Allow me to be the first to contribute to Miscellany Room X!
For years I’ve carried on a pen-pal relationship with an inmate in a federal prison in Texas. We discuss many things — my work, his hobbies, and our shared interests. He is highly intelligent, and one of those rare birds in American prisons, an atheist.
The subject of trangenderism came up. He mentioned that it’s a hot topic of discussion among his fellow inmates, and I asked him to elaborate on that. With his permission, here is what he wrote:
in here there are certain protections and options one gets for “identifying” as transgender. there are certain shampoos for example (As well as makeup and other things) That are only available to trans people. personally i find that to be discriminating against everyone else, they aren’t allowed to sell certain commissary items to blacks or Mexicans so why should anyone be different? the staff generally bend over backwards to be accommodating to transgenders, letting them get away with stuff they wouldn’t let other inmates get away with. if you are transgender you can request that you only ever be patted down or strip searched by an officer of your “identified” gender (which makes me wonder how the officers of that gender feel having to accommodate them). when i say its a big issue in here i mean all of those things as well as the fact that there seem to be a disproportionate number of people in here who claim to be transgender. many of them are simply gay and want to come off as more feminin to appeal to “straight” guys (though i contend anyone in prison who has any sort of sexual relationship with another inmate is gay regardless of what the other inmate “identifies” as).
Peter N, it sounds like everywhere else. Their “rights” are things no one else gets to have. Everyone else is ordinary, but the ‘special’ people get perks.
I am seeing that trying teecue+ with LGB is feeding the anti-gay tendency of conservatives. This is really fucking up our society. Libs of TikTok is an example, and another reason to think carefully of who to keep at arm’s length, even if they share gender skeptical views.
I saw this story about a transgender inmate suing for discrimination in Minnesota. The Minnesota DOC entered into a settlement agreement to place the guy in the women’s prison and pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. The women, of course, had no say in the “settlement agreement.” Where’s THEIR compensation?
I’ve just finished watching (well, mostly listening to) this lovely conversation at the Free Speech Union Arts Forum, between Dr Kathleen Stock and choreographer Rosie Kay. Two very clever women with a sense of humour. Not a bad way to spend forty minutes!
It is, but there’s a man dressed and made-up as a woman smack in the center of the picture.
I’m seeing a lot of LGB people saying they’re sick of the whole Pride thing. Of course, my friends may not be representative, but they’re tired of the ballyhoo. Especially since, nowadays, it so relentlessly centers the T, the Q, and the kinksters.
I went back and looked at the photo, and I hadn’t seen him before. Absent the teecue phenomenon, I wouldn’t have given him a second thought. The toxicity that has been introduced by their insistence on being in the forced community is probably whar generates the backlash on this photo.
Given where you live, I think your friends are pretty much in tune with the negative Pride vibe.
I’m seeing a lot of LGB people saying they’re sick of the whole Pride thing. Of course, my friends may not be representative, but they’re tired of the ballyhoo. Especially since, nowadays, it so relentlessly centers the T, the Q, and the kinksters.
But they’re not allowed to leave! If they do they’re betraying the whole LBGTQ Communiteeeeee! On whose coat-tails will the T, Q and kinksters ride if the LGB abandon them?! Whose discrimination will they leach off of and browbeat us with if they can’t parasitize the Gay Rights movement? People are being turned off by the Holocaust and Trans Genocide tropes, so who else’s struggle is there to appropriate, infiltrate, and hijack? Left-handed people? Red-heads? Give them a break, will you! It’s almost like you expect them to grow spines, stand up and shift for themselves, you TRANSPHOBIC, GENOCIDAL BIGOT!!!
I’m in New York for a conference. The best thing about traveling to New York is that it’s an easy train ride–just 3.5 hours from downtown to downtown. The air outside the hotel window is visible–earlier today it was an eerie yellow-orange; it was like looking at the world through ski goggles. Apparently it hasn’t been this bad since the ’70s. People are putting on their covid masks when they go outside. And from what I understand, it isn’t much better back home in northern Virginia.
But hey, what’s a little forest fire compared to the thrill of an SUV?
I saw a photo of the NYC air via a friend on Facebook. Orange. I’m all too familiar with it: Seattle had the same problem in summer 2020 and last summer.
Seems much of the GLAAD /Stonewall jargon was conjured up by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in 1994. This included the use of the term “transgender” to refer to *any* form of gender non-conforming behaviour, and the first appearance of the “trans umbrella”. It also called for “transgendered persons” to be given access to battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers.
From Charles M. Blow in the NY Times today (no link, but it’s in the Opinion section) on the considerable amount of Republican legislation dealing with transgender issues:
And one of the saddest aspects of this episode has been seeing a small but vocal group of people who claim to be liberal — and who one would think would be allies — aid and abet the arguments of transphobes.
Some are feminists who have essentially argued that full inclusion of trans women is anti-feminist — that it’s harmful to or an assault on the rights of cisgender women.
And there have been some in the queer community who have remained shockingly silent when it comes to trans rights, treating the issue as zero sum. Rather than express solidarity with the trans community, they see the fight for trans rights as an opening for homophobes to erase the hard-earned gains of gay men, lesbians and bisexuals. This is not a hill they chose to die on.
But if you are queer and silent on this issue, you are betraying your own cause. Silence won’t shield you. It will only embolden your adversaries and expose your cowardice.
Maybe if the TQ+ were willing to listen to the concerns of women about males in single-sex spaces, about male athletes competing with females, and about the medicalization of children who aren’t seen as being gender conforming, there might not be so much Republican backlash happening now. Because sex is real and that reality matters. Trying to shame us into silence or trying to force us to side with you or else be called fascists for daring to say the obvious – that males aren’t females – isn’t helping anyone and just plays into the GOPs hands.
Excellent twitter thread by Mr Menno, responding to some nonsense from Montgomerie:
1 / The difference between actual civil rights movements and the ‘trans’ movement is that none of them fought for rights on the basis of something they were not, or passing themselves of as another demographic of people. Black people didn’t say “Hey, we’re white!” Women didn’t 2 / say “Hey, we’re men!” and gay people didn’t say “Hey’ we’re straight!” They fought for rights on the basis of what set them apart.
But ‘trans’ is about claiming the identities and rights of others. Men claiming to be women. Women claiming to be men. Straight men claiming to 3 / be lesbians. It is the only movement that wants the right to identify into demographics of people that already exist within their own right.
It’s a form of colonisation. Not only that, under the guise of ‘trans’ the meaning of words and material reality all have to be 4 / turned upside down to ‘accommodate’ this colonisation. Actual women are now ‘cis’ women so that men who call themselves ‘trans women’ can be seen to be every inch a women as them, even if they have an extra couple of inches dangling between their legs. Actual lesbians become 5 / ‘cis’ lesbians and are told they can’t have female only events anymore as they’re be breaching anti-discrimination laws that prioritise the demands of blokes who call themselves lesbians.
This is co-opting, appropriation, colonisation and the rewriting of reality. …
Thought this would be of interest: an article in the Wall Street Journal called “The Truth About ‘Puberty Blockers” by Gerald Posner.
I liked this bit:
Gender advocates also falsely contend that puberty blockers for children and teens have been “used safely since the late 1980s,” as a recent Scientific American article put it. That ignores substantial evidence of harmful long-term side effects.
Kevin Drum has been exploring data, investigating whether young people are becoming more conservative; there seems to be some evidence to support that; weak, perhaps, tentative, but intriguing. A recent installment, though, was interesting. A survey found that the percentage of Gen Z people who would agree with the statement “there are only two genders” increased substantially over the last two years.
There are all kinds of problems with this question, the framing of it, and especially the idea that saying “there are only two genders” is an indication of conservatism. I am pleased to see that Gen Z people are increasingly prepared to buck the genderist orthodoxy, and also pleased to see a robust discussion going on in the comments section on the blog post. Predictably, some people claim that statements supporting “there are only two genders” are the work of trolls and bigots, but there are a lot of people expressing views ranging from mild to wholehearted agreement.
This time Lavery is complaining that she wrote an article “The Gender Critical Movement Is Undermining Academic Freedom”, for “Think Pieces”, a journal linked to University College London. The article was not published by UCL for “legal reasons”. Now Lavery is on her high horse complaining about a powerful GC lobby silencing people, and Lavery’s claims are being spread across social media by her political allies:
I should point out that Kenan Malik isn’t one of Lavery’s allies: I picked his tweet because it was a relatively impartial discussion of the Lavery issue.
Somebody online is criticising Lavery’s claim here:
If the uni thinks there’s strong grounds for a libel case about the things you have said, then you clearly haven’t done your research. Academia is not about lashing out and making things up, save that for a petty blog post. Articles are critical thinking and clear evidence.
Matt Osborne at The Distance has a really good article about Ellen “Elliot” Page. She was treated horribly by her religious homophobic parents. More relevant at the moment because the Jordan Peterson interview with Helen Joyce was recently thrown off of YouTube due to “misgendering” of Ms Page.
Some good news: The TIM trans activist who murdered a lesbian couple and their adopted son has (finally) been sentenced, and will spend the rest of his life in prison.
The bad news: This happened in California, so there’s a good chance he’ll spend it in a women’s prison.
The ACLU has a sad because Duane Owen, who was executed yesterday, was not afforded the “dignity” of “gender affirming care” while in prison.
They tweeted:
The state of Florida never provided medically necessary gender-affirming care to Duane Owen — causing her enormous suffering and violating her right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment for the more than 30 years she was in state custody.
Who was Duane Owen? Per CNN:
Slattery was repeatedly stabbed and raped in a home in Delray Beach while the two children she was babysitting were sleeping.
And two months later, Owen killed Worden of Boca Raton with a hammer, while her two small children slept nearby, according to WPBF.
Slattery was 14 years old. CNN doesn’t mention that he raped her corpse.
(In a ladylike manner befitting his gender identity, no doubt.)
It’s interesting that CNN refers to Owen using sex-appropriate pronouns, and does not mention his precious “gender identity.” It would be nice to think they’re rebelling against the nonsense, but maybe they just want to hide the fact that this monster was a translady. We all know how those evil terfs keep harping on these ever so rare cases in order to demonize etc. etc. Wouldn’t want to encourage the morally panicked women who don’t want trans women in women’s spaces, or those who insist that sex predators not infrequently claim transwomanhood in prison, or those who refuse altogether to believe in the gender fairy and the specialness of women like Duane.
How lovely. An ad from the Crane Center (for Transgender Surgery). The image says “Time to meet the real you!” and offers “6 world-class surgeons; leaders in the affirmation surgical field; in-person or tele-med appointments”. The text at the bottom is for a non-existent domain, but the ad does click through to the web site referenced above. The caption above the image says: “Whether you have begun your transition, or are figuring out where to start, reach out to the Crane Center today and begin the journey that will introduce you to your most authentic self!”
I know this is a surgical center, but it is appalling to me that they seem to offer no counseling for deciding whether this is the right thing to do. It’s either do what you’ve decided, or get help figuring where to start; there’s no “whether to start” option. And of course all that nonsense about “the real you”.
The Brenda system categorized obscene callers based on their motivations and included horny adolescent boys, men who were frightened of women, men who were angry at their mothers, actual psychopaths, and “fetishists and transvestites”.
Now, isn’t that interesting? Not the fact that there is a low-level sociopathic sexual drive shared by so many men that the Samaritans had to develop two separate systems to deal with all of them, but that this same population of males now hold such power that we are ALL of us forced to listen to their insulting, masturbatory shit.
The same ethos of compassionate care for horny dudes, has transformed society.
India Willoughby – CLIP: a woman wearing a hat and sunglasses is taking a selfie with her cell phone and wearing a baseball cap, Elaine Duillo, woman, a picture, american romanticism
India Willoughby – DeepBooru: 1girl, earrings, hat, hoop_earrings, jewelry, sleeveless, solo, sunglasses, tank_top, upper_body
Kathleen Stock – CLIP: a woman with grey hair and a black jacket sitting in front of a plant and a bench in a garden, Brigid Derham, professional photo, a character portrait, de stijl
Images used were the recent India Willoughby Twitter post and a pretty standard Telegraph picture of Kathleen Stock. That said, the Booru tags are *very* superficial and anime-influenced.
There have been a number of good pieces written about how the inception of LGBTQ+ and related issues have made support wither for the gains achieved by gay and lesbian activists in the recent past. 4W had a good piece about regression in the Republican Party, and there have been several articles about how the Pride movement has been taken over by trans activism and paraphilia. The forced teaming, the scope creep, the speed of the takeover, all of this can probably account for people rethinking prior support for what they are insistently told are related issues. It’s not necessarily the case that people are becoming more conservative, certainly not in a general sense. How unfortunate that people have trouble seeing this.
BKiSA: Both CLIP and DeepBooru are kind of aggressive in their prioritization of certain features for sex. You can see this in action with Stable Diffusion. Female subjects often get turned male, but the reverse frequency is nowhere near equivalent, at least in my experience. Using image-to-image diffusion on family photos leads to half my female relatives actually misgendered and suddenly growing Viking beards. I should add that none of them is particularly mannish in reality.
I received a text for a poll from 20-20 polling yesterday. After a few pages of gauging my leanings by asking how I rank the leading candidates for President the questions turned towards where I stand on Transgender issues, and it soon revealed itself as a push poll to generate favorable results for trans. It even included a video pushing the lie that Affirmation is the treatment for gender dysphoria, citing the AMA, the APA, and enocrinologists. As soon as I realized it is a push poll, I exited and texted the sender to ask who had hired them.
20/20 Insight is an organization founded by two former Democratic Operatives from Georgia. We have two awful parties in the US now. The Republicans are awful because they can’t help it. The Democrats because they are beholden to the trans industry.
Hi all, it’s been a while, and this will be a flying visit because I have very little time to spend doing internet things these days. I drop by to catch up on posts here and elsewhere, but commenting time is at a premium.
Anyways, to the point.
Just seen a post by PZ from yesterday castigating anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy – no problem with that, of course, loonies need a good castigation. However, PZ provides quotes about Mark Geier, a doctor who’s work Kennedy draws on. Said quotes include the bad things that Geier has done, including this absolute gem:
Geier pushed the vaccine-autism link as a frequent expert witness. He also misrepresented his credentials and developed “a ‘protocol’ for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically castrate sex offenders…
(bolding mine).
What a monster! Using castration drugs in autistic kids! But it sounds oddly familiar, that treatment of autistic kids. I had a quick look through the comments there but it seems that nobody else has picked up on the bad thing that, actually, they are all in favour of. Nobody is ripping PZ a new one for including that criticism of what they insist elsewhere is a life-saving treatment that must be made available on demand to avoid genocide.
Odd, that.
Right, back to real life. I’ll be back again, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Odd indeed. Like being against FGM, circumcision, foot binding, ear-piercing of newborns, bodices, etc., yet supporting breast binding and “top surgery” for minors.
The essential difference is the sanctity of trans ideology. Or, to really badly paraphrase Orwell, sterilise and mutilate for our reason good, sterilise and mutilate for your reason bad.
It does suggest some level of cognitive dissonance and compartmentalisation doesn’t it? PZ knows in some rational scientific compartment that injecting autistic kids (any kids!) with those drugs is wrong. But when he steps into the adjacent woo filled ideological compartment doing exactly the same thing is righteous, necessary, and life saving. I think my head would explode if I tried doing that.
It reminds me of one of my classmates back when I was doing post-grad. She was much brighter than me, than pretty much the rest of the class actually. She was also in one of those ‘bible believing’ fundamentalist sects that were just starting to pop up under the influence of American preachers making visits to NZ at the time.
She firmly believed the earth was ~4000 years old. After talking about it with her for a while I pointed out that recently we had done a unit on radioactive decay and how one application was dating rocks. How did she reconcile the two? Her face literally dropped. We certainly never had another meaningful interaction. Her life was so deeply compartmentalised that she was holding incompatible concepts in her mind simultaneously without hesitation. I don’t think PZ is that compartmentalised, but he’s pretty close.
I sure miss the regular gay pride rainbow flag. Every time I see the so-called “Progress Pride” flag flying, I feel like I’m walking under the colours of an occupying force. It’s angering and depressing.
Yeah, me too YNnB. It’s quite common for some schools in NZ to have a Pride event. With so much of Pride in recent years focussing on trans issues, there has definitely been a level of pushback on these events, unfortunately leading to gay and lesbian kids being abused. Not cool at all. Frankly, abusing trans kids isn’t cool either. If only the adults in the room made the focus the gay/lesbian pride issue I suspect the unpleasantness would drop away, but no, they just have to make it all about trans.
Legal steps could be on the cards in the case of the teacher who bullied some girls who refused to say that they believe that a classmate could be a cat.
Specifically, Lupron, a ‘GNrH analogue’ i.e. something that imitates GNrH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone). And what do genderist clinics use to stop puberty? A GNrH analogue, usually a form of Lupron.
Speaking of PZ, he also posted about that ‘cat identity’ incident. His position is essentially ‘nothing to see here, move along’:
Anyway, in this case [Jerry Coyne] credulously goes on to tell the story of kids in England thinking they are cats and other animals.
…
Except…that’s not what happened at all. It’s all hyper-inflated hyperbole from the UK news media. The school has said it didn’t happen.
In a statement to Schools Week, the trust said it wanted to “clarify that no children at Rye College identifies as a cat or any other animal”.
He quotes the bulk of an article looking into the incident, which concludes:
What, by our source’s account, happened is that there was an ongoing conversation happening between several pupils about identity before B and C engaged with them and – according to our source – as the discussion became increasingly personal and ill-tempered, either B or C then said, apropos of gender: ‘if you identify as a cat or a carrot you are insane’.
In other words, nobody was talking about ‘cats’ until the subject of them was introduced into the conversation by one of the two pupils who later made the recording.
But that reporter and PZ both miss – or avoid – the part of the story that caused the furore: the teacher hectoring the students to believe all identity claims. The indoctrination.
I don’t see how this omission could be anything but deliberate.
Australia’s national broadcaster ABC has a show called Media Watch, and the brief of that show is to examine Australian media for bias. And just now it found a big one: yet another female reporter drummed out of her job due to gender feelz.
The verdict of the host seems pretty reasonable to me – media outlets have been intimidated out of doing their duty. Tellingly, it is the female reporters that feel the burn most.
Manic Pixie Nightmare Boy: Once famous, but now Washed-up Film Critic Nathan Rabin has tried to boost his declining fortunes by becoming a fanatical supporter of identity politics. This week, he tried to win credit among the terminally online by attacking J. K. Rowling:
So it [sic] not at all surprising that JK Rowling aggressively cosigned Musk’s decision, tweeting insufferably, “’Cis’ is ideological language, signifying belief in the unfalsifiable concept of gender identity. You have a perfect right to believe in unprovable essences that may or may not match the sexed body, but the rest of us have a right to disagree, and to refuse to adopt your jargon.”
Being a writer of note, Rowling made sure to make her hate as verbose as possible.
The sad thing, is Rabin used to be funny and smart once (check out his book “My Year of Flops”).
But Trump’s election seemed to make him snap, and Rabin’s now obsessed with going after “Bad people” like J. K. Rowling. Rowling has the Wrong View on the Trans Issue, and hence is a Complete Monster Like Trump in Rabin’s eyes.
The number of Victoria Police employees self-identifying as “gender neutral” has more than quadrupled since last year, new figures show, as the force confirms it is investigating reports some of its officers are gaming the HR system in order to gain an extra $1300 a year.
No one would ever self identify as something they’re not, simply to gain advantage. Amirite?
Popular Twitter account Voice For Victoria on Tuesday followed up, writing, “Have had this confirmed. It started with a few people and has now blown out to about 20-30. They will all now get an extra $1300 a year in pay, tax free, as a result. Management is apparently very unhappy and unsure what to do. Good luck to them questioning how staff identify.”
Voice For Victoria added, “I’m told this is intended to be a ‘f**k you’ to the organisation only and not the LGBTQI+ community. This is what happens when staff are left under-resourced, overworked and under-appreciated for too long. Would expect the union also has no idea how to handle this situation.”
I am sure the Union has no idea how to handle this as they seem to have gone all in on the “believe who people say they are”.
One Victoria Police source told the Herald Sun it would be a travesty if anyone was lying about their gender status for extra money and questioned whether it could be a criminal offence.
“It goes to their integrity,” the source told the newspaper. “For VicPol, this would be terrible and its taxpayers’ money, this is offensive to genuine non-binary employees.”
Intergrity? Well, yes. if Police openly lie about this, what else do they lie about? Many of us often suspect that the Police look for a suspect first and then “find” the evidence to match that suspect, often leaving the real perpetrators at large.
“It doesn’t get any crazier than this! A paper argues that “gendered” pregnancy care is too focused on helping women have healthy babies; some transmen don’t want to stop testosterone, even if it puts their babies at risk of DSDs! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667321523000811 “
If I’m understanding this correctly, Montana has gone off the rails, and is accepting that the sex on birth certificates can be changed. The fight shouldn’t be “it’s unconstitutional to force you to have surgery to change the sex on your birth certificate. Therefore, you can change it without surgery.” The fight should be, “it’s impossible to change sex, surgery or not. No one can force you to mutilate yourself; you can have fantasies with or without surgery. But birth certificates reflect facts, not fantasies. Sex is a fact; it can’t be changed. In exceedingly rare cases, there might be a factual mistake that needs correction on the birth certificate, but sex is not the same thing as gender. No one has a right to lie on vital government records.”
Has Twitter decided to block non-members? Before today, I’ve been able to click on and see the Twitter threads that Ophelia posts here, but now they’re forcing me to sign in, or sign up. I’d really rather not become a Twit; I have enough rabbit holes in my life.
Yes it apparently has – probably Musk as opposed to Twitter. I used to be able to see accounts that had blocked me by not being signed in, and as of today I can’t. Very annoying.
Ugh. Honestly the most annoying thing is that I’ve been following an account that’s been “live Tweeting” WWII. It’s up to 1945. Now I’ll never know how it ends.
A kludgy workaround for now for those wanting to try and see some posts on Twitter is to open Google and type “@theirTwittername” in the search line. You might or might not get a few recent tweets from said name that way.
It appears that Twitter is going the way of other social media like Facebook and going more private. I’m not planning on joining Twitter yet, but will see how this change is received first.
Question for anyone that might know t he answer. Can anyone recommend a good speech to text program, and a good microscope? Until I can write again, my nerves are on edge, not having my normal outlet for stress. Even a comment like this takes an abnormally long time.
Also, for the record, my husband and I just bought a house in Maine. We plan to move in late August.
Can’t help with the microscope or speech to text, but congrats on choosing Maine. Can I ask where in Maine (if you’re comfortable sharing that level of detail)?
Peter N, I had a speech to text program once, and it kept telling me I needed a different microphone. Right now I have a snowball, and it works well for recording my lectures and for doing zoom on my desktop, which doesn’t have a built in microphone.
Hmm. It sounds like one of those all-purpose error messages (like Twitter today — “Something went wrong, try reloading” — which is not the actual problem). Two things come to mind…
There may have been a setting in the speech-to-text software that selected among available sound sources, and you need to instruct it to use your nice Blue Snowball mic?
Or maybe the mic was too far away or was picking up too much background noise. As a test, you could try holding the mic right up to your face. A headset mic (even a cheap one) would work for your application.
In case you need a break from all the bad and infuriating news. Here’s a beautifully-written story about the friendship of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.
Site question: Are we ever going to see a return of the edit button? I don’t know about anyone else, but I get really uncomfortable when I notice I’ve misspelled something, especially when I misspell my correction to my previously misspelled misspelling.
Yeah, a few years ago before the big blowup that also broke the formatting between when you’re signed in and signed out, and broke the site menu so that it always says, “No categories,” and broke something so that there’s always a message below the Submit button saying, “There has been a critical error on this website.” Latsot offered to help troubleshoot here.
Iknlast, congrats on finding somewhere to move too. Looks pretty, but the climatic extremes are something hard for a temperate island dweller to comprehend, even though I live in the mountains. The lows especially, the highs we do get here.
In the news recently are efforts by the Italian government to invalidate certain birth certificates. The birth certificates in question are ones in which one (or both?) of the listed parents is not in fact the biological parent of the infant.
There is good reason to say that these efforts are, in a large part, designed to make it more cumbersome for same-sex couples to raise kids. Certainly some of the rhetoric used by Meroni and others points in that direction. But I note, too, that the Italian government is seeking to make it illegal for any Italian couple to obtain an infant via overseas surrogacy (surrogacy within Italy is already illegal).
I think it’s important that birth certificates provide accurate medical information, rather than being used as some kind of social statement. Seal the certificate if you must, but don’t lie. The article notes that the non-biological partner needs to go through some lengthy “special adoption process”; if that’s the case, fix that process rather than lie on the birth certificates.
The quotes in the article from opponents are mostly about parental rights. Do people simply not adopt children in Italy? If only the parents listed on the birth certificate can enroll the children in kindergarten, what do adoptive parents do?
It would seem to me that an obvious solution would be a streamlined or automatic adoption process when an infant is born with one parent being the member of a married same-sex couple. This obvious remedy seems to be ignored in favor of lying on a medical record.
Why aren’t activists encouraging same-sex couples to adopt? Why is it so all-fired important that the child not only be biologically related to one of the couple, but that they pretend it’s related to both?
We are delighted to be able to bring you the news we’ve all been waiting for.
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It’s been a long, and sometimes bruising, fight but we couldn’t have done it without your incredible support and generosity. Thank you, thank you, thank you x
P.S. We’ll be sharing updates on our website and social media accounts throughout the day.”
There is a new imperative for trans health care: Change the scent of our hands from male to female:
I would have changed the headline of this article to read “Men and women have different smells.” The way it reads now, we have different ways to smell from each other. This is in the Telegraph, and I only have a cheap subscription that doesn’t include gift articles, but here is a story on how forensics may be aided in the scents criminals leave behind. There is a difference in scent between men and woman that can be discerned by investigators. Men and Women Smell Different
15 key chemicals
“We identified 15 key chemicals, and seven were the most important in differentiating females from males,” study author Dr Kenneth Furton told The Telegraph.
“To date we still cannot say what men and women in general smell like but we can say that they smell different chemically and we are now closer to discovering which chemicals are responsible for that difference.”
No word yet on whether the investigators were confusing sex wtih gender identity.
The gist of the story, to my reading, is this: a lecturer (Dr Journey) planned a course. The mere existence of that course bothered a student. The student complained publicly, and included the lecturer’s photo and email address along with the course description. “People have a right to know who’s teaching these classes”, he said in a video. The lecturer received threats and other abuse online. The question that seems to be foremost on people’s minds is whether the student “crossed the line”, or whether what the student said should be protected on free speech grounds. Background to all this is the lauded declaration of free speech principles from this very university. The lecturer lodged a complaint that the student incited cyberbullying, and the complaint was dismissed.
The course in this case was titled “The Problem of Whiteness”. I have to wonder what the response might have been if the course were in favor of or opposed to gender ideology.
Dr. Journey filed another complaint to the university in April, this time also signed by Shannon Lee Dawdy, then the chairwoman of the anthropology department.
“On a campus famously dedicated to academic freedom,” they wrote, “students cannot be allowed to launch public hate campaigns with the intent of intimidating faculty and shutting down the teaching of material that they do not like.”
That complaint, too, was dismissed.
It’s a thorny question, trying to figure out what the university itself should do. I do think that the student “crossed a line”, invoking a mob response directly to the lecturer. I think it’s clear that the student had no interest in having a civil discussion about the course and its contents, nor in actually taking the course or talking to people who had done so in order to find out more about it. But a big piece of the problem is how incredibly easy it is to call forth a mob, and how little control entities such as universities have at stemming the abuse from such mobs.
So, Michigan’s house of representatives passed a bill to amend the hate crimes laws to include misgendering or not using the preferred pronouns. If this passes the Senate and is signed by the governor, it could be a felony if any of the 4 conditions are present:
4) If any of the following conditions apply, a person who
6 violates subsection (1) is guilty of a felony punishable by
7 imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more
8 than $10,000.00, or both:
9 (a) The violation results in bodily injury.
10 (b) The person has 1 or more prior convictions for violating
11 subsection (1).
12 (c) A victim of the violation of subsection (1) is less than
13 18 years of age and the offender is at least 19 years of age.
14 (d) The person commits the violation of subsection (1) in
15 concert with 1 or more other individuals.
16 (e) The person is in possession of a firearm during the
17 commission of the violation of subsection (1).
The format is wonky because I am copying it from a pdf of the bill.
The bill made it through the House on June 20, I don’t know if a companion bill has been taken up in the Senate yet. This is creeping authoritarianism, inspired by the righteous. Righteous people are the most dangerous of all, because they believe themselves to be justified at whatever they do, because they serve the Greater Good.
Here is Newsweek’s July 3 article. Doesn’t tell us much about the status in the state legal process.
Recently Katie Ledecky and Megan Rapinoe have been in the news and so in Facebook, Ledecky for qualifying for the world championships in swimming once again, Rapinoe for announcing her retirement from the US Women’s soccer team. Both are remarkable athletes. Ledecky is tall, with a well-developed swimmer’s body. Rapinoe of course is outspoken politically (including, alas, on trans issues) and a lesbian. And both are being referred to as “he” in the comments section.
Of course that’s nothing new. Women who don’t fit the feminine stereotype in one way or another have long been called “he”, while men who are perceived as somehow not masculine enough have long been referred to as “she”. As long as that was just your bog-standard misogyny, not too many people complained about it, those who did were dismissed as over-sensitive whiners (or worse, feminists), and certainly no one tried to pass laws outlawing “misgendering”. But suddenly now that men who don’t want to be men are being called “he” and women who don’t want to be women are being called “she”, “misgendering” has become one of the worst hate crimes imaginable.
Probably not when you do it to a cis-scum person, though.
Not only is Florida sizzling in record-crushing heat, but the ocean waters that surround it are scorching, as well. The unprecedented ocean warmth around the state — connected to historically warm oceans worldwide — is further intensifying its heat wave and stressing coral reefs, with conditions that could end up strengthening hurricanes.
Just how hot?
That heat dome has made coastal waters extremely warm, including “downright shocking” temperatures of 92 to 96 degrees in the Florida Keys, meteorologist and journalist Ben Henson said Sunday in a tweet.
Going there gets you to the default of current wind conditions.
Clicking on the “earth” label in the lower left get you to options for looking at different times, or different conditions.
Eg: Click on ‘Ocean’ then ‘SST’ to see the water temperature of the ocean. I hadn’t seen temperatures in the 30s C except in the Red Sea & Persian Gulf when I have checked previous years.
I’ve seen a variety of news reports claiming the salon rejects all members of the “LGBTQ community”, but this one at least provides quotes and details.
In a Facebook post, the owner of the salon wrote (and I’m transcribing here from a photo, I hope I got it accurately):
If a human identifies as anything other than man/woman please seek services at a local pet groomer.
You are not welcome at this salon. Period.
Should you request to have a particular pronoun used please note we may refer to you as “hey you”. Regardless of Mi HB 4744. ([Kiss my ass] Governor Witchmere)
This is America, free speech. This small business has the right to refuse services. We are not bound to any oaths as realtors are regarding discrimination. My recent airport experience validates this.
