such a personal matter feels off.
Kyle Rittenhouse trial sounds like it’s not going well… Should we be expecting another round of rioting or will it be toned down?
Well, the Judge’s phone going off while the Prosecutor was talking was an interesting moment for sure. Especially since the ring tone was the music used by Trump coming on stage at some of his rallies.
A welcome development, and perhaps the biggest change in fortunes yet:
BBC pulls out of Stonewall diversity scheme
That is indeed a welcome development. Hopefully that’ll mean their coverage will improve.
It’s being a big day for the BBC-Trans alliance, so big I can’t keep up.
Saw an (obviously) female gender goblin working in a hardware store today… Putting “your” pronouns on your badge instead of your name… So tempting.
Instead of a name? How the heck is that supposed to work?
“Hey, um, excuse me,” *spies coworker* “Hey, Ted, could you tell, uh, zer that I would like to ask zer a question? Uh, ze doesn’t have a name on zer name badge, so I didn’t know how to get zer attention.”
Nick of Wessex has a DSD and has been vocal on social media about the facts that this doesn’t make people with DSDs ‘intersex’ and that gender identity extremists should stop using them to pretend that sex is a spectrum.
He runs an online store selling jewellery he makes. This has been targeted a number of times by trans activists and he has always managed to rebuild. Now they have gone after his suppliers and it looks like it’s game over. He’s going to have to wind down the business because the suppliers have been pressured by the trans activists to drop him as a client. He’s been unable to find alternative suppliers.
He’s still selling what he has in stock at https://ko-fi.com/nickofwessex
I’m sure he’d like to liquidate that stock as quickly as possible so if you have any jewellery needs, you could check it out.
Nick has lost his main source of income and has had to cancel a holiday. He’s a nice man and he’s doing nothing but look out for the interests of people with DSDs. And he’s been deprived of his income because he’s one small voice disagreeing with a bogus argument for an idiotic claim that isn’t even needed to short up an already incoherent ideology. And somewhere, people are celebrating a job well done. Makes me furious.
Anyway, have a look at his store if you’re in the market for jewellery and tell people about this, if you can. The full story is at his Twitter feed, here: https://twitter.com/CCSDvoice
If this weren’t published by The Stranger, I would swear this was a parody.
Self-described “active polyamorous slut” is saddened and confused that potential casual sex partners care about genitals.
I expect this will be the first in a series of columns, to be followed by:
— Uber driver is hurt that would-be passengers cancel the “ride” when they find out the vehicle is a tandem bicycle. “You were fine with me transporting you to your destination, what difference does it make how I do it?”
— Tennis instructor can’t understand why people refuse to pay when he shows up for lessons with a set of golf clubs. “I don’t get it, I’m wearing a cute tennis outfit and I totally look like I can teach them tennis. People are so superficial!”
I suppose the refreshing thing is that for once it’s a trans man complaining about the “cotton ceiling.”
My New York Times newsletter included an invitation to a subscriber-only online event (via Slack), “Can We Have Healthy Online Relationships?”. Headlining the conversation are Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and drag queen Latrice Royale. That’s Reddit, which jettisoned a bunch of highly popular radical feminist and gender critical discussion forums without so much as a warning; Reddit, employer (maybe ex, maybe not anymore) of Aimee Challenor. And a drag queen. Those are the people they wish to have as participants in a conversation about healthy online relationships. A man hostile to women, and a man pretending to be a woman. Also in the conversation are Katie Bilowitz (co-founder of a vaccine-related Facebook group) and Claudia Lo (who apparently has much experience moderating online communities).
I don’t hold much hope for anything other than an infuriating conversation. I don’t think I’ll bother. I’m not a Slack user, anyway.
The headline on the event page is Can We Find Real Community Online? The headline from the video ad is “Can We Have Healthy Online Conversations?”, and notes that the host will be technology writer Shira Ovide. The headline in the email description is “Can we have healthy online relationships?” The subject of the email is “Can we have civil conversations on the Internet?” Those are related topics but not the same thing by any means. Maybe they needed more than one topic, I don’t know. I wish they’d make up their mind.
The description from the email is below. Someone needs to review how to use commas.
The text from the event page:
And just in case anyone was wondering what Milo Yiannopoulos was up to. It’s this…
Too delicious to be true. I guess even grifters have to eat.
Proof positive that you can only be cancelled by your “own” side.
Infuriating.
The article goes on to note that Belter had previously been given “interim probation” while awaiting final sentencing, and proceeded to violate the terms of that probation. So I’m not sympathetic to any arguments about how he’s changed since those “youthful indiscretions.”
I’m so tired of judge’s giving weak sentences based on “youthful indiscretions”! A boy of 16 or 17 should know better; he is almost a legal adult, and if he has no better control than that, what kind of adult man will he be?
Meanwhile, women who have miscarriages go to mail.
I apologize for the apostrophe error in the previous post. I was ambushed and violently assaulted by a roving band of rogue apostrophes and forced to insert one where it did not belong, under threat of being haunted by apostrophes for the rest of my life. I cannot call it a youthful indiscretion, as I am no longer youthful.
And I assume a posse of angry postal carriers forced you to use “mail” instead of “jail”? The streets are so dangerous these days. THANKS, JOE BIDEN!
The Casting of Non-Jewish Actors as Jewish Characters Is Causing Controversy
Sarah Silverman is right that it shouldn’t be a big deal, and that it feels weird to have someone play a Jew badly. And that the question of who is Jewish enough is a frequent argument among Jews. But people complain about crappy Southern accents and crappy Cockney accents, too. It shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s acting. But Jewish is a religious identity and only sort of an ethnic one. Ashkenazi American Jew from NYC? Orthodox Israeli Jew? Sephardic Jew? Reform Jewish convert with a Southern accent? Apostate former Jew who grew up in France? I think the first one is the main target. That’s not “a Jew”, that’s a Jewish person from NYC, and the task is to be from NYC as well as to be Jewish. I see no reason to insist that only New Yorkers take that role.
A thirty year old Zoomer hardly counts as an adult let alone one of seventeen… Still you’ve got to hold them accountable in some fashion. Why are they allowed to drive/own firearms/have a Twitter account? They sure as fuck can’t be trusted with any sort of responsibility.
Re. my comment at #123 and the resulting guest post, I recently finished reading Steven Hassan’s Combating Cult Mind Control. Like Rick Ross, Hassan is an experienced cult “de-programmer” who, unlike the other authors, has personal experience of being in cult* and even actively applying thought reform to others. While I have some issues with Hassan, I find his book a valuable supplement to the others. Most notably:
• He doesn’t consider the presence of an identifiable leader one of the defining features of a cult, but defines a cult as any group or movement that practices coercive persuasion techniques to gain undue influence. This makes his definition more applicable to things like the Trans Rights movement.
• His “BITE” model (acronym for “Behavior control, Information control, Thought control, and Emotional control”), explicitly invokes cognitive dissonance.
I also finally got around to reading Robert Lifton’s The Psychology of Totalism, but although the study of thought reform in Mao’s China is interesting in its own right, I can’t help finding it of relatively peripheral relevance or applicability to the study of cults. Somewhat surprising considering the central role of the text within the field. Maybe I’m just missing something essential…
* Hassan used to hold a high position within the Unification Church of Sun-Myung Moon, a.k.a. the “Moonies”, until his deprogramming in the 1970s.
(While the other authors seem to accept Lifton’s definition, they too are not entirely consistent on this point. I seem to remember both Singer and Ross extending their analysis of cults to things like MLM schemes and LGAT programs that don’t involve a supposedly infallible leader, but most definitely apply coercive persuasion techniques)
A week or so ago, FTB blogger Intransitive wrote a post about the supposed tide of killings of trans people, entitled “The Pandemic Continues: 2021 is the worst year yet for the mass murder of Transgender and Non-Binary people”. An eye-catching claim, and I wondered at the data which would prompt such strong language, so I had a look.
The first source of this post (HRC) states:
Okay, 45 murdered trans and ‘gender non-conforming’ people, but already, there are multiple problems with the data. Firstly, we have a numerator, 45, but no denominator – we are not told anywhere in that source, or in Intransitive’s writing, the total number of murders occurring in the nation for that same period, hence we have no idea what proportion of the total these murders comprise (but more on this later). The number 45 is presented as proof of targeted murder, but with no context it cannot be taken to mean any such thing.
Another problem is the incredible vagueness of that population group. Trans is a poorly defined term with many competing definitions, and gender non-conforming is worse still. Depending on who you ask, a trans person is anyone that says they are trans, or perhaps a trans person is anyone that transitions physically; a gender non-conforming person might be any person declares themselves an enby, or any person that defies any gendered expectation at all even unknowingly. Every man that grows his hair long / every woman that keeps her hair short is defying a gendered expectation by that token alone, to say nothing of the vast array of other ways in which we might accidentally break a gendered expectation. And so I suspect the ‘gender non-conforming’ metric in particular is going solely by whether a person has made a social media declaration of specialness, otherwise virtually every person (and hence every person in the murder statistics) would qualify.
The second post (PinkNews) gives a global figure:
Over the course of a year, out of all of the people that were murdered in that year, 375 were trans or non-binary or gender non-conforming. The problems of the first figure are repeated: no denominator to provide proportionality, and those same barely defined terms. Intransitive himself seems to notice the first of those problems, as he says:
Does anyone see a new problem here? Those figures looked suspiciously round to me, and quite unlikely to be a real world murder figure. I poked at them a little and discovered that 13,200 is the product of 44 and 300, while 112,500 is the product of 375 and 300. I was right, these weren’t real murder figures at all, they were simply the trans murder figures multiplied by the 1-in-300 population proportion. Incidentally, Intransitive seems to have used the wrong US figure – 44, instead of the record-breaking figure of 45 – but the difference is minor so I will put it down as merely a mathematical typo.
No real world general population data are presented yet in the post. Intransitive scaled the figures for murdered trans people in USA and the world up to the general population, but still has not compared these figures with any actual data. Given the claim being made, you’d think this would be not only relevant, but vital to the point.
Intransitive concludes:
It is apparent that Intransitive has become muddled here. The figure of 112,500 was obtained by multiplying the number of known murdered trans people by 300 to scale this figure up to the total global population, not a population subgroup, yet Intransitive is clearly thinking about this figure in terms of ethnic subgroups.
Most importantly though is the fact that Intransitive has reached the conclusion, that trans people are being deliberately targeted for murder, without once comparing those murder figures to the general population murder data. I thought he was going to when he scaled the number of murdered trans people up to the general population, but no, not even then. He skips that step, which seems indispensable to me, and simply declares that the up-scaled figures are indicative of deliberate targeting of trans people for murder.
Fine, I guess I’ll do the most important part of his post for him.
The number of intentional homicides in USA is 21,570, obviously well above the figure obtained by multiplying the number of murdered people reported to be trans by their proportion of the population. Also, apparently this is a surge of “almost 30%” over the previous year, while the homicides against trans people only increased by one 44th, or 2.3%.
The number of international homicides globally was 464,000 in 2017, the most recent I could find. This crushes the figure equivalent figure for trans people.
He wrote about trans people being murdered disproportionately, scaled the number of homicides against trans people up to find the general population equivalent figure, but never bothered to look at the actual general population homicide data. I can’t begin to tell you how flabbergasted I was at this. I facepalmed, I rolled my eyes, I laughed, I stared mouth agape at it multiple times over the last week before I managed to write about it. It is a monument to fatuous reasoning.
Oops, that post has a bunch of links. Oh and way too long.
Not a bit of it.
Another issue is whether the murders were “because trans” or not. As many people have pointed out, such murders are mostly of people doing “sex work,” so causality is more complicated than just “because trans.”
So, taking the numbers in Intransitive’s post at face value, I did some calculations. The population of the US is about 330,000,000. If 1 in every 300 is trans or enby, that’s about 1,100,000. If 45 of them were murdered, that gives you a murder rate of around 4 per 100,000. If that were the murder rate in the general population, there’d be about 13,200 murders per year.
Per Pew Research (which gets its numbers from the CDC), the actual murder rate in the US in 2020* was 7.8 per 100,000, or about 26,000 total. So it looks like trans and enbies are underrepresented among murder victims.
*Not quite the same window as in Intransitive’s post, but I think there’s enough overlap to make them comparable.
Oh, the 44 figure was from 2020, so forget my asterisk.
It’s harder to get worldwide numbers, but if there were 375 trans and enbies murdered over the course of a year, with a world population of 7.9 billion, that works out to about 1.4 per hundred thousand, or about 112,500 per year (aside to Holms: it looks like his calculations were correct, but check my math). The most recent worldwide statistics I can find are from the UN for 2017, when they estimate that there were about 464,000 homicides, or 6.1 per 100,000.
So again, if the estimates for both rates of enbies and trans in the general population and homicides among them are accurate, it looks like they’re well underrepresented as homicide victims. (But I don’t much trust the statistics cited.)
Oh, this tweet is lovely:
https://uploads.ovarit.com/41e03fec-94c4-5edc-b3aa-9f08ee50131b.png
Original poster writes: “You’re telling me you actually believe EVERY SINGLE trans woman is secretly a man in a dress?”
Oh dear.
GW, yes, I was laughing at that this morning. There is a haiku-like beauty to it.
Help me out here. I don’t get the vagueness of ‘gender non-conforming’. Couldn’t that be an obviously lesbian woman or gay man? Couldn’t it just mean a person who doesn’t dress or act in the typical way – maybe even only seldom, but just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? I mean, the definition is just so loose as to be useless as a victim category in the circumstances argued by intransitive. Every murder is reprehensible. So is misusing murders to argue your case.
Also, the numbers really don’t appear to support intransitives claims, even when accepted at face value.
#379 Ophelia
Yes, motive is never visible in statistics like these, which means the only recourse they have is to compare the subgroup murders to the baseline expected. And yet they always forget that step.
Rob,
There are certainly some measures by which I could presumably be considered gender non-conforming. Although these days I tend to dress in a traditionally male fashion, some years ago I had very long hair which was usually braided and I often wore clothes belonging to my then girlfriend, which could certainly have been considered somewhat feminine. I wore a little makeup very occasionally, but this was in the 80s and as one woman or another applied it before a night out, it’s safe to say my motive was not gender expression.
The reason that my hair is now short is obvious from my picture: I don’t care about it and leave it more or less to its own devices as you can plainly see. The same is true of my clothes, I just tend to wear whatever’s practical, with fucking great boots, especially if it comes in black. My point being that I don’t care at all about gender expression. Having long, braided hair was fun for a while, but these days I can’t be arsed. Same with a bit of gender-bending clothing and a lick of the makeup brush. I wouldn’t be against the idea these days, but it all just seems like a bit too much effort. And, of course, I can get away without making that effort because I happen to be male.
On the other hand (I think that’s three, now) I’ve never liked participating in team sport and I hate watching it. I’m not interested in cars or DIY. I’m an introvert. I despise bullying and displays of one-upmanship. I never assert myself for the sake of it. I try always to prioritise other people. I’m shy. I tend to exaggerate my failings and failure (partly, I admit, for comic or dramatic effect) and I’m enormously critical of my achievements. I have more admiration for people in support roles than for leaders. I’ve managed large and small teams, but I’ve always considered that management exists to help the managed do their jobs. I’ve stubbornly resisted playing politics or climbing ladders in favour of doing the job I think needs doing, regardless of whether it’s recognised or celebrated. I’ve sucked up insults and passed up opportunities for the sake of things more important than I.
These are not usually considered masculine traits, but I doubt many people would consider me gender non-conforming because of them. You can see where I’m going with this.
On the forth (or so) hand, of course, I’m a super geek. I’m one of those annoying ones who is such a geek they’ve come out the other side and use low technology in an elegant way to do things other people are doing with high technology. This truly is next-level geeking, which is usually considered a masculine trait. I was a promising martial artist. I’ve worked as a welder and as a nightclub bouncer. I worked as a scientist for many years and at heart I’m an engineer, a tinkerer. You’d be lucky to find an emotion anywhere inside me, if you don’t count constant incandescent rage. I like sci-fi. Among my hobbies are lock-picking and knife throwing (an especially inconvenient passtime for the wheelchair bound)..
All ‘masculine’ stuff.
I’m like everyone else. I’m a mixture of stuff that’s coded masculine and stuff that’s coded feminine. But I guarantee that:
1. Nobody would call me gender non-conforming if they met me now, but
2. Some would if I still had long. braided hair and wore blouses.
And it’s that superficial. That’s the part that really pisses me off. Being considered gender non-conforming these days has nothing to do with not conforming. It has everything to do with presenting an image of not conforming, without really ever doing it. Bowie and Boy George thought: fuck convention, away with it! It doesn’t apply to me! THAT is being gender non-conforming. Dying your regulation asymmetrical hair an approved shade of blue is absolutely fuck all, is what it is.
I am gender non-conforming. I altogether reject much of the behaviour and attitude attributable to my sex. I bullishly do what seems like the right thing with whatever’s in front of me, without considering for a heartbeat what boxes it will tick or how it will be perceived.
And I’m certain that most people do the same because doing elsewise is no way to live at all.
So to answer your (I’m guessing rhetorical anyway) question, Rob: yes, it’s all that fucking stupid.
THAT.
A petulant person has decided that a well-liked official has done this one thing that offended him, and therefore this official must be removed from office. Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before.