The news station contacted the owner Christine Geiger, “who says she has no problems with the LGB part, it’s the TQ+ that she doesn’t support. Geiger said she is taking a stand against being forced to use preferred pronouns”.
How I read this is that she and her staff reserve the right to refuse to use “preferred pronouns”, and if a customer has a problem with that, go elsewhere. I would not expect her to have a completely logically consistent policy statement in her Facebook post, but combining it and the follow-up, this is how it looks to me.
I think this is another example of the consequences of this forced teaming. This has nothing to do with gay or bisexual people, a fair amount to do with people rejecting sex, and a heck of a lot with other people being forced to pretend to go along with trans claims.
I suspect a man-who-claims-to-be-a-woman might get a perfectly nice, feminine haircut at this place as long as he is willing to tolerate being called “sir” (or “hey you”) for a little while.
HB 4744 refers to new hate crime legislation that Mike Haubrich discusses intelligently at the link.
Remember those disgusting women who attended “Let Women Speak” rallies in Australia, and in particular, in Melbourne?
Remember how those vile, disgusting women cozied up to NAZIs?
Remember how the Premier of Victoria loudly and proudly defended those defenceless TIMs? And how the Victorian Liberal Partry expelled one of their own for the heinous crime of saying men aren’t women?
The Ox is slow, but the Earth is patient.
Seems the wheels are falling off.
Victoria Police has launched a formal investigation into social media posts by an officer “boasting” about his son’s attendance at a neo-Nazi rally at Parliament House.
Police also came under fire for failing to stop the neo-Nazi protesters from marching and saluting on Spring St when they gatecrashed a Let Women Speak rally in March.
Leading criminal barrister Remy van de Wiel, KC, subsequently wrote to chief commissioner Shane Patton on behalf of a client, putting him on notice of legal action over the vile ‘heil Hitler’ salutes.
He claimed police’s failure to halt the hate act amounted to a breach of a legal agreement signed off by former police chief Christine Nixon in 2008.
Thanks, Sackbut! I was visting this thread to shamelessly self-promote my post, and you saved me from the narcisisstic urge. I hope that if that bill becomes law, this business owner is the successful test case.
The SPLC is being sued for defamation for calling an organization an “anti-immigrant hate group”. It will be interesting to see how this case goes. I’m glad a suit of this nature was filed, because the SPLC designations have become “evidence” rather than opinion. I keep checking their lists to see if some organization I support, perhaps a feminist or LGB organization, gets designated as “anti-trans” (or “anti-LGBTQ” in their parlance).
SPLC notes on their “Hatewatch” page that they track only a certain set of “hate” types and is not exhaustive. They list “male supremacy” as one of the categories, and they have one group in that category.
“I am not honored. I am not proud of myself at all. I believe other transgender athletes would feel the same way. They may not want to admit it, but they’re being selfish. There is no honor as an athlete in that,” Na said.
“I have no unresolved feelings over winning because that’s no longer what I want. My goal was to stir controversy and get my story heard by competing.”
I’m sure the response to the cyclist entering the race will be that “no true trans would ever do such a thing”, which ignores the fact that males do have an athletic advantage over females in general and the transwomen are in fact male.
Damn, I just came here to link to that story about the S. Korean TW cyclist. J.A, the proper response to anyone claiming “no true trans” is to point at the person and shout, “Gatekeeping! You’re trans if you say you’re trans!” After all, that’s a key part of the ideology.
I’d take it as well-known people lending their names and voices in support of people who need protection and are not as well paid. There are 160,000 members of the union. Only a small percentage of SAG members earn even a livable income from screen acting. Plus, being well-paid doesn’t mean it’s OK for an employer to take unreasonable advantage.
I’m with Sackbut on this one. Sure, a small handful are grossly overpaid, but the vast, vast majority of SAG members are making barely-surviving wages, especially when you factor in things like the fact that most of them are only working part-time, and have to have a second job just to keep money coming in.
The strike goes beyond money, too, the actors want to make sure that the studios, with CGI and AI technologies, don’t use their likenesses without compensation or residuals. And yes, it’s not only the wealthy stars who are striking, it’s the struggling actors who have seen better days and the ones who are seeking better days. Nobody should work for pittances when the studios are benefitting from the explosion of video entertainment through streaming. Solidarity with the writers, too.
The AI problem is akin to identity theft, so that definitely needs to be addressed, but yeah, everyone wants to be paid more. How about the baseball strike in ’94? Again, part time work with huge incomes. I haven’t watched a game since. Now the lowest MLB salary is 700k/year. It’s absurd.
Work is necessarily “part time” when the income you get from the job is not sufficient for survival and you need to take a second job. I’m not buying the distinction here. I know people in the music field who have managed to get to the point where all their income comes from music, yet they have no “full time” jobs at all. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want not to be exploited.
“Everyone wants to be paid more.” Sure. Everyone also wants not to be exploited. I don’t have a problem with people complaining about mistreatment, even if they get better-than-average income. In the case of actors, they don’t, generally. Baseball at the major league level, or even at the minor league level, is a full time job; the team has almost total control of your time for the duration of the season. Minor league players make around $65K (varies widely by division). The 1994 baseball strike was not over inadequate pay, but about fairness, about owners taking financial advantage of players via salary caps and restricted free agency.
I get it, you don’t like the idea of people who make a large amount of money complaining about their lot in life, or about the lot in life of other people in the same field who don’t make much money. I don’t agree.
I think we disagree on whether they’re being mistreated or exploited or not. There are plenty of thankless jobs where I would be all for organizing and striking for better conditions and better compensation, I just don’t think acting or baseball are those.
I know the screenwriters are hopelessly exploited, and usually not overpaid. They get money for their script, a small portion compared to what it’s worth to the studio, then it gets torn apart and rewritten by Hollywood committees and the writer has no control. It is possible there may be literally no word, no plot, left in the script but it will have the writer’s name on it…and that puts reputation at stake, as well. And in this case a lawyer won’t help because the contract requires they have no choice.
Sure, life choices. But that’s true of all of us. I know, people with fewer opportunities may have little chance but to work for McDonalds or WalMart. For screenwriters, the choice may be between accepting a bad deal or not selling their script to anyone, and this is as much about their income as it is with the above mentioned McDonalds or WalMart workers.
And teachers? They are told they don’t deserve more money because they made a life choice to be a teacher. That’s not a good argument. They are doing a job, and they deserve to be paid what the job is worth. Teachers are horribly underpaid related to others with similar education and experience; baseball players and some actors are highly overpaid, if you put it in the value to society. It isn’t, though. These jobs pay well because of the amount of money people are willing to pay to go see the game or the movie. They generate tons of income for someone. And that someone now wants to make tons more without paying more. It’s the same principle driving McDonalds and WalMart, and increasingly, education (even public education where people want to pay lower taxes while keeping educational standards high…and making sure their kid passes with a high GPA).
Teachers deserve to be paid what the job is worth, I agree. I wouldn’t use a life choices argument about such a vital profession. It’s not simply about what the market will bear.
twiliter, you might not, but everyone else does. I’ve never heard anyone point out that CEO is also a life choice, and they make huge amounts of money, with golden parachutes if they fall. Sure it’s a life choice. So is teaching. But teachers are paid poorly while CEOs are paid handsomely, often with much less education.
As for actors and writers? Sure, pay what the market will bear. But I think art shouldn’t be based in the market anyway…nor medicine, nor education. These are vital resources, and those who provide them should be compensated a fair price, but people who use them should not be scalped. How to do that? There’s only one way – government funding. And therein lies a different tail to wag a different dog. Censorship is present in art and in education, and apparently also in medicine. Most people feel better about business censorship than government censorship, since most people believe the market won’t censor if profits start to fall. Yeah, probably not. But that doesn’t happen. Why? I don’t know. People gripe and complain about it, but like the weather, no one does anything.
There’s a short but scathing opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about the rush to “affirm” gender confusion in children with permanent medical interventions. It focuses on an earlier WSJ opinion piece by the Endocrine Society for its endorsement of same using cherry-picked data points. It’s paywalled but Jerry Coyne has helpfully reproduced the entire thing.
When I tell people that I moved from Arizona to Minnesota willingly, they question my sanity. But, when this sort of stuff happens, I think I made the right choice. and with two dry summers, we now have a dry heat. (It’s actually been cool enough this week I haven’t need to turn on the air conditioning.)
It’s not frying an egg, it’s frying people’s feet on the sidewalk.
Mike H, when people hear I’m moving from Nebraska, their first assumption is that I’m moving south. When I tell them I’m not, they have trouble believing it. “But it’s cold in Maine!” Yeah, and I like it cold.. I get sick when the heat gets up to 80 (used to be better; I grew up in central Oklahoma without air conditioning, I did my masters and doctoral research outside in Oklahoma and Texas summers. I would not be able to anymore).
When one of the people at my retirement party heard we were moving, they said “What’s the matter with Hastings?” I didn’t hear her, my husband did, or I might have said “I’ll make you a list”. Politics and religion figure high on that list; the inability to support a decent restaurant or department store would also. I refuse to shop at WalMart, and it’s now the only department store in town.
I’ve never been to Maine, but I’ve known more than a few people who live there. I think it has the climate of Minnesota with the bonus of being near the ocean. I have lived in places like Hastings, and I find it to be a bit depressing.
I hope the move works out great for you and your husband.
I’ve just barely been to Maine…a hundred years ago, going with a school friend and her family to Campobello Island for 2 weeks for 2 summers in a row. It’s a pretty damn nice part of the world.
I lived there when I was little; we left when I was ten. My father took us from Maine to Oklahoma in the middle of August. Culture shock and climate shock all in one! I don’t think I’ve ever recovered.
I’ve been to Maine many times; my favorite coastline. I see that Maine has become the first state to enact the Equality Model (aka the Nordic Model) into law, so good going, Maine! Best wishes for your retirement.
In other news:
I came across this article today, by an Australian writer, from 2021, and it is excellent (and long). The author, Annie Kia, discusses the difficulty of queer ideology to deal with complexity.
Darn, I spoke about two things in a comment, and included three links in total, and I forgot, that goes to moderation. I should have made it two comments. Live and, uh, forget and make the same mistake again.
FYI, for those of us who used to lurk on Twitter without an account, there is again an alternative, Nitter.net. Just go there and enter the Twitter handle of the Tweeter you want to follow and Nitter will show their tweets and replies to tweets as well.
Once upon a time, a proportion of Privileged Penised People took it for granted that everything – the entire pie – belonged to them. Sometimes, of course, they would argue amongst themselves whether one of them was taking more than his fair share (making other people fight on their behalf, of course), but they were in broad agreement that none of it belonged to the ungrateful women and minority groups who were whining about only getting crumbs.
Eventually, however, women and minority groups got organised and created their own pie. This worked wonderfully. The PPP still had their bloated pie, so at first they didn’t notice, but when they did… all of a sudden they realised that they no longer had everything, and they wanted it. They started accusing women and minority groups of being ‘exclusionary’; they spread a new idea that everyone should be ‘inclusive’ of everyone. At first, assuming that these PPP had gone through some kind of revelation, and intended to share their pie, everyone else went along with it. But it turned out that, actually, the PPP pie was always going to be out of reach, and the PPP soon had much of the other pie, too. Even though there were plenty of women and members of minority groups pointing out that they were going to lose everything they’d worked for, they were undermined by adherents of post-modernist theory who were utterly convinced that all you had to do to bring about a perfect society was to behave as if it already existed. If you stopped divisively calling people ‘women’ or ‘members of a minority group’, those groups would cease to exist and everyone would be a PPP and automatically have a nice big slice of pie!
____________
A dwarf actor explains why it’s not in the least ‘inclusive’ to exclude dwarf actors from roles playing dwarfs, as if you think that they already have access to all the other roles in Hollywood, so don’t need to be ‘typecast’. I apologise for the interviewer being Piers Morgan, but he’s not the annoying man in this three-man conversation.
It has recently become fashionable to recast dwarf characters as everything but (and gotta make sure there’s some trans in there somewhere).
Oh the absolute shit show that was ‘The Watch’… Let’s take a budding feminist lady dwarf with a beard and turn her into a tall man with no beard at all…
Re Maine, my brother’s lived there most of his adult life and seems to enjoy it. But he’s crazy.
Re the interview, my takeaway is that apparently if Piers Morgan says it it’s automatically wrong. (I can’t think of anyone past or present of whom I would think that. I mean, if it were revealed that Hitler drank coffee every morning, that still wouldn’t put me off my daily joe.)
Great, well-researched, article in The Critic, explaining exactly how ‘trans’ ideology infiltrated the British establishment and inserted a false (and illegal) interpretation of the Equality Act into codes of practice throughout government and industry.
If you prefer to listen to, rather than read, the article I linked above, Barry Wall has done a YouTube video where he reads the whole thing, apart from the many links within the article.
The 19-year-old was nominated alongside Sharon Horgan, Melanie Lynskey, Elisabeth Moss, Keri Russell, and Sarah Snook for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series. However, the Television Academy’s decision to place Ramsey, who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, in a gendered category has struck a nerve with some fans of The Last of Us.
Etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Say what you will about the language which differentiates between actors based on their sex – with the default ‘actor’ and male ‘actor also being one and the same – but reason there is an actor/actress split in awards is to fight the tendency to overlook the female half of that working force. And Bella is female.
A surprisingly (to me, at least) sober and fair (and long) examination of the surrogacy industry (and industry it is) in Ukraine, with much reference to surrogacy laws in other parts of the world.
The requirements to use a surrogate in Ukraine are simple: A heterosexual couple must to be married, show they are medically unable to have children and provide at least half of the child’s genetic link, via sperm or embryo. BioTexCom advertises on its website packages from as little as $40,000. On average, surrogacy with BioTexCom costs $40,000 to $50,000, with an “all inclusive VIP” package going for $71,000, according to the website. These prices are substantially less than what surrogacy costs in the United States, where surrogacy experts and firms estimate that the average price tag is upward of $100,000.
The treatment of surrogate mothers is also discussed at some length. It’s not pretty.
In the surrogacy vein been thinking a bit about those concerned that our best and brightest aren’t squandering their potential to satisfy biology… Seems the obvious thing is to go full on cuckoo with embryos and child rearing if you’re already picking the best embryo and aborting any unfortunate pregnancies, but without uterine replicators it can’t be ethical.
Love him or hate him, Nigel Farage does have a point. If banks aren’t apolitical, but are imposing their weird flavour of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity politics’ on their customers, then they are doing an unpleasant form of social engineering. They are manipulating us so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to carry out any transactions without doing so through a bank.
Cash is, increasingly, being restricted – by the banks. Businesses pay their employees electronically and ask customers to pay by card, because the closure of local branches mean that transporting cash for wage packets or deposit isn’t practical. So if a bank decides to kick a customer out for holding views that the board doesn’t like, and (as in Farage’s case) ensure that the other banks are on board, they’re effectively removing that person’s right to participate in society; for the crime of not being ‘inclusive’ (which is Newspeak for ‘thinks that all women and men have a right to free speech, not just those who agree with us’).
Now that I’m about two months away from retirement my employer just announced that we can change our name if we prefer not to use our legal name on the job, including for our email and phone. Because it’s more inclusive. Not sure how John Q. Public is going to handle that though.
The emphasis on DEI where I work is only going to grow, and more and more of my younger co-workers are already sporting pronouns in their emails. Olds like me, not so much. Like it or not (and I don’t) this is not going away anytime soon, certainly not in Minnesota and especially in the Twin Cities.
The longer we wait to act, the greater the dangers and the larger the problem.
Large-scale pollution of air and waterways is no respecter of political boundaries, and its effects extend far beyond those who cause it.
Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
(emph added)
February 8, 1965.
Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States: 1963 ‐ 1969.
Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty.
Seems we’ve been turning a blind eye longer than I thought.
The report included a section on atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change, written by prominent climate scientists Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, Charles Keeling, Harmon Craig, and J Smagorisnky. Reviewing the document today, one can’t help but be struck by how well these scientists understood the mechanisms of Earth’s climate change 50 years ago.
Vaguely related (and it came up with the British PM):
The new right winger position seems to be “mustn’t do anything about climate change because poor and marginalized people/developing world but yes of course we believe in it”. Why is this? Is it just that you look like a moron or a loon if you pretend it doesn’t exist/isn’t a problem?
I guess “climate change do nothing abouter” isn’t as snappy as denier, but believing in the reality of climate change is meaningless; the soup throwers believe in climate change too and what good are they doing?
I recall the climate change debate happening in the sixties and early seventies, but those claiming that we were merely helping to avert an overdue ice age were pretty vociferous too. It was pretty hard to tell which side had the evidence back then, with the general public having no easy access to up-to-date research because the World Wide Web was not yet in existence. Of course, we remain bamboozled to this day, because stuff on the WWW isn’t easy for laypeople to sort into fact/fiction, science/pseudoscience.
BKiSA, how about ‘hand-wringers’? That’s a title which has been long applied to those who say about everything ‘This is too hard to deal with, all we can do is worry’.
The State of Michigan has enacted a ban on conversion therapy, including therapy for minors – that’s in practice an affirmation-only treatment of gender dysphoria. For the life of me, the fact that there are those who de-transition should be a warning of the dangers of this. Combine this with how easy is it to get sex hormones now with little or no review by a therapist and we’re off to the races.
tigger, that is still thrown up as “proof” that global warming isn’t real, because back in the 1960s scientists were predicting an ice age. If you want to know what was really happening, you can read on.
There were Ice Age predictions during the 1960s. These were in the popular, lay scientific magazines which most Americans believe represent the absolute latest in scientific thinking. The scientific literature was already predicting warming. Now, everyone remembers the popular literature and not the scientific. Who reads that? Just scientists…many of whom these days won’t read any scientific literature older than two years, and so they don’t know either that scientists were predicting warming back then.
I was treated like a goof when I was in my program for consuming (devouring, actually) works about the history of science, and reading older books.
My understanding is that without human greenhouse gas emissions the earth would be slowly cooling into the next glacial period. We are simply *massively* over compensating for the natural cooling.
The “Ruddiman Hypothesis” or “Long Anthropocene” proposes that human activity has been modifying global climate for 8,000 not just the last 200. According to this, the advent of agriculture helped to delay the onset of the next glaciation well before our burning of fossil fuels put us into the current greenhouse crisis.
I came across this article on baby names, and how some parents are so insecure in their baby’s masculinity that they are giving them action hero manly names, to force a “gender identity” on them that will prevent bullying.
“The result,” she writes, “was a two-fer.” You got the zippy style of a self-made surname and the roundhouse throat-punch of a vigorous action-name, a killer combo which sent the popularity of brawny last names like Saylor and Stryker soaring. Eventually, she says, last names became first names, and soon, any doer name became fair game, especially for boys. And though they’d previously been conservative and biblical in their naming habits, parents began naming their wriggly, fat-headed little boy babies after pretty much anything you’d see during a Super Bowl halftime commercial: rugged SUVs, lethal combat positions, and you guessed it, condoms (apparently, the names “Magnum” and “Maxx” are gaining popularity, the extra “x” in the latter signifying a next-level extremeness never before seen in tiny, blubbering male humanoids too young and cartilaginous to understand just how much extra beer that means they’re going to have to shotgun at parties).
Needing to live up to gender roles and expectations, but finding a way out by declaring themselves trans, or NB is likely a driver behind ROGD for boys, and the shitttiness of the way that girls are treated during the stages of adolescence is an obvious factor in the bindings and mastectomies.
Here’s the Joan Smith article Laurie is complaining about. Note that Smith does not say in the article that the ad is an “insult to womanhood” (that was the headline, probably picked by an editor).
Any non-criminal act, including words, directed at a person(s) and motivated by bias against a person, group, or place. A hate incident is an action or behavior motivated by hate or bias but legally protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of expression. A hate incident follows all of the same policies and laws as described in a hate crime.
Hate incidents include, but are not limited to, the following:
– Utterance of epithets;
– Distribution of hate materials in public places;
– Posting of hate materials without causing property damage; and
– The display of offensive materials on one’s own property.
The freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, such as the freedom of speech, allow hateful rhetoric as long as it does not interfere with the civil rights of others. If this type of behavior escalates to threats against a person, that activity would be classified as a hate crime.
The page does not define “hateful”, nor “hate materials”, nor “offensive”, but it does provide this further clarification of “hate crime”:
Pursuant to Penal Code Sections 422.55 and 422.56, such characteristics of a hate crime and their definitions are:
– Disability – Includes mental or physical disability regardless of whether the disability is temporary, permanent, congenital, or acquired by heredity, accident, injury, advanced age, or illness;
– Gender – Means sex and includes a person’s gender identity and gender expression (such as a transgender person). “Gender expression” means a person’s gender-related appearance and behavior regardless of whether it is stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth;
– Nationality – Means country of origin, immigration status, including citizenship, and national origin;
– Race or Ethnicity – Includes ancestry, color, and ethnic background;
– Religion – Includes all aspects of religious belief, observance, and practice, including agnosticism and atheism;
– Sexual Orientation – Means heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality; and/or
– Association with a person or group with one or more of the above actual or perceived characteristics. This includes advocacy for, identification with, or being on the premises owned or rented by, or adjacent to, a community center, educational facility, family, individual, office, meeting hall, place of worship, private institution, public agency, library, or other entity, group, or person that has, or is identified with people who have, one or more of the characteristics listed above.
A hate crime is an actual or attempted criminal act committed against a victim or the property of a victim because the victim is perceived to possess a protected characteristic.
I highlighted the garbled description of “gender”: “Gender means sex but it also doesn’t mean sex”. Good that they mentioned sex; good that they mentioned stereotypes; not so good that they fell into “assigned at birth” at the end.
It is alarming that the police are encouraging people to report perfectly legal activity, that the police should really be in the business of protecting, as if it were a prelude to crime.
I have merely reached the foothills of all the issues involved in the transgender debate. I now have a new summer reading list whose authors represent a roll call of honour to those who have fought in the trenches, often at great personal cost: Helen Lewis, Julie Bindel, Sarah Ditum, Hannah Barnes, Helen Joyce, Labour MP Rosie Duffield, Hadley Freeman and others too numerous to mention (and, yes, you’ve noticed — there are no men on this list, which only underlines who’s been doing the heavy-lifting).
I’m ready for the further abuse that awaits me for siding with such company. Frankly, it’s water off a duck’s back. And it’s never as brutal against men as it is women, which speaks volumes for those dishing out the abuse.
As for the last bit, can confirm. I’ve lost some friends, but that’s minor compared to what women have had to put up with.
NBC News has an article about people who think they can change their race.
That analogy you’re thinking of? Oh, they address it. Sort of:
RCTA and transracialism — which came to the forefront because of controversial figures like Rachel Dolezal — have been compared to being transgender. However, psychologists and activists push back against comparisons.
Tiq Milan, a Black transgender activist and writer, said it is a disservice to transgender people to compare the two. Race historically emerged as a social construct to establish a racial hierarchy with the white race at the top, whereas variances in gender identity have existed for thousands of years, he said.
“When it comes to who we are as racialized people, it is how we present to the world, but it’s also how people treat you,” Milan said. “It’s not just putting on the hair and the makeup and talking and walking [in] a kind of way. That is fetishizing, and it’s objectifying, and it reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of color.”
You see, when a white man puts on hair and makeup and talks and walks in a sort of way to claim a different identity, it’s fetishizing and objectifying… except when it’s not.
‘variances in gender identity have existed for thousands of years’ – Tiq Milan, ”a Black transgender activist and writer’, in passage quoted by Screechy Monkey at #178 above
I’m seeing this kind of statement quite often, but I have never seen any evidence adduced in support. Has anyone come across any kind of attempt to back this claim up with sources?
The American Academy of Pediatrics backed gender-related treatments for children on Thursday, reaffirming its position from 2018 on a medical approach that has since been banned in 19 states.
But the influential group of doctors also took an extra step of commissioning a systematic review of medical research on the treatments, following similar efforts in Europe that found uncertain evidence for their effectiveness in adolescents.
Critics across the political spectrum — including a small but vocal group of pediatricians — have been calling for a closer look at the evidence in recent years, particularly as the number of adolescents who identify as transgender has rapidly increased.
The treatments are relatively new, and few studies have tracked their long-term effects. Health bodies in England and Sweden have limited access to the treatments after carrying out systematic reviews, the gold standard for evaluating medical research.
“The board has confidence that the existing evidence is such that the current policy is appropriate,” said Mark Del Monte, the chief executive of the A.A.P. “At the same time, the board recognized that additional detail would be helpful here.”
As for the policy changes in Europe, he said, “they engaged in their process, we’re engaging in our process.”
After completing the review, he said, the group will issue additional clinical guidance for doctors and likely update its recommendations.
There’s really no way to study that claim since it involves putting people into categories that really didn’t exist until about ten or twenty years ago, but they get around it by claiming anyone who didn’t follow proscribed gender norms for their team. Just google “Was Joan of Arc trans?” for a taste (but be sure to have some strong breath mints handy).
Such floods, known as glacial outburst floods, happen when glaciers melt and pour massive amounts of water into nearby lakes. A study released earlier this year found such floods pose a risk to 15 million people around the globe, more than half of them in India, Pakistan, Peru and China.
The National Weather Service explains that the Suicide Basin is a side basin of the Mendenhall Glacier above Juneau.
“Since 2011,” the service says, “Suicide Basin has released glacier lake outburst floods that cause inundation along Mendenhall Lake and Mendenhall River.”
Mendenhall Lake gauge crested at 11:15 p.m. Saturday at a maximum level of 14.97 feet, the service pointed out, “well above the previous record stage of 11.99 feet set in July 2016.”
The lake level was 7.22 feet at 5:15 p.m. Sunday and waters continued to recede, the service noted.
Significant flooding was reported with water in areas that had never been flooded before, the service said. “Significant bank erosion has been reported as well with a few structures lost to the river. Tree-fall and debris are in the river,” it said.
The D.C. area faces an uncommonly severe thunderstorm threat Monday with the potential for damaging winds, tornadoes, hail, torrential rain and frequent lightning between 4 and 8 p.m. — with the Beltway area most at risk between 5 and 7:30 p.m. The National Weather Service has issued a Level 4 out of 5 risk for severe storms for the first time in about a decade.
A tornado watch is in effect until 9 p.m. A watch means ingredients are in place for severe storms with destructive winds and possibly tornadoes, but that’s not a guarantee and you should stay alert. If a warning for a tornado or a destructive thunderstorm is issued for your location, you should shelter in an interior room, away from windows, at the lowest level of a strong building.
Power outages are likely; charge devices and secure or bring inside loose outdoor items ahead of the storms. Avoid travel during the storms.
This after severe thunderstorms a little over a week ago that cut our power for about 28 hours.
Thanks. We seem to have dodged the worst of it, though it looks like the areas to the north and west were hit harder. We got a nice dusk sky out of it.
We just got hit by a bit of extreme weather in Southern Norway, too. A named storm called Hans. A bit of background: Norway has mountains, in the southern parts they are along the west coast. Since weather normally comes from the west, the west coast and the western parts of the mountains normally bear the brunt of it. But Hans was sneaky, coming up from the continent up trhough Sweden and then into Norway from the east. So all those parts that are not used to large amounts of rain got soaked. Worse, Hans decided to just sit there for more than two days, soaking the landscape and leading to lots of landslides and flooding. Currently, there is essentially no way to get from Trondheim, where I live, to Oslo other than by flying. The storm is now over, but major rivers keep growing and threaten major flooding. Almost miraculously, no one has been killed yet, though many homes are destroyed.
It’s poetic justice, I suppose. After all, we are rich from oil and gas exports. We have helped cook the planet, and now pretend to be the world champions of cutting greenhouse gases. But nature will have its way in the end.
I’m trying. I’ll miss my aunt’s funeral in Oslo tomorrow, as there is basically no way to get there in time. I was also going south for a bit of vacation time, but that is on hold until the roads are passable once more. Of course, the main highways between Trondheim, where I live, and Oslo follow the major rivers, so they are prone to flooding.
While reading some critiques of Foucault, I encountered this little 1970 article from the Times on a German pedophilia scandal. It sounds disturbingly familiar, especially that “parents had not been asked for consent and had, as a rule, not even known that their children attended sessions,” and that the psychologists’ goal was “to emancipate working‐class children from the repressive influence of their home education by exposing social exploitation and sexual compulsions.” I then found more on the subject.
So, man who assaulted a granny has pled guilty, but still wants name suppression and hasn’t been sentenced yet. Note the phrasing that it was a ‘heated confrontation between’, rather than the TRAs stormed the barricades and attacked.
And notice the very first sentence – “A man has admitted assaulting an elderly woman during a protest against an anti-transgender speaker.” Italics mine.
“A man has admitted assaulting an elderly woman during a protest against an anti-transgender speaker.”
It works both ways; if pro-women can be translated into “anti-trans,” then “pro-trans” must be anti-women. Not an original thought, but worth repeating.
Nullius, not exactly a one off as detailed in this horrifying New Yorker article about a programme to place at risk children in the care of known paedophiles. This was happening in Germany until the present century.
Francis, that’s a very interesting article. I don’t know enough about 20th-century German society to add anything, but this remark certainly caught my attention:
A few years later [after 1976], Germany’s newly established Green Party, which brought together antiwar protesters, environmental activists, and veterans of the student movement, tried to address the “oppression of children’s sexuality.” Members of the Party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults.
I recently watched the Disney animated movie “Strange World”. It was a visual delight, but rather heavy-handed and confusing regarding plot. The film was subjected to some right-wing criticism (leading to some showings being cancelled) because the teenage son in the story, one of several central characters, has a boyfriend. This is described in Wikipedia and I’m sure elsewhere as “Walt Disney Animation Studios’ first openly LGBTQ lead character”.
No. First same-sex couple, first obviously gay character, something like that. Mulan was a woman who pretended to be a man, you can’t get more “lead character” than that, but I suspect there are fights over whether she could be counted as “trans”. And I’m sure there are others who might be handwaved into the other letters. No, the issue here was “gay”, not alphabet soup.
Ah! I found, or re-found Miscellany Room. Florida’s De Santis now requires public schools in Florida to use cartoon-films published by ‘Prager University’ (which is of course not a university but a purveyor of propaganda founded by the right-wing radio host Dennis Prager) in order to teach fairly young children that slavery really was not such a bad thing after all. So, in a clip shown by Mehdi Hasan on MNSBC, we have a comic-book travesty of a smiling Frederick Douglass preaching to a couple of white children (no black children in sight) about how slavery was really not anything to worry about and it is only nasty radicals who kick up a fuss about it. The clip is wholly disgraceful in its dishonesty and its design on its victims: children of all races.
Two links concerning Haiti, and ‘reparations’ – Haiti was forced by France to pay reparations for the loss of French property after Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rebellion. The USA comes out of it badly, too, and continues to come out of it badly now, under the Biden administration, which in many ways I admire. I’m sorry to bang on about slavery but it is important, and I am fed up with people who pretend that it all happened hundreds of years ago, and that is of no relevance to our happy present. As William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
So, in a clip shown by Mehdi Hasan on MNSBC, we have a comic-book travesty of a smiling Frederick Douglass preaching to a couple of white children (no black children in sight) about how slavery was really not anything to worry about and it is only nasty radicals who kick up a fuss about it. The clip is wholly disgraceful in its dishonesty and its design on its victims: children of all races.