In this case, the offended person is Donald Trump, and the official is Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama, who has the highest popularity rating of any Southern governor, and who informed the Trump organization back in June that their intended use of a state-owned memorial park for political purposes was illegal and would not be permitted to take place. Or, rather, she said that it appeared to be illegal, and the Trump people should talk to the commissioners of the park, and the commissioners nixed the rally. Not Ivey’s decision, but Trump blames Ivey anyway. Trump is seeking to endorse a different candidate in the upcoming Republican primary.
I suppose it’s too much to hope we can manage to get a Democrat elected here.
I was just at a talk by Gloria Steinem this afternoon. During the Q&A, the first question asked was basically – what about the men? Not transmen in this case, but actual men. A woman he got pregnant when he didn’t want to. Gloria gave the exact right answer, in my opinion: You have a responsibility for birth control if you don’t want to be a father; don’t put it all on the woman. So two questions later, a woman asked what about the men, using a slightly different story about a sister who got pregnant and the man didn’t want anything to do with it; she tried to sell the argument by positing a child growing up without a father. Gloria’s answer? The exact same thing. If a man doesn’t want a child, he is responsible for his own choices.
I can’t believe (I guess I can) that people in this audience were suggesting a man should be able to demand a woman get an abortion; I find that as unacceptable as a man demanding a woman not get an abortion. Dude, you want the baby, you carry it. You don’t want it, stay out of the sack, or put on a condom.
Good for her! I assume her talk was similarly on point. About abortion?
Jessica Taylor wrote that she’s constantly asked “What about the men?” when she talks about women’s shelters, violence against women, and so on. But she founded and runs a men’s charitable organization, and she has not once ever been asked “What about the women?” in all the many times she’s spoken about that organization.
Those people that put the question of abortion in terms of a child being raised with only a single parent, and worse yet characterising that as some horrible thing, are showing some very blinkered thinking. I am betting that almost universally the people making such arguments were raised by both parents, and are looking at the question from that viewpoint – thinking about childhood with one parent in terms of their own (two parent) childhood. This would be horrible specifically because they were raised with a mother and father, and would be bereft without either one.
I was raised by a single parent, and that’s just not how it is. I can agree that two parents would have meant more financial stability, but I do not view my life as one of being bereft of a parent. You don’t miss someone if you never really know them in the first place.
PZ and his, well, I doubt it’s a ‘horde’ these days, frolic in delight at their use of the misogynistic term ‘Karen’:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/11/19/karen-has-strong-feelings-about-a-christmas-carol/
Ugh.
I just can’t quite bring myself to believe that the PZ of years ago would have used “karen”. I think he’d have either spotted the misogyny or listened when women pointed it out. But now it seems just fine. It looks as though he’s bought into the whole fetid narrative about white women having all the power and spoiling everything for everyone else. I suppose he kind of has to, since so many of those horrible TERFs that so plague him seem to be white women.
I’m quite sure he wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have joined FTB if I had thought he was a misogynist.
latsot @ 387, spot on.
Holms @ 392, I was also raised by a solo parent. I agree, more financial stability and security would have been nice, as would a father figure – it may (or may not) have saved me a few beatings. Still, I’d far rather have one parent who loved me, than two where one was disinterested or abusive.
latsot @ 393, JFC on a pogo stick. What the hell has happened to that man? yes, another rhetorical question. Explicit rather than implicit this time.
A stable two-parent home is a privilege that many do not have; doesn’t mean that a single parent can’t raise a fully functional child, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to spread the load.
I see that chigau and John Morales called out the horde on the use of “Karen”.
And Silent Bob was, of course, not so silent in response.
WaM:
I might have to take your word for it, I’m not sure I can bear to look.
latsot:
chigau’s comment:
Morales:
I’ll save your keyboard from your puke and not quote Silent Bob.
Interesting piece about Kyle Rittenhouse and “heroic masculinity.”
http://www.mctdirect.com/preview.php?id=202111220530MCT_____NEWS_SVC_02463_kniga
I came across this interesting Facebook video that I found, perhaps surprisingly, insightful:
The Death of the Public Intellectual
The presenter talks about the decline of “public intellectuals” and the rise of “thought leaders”, with references to declining confidence in institutions, increased number of think tanks, and the increasing reliance on internet media.
That sounds a lot like Dan Drezner’s book, The Ideas Industry.
Dawkins signs the Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights,
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1465324057277173772
reads Material Girls by Kathleen Stock
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1465004190116188160
Anyone seen this?
https://twitter.com/JJM_1994/status/1464967833209741312
“Maybe we should just eliminate LGB and accept people are just trans. It’s unfair to push them into believing being gay is natural or right when clearly they’re just confused by their gender. Nothing to do with sexuality.”
“Maybe it’s the other way round – maybe conversion therapy IS pressuring people that being gay is okay when actually they are trans. It’s the difference between someone being their true self as your daughter, or you convincing them they’re just your gay son.”
Oh. Then he took a back-step and claimed to be joking:
https://twitter.com/JJM_1994/status/1464999722230468609
“Why are gender critics debating this as if I’m being at all serious?Flushed face”
GW, yes I did see that and I’m about as convinced by his only-joking defence as I suspect you are.
I’m not sure he knows what a joke is. As in, yes, I think that he said these statements as a kind of reductio ad absurdum, but — paradoxically — he probably also believes them to a certain (great?) extent.
I’m reminded of when Trump said “I was being sarcastic when I suggested drinking (or injecting?) bleach to cure corona!” Except that there I think that the case was even simpler: he was 100% serious when he first said the thing about the bleach.
I dunno. It strikes me as (poor) satire, trying to imply that LGB and T belong together by ham-handedly reversing the argument for removing T from the set. Satire is of course different from joking, but maybe the author doesn’t understand this.
This article might be of interest to those who study epidemics and inequality (in all it’s forms). It describes the critical period over which NZs covid elimination strategy failed and why.
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/long-read-the-weeks-the-wheels-fell-off-the-delta-response?utm_source=Friends+of+the+Newsroom&utm_campaign=dfeb192886-Daily+Briefing+30.11.2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_71de5c4b35-dfeb192886-97836603
The tl;dr is that the disease found it’s way into the most disenfranchised and left behind in the community.
Despite the GMC urging everyone involved to be discrete, Harrop has another interview with Ben Hunte at Vice:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wwxa/nhs-doctor-adrian-harrop-suspended
Everyone? Wasn’t it just Harrop’s victims who were told to be discreet?
Jesus christ. The martyrdom of Saint Adrian at the hands of the Evil Witches.
I had thought it was implied that Harrop be discreet too.
The martyrdom is laid on just a little thick, isn’t it? Given that, you know, the bullying and harassment.
But he’s definitely sorry, see how sad he looks in the picture?
Nope, you’re right, it was “witnesses” who were asked to keep quiet. I’m not sure why I thought it was everyone involved.
Probably because you unconsciously assumed there was some kind of principle of fairness in operation. The unconscious mind can be so silly sometimes!
Glinner linked to this on his site, and I laughed out loud.
https://twitter.com/SatiriaNews/status/1461429752863014919?s=20
I just had to fill out a form before getting my COVID booster.
It asked for my “sex assigned at birth” — I put “male”, of course. I considered crossing out “assigned at birth” and instead writing something like “observed at birth” or “determined from ultrasound”, but I think I worried that crossing out the words on the form would have the potential of preventing me from receiving the booster.
Then it asked also for my “gender identity” — it gave a bunch of options: M, F, NB, I think GF (genderfluid), some other things, “rather not say”, and GNL — “gender not listed (please provide in the blank space)”. I selected GNL, and wrote in: “Gender doesn’t exist. I reject this religion.”
There was a spot for GNL people to write in special pronouns; of course I left that blank, despite having selected GNL.
I forget whether they had an option “rather not say” also for sex. I hope not, because if they’re taking statistics to see who had reactions to the booster, sex is rather important.
I worried that the clerk would tell me: “Sir, there’s a problem with your form”, but he just said: “Go over there to the woman administering the shots”, and everything was fine. So I’ve got my booster now.
I’m actually not 100% sure they were doing ultrasound tesing when I was in utero (1983-1984), so I just did a bit of research, and came up with nothing — but this led me to the Wikipedia page on “Gender Reveal Parties”. I first learned about that ridiculous practice from The Daily Show, a bit over a year ago, when Trevor Noah criticized the practice for being stupid and causing forest fires and other damage, and also, he said, “Because we know so much more about gender now than a decade ago, when the practice started. In fact, it turns out that the woman who invented Gender Reveal Parties, to announce that she was supposedly pregnant with her daughter — it turns out now that that child is a boy.”
That was when I stopped watching Trevor Noah. He totally bought into the trans narrative, and (as far as I remember) didn’t criticize the parties at all for encouraging harmful sex stereotypes.