Hrm. Here’s the clip in question. While it’s certainly cringe-worthy and ideologically biased, I don’t think your description is, um, entirely apt. Yes, the art, script , and acting are horrible. Yes, Frederick Douglass is smiling. Yes, the two children are white. However, the children are a brother and sister in an ongoing series of clips, not once does Douglass even insinuate that slavery was anything but evil, and never is it suggested that radicals were wrong to oppose it.
Did Mehdi show the whole clip or only a brief segment?
The city of Yellowknife (pop. 20,000), capital of the Northwest Territories, Canada, is being evacuated because of wildfires. Having visited there a few years ago, and having friends who live there, this feels much more personal personal in a way that other places being threatened with fire does not.
No, that isn’t what the school system did. The relevant paragraph from the announcement:
All students are expected to conduct themselves at school in a manner consistent with their biological sex. School practice shall consider the gender of all students as being consistent with their biological sex, including, but not limited to, the following: participation in school athletics; school-sponsored dances; dress and uniform policies; the use of changing facilities, showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms (with rare exceptions only on a limited, case-by-case basis, to be determined by the principal of the school); titles, names, and pronouns; and official school documents.
The students were not assigned a sex, let alone pronouns, at birth. The closest to something “assigned” is a name, and one student mentioned in the article was upset that his (official, legal) name was read at graduation instead of a new preferred name. (The article refers to this student as male, but, given the topic, it’s entirely possible that this student is actually female.)
On the other hand that “dress and uniform” bit is bad in a different way. Skirts are horrible, especially in a mixed-sex school. Girls shouldn’t be told to dress in a way that is “consistent with their biological sex,” not least because way too many boys see skirts as an invitation to look up them.
Certainly there are any number of things wrong with the way Catholic schools are run, including sexism and reinforcement of gender roles. You’d think the NYT would pick up on that issue, but no, they’re up in arms over proper grammar and refusal to agree that people can change sex.
Yeah, school uniforms are on of those things that really highlights the three-way nature of this fight. The conservatives say, “Only girls should wear dresses”, the TRAs say, “Anyone who wears a dress is a girl” and meanwhile, the Gender Criticals are saying, “Let the kids wear what they want, just recognize it doesn’t change their sex.” So you could have skirts and pants and just let the kids be themselves without forcing the trans baggage onto it.
The article starts out quite well; it’s a full-bore discussion of why we need more scientific research into girls’ and women’s sports medicine, explaining how it’s always focused on male physiology, and thus a lot of the baseline assumptions about what constitutes ‘fitness’ for girls is badly out of sync with reality. It goes into some detail on how menstruation is sometimes inhibited for girl athletes, and why this fact, which is often just regarded as ‘the norm’ for young female athletes, can be harmful to long-term development. Bone density, specifically, is called out.
Then it completely ignores the obvious point that maybe, just maybe, hormone blockers are not as benign as they’ve been portrayed as, and jumps instead into a lot of waffling about how important it is to be incloooosive. The absurdity starts in the lower half of the article, under the heading, “On both acknowledging sex-based differences in sports while also being inclusive of transgender athletes.”
(The broadcast interview, I should note, was worse, with the waffling being right up front, as the interviewer made sure to mention that they were also going to talk about how important it is to not exclude males from female sport. I suspect that’s because they knew if they started a show using the words “women” and “girls” exclusively, without laying the groundwork for the eventual backpedaling, the station would be drowned in angry phone calls–but constantly using a strained ‘gender-neutral’ construction while talking about sex differences would be nigh-impossible.)
Sackbut, in my town (my soon to be prior town. Yay! One more week…) the Catholic school wouldn’t even allow cross-dressing for the purpose of a play. The play must be cast as female=female and male=male. I don’t have a problem with that in general, if the sex is specified, but it’s often the case that not enough males show up to fill the male roles, and why not allow females to do them? Some cross-casting doesn’t work, especially if the actor isn’t up to the task, but it can be good experience for a budding young actor.
The many problems with Catholic schools don’t excuse the New York Times for incorrectly reporting what this particular school system did. It would have been quite reasonable to take the school system to task for demanding that girls wear dresses, and for the policies on homosexuality in the same document, but no, the NYT decided that the most important thing was to use the nonsense phrase “pronouns assigned at birth” and focus on the trans aspect. That’s possibly the one thing the school system did correctly.
I posted the article to criticize the NYT coverage, not to imply the Catholic school system policy was perfectly fine.
Sackbut, I’m sorry if it sounded like I was thinking you were implying it was fine; I certainly didn’t think that. I was just giving another data point.
Footage from the panel show The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2008 has resurfaced online.
The quiz mentioned the pregnancy of “trans man” Thomas Beatie. Two of the panellists (the late Sean Lock and James Corden) called the pregnancy “an abomination”. The audience and the other panellists (Michael McIntyre, Claudia Winkleman, Dara Ó Briain and Davina McCall) all laugh at their comments and make more jokes at Beatie’s expense.
The NYT piece is ingenious in that it corroborates all of the whistleblower’s points while trying to make it sound like it doesn’t, because ew Republicans might be right. Still, the facts are all corroborated in the Liberal Paper of Record, even if they’re sandwiched in between a lot of slanted writing.
Lisa Selin Davis has a good fisking of it already:
Allegedly, Prigozhin has fallen out of a very tall window indeed. His jet has been shot down outside Moscow. Given that 13 Russian aircrew died in his insurrection or whatever it was, the symbolism is the point.
One thing really grinds my gears of late: “How dare you say mean things about Chris Rufo and accurately identify him as a grasping authoritarian and a grifter? The Wokies are so vile and dangerous wouldn’t it be much better if fascist shits like us were in charge again?”
No, the problem with the Wokies isn’t that they think men can be women and that math is racist, it’s that they *ARE* you. You’re the fucking same and that’s just terrible.
(Forgive me the rant, but I have to get this off my chest and for reasons that should become apparent, a semi-anonymous forum is the best place.)
So it’s 202(checks calendar)3, and people still haven’t grasped the concept of when, and more importantly when not, to use reply-all. I work for an organization of around 150 people, and every now and then we’ll get email announcements about new hires, or promotions, or individual achievements, or projects successfully completed. And that’s fine–it’s good to keep up on what your colleagues are doing, especially since most of us these days are remote. But then the reply-alls come in–“Congraulations!” “Such a great achievement!” “Welcome aboard” etc. Note to all: not everyone needs to see your reaction! Send it to the person (or people) who you’re celebrating, but leave the rest of us out. We don’t need to see it!
The worst of it is that most of the reply-allers are senior staff members, so you can’t really send a message to them saying “Please don’t” (and it would be rude to anyway). And even worse than worst, I can’t make any snarky remarks about it to my boss because she’s one of the worst offenders. To be clear, she’s a great boss overall–very supportive and responsive–and I realize that if this is the worst thing I can say about her, I can’t really complain. But dammit, it grates! I mentioned this to our IT guru, and his response was basically, “We discourage it, but we’re not going to say anything.”
Don’t get me wrong–I like my job, and I think our organization is doing great and important work, and I hope to stay here till I retire. But some days I wish retirement would come a bit faster.
Things that grate just do grate! I hope it at least helps to have a good rant about it.
For another example of things that grate, I watched an interesting episode of Nova [I think it was Nova] about different inventions of paper and what flowed from them on PBS last night – interesting, as I say, but accompanied by an almost constant loud obtrusive stream of random music, even while people were actually talking. What the HELL?! Are we so brainless and childish that we can’t listen to people talk for 50 minutes or so without a meaningless overlay of loud music? It was so irritating I gave up on the episode.
Ditto reply all – my playwriting group is particularly bad about it (now that I’m retired; otherwise, I had the same problem as WaM). Also the music.
And hold music…don’t get me started. I had to call the bank the other day about financial things related to our new house (I’m in Schenectady! Tomorrow, Presque Isle! Yay!) The hold music was not only awful, it was loud. I had to hold the phone away from my ear. Social Security is even worse.
And what is with the places that say “We’re having a high volume of calls. Try later.” No chance to leave a message, or to choose to hold. And of course when you call later, the same thing. They want you to go to the website…but if you can’t? If you are not the person who has the account on the site? If the person who has the account is dead, and you are now in charge of their business, but they didn’t leave you logins? Probably because they were 90 years old and weren’t doing much of their business online? And people who don’t return calls or messages, even when THEY are trying to sell YOU a product…
Sorry for the additional rant to WaM’s rant. With all the things I’m dealing with lately, I’ve found a lot to be crabby about.
“We expect it to take X minutes before we can answer you. You can hold or you can give us your phone # & we will call you when you get to the top of our list.” So I might get the call in a couple of hours, but at least I can do other stuff while I am waiting.
Ditto re. music on hold. I imagine the business on the other end of the phone isn’t even aware of it — I guess if it’s a small enough business, you might ask them to cut it off? But I could assure them, even if it were music I would otherwise enjoy (as if that ever happened), being compelled to listen to it, with appalling audio quality, in one ear, is not improving my “customer experience”.
And ditto the annoying music on PBS documentaries. I gave up on PBS years ago — their documentaries used to be informative but now they all seem to be written at a 5th-grade level, delivered agonizingly slowly, and as you say, inevitably corrupted by incessant, overwrought, electronic music soundtracks.
But an accidental “reply-to-all” can be highly amusing.
My wife used to have even more irritating reply-all stories. She works (technically consults) for a nationwide organization with thousands or probably tens of thousands of workers–an organization that comes to your house nearly every day if you live in the US. Occasionally someone would reply-all to an organization-wide email, and the cascade would begin: reply-alls to the reply-all saying “Please don’t reply-all”, and then reply-alls to the reply-alls to the reply-all saying “Please don’t reply-all to the reply-all”, and on and on, sometimes to the point of crashing the email system.
But people seem to have learned, or at least she hasn’t told me any of those stories in a long time.
#226 and #229, both perfectly good rants. A couple of companies I deal with in NZ have introduced booked call backs. When the call centre is overloaded you are given the options of waiting, calling back, or press ‘#’ to be called back – no loss of queue position. Not even a need to supply phone number since they already know that. There is a more detailed menu where apparently you can give an alternative number.
So, my rant, the inevitable day has arrived, a group of staff and shareholders at my company have proposed a Diversity policy. They have taken the proposed wording from examples taken from similar companies to ours that had joined an accord that provided templates. It’s everything you’d expect. Loads of meaningless feel good waffle requiring “acknowledging, appreciating, and celebrating… ” a long list of things, including gender and gender identity. No mention of sex, which in NZ is a protected category under the Human Rights Act. In a workplace setting I am happy to acknowledge someone for what they are, and behave in a mutually respectful manner. They go on to propose “Diversity support and education”, but couldn’t define what they meant by that. Hello to the next template from the ‘accord’. We have a company comprised of employees and shareholder employees. I’m currently one of the Directors. I suspect this will be the beginning of the end of my career, as in the current environment even friends of decades assume you’re a bigot for questioning any aspect of things like this. I can’t just role over without saying anything though.
Hey, everyone! I have arrived in my new home. I shall no longer suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Nebraska. I am in a beautiful area where I will be able to see the northern lights. There are trees.
I will say, the drive convinced me of a couple of things. It was fortune (or Ganesha) that kept me from moving to Massachusetts two decades ago…one single trip through on their highways, and I am ready for the funny farm. Why do they even bother to say road work ahead? Why don’t they just notify us when there isn’t road work? “No road work next 50 feet” or something.
Once I got out of Massachusetts things got better. Some spots where going was slow, but mostly a relatively relaxing drive (if any drive can be called relaxing). And if I never drive through Chicago again, I will be thrilled. I love Chicago, but driving in it? At rush hour? Not my idea of fun.
One of Jesse Singal’s readers writes him an email about the book Gender Queer that’s worth passing along here. (IMO, that book isn’t even close to being about sex education, it’s actually porn.)
Massachusetts and Chicago are two of my favorite places, mostly because I spent my formative years there (I still drive like a Masshole, I’m afraid), but Maine isn’t far behind. Enjoy!
I think the worst is the message that says “Call volume is higher than expected. We appreciate your patience.” But, these are companies whose call volume is always higher than expected. That may mean that they don’t have enough people to take calls.
So it’s 202(checks calendar)3, and people still haven’t grasped the concept of when, and more importantly when not, to use reply-all. I work for an organization of around 150 people, and every now and then we’ll get email announcements about new hires, or promotions, or individual achievements, or projects successfully completed. And that’s fine–it’s good to keep up on what your colleagues are doing, especially since most of us these days are remote. But then the reply-alls come in–“Congraulations!” “Such a great achievement!” “Welcome aboard” etc. Note to all: not everyone needs to see your reaction! Send it to the person (or people) who you’re celebrating, but leave the rest of us out. We don’t need to see it!
There really should be a segment on this in orientation. What most people don’t realize is that most email programs have a way to remove your address from an email thread. In my former company’s recent past, an email was sent to an operations group distribution in error rather then a more limited department distribution, announcing a birthday celebration for Holly, somewhere. The cascade of ‘don’t reply all” was intermixed with “Happy BIrtthday Holly” emails to all. The operations managers now send out an anniversary announcement of the “Happy Birthday Holly” with reminders not to “reply all” to say “Don’t Reply All.”
Group texts too. The first time this happened to me, it was an invite from a friend to go tubing in the mountains. I was then inundated with replies and banter from a dozen people, most of whom I didn’t know. My phone went off randomly with messages meant for other people for days. I ended up blocking many numbers and had to explain to my friend how group texts work and why I don’t want to be included in any. Some of the respondents knew to reply directly and not to the group, but so many of them didn’t. I think sending emails to multiple addresses has it’s uses, but group texts are something I can do without. I did wonder if I was being too fussy, or feeling like my phone number is more personal than email or something, but I think it’s rude.
Arizona is not the only state with a water problem. The NYT published a feature article on the pursuit of the perfect potato for french fries, and how the varieties that a Minnesota Agri-corp produces are especially thirsty. If they don’t get enough water, the tubers don’t grow in the perfect shape (long and slender) to prevent spots in your McDonald’s fries. The company claims that they are developing varieties which are not so thirsty, but in the meantime wells are drying up in rural Minnesota, ponds and lakes where wild rice and fish grow, are either getting too warn because they are not being fed by cool water aquifers, or merely drying up. This is a shareable “gift article” link so no need to worry about a paywall.
I really doubt that most people who rush to the drive-thru window at McDonald’s to munch down fries while on the way to soccer practice care about “flawless” fries with no spots. I think the big thing about fast-food fries is that since they are fried in trans-fats that people have to eat them quickly because cold fries taste like grease, they’re only edible when hot. Perhaps chain restaurants could invest in air friers to save money on frying oils and selling fries that won’t clog our arteries would be better investments than trying to make the “perfect potato.”
I am not sure where growers and fast-food chains get these ideas that we want food to look perfect while forgetting about how they are supposed to taste but perhaps it is just from focus groups who are shown pictures and asked what they would rather eat. This kind of thinking has led to the red delicious apples becoming inedible mealy mush, and the idea that people at fast food restaurants even look at their food before eating it. On the occasions I eat fries, myself, I would rather have steak fries than those spindles of nothing that would have no flavor except salt and grease.
Another note in the article is the irrigation of sugar beets. What’s sad about this is that the sugar beets in Minnesota are grown mostly in the Red River Valley of the North, and the soil there is perfect for them. It’s a clay soil, the famous Red River Mud that the oxcarts had to struggle through to move furs from the northern plains to Minneapolis before the railroads were built. It retains water, so if the farmers are having to irrigate, that’s a sign of how severe and regular the droughts are now. The upper midwest is being touted as the area that climate refugees will be flocking to in the future of a drowned Florida and a baked Texas and Arizona. We’ll probably be arming ourselves against the neighbors who want water.
The reason why the upper Midwest is seeing drier summers is that temperatures in the upper atmosphere are getting warm enough to “cap” the formation of thunderstorms by preventing the rise of warm, humid air. We had a very snowy winter here in NW Wisconsin and there was plenty of water in the ground back in May, but starting in June it was like the great water tap in the sky was turned off. So unless you irrigate, your yield or corn and soybeans is affected and the hay simply stops growing too.
A study that uses fine-scale statistical analysis of megafauna extinction rates against both climate change and hominin/human range expansions comes down clearly in laying the cause of these extinctions at the feet of the latter as the driving cause of the global extinction of large bodied animals.
The Earth has lost approximately half of its large mammal species (≥45 kg, one-third of species ≥9 kg) over the past 120,000 years, resulting in depauperate megafauna communities worldwide. Despite substantial interest and debate for over a century, the reasons for these exceptionally high extinction rates and major transformation of the biosphere remain contested. The predominant explanations are climate change, hunting by modern humans (Homo sapiens), or a combination of both. To evaluate the evidence for each hypothesis, statistical models were constructed to test the predictive power of prehistoric human and hominin presence and migration on megafauna extinction severity and on extinction bias toward larger species. Models with anthropic predictors were compared to models that considered late-Quaternary (120-0 kya) climate change and it was found that models including human factors outperformed 100% of purely climatic models. These results thus support an overriding impact of Homo sapiens on megafauna extinctions. Given the disproportionate impact of large-bodied animals on vegetation structure, plant dispersal, nutrient cycling and co-dependent biota, this simplification and downsizing of mammal faunas worldwide represents the first planetary-scale, human-driven transformation of the environment.
Yes, JA there are harsh realities at play. St.Paul has instituted a partial watering ban in response to protect the reservoirs that source our taps, but a better solution would be for more people to re-think our lawns. We don’t need grass that must be watered in order to have beautiful lawns (and fertilized, and pesticized.) There are green ground covers that are native and drought resistant. But even for people who want grass because that’s how it’s always been, it’s never made sense to rake the grass and dump it after mowing, nor the leaves in the fall when mulch cutting allows for natural fertiization. The fertilizers that lawn care companies spray runs off or else feeds the weeds as much as it does grass because grasses tend to have shallow roots while native plants, aka weeds to some people, have deeper roots and capture the water from your sprinkler and the fertilizer that otherwise would run off to the Gulf Of Mexico and feed the red tide algae.
How much of the water from irrigationis lost to evaporation in row crops? Farmers do have the option of cover crops to reduce the need for aquifer water and that has the added benefit of reducing the carbon loss from winter plowing. We need to eat, but we also need to be more thoughtful of the ways that we grow our crops, and break some of the cycles that lead us into downward spirals.
But, we also need to focus less on growing crops with the perfect appearance. That’s just wasteful.
British Quakers have been lost to the Successor Ideology:
@BritishQuakers appear to have been lost to the cult. A group for female rape/sexual abuse survivors has been refused a room at Brighton meeting house . We also hear that Quaker staff now consider talking about Elizabeth Fry to be trans phobic…
@BritishQuakers run a Facebook group – they have declined to approve 3 (that we know of) posts trying to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the gaols act – transphobic innit to celebrate Elizabeth Fry’s work in bringing about single sex prisons
The trial of the man accused of murdering four members of a Muslim family in London, Ontario has begun. It is being held in Windsor (about a two hour drive from London); details on why the change in venue are subject to a publication ban. The Crown looks like it’s going to base at least some of its case on statements made by the accused that he was out to kill Muslims.
“Why did he do this? You’ll hear him in his own words,” Shaikh said, referring to the accused. “He made two statements to detectives after he surrendered and you will hear both of those statements. You’ll hear him say that he did it on purpose … he said he did it because they were Muslim.”
The accused has pleaded not guilty. He’s facing not only murder charges, but terrorism charges as well.
Here’s an interview out today of Alex Byrne (MIT) and Holly-Lawford Smith (University of Melbourne) that’s quite good at clarifying some basic concepts that others have long muddied the waters over.
Meanwhile in Madrid, a reporter is sexually assaulted on air. The story and video are in Spanish, but even if you don’t speak the language the video is pretty self-explanatory. Of course this happens to women all the time, and it’s not even news now that it happens to reporters on live TV. What’s strange about this case is that the guy hung around for an interview, and returned later after assaulting other women on the street.
For what it’s worth, the assailant is Romanian; he’s since been arrested for sexual assault.
Yikes! That’s quite something. I take it the reporter tried to carry on regardless and her male colleague in the studio interrupted her to say hang on, that’s not ok what that guy just did, we have to address that now?
Yes, and then later he warned her that the guy was behind her. She starts to interview him again (or at least interrogate him: “Did you really have to touch my butt?”), but then cuts it off, saying “I don’t want to give him protagonism” (sounds better in Spanish; in English something like “I don’t want to make him the star”).
Clarification: the question I quoted came at the end of their first interaction; later when he came back he tried to gaslight her (“Tell the truth”) and she basically (not literally) told him to fuck off.
My wife was looking for one of those devices that allow a woman to pee while standing up, and found this one on Amazon,
But it’s not only for women! Noo, it “for Women, Non Binary, & Trans Men”. They go on to explain it is “GENDER INCLUSIVE: Whatever your gender, if you can’t already stand to pee while fully clothed, the pStyle is for you!”
In the product description, they go on to talk about the many potential users of this device:
PUD’S ARE FOR EVERYONE!
For many years pee funnels have been marketed under the name Female Urination Device, or FUD. It’s time to retire this outdated term in favor of ones like Stand to Pee or STP (popularized by the trans community), Pee Funnel, Personal Urination Device, or PUD.
Why is it time to change? We have found in 17 years of interacting with our wonderful customers that every gender imaginable uses these products.
There are cis women who can stand and pee while fully clothed without a pee funnel. It is a rare ability and takes practice but it is possible for some! Many women (including trans women) need help standing to pee while clothed. That’s where a Personal Urination Device like the pStyle comes in handy.
Trans men, non binary, and intersex people often have a need for an STP, either for gender affirmation, safety, convenience, or all three.
Cis men may also want a urinary funnel if they have medical conditions that make it challenging or impossible for them to stand and pee.
I think I was more surprised because it’s The Guardian, and I’m used to seeing anything in there written from a GC viewpoint being liberally (sic) spattered with scare quotes around any words or phrases that the interminably fragile may find offensive, presumably added by over-cautious editors not wishing to cause offence.
I’ve been trying desperately to convince the universe that I belong to an entirely different clade, the spider kind, but so far medical science has failed to provide a mechanism to make my transformation at all convincing.
Yup, and he is the expert biologist, after all. Seriously, though, I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s done this, to the extent that I sometimes* wonder if he’s consciously !or unconsciously) daring people to apply his words to the trans ideology.
*Only sometimes, though. The rest of the time I imagine an increasingly suppressed voice in the back of his mind fruitlessly crying out for him to remember he’s a scientist and a sceptic, while an increasingly loud voice closer to the front demands it shuts up lest the mob hears its cries.
Two teachers in a Southern California school district sued in federal court to challenge a district policy that requires teachers to withhold from parents any information about their child “gender transitioning” at school. The federal court granted a preliminary injunction in favor of the teachers (prohibiting punishing the teachers for violating the policy keeping the child’s gender transition at school confidential from the parents), and denying the motions to dismiss the actions, brought by state educational officials and by district officials.
Men can change into women because that’s microevolution. They are the same Kind. However, there’s no such thing as macroevolution, because the Bible says you can’t change into a different Kind.
Frankly I hope the teachers are ruled against… shouldn’t be snitching on their students. That said there shouldn’t be a policy preventing it or requiring it.
I know Meghan Murphy has gone full right-wing, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong about everything on all occasions.
Also, “snitching”? It is part of a teacher’s duty to inform parents if a child is in serious psychological trouble isn’t it? Is suicidal, or the target of bullying, or making rash self-destructive decisions? For instance if a child is anorexic – aren’t teachers supposed to give the parents a heads up?
Monica Hesse, in a column on abortion tourism, grudgingly mentions women, but just once, near the end. Otherwise, it’s all about “pregnant people” and “patients”.
The significance is in the politicians and activists hoping that the right word choice can persuade millions of voters that people — mostly women — are so irresponsible with their abortion-related decisions that the decision should simply be taken away, and that these politicians can take them away faster and with more cruelty.
The majority of children in a landmark study on puberty blockers experienced positive or negative changes in their mental health, new analysis suggests.
The original study of 44 children, who all took the controversial drugs for a year or more, found no mental health impact – neither benefits nor harm.
But a re-analysis of that data now suggests 34% saw their mental health deteriorate, while 29% improved.
Note: The study has not been in a peer-reviewed journal yet
Yes: ‘It is part of a teacher’s duty to inform parents if a child is in serious psychological trouble’. Absolutely. This is well understood and in the UK it is set out in government guidance. There are exceptions in cases where informing the parents is believed to carry a risk of harm to the child.
And in the case of college students, there are also some requirements that teachers inform, not parents, but appropriate authorities of any indication of problems. We had a special notification system set up at our school, and I imagine most colleges do.
Things are trickier in college, but there are still duties to inform. Not tattle. In fact, when speaking with a student, I was required to inform them that I might have to reveal information to proper authorities.
One, I’m imagining the teachers are appealing on 1st Amendment grounds and while I think they’re being dicks, I am a firm defender of free speech.
That throat clearing done, I’m pretty sure y’all would not be cool with teachers informing on Hector kissing a boy, Sarah having an abortion (admittedly a bit more serious but I doubt y’all’d defend it), a Mustafa’s change in religion, Heinrich practicing tarot, and other fairly harmless things. Calling yourself Colin and insisting on male pronouns is a tattling offense and unlikely to be especially harmful.
Now if little Colin is using the boys’ changing room/restroom, yes, you should do that because it’s risky behaviour. Can’t see how you shouldn’t be informing the parents of that, breast binding, cutting, or other sorts of risky behaviour and self-harm.
As to Meghan Murphy, of course she’s right about some things, but I don’t need someone who abandoned her principles because people were mean to her to tell me men aren’t women. Men aren’t women, full stop. The trannies are liars and bullies whose bullshit should not be indulged. It’s like joining the fascists because you hate commies.
The extremist trans activist Alejandra Caraballo is promoting an article in the Smithsonian Magazine that claims the Nazis persecuted transgender people:
The Nazis came for trans people, burned the first trans clinic, and murdered the first trans woman who ever got bottom surgery.
I keep hearing this claim put about by many trans activists. The obvious purpose of this claim is to smear anyone who disagrees with puberty blockers, men in women’s prisons, men competing in women’s sports, etc. as being a similar type of murderous bigot that the Nazis were.
Has anyone researched this? I know Malcolm Clark has looked into the issue.
The Nazis persecuted and murdered tens of thousands of homosexual men. A number of these homosexual men were what used to be called “transvestites”, who wore women’s clothing for most or all of the time. One of them was “Liddy” Bacroff, who has been described as a homosexual and a transvestite.
So it seems the “trans” people that Caraballo is talking about were actually homosexuals who liked to cross-dress.
Their suffering was tragic and deserves to be commerated, but such people were not the main target of the Nazis, like Jews and Roma were. Nor is there any ideological connection with disagreement with “gender ideology” and Nazism.
NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League), more recently NARAL Pro-Choice America, has changed its name to Reproductive Freedom For All. In the current political climate, “for all” is a red flag for me, so I went looking for what the organization was after with this name change. Information was meager, but eventually I found this interview in Elle magazine:
The interview is with Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All. I liked what she had to say. The organization isn’t shying away from the word “abortion”. They are moving away from the “choice” label, because with the many barriers to access and availability and other issues it really isn’t about choice per se. The “for all” bit is meant to emphasize women of color and women from various economic backgrounds. Good points made. It’s all about women, and not one word is mentioned about “transmen can get abortions, too”; the only nod to gender ideology is the notion that NARAL at the beginning was “by and for cis white women”.
There’s no evidence that the HP panel was going to discuss the Trans issue or any other political issue, but they can’t have anything by That Woman in their Safe Space.
“The Mississippi River is forecast to reach ‘historic lows over the next several weeks,’ Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said during a Friday news conference.”
If you’re going to virtue signal, maybe make sure the person you choose as the signal is actually virtuous, before getting all misty eyed.
During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Ottawa on Friday, MPs honoured 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka in the House of Commons.
Hunka was invited by Speaker Anthony Rota, who introduced him as a war hero who fought for the First Ukrainian Division.
“I am very proud to say that he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing_Timiskaming,” the Ontario MP said as an introduction.
“He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”
MPs cheered and Zelenskyy raised his fist in acknowledgement as Hunka saluted from the gallery during two separate standing ovations.
Sounds like the sort of hero Ukraine needs right now, doesn’t he?
The First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis.
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies issued a statement Sunday saying the division “was responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians with a level of brutality and malice that is unimaginable.”
Ooops.
Not the hero Ukraine needs, and not the example to pull from a magician’s hat when Russia and its allies point out Ukraine’s Nazi past and accuse Zelensky et al of being Nazis from whom Mother Russia is bravely defending the world.
However, as Canada legally mandates Men are Women and Women are Bitches, I guess an Old Nazi is also a freedom fighter.
another player in same female team is kicked/suspended for “allegations of cheating” (presumably cheated under another identity, then evaded any ban/punishment)
I saw that reported everywhere and wondered: is he still a Nazi believer? It is of course very possible that he is, but mention of him cites as evidence his membership with an SS unit… about 80 years ago. That’s a hell of a long time, and easily long enough to change his views. Has anyone asked?
Whatever the answer, mobbing up with them is nothing to venerate, it just bugs me that everyone speaks in the present tense as to his being a Nazi, despite his affiliation being a lifetime ago.
Well also, how much would any of us complain if the Proud Boys showed up to fight against China or Russia if they happened to be on the same continent instead of impossibly far away?
Wouldn’t be singing their praises later obviously…
Considering what Stalin did to the Ukrainians in the 1930s I can’t totally condemn any Ukrainians who fought on the side of the Germans invading the Soviet Union in the 1940s.
Did they *all* commit atrocities against Jews etc.?
The doubtless well-intentioned mendacity of many GCs – who I assume tell lies knowingly in the belief they serve a greater good – debases intellectual currency, enables cruelty and drags them towards default irrational Right politics. Why do they not see this?
My point is, believing that the end justifies the means corrodes them and the society around them.
It saddens me that a number of people I once liked have become too ghastly to contemplate.
” Too ghastly to contemplate” – note the complete *dehumanization* of Kaveney’s former friends, as if uttering mild criticism of puberty blockers and Jordan Gray exposing male genitalia to millions was the apex of mankind’s capacity for evil.
After reading PZ”s awful justification of the cancellation of the session at the anthropologist conference, I made the mistake of reading the comments. Ever seen something so wrong that you couldn’t not get involved?
They really have nothing to back up their claims, do they? Every point I made was met with little more than insults: highlighting the lack of logic in their ideology was countered with irrelevance, twisting of my words, lies, and several comments that just made no sense at all (too many they and thems in a sentence tend to hamper understanding).
I won’t list it all (but the thread worth a look if you have ten minutes to kill and fancy a giggle) but one series of exchanges will suffice as an appetiser.
It started after I’d criticised PZ’s trick of dismissing individual sex markers: one day he’ll say that chromosomes are only a guide, not a foolproof method, the next it’s body types that are not always in line with sex, then it’s genitals, reproductive organs, gamete production, etc. I said that when dealt with individually, of course no single method was foolproof, but that what PZ was failing to mention was that when taken as a whole, all of the sex markers had the inconvenient habit of all falling on the same side of the binary for any given person, so in combination they were indeed very accurate ways of determining sex. Enter Brony:
Oh, “body type consistent with ova”. I’m sure other hominids were all about the gamete distinctions. Hundreds of years ago that’s what they used to force people into 50:50. We couldn’t possibly be dealing with a more complex society than that.