Anyway, I read the Wikipedia page on Gender Reveal Parties just now, and it said: “An early example was recorded in the 2008 posts of then-pregnant Jenna Karvunidis on her ChicagoNow blog High Gloss and Sauce announcing the sex of her fetus via cake. […] In 2019, […] [s]he expressed regret at having helped start the trend, learning how the LGBT and intersex communities feel, and finally revealing the daughter they announced back in 2008 to be a gender-nonconforming individual who wears suits while still identifying as female.”
I didn’t check up on Wikipedia’s sources, but if Wikipedia is correct, I’m even more annoyed with Trevor Noah. Never mind the point that Karvunidis seems to be “an early example”, and not necessarily the “inventor” of the phenomenon, but seriously, this child doesn’t even claim to be a boy; she fucking wear suits, and therefore you call her a boy? This is infuriating.
A former friend, deep into trans ideology, had a gender reveal party a few years ago that included a cake with the message “gender is a social construct”. He was too attached to the ideology to allow discussion about what he really meant by that, and it was he who blocked me after I posted an article critical of trans ideology.
I guess there’s not room on a cake for “gender is a social construct which you will be harshly punished for not endorsing.”
Perhaps that can go on a banner that can hang at the party. :-)
Dawkins tweets:
For a moment I thought he meant you when he wrote “Ophelia”.
I know, I joked about it on Twitter.
Nice, PZ was caught being publicly idiotic on twitter by Emma Hilton and Jane Clare Jones. Unfortunately I am not twitter adept, or my browser hates it or something, so I can’t string them together. Here’s a sample though
https://twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1466870600002150410
lol
I saw some of the beginning of that but it’s grown while I was out getting some fresh air. I’ll have to do a post.
Ooh, Erasure of Women, episode 20,000:
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/52043/apparently-women-do-not-deserve-their-own-section-on-a-domestic-and-sexual-viole
Resources for victims of domestic violence and sexualized violence: (1) For men; (2) For LGBTQ2S. (If you read the fine print, you find that this also includes women.) (3) For children.
I’m not sure whether anyone has posted this in the comments, I’ve fallen a bit behind in keeping up with them all lately, but here’s @LabelFreeBrands comparing the responses to JKR and Dawkins on their evil TERFitude:
https://twitter.com/labelfreebrands/status/1465854963729321987?s=21
In my response to “It’s a huge honour for him,” I mentioned a song I wrote in the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre. I didn’t think t was appropriate to include a link to it in my comment, but I’ll share it here. This is a link to a 1992 recording of it that my friend and songwriting partner posted to his Soundcloud account.
We Will Not Be Silent:
https://soundcloud.com/getdunne/we-will-not-be-silent
Headline
Lisa Jones sexually assaulted female stranger she followed in Melbourne
Subhead
A woman has been thrown behind bars after sexually assaulting a stranger she followed down a Melbourne street before issuing a shocking demand.
4th Para
Jones, a transgender woman, (…)
16th Para
It was revealed in court Jones spent six years in a male prison in Germany for sexually abusing a six-year-old girl, before she transitioned.
But it never, ever happens.
https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/courts-law/lisa-jones-sexually-assaulted-female-stranger-she-followed-in-melbourne/news-story/1d1330396c4aae18638e725a7a8a6a2e
And the repeaters swallow the dogma whole.
not Bruce at #430…
Thank you for posting that — very powerful, great work from everyone involved!
We last heard of Durham university teaching students how to be prostitutes. Now, there’s a student uprising because they didn’t like a speaker.
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/19765550.durham-university-investigating-rod-liddle-speech-outrage/
OK, Liddle is an idiot and I can’t think of a single reason anyone would go to watch him speak in the first place. And I’m all for not going to a talk or even dramatically (but not too disruptively) leaving a talk in disgust if you feel like it. I’m all for peacefully (and not too disruptively) protesting a talk you don’t like.
But, of course, students are declaring they are not safe because a visitor to the university said some words. They’re safe being taught how to be prostitutes as though it’s a job at McDonalds, but they are not safe because a known idiot said some words, even if they didn’t hear them.
I know some of the commentariat listen to Savage Minds… Seems like Julia Long has gone full Bret Weinstein. *Sigh*
There’s a good thread here (apologies for the hard of twittering):
https://twitter.com/ox_fem/status/1469152679138107394
about the common argument by gender identity extremists for self-ID:
The author asks what evidence he or she would need to believe that statement is true.
I’ve given the same question some thought too and I generally approve of this answer.
The TRAs are arguing that any doubts about self-ID is moral panic because it’s totally fine in other countries. Even though one of these is Iran.
Butterflies and Wheels inhabit my brain. I saw an article about a man attacked by otters, and I thought, likely story, it was probably a group of trans otters, and now the statistics will get all messed up.
Hahahahaha we control your thoughts.
Sackbut:
I saw the same article and exactly the same sequence of thoughts occurred to me.
We’ve had a few discussions here that make reference to hypodescent (One Drop Rule), and this article is related:
I’m Black But Look White. Here Are The Horrible Things White People Feel Safe Telling Me.
I’m sharing it not so much for the main points of the article, how a white appearance makes white people feel “safe” in expressing racist sentiments to your face, but rather for the matter-of-fact assertions throughout the article that the author is Black, that these other people she speaks of are Black because of Black ancestry, and they just look white, they pass for white, they present as white. No question is raised regarding what any of that means.
I’m BIPOC, or at least considerably more so than Elizabeth Warren (My grandfather was half Sewanee)… but hypodescent is bullshit, so really I’m white.
Hypodescent mostly seems relevant, in my experience, in reference to Black people in the US. A book I read on the topic included anecdotes of American Black people who traveled abroad, encountered people of mixed racial background, and were confused about why these other people did not consider themselves Black (as they, the travelers, did). I find interesting the attitude of the author of the linked article, which is very common in my experience, that of course these people are Black, it’s not even a question, and if they look white they either acknowledge being Black or they are passing, there is no alternative worth considering.
The topic of hypodescent reminded me of one of the cringiest videos I have ever seen.
That was a fascinating video. It pulled in so many concepts. People “identifying” arbitrarily; it being “cool” or “better” to not be white; cultural rather than ethnic markers for race; people “passing”; people of mixed racial background (one of which Is Black) being declared Black. Very interesting, thanks for the link.
The cultural marker questions were particularly interesting. There is this idea that racial “identity” informs one’s speech pattern, accent, taste in music, and food preferences. Yet someone with the right background, devoid of the right preferences, is of that ethnicity, while someone of the wrong background, and fully immersed and knowledgeable, is not of that ethnicity.
Mark Meadows [final chief of staff for Trump] used his own cell phone, 2 personal Gmail accounts, and Signal for official White House business, Jan. 6 committee says
but her emails
I found this graph fascinating, and very sad at the same time.
Quidditch to change name, citing JK Rowling’s anti-trans positions
She made up the sport. Other people came up with some way to play a sport that, in the books, involves flying on broomsticks and chasing magical flying balls, and their issue is based on the stupid ignorant ranting of TAs. You’d think that maybe if they read what she actually wrote they’d tell the activists to stuff it, but they seem to have trouble telling the reality of their Earthbound sport from the fiction of the Harry Potter books anyway.
Gender Critical Coming Out Day is tomorrow.
The Night Before Terfmas
Sackbut #448
My coming out post has been on Facebook for an hour now, and the world hasn’t ended yet :)
Of course I had to link to my longest rant on B&W:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/guest-post-a-hostile-ultimatum/
Do follow the link to the poem, it’s brilliant.
Happy solstice to all denizens of the B&W blog! Winter solstice, to those of us identifying as residents of the northern hemisphere. How I wish I could simply identify as the opposite; I would have midsummer now, instead of the oppressive darkness caused by the combination of a very short day and a ridiculously heavy cloud cover.
There’s been a lot of ridiculously heavy cloud cover over Seattle lately too – ridiculously even for Seattle, which is notoriously grey in winter – along with earlier dark than most of the US, though much less so than Norway. Sunday the clouds parted and there was much blue sky for most of the day, and it was like a giant party in my head. (I actually like winter, but the dark this time has been getting to be a bit much.)
Seattle and Trondheim are both situated on a west coast, so I think it’s not too surprising if we have similar weather patterns. We are much farther north, but on the other hand we have the Gulf Stream to keep us warm(ish) in winter, which helps a lot.
We also had a brief glimpse of the sun yesterday, before the clouds moved in once more. A couple weeks ago, we had a cold snap with some snow on the ground. It made a world of a difference! It’s just so much lighter when there is snow. Now, the weather is warmer, all the snow is gone, and the gloom is back. But we’re heading to the mountains for the Christmas holidays, a change from traditions but one I am looking forward to. There will be a generous snow cover, for one thing.
Snow: nature’s light bulb.
I think this is called an “own goal”.
I’ve been asking some biology denying pronoun people to provide examples of transsexualism in other mammals. This is what I received:
https://i.postimg.cc/rwW8ZK2L/opera-4-CKfx6o07l.png
Not only have they failed to provide mammalian examples, but they have also proven that transsexualism exists in order to deceive and rape.