I replied:
You really don’t do logic at all, do you? In the context you are using it here, society, like gender and gender identity, is an abstract concept invented by humans. Sex is a reality that existed for millions of years before humans evolved and will continue to exist long after we’ve gone.
Raging Bee jumps in with:
Yes, and even without gender in the picture, it is, and always has been, a far more complex reality than you or your simpleminded binary worldview can handle. Also, how can sex “continue to exist long after we’ve gone?” Essentialist much? [bolding mine. It’ll soon become clear why]
Hmm, how could sex possibly continue in the absence of humans? I can’t believe it needed spelling out but I did so anyway:
Because we humans are not the special creation, separate from the rest of nature, that you seem to think we are. We will go extinct one day but life will continue. Your view of life may be anthropocentric but some of us understand that there are a lot more animal species out there that will continue to inhabit the planet after we’re gone. Male and female will not cease to be just because we won’t be around.
Along came PZ:
“Male and female will not cease to be”…no one has argued that they will […] so inventing that kind of accusation is silly.
This is where the the bolded part of RB”s comment is relevant. RB thinks that the end of mankind will mean the end of sex and PZ accuses me of making it up!
That exchange is far from everything but, long story short, I am now banned from Pharyngula. Hey ho.
In the event that you haven’t come across news of the current kerfuffle about Lucien Greaves, spokesperson for The Satanic Temple (TST), this article is probably a good summary. There was a lengthy and paywalled discussion in The Atlantic that was my introduction to the topic.
Greaves met with David Silverman, former head of American Atheists, and was photographed with him. Silverman has a lot of baggage, including allegations of sexual misconduct, which led to him being pushed out of American Atheists. Silverman also initiated an atheist presence at CPAC. Silverman of late has been expressing disagreement with trans ideology.
Members of TST are upset because Greaves associated with someone who disagrees with trans ideology. Not a person pushed out of a leadership position over sexual misconduct allegations, not a person who seeks better representation at a conservative conference, but a person who disagrees with trans ideology, that’s the only important point. The members are demanding that Greaves recite the appropriate mantras due to his contamination with the unclean. Something like that.
I really liked this piece at WaPo. I’ve never heard of the author (Kate Cohen) before.
I would summarize it as:
1. There are a lot of people who are actually atheists but don’t declare themselves as such. Not just the “nones” who list no religious affiliation, but plenty of people who call themselves Catholics, Protestants, etc. Folks who have invented new definitions of “God” (e,g, God is love, God is the sense of wonder I get from looking at a sunset) so they can say they believe.
2. Atheists don’t have the luxury of believing that our fate is decided by God, and that shows up in data: atheists are more like to vote, be politically active, etc.
3. Atheists have a role to play in being able to reject Christian nationalism and religious-based politics.
4. With understandable exceptions for people who would be persecuted, atheists should “come out.”
Okay, but should you say you’re an atheist even if you believe in “God” as the power of nature or something like that?
Yes. It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in God metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that God is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell.
In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)
So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?
If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.
This feels very much like a throwback to the days of “New” Atheism. I’m interested to see if it will spawn much reaction. (There are over 10,000 comments at WaPo, but I know better than to wade into the comments section at a major media outlet.)
You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands.
I can finally retire “Cynical Theories” as a means of understanding the Wokies, eat shit James Lindsay!
“The Identity Trap” by Yascha Mounk is miles better (though it focuses primarily on race it basically treats the gender goblin shit and similar as interchangeable because intersectionality as popularly understood makes it so).
The Nation magazine, in looking over the political magazine scene, makes a gratuitous swipe at a certain writer:
…compared with the more demagogic anti-woke venues that have proliferated in recent years—
Quillette, Unherd, Compact, The Free Press, or any number of lucrative Substacks—Liberties isn’t creepily obsessed with the supposed threat of trans-affirming medical care. In fact, the one article on the topic, by Laura Kipnis, skewers J.K. Rowling and encourages a live-and-let-live approach to gender expression.
J. A., it’s interesting how she sees the point about the god question – we need to be able to ask the hard questions – but then relates the ‘anti-trans’ side to the ones not asking the ‘hard’ questions…Blinders, much?
Well the god botherers think women were made from a dude’s rib and were cursed forever for eating a magic fig… not convinced they really know what a woman is either. They get the right answer on accident.
Now when we apply the scientific method to all this…
There’s an online course being offered next week where I work (until the end of the year, when I’ll be retiring) titled: Expanding Psychological Safety for LGBTQ Employees. Here’s some detail about that:
“Allyship is an action, psychological safety is an environment. Allyship best practices will change over time but psychological safety is a measured and sustained experience. Psychological safety is a knowing that LGBTQ employees don’t have to cover who they are and that vulnerability, no matter which employee is expressing it, is not a punishable offense. Learning objectives for this session include: I can list which of the common behaviors that employees may practice to cover their identities. I can practice and hone strategies that created a psychologically safe workplace and supports my teams’ authentic selves and I can identify what a psychologically safe workplace looks like.”
I could go on, but to cut to the chase what this is about is having employees understand that if another employee brings their authentic self to work and uses a bathroom that doesn’t line up with their sex, my response is to not raise any objection because of their psychological vulnerability. (Cis-gendered women’s actual vulnerability to males in same-sex spaces is not the object of this training, obviously.) I also will adopt a common behavior of wearing a “my pronouns are” badge to also help foster said psychologically safe workplace and of course extend that to my email signature not only to other co-workers but to the public at large because psychological vulnerability is everywhere and my allyship should extend beyond the workplace as well.
Should I sign up? As a short-timer I don’t have much to lose if I do raise some objections or perhaps more wisely ask some hard questions that other participants might hear and ponder.
From Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter dated yesterday (but published today):
Katherine Faulders, Alexander Mallin, and Mike Levine of ABC News reported today that sources have told them that former president Trump shared information about U.S. nuclear subs with Anthony Pratt, an Australian billionaire who was a member of the Mar-a-Lago club. The sources say Pratt then shared that information with at least 45 others: more than a dozen foreign officials, his own employees, and a few journalists. Trump allegedly shared the exact number of nuclear warheads U.S. submarines carry, and exactly how close they can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.
Jesus. What amazes me is that so many of his supporters call themselves patriots and supporters of the military—no doubt many would call for the death penalty for the likes of Eric Snowden—and yet when Trump casually reveals some of our most sensitive military information, they don’t bat an eye.
For those who aren’t aware of it, Daniel Dennett’s autobiography I’ve been thinking is now out. I’m a few chapters in. What I enjoyed most so far, is the introduction, where he writes about how he nearly died from a serious health problem, and how he reacted to friends telling him they had prayed for him. First he appreciates their concern, then he forgives them for being so wrong-minded about it. That’s an interesting take. I’ve had people praying for me too, over much less serious health problems – and I never quite knew how to deal with it. For sure, I too can appreciate the thought, but the notion of forgiveness hadn’t occurred to me.
The book is of course quite different from his other work, full of anecdotes from his student days. But his writing is clear and lucid as always, and I find it hard to put the book down.
I happened upon a video in which the host was listing which authors had the most film treatments of their works. It was presented in countdown style by number of works, and it was clear from the beginning that the “winner” was going to be William Shakespeare. Along the way various other authors were mentioned and occasionally discussed briefly.
The host got to, I think the 11-work mark, and (paraphrased): “There are two people at this position” – photos are shown – “Um, one person” *smirk*.
There were two photos shown. One was the author the host went on to mention. The other was JK Rowling.
Apparently she is not even a person now, in this host’s eyes. I guess he agrees with all of the political and social views of all the other nine authors mentioned, or at least finds their faults sufficiently minor to allow for their names to be mentioned and their personhood not to be rejected.
Isn’t it interesting how the trans Movement claims it’s dehumanizing not to believe people are the other sex, while so many trans believers make literally dehumanizing “jokes” like that?
My apologies in advance for this being so long, and I hope it doesn’t violate any comment rule. I think for once that TL;DR won’t suffice though, and that it’s best to read the whole damn thing. So, here’s what I received from my employer’s HR department this week (I’ve redacted my employer’s name from it) about how they’re going to go forward with being more inclusive. I’m glad I’m retiring at the end of this year because I don’t want to bring my honest opinion about this to work.
Written by PRIDE: LGBTQIA2S+ employee resource group
Getting to true inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees requires much more than an inclusive and respectful workplace policy or rainbow branding each year for Pride month.
True inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees means creating a psychologically safe workplace environment and expanding allyship practices across all departments.
The PRIDE employee resource group has been actively advocating and working toward inclusion for LGBTQIA2S+ employees in both big and small changes this year, such as promoting inclusive benefits and policies for LGBTQIA2S+ employees and intentionally recruiting for LGBTQIA2S+ representation. PRIDE has also been working with HR on smaller steps like including personal pronouns in communications and HR systems and providing employee training to decrease the frequency of microaggressions (such as automatically asking women about husbands/boyfriends, asking men about wives/girlfriends, misgendering, tokenization of identity, use of derogatory language, failure to acknowledge queer relationships, exclusion from socializations, etc.).
And part of true inclusion starts this week with National Coming Out Day which is commemorated each year on Oct. 11 and aims to “continue to promote a safe world for LGBTQ individuals to live truthfully and openly,” (Human Rights Campaign website). National Coming Out Day can trace its roots back to the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The march aimed to draw attention to the federal government’s inaction in confronting the AIDS crisis and the Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling upholding Georgia’s anti-gay sodomy law.
The march marked the unveiling of the AIDS memorial quilt (a massive patchwork honoring those lost to the virus) and at the time an unprecedented show of support for gay rights: More than half a million people showed up to demand their rights that fall.
36 years later, the PRIDE employee resource group recognizes that there are still areas where employees experience a workplace environment where “coming out” is not welcomed. Coming out of the closet, shortened to “coming out,” is often a metaphor used to describe LGBTQIA2S+ people’s self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation or gender identity. “Coming out” is often framed and debated as a privacy issue in the workplace. “Coming out” is experienced variously as a psychological process or journey. In coming out there is: decision-making or risk-taking; a strategy or plan; a matter of personal identity; a rite of passage; liberation or emancipation from oppression; feelings of LGBT pride, shame and social stigma; or even a career-threatening act.
Our PRIDE employee resource group acknowledges that “coming out” has been the common term for someone who acknowledges being LGBTQIA2S+ but it is a lived experience and therefore is experienced differently by different individuals. It is also important to note that this language centers on the people that are the audience to the “coming out” rather than the LGBTQIA2S+ individuals themselves who are coming out. It gives the impression that people who don’t identify as cisgender or heterosexual are hiding something from society and need to be honest and come out, rather than acknowledging how homophobia and transphobia create an unwelcoming environment.
When publicly identifying as LGBTQIA2S+, an individual is inviting people into a personal part of their life journey. A part that requires being vulnerable and that should be protected and celebrated. “Coming out” is not about your LGBTQIA2S+ co-worker(s) asking permission to be themselves. “Coming out” is the opportunity for LGBTQIA2S+ people to control the narrative, as well as who and what they allow into their life.
This October the PRIDE employee resource group wants you to focus on the collective power of expanding allyship practices across all departments and creating a psychologically safe workplace environment. We want you to not look at National Coming Out Day as a mandate for gays to out themselves but as an opportunity to uphold an inclusive and respectful workplace environment for all employees and celebrate the month of LGBT history.
Everyone deserves a life free from bias, discrimination and hate — and we are working hard every single day to make sure that is a reality for you and for everyone. We are going to build a world where every LGBTQIA2S+ person can be healthy, safe, liberated, celebrated and joyful in every area of our lives – without exception!
Things heard from a young woman’s mouth: [speaking of potential romantic matches] “I would definitely want someone open-minded but not a freak. So … you shouldn’t be into feet, but, you know, a little choking’s [indistinct] fun, you know.”
Can we start this humanity thing over from level one? Where’s the reset button?
Some women are into it… That said, it’s edge play and thus risks serious injury or death. It shouldn’t be seen as casual “spice”. People should receive education to that effect (and an understanding that if you kill her on accident it’s 100% on you and the law should treat it as such). I’ll certainly not engage in it regardless of what a potential partner is into.
In 1978, Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag as a symbol of LGBTQ+ pride and hope for the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Celebration.
Baker first created the Rainbow Flag with a collective. He refused to trademark it, seeing it as a symbol for the #LGBTQ+ community. #LGBTQHistoryMonth
They correctly note, in the image and in the caption, that it was a “Gay Pride flag” and it was for use in a “Gay Freedom Celebration”, but they nonetheless insist it was intended as a symbol of “LGBTQ+ pride” and for the “LGBTQ+ community”, despite there not being such a thing 45 years ago.
… but they nonetheless insist it was intended as a symbol of “LGBTQ+ pride” and for the “LGBTQ+ community”, despite there not being such a thing 45 years ago.
Margot Polivy has died. I have to admit that I had never heard of her, but I knew her work. She was one of the drivers of the push to enact Title IX. There was a lot of opposition to it at the time, but as she pointed out much of that was more about money than misogyny.
The legislation was resisted by the NCAA and opposed by some members of Congress and university administrators who argued that the measure would drain funds from football and other men’s sports that contributed significantly to university revenue.
“The problem is that you’re thinking in terms of equality for men and women,” Ms. Polivy recalled one university leader remarking to her. “Well, I’m all in favor of equality for men and women. But it’s not just men and women; there’s men and women and football players.”
***
Ms. Polivy readily conceded that misogyny was not to blame for all opposition to Title IX. Many university administrators are “at worst basically indifferent to women’s needs, and often favorably disposed in theory toward increased athletic opportunities for women,” she wrote in a commentary published in the New York Times in 1978. “The root of their opposition is money.”
She eventually drafted some anodyne language that had the effect of assuaging those fears.
In the hubbub of activity on Capitol Hill, Ms. Polivy had no desk and scribbled her proposed provision on the back of U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.). The amendment, successfully introduced by U.S. Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.), called simply for “reasonable provisions considering the nature of particular sports.”
“In essence, it reassured colleges that they wouldn’t have to spend the same money on gymnastic equipment as they did on football equipment, nor have equal event-management budgets for games attended by 100 people as games attended by 100,000 people,” sportswriter Michael MacCambridge wrote in the 2023 book “The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America.”
“It was both obvious and suitably vague,” he continued, quoting Ms. Polivy, who said of the amendment: “It was a word salad.”
On the effects of Title IX:
Ms. Polivy, reflecting on the impact of Title IX, wrote in the Times that thanks to the law, “all the old arguments about the preference of ‘normal’ girls for passive pursuits have come to be universally recognized for the foolishness they are.
“Indeed,” she continued, “equal opportunity in athletics has come to symbolize for many women the larger recognition that it is both right and rewarding to compete, to achieve and to excel.”
No word on how she felt about the current threat to Title IX from the trans movement.
taking in a significant amount of football money doesn’t mean a school’s football program is actually profitable. Profitable college football programs are not the rule; they are the exception. As pointed out in the International Business Times, “Most public universities lose money on their athletic programs.”
It isn’t really the money, you know. Or maybe it is, but not because the school’s are making money off the football team. They like to say that; I hear it all the time, but almost all schools are losing money on sports. It could be they don’t want to lose more money by adding women’s sports, but saying that would be admitting what a revenue sink the damn football team is.
Now where would schools actually gain something by a program? Why, science grants! (Maybe other departments, too, probably, but I don’t know as much about them). My major professor when I was doing my doctorate was bringing more money into the school than any other professor on campus. His research grants made him a man to reckon with. The football team, on the other hand, was losing not only games but money. So what was the response of administration? Build a new stadium! Now they lose games in a better stadium.
Pop quiz: Keeping in mind which department draws in more money, do you think the school will build a science building before a stadium? Of course not. Stadiums are big flashy places everyone goes to, and that might be seen on TV. Donors donate to them. Science buildings are ordinary looking buildings (only with microscopes and skeletons) that no one watches on TV because it isn’t all that interesting to watch students in class.
So Rishi Sunak has given in. Faced with a backlash to his mild remarks about biological sex at the Conservative Party Conference, it looks as though the Government intends to go ahead with a complete ban on “conversion therapy”.
Oh, yes, I know about the lie of big sports money and universities. I was fortunate enough to go to a school that had dismantled a onetime highly successful football program, and built a library where the stadium had stood. It was (and still is) extremely well-funded.
But I think Polivy had a point–the people in power saw and benefited from the flow of money, even if the universities didn’t. (The NCAA is basically a money-printing organization.)
Yes, I imagine. And the universities benefit from the visibility. Great libraries don’t get you publicity; they don’t give people a reason to go to your school (though they should, especially if the academic programs are equally good).
Et tu, Bob? Even “Quirks and Quarks,” a show that has been giving me great info on science for years, is now being infested with trans “queering of science.” I was listening on what may be my last good MC ride of the season today, and this segment came in:
A new book lays out why women’s bodies may have driven evolution which was going great in discussing the importance of the differences between the sexes wrt evolution until Cat Bohannon started rambling about how the cocktail of hormones that transwomen take to breastfeed their babies is the same as those given to women who don’t naturally produce much milk and need some help.
Early summer there was a segment on how “queer scientists” put on a show in Toronto to wow the audience with how queer science can be. I’m sorry CBC, I used to respect you.
But I think Polivy had a point–the people in power saw and benefited from the flow of money, even if the universities didn’t. (The NCAA is basically a money-printing organization.)
It wasn’t long ago that athletes could get suspended by the NCAA for accepting a ride from the coach during a blizzard, while the coach could make millions with a shoe contract by requiring the players wear a certain brand.
Carole Hooven has found something alarming in the journal “Hormones and Behavior”:
“We [are] well-positioned to implement this deconstructionist approach in lieu of binary sex frameworks, to move away from this hypersimplistic sex model…’Sex’ is a constructed category, not a biological variable – and our science should reflect that.”
The University of Cambridge’s national library has been accused of blacklisting books in a “sinister” new decolonising drive, the Telegraph can disclose.
The University Library, one of just six legal deposit libraries in Britain with some 10 million books, is asking lecturers to flag “problematic” books that might be “offensive/harmful”.
Examples of such books are being sought from across the university’s colleges, with officials planning to draw up guidance for librarians and readers on how to cope with them. — Telegraph
From the Palestine Mandate, entrusted to Britain by the Council of the League of Nations in 1922:
ARTICLE 2. The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion. [My emphasis]
This bit from a report on a trans mentorship program in the Twin Cities definitely has me wondering what’s going on:
One thing that Hangsleben noted about the Twin Cities is the fact that the number of young people who identify as LGBTQ+ is growing. “The Minnesota Department of Education did a survey in 2022 and reported that almost 40% of eighth grade students in Hennepin County identify as asexual, bisexual, queer and pansexual,” she said.
Behold the power of suggestion on young minds, I’d say. And beware too.
Here’s a link to the report, if anyone’s interested in reading it. It’s clear to me that Minnesota is where transgender ideology is firmly entrenched.
FWIW, the report I linked to is a personal story and it doesn’t take a critical approach to the subject of gender and mental health. That the minor had been suffering from overall mental distress was noted, but with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and subsequent affirmation there was improvement seen and the mentor program is also noted as a positive factor in that improvement. So the narrative of the report is a positive one and there’s nothing to question, other than the 40% figure in that survey I noted.
Except that such narratives may be persuasive when presented in schools, both to kids as well as adults.
That the minor had been suffering from overall mental distress was noted, but with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and subsequent affirmation there was improvement seen and the mentor program is also noted as a positive factor in that improvement.
I’m guessing that extra attention of any kind, even outside of “affirmation” would have been helpful, and that a mentor of any kind, even a non-trans one, would have resulted in improvement. That 40% figure sure sounds like social contagion and band wagoneering rather something real. Special treatment, extra attention, a trans day or month of something or other several hundred times a year; how many wouldn’t think about maybe signing up for that?
Eighth grade is right about the point where kids are in puberty. Eighth grade is an awful place to be, because you are changing so rapidly physically, and while you’re starting to feel sort of adult, you aren’t an adult. And for girls, they are usually growing breasts and curves, and boys are starting to notice them, not always in a positive manner. It seems like the ideal spot for trans activists to target young people, because kids and their identities are so wobbly at that point.
The suspect is still at large, Maine residents in two-three counties are told to shelter in place (it’s not particularly close to me, but who knows?). A Maine congressman has reversed his stance on assault weapons bans, and is now calling for just that.
The world has gone totally insane.
Oh, and it looks like this guy is the sort of guy they would usually think of when they say “a good guy with a gun”. It never occurs to them that a good guy with a gun can become a bad guy with a gun with only small nudging over the line in some cases.
Eighteen people are dead. Let’s hope we get more than thoughts and prayers.
Bitterly ironic as it accepts that men are women without batting an eye, and are complicit in forcing this belief on the rest of the country through its dishonest reporting (TiMs in women’s prisons, sports, politics, etc.).
I see that the topic on Buffy Saint-Marie has been closed (for perfectly good reasons), so I’ll add a few thoughts here.
I am yet again struck by the conflict between ancestry and cultural heritage. Buffy Saint-Marie is a member of a tribe. She speaks the Cree language well enough to teach it to others. She worked with indigenous youth. She has been strongly involved in advocacy for indigenous people. She has participated in many tribal events. Isn’t that important?
Someone born to American parents who is adopted by an Italian couple and grows up immersed in Italian culture, is it acceptable to call that person Italian? I think that person is a better representative of Italian life and culture than someone who grew up in the US outside of an immigrant community who only discovers Italian ancestry through a DNA test.
I understand that truth is important, and whether her claims of indigenous background are true, mistaken impressions on her part, or falsifications, is thus also important. But I don’t get the impression she used her (possibly inaccurate) indigenous ancestry for self-aggrandizement.
Well the CBC article did mention prizes and awards she got for being indigenous.
I take your point but I think she could have called herself an advocate for indigenous people (or a friend, or admirer, or a list of similar things) rather than claiming to be indigenous.
She could have refrained from calling herself indigenous. If she is not indigenous, and knew that. Perhaps she did. I’m not clear on the facts of the matter in the situation.
Part of my concern, though, is that so many of these prizes and awards are for people with a particular ethnic background, when at least some of them could be for representation of a particular culture. Best Italian meal at a restaurant may not require that the chef actually have Italian ancestry, just to throw out an example. There was much controversy when a non-Japanese wrestler rose to the top of the sumo rankings; his skill and his knowledge of the sumo culture really should have been more important, in my estimation, but a bunch of people wanted the laurels to go only to Japanese wrestlers.
So that’s what I’m wrestling with, you might say. Or I might. :-)
I’ve long been uneasy with my role in manufacturing weapons of war… but that was when it was really just for the War on Terror. Making stuff to kill people felt morally dubious (but earning a paycheck is what you do). Now though? Seems like a lot of people need killing these days, so I’m considerably more sanguine about the whole thing…
Point of clarification on Buffy Ste. Marie being “adopted,” because I was confused, too.
The family that raised her (the Santamarias) was white. Her story has been that they adopted her as an infant, but the recent CBC reporting is that there’s no record of that, and it appears that they are actually her birth parents — there’s a birth certificate from Massachusetts listing her as being born to the Santamarias (and listing her and the parents as white). The adoption story seems to have been invented by her sometime in her 20s, and it’s shifted around a bit as to whether she knew her birth parents, what tribe they were, etc. Her family members have disputed it, only to be threatened with lawsuits. (One now-deceased brother was apparently threatened that if he disputed Buffy’s heritage, she would accuse him of sexually abusing her. The abuse may of course have happened, I have no way of knowing, but obviously it’s a little suspicious when it’s raised in that context.)
As an adult, she was “adopted” by a Cree couple, which is apparently a cultural practice that has significance to the tribe. But that’s obviously very different from the story she’s told, and from the hypothetical posed by Sackbut.
Important post on The Free Press website: ‘Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It’ by Finnish psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala.
Epic–I mean, EPIC–takedown of a man minimizing the assault on Maria MacLachlan by JK Rowling. She hands him his butt on a platter and seasons it for him.
By all means, let’s be rational. Let’s look at the facts.
You’ve now called the battery (legal term for ‘assault by beating’) of a 60-year-old woman by a 26-year-old male, for which the man was convicted and fined, a minor offence. You’ve lol-ed while minimising. You entered my timeline to police my language when I made reference to this violent male assault in a conversation you weren’t part of. You denied that Maria MacLachlan was punched, even though it was stated clearly in the headline of the article you yourself posted. You were shown video of said assault, but continued to jeer, asserting that the victim suffered ‘a light slap’, in a Tweet you’ve now deleted.
These are not the pronouncements of a man who takes male violence against women seriously. On the contrary, with every denial of plain fact and minimisation of the offence, every ‘lol’, every airy reference to ‘ACTUAL’ beatings, you reveal yourself as a man who’s indifferent at best to women being physically intimidated or hit.
Out of interest, how many punches does a woman have to take for it to qualify as a @WVSoccerdad-approved, actual beating? What would you want to see – broken bones? Decent bit of blood?
Now let’s examine your own approach to rational debate. All of this began when you thrust your way onto my timeline to tell me I was lying. With your ‘come down from the cross’ comment, which was made two Tweets in, you whipped out the standard ‘playing the victim’ card against the woman you were calling in a liar. Some might not see this as rational debate. Some might even say you’ve been offensive from the start: to me, to Maria MacLachlan, and to every person disgusted by what happened to her. Now you’re huffy because people have called you a misogynist. Violent assault of a woman: lol-worthy. Your hurt feelings: very serious business.
‘You should be better than this’, you say. Try and grasp – it’ll be hard, I know – that my interest in your opinion of me is roughly equivalent to my interest in how much dust is currently under my fridge. I know you think you’re a heckuva great guy, and it’s come as a shock to get feedback that suggests not everyone agrees, so here’s some unsolicited advice, in exchange for all you’ve given me. In future, try mocking women being knocked around in the privacy of your own house, instead of ‘lol’-ing about it on the internet.
When I was detained in Tehran in 1999 in the ayatollahs’ prison,
I could never have imagined that one could also be imprisoned in the West for the same reason.
The day before yesterday, it was announced in the United States that they have a comprehensive plan to fight Islamophobia.
What might this national plan entail?
Criminalising “Islamophobia” and making it punishable?
Here in Belgium too, UNIA wants to do the same and as a member of parliament, I have been trying to stop this for years with debates in parliament. More and more people are trying to silence people who criticise Islam.
However, it is a fundamental right to be able to criticise religions and political views.
When I was detained in a prison of Ayatollah Khamenei in 1999 at 23 for criticising the way I was marginalised as a woman by Islam as a second-rate gender, I never imagined that I could ever face a prison sentence in the West because of the same criticism.
Why should I not be allowed to say that many aspects in Islamic law violate human dignity and fundamental rights? Will I be prosecuted for Islamophobia because of that? Where would that leave my civil rights and freedoms? I did not flee an Islamic country only to lose my freedom of speech in this country, because of such a thoughtless proposal.
Islam is a religion that has not yet experienced enlightenment and many discriminatory rules from thousands of years ago, institutionalised in this religion, are still in force.
Moreover, Islamism is a pernicious ideology that wants to conquer the world.
In the Muslim world, there are many critics who openly criticise it, even if they have to pay with their lives, because Sharia law is not tolerant.
In the West, under the guise of religious freedom, the radical Muslims try to further perpetuate their discriminatory views, especially against women. And anyone who criticises them is called polarising, stigmatising and Islamophobic.
And sometimes they can get right with some “progressives”, who themselves, in the not so distant past, stood up against certain rules of another religion.
But now, suddenly, they are no longer critics of gender inequality or so many other discriminatory rules of Islam.
Because of their cultural relativism, they are abandoning millions of women and young girls, including here with us.
While Western civilisation waits for “enlightened” Islam and it is believed that the change must come from the Muslims themselves, some of them abandon the reforming critical eyes and silence them because it is allegedly “stigmatising”.
Maybe they believe in miracles, but all I see in this way is an evolution towards a dark future.
The West urgently needs a wake-up call to ensure the future of our posterity.
That should be our mission.
Darya Safai, MP, includes two photos of herself – one in headcovering and one in freedom.
Thanks for the link to the J. K. Rowling post; that was a great way to start a morning. I love the comment about being about as interested in his opinion as in how much dust is under her fridge.
A friend gifted me this link, sorry it may be paywalled. Really interesting analysis of how and why US democracy has fallen from being world leading, to one of the least democratic democracy’s in the world.
In order to #BanConversionTherapy we need to invest in housing so queer youth have somewhere to go when parents won’t affirm. We need to disrupt online spaces where parents are radicalised. We need to treat pro-CT groups like anti-vaxxers.
The phrasing makes it sound like Thorn wants people to go after places likes Mumsnet and Transgender Trend, where parents worried about gender ideology can discuss issues together.
Also, can I say the whole campaign against “conversion therapy” (actually the “watchful waiting” therapy) is the purest example of a “Moral panic” that I can think of?
A mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behaviour or group of people is dangerously deviant and poses a threat to society’s values and interests.
This is a “moral panic” – that there’s a epidemic of “conversion therapy” promoted by “powerful transphobes” in Britain, and it’s harming children and teenagers (“trans children” and Thorn’s “queer youth”).
A post over on Pharyngula brought me up short – apparently, male and female kiwis (the birds) have different calls. But how do they know which is which???
@Holms – those stupid birds don’t realize they can assign their hatchlings’ sex. Here’s a WaPo article about color vision deficiencies in children, and it starts off badly:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali says she’s found God. She now says she has abandoned atheism and become a Christian.
Ali says “Western Civilization” is under threat from Russia, China and the Islamic world, and secular philosophies can’t protect West. Civ. from the enemies.
So She writes.” The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Interesting she doesn’t seem interested in Christian ideas like the Resurrection and Original Sin – it’s Christianity as a means of social cohesion that she seems to be interested in.
Mostly Cloudy @382, I think that’s always been one of the major attractions of religion. I don’t think that all that many people really care about the details of the belief, and certainly not about the specific doctrinal beliefs that seperate say one christian church from another. It’s that pull to belong, to feel a part of a community where you are involved, loved, and supported. We’ve probably all met people for whom that is the case. There was that English philosopher a few years back who proposed ‘atheist cathedrals’ just so that atheists could have that experience of community through shared ceremony and procedure. Some people displace that into following a sports team, gamer culture, family, politics, social causes. All of which can be constructive, but all of which can become pathologically destructive as well. Just like religion.
The Judeo(cultural appropriation)-Christian tradition is as much an enemy and stumbling block to Western civilization as the Islamists and Slavic barbarians are; moreso even in some respects because it makes us stupid. Enemies you can shoot at, stupidity is harder to kill.
Yes. Orthodox Christianity is a non-Western tradition of Christianity over a thousand years old, and the Russian faction of it largely supports Putin (who seems to be a practicing Christian).
I did not know until today that there’s a senator named Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma. A Republican, of course. Anyway, it seems he’s a tough guy. At least when he’s grilling a union boss in a Senate hearing.