Nice to find an honest TRA. :-)
Ouch
Dr Oz is running for US Senate in Pennsylvania. He has many failings, but the key super important new issue, according to a writer at Daily Kos, is that he dared to support JK Rowling. He said she was “very brave”. She is.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2070299
Pedophile who Identifies as a 5-Year-Old Girl Sentenced Over Breaching Order
Of course they went along with his “identity” as female, but not his “identity” as a small child. Why is that? Anyone?
Good god.
[…] Via Sackbut […]
This is interesting. Trump says that the COVID vaccines works, and that the Americans that have died of COVID this year are responsible for their own deaths, because, he says, they didn’t get vaccinated..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GC86EhnpiQ
He doesn’t blame Biden for their deaths, even though it would have been very easy.
Why is this? I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that Biden is a White man.
Doubt it, probably just forgot… Give him time.
A week before Christmas, my wife and I went to a musical performance at the local, main, professional theatre. It was supposed to be a “welcome back” after a year’s closure and renovations. In the week since, we’ve broken daily case count records for the entire pandemic locally, provincially and nationally (though mercifully, hospitalizations and deaths have not spiked alongside cases). Toilet facilities are now “All Gender”, featuring individual, completely enclosed toilet stalls, and a communal hand-washing area. It could have been worse. In the past there were usually line-ups outside the women’s washrooms, but never the men’s. Maybe this will even things out? I’m also wondering if some future renovation will end up re-segregating these facilities by sex, if and when the genderism fad blows over and saner heads prevail.
During the opening number, each of the performers gave a little “Gee, it’s great to be back, nice to see you all” speech, written, I’m guessing, with input from each of them. One of of these little speeches ended with “My pronouns are they/them.” As if this was something Vitally Important for the audience to know. They/them was a male, with beard and moustache, but broadcasting “Their “Non-Conforming status through a combination of nail polish, and a deep blue, glittery headband with jeweled center-piece. Still just one entity though, no plurality or duality present. That one little line felt intrusive, contrived, self-centred, and self-indulgent. “They” had an excellent voice, but that little bit of gender-snowflake grandstanding left me feeling cold and unappreciative of his performance. The theatre gets to show how Progressive it is, but so what? As far as this show and this performer was concerned, IT DOESN’T MATTER AND I DON’T CARE. Please, just SHUT THE FUCK UP. “All Gender” washrooms was political statement enough. Had this been a movie, it would have been a moment better left on the cutting room floor. Sigh.
Yes somebody you’re not going to be chatting to, and not going to be talking about in “their” presence, really doesn’t need to say anything about “their” customized pronouns.
You know, political slogans used to be meaningful, even if they could be used by showoffs and grifters to get some kind of reward. No pasaran, viva la huelga, vive la résistance, black lives matter, sisterhood is powerful, solidarity forever – they’re all about something beyond the self. Way beyond the self. “My pronouns are” is so diametrically opposed to that you’d think someone would eventually notice.
Most recently the phrase “Every Child Matters” has been added to the Canadian conciousness. Something this theatre has been doing for years is to include a few lines regarding Land Acknowledgement in the program of each current show. This time the program was online only (likely to reduce points of contact) and has a whole page outlining Treaty history in our area. The newly renovated lobby also has a commemorative display of 215 orange feathers hanging from the underside of the stairway going up to the balcony. They represent the initial 215 unmarked graves discovered in Kamloops on the grounds of the residential school. To keep this accurate and updated, they will need longer stairways and many more feathers…
A link to the program. The Land Acknowledgement is on page 4: https://www.grandtheatre.com/sites/default/files/programs/Home%20for%20the%20Holidays%20-%20House%20Program_1.pdf
Experts troubled by TikTok trend that can have teens believing they have serious mental disorders
To which I sarcastically say: No kidding! You don’t say! Do you think maybe this might have some people believing the lie that they can change sex, too?
Glinner “guest posts” a letter from Matt Osborne:
A disaster ahead for Democrats
Matt Osborne is from my own state of Alabama, and he, a political scientist, often has insightful commentary on state politics. This letter is inspired by a comment from an Alabama Democratic state party official: “How are we going to talk to voters with a straight face after setting a quota for non-binary party officials?”
Very, very true. The Alabama Democratic Party (ADP) has a complicated set of quotas intended to ensure the demographics of the party apparatus is close to that of the state, but which has become an absolute circus. Recent turmoil in the party was not over policy and candidates, but over representation. There was a fractious change of leadership in 2019, and since then there has been significant improvement, in my view, in the direction of the party, but the quotas and emphasis on representation are in the bylaws and remain a force. It is not in the least surprising that the party apparatus has added trans ideology to its mindless list of “inclusive” causes, along with the trans-related quotas. I don’t know if they have added quotas for men-who-claim-to-be-women, or if such men take precedence over women in the choices for “women” seats, but it’s unfortunately possible. Even with the renewed focus on policy, I’m afraid that these quotas are going to bite the Democrats on their, er, asses even worse in the upcoming elections. Bad times ahead this year.
Oh gawd what a nightmare.
Wasn’t exactly surprising that Doug Jones lost his seat but shit like that couldn’t have helped…
Doug Jones wasn’t getting support from the ADP, and he worked behind the scenes to push the change of party leadership. I wish he had won, but if his legacy within the state is a better-functioning party, I’m glad for that. There’s a long way to go, though, and crap like this doesn’t help.
Another lead from Glinner about a legal article an attorney posted on his LinkedIn page, which was censored by LinkedIn as “hate” speech. IMO, the lawyer — former judge — has a point.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/from-the-memory-hole-a-trial-court?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNDkzNTcwLCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0NjU0NzI3OSwiXyI6InZJa0tMIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQxMjYzNzQ2LCJleHAiOjE2NDEyNjczNDYsImlzcyI6InB1Yi02NzMwOSIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.PJWmC5wfrOb-l23tA6Ad6SLVlkF3cvfJ3CQ_7Dx_Zxk
Religion News Service article about the nonbeliever exodus from Patheos. They are forming a platform called Only Sky. The article mentions no media outlets in existence that specializes in the needs of the Nones; that can’t be right, unless they are making some fine distinction that disqualifies FtB, Skepchick, The Orbit, and several other attempts at having a communal site for atheist writers. Maybe they are all defunct?
Also mentioned is that Patheos is changing their “brand” and will not allow atheist writers to be critical of religion; writers are in general expected to focus on how to live a good life within their world view, not on criticizing the views of others. So I’m not at all surprised the atheists left.
Ah yes, I knew about that because my Freethinker column for last month is waiting for the move; I’m told there was a certain lack of advance notice.
Blogs aren’t exactly media outlets, are they? Even networks of blogs. I’ve never considered myself “media,” even when I was at FTB.
I’m failing to see a relevant distinction between Patheos, Only Sky, and FtB and the others. They are all blog networks, no?
I just meant I don’t think of blog networks as media outlets. I could be wrong.
I agree there. I guess I’m a bit surprised that the article implies Only Sky brings something new to the table, something that wasn’t true of other atheist blog networks, and it isn’t clear to me what that might be. A voice for the Nones who are not atheists? I doubt it. Something more “media outlet” than “blog network”? If so, I’m wondering what that is.
Or perhaps the writer was just wrong.
So now I’m reading the article (fun concept! I didn’t get around to it yesterday) and I see what you mean.
Yes I think FTB et al. fit that description. Then again I know nothing about Only Sky; maybe it’s a more platformish platform – less homemade, so to speak.
OnlySky is supposed to be more than a blog network. Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism wrote:
Some of my favorite bloggers are moving there (plus a few I don’t care for at all) so I think it would be worth a look. It hasn’t been launched yet, though.
Speaking of blog history, the Lawyers, Guns & Money podcast has started a series on The Oral History of the Blogosphere. They’re more focused on the political blogosphere, so I wouldn’t expect them to get into atheist/skeptic stuff, but still interesting if you remember (or still follow) that world. Episode 1 was with Matt Yglesias, #2 with Dan Drezner came out recently.
#471 maddog
From the guest letter, quoting some of the guidance given to judges:
Have they considered not dressing as caricatures of women?
But that would ruin all the fun.
I hope Ophelia will forgive me for the shameless plug.
I’ve signed up for various wheelchair distance events in 2022 including the Leeds and Sheffield half marathons, the Middlesbrough 10k and (hopefully) the Great North Run.
I’m raising money for nia (https://niaendingviolence.org.uk/), a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.
My crowdfunder for the Sheffield event (in March) is here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/latsot-sheffield
Donate if you can and share the link if you like!
Yer darn tootin’ I “forgive” that.
A strange Daily Kos article talks about a fringe group of physicians being promoted on Fox News who are suggesting ivermectin as a “front line” treatment for Covid. The “second line” treatment includes a set of drugs that are used (off label, I am pretty damn sure) for androgen suppression in trans-identified males. DK makes the point that Fox thinks these medications are dangerous and terrible for use for “gender affirming” care, but suddenly they are fine for Covid. It seems to me that both Covid and “gender affirmation” are off-label uses of the medications.
You’d need to be awfully sure the medicine understood which purpose you were taking it for…
Sackbut,
I’m certainly not making an argument for treating COVID with ivermectin, but let’s not get hung up on whether or not something is “off label.” My understanding is that there’s nothing necessarily bad about “off-label” uses of medication. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t allowed to promote “off label” uses of their products, but doctors are free to prescribe “off label,” and frequently do.
I think there can be multiple reasons why a drug that is (in the U.S.) FDA-approved for treating condition A might not have approval for treating condition B. Obviously one reason might be that it really isn’t an effective treatment for B. But it could also be that it will eventually be approved for B, there hasn’t been time to gather the evidence and go through the regulatory process. Or the maker decided that it isn’t worth their time and money to go through the process to get it approved for B — it might be a relatively small market compared to A, and since physicians can prescribe off-label, it may be that everyone is happy with that status quo: the manufacturer can make and sell it, and promote its use for A, while anyone who wants to take or prescribe it for B can do so.
Some info from the FDA here.
I saw this in my feed, How to Talk about Trans Issues | Robert Wright & Agustín Fuente
Had to click round randomly (finding Fuente’s slick sophistry hard to take right now) and read the comments (see to be uniformly scathing)
Did catch enough in the section on sports to know this should have someone knowledgeable do a take down:
– seems to imply that some women in WNBA could play in NBA
– is sure that Williams sisters could beat male tennis players ranked in top 50
Usual JKR bashing – Fuente can’t imagine why she would want to comment on this issue (seems to contradict himself later saying it is better to discuss than not, but seems bewildered that she didn’t immediately cave when people criticised her.)
Just realised he was mentioned here Our letter to Science about Agustín Fuentes’s Darwin-bashing
I had downloaded that podcast but not listened to it yet. You’ve probably spared me the time.
The tennis thing is just nonsense. It instantly brands you as someone who doesn’t know tennis. Early in their careers, the Williams sisters made some noises about competing against the men. Karsten Braasch, a German player then ranked #203, offered to play them, and beat Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. After that they stopped making those kinds of challenges, and have been pretty clear in recent years that they don’t claim to be able to compete with the top men. There have been other examples over the years of similar formal and informal matches. Yes, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the 70s, and that was a good and important victory for the fledgling women’s tour — but it was important precisely because Riggs was an old man who shouldn’t have been able to beat top women, but in fact had previously crushed Margaret Court. (I don’t give much credence to the conspiracy theories that Riggs threw the match against King, I assume she beat him fair and square.)
Anyway, at every level (pros, college, etc.), there is a huge gap between the best men and the best women, and anyone who’s spent any time around the game knows it. So anyone who comes to a discussion about women’s sports with “I think Serena can beat the men” is not someone worth my time.
Swanalien, even the Williams sisters in their prime did not make so bold a claim when they challenged a male player and bragged that they would win. They issued the challenge to any male player outside the top 200, the challenge was taken up by the 203rd ranked male player, who won with ease. They then revised their challenge to any male player outside the top 350.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)#1998:_Karsten_Braasch_vs._the_Williams_sisters
Other than that I am not going to touch that video. An hour long and with very few views and fewer comments, it is not having much impact.
Curses!
Curses why?
Oh because Screechy scooped you by minutes. Heh heh.
I once watched the video of that Connors-Navratilova match referenced on the Wiki page. It was just dreadful tennis by both of them.
I’m in a weird place… on the one hand I think SCOTUS blocking of the vaccine mandate for large workplaces is bullshit but on the other hand it’s hard to argue that using OSHA to put one in place is within the scope of what the agency is designed to do. But this is where we are when Congress is fucking useless and all we have is the imperial presidency.
This is hell nor are we out of it.
Glinner has a post about a man in prison for assaulting a 14-year-old girl. The man identifies as a woman, and has apparently altered his appearance. He is subjected to assault in the prison, from staff and other prisoners. News articles are leaving out his crime and framing the assaults as “transphobia”. Glinner’s take is unsympathetic toward the pedophile and angry at the news media for making this about his mistreatment.
It is my understanding that pedophiles are treated badly in prison, and nothing I read in the article Glinner links to convinces me that this isn’t like any other abuse of a pedophile. I do not condone assault of prisoners for any reason, including this case. I agree with Glinner that the news media is omitting important information, but I also think the news media is playing favorites here. They could be reporting about prison rape and assault, and decrying the abuse of prisoners, even unsympathetic ones, but no, they have to turn this into a transgender story. There are many other stories about prison assault that they aren’t telling.
Apropos of nothing particular, I ran across this story on YouTube, about a police sergeant, who was about to deploy pepper spray on a suspect in custody, who was restrained (pulled on the back of the belt) by another officer. The sergeant did desist from deploying the pepper spray, but turned on the other officer. The police cam footage shows the sergeant putting his hands to the restraining officer’s neck. The story never once acknowledges that the junior officer was a woman officer; it certainly looks like a woman officer to me. I wonder if the sergeant would have put hands to the officer’s throat if it weren’t a woman. Somehow I doubt it. Police officers have serious problems with domestic violence and misogyny.
https://youtu.be/V3OATDKa2yc
If I’ve done this correctly.
Teehee, not the brightest spoons in the toolbox:
Capitol rioters called Nancy Pelosi’s office asking for ‘lost and found’ for items they left there during riot
This is the review we’ve all been waiting for.
Julie Bindel reviews Laurie Penny’s book.
https://thecritic.co.uk/penny-for-your-thoughts/
Oh goody.
A Guardian article today, Middle-class Britons more likely to be biased about Islam, finds survey, contains a link to a report (PDF), The Dinner Table Prejudice: Islamophobia in Contemporary Britain. The article is focused on class differences in the report, but I found the report itself more interesting in regard to what they consider “islamophobia”, and how it was detected.
My relatively quick reading gives me several impressions.
The authors did try to make a distinction between criticism of religion, which they acknowledge must be allowed in a free society, and prejudice against or hostility toward Muslims. Ultimately, though, they concluded that it is difficult to tease those concepts apart, and therefore somehow criticism of the religion of Islam needs to be considered a problem. I don’t agree. Criticism of ideas, including religions, must be protected. If it’s difficult in some cases to make fine distinctions, then it’s difficult, but don’t come down against criticism.
There was a fair amount of whatabouttery: criticism of Islam was compared to criticism of other (e.g. non-Christian) religions, and people are less familiar with those religions so had little criticism to offer. Among the points being pressed was whether Islam was supposed to be taken literally (especially more so than other religions). This issue is a familiar one to many of us; people claim a religion is not really supposed to be taken literally, despite the fact that so many of the clergy and the adherents actually do take it, or key points, literally. Nowhere in the report was the actual truth of the question raised, it was apparently just assumed that no, it’s not to be taken literally. But it doesn’t matter if Islam is more literal than other religions so much as it matters that Islam is literal; we are allowed to talk about a problem without having to decide it’s the single worst problem.
The fact that Muslim women are typically identifiable in Western society by the wearing of head scarves, and that people were using the proliferation of head scarves as an indication of the proliferation of Muslims, was criticized as prejudice against women and mocking of Muslim dress. To be fair, sometimes it is. But there is a problem of lack of truly free choice in the wearing of head scarves, and there is nothing wrong with using identifiable characteristics of a group as a marker indicating the presence of a group. What one does with that information is another issue.
The report does, I think, a decent job of addressing racial coding of Islam in the eyes of Britons.
It seems a well-done report, but hampered by a desire to stamp out criticism of Islam along with prejudice against Muslims. It would be interesting to see a report on “islamophobia” by an organization unafraid to criticize Islam and other religions: Campaign for Free Expression, perhaps, or Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.
Our new Republican governor here in Virginia, champion of limited government and parental choice, has decided the Stasi had the right idea:
This is how he intends to keep “divisiveness” out of schools.
FAKING NEWS FAKING NEWS FAKING NEWS
In a move that goes beyond email signatures and corporate bios, an American company is putting pronouns in their company name. The chocolate manufacturer will now be known as “Her/She”.
:-)
I’ll see myself out.
Hahahaha good one.
Skeptic magazine (yes, Shermer, but bear with me) is having trans stuff as their cover feature in an upcoming issue. They’ve posted an article by Carol Tavris from it:
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/transgender-reality-i-didnt-know-there-was-another-side/
It’s not going to please trans activists. Some of the other stories listed on the cover likely won’t as well, but it looks like they’re going to have people from both sides weighing in.