I don’t have an independent source for this, but a Facebook friend who was at the pro-Israel rally yesterday had this to say:
Few recognized another diverse aspect of the March. The singers (including Israeli great Oner Adam) were men because Orthodox Jewish men are not supposed to hear women singers – but the recorded Israeli music between speakers did include some women.
So once again women are forced to be silent in the name of “diversity”.
A pool player named Lynne Pinches forfeited her chance to win a national title rather than play a trans-identified man. And she had the support of the room.
More of this, please!
EXCERPTS:
A pool player has forfeited her chance to win a top national title in protest at the sport allowing a transgender woman to compete against natal females.
Lynne Pinches told Telegraph Sport she has turned down an invitation to turn full-time professional amid her despair at a “U-turn” in international rules.
On Saturday, Pinches was cheered by spectators as she packed up her cue and refused to play as the final of the Ladies Champions of Champions got under way. Her opponent, Harriet Haynes, reacted with bemusement before later picking up the trophy by default.
“Walking out was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do in the game in my life,” said Pinches, 50, from Norwich. “I have played 30 years and I’ve never even conceded so much as a frame, never mind a match. This was only my fourth final ever but the trophy or money meant nothing to me without fairness, and that’s what I said to the tournament director afterwards….
***
“The devastation I have felt, I can’t even explain,” said Pinches, whose son, brother and father all played pool or snooker at elite levels. “I didn’t eat or sleep properly for two days. I was crying until 3am. I was devastated. My son Tommy, who plays on the Ultimate Pool Challenger Series, messaged me and said, ‘I know you must be absolutely devastated mum, because I know that you’ve you’ve hated this since the beginning’. He really wanted to write it on his Facebook but he was worried he’d get banned. And that’s what pushed me over the edge to be honest. I thought ‘you’ve silenced me for years. You’re not silencing my child as well’. I’m not putting up with that…”
This has been my recurring point, beyond one being the aggressor why are we rooting for Stalin instead of Hitler? They’re fundamentally the same sort of people, atavistic barbarians to the core.
Our old friend Gretchen Felker-Martin has apologised after making an appallingly *offensive* tweet defending Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center:
I support the rights of Palestinian people to live in peace, to farm their land, and to return to their ancestral homes. I do this, not because they are Muslim, but despite their religion. I do it because it is a humanitarian thing to do.
I oppose the Israeli government’s repression of Palestinians, and its support for the “settlers” in the West Bank, almost all of whom have just stepped off a plane from Europe. Every day, West Bank Palestinians are being evicted from homes their families have lived in for generations. If they resist eviction, they are likely to be shot by “settlers”. If they fight back, they will be shot by the IDF. I do not do this because they are Jews, but despite their religion. I do it because it is a humanitarian thing to do.
Coyne may be right on some aspects of Islam and this current conflict, but his article is like so many I have read this last month that equates Islam as evil and Israel as the tough little guy standing up for ‘Western Values’.
Do I think the attack by Hamas was evil? Yes, I do.
Do I think that Israel’s response was proportionate? No, I don’t. Israel has the right to defend itself, but the right to self defence does not, or should not, be the wholesale destruction of civil infrastructure. Israel is losing the propaganda war, it is losing some of the support it has traditionally held from around the world. And it is desperately spinning the narrative to try to keep looking like the “good guys with guns” when the reality is the IDF and Hamas are two sides of the same coin.
Right now, just like the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel is creating a breeding ground for the next batch of Hamas and other terrorists. When you leave people with no hope, they also have nothing to lose.
Not all Israelis are Likud. Not all Palestinians are Hamas.
While Islam has some regressive theology it hasn’t always been that way. It has often been like Christianity and Judaism, where the holy books are full of evil ideas, but the adherents choose which bits to follow and which bits to ignore. There are Jews who eat shellfish, Muslims who drink alcohol, and Catholics who use birth control and all still see themselves as faithful followers of their religion.
Your great ally in the ME, Saudi Arabia, is the exporter to the world of the worst form of Islam, Wahhabism. This is the origin of the worst aspects of modern day Islam. Historically Muslims lived in peace with their neighbours, and countries like Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Lebanon once had thriving, secular societies where people were free to worship or not, where women were educated, owned wealth, and chose their own partners. This didn’t change because the people decided to become more religiously conservative, it changed because of outside forces that created a feeling of oppression
In Australia, we have one of the world’s greatest train journeys, from Adelaide to Alice Springs, and later extended to Darwin. It is called “The Ghan”; short for “The Afghan Express”. It is named for the Afghan cameleers who created the route from Adelaide to Alice, who carried the goods on their camels, who built mosques and who often intermarried with local Aboriginal tribes. They helped build society, they did not tear it down, oppress women, or attempt to overthrow the government.
And finally, while there is much in Islam to despise, while there is much of Islam that is anti-women, the same can be said for sections of Judaism. I recall a number of articles here about Jewish men forcing women out of their airline seats, Jewish men who insist their wives both produce vast numbers of children and earn an income so the men can spend their days studying their holy books.
There is much angst in Australian indigenous communities over the legal fiction of Terra Nullius that was used as the excuse for colonising a continent and pretending that there were no pre-existing communities. The same justification is used by apologists for Israel. You’ll hear/read there never was a country called Palestine, there was no government between the river and the sea until Israel was formed. There is a sliver of truth there, but total ignorance of the fact that people lived, worked, played, and yes, worshipped there long before modern Israel was a twinkle in Balfour’s eye.
To paraphrase the Bard
Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Palestinian wrong a Jew, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Jew wrong a Palestinian, what should his sufferance be by Jewish example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Thank you Reverend David Brindley for your eloquent statement.
Whoever knew that explaining why Israel might be responsible for some of the anger that exists against it meant that one was celebrating the Hamas attack?
I guess the same people who knew that explaining the roots of 9-11/2001 were actually justifying it. (I suppose.)
Who knew that not wanting thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza to be slaughtered meant total support for all aspects of “Muslim societies”?
The same people who say that opposing the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is Jew-hating fascism (as well as misogyny). [Waitaminnit! Aren’t some of the 12,000 dead and the tens of thousands traumatized FEMALE???]
It’s been appalling reading commenters here saying that Israel has every right to bomb hospitals. To read people saying with a straight face that the IDF is trying to minimize civilian casualties when IDF spokespersons and Israeli politicians have said quite clearly that they want to create a “city of tents” and that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, and the ELECTED Netanyahu is babbling about doing what the Israelites did to the people of Amalek in the Bible, which was to kill them all as well as their animals so that nothing of their society remained. To read how the failure of any “peace process” has mainly been the fault of the Palestinians when it has always been the Israelis who have the most power in this equation and who have been using this power to steal the Palestinians’ land and to smash them when they resist.
THREE TIMES I mentioned Israeli snipers deliberately shooting innocent people (including nurses and children) during a peaceful Palestinian protest in 2018 and each time it was as if I’d never mentioned it.
While 12,000 innocent people are killed, and over a million more are being deprived of the necessities of life, let’s post about how people angry about this might be protesting in bad taste. Apparently the worst thing about this is that Israel’s barbarism has given antisemites an opportunity to spew their racist garbage. How dare they take advantage of Israel’s barbarism like that!!!!
If I were to have posted links to news stories about women convicted of false rape or abuse allegations during the “Me Too”/Jeffrey Epstein moment, I would expect that people would think I had an agenda.
If I were to have posted links to stories about Black people killing each other or about vandalism and riots during the George Floyd/BLM protests, I would expect that people would think I had an agenda.
Again I say: If you want to understand how otherwise decent, intelligent people (especially women) can have gotten the whole “Trans vs. gender critical” debate so titanically wrong, some of you should review how you have responded to this tragedy.
I’m not a fan of his marketing luxury cars to conspicuous consumers under the false pretenses of environmental benefits either. My neighbor drives by in his Tesla with a “zero emissions” license tag on it. Sure, zero local emissions, but it’s misleading and dishonest.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, true, and his license tag reading “zero emissions” is not completely correct. But people do no realize just how much energy goes into the production and delivery of petrol to your pump, with emissions being pumped into the atmosphere along the way. There is the extraction, the distribution of crude to refineries, refining, distribution logistics to the pump, pumping, and then burning an inefficient product, with another set of emissions. This is what we are trying to reduce in moving to electric vehicles. For gasoline and diesel engines, it’s a continuous need for energy in all these phases in order to get to transportation.
An EV uses mined minerals, some of them rare earth minerals with a cost to the environement. An EV also relies on a source of electricty. Some of it is from renewable sources, but yes, most of it is still carbon-based. However, the amount that’s coming from renewable sources is increasing. In Minnesota, more than 31% of our electricity comes from renewable sources, and while 69% comes from carbon-based, it’s changing. We are still in a nascent phase of moving from carbon to other energy sources. But I don’t know what people expect we should do and perhaps you can help.
Should we wait until we can flip a switch from all-carbon to all-renewable?
Cobalt is one element that is frequently mentioned as a reason that EV’s are bad. But more cobalt is currently used for jet engines by a long shot than is used for EV batteries and new technology is being developed to make batteries using lithium, which is an abundant element. And cobalt can be recycled when batteries reach the end of life.
If we use cobalt and other elements as the reason that we don’t move to EV’s, should we also stop using computers, cell phones, watches, TV’s and everything else that requires such elements?
The thing is, if the car I bought in July uses some carbon based electricty for power now, it will use less in five years and even less five years from then. But if I had bought a gas powered car then it would always be a gas powered car. And I have yet to see a gasoline powered car that can generate more gas in my tank as I break or coast. My car has regenerative breaking.
And it has also saved me a ton of money on what I was paying for fuel.
Good points all Mike, thanks. I’m not against electric cars, that’s the future. I think if electric vehicles could be produced without using fossil fuels, and operated and maintained likewise, then a “zero emissions” plate would make more sense. Hybrids make sense too, storing and releasing otherwise wasted energy. I understand the way these systems work, and I don’t think the technology is bad, or the idea of drastically reducing our dependence on fossil fuels isn’t absolutely necessary, because it is. As you say, it will be a gradual thing, and the infrastructure will have to catch up. I think we agree on this.
I think I object to the misleading marketing mostly, and the hype that surrounds Musk in particular. I do tend to go on about that, but I really don’t understand the exaltation of, what I think is, a successful businessman. Not a genius, not an enigma, not a savant, just a successful businessman. Sure he’s eccentric, but aren’t we all?
Also not lost on me is the fact that EVs are subsidized, so we taxpayers are contributing to the producers of EVs, even if we object to who’s profiting and how.
Israel has the right to defend itself, but the right to self defence does not, or should not, be the wholesale destruction of civil infrastructure.
Is there such “wholesale destruction” though? From what I am seeing in photos like those in the following article, the damage to infrastructure in Gaza is limited to buildings that Hamas fighters are using, either to launch missiles or attack IDF forces. It’s targeted, not indiscriminate.
And who was it who told you “the damage to infrastructure in Gaza is limited to buildings that Hamas fighters are using”? On what basis do you believe this claim?
Have you not seen the TV reports of Palestinian civilians being pulled from the rubble of bombed buildings?
I guess you were taken in by the staged photos of weapons neatly laid out in a hospital ward, rather than being shown in situ. You probably also believed the other photos the IDF published showing Hamas have so much free tIme their vehicles are wearing a spotless showroom shine.
I’m not claiming that all IDF attacks are only hitting Hamas targets. What I am claiming is that the IDF is not indiscriminately bombing civilian infrastructure. The basis for my claim is the satellite imagery showing that most of the infrastructure is still there.
The news coverage deservedly focuses on the damage that has been done and it’s impossible to have not seen and heard about civilians being killed in Gaza, and I’m skeptical about the claims Netanyahu made about the cache of weapons found in said hospital. I’m also skeptical about claims that the IDF is deliberately targeting civilians.
“the IDF is not indiscriminately bombing civilian infrastructure.”
I’ve seen before/after comparisons of satellite imagery showing entire blocks of building shattered, even amongst residential areas, so I don’t see how that claim bears up at all.
As the IDF continues to advance in northern Gaza, the fighting is resulting in more destruction as Hamas forces resist, so I will revise my claim accordingly. That said, southern Gaza is not being attacked.
Yes. Eastasia has always been at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
You’re obvs not very good at keeping up with the news.
18 Nov 2023
At least 28 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes on two residential areas of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
A neighbourhood in Hamad was struck in a bombardment on Saturday, said Al Jazeera’s Youmna ElSayed, reporting from Khan Younis. Dozens were also wounded in the attack that mostly killed children.
Oct 25 (Reuters) – Israel has told civilians in the northern Gaza Strip, including residents of Gaza City, to move to the south of the enclave, saying it will be safer there as the military attacks Hamas following its Oct. 7 cross-border assault.
However, Israeli warplanes have continued to hit sites in southern Gaza, spreading fear among the evacuees that they are just as vulnerable there as they were in their homes in the north. Here is an overview of the situation.
WHY IS ISRAEL STILL HITTING THE SOUTH?
Since telling Gazans to head south, the Israeli military (IDF) has continued to pound targets across the area, killing an unknown number of civilians. In all, authorities in Gaza say 6,546 Palestinians have died since Israeli strikes started on Oct. 7.
Again I say: If you want to understand how otherwise decent, intelligent people (especially women) can have gotten the whole “Trans vs. gender critical” debate so titanically wrong, some of you should review how you have responded to this tragedy.
I’m staggered at the number of GC women I follow on Xwitter who are all in on the “Israel is Holy and infallible” brainfart.
We often say that it isn’t up to women to solve men’s problems. To me, modern Israel is in the same basket. Europe forced the Palestinians to “fix” Europe’s problem with Jews. There was no bar to Jews living in Palestine, there was no need to forcibly create Israel on Palestinian land.
A new homeland for Europe’s Jews should have been carved out of Bavaria and Austria.
I should have been clearer and said attacked by ground forces, which is what’s responsible for most of the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza.
Israel has said that they’re going to attack Hamas wherever they are in Gaza, so the announcement by leaflets of an imminent ground attack by the IDF on Khan Younis in the south was covered a few days ago, I know.
For what it’s worth, I’m not following the war closely so I don’t mind your criticism. Any recommendations you may have regarding accurate coverage would be appreciated.
J.A., I understand. As for “accurate coverage”, that’s almost an oxymoron these days.
I like Al Jazeera as they have so many resources so close, but even they are not immune to some bias.
I discount almost anything that comes from a Murdoch source, especially Fox and the NY Times.
Anything from an overtly Jewish or Arabic source is likely to be biased, particularly if that source isn’t media but political/social/ethnic clubs.
Whenever Israel makes an announcement by leaflets of an imminent ground attack by the IDF all they are doing is pretending they care about civilians. Just what do those leaflets say?
Wassup, guys, we’re about to bomb the shit out of your homes, so pack your camel and leave. NO! Civilians ONLY, Hamas, you stay right where you are so we can bomb you.
Rupert Murdoch controls the Wall Street Journal, Fox, News Corp, and the New York Post. A.G. Sulzberger’s family trust runs the New York Times (Sulzberger is the publisher).
Sometimes I wonder if PZ knows he is talking shit, and is giggling at the people he fools. Otherwise, I have no explanation for how thick his blinders must be to not see the problem with what he just posted:
…
Then I see this species of harvestmen that put my spiders to shame. Look at this gigantic [chelicera] on the animal’s head! It can be up to 50% of their body weight!
The surprised don’t end there. These harvestmen have three distinct kinds of males, alpha, beta, and gamma, all distinguishable by the morphology of their genitals, and then there are females, of course (only one flavor, though). So four sexes?
Alpha males are male. Beta males are male. Gamma males are male. Females are female. Just the usual two sexes, and the same facetious drivel as his much older comment about there being seven sexes of horse (mare, stallion, gelding, freemarten, etc.).
QUEBEC — Non-binary Montrealer Alexe Frédéric Migneault is on Day 3 of a hunger strike to pressure Quebec’s public health insurance board to add a third gender option to health cards.
Migneault, whose pronouns are they/them, is camping near the board’s office in Quebec City and says they won’t give up their strike until the cards carry an alternative to the traditional “M” or “F” identifiers.
But haven’t we been told numerous times that sex and gender are two completely different things? Yet here’s someone who thinks their gender identity means that they are no longer male or female.
An unreasonable demand for recognition of an impossible thing, backed with emotional blackmail. I think that’s a trifecta. Or, since this is Quebec, a hat-trick.
A transgender swimmer at a college in New Jersey broke a women’s school record after having competed with the men’s team for the previous three years.
Meghan Cortez-Fields took first place and broke the Ramapo College school record in the 100-yard butterfly with a time of 57.22 at a meet this past weekend. She also finished first in the 200-yard individual medley and was second in the 200-yard butterfly.
But there was pushback from Riley Gaines on Twitter, so a congratulatory post from the college that allowed the cheating to happen was deleted.
The college responded to Fox News, saying that the school “supports all of our student athletes.”
“The original post of Meghan’s achievement was deleted by a peer who wanted to protect their teammate from insulting comments on the post,” the school spokesperson said.
How many of those “insulting” comments would have simply been pointing out that he was a male and a cheat. If you can’t handle the truth, stop pushing your goddamn fantasy on the rest of the world. And what of the insult to the women on “his” team, and the insult to the woman who was pushed aside to make way for this narcissist? What of the other women from all the other teams you cheated against? I guess pointing out cheating is worse than cheating itself.
And who was the cheat’s inspiration? “Lia” Thomas.
Last year, Cortez-Fields told The Ramapo News that she admired Lia Thomas, the trans University of Pennsylvania swimmer who controversially won an NCAA Championship in 2022.
Cortez-Fields said at the time that Thomas “is an inspiration to me in that way, but also I felt so bad for her because I know exactly what she was going through. Even going into this season, I had a fear of succeeding, because I don’t want what happened to her to happen to me.”
Why should you feel bad for someone who was justly criticized for cheating and violating women’s spaces? Your role model is a toxic, entitled asshole. I’ll say this much for you; you’re doing a good job following in his footsteps. Like him, you wanted the fruits of cheating without facing the resulting disapprobation. Like him, you have others at the college coaching and administration levels running interference for you*. Funny how empathy never seems to extend beyond the bounds of their own thin skins. You deserve each other. A few more like you and you’ll have your own division, and you’ll be able to leave women’s swimming the fuck alone.
*Had there been any justice, the coaches and members of the governing swim federation would have stood up for all the women against your invasion of their team and their sport. You should have been laughed out of the room and told to go jump in the lake, not into a lane. Instead, they paved the way for you, and women are left to their own devices as you cheat and their places and their medals.
YNnB, for the coaches, it’s all about winning. Oh, they give lip service to “it’s the competition, not the outcome” and to doing it for love of sport, but they know if they don’t win often enough, their job will go to someone else. The administration is all about winning, too. Good PR. That’s why faculty get pressured to make sure athletes pass (I’m not so sure that’s the case with women athletes, though; I don’t remember ever being asked to provide a progress report on a woman athlete, though I did have to provide a progress report on e-sports athletes).
And for the fans it’s about winning. They don’t mind if it’s a good, well matched game as long as their team wins. If it’s a blow out, even better. (Growing up in Oklahoma, I learned that winning 10-7 was not enough; they wanted to “STOMP” the other team).
Trans athletes can give them all that…until the day all the other teams have trans, too. Then there is competition again, no more just steam rolling over the opposition.
YNnB @ 415, good luck getting insurance companies to become blind to sex. They know only too damn well that your sex relates directly to lifetime risk of certain factors that will relate to how much money they will spend on you. They’re not going to give that tool up easily.
Can we make a diversion into popular culture? Transervant Russell T. Davies is being lauded by critics for filling a TV show for families with identarian propaganda:
Doctor Who’s first 60th anniversary special is a Terf’s worst nightmare
Doctor Who not only has a trans character, but an entire trans storyline – and not even that, but trans joy…..Yasmin Finney stars s Donna’s daughter, Rose, and her being trans is more than just an inclusion for the sake of it – it’s a major plot point in a hugely positive light.
I never liked Russell T. Davies’ version of “Doctor Who” – it was filled with numerous mentions of soap operas and reality shows like “Big Brother”, as if Davies was ashamed of liking something as unfashionable as a low-budget family SF show. I always preferred the DW episodes written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss instead.
Here we have a news piece (not an op-ed) from a recent Wall Street Journal, reporting that a high school in the Chicago-adjacent town of Evanston, Illinois, is offering voluntarily race-segregated classes as a way to achieve “equity”. These classes, called “affinity classes”, are of course optional, because mandated race-segregated classes are illegal.
The claim is that voluntary racial segregation produces better academic results for minorities (the minority classes are black and Latino, not white or Asian, and the “classes of color” also have race-compatible minority teachers), but the evidence for “reducing disparities” is either thin or nonexistent.
Moreover, there’s a huge irony involved in doing this: segregating classes by race reduces diversity in the classroom, yet advocates for diversity always (again, here the evidence is thin) that greater diversity of groups leads to greater achievement of those groups on average. You can’t have it both ways!
Of course you can have things both ways in the wonderful world of Critical Theory!
Male organizer also accused of secretly running female coder Instagram account.
The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday. Orosz alleged that out of three women—Kristine Howard, Julia Krisina, and Anna Boyko—scheduled to speak at DevTernity, Krisina and Boyko were fake profiles created by the event organizers to make the event look diverse in order to “successfully attract some of the most heavy-hitter men speakers in tech.”
So, this was a case of non-existent women being promoted as real women, and a man using a female persona as director of a coding platform. At least some of these actions were intended to create the appearance of “diversity”. One of course wonders if actual speakers had been found who were men-claiming-to-be-women, would that make it even better for “diversity” because they would count as both “women” and “trans”. Part of the problem with a number of simplistic diversity initiatives is that they inadvertently encourage playing games like this.
Eventually, I will have to come out of the closet in the Minnesota DFL (Democratic party) as a TERF-supportive male. I am seeing a runaway trans train here when the Democrats have a tri-fecta government. The only people who are standing against the steamrollers are the Republicans, and I simply cannot change parties to that odious group for several reasons. But, I need to find some ally that will help me here. I just received an invitation to an event being held by the Minnesota Atheists, of which I was once a board member. It’s a meeting to join in support of the revived push for an ERA ratification in the State Constitution. But, it’s been re-worded now to include a kitchen sink of cultural minorities. And while sex is generously included, well, see for yourself what the proposed wording says:
Equality under the law shall not be abridged or denied by this state or any of its cities, counties, or other political subdivisions on account of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry, or national origin.
Emphasis mine, of course. But, it’s kind of sneaky how it’s buried in there. I do not believe that anyone should be discriminated against due to their perceptions of gender, but I am afraid that the provision will be used against women. There is a built-in self-contradictory set of clauses that will tie up the courts in interpretation.
If you, or any of your friends, know someone else in Minnesota who remains a gender critical Democrat, please have them contact me. I’m at a loss for how to stand up to this on my own.
The Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital. All the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, “Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!” No one would admit these much-admired clothes could not be seen because, in doing so, he would have been saying he was either a simpleton or unfit for his job.
“But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” said a little child. “Listen to the voice of the child!” exclaimed his father. What the child had said was whispered from one to another. “But he has nothing at all on!” at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was upset, for he knew that the people were right. However, he thought the procession must go on now! The lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold, and the Emperor walked on in his underwear.
And then a voice cut through the throng. “Blasphemer! Seize that boy!” The cries of the people died down, and were soon replaced by chants of “Misapparelist!” and “Invisible clothes are clothes!” Rough hands grabbed the boy and dragged him to the castle, through endless corridors and down steep stairwells, till finally they threw him into a cell in the deepest, dankest dungeon. A table was brought in, and the boy was shoved into a hard wooden chair, with burly guards standing at each side, ready to push him down if he tried to escape. Candles were lit on the table, and mirror set so that the light from the candle burned into his eyes, all but blinding him. From the dark faceless voices began to interrogate him.
“Did you not see the Emperor’s clothes?”
“Well, no,” stammered the boy. “All he had on was his underwear.”
“Pervert!” shouted one, and “Are you always this obsessed with other people’s undergarments?” hissed another.
“No. I mean, it was obvious…”.
“And yet you were the only one who noticed? How… convenient.”
“I’m sure that others noticed,” said the boy, gathering his courage. “It’s just they were too scared to say anything.”
At this the voices broke out into a confused cacophony. “Bigot!” “Blasphemer!” “Misapparelist!” “Visibilist scum!” And then one strident voice rose above the others. “I have just one question for you. Answer yes or no. Are the invisibly beclothed beclothed? And be forewarned: any answer other than an unequivocal ‘Yes’ will brand you for life as an invisible misapparelist!”
“Of course they’re beclothed,” reasoned the boy, “in a sense. I mean, they’re not actually beclothed, obviously, but I’m willing to say that they believe they are beclothed.”
The interrogators gasped as one. And the strident voice called out, “Bring forth this boy’s father!”
The boy’s father came through the crowd and stood next to the boy. A voice intoned, “As this boy’s father, you are responsible for his discipline. We will abide by your decision on his punishment, whatever it may be.”
“Father, surely you know I was right!”
The father looked down at his son, a solitary tear running down his cheek, and said, more in sorrow than anger, “Son, I have always brought you up to think freely, and I have always supported your right to speak your mind, even when I disagree. But in this case, I fear you have gone too far. The invisibly beclothed community is the most oppressed in our society, and anything less than our unequivocal and unquestioning support of their rights and truth is the greatest sin a visibilist can commit.” Turning to the interrogators, he began, “I sentence my son to…”.
But before he could pronounce his sentence, the boy escaped through a small crack in the wall and ran off to a secret cottage by the sea, where he lived out his life, surrounded by a small group of friends, chasing butterflies and frolicking with the otters.
Mike, I know a couple of people in Minnesota. Unfortunately, they are theatre professionals, and if they have not yet drunk the Kool-Aid, they will almost certainly pretend they have. “What? There’s no Kool-Aid lying behind me on the floor! I did not throw my Kool-Aid over my shoulder! I drank my Kool-Aid! And if I offended anyone by not drinking my Kool-Aid quickly enough, I apologize and will do whatever penance you require!”
Mike, I live across the river from the Twin Cities in Wisconsin and I have friends who are politically involved with the DFL or follow politics closely. The one time on Facebook I raised the issue of gender versus sex (via what J.K. Rowling said about Maya Forstater) there wasn’t a single one of them who sympathized with the gender critical position. It was mostly civil thankfully, but there was one acquaintance who rather than answer a polite question about what they thought the difference between sex and gender was, cursed and unfriended me. Oh well. But it did show me how entrenched the mindset is regarding the topic of gender identity among Democratic-leaning folks. They didn’t want to acknowledge that sex also matters in ways that affect women.
Given how politics on the left is driven more and more by the goal to achieve social justice, it’s hard to be critical of any part of it. I remember after the riots when George Floyd was killed saying to some that burning down businesses wasn’t right, only to be told property mattered less than lives. What? Two wrongs don’t make a right. I understood how anger over Floyd’s death would drive some to commit acts of arson and vandalism, but we shouldn’t excuse such acts either, even politically.
And now the DFL is struggling with the issue of the Israel-Hamas conflict and it’s not pretty, as divisions between Jewish and Muslim DFLers are growing, so as the saying goes, It Could Be Worse.
chigau at #426 — on the standard Windows keyboard, it’s one of the six keys on the upper-right, between the letters and the numbers. If you’re in Apple-land, I can’t help you! I saw one once — the mouse only had one button! I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without right-click!
Trans student shower allegation in Sun Prairie will be reviewed for Title IX violation
The U.S. Department of Education is opening an investigation into whether the Sun Prairie Area School District failed to report sexual harassment following an incident this spring involving a transgender student in a girls’ locker room.
Dawn Matthias with the department’s Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to the conservative law firm, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, on Wednesday, confirming the Title IX investigation.
WILL filed a complaint against the district in June alleging the school district violated Title IX rules in March, when, according to the law firm, four 14-year-old freshman girls at East High School were exposed to the genitalia of an 18-year-old senior who is transgender. …
On a standard Apple keyboard the ‘end’ key doesn’t exist (at least on laptops. If you get an extended apple keyboard it sits just below the ‘home’ key. The one button Magic Mouse is a thing of beauty, surpassed only by the touch pad. On the rare occasions I’m forced to use a mouse these days I feel like I’m being forced into some kind of arcane test.
So in a bit of a different direction, Jesse Singal mentioned in a recent news letter some interest in doing an episode of Blocked and Reported about the Atheism Plus train wreck… Any interest in collaborating on a FTB-related episode? There’s just so much stuff, some of which I’ve only heard about… The Slymepit, Richard Bukkake, Avicenna, obviously OB’s public backstabbing, gross stuff with Zinnia Jones, etc…
WILL filed a complaint against the district in June alleging the school district violated Title IX rules in March, when, according to the law firm, four 14-year-old freshman girls at East High School were exposed to the genitalia of an 18-year-old senior who is transgender.
Maybe we can remind transactivists again (as they so like to remind us when it suits them) that “sex” and “gender” are not the same, and that locker room facilities are segregated by sex alone. Being “transgender” does not change one’s sex, and males remain male however they “identify.” “Gender identities” don’t change clothes, or run races or swim laps, or ride bcycles; sexed bodies do. One’s “gender identity” has no bearing on the facilities and positions one is allowed to access, if they were originally apportioned on the basis of sex. You can play around with word meanings, but you can’t change sex. Some day sanity will return and people will wonder what the fuck people in the early 2000s were smoking.
I don’t know if it is a “standard Windows keyboard” but there is a shed-load of keys on the upper-right, none of which are between the letters and the numbers.
chigau — sorry you’re having problems. The most common PC keyboard layout has some buttons between the letters and numbers , being the four arrow keys, and, above those, a group of six keys labeled insert, Home, Page Up, Delete, End, and Page Down. End should jet you to the bottom of a web page, and Home to the top.
You may have the slightly more compact keyboard layout with those keys arranged vertically along the right side of the letter keys.
If that doesn’t help, let’s solve this! Email me at nothpj{at}gmail.com.
Well I was thinking about pitching an episode and Jesse and Katie would probably at least want to do e-mail or text interviews. Probably not the most flattering to everyone involved, but you know where Jesse stands on most of this stuff. B&R is an entertainment program, but they do do actual journalism as well.
Ellison says Kaveney has “has spent almost 50 years actively fighting the British TERF movement” (Goodness me!).
Ellison also says: ” The anti-sex movement translated seamlessly into the “gender-critical” movement because they rest on the same core principles.
Both movements insist that political ideology can and should determine how other people relate to their own bodies; there is a direct line between the idea that getting consensually spanked is “aiding and abetting grievous bodily harm” and the argument that voluntary top surgery is self-mutilation.
Really? Then who’s writing books for small children telling them that they’re “given an assigned gender at birth based on their perceived biological sex?” Books for small children full of political ideology determining how they should relate to themselves?
Certainly not “internationally notorious TERF” Julie Bindel or Linda Bellos.
I guess it’s lost on Ellison and Kaveney that it’s trans ideology making demands about how other people must relate to trans bodies. Lesbians can also have penises, and all that nonsense.
I was going to read it, but then Ellison got into the biography bit and I couldn’t go on. I just don’t care that much about Roz Kaveney. In fact I don’t care about him at all.