It’s nice to see more cracks in the “there is nothing to debate!” wall.
Even Shermer isn’t wrong about everything.
Interesting article.
Ugh. Just so many levels of awful here. 11 arrested after woman allegedly gang raped, tortured and paraded through streets in India:
Of course the woman is to blame for being stalked, and rejecting her stalker, thus causing his suicide. But if she had given in to him, how do you think her husband’s family would’ve reacted? (And how will his family react now that she’s committed the crime of being raped?)
Just awful.
Yeah he “fell in love with her.” That’s not love.
An opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed by English professor Angie Kirk, Biological Gender in Fair Competitive Sports Policy, seems reasonable and well put. She makes good points about biological reality, fairness, language, and women’s rights.
I learned of this opinion piece via a link in a Daily Kos article by Marissa Higgins, English professor fired off a vehemently anti-trans op-ed in a big news outlet. Let’s talk about it. This one was, as you might expect, not reasonable or well put. Higgins says that calling trans-identified males “biological males” is “a warning bell if I’ve ever heard one”. She calls Kirk “biological essentialist” and fails to address the biological facts of the matter. She also makes the common and inappropriate Appeal to Intersex.
I don’t see why Kirk’s measured and clear essay would be called “vehement”, except in the case that any disagreement with trans ideology is automatically “vehement”. Probably the Daily Kos piece gets tossed on the enormous pile of bad faith responses to reasonable disagreements. But Kirk’s article is good and worth reading.
Yes I’m familiar with that “vehement – shouting – screaming” etc trick. PZ’s mob rely on it heavily.
*sigh*
https://boingboing.net/2022/01/30/introducing-karen-the-musical.html
Remember Robert LaMay? The State Trooper that told Governor Inslee to kiss his ass?
A recent twiiterfitter tried to “win” the debate by pointing me to the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, you know, the guy who coined the term “transsexual”. Interestingly, upon “educating myself”, I found this.
https://i.postimg.cc/tR12KfPV/FKc-Ayu-QXEA4ypjt.jpg
But of course, we all know it never happens.
@ Roj # 513
I can’t see the image.
“Postimage error: Internal Server Error”
Jenni Swayne (the disabled woman arrested by Gwent police for feminist stickers) is interviewed on today’s The Mess We’re In podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a4uWYUIMi0
For the curious, I recently stumbled across this article on Joe Rogan, published back in 2019. I found it had many of the points I recently made, better than I made them, along with some counterpoints worth considering.
Durchwanderer@516
I’m among the curious. Thanks for that, and for the other article.
There was a New York Magazine article about the Spotify backlash that I commented on a few days ago but may have been lost to the mists of time. I thought you and others might find it of interest.
Sackbut,
Thank you for that comment and for pointing it out. You make good points about allowing mobs to dictate acceptable norms and legitimising the hecklers’ veto, especially when that veto is a demand that backroom executives arrogate to themselves the power to decide what the rest of us can see and hear and read, ostensibly for our own good. It is a bit astounding that so many self-described leftwing people are championing corporate censorship, as explored by the Daily Beast, giving a leftist rebuke to this instinct.
There has been much hubbub over the attempts to remove Maus and various other books from school libraries and curricula. The backlash has caused, at least in my window on the digital world, a great many memes declarations against censorship and against banning books. It seems assumed that books are wonderful, that the best way to get people to read a book is to try to ban it, and that the people doing the banning are uniformly conservative.
As we know well, not all attempts at banning books are from conservatives. While looking for some discussion of this point, I came across this short and apropos WSJ opinion piece by Thomas Spence from September: ‘Banned Books Week’ Isn’t Actually Interested in Banned Books, with a subhead of “If it were, conservative writers like Abigail Shrier and Ryan T. Anderson would be on the list.” It talks specifically about the attempts to hide or prevent the sale of “Irreversible Damage” and “When Harry Became Sally”, and also more generally. Spence has a dog in this fight; he’s president of Regnery Publishing, a conservative publishing house. But the general point that book banning is not strictly a conservative action is a good one. (He is focused on liberal censorious actions against books he considers conservative, but he misses actions against books by liberals of different opinions.)
I feel like collecting many of these “anti-banning” memes and statements and playing them back the next time someone wants to remove a new gender-critical title, or heck, even just a novel by JK Rowling or some other person who has been declared off-limits. It sometimes seems like Left and Right are fighting over the Harry Potter books: “I want to ban them because witchcraft!” “No, I want to ban them because transphobe!” In all the controversy over Maus, CRT, and books with so-called “LGBTQIA+” characters, I haven’t seen any “woke” liberals stand up against the banning of Harry Potter by conservatives.
Here is an absolutely bonkers tale of a family’s dissolution catalysed by gender ideology — initially as a complicating factor in the separation itself, and then as a legal instrument of torture for the father. I’ve read of similar stories in Canada, but this one hits particularly hard.
I didn’t read all of this article about the potpourri of laws coming out of Florida, but this bit struck me:
So Cooper likes wearing dresses? Good for him! And his classmates are accepting of it? Even better! No one should be subject to bullying just because they prefer to wear unconventional clothes.
But why not tell the kids “Cooper’s a boy. And it’s ok for boys to wear dresses. Dresses aren’t ‘girl things’, they’re ‘people things’. Just like dolls and toy cars and pink and blue.”?
5 women ski jumpers are disqualified at the Olympics over their jumpsuits
The suits were judged a little too big, giving an “unfair advantage”, even though the exact same suits were just fine in a different event a few days ago.
When was the last time that men were penalized a sports competition because of the cut of their uniform? How often does that happen? It happened to women a couple of times at the Summer Games just last year, if I recall correctly. I can’t recall it ever happening to men, so I doubt it’s nearly as frequent.
The bit of extra room in the thigh gives an “unfair advantage”, but the sports world can’t manage to understand that having an adult male body confers a significantly larger “unfair advantage” in most sports.
Whaaaaaat
That Jimmy Carr special (with the gypsy Holocaust joke) was actually really good… it’s all in the delivery.
Splendid bit of satire from Titania McGrath in The Critic.
The villainy of J.K. Rowling
Re Sackbut @ 522 – I watched some male ski jumping last night and noticed their suits are downright baggy.
NPR had an article about the suit controversy, and noted how minutely detailed the uniform regulations are. They also noted that women’s uniforms are far more regulated than men’s, and that women had to add a large number of panels to their uniforms with recent regulation changes, purportedly to make them fit more aerodynamically, but also (some claimed) to highlight the athletes’ figures.
Adele comes out as a TERF (apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, but it has the most details):
Oh, brave new world, that has such
womenpeople in it!Twitter – so I don’t have an account, I just leave a tab open and browse the timeline of people I’m interested in. As of this morning, I can read about 2-4 tweets and a pop-up appears requiring me to sign in to view more. I can refresh the screen, scroll down to the next batch of tweets and read a couple more before the pop-up returns.
Is this happening to anyone else? any work arounds? I’m really not keen to create an account.
Try incognito window. I just experimented with it and someone’s timeline and was able to scroll and scroll.
P.S. Grab the link to someone’s account and put that in the incognito window – it won’t work to go to Twitter home that way, they’ll just say sign in.
Thanks Ophelia. I always use a Private browser window anyway and grab a direct link as you suggest. Weirdly, todays issue didn’t affect safari on iOS. In any event I had to reboot my computer (thanks Parallels!) and after that everything has been working fine. Twitter is weird. Way too much code going on that website.
Rob,
Yes, this is a business decision Twitter has made, to give no-account users enough rope to addict themselves with and then cut off the supply in order to nudge them into creating an account and joining the funhouse 24/7. I am of course not privy to the details, but I suspect they are creating shadow-accounts based on browser fingerprinting — even for private browsers, whose main benefit is that the fingerprinted profiles created from them are slightly more difficult to associate with a real-world identity than a normal browser.
Anyway, these shadow-accounts are presumably given a certain amount of browsing time, measured in number of tweets loaded or some other proxy, before the spigot is turned down to the lowest setting, allowing you to see a handful of tweets before being inexorably prompted to sign up or sign in. Because the shadow-accounts do not see the advertisements (at least not yet), whereas actual accounts do.
Your new browser will only take you so long before it too will reach the hard limit, in a week or a month or however long some Twitter executive has decided is long enough to sink the hook and reel you in. If you really want to swimming in the waters without getting gutted, you’ll need to shell out, either for a truly private browsing experience or a VPN which lets you cycle your internet traffic through different countries, possibly even while spoofing different browser and OS setups out of which fingerprints are made. (Or possibly both.)
I suspect at some point the engineers will rejigger their ad system to show the advertisements to the shadow-accounts, perhaps after they have mined them long enough to build up a decent advertising profile to sell to the advert market. Since the GDPR, European advertisers are having to build such a system anyway, an ecosystem with profligate digital profiles only distantly-connected to a real-live human being on the other end; when enough advertisers get comfortable with the notion of cutting the cord of a real account, there’ll be nothing but inertia to keep Twitter and Facebook and any other social media company from simply creating shadow-accounts for every browser without anyone needing to sign up at all.