As mentioned elsewhere, I recently finished reading Cynical Theories [1] by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. While I have some issues with the author’s take on specific topics, I do recommend it to anyone struggling to make sense of questions like:
• What is “Identity Politics”, or “Wokism”, or “Social Justice” (capital S, capital J), and how (if at all) do these differ from a general commitment to fighting bigotry and oppression, i.e. social justice (small s, small j)?
• What is “Critical Race Theory”, and how (if at all) does it differ from, say, speaking openly and honestly about the role that racism has played (and continues to play) in Western societies?
• Why did such a large (or at least vocal!) faction of the Left turn 180°, from trying to get away from boxes and labels and sweeping generalizations about whole demographics of people, to treating boxes and labels and generalizations (under the guise of “identities”) as the only relevant features of a person?
• Which fucking “Theory” (capital T) are you talking about? “Theory” of what?!
Pluckrose and Lindsay trace the roots of Identity Politics back to postmodernism and the work of French intellectuals like Michel Focault and Jaques Derrida in the 1960s and 70s. Postmodernism can be understood, at least in part, as a reaction to the failures of Soviet-style Communism [2] leading to a sense of despair on the Left, as well as a profound skepticism that any truly liberatory politics was even possible: Ideas and ways of thinking serving the interests of the powerful were so deeply ingrained in culture, and especially language (or “discourse” – the way we talk about things), that they came to be seen as “natural”, “normal”, “just the way it is”, and people (presumably with the exception of these intellectuals themselves…) were so hopelessly incapable of thinking outside the boxes imposed by culture and language that they couldn’t help unwittingly taking part in the oppressive power dynamics. Thus postmodernism can be understood as a “conspiracy theory without conspirators” [3]. Even science itself – including the idea that truth claims should be be based on sound reasoning, logically consistent, testable, confirmed rather than disconfirmed by empirical evidence etc. – was all just part of the conspiracy, just another oppressive “metanarrative” to elevate the self-serving ideas of the powerful to the status “objective truth” and hence unquestionable. Like any other conspiracy theory (the kind with conspirators), this one also relied heavily on unfalsifiable assertions, circular logic, and even reinterpreting disconfirming evidence and arguments as confirmation (“that’s just what they the system want wants you to think”). The early postmodernists were hardly revolutionaries. The best that could be done to thwart the conspiracy was to “deconstruct” the dominant discourses (basically nit-picking words and phrases for “problematic” assumptions) and expose the hidden biases at their root. Any attempt to replace the prevailing system with something better (the Russian revolution being an obvious example) was doomed to produce something equally oppressive.
While many of the ideas and concepts coming out of this early, radical deconstructionist, phase of postmodernism held great appeal to many leftist intellectuals, its profound pessimism about the possibility of progress was hardly conducive to activism. With the rise of what the authors call “applied postmodernism” (roughly from the late 1980s to 2010), Social Justice scholarship took a more explicitly activist turn. It wasn’t enough to “deconstruct” the prevailing discourses and metanarratives. Scholarship had to become explicitly subservient to leftist political goals, hence the “applied” part. The purpose of scholarship could no longer be to describe what is (obviously, since there were no objective, politically neutral “descriptions” anyway) but to bring about what ought to be. Pluckrose and Lindsay explore the main strands of activist scholarship rooted in applied postmodernism – frequently lumped together under the common name “Critical Theory” or simply “Theory”. These include Post-Colonial Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Feminism/Gender Studies, and, more recently, Disability and Fat Studies. Despite important differences, these all revolve around two main principles:
• The postmodern knowledge principle: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.
• The postmodern political principle: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.
To these two principles the authors add 4 “themes”:
1. The blurring of boundaries
2. The power of language
3. Cultural relativism
4. The loss of the individual and the universal
The blurring of boundaries [4] should be well known to regular readers of B&W under the name “queering” and is obviously of central importance to the Gender Wars. The Orwellian idea that language determines what people are capable of thinking is apparent both in the obsession with policing language for (supposedly implicit) “problematic” content that perpetuates the existing power imbalances, and in the idea that you can literally change the way people think by changing the language. Cultural relativism is only too familiar as well. Objective knowledge, common values, and universal rights are all dismissed as metanarratives that only serve the interests of the powerful [5]. “Knowledge”, just like rights and values, is entirely “local” and specific to a culture or identity group.
Theme 4 merits special attention: The Civil Rights movement, 1st and 2nd Wave Feminism, the original Gay Rights movement etc. were all rooted in classical liberalism which saw people as individuals with universal rights and sought to render other ingroup/outgroup distinctions largely irrelevant with respect to how people were treated. These movements succeeded in bringing about extraordinary changes in no small part by challenging the dominant groups to live up to their own stated ideals (“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”) and pointing out the blatant hypocrisy and inconsistency of claiming to believe in these ideals while failing to extend them to blacks, women, homosexuals etc. As Nick Cohen once pointed out, despite frequent claims to the contrary, women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities were not asking for special treatment: What they were protesting against was precisely the fact that they were given special treatment. That’s what “discrimination” means.
Applied postmodernism and its offshoots reject this approach in favor of one that explicitly treats people differently according to group identity (race, gender, sexual orientation etc.) in order to compensate for the inherent biases built into the system, elevate the marginalized, and deprive the dominant groups of their unearned privileges. Equal treatment regardless of group identity is not just seen as unrealistic: It was never a goal worth striving for in the first place. This is indeed what distinguishes “Identity Politics” from a general commitment to social justice. While applied postmodernism rejects the idea that humans in general have any meaningful shared experiences, oppressed identity groups do (specifically the experience of being oppressed). And while no one can lay claim to speak for humanity as a whole, there is such a thing as the “authentic voice” of marginalized identity groups, i.e. those who agree with Theory. Those who don’t are either dupes suffering from internalized bigotry against “their own” kind or deserters siding with the oppressor in exchange for a more favorable treatment. Their views can therefore be safely discounted. No trueScotsman member of a marginalized group disagrees with Theory. Thus the universal and the individual are both discarded in favor of identity groups, understood as homogeneous, monolithic blobs, whose collective goals and interests are entirely in line with the applied postmodernist agenda. It’s very similar to the way communist parties used to claim monopoly on representing and speaking for workers everywhere whether the latter wanted it or not.
According to the closely related idea of “Standpoint Theory” members of privileged groups are blind to anything but the dominant perspective, whereas members of marginalized groups (again, provided they agree with the prevailing strand of identity politics), by virtue of living in a culture in which discourses favoring the interests of the dominant are the default, are capable of understanding both the dominant and the marginalized perspective. Hence the latter always have a more complete and accurate understanding of the World than the former, which means their views take precedence. A member of a dominant group can never have a legitimate disagreement with a member of a marginalized group. If you belong to a dominant group, all you can do is ask the more enlightened marginalized classes what to think and accept the answer as definitive and authoritative. To do anything else is inherently oppressive and an act of “epistemic violence”.
On one hand, in other words, marginalized people said to have a more accurate view of the world than the dominant. On the other hand accuracy itself is considered expendable in the name “epistemic justice” and “decolonizing” academia (again, hardly surprising if you think there’s no such thing as objective “accuracy” anyway):
Social Justice scholarship takes umbrage with anything that foregrounds reason and evidence as the way to know what is true and demands “epistemic justice” and “research justice” in their place. By this, it means that we should include the lived experiences, emotions, and cultural traditions of minority groups, consider them “knowledges,” and privilege them over reason and evidence-based knowledge, which is unfairly dominant. […] Social Justice scholars categorize the different approaches to knowledge as “marginalized” or “dominant,” and of course they prefer the former. But they are not much interested in knowing whether these competing methods are effective in the sense of bringing beliefs into closer accord with reality; that is at best a secondary concern.
This is, of course, Post-Truth Politics at it finest. If no claims to knowledge, or even methods for arriving at supposed “knowledge”, have any more validity than any other, you might as well go with whatever serves the current agenda, whether it’s increasing the representation of marginalized groups in academic research or claiming victory after losing an election.
The concept of “intersectionality” may have grown out of the perfectly reasonable idea that e.g. the injustices experienced by black women could not be simplistically reduced to the sum of injustices experienced by white women and black men respectively. Increasingly, however, the term has become virtually synonymous with mission creep and forced teaming (As I like say, “intersectional feminism” = feminism for everyone except the people formerly known as “women”). Conspicuously absent from most intersectional analyses is any consideration of economic class, the one axis of marginalization and privilege that used to be of greatest concern to the old Left. This is hardly surprising considering that the current strand Social Justice activism has never been a bottom-up, grassroots movement, but disproportionally the domain of highly educated, mostly white, comfortably middle class people who have never had to worry about putting food on the table or affording the rent. Indeed, from such a perspective, the whole ideology is beginning to look suspiciously like a luxury belief system for people who can afford to ignore economics in favor of an obsession with pronouns, entirely theoretical arguments about what is supposedly implied (intended or not) by certain wordings, or reading “fatphobic” attitudes into Moby Dick.
The current phase, which the authors call the “reification of Postmodernism”, began around 2010. This is when the ideas of activist Social Justice scholars (or a grossly oversimplified, vulgarized, or “memefied” version thereof) began to escape the academy and take over schools, the mainstream media, non-profit organizations, private companies, public institutions etc. At the same time the last trace of postmodernism’s radical skepticism towards truth-claims gave way to a dogmatic, inflexible certainty that tolerated no dissent, left no room for legitimate differences of opinion, and saw anything other than unconditional agreement in advance as conclusive proof of “bigotry”, “hate”, “phobias” etc. The result is only too familiar. Indeed, by now it’s tempting to say that postmodernism has become a metanarrative in its own right, and I guess I just did. Terms like “wokism” or “Social Justice” do not simply mean a general commitment to fighting bigotry and oppression, but imply agreement with tons of highly dubious truth claims, academic theories (based on alternative, non-scientific, “ways of knowing”), and ideological doctrines that are fundamentally at odds with the ideals of the Civil Rights movement, 2nd wave Feminism, and the original Gay Pride movement. All this extra baggage may be essential to wokism in particular, but it’s no more essential to true social justice than the Gulag was to the rights and interests of the working class.
In the last chapters of the book, Pluckrose and Lindsay make a plea for a return to the principles of classical liberalism and argue that what now passes for Social Justice activism is actively counterproductive to the interests of the people it purports to help, e.g.:
• Portraying science and reason as inherently “white” and “male” is outright insulting to women and non-whites, perpetuates negative stereotypes of women and people of color as irrational, superstitious and primitive, and deprives people of the means to make informed decisions in their own best interest. E.g. telling morbidly obese people that any talk about the health risks associated with obesity is motivated by “fatphobia” can be outright lethal.
• Splitting people into separate identity groups with conflicting interests and no shared understanding of reality that would allow them to settle their differences is more likely to spark zero-sum conflict than solidarity, a conflict that the truly marginalized are very unlikely to win.
• Telling people they can’t stop themselves from being racist, sexist, abelist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic etc. by virtue of existing, reading their every word in the least charitable way possible, and bullying into silence anyone who tries to offer a more nuanced view, gives social justice activism in general a bad name, hands free ammunition to the demagogues on the far Right, and makes them seem like fearless truth-tellers.
We have already seen the results.
_________________________________
1. The title is obviously a play on “Critical Theories”. The cynicism alluded to refers to the habit among Social Justice scholars of deliberately reading history, as well as the words and deeds of other people, in the most cynical, least charitable way imaginable.
2. As e.g. Yascha Mounk has pointed out, portraying Identity Politics or Wokism as “Cultural Marxism” fundamentally misses the point. Marxists believed in objective truth and claimed to have the one and only right answer to everything. To the postmodernists any such sweeping “theory of everything”, including Marxism, was just another oppressive metanarrative.
3. This conspiratorial mindset continues to be manifested in, say, the idea that white people can’t help being racist even if they don’t consciously hold any negative attitudes towards people of color.
4. Obviously between “sex” and “gender”, “man” and “woman”, “male” and “female”, “feminism” and “men’s rights” but also between “gay” and “straight”, “able-bodied” and “disabled”, or even between “true” and “false”, “knowledge” and “superstition” etc.
5. This, of course, raises an all too familiar problem: If nothing is true (or at least not knowable) why should we take seriously anything that these scholars themselves have to say? If there are no universal values, why should social justice itself be of any concern to everyone?
This, of course, raises an all too familiar problem: If nothing is true (or at least not knowable) why should we take seriously anything that these scholars themselves have to say? If there are no universal values, why should social justice itself be of any concern to everyone?
Indeed. It’s the Epimenides paradox without the self-deprecating irony.
Conspicuously absent from most intersectional analyses is any consideration of economic class, the one axis of marginalization and privilege that used to be of greatest concern to the old Left. This is hardly surprising considering that the current strand Social Justice activism has never been a bottom-up, grassroots movement, but disproportionally the domain of highly educated, mostly white, comfortably middle class people who have never had to worry about putting food on the table or affording the rent. Indeed, from such a perspective, the whole ideology is beginning to look suspiciously like a luxury belief system for people who can afford to ignore economics in favor of an obsession with pronouns, entirely theoretical arguments about what is supposedly implied (intended or not) by certain wordings, or reading “fatphobic” attitudes into Moby Dick.
It’s also a bold bit of jiu-jitsu, attempting to style itself as the “dominant narrative, ” while denying the legitimacy of “dominant narratives.”
Allow me to be the first to contribute to Miscellany Room X!
For years I’ve carried on a pen-pal relationship with an inmate in a federal prison in Texas. We discuss many things — my work, his hobbies, and our shared interests. He is highly intelligent, and one of those rare birds in American prisons, an atheist.
The subject of trangenderism came up. He mentioned that it’s a hot topic of discussion among his fellow inmates, and I asked him to elaborate on that. With his permission, here is what he wrote:
As Richard Dawkins would say, discuss!
Peter N, it sounds like everywhere else. Their “rights” are things no one else gets to have. Everyone else is ordinary, but the ‘special’ people get perks.
It’s so bizarre though. You’d think prison administrations would be the last people on earth to be befuddled by trans ideology.
I am seeing that trying teecue+ with LGB is feeding the anti-gay tendency of conservatives. This is really fucking up our society. Libs of TikTok is an example, and another reason to think carefully of who to keep at arm’s length, even if they share gender skeptical views.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1665945887980306433?s=20
This is a standard rainbow. i think it’s important to teach kids to be accepting of gays and
lesbians as individuals, as people. This is not an example of grooming, on the order of drag story hours, or burlesquing babies.
https://reduxx.info/first-male-inmate-transferred-to-womens-prison-in-minnesota/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I saw this story about a transgender inmate suing for discrimination in Minnesota. The Minnesota DOC entered into a settlement agreement to place the guy in the women’s prison and pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. The women, of course, had no say in the “settlement agreement.” Where’s THEIR compensation?
Thanks for the new room!
Gender Wars is available for viewing on YouTube. I think it’s quite good.
https://youtu.be/znVPhte_c8U
My state is embarrassing me enough, maddog, this is in my own county. They might as well be pulling my pants down now.
I wonder if Phoenix will take me back.
I’ve just finished watching (well, mostly listening to) this lovely conversation at the Free Speech Union Arts Forum, between Dr Kathleen Stock and choreographer Rosie Kay. Two very clever women with a sense of humour. Not a bad way to spend forty minutes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9WV4j2ajkM
Mike Haubrich @4
It is, but there’s a man dressed and made-up as a woman smack in the center of the picture.
I’m seeing a lot of LGB people saying they’re sick of the whole Pride thing. Of course, my friends may not be representative, but they’re tired of the ballyhoo. Especially since, nowadays, it so relentlessly centers the T, the Q, and the kinksters.
I watched Gender Wars via Sackbut’s link. It is indeed very good.
@LM –
I went back and looked at the photo, and I hadn’t seen him before. Absent the teecue phenomenon, I wouldn’t have given him a second thought. The toxicity that has been introduced by their insistence on being in the forced community is probably whar generates the backlash on this photo.
Given where you live, I think your friends are pretty much in tune with the negative Pride vibe.
But they’re not allowed to leave! If they do they’re betraying the whole LBGTQ Communiteeeeee! On whose coat-tails will the T, Q and kinksters ride if the LGB abandon them?! Whose discrimination will they leach off of and browbeat us with if they can’t parasitize the Gay Rights movement? People are being turned off by the Holocaust and Trans Genocide tropes, so who else’s struggle is there to appropriate, infiltrate, and hijack? Left-handed people? Red-heads? Give them a break, will you! It’s almost like you expect them to grow spines, stand up and shift for themselves, you TRANSPHOBIC, GENOCIDAL BIGOT!!!
I’m in New York for a conference. The best thing about traveling to New York is that it’s an easy train ride–just 3.5 hours from downtown to downtown. The air outside the hotel window is visible–earlier today it was an eerie yellow-orange; it was like looking at the world through ski goggles. Apparently it hasn’t been this bad since the ’70s. People are putting on their covid masks when they go outside. And from what I understand, it isn’t much better back home in northern Virginia.
But hey, what’s a little forest fire compared to the thrill of an SUV?
I saw a photo of the NYC air via a friend on Facebook. Orange. I’m all too familiar with it: Seattle had the same problem in summer 2020 and last summer.
I thought this would be of interest to B&W readers. It’s an article called “No, the Gay Movement Did Not Spawn the Trans Movement.”
https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/no-the-gay-movement-did-not-spawn?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Seems much of the GLAAD /Stonewall jargon was conjured up by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in 1994. This included the use of the term “transgender” to refer to *any* form of gender non-conforming behaviour, and the first appearance of the “trans umbrella”. It also called for “transgendered persons” to be given access to battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers.
A sad loss, if not of life but what helps makes life happy.
https://twitter.com/EmineDzheppar/status/1666762781444435968
Terrible to read about what happened to Polina Raiko’s works. Very sad.
From Charles M. Blow in the NY Times today (no link, but it’s in the Opinion section) on the considerable amount of Republican legislation dealing with transgender issues:
Maybe if the TQ+ were willing to listen to the concerns of women about males in single-sex spaces, about male athletes competing with females, and about the medicalization of children who aren’t seen as being gender conforming, there might not be so much Republican backlash happening now. Because sex is real and that reality matters. Trying to shame us into silence or trying to force us to side with you or else be called fascists for daring to say the obvious – that males aren’t females – isn’t helping anyone and just plays into the GOPs hands.
Somehow the medicalisation of gay, bisexual and autistic teenagers leaves Mr. Blow unmoved.
I just saw a YouTuber highlight this tweet:
Excellent twitter thread by Mr Menno, responding to some nonsense from Montgomerie:
There’s more
Thought this would be of interest: an article in the Wall Street Journal called “The Truth About ‘Puberty Blockers” by Gerald Posner.
I liked this bit:
Gender advocates also falsely contend that puberty blockers for children and teens have been “used safely since the late 1980s,” as a recent Scientific American article put it. That ignores substantial evidence of harmful long-term side effects.
https://archive.is/Lzozj#selection-323.0-323.245
Kevin Drum has been exploring data, investigating whether young people are becoming more conservative; there seems to be some evidence to support that; weak, perhaps, tentative, but intriguing. A recent installment, though, was interesting. A survey found that the percentage of Gen Z people who would agree with the statement “there are only two genders” increased substantially over the last two years.
There are all kinds of problems with this question, the framing of it, and especially the idea that saying “there are only two genders” is an indication of conservatism. I am pleased to see that Gen Z people are increasingly prepared to buck the genderist orthodoxy, and also pleased to see a robust discussion going on in the comments section on the blog post. Predictably, some people claim that statements supporting “there are only two genders” are the work of trolls and bigots, but there are a lot of people expressing views ranging from mild to wholehearted agreement.
Those comments are heartening.
Grace Lavery is making waves on Twitter again.
This time Lavery is complaining that she wrote an article “The Gender Critical Movement Is Undermining Academic Freedom”, for “Think Pieces”, a journal linked to University College London. The article was not published by UCL for “legal reasons”. Now Lavery is on her high horse complaining about a powerful GC lobby silencing people, and Lavery’s claims are being spread across social media by her political allies:
https://twitter.com/kenanmalik/status/1667571388746547201
Oh, damn, I like Kenan.
I should point out that Kenan Malik isn’t one of Lavery’s allies: I picked his tweet because it was a relatively impartial discussion of the Lavery issue.
Somebody online is criticising Lavery’s claim here:
If the uni thinks there’s strong grounds for a libel case about the things you have said, then you clearly haven’t done your research. Academia is not about lashing out and making things up, save that for a petty blog post. Articles are critical thinking and clear evidence.
https://twitter.com/LottieHistory/status/1667157942599143425#m
And now for something different: Today’s Non Sequitur cartoon is worth a look. No, some things have not changed much since 1999.
I like the punchline “God is not a woman.” Strikes a chord.
Matt Osborne at The Distance has a really good article about Ellen “Elliot” Page. She was treated horribly by her religious homophobic parents. More relevant at the moment because the Jordan Peterson interview with Helen Joyce was recently thrown off of YouTube due to “misgendering” of Ms Page.
https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/how-ellen-page-prayed-away-the-gay
In fairness, Elliott still sounds like a girl’s name…
Some good news: The TIM trans activist who murdered a lesbian couple and their adopted son has (finally) been sentenced, and will spend the rest of his life in prison.
The bad news: This happened in California, so there’s a good chance he’ll spend it in a women’s prison.
https://reduxx.info/breaking-prominent-trans-activist-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-for-murder-of-california-family/
The ACLU has a sad because Duane Owen, who was executed yesterday, was not afforded the “dignity” of “gender affirming care” while in prison.
They tweeted:
Who was Duane Owen? Per CNN:
Slattery was 14 years old. CNN doesn’t mention that he raped her corpse.
(In a ladylike manner befitting his gender identity, no doubt.)
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/16/us/florida-executes-inmate/index.html
It’s interesting that CNN refers to Owen using sex-appropriate pronouns, and does not mention his precious “gender identity.” It would be nice to think they’re rebelling against the nonsense, but maybe they just want to hide the fact that this monster was a translady. We all know how those evil terfs keep harping on these ever so rare cases in order to demonize etc. etc. Wouldn’t want to encourage the morally panicked women who don’t want trans women in women’s spaces, or those who insist that sex predators not infrequently claim transwomanhood in prison, or those who refuse altogether to believe in the gender fairy and the specialness of women like Duane.
How lovely. An ad from the Crane Center (for Transgender Surgery). The image says “Time to meet the real you!” and offers “6 world-class surgeons; leaders in the affirmation surgical field; in-person or tele-med appointments”. The text at the bottom is for a non-existent domain, but the ad does click through to the web site referenced above. The caption above the image says: “Whether you have begun your transition, or are figuring out where to start, reach out to the Crane Center today and begin the journey that will introduce you to your most authentic self!”
I know this is a surgical center, but it is appalling to me that they seem to offer no counseling for deciding whether this is the right thing to do. It’s either do what you’ve decided, or get help figuring where to start; there’s no “whether to start” option. And of course all that nonsense about “the real you”.
The image from that particular ad is here.
Via Graham Linehan at the Glinner Update:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-brenda-volunteers?utm_medium=ios&fbclid=IwAR3CNFZTlGK3O104E1SMDoWBJdrPfHlf67hcpymsUbiE4Jj4_DLjofrEYlo
Y’all aren’t going to like this:
India Willoughby – CLIP: a woman wearing a hat and sunglasses is taking a selfie with her cell phone and wearing a baseball cap, Elaine Duillo, woman, a picture, american romanticism
India Willoughby – DeepBooru: 1girl, earrings, hat, hoop_earrings, jewelry, sleeveless, solo, sunglasses, tank_top, upper_body
Kathleen Stock – CLIP: a woman with grey hair and a black jacket sitting in front of a plant and a bench in a garden, Brigid Derham, professional photo, a character portrait, de stijl
Kathleen Stock – DeepBooru: 1boy, blurry, blurry_background, depth_of_field, jacket, lips, looking_at_viewer, mole, outdoors, plant, realistic, smile, solo, tree, upper_body
Images used were the recent India Willoughby Twitter post and a pretty standard Telegraph picture of Kathleen Stock. That said, the Booru tags are *very* superficial and anime-influenced.
Kevin Drum writes that More Americans suddenly disapprove of gay and lesbian relations. The comments this time are not heartening. Posting here not so much to share the Kevin Drum post as to comment about it.
There have been a number of good pieces written about how the inception of LGBTQ+ and related issues have made support wither for the gains achieved by gay and lesbian activists in the recent past. 4W had a good piece about regression in the Republican Party, and there have been several articles about how the Pride movement has been taken over by trans activism and paraphilia. The forced teaming, the scope creep, the speed of the takeover, all of this can probably account for people rethinking prior support for what they are insistently told are related issues. It’s not necessarily the case that people are becoming more conservative, certainly not in a general sense. How unfortunate that people have trouble seeing this.
BKiSA: Both CLIP and DeepBooru are kind of aggressive in their prioritization of certain features for sex. You can see this in action with Stable Diffusion. Female subjects often get turned male, but the reverse frequency is nowhere near equivalent, at least in my experience. Using image-to-image diffusion on family photos leads to half my female relatives actually misgendered and suddenly growing Viking beards. I should add that none of them is particularly mannish in reality.
I received a text for a poll from 20-20 polling yesterday. After a few pages of gauging my leanings by asking how I rank the leading candidates for President the questions turned towards where I stand on Transgender issues, and it soon revealed itself as a push poll to generate favorable results for trans. It even included a video pushing the lie that Affirmation is the treatment for gender dysphoria, citing the AMA, the APA, and enocrinologists. As soon as I realized it is a push poll, I exited and texted the sender to ask who had hired them.
20/20 Insight is an organization founded by two former Democratic Operatives from Georgia. We have two awful parties in the US now. The Republicans are awful because they can’t help it. The Democrats because they are beholden to the trans industry.
Hi all, it’s been a while, and this will be a flying visit because I have very little time to spend doing internet things these days. I drop by to catch up on posts here and elsewhere, but commenting time is at a premium.
Anyways, to the point.
Just seen a post by PZ from yesterday castigating anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy – no problem with that, of course, loonies need a good castigation. However, PZ provides quotes about Mark Geier, a doctor who’s work Kennedy draws on. Said quotes include the bad things that Geier has done, including this absolute gem:
(bolding mine).
What a monster! Using castration drugs in autistic kids! But it sounds oddly familiar, that treatment of autistic kids. I had a quick look through the comments there but it seems that nobody else has picked up on the bad thing that, actually, they are all in favour of. Nobody is ripping PZ a new one for including that criticism of what they insist elsewhere is a life-saving treatment that must be made available on demand to avoid genocide.
Odd, that.
Right, back to real life. I’ll be back again, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Hoooo-boy that is “odd” all right.
Odd indeed. Like being against FGM, circumcision, foot binding, ear-piercing of newborns, bodices, etc., yet supporting breast binding and “top surgery” for minors.
I’m sure I’m missing some essential difference.
The essential difference is the sanctity of trans ideology. Or, to really badly paraphrase Orwell, sterilise and mutilate for our reason good, sterilise and mutilate for your reason bad.
It does suggest some level of cognitive dissonance and compartmentalisation doesn’t it? PZ knows in some rational scientific compartment that injecting autistic kids (any kids!) with those drugs is wrong. But when he steps into the adjacent woo filled ideological compartment doing exactly the same thing is righteous, necessary, and life saving. I think my head would explode if I tried doing that.
It reminds me of one of my classmates back when I was doing post-grad. She was much brighter than me, than pretty much the rest of the class actually. She was also in one of those ‘bible believing’ fundamentalist sects that were just starting to pop up under the influence of American preachers making visits to NZ at the time.
She firmly believed the earth was ~4000 years old. After talking about it with her for a while I pointed out that recently we had done a unit on radioactive decay and how one application was dating rocks. How did she reconcile the two? Her face literally dropped. We certainly never had another meaningful interaction. Her life was so deeply compartmentalised that she was holding incompatible concepts in her mind simultaneously without hesitation. I don’t think PZ is that compartmentalised, but he’s pretty close.
I sure miss the regular gay pride rainbow flag. Every time I see the so-called “Progress Pride” flag flying, I feel like I’m walking under the colours of an occupying force. It’s angering and depressing.
My neighbors have, I’d estimate, something like 30 little Progress Pride flags around their front garden and a full size one by their door.
I don’t understand how a Gen X gay couple could fail to see the homophobia inherent in the
system.ideology.Or rather, I understand mechanically but not viscerally.
Yeah, me too YNnB. It’s quite common for some schools in NZ to have a Pride event. With so much of Pride in recent years focussing on trans issues, there has definitely been a level of pushback on these events, unfortunately leading to gay and lesbian kids being abused. Not cool at all. Frankly, abusing trans kids isn’t cool either. If only the adults in the room made the focus the gay/lesbian pride issue I suspect the unpleasantness would drop away, but no, they just have to make it all about trans.
Legal steps could be on the cards in the case of the teacher who bullied some girls who refused to say that they believe that a classmate could be a cat.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/letter-from-minister-for-women-and-equalities-to-the-ofsted-chief-inspector
#40 AoS
Specifically, Lupron, a ‘GNrH analogue’ i.e. something that imitates GNrH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone). And what do genderist clinics use to stop puberty? A GNrH analogue, usually a form of Lupron.
Speaking of PZ, he also posted about that ‘cat identity’ incident. His position is essentially ‘nothing to see here, move along’:
He quotes the bulk of an article looking into the incident, which concludes:
But that reporter and PZ both miss – or avoid – the part of the story that caused the furore: the teacher hectoring the students to believe all identity claims. The indoctrination.
I don’t see how this omission could be anything but deliberate.
Australia’s national broadcaster ABC has a show called Media Watch, and the brief of that show is to examine Australian media for bias. And just now it found a big one: yet another female reporter drummed out of her job due to gender feelz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URiQJKRhUKQ&t=501s
The verdict of the host seems pretty reasonable to me – media outlets have been intimidated out of doing their duty. Tellingly, it is the female reporters that feel the burn most.
Manic Pixie Nightmare Boy: Once famous, but now Washed-up Film Critic Nathan Rabin has tried to boost his declining fortunes by becoming a fanatical supporter of identity politics. This week, he tried to win credit among the terminally online by attacking J. K. Rowling:
So it [sic] not at all surprising that JK Rowling aggressively cosigned Musk’s decision, tweeting insufferably, “’Cis’ is ideological language, signifying belief in the unfalsifiable concept of gender identity. You have a perfect right to believe in unprovable essences that may or may not match the sexed body, but the rest of us have a right to disagree, and to refuse to adopt your jargon.”
Being a writer of note, Rowling made sure to make her hate as verbose as possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230626112115/https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2023/6/26/elon-musk-and-jk-rowling-want-to-be-victims-so-badly-its-pathetic
So Nathan Rabin thinks people who don’t believe in Magic Gender Souls are “hateful” and “insane”.
Nightmare boy seems to be very dimwitted.
The sad thing, is Rabin used to be funny and smart once (check out his book “My Year of Flops”).
But Trump’s election seemed to make him snap, and Rabin’s now obsessed with going after “Bad people” like J. K. Rowling. Rowling has the Wrong View on the Trans Issue, and hence is a Complete Monster Like Trump in Rabin’s eyes.
Another entry for the “This Never Happens” file
No one would ever self identify as something they’re not, simply to gain advantage. Amirite?
I am sure the Union has no idea how to handle this as they seem to have gone all in on the “believe who people say they are”.