This is golden:
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/63296/violent-trans-activist-who-kicked-lesbian-out-of-pride-org-quietly-detransitions
Violent Trans Activist Who Kicked Lesbian out of Pride Org. Quietly Detransitions
Good article about Rowling and the Harry Potter books by Sam Leith at Unherd: Harry Potter fans need to grow up. I note in particular this section:
I especially like this bit:
That’s what I disliked about the first book and why I stopped reading it at that point.
Another rat abandons Trump’s ship.
Yikes. That seems…incriminating.
Words that don’t translate:
https://eunoia.world/
Sure, priests diddling kids, mistreatment of pregnant women, opposition to abortion, not providing proper medical care, you think all those are problems for the Catholic Church. But you’re missing what really matters: getting the baptism script right.
Fortunately the church hierarchy is on top of things.
So what was this priest’s horrendous sin?
At least we now know Jesus’s pronouns. But the scandal may go further.
Still, the miscreant is appropriately penitent, and remains in good standing.
And the church is right on top of things for all those poor, innocent victims:
Though it strikes me as odd that an omni-omni deity can’t perform his duty because of a small error. I can just imagine Him sitting on His throne in Heaven, watching the proceedings, all ready to give His blessing to the little one and subject it to an eternity of torment, exclaiming when he’s blocked by the faux pas, “Dammit! Borked again!”
Ophelia shared a post by Derrick Jensen on her Facebook page about what would happen if The Emperor’s New Clothes were set today. It made me laugh :D
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009251975639&__cft__%5B0%5D=AZWUNDsq3c-JqzZKiwIZ4AXP72ZPKAEJu5hBfyHKwYKVRtISNsJhp0ufrPBojPqMbT9TjSDMGrjG2sDaZKMBmsXIH3VnSCSgcQt92CNWV6alYOdshy-VXsBleFjIHDnzmiMo6KixIMozLySn355e8Y_suyip5Mpw_unPtVCzAOkOfg&__tn__=-UC%2CP-y-R
I was inspired to write this:
There is an expression in my mother tongue that translates as “Adam’s clothes” – or, alternatively, “Eve’s clothes” – and is commonly understood to denote the absence of any physical garments. This appears to be conclusive scientific* proof that the very first humans** were in fact trans-dressed and what they were wearing was widely accepted as a legitimate kind of clothing from the very beginning. The white, Western idea that wearing “clothes” – or being fully “dressed” – has anything to do with vulgar physical fabrics is a recent cultural invention and inextricably linked to cultural imperialism, Western hegemony and white supremacy, i.e. the stereotypical “dressed” person is not just imagined to be cis-dressed (i.e. covered in garments), but also white, Christian and middle-class. This whole weird fixation on physical fabrics is also kind of obscene, not to mention creepy as hell, to be honest.
It is disheartening to see such a stunning and brave performance by our first ever openly trans-dressed emperor be met by yet more bigotry, hatred, and literal violence against one of the most vulnerable and oppressed minorities in our society. There’s a direct path from denying the very existence of trans-dressed individuals through statements like “The emperor is naked!” to rounding them up by the millions and sending them to the gas chamber. Their blood is literally on this child’s hands, and we need to remind everyone of this ugly truth whenever the brat opens its mouth for the rest of its life.
* Pseudoscience is science! It’s in the name!
** Those who argue that Adam and Eve were not historical figures only provide further proof (as if any were needed!) of their cis-historical bigotry. Being an historical figure was never about crude, physical existence!
The correct link:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=3108181059500263&id=100009251975639
Oh good – asking you to make it public was step one to posting it here. My cunning plan!
[…] Originally a Facebook post/Miscellany post by Bjarte Foshaug: […]
WaM @ 540,
I’m not up on my Catholic theology — are there any supposed consequences if one of those “improperly baptized” people has already died? Is baptism a requirement for entrance to heaven? Can they baptize a dead person retroactively as the Mormons do?
Well if Jesus was officiating at the event, you’d think he would have spoken up at the time.
We’ve discussed at least one article by Daily Kos writer Marissa Higgins before. Here is another one:
Missouri Republican launches 30-second ad filled with transphobia in the name of women’s sports
The ad in question talks about Lia (previously William) Thomas, with pictures and information of him prior to “transition”; Higgins is aghast that anyone would dare to use that information, including in the context of this ad, where it is relevant to the points being made.
The article contains the usual rejection of any gender-critical issues, and “transwomen are women” and other slogans. I do wish to point this bit out, though:
I have some amount of agreement with her point that this politician, like many other Republican politicians, likely doesn’t really care about the rights and welfare of women and girls. The issues she mentions are good ones.
That, however, doesn’t make the issues inherent in gender ideology disappear. The suggested increase in team funding won’t make it more likely for women to win championships (and endorsements and scholarships) against male competitors. Heck, it might provide even more men with lucrative opportunities.
I note that she phrases the conflict as between “transwomen” and “(cisgender) women”. If she’s so strongly embedded in trans ideology, she should recognize that “nonbinary” people who are female, and trans-identified females (“transmen”), are on the right-hand side of that comparison, just as “nonbinary” people who are male are on the left-hand side. This is about single-sex spaces, not gender identity at all.
Screechy Monkey,
I don’t know much theology, but I think you need your baptism card stamped to get through the gates (unless you’re born in a time or place where that wasn’t an option).
So I don’t know, maybe Limbo if they’re good?
About those truckers who may or may not cause the Apocalypse by insisting on their individual freedoms in the face of a pandemic, here is an opinion piece I have found interesting and informative. In particular, the analysis of the two emerging social classes rings true for me (a Reality-born outcast currently on a Virtual mercenary tour).
I do not think it is a coincidence that, as the Virtual class came to full flower and the Virtual economy collapsed in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis (itself caused by Virtuals), the Virtual world’s mores shifted entirely away from a more traditional class-based analysis to one of historical privilege hierarchies. This allows a Virtual who must get by on two or three part-time academic jobs summing to below the national median wage to feel morally superior to a Real tradesman making two or three times what said Virtual earns; the Real tradesman, despite having access to no real levers of power except for those he’s built himself, is an avatar of a privileged upper class, his values and language and very existence offensive to those that upper class has oppressed. (Note that many Real tradesmen are not white, or are not men, or are not white men, but, in the Virtual collapsing of categories, the ideal Real tradesman is in fact a white man.)
It doesn’t seem to matter that the Virtual religion is being shouted from the boardrooms of the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world, that its evangelists have spread it to virtually every campus, nearly every media outlet, and nearly every Western government. Those barbaric Reals, as evinced and exemplified by the recalcitrant truckers, are the ones making the world an unsafe and unruly hellscape. They must be shown their place.
Something cheerful to get through this bleak day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvM1ev2JNTg
That is cheerful. A bit Randy Rainbow, a bit Tim Minchin.
Not woke enough.
US ‘Queer’ Female Professors Labeled TERFs by Students and Staff
A survey asking people what gender they consider themselves had options for “man”, “woman”, “transgender”, and a fill-in box for “self-identity”. The lack of boxes for “cisgender”, “nonbinary”, and “agender” caused the uproar. In the professors’ words:
Is there an argument to be made that we didn’t actually win the Cold War? It certainly looks like the powers that defined it are quite capable of threatening Western civilization (perhaps moreso in the case of China).
Blood Knight… I think as history unfolds, it will turn out that we did indeed win the Cold War. The anti-war, anti-Putin protests across Russia are tremendously heartening. Putin may have the machinery of the government and the military under his personal control, but he won’t live forever. The arc of the moral universe is long…
Germany’s response to the invasion of Ukraine: military spending is going to increase to 2% of its economic output, from its current 1.53%.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-hike-defense-spending-scholz-says-further-policy-shift-2022-02-27/
Maybe Leopard IIIs will finally become a reality then… we’ll see I guess.
Lately IMO, PZ’s posts have been rather anodyne on the spectrum of sex stuff, which has me wondering if, after his exchange with Emma Hilton and others, his department head had a little chat with him about how it might reflect badly on the University of Minnesota at Morris if he made himself a laughingstock with respect to his actual profession.
That PZ’s spectrum of sex claims must be known to his students, and that those who might dare to disagree with him about it won’t because he is their instructor, is shameful, IMO.
That’s a good point. Imagine being an actual student of his.
This is absofuckinglutely brilliant.
They’ve made clothes for NBs that no NB can wear. :-)
Oooops – forgot the image link …
https://i.postimg.cc/Wb4nDrf4/FM4a8-Vl-WYAYDGse.jpg
No you didn’t, I deleted it, because it was a porn link. This one seems to be ok.