Intergrity? Well, yes. if Police openly lie about this, what else do they lie about? Many of us often suspect that the Police look for a suspect first and then “find” the evidence to match that suspect, often leaving the real perpetrators at large.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/victoria-police-looking-into-claims-officers-identifying-as-gender-neutral-for-extra-1300-allowance/news-story/ab85868602ca99251b4aff14ae55d5ff
Hmmm:
https://twitter.com/genspect/status/1673813493282217986
“It doesn’t get any crazier than this! A paper argues that “gendered” pregnancy care is too focused on helping women have healthy babies; some transmen don’t want to stop testosterone, even if it puts their babies at risk of DSDs! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667321523000811 “
Oh jeeeeez
Rev @55, why do certain police officers get an extra $1,300 tax free per year? What is the rationale?
https://dailymontanan.com/2023/06/27/birth-certificate-rule-is-unconstitutional-judge-holds-state-in-contempt-liable-for-entire-suit/
If I’m understanding this correctly, Montana has gone off the rails, and is accepting that the sex on birth certificates can be changed. The fight shouldn’t be “it’s unconstitutional to force you to have surgery to change the sex on your birth certificate. Therefore, you can change it without surgery.” The fight should be, “it’s impossible to change sex, surgery or not. No one can force you to mutilate yourself; you can have fantasies with or without surgery. But birth certificates reflect facts, not fantasies. Sex is a fact; it can’t be changed. In exceedingly rare cases, there might be a factual mistake that needs correction on the birth certificate, but sex is not the same thing as gender. No one has a right to lie on vital government records.”
Holms @51, that was a good watch, thanks.
Has Twitter decided to block non-members? Before today, I’ve been able to click on and see the Twitter threads that Ophelia posts here, but now they’re forcing me to sign in, or sign up. I’d really rather not become a Twit; I have enough rabbit holes in my life.
Yes it apparently has – probably Musk as opposed to Twitter. I used to be able to see accounts that had blocked me by not being signed in, and as of today I can’t. Very annoying.
Ugh. Honestly the most annoying thing is that I’ve been following an account that’s been “live Tweeting” WWII. It’s up to 1945. Now I’ll never know how it ends.
snerk
A kludgy workaround for now for those wanting to try and see some posts on Twitter is to open Google and type “@theirTwittername” in the search line. You might or might not get a few recent tweets from said name that way.
It appears that Twitter is going the way of other social media like Facebook and going more private. I’m not planning on joining Twitter yet, but will see how this change is received first.
Question for anyone that might know t he answer. Can anyone recommend a good speech to text program, and a good microscope? Until I can write again, my nerves are on edge, not having my normal outlet for stress. Even a comment like this takes an abnormally long time.
Also, for the record, my husband and I just bought a house in Maine. We plan to move in late August.
@iknklast,
Can’t help with the microscope or speech to text, but congrats on choosing Maine. Can I ask where in Maine (if you’re comfortable sharing that level of detail)?
We will be moving to Presque Isle, in the crown of Maine. We’ll be 20 miles from Canada.
And I didn’t actually mean microscope; I already have one of those. I meant microphone.
My sister-in-law is from Presque Isle. I’ve never been quite that far along the coast, but the parts I’ve visited are gorgeous.
(And I can’t help with the microphone either.)
And of course Presque Isle is far from the coast. I shouldn’t post before coffee.
iknklast — I’m a recording engineer, and I have questions… What is your specific need for a microphone, and how much would you like to spend?
@iknklast – if you are looking for something to use for text-to-speech, I really like this “Blue” microphone from Logitech. It’s good enough quality for clear sounds, and I even use mine for recording the podcast. Less than $50, USB – https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Snowball-Condenser-Microphone-Cardioid/dp/B006DIA77E/ref=asc_df_B006DIA77E?tag=bingshoppinga-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80745437134304&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4584345024921846&th=1
I’ve had mine for 8 years and have had no quality issues, or breakdown.
Peter N, I had a speech to text program once, and it kept telling me I needed a different microphone. Right now I have a snowball, and it works well for recording my lectures and for doing zoom on my desktop, which doesn’t have a built in microphone.
Hmm. It sounds like one of those all-purpose error messages (like Twitter today — “Something went wrong, try reloading” — which is not the actual problem). Two things come to mind…
There may have been a setting in the speech-to-text software that selected among available sound sources, and you need to instruct it to use your nice Blue Snowball mic?
Or maybe the mic was too far away or was picking up too much background noise. As a test, you could try holding the mic right up to your face. A headset mic (even a cheap one) would work for your application.
Someone shared this video in the comments on a recent Jesse Signal post:
“The fight for gender-affirming health care” from the Harvard Public TH Chan School of Public Health
https://www.youtube.com/live/hbroz0CQ0H8?feature=share
A few comments I made, as I watched, mouth agape at the sheer number and blatancy of the lies:
A”ndrea Jenkins. Minneapolis City Council”… Oh geez. Please. [Why?]
“It’s really quite terrible to think about using youth in this way, as a political wedge issue.” You don’t fucking say!
“If you are someone who’s brain doesn’t produce adequate levels of testosterone…” A doctor just said this. Please make it stop!
TDD, I’ve heard it said that many a man thinks with his balls…
In case you need a break from all the bad and infuriating news. Here’s a beautifully-written story about the friendship of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2023/chris-evert-martina-navratilova-cancer/?itid=hp-mv-top-stories_top-table-main_p001_f001
Site question: Are we ever going to see a return of the edit button? I don’t know about anyone else, but I get really uncomfortable when I notice I’ve misspelled something, especially when I misspell my correction to my previously misspelled misspelling.
Was there an edit button in the past? I don’t remember one. I do fix typos when I spot them.
Yeah, a few years ago before the big blowup that also broke the formatting between when you’re signed in and signed out, and broke the site menu so that it always says, “No categories,” and broke something so that there’s always a message below the Submit button saying, “There has been a critical error on this website.” Latsot offered to help troubleshoot here.
That is, here: https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/our-awareness-is-still-low/
Ah. Sorry. I don’t have the skills.
Ah, well. C’est la vie, then.
Sorry.
iknklast,
Presque Isle, you say? I just found out you will have a total solar eclipse there on April 8, 2024!
Iknlast, congrats on finding somewhere to move too. Looks pretty, but the climatic extremes are something hard for a temperate island dweller to comprehend, even though I live in the mountains. The lows especially, the highs we do get here.
In the news recently are efforts by the Italian government to invalidate certain birth certificates. The birth certificates in question are ones in which one (or both?) of the listed parents is not in fact the biological parent of the infant.
There is good reason to say that these efforts are, in a large part, designed to make it more cumbersome for same-sex couples to raise kids. Certainly some of the rhetoric used by Meroni and others points in that direction. But I note, too, that the Italian government is seeking to make it illegal for any Italian couple to obtain an infant via overseas surrogacy (surrogacy within Italy is already illegal).
I think it’s important that birth certificates provide accurate medical information, rather than being used as some kind of social statement. Seal the certificate if you must, but don’t lie. The article notes that the non-biological partner needs to go through some lengthy “special adoption process”; if that’s the case, fix that process rather than lie on the birth certificates.
The quotes in the article from opponents are mostly about parental rights. Do people simply not adopt children in Italy? If only the parents listed on the birth certificate can enroll the children in kindergarten, what do adoptive parents do?
It would seem to me that an obvious solution would be a streamlined or automatic adoption process when an infant is born with one parent being the member of a married same-sex couple. This obvious remedy seems to be ignored in favor of lying on a medical record.
Why aren’t activists encouraging same-sex couples to adopt? Why is it so all-fired important that the child not only be biologically related to one of the couple, but that they pretend it’s related to both?
Recently seen sign:
“All lives can’t matter until black lives matter”
Woohoo! LGB Alliance have won!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igloPbw0EOM
Look at their joyful banner!
https://lgballiance.org.uk
“The Statement
We are delighted to be able to bring you the news we’ve all been waiting for.
The Tribunal found in our favour and we will retain our charitable status.
It’s been a long, and sometimes bruising, fight but we couldn’t have done it without your incredible support and generosity. Thank you, thank you, thank you x
P.S. We’ll be sharing updates on our website and social media accounts throughout the day.”
WAHOOOOO!
There is a new imperative for trans health care: Change the scent of our hands from male to female:
I would have changed the headline of this article to read “Men and women have different smells.” The way it reads now, we have different ways to smell from each other. This is in the Telegraph, and I only have a cheap subscription that doesn’t include gift articles, but here is a story on how forensics may be aided in the scents criminals leave behind. There is a difference in scent between men and woman that can be discerned by investigators. Men and Women Smell Different
No word yet on whether the investigators were confusing sex wtih gender identity.
NYT: At UChicago, a Debate Over Free Speech and Cyberbullying
The gist of the story, to my reading, is this: a lecturer (Dr Journey) planned a course. The mere existence of that course bothered a student. The student complained publicly, and included the lecturer’s photo and email address along with the course description. “People have a right to know who’s teaching these classes”, he said in a video. The lecturer received threats and other abuse online. The question that seems to be foremost on people’s minds is whether the student “crossed the line”, or whether what the student said should be protected on free speech grounds. Background to all this is the lauded declaration of free speech principles from this very university. The lecturer lodged a complaint that the student incited cyberbullying, and the complaint was dismissed.
The course in this case was titled “The Problem of Whiteness”. I have to wonder what the response might have been if the course were in favor of or opposed to gender ideology.
It’s a thorny question, trying to figure out what the university itself should do. I do think that the student “crossed a line”, invoking a mob response directly to the lecturer. I think it’s clear that the student had no interest in having a civil discussion about the course and its contents, nor in actually taking the course or talking to people who had done so in order to find out more about it. But a big piece of the problem is how incredibly easy it is to call forth a mob, and how little control entities such as universities have at stemming the abuse from such mobs.
They could just ask a dog.
So, Michigan’s house of representatives passed a bill to amend the hate crimes laws to include misgendering or not using the preferred pronouns. If this passes the Senate and is signed by the governor, it could be a felony if any of the 4 conditions are present:
The format is wonky because I am copying it from a pdf of the bill.
Here’s the bill, as markup of existing law:
https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2023-2024/billengrossed/House/pdf/2023-HEBH-4474.pdf
The bill made it through the House on June 20, I don’t know if a companion bill has been taken up in the Senate yet. This is creeping authoritarianism, inspired by the righteous. Righteous people are the most dangerous of all, because they believe themselves to be justified at whatever they do, because they serve the Greater Good.
Here is Newsweek’s July 3 article. Doesn’t tell us much about the status in the state legal process.
https://www.newsweek.com/michigan-pronouns-law-abomination-joe-brown-1810459
I’ll probably do some research and write it up for my Substack sometime this week.
Recently Katie Ledecky and Megan Rapinoe have been in the news and so in Facebook, Ledecky for qualifying for the world championships in swimming once again, Rapinoe for announcing her retirement from the US Women’s soccer team. Both are remarkable athletes. Ledecky is tall, with a well-developed swimmer’s body. Rapinoe of course is outspoken politically (including, alas, on trans issues) and a lesbian. And both are being referred to as “he” in the comments section.
Of course that’s nothing new. Women who don’t fit the feminine stereotype in one way or another have long been called “he”, while men who are perceived as somehow not masculine enough have long been referred to as “she”. As long as that was just your bog-standard misogyny, not too many people complained about it, those who did were dismissed as over-sensitive whiners (or worse, feminists), and certainly no one tried to pass laws outlawing “misgendering”. But suddenly now that men who don’t want to be men are being called “he” and women who don’t want to be women are being called “she”, “misgendering” has become one of the worst hate crimes imaginable.
Probably not when you do it to a cis-scum person, though.
Where on Facebook?
Good god!! Imprisonment for up to 5 years!! Has everyone gone stark raving mad?
Here’s an example of people reacting to Katie Ledecky: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0P9AaYTngi1nXaiz2nN53duKL7H94ojVCjJZtJpsYevHEs6m7EckpGcp3QbSxnUyal&id=100044589062230 (and note the people complaining about “transphobia”—it’s a total clusterfuck).
And here’s Megan Rapinoe: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0kAPSB3ed2QNHmaQGgcsmrQCUGFbD5fvMzwsR5WrHKbt6MmKNi2iCM3MFvTEVpqHWl&id=100044357169727
Miss Netherlands 2023 is a male. Not that women’s beauty pageants are respectable at all, but still.
Florida ocean temperatures at ‘downright shocking’ levels
Just how hot?
Hot.
I like this website for such information
https://earth.nullschool.net/
Going there gets you to the default of current wind conditions.
Clicking on the “earth” label in the lower left get you to options for looking at different times, or different conditions.
Eg: Click on ‘Ocean’ then ‘SST’ to see the water temperature of the ocean. I hadn’t seen temperatures in the 30s C except in the Red Sea & Persian Gulf when I have checked previous years.
Michigan: Traverse City hair salon no longer servicing certain LGBTQ members
I’ve seen a variety of news reports claiming the salon rejects all members of the “LGBTQ community”, but this one at least provides quotes and details.
In a Facebook post, the owner of the salon wrote (and I’m transcribing here from a photo, I hope I got it accurately):
The news station contacted the owner Christine Geiger, “who says she has no problems with the LGB part, it’s the TQ+ that she doesn’t support. Geiger said she is taking a stand against being forced to use preferred pronouns”.
How I read this is that she and her staff reserve the right to refuse to use “preferred pronouns”, and if a customer has a problem with that, go elsewhere. I would not expect her to have a completely logically consistent policy statement in her Facebook post, but combining it and the follow-up, this is how it looks to me.
I think this is another example of the consequences of this forced teaming. This has nothing to do with gay or bisexual people, a fair amount to do with people rejecting sex, and a heck of a lot with other people being forced to pretend to go along with trans claims.
I suspect a man-who-claims-to-be-a-woman might get a perfectly nice, feminine haircut at this place as long as he is willing to tolerate being called “sir” (or “hey you”) for a little while.
HB 4744 refers to new hate crime legislation that Mike Haubrich discusses intelligently at the link.
Remember those disgusting women who attended “Let Women Speak” rallies in Australia, and in particular, in Melbourne?
Remember how those vile, disgusting women cozied up to NAZIs?
Remember how the Premier of Victoria loudly and proudly defended those defenceless TIMs? And how the Victorian Liberal Partry expelled one of their own for the heinous crime of saying men aren’t women?
The Ox is slow, but the Earth is patient.
Seems the wheels are falling off.
https://archive.md/20230703043305/https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/victoria-police-probe-officers-response-to-neonazi-salute-at-spring-st-march-rally/news-story/33953464b224210ae347fc307d168a18#selection-743.0-763.149
Interesting!
Effect and Cause in two simple images, from today’s edition of “The New Daily”. Now, if only someone could join some dots …
https://i.postimg.cc/wTvF3DzC/2023-07-13-07-52-57.png
https://thenewdaily.com.au/
Thanks, Sackbut! I was visting this thread to shamelessly self-promote my post, and you saved me from the narcisisstic urge. I hope that if that bill becomes law, this business owner is the successful test case.
A post well worth promoting. HERE IT IS AGAIN.
The SPLC is being sued for defamation for calling an organization an “anti-immigrant hate group”. It will be interesting to see how this case goes. I’m glad a suit of this nature was filed, because the SPLC designations have become “evidence” rather than opinion. I keep checking their lists to see if some organization I support, perhaps a feminist or LGB organization, gets designated as “anti-trans” (or “anti-LGBTQ” in their parlance).
SPLC notes on their “Hatewatch” page that they track only a certain set of “hate” types and is not exhaustive. They list “male supremacy” as one of the categories, and they have one group in that category.
So this is interesting. TRANS CYCLIST ENTERS WOMEN’S RACE, AND WINS, TO PROVE MEN HAVE AN ATHLETIC ADVANTAGE (apologies for the all caps).
I’m sure the response to the cyclist entering the race will be that “no true trans would ever do such a thing”, which ignores the fact that males do have an athletic advantage over females in general and the transwomen are in fact male.
Damn, I just came here to link to that story about the S. Korean TW cyclist. J.A, the proper response to anyone claiming “no true trans” is to point at the person and shout, “Gatekeeping! You’re trans if you say you’re trans!” After all, that’s a key part of the ideology.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/13/business/sag-aftra-actors-talks-hnk-intl/index.html
Grossly overpaid people going on strike for more money, ain’t it grand? Bunch of greedy crybabies.
Re #112
I’d take it as well-known people lending their names and voices in support of people who need protection and are not as well paid. There are 160,000 members of the union. Only a small percentage of SAG members earn even a livable income from screen acting. Plus, being well-paid doesn’t mean it’s OK for an employer to take unreasonable advantage.
Happy shark awareness day, everyone! I hope everyone avoids becoming shark chow on their special day.
I’m with Sackbut on this one. Sure, a small handful are grossly overpaid, but the vast, vast majority of SAG members are making barely-surviving wages, especially when you factor in things like the fact that most of them are only working part-time, and have to have a second job just to keep money coming in.
The strike goes beyond money, too, the actors want to make sure that the studios, with CGI and AI technologies, don’t use their likenesses without compensation or residuals. And yes, it’s not only the wealthy stars who are striking, it’s the struggling actors who have seen better days and the ones who are seeking better days. Nobody should work for pittances when the studios are benefitting from the explosion of video entertainment through streaming. Solidarity with the writers, too.
So they want full time pay for part time work. Must be nice.
https://blog.gitnux.com/acting-career-statistics/#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20only,continue%20to%20pursue%20acting%20opportunities.
The AI problem is akin to identity theft, so that definitely needs to be addressed, but yeah, everyone wants to be paid more. How about the baseball strike in ’94? Again, part time work with huge incomes. I haven’t watched a game since. Now the lowest MLB salary is 700k/year. It’s absurd.
Work is necessarily “part time” when the income you get from the job is not sufficient for survival and you need to take a second job. I’m not buying the distinction here. I know people in the music field who have managed to get to the point where all their income comes from music, yet they have no “full time” jobs at all. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want not to be exploited.
“Everyone wants to be paid more.” Sure. Everyone also wants not to be exploited. I don’t have a problem with people complaining about mistreatment, even if they get better-than-average income. In the case of actors, they don’t, generally. Baseball at the major league level, or even at the minor league level, is a full time job; the team has almost total control of your time for the duration of the season. Minor league players make around $65K (varies widely by division). The 1994 baseball strike was not over inadequate pay, but about fairness, about owners taking financial advantage of players via salary caps and restricted free agency.
I get it, you don’t like the idea of people who make a large amount of money complaining about their lot in life, or about the lot in life of other people in the same field who don’t make much money. I don’t agree.
I think we disagree on whether they’re being mistreated or exploited or not. There are plenty of thankless jobs where I would be all for organizing and striking for better conditions and better compensation, I just don’t think acting or baseball are those.
I also don’t think it’s a lot in life problem, but more of a life choices problem.
I know the screenwriters are hopelessly exploited, and usually not overpaid. They get money for their script, a small portion compared to what it’s worth to the studio, then it gets torn apart and rewritten by Hollywood committees and the writer has no control. It is possible there may be literally no word, no plot, left in the script but it will have the writer’s name on it…and that puts reputation at stake, as well. And in this case a lawyer won’t help because the contract requires they have no choice.
Sure, life choices. But that’s true of all of us. I know, people with fewer opportunities may have little chance but to work for McDonalds or WalMart. For screenwriters, the choice may be between accepting a bad deal or not selling their script to anyone, and this is as much about their income as it is with the above mentioned McDonalds or WalMart workers.
And teachers? They are told they don’t deserve more money because they made a life choice to be a teacher. That’s not a good argument. They are doing a job, and they deserve to be paid what the job is worth. Teachers are horribly underpaid related to others with similar education and experience; baseball players and some actors are highly overpaid, if you put it in the value to society. It isn’t, though. These jobs pay well because of the amount of money people are willing to pay to go see the game or the movie. They generate tons of income for someone. And that someone now wants to make tons more without paying more. It’s the same principle driving McDonalds and WalMart, and increasingly, education (even public education where people want to pay lower taxes while keeping educational standards high…and making sure their kid passes with a high GPA).
Teachers deserve to be paid what the job is worth, I agree. I wouldn’t use a life choices argument about such a vital profession. It’s not simply about what the market will bear.
twiliter, you might not, but everyone else does. I’ve never heard anyone point out that CEO is also a life choice, and they make huge amounts of money, with golden parachutes if they fall. Sure it’s a life choice. So is teaching. But teachers are paid poorly while CEOs are paid handsomely, often with much less education.
As for actors and writers? Sure, pay what the market will bear. But I think art shouldn’t be based in the market anyway…nor medicine, nor education. These are vital resources, and those who provide them should be compensated a fair price, but people who use them should not be scalped. How to do that? There’s only one way – government funding. And therein lies a different tail to wag a different dog. Censorship is present in art and in education, and apparently also in medicine. Most people feel better about business censorship than government censorship, since most people believe the market won’t censor if profits start to fall. Yeah, probably not. But that doesn’t happen. Why? I don’t know. People gripe and complain about it, but like the weather, no one does anything.
Well from all your replies, I’m definitely not thinking about this from a wide enough perspective. Thanks all, I think I can be more sympathetic now.
Just a small celebration…we sold our house! For the full asking price! Now we won’t need to get a loan on our new house in Maine! Yay!
Yay! So long Nebraska!
There’s a short but scathing opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about the rush to “affirm” gender confusion in children with permanent medical interventions. It focuses on an earlier WSJ opinion piece by the Endocrine Society for its endorsement of same using cherry-picked data points. It’s paywalled but Jerry Coyne has helpfully reproduced the entire thing.
Jerry’s commentary is excellent also.
At least she waited until after Bastille Day. Vale Jane Birkin, songstress to my youth.
https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1680568108535148544
https://twitter.com/miriamcosic/status/1680728904116637697
When I tell people that I moved from Arizona to Minnesota willingly, they question my sanity. But, when this sort of stuff happens, I think I made the right choice. and with two dry summers, we now have a dry heat. (It’s actually been cool enough this week I haven’t need to turn on the air conditioning.)
It’s not frying an egg, it’s frying people’s feet on the sidewalk.
Oh jeez.
Mike H, when people hear I’m moving from Nebraska, their first assumption is that I’m moving south. When I tell them I’m not, they have trouble believing it. “But it’s cold in Maine!” Yeah, and I like it cold.. I get sick when the heat gets up to 80 (used to be better; I grew up in central Oklahoma without air conditioning, I did my masters and doctoral research outside in Oklahoma and Texas summers. I would not be able to anymore).
When one of the people at my retirement party heard we were moving, they said “What’s the matter with Hastings?” I didn’t hear her, my husband did, or I might have said “I’ll make you a list”. Politics and religion figure high on that list; the inability to support a decent restaurant or department store would also. I refuse to shop at WalMart, and it’s now the only department store in town.
I’ve never been to Maine, but I’ve known more than a few people who live there. I think it has the climate of Minnesota with the bonus of being near the ocean. I have lived in places like Hastings, and I find it to be a bit depressing.
I hope the move works out great for you and your husband.
I’ve just barely been to Maine…a hundred years ago, going with a school friend and her family to Campobello Island for 2 weeks for 2 summers in a row. It’s a pretty damn nice part of the world.
I lived there when I was little; we left when I was ten. My father took us from Maine to Oklahoma in the middle of August. Culture shock and climate shock all in one! I don’t think I’ve ever recovered.
I’ve been to Maine many times; my favorite coastline. I see that Maine has become the first state to enact the Equality Model (aka the Nordic Model) into law, so good going, Maine! Best wishes for your retirement.
In other news:
I came across this article today, by an Australian writer, from 2021, and it is excellent (and long). The author, Annie Kia, discusses the difficulty of queer ideology to deal with complexity.
Uncritical allegiance: the harms of queer ideology
The article is very well written, with many supporting links, including this one, from a trans-identified female who disagrees with trans ideology:
Ground Control to Major Trans
Darn, I spoke about two things in a comment, and included three links in total, and I forgot, that goes to moderation. I should have made it two comments. Live and, uh, forget and make the same mistake again.
FYI, for those of us who used to lurk on Twitter without an account, there is again an alternative, Nitter.net. Just go there and enter the Twitter handle of the Tweeter you want to follow and Nitter will show their tweets and replies to tweets as well.
Oooh, thank you!
Big Tobacco celebrates Pride:
https://exposetobacco.org/news/pride-pr-opportunity/
Once upon a time, a proportion of Privileged Penised People took it for granted that everything – the entire pie – belonged to them. Sometimes, of course, they would argue amongst themselves whether one of them was taking more than his fair share (making other people fight on their behalf, of course), but they were in broad agreement that none of it belonged to the ungrateful women and minority groups who were whining about only getting crumbs.
Eventually, however, women and minority groups got organised and created their own pie. This worked wonderfully. The PPP still had their bloated pie, so at first they didn’t notice, but when they did… all of a sudden they realised that they no longer had everything, and they wanted it. They started accusing women and minority groups of being ‘exclusionary’; they spread a new idea that everyone should be ‘inclusive’ of everyone. At first, assuming that these PPP had gone through some kind of revelation, and intended to share their pie, everyone else went along with it. But it turned out that, actually, the PPP pie was always going to be out of reach, and the PPP soon had much of the other pie, too. Even though there were plenty of women and members of minority groups pointing out that they were going to lose everything they’d worked for, they were undermined by adherents of post-modernist theory who were utterly convinced that all you had to do to bring about a perfect society was to behave as if it already existed. If you stopped divisively calling people ‘women’ or ‘members of a minority group’, those groups would cease to exist and everyone would be a PPP and automatically have a nice big slice of pie!
____________
A dwarf actor explains why it’s not in the least ‘inclusive’ to exclude dwarf actors from roles playing dwarfs, as if you think that they already have access to all the other roles in Hollywood, so don’t need to be ‘typecast’. I apologise for the interviewer being Piers Morgan, but he’s not the annoying man in this three-man conversation.
It has recently become fashionable to recast dwarf characters as everything but (and gotta make sure there’s some trans in there somewhere).
Oh the absolute shit show that was ‘The Watch’… Let’s take a budding feminist lady dwarf with a beard and turn her into a tall man with no beard at all…
Re Maine, my brother’s lived there most of his adult life and seems to enjoy it. But he’s crazy.
Re the interview, my takeaway is that apparently if Piers Morgan says it it’s automatically wrong. (I can’t think of anyone past or present of whom I would think that. I mean, if it were revealed that Hitler drank coffee every morning, that still wouldn’t put me off my daily joe.)
Great, well-researched, article in The Critic, explaining exactly how ‘trans’ ideology infiltrated the British establishment and inserted a false (and illegal) interpretation of the Equality Act into codes of practice throughout government and industry.
If you prefer to listen to, rather than read, the article I linked above, Barry Wall has done a YouTube video where he reads the whole thing, apart from the many links within the article.
Emmy Awards criticised after nominating Bella Ramsey, who is non-binary, for Best Actress
Etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Say what you will about the language which differentiates between actors based on their sex – with the default ‘actor’ and male ‘actor also being one and the same – but reason there is an actor/actress split in awards is to fight the tendency to overlook the female half of that working force. And Bella is female.
POLITICO: Inside a Ukrainian Baby Factory
A surprisingly (to me, at least) sober and fair (and long) examination of the surrogacy industry (and industry it is) in Ukraine, with much reference to surrogacy laws in other parts of the world.
The treatment of surrogate mothers is also discussed at some length. It’s not pretty.
So have the Emmy Awards dropped Bella Ramsey from the list of nominees? One hopes?
In the surrogacy vein been thinking a bit about those concerned that our best and brightest aren’t squandering their potential to satisfy biology… Seems the obvious thing is to go full on cuckoo with embryos and child rearing if you’re already picking the best embryo and aborting any unfortunate pregnancies, but without uterine replicators it can’t be ethical.
Love him or hate him, Nigel Farage does have a point. If banks aren’t apolitical, but are imposing their weird flavour of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity politics’ on their customers, then they are doing an unpleasant form of social engineering. They are manipulating us so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to carry out any transactions without doing so through a bank.
Cash is, increasingly, being restricted – by the banks. Businesses pay their employees electronically and ask customers to pay by card, because the closure of local branches mean that transporting cash for wage packets or deposit isn’t practical. So if a bank decides to kick a customer out for holding views that the board doesn’t like, and (as in Farage’s case) ensure that the other banks are on board, they’re effectively removing that person’s right to participate in society; for the crime of not being ‘inclusive’ (which is Newspeak for ‘thinks that all women and men have a right to free speech, not just those who agree with us’).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9IrNcv_OdM
Now that I’m about two months away from retirement my employer just announced that we can change our name if we prefer not to use our legal name on the job, including for our email and phone. Because it’s more inclusive. Not sure how John Q. Public is going to handle that though.
Hahahaha more inclusive of what?!
Employers will be handing out pacifiers at work next.
The emphasis on DEI where I work is only going to grow, and more and more of my younger co-workers are already sporting pronouns in their emails. Olds like me, not so much. Like it or not (and I don’t) this is not going away anytime soon, certainly not in Minnesota and especially in the Twin Cities.
Just came across this gem.
(emph added)
February 8, 1965.
Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States: 1963 ‐ 1969.
Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty.
Seems we’ve been turning a blind eye longer than I thought.
Huh. I didn’t know people were talking about it in 1965 either.
Johnson’s role in supporting NASA probably put him in the pipeline for this sort of information. That’s my guess at least. He’d also been given a warning by scientists: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/05/scientists-warned-the-president-about-global-warming-50-years-ago-today
Vaguely related (and it came up with the British PM):
The new right winger position seems to be “mustn’t do anything about climate change because poor and marginalized people/developing world but yes of course we believe in it”. Why is this? Is it just that you look like a moron or a loon if you pretend it doesn’t exist/isn’t a problem?
I guess “climate change do nothing abouter” isn’t as snappy as denier, but believing in the reality of climate change is meaningless; the soup throwers believe in climate change too and what good are they doing?
I recall the climate change debate happening in the sixties and early seventies, but those claiming that we were merely helping to avert an overdue ice age were pretty vociferous too. It was pretty hard to tell which side had the evidence back then, with the general public having no easy access to up-to-date research because the World Wide Web was not yet in existence. Of course, we remain bamboozled to this day, because stuff on the WWW isn’t easy for laypeople to sort into fact/fiction, science/pseudoscience.
BKiSA, how about ‘hand-wringers’? That’s a title which has been long applied to those who say about everything ‘This is too hard to deal with, all we can do is worry’.
The State of Michigan has enacted a ban on conversion therapy, including therapy for minors – that’s in practice an affirmation-only treatment of gender dysphoria. For the life of me, the fact that there are those who de-transition should be a warning of the dangers of this. Combine this with how easy is it to get sex hormones now with little or no review by a therapist and we’re off to the races.
Michigan Democratic signs ban on ‘conversion therapy for minors – (CNN)
tigger, that is still thrown up as “proof” that global warming isn’t real, because back in the 1960s scientists were predicting an ice age. If you want to know what was really happening, you can read on.
There were Ice Age predictions during the 1960s. These were in the popular, lay scientific magazines which most Americans believe represent the absolute latest in scientific thinking. The scientific literature was already predicting warming. Now, everyone remembers the popular literature and not the scientific. Who reads that? Just scientists…many of whom these days won’t read any scientific literature older than two years, and so they don’t know either that scientists were predicting warming back then.
I was treated like a goof when I was in my program for consuming (devouring, actually) works about the history of science, and reading older books.
My understanding is that without human greenhouse gas emissions the earth would be slowly cooling into the next glacial period. We are simply *massively* over compensating for the natural cooling.
The “Ruddiman Hypothesis” or “Long Anthropocene” proposes that human activity has been modifying global climate for 8,000 not just the last 200. According to this, the advent of agriculture helped to delay the onset of the next glaciation well before our burning of fossil fuels put us into the current greenhouse crisis.
Link to above information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ruddiman
I came across this article on baby names, and how some parents are so insecure in their baby’s masculinity that they are giving them action hero manly names, to force a “gender identity” on them that will prevent bullying.
Needing to live up to gender roles and expectations, but finding a way out by declaring themselves trans, or NB is likely a driver behind ROGD for boys, and the shitttiness of the way that girls are treated during the stages of adolescence is an obvious factor in the bindings and mastectomies.
Naming your kid “Stryker” is just setting him up for a drinking problem later in life.
@WaM That’s one of my most favorite movies ever since I saw it in the theater and I totally LOLed! Thank you for that.
@Mike,
I’m glad someone got the reference.
I got it. But I was several days too late.
Dearie me. Laurie Penny is furious:
If an image of a trans man is an ‘insult to womanhood’ and ought to be banned, what about actual trans men? Have the guts to say what you mean.
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/1686441725865168896#m
Here’s the Joan Smith article Laurie is complaining about. Note that Smith does not say in the article that the ad is an “insult to womanhood” (that was the headline, probably picked by an editor).
https://unherd.com/thepost/costas-trans-mastectomy-advert-is-an-insult-to-women/
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has a page on reporting hate crimes and hate incidents. “Hate incidents” are:
The page does not define “hateful”, nor “hate materials”, nor “offensive”, but it does provide this further clarification of “hate crime”:
I highlighted the garbled description of “gender”: “Gender means sex but it also doesn’t mean sex”. Good that they mentioned sex; good that they mentioned stereotypes; not so good that they fell into “assigned at birth” at the end.
It is alarming that the police are encouraging people to report perfectly legal activity, that the police should really be in the business of protecting, as if it were a prelude to crime.
Happy Third Trump Indictment Day, everyone!
Many happy returns of the day!
Sackbut @ 169 – that is disturbing.
Destined to become one of my favourite Federal Holidays (I hope).
I saw a strange tweet
https://twitter.com/muri76483833/status/1686669929905344512
in response to someone quote-tweeting Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles)
now, what could it mean?
I remember something something “his repeated boundary-pushing behavior”
Well that led me to an interestingly absurd conversation between a crank and Andy Lewis. The absurdity was all the crank’s, of course.
To quote Mr. Natural:
“It don’t mean sheeit.”
I’m not familiar with this writer, but I guess he’s a significant member of the British press. He’s declared himself on the side of the TERFs having seen the testimony of Chloe Cole, and this is a paywall-skirting version of his coming out party, from the Mail:
As for the last bit, can confirm. I’ve lost some friends, but that’s minor compared to what women have had to put up with.
NBC News has an article about people who think they can change their race.
That analogy you’re thinking of? Oh, they address it. Sort of:
You see, when a white man puts on hair and makeup and talks and walks in a sort of way to claim a different identity, it’s fetishizing and objectifying… except when it’s not.
Grace Lavery (formerly Joseph Lavery) is *not* happy with Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock at all.
So Lavery has written a long hatchet job on their books for the LARB:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230801094049/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/
Very odd that Lavery seems to think the Victorian writer Margaret Oliphant was a feminist (Oliphant wasn’t one).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Oliphant
The women on Mumsnet are amusingly, ripping Lavery’s article to pieces:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4862173-grace-lavery-reviews-helen-joyce-julie-bindel-and-kathleen-stock?page=1
Ooof. Thanks for that. I thought I’d do my own little hatchet job on it, but it’s way too prolix and boring.
I’m seeing this kind of statement quite often, but I have never seen any evidence adduced in support. Has anyone come across any kind of attempt to back this claim up with sources?
Why conduct a research review if it’s all good? IMO, to set the stage for “well, we had NO IDEA”, that’s why. From the New York Times:
Medical Group Backs Youth Gender Treatments, but Calls for Research Review – The American Academy of Pediatrics renewed its support of gender care for minors while commissioning a fresh look at the evidence.
@NightCrow,
There’s really no way to study that claim since it involves putting people into categories that really didn’t exist until about ten or twenty years ago, but they get around it by claiming anyone who didn’t follow proscribed gender norms for their team. Just google “Was Joan of Arc trans?” for a taste (but be sure to have some strong breath mints handy).
Global warming helping to cause record flooding in Juneau, AK.
“Glacial outburst” flooding destroys at least 2 buildings, prompts evacuations in Alaskan capital of Juneau – CBS News
Meanwhile, here in the DC area:
This after severe thunderstorms a little over a week ago that cut our power for about 28 hours.
Yikes. Then you’re in it now. Hope all goes well!
Thanks. We seem to have dodged the worst of it, though it looks like the areas to the north and west were hit harder. We got a nice dusk sky out of it.
We just got hit by a bit of extreme weather in Southern Norway, too. A named storm called Hans. A bit of background: Norway has mountains, in the southern parts they are along the west coast. Since weather normally comes from the west, the west coast and the western parts of the mountains normally bear the brunt of it. But Hans was sneaky, coming up from the continent up trhough Sweden and then into Norway from the east. So all those parts that are not used to large amounts of rain got soaked. Worse, Hans decided to just sit there for more than two days, soaking the landscape and leading to lots of landslides and flooding. Currently, there is essentially no way to get from Trondheim, where I live, to Oslo other than by flying. The storm is now over, but major rivers keep growing and threaten major flooding. Almost miraculously, no one has been killed yet, though many homes are destroyed.
It’s poetic justice, I suppose. After all, we are rich from oil and gas exports. We have helped cook the planet, and now pretend to be the world champions of cutting greenhouse gases. But nature will have its way in the end.
Horrors. Rivers flooding are a regular thing here in the Pacific Northwest in the winters. Stay safe!
I’m trying. I’ll miss my aunt’s funeral in Oslo tomorrow, as there is basically no way to get there in time. I was also going south for a bit of vacation time, but that is on hold until the roads are passable once more. Of course, the main highways between Trondheim, where I live, and Oslo follow the major rivers, so they are prone to flooding.
I saw that there’s one village that is completely cut off, and the only access is via a forest trail, which is being used to bring food supplies in.
Indeed. Other places have been isolated by landslides and the inhabitants had to be evacuated by helicopter.
While reading some critiques of Foucault, I encountered this little 1970 article from the Times on a German pedophilia scandal. It sounds disturbingly familiar, especially that “parents had not been asked for consent and had, as a rule, not even known that their children attended sessions,” and that the psychologists’ goal was “to emancipate working‐class children from the repressive influence of their home education by exposing social exploitation and sexual compulsions.” I then found more on the subject.
Oyy.
So, man who assaulted a granny has pled guilty, but still wants name suppression and hasn’t been sentenced yet. Note the phrasing that it was a ‘heated confrontation between’, rather than the TRAs stormed the barricades and attacked.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/300948135/man-admits-hitting-elderly-woman-at-posie-parker-protest
And notice the very first sentence – “A man has admitted assaulting an elderly woman during a protest against an anti-transgender speaker.” Italics mine.
Thanks for the link!
It works both ways; if pro-women can be translated into “anti-trans,” then “pro-trans” must be anti-women. Not an original thought, but worth repeating.
Nullius, not exactly a one off as detailed in this horrifying New Yorker article about a programme to place at risk children in the care of known paedophiles. This was happening in Germany until the present century.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles
Francis, that’s a very interesting article. I don’t know enough about 20th-century German society to add anything, but this remark certainly caught my attention:
I recently watched the Disney animated movie “Strange World”. It was a visual delight, but rather heavy-handed and confusing regarding plot. The film was subjected to some right-wing criticism (leading to some showings being cancelled) because the teenage son in the story, one of several central characters, has a boyfriend. This is described in Wikipedia and I’m sure elsewhere as “Walt Disney Animation Studios’ first openly LGBTQ lead character”.
No. First same-sex couple, first obviously gay character, something like that. Mulan was a woman who pretended to be a man, you can’t get more “lead character” than that, but I suspect there are fights over whether she could be counted as “trans”. And I’m sure there are others who might be handwaved into the other letters. No, the issue here was “gay”, not alphabet soup.
Ah! I found, or re-found Miscellany Room. Florida’s De Santis now requires public schools in Florida to use cartoon-films published by ‘Prager University’ (which is of course not a university but a purveyor of propaganda founded by the right-wing radio host Dennis Prager) in order to teach fairly young children that slavery really was not such a bad thing after all. So, in a clip shown by Mehdi Hasan on MNSBC, we have a comic-book travesty of a smiling Frederick Douglass preaching to a couple of white children (no black children in sight) about how slavery was really not anything to worry about and it is only nasty radicals who kick up a fuss about it. The clip is wholly disgraceful in its dishonesty and its design on its victims: children of all races.
Argh!
Why though? I should think a triumphalist account should be quite sufficient to make the statement “…but now things are just fine.”
Is it just a need to absolve Southerners ‘ ancestors of their misdeeds?
Two links concerning Haiti, and ‘reparations’ – Haiti was forced by France to pay reparations for the loss of French property after Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rebellion. The USA comes out of it badly, too, and continues to come out of it badly now, under the Biden administration, which in many ways I admire. I’m sorry to bang on about slavery but it is important, and I am fed up with people who pretend that it all happened hundreds of years ago, and that is of no relevance to our happy present. As William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/5/24/france_us_haiti_reparations_colonized_revolution
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/takeaways-haiti-reparations-france.html?ref=oembed
some German gaming/internet news site, article (auf Deutsch!) about something to do with that Linus Tech Tips
(emphasis mine)
ridiculous
rabbit hole: its source seems to actually cycle through the pronouns …
clowns
sources (hidden in cite attribute of blockquotes):
https://mein-mmo.de/linus-tech-tips-ex-mitarbeiterin/ (auf Deutsch)
rest is regular gendered German (“Streamerin”, “Mitarbeiterin”, (“sie” also covers unknown person)), apart from that one hint
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/ex-linus-tech-tips-employee-alleges-mistreatment-and-poor-conditions-2251613/ (in English)
like 80 % “they” and 20 % “she”
Tim:
Hrm. Here’s the clip in question. While it’s certainly cringe-worthy and ideologically biased, I don’t think your description is, um, entirely apt. Yes, the art, script , and acting are horrible. Yes, Frederick Douglass is smiling. Yes, the two children are white. However, the children are a brother and sister in an ongoing series of clips, not once does Douglass even insinuate that slavery was anything but evil, and never is it suggested that radicals were wrong to oppose it.
Did Mehdi show the whole clip or only a brief segment?
The city of Yellowknife (pop. 20,000), capital of the Northwest Territories, Canada, is being evacuated because of wildfires. Having visited there a few years ago, and having friends who live there, this feels much more personal personal in a way that other places being threatened with fire does not.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nwt-wildfire-emergency-update-august-16-1.6938756
Yikes.
This might be worth a listen later this afternoon on NPR’s Science Friday:
Challenging The Gender Gap In Sports Science
After the broadcast there will be a transcript made available.
In the Guardian today:
William Gladstone: family of former British PM to apologise for links to slavery
Descendants of PM, whose father’s wealth came from sugar plantations, travel to Guyana for 200th anniversary of rebellion by enslaved Africans.
NYT: Catholic School System Directs Students to Use Pronouns Assigned at Birth
No, that isn’t what the school system did. The relevant paragraph from the announcement:
The students were not assigned a sex, let alone pronouns, at birth. The closest to something “assigned” is a name, and one student mentioned in the article was upset that his (official, legal) name was read at graduation instead of a new preferred name. (The article refers to this student as male, but, given the topic, it’s entirely possible that this student is actually female.)
On the other hand that “dress and uniform” bit is bad in a different way. Skirts are horrible, especially in a mixed-sex school. Girls shouldn’t be told to dress in a way that is “consistent with their biological sex,” not least because way too many boys see skirts as an invitation to look up them.
Certainly there are any number of things wrong with the way Catholic schools are run, including sexism and reinforcement of gender roles. You’d think the NYT would pick up on that issue, but no, they’re up in arms over proper grammar and refusal to agree that people can change sex.
Yeah, school uniforms are on of those things that really highlights the three-way nature of this fight. The conservatives say, “Only girls should wear dresses”, the TRAs say, “Anyone who wears a dress is a girl” and meanwhile, the Gender Criticals are saying, “Let the kids wear what they want, just recognize it doesn’t change their sex.” So you could have skirts and pants and just let the kids be themselves without forcing the trans baggage onto it.
**************
Meanwhile, here’s a link to NPR trying to have it both ways.
The article starts out quite well; it’s a full-bore discussion of why we need more scientific research into girls’ and women’s sports medicine, explaining how it’s always focused on male physiology, and thus a lot of the baseline assumptions about what constitutes ‘fitness’ for girls is badly out of sync with reality. It goes into some detail on how menstruation is sometimes inhibited for girl athletes, and why this fact, which is often just regarded as ‘the norm’ for young female athletes, can be harmful to long-term development. Bone density, specifically, is called out.
Then it completely ignores the obvious point that maybe, just maybe, hormone blockers are not as benign as they’ve been portrayed as, and jumps instead into a lot of waffling about how important it is to be incloooosive. The absurdity starts in the lower half of the article, under the heading, “On both acknowledging sex-based differences in sports while also being inclusive of transgender athletes.”
(The broadcast interview, I should note, was worse, with the waffling being right up front, as the interviewer made sure to mention that they were also going to talk about how important it is to not exclude males from female sport. I suspect that’s because they knew if they started a show using the words “women” and “girls” exclusively, without laying the groundwork for the eventual backpedaling, the station would be drowned in angry phone calls–but constantly using a strained ‘gender-neutral’ construction while talking about sex differences would be nigh-impossible.)
Sackbut, in my town (my soon to be prior town. Yay! One more week…) the Catholic school wouldn’t even allow cross-dressing for the purpose of a play. The play must be cast as female=female and male=male. I don’t have a problem with that in general, if the sex is specified, but it’s often the case that not enough males show up to fill the male roles, and why not allow females to do them? Some cross-casting doesn’t work, especially if the actor isn’t up to the task, but it can be good experience for a budding young actor.
The many problems with Catholic schools don’t excuse the New York Times for incorrectly reporting what this particular school system did. It would have been quite reasonable to take the school system to task for demanding that girls wear dresses, and for the policies on homosexuality in the same document, but no, the NYT decided that the most important thing was to use the nonsense phrase “pronouns assigned at birth” and focus on the trans aspect. That’s possibly the one thing the school system did correctly.
I posted the article to criticize the NYT coverage, not to imply the Catholic school system policy was perfectly fine.
Sackbut, I’m sorry if it sounded like I was thinking you were implying it was fine; I certainly didn’t think that. I was just giving another data point.
2008 was a Very Different Time.
Footage from the panel show The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2008 has resurfaced online.
The quiz mentioned the pregnancy of “trans man” Thomas Beatie. Two of the panellists (the late Sean Lock and James Corden) called the pregnancy “an abomination”. The audience and the other panellists (Michael McIntyre, Claudia Winkleman, Dara Ó Briain and Davina McCall) all laugh at their comments and make more jokes at Beatie’s expense.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-endless-hypocrisy-of-the-comedy-class/
Amusing that Corden, in particular, has now become a fanatical transervant.
This feels really big. NYT actually starting to cover this issue a bit better.
https://lgbtcouragecoalition.substack.com/p/how-a-single-staff-member-in-a-gender
The NYT piece is ingenious in that it corroborates all of the whistleblower’s points while trying to make it sound like it doesn’t, because ew Republicans might be right. Still, the facts are all corroborated in the Liberal Paper of Record, even if they’re sandwiched in between a lot of slanted writing.
Lisa Selin Davis has a good fisking of it already:
https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/p/there-i-fixed-it
Allegedly, Prigozhin has fallen out of a very tall window indeed. His jet has been shot down outside Moscow. Given that 13 Russian aircrew died in his insurrection or whatever it was, the symbolism is the point.
Tokitae, the last Southern Resident Killer Whale in captivity has died in Florida following more than fifty years of imprisonment: https://www.whaleresearch.com/post/toki-will-always-be-remembered?utm_campaign=e80cf57b-6e87-47b7-b56a-80a8bf696696&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail&cid=ea53ce53-8187-48a8-ab49-b6130a72e700
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/25/business/edgar-sison-assault-credential-invs/index.html
This animal will walk free, looking for his next opportunity to rape an incapacitated woman. This is not justice.
One thing really grinds my gears of late: “How dare you say mean things about Chris Rufo and accurately identify him as a grasping authoritarian and a grifter? The Wokies are so vile and dangerous wouldn’t it be much better if fascist shits like us were in charge again?”
No, the problem with the Wokies isn’t that they think men can be women and that math is racist, it’s that they *ARE* you. You’re the fucking same and that’s just terrible.
(Forgive me the rant, but I have to get this off my chest and for reasons that should become apparent, a semi-anonymous forum is the best place.)
So it’s 202(checks calendar)3, and people still haven’t grasped the concept of when, and more importantly when not, to use reply-all. I work for an organization of around 150 people, and every now and then we’ll get email announcements about new hires, or promotions, or individual achievements, or projects successfully completed. And that’s fine–it’s good to keep up on what your colleagues are doing, especially since most of us these days are remote. But then the reply-alls come in–“Congraulations!” “Such a great achievement!” “Welcome aboard” etc. Note to all: not everyone needs to see your reaction! Send it to the person (or people) who you’re celebrating, but leave the rest of us out. We don’t need to see it!
The worst of it is that most of the reply-allers are senior staff members, so you can’t really send a message to them saying “Please don’t” (and it would be rude to anyway). And even worse than worst, I can’t make any snarky remarks about it to my boss because she’s one of the worst offenders. To be clear, she’s a great boss overall–very supportive and responsive–and I realize that if this is the worst thing I can say about her, I can’t really complain. But dammit, it grates! I mentioned this to our IT guru, and his response was basically, “We discourage it, but we’re not going to say anything.”
Don’t get me wrong–I like my job, and I think our organization is doing great and important work, and I hope to stay here till I retire. But some days I wish retirement would come a bit faster.
Things that grate just do grate! I hope it at least helps to have a good rant about it.
For another example of things that grate, I watched an interesting episode of Nova [I think it was Nova] about different inventions of paper and what flowed from them on PBS last night – interesting, as I say, but accompanied by an almost constant loud obtrusive stream of random music, even while people were actually talking. What the HELL?! Are we so brainless and childish that we can’t listen to people talk for 50 minutes or so without a meaningless overlay of loud music? It was so irritating I gave up on the episode.
Ditto reply all – my playwriting group is particularly bad about it (now that I’m retired; otherwise, I had the same problem as WaM). Also the music.
And hold music…don’t get me started. I had to call the bank the other day about financial things related to our new house (I’m in Schenectady! Tomorrow, Presque Isle! Yay!) The hold music was not only awful, it was loud. I had to hold the phone away from my ear. Social Security is even worse.
And what is with the places that say “We’re having a high volume of calls. Try later.” No chance to leave a message, or to choose to hold. And of course when you call later, the same thing. They want you to go to the website…but if you can’t? If you are not the person who has the account on the site? If the person who has the account is dead, and you are now in charge of their business, but they didn’t leave you logins? Probably because they were 90 years old and weren’t doing much of their business online? And people who don’t return calls or messages, even when THEY are trying to sell YOU a product…
Sorry for the additional rant to WaM’s rant. With all the things I’m dealing with lately, I’ve found a lot to be crabby about.
Ranting can be healthy, and these are things worth ranting about.
And honestly, I’m very fortunate to have the job I have.
“We’re having a high volume of calls.”
I have had a few companies say
“We expect it to take X minutes before we can answer you. You can hold or you can give us your phone # & we will call you when you get to the top of our list.” So I might get the call in a couple of hours, but at least I can do other stuff while I am waiting.
*Why doesn’t every company do that???*
Ditto re. music on hold. I imagine the business on the other end of the phone isn’t even aware of it — I guess if it’s a small enough business, you might ask them to cut it off? But I could assure them, even if it were music I would otherwise enjoy (as if that ever happened), being compelled to listen to it, with appalling audio quality, in one ear, is not improving my “customer experience”.
And ditto the annoying music on PBS documentaries. I gave up on PBS years ago — their documentaries used to be informative but now they all seem to be written at a 5th-grade level, delivered agonizingly slowly, and as you say, inevitably corrupted by incessant, overwrought, electronic music soundtracks.
But an accidental “reply-to-all” can be highly amusing.
My wife used to have even more irritating reply-all stories. She works (technically consults) for a nationwide organization with thousands or probably tens of thousands of workers–an organization that comes to your house nearly every day if you live in the US. Occasionally someone would reply-all to an organization-wide email, and the cascade would begin: reply-alls to the reply-all saying “Please don’t reply-all”, and then reply-alls to the reply-alls to the reply-all saying “Please don’t reply-all to the reply-all”, and on and on, sometimes to the point of crashing the email system.
But people seem to have learned, or at least she hasn’t told me any of those stories in a long time.
#226 and #229, both perfectly good rants. A couple of companies I deal with in NZ have introduced booked call backs. When the call centre is overloaded you are given the options of waiting, calling back, or press ‘#’ to be called back – no loss of queue position. Not even a need to supply phone number since they already know that. There is a more detailed menu where apparently you can give an alternative number.
So, my rant, the inevitable day has arrived, a group of staff and shareholders at my company have proposed a Diversity policy. They have taken the proposed wording from examples taken from similar companies to ours that had joined an accord that provided templates. It’s everything you’d expect. Loads of meaningless feel good waffle requiring “acknowledging, appreciating, and celebrating… ” a long list of things, including gender and gender identity. No mention of sex, which in NZ is a protected category under the Human Rights Act. In a workplace setting I am happy to acknowledge someone for what they are, and behave in a mutually respectful manner. They go on to propose “Diversity support and education”, but couldn’t define what they meant by that. Hello to the next template from the ‘accord’. We have a company comprised of employees and shareholder employees. I’m currently one of the Directors. I suspect this will be the beginning of the end of my career, as in the current environment even friends of decades assume you’re a bigot for questioning any aspect of things like this. I can’t just role over without saying anything though.
Well that sounds terrible! I hope you can salvage your career.
Hey, everyone! I have arrived in my new home. I shall no longer suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Nebraska. I am in a beautiful area where I will be able to see the northern lights. There are trees.
I will say, the drive convinced me of a couple of things. It was fortune (or Ganesha) that kept me from moving to Massachusetts two decades ago…one single trip through on their highways, and I am ready for the funny farm. Why do they even bother to say road work ahead? Why don’t they just notify us when there isn’t road work? “No road work next 50 feet” or something.
Once I got out of Massachusetts things got better. Some spots where going was slow, but mostly a relatively relaxing drive (if any drive can be called relaxing). And if I never drive through Chicago again, I will be thrilled. I love Chicago, but driving in it? At rush hour? Not my idea of fun.
Yay! Goodbye Nebraska hello forests of Maine!
One of Jesse Singal’s readers writes him an email about the book Gender Queer that’s worth passing along here. (IMO, that book isn’t even close to being about sex education, it’s actually porn.)
https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF450F_PXMAAZtjJ.png
Massachusetts and Chicago are two of my favorite places, mostly because I spent my formative years there (I still drive like a Masshole, I’m afraid), but Maine isn’t far behind. Enjoy!
@J.A.,
You must not get out much then… If “Gender Queer” is porn it’s extraordinarily boring porn.
I think the worst is the message that says “Call volume is higher than expected. We appreciate your patience.” But, these are companies whose call volume is always higher than expected. That may mean that they don’t have enough people to take calls.
There really should be a segment on this in orientation. What most people don’t realize is that most email programs have a way to remove your address from an email thread. In my former company’s recent past, an email was sent to an operations group distribution in error rather then a more limited department distribution, announcing a birthday celebration for Holly, somewhere. The cascade of ‘don’t reply all” was intermixed with “Happy BIrtthday Holly” emails to all. The operations managers now send out an anniversary announcement of the “Happy Birthday Holly” with reminders not to “reply all” to say “Don’t Reply All.”
Group texts too. The first time this happened to me, it was an invite from a friend to go tubing in the mountains. I was then inundated with replies and banter from a dozen people, most of whom I didn’t know. My phone went off randomly with messages meant for other people for days. I ended up blocking many numbers and had to explain to my friend how group texts work and why I don’t want to be included in any. Some of the respondents knew to reply directly and not to the group, but so many of them didn’t. I think sending emails to multiple addresses has it’s uses, but group texts are something I can do without. I did wonder if I was being too fussy, or feeling like my phone number is more personal than email or something, but I think it’s rude.
Arizona is not the only state with a water problem. The NYT published a feature article on the pursuit of the perfect potato for french fries, and how the varieties that a Minnesota Agri-corp produces are especially thirsty. If they don’t get enough water, the tubers don’t grow in the perfect shape (long and slender) to prevent spots in your McDonald’s fries. The company claims that they are developing varieties which are not so thirsty, but in the meantime wells are drying up in rural Minnesota, ponds and lakes where wild rice and fish grow, are either getting too warn because they are not being fed by cool water aquifers, or merely drying up. This is a shareable “gift article” link so no need to worry about a paywall.
Big Farms and Flawless Fries Are Gulping Water in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes
I really doubt that most people who rush to the drive-thru window at McDonald’s to munch down fries while on the way to soccer practice care about “flawless” fries with no spots. I think the big thing about fast-food fries is that since they are fried in trans-fats that people have to eat them quickly because cold fries taste like grease, they’re only edible when hot. Perhaps chain restaurants could invest in air friers to save money on frying oils and selling fries that won’t clog our arteries would be better investments than trying to make the “perfect potato.”
I am not sure where growers and fast-food chains get these ideas that we want food to look perfect while forgetting about how they are supposed to taste but perhaps it is just from focus groups who are shown pictures and asked what they would rather eat. This kind of thinking has led to the red delicious apples becoming inedible mealy mush, and the idea that people at fast food restaurants even look at their food before eating it. On the occasions I eat fries, myself, I would rather have steak fries than those spindles of nothing that would have no flavor except salt and grease.
Another note in the article is the irrigation of sugar beets. What’s sad about this is that the sugar beets in Minnesota are grown mostly in the Red River Valley of the North, and the soil there is perfect for them. It’s a clay soil, the famous Red River Mud that the oxcarts had to struggle through to move furs from the northern plains to Minneapolis before the railroads were built. It retains water, so if the farmers are having to irrigate, that’s a sign of how severe and regular the droughts are now. The upper midwest is being touted as the area that climate refugees will be flocking to in the future of a drowned Florida and a baked Texas and Arizona. We’ll probably be arming ourselves against the neighbors who want water.
The reason why the upper Midwest is seeing drier summers is that temperatures in the upper atmosphere are getting warm enough to “cap” the formation of thunderstorms by preventing the rise of warm, humid air. We had a very snowy winter here in NW Wisconsin and there was plenty of water in the ground back in May, but starting in June it was like the great water tap in the sky was turned off. So unless you irrigate, your yield or corn and soybeans is affected and the hay simply stops growing too.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
A study that uses fine-scale statistical analysis of megafauna extinction rates against both climate change and hominin/human range expansions comes down clearly in laying the cause of these extinctions at the feet of the latter as the driving cause of the global extinction of large bodied animals.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221330542300036X
Here’s the abstract:
Yes, JA there are harsh realities at play. St.Paul has instituted a partial watering ban in response to protect the reservoirs that source our taps, but a better solution would be for more people to re-think our lawns. We don’t need grass that must be watered in order to have beautiful lawns (and fertilized, and pesticized.) There are green ground covers that are native and drought resistant. But even for people who want grass because that’s how it’s always been, it’s never made sense to rake the grass and dump it after mowing, nor the leaves in the fall when mulch cutting allows for natural fertiization. The fertilizers that lawn care companies spray runs off or else feeds the weeds as much as it does grass because grasses tend to have shallow roots while native plants, aka weeds to some people, have deeper roots and capture the water from your sprinkler and the fertilizer that otherwise would run off to the Gulf Of Mexico and feed the red tide algae.
How much of the water from irrigationis lost to evaporation in row crops? Farmers do have the option of cover crops to reduce the need for aquifer water and that has the added benefit of reducing the carbon loss from winter plowing. We need to eat, but we also need to be more thoughtful of the ways that we grow our crops, and break some of the cycles that lead us into downward spirals.
But, we also need to focus less on growing crops with the perfect appearance. That’s just wasteful.
British Quakers have been lost to the Successor Ideology:
@BritishQuakers appear to have been lost to the cult. A group for female rape/sexual abuse survivors has been refused a room at Brighton meeting house . We also hear that Quaker staff now consider talking about Elizabeth Fry to be trans phobic…
@BritishQuakers run a Facebook group – they have declined to approve 3 (that we know of) posts trying to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the gaols act – transphobic innit to celebrate Elizabeth Fry’s work in bringing about single sex prisons
https://nitter.net/ReSistersU/status/1701120695197917683#m
Oh ffs.
The trial of the man accused of murdering four members of a Muslim family in London, Ontario has begun. It is being held in Windsor (about a two hour drive from London); details on why the change in venue are subject to a publication ban. The Crown looks like it’s going to base at least some of its case on statements made by the accused that he was out to kill Muslims.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/jury-at-murder-terror-trial-sees-video-of-truck-that-struck-muslim-family-in-london-ont-1.6962613
The accused has pleaded not guilty. He’s facing not only murder charges, but terrorism charges as well.
This made me laugh. Someone asked the A.I. ChatGPT the following:
“How do you say ‘non-binary’ in Spanish?”
The bot replied, “The term ‘non-binary’ can be translated to Spanish as ‘no binario’ or ‘no binaria’ depending on the gender of the person.”
https://twitter.com/wontsomeonethi2/status/1701426436211650649
I’m surprised that ‘no binarx’ wasn’t the response. Yet.
Here’s an interview out today of Alex Byrne (MIT) and Holly-Lawford Smith (University of Melbourne) that’s quite good at clarifying some basic concepts that others have long muddied the waters over.
https://areomagazine.com/2023/09/12/gender-critical-philosophy-a-defence/
Meanwhile in Madrid, a reporter is sexually assaulted on air. The story and video are in Spanish, but even if you don’t speak the language the video is pretty self-explanatory. Of course this happens to women all the time, and it’s not even news now that it happens to reporters on live TV. What’s strange about this case is that the guy hung around for an interview, and returned later after assaulting other women on the street.
For what it’s worth, the assailant is Romanian; he’s since been arrested for sexual assault.
Yikes! That’s quite something. I take it the reporter tried to carry on regardless and her male colleague in the studio interrupted her to say hang on, that’s not ok what that guy just did, we have to address that now?
Yes, and then later he warned her that the guy was behind her. She starts to interview him again (or at least interrogate him: “Did you really have to touch my butt?”), but then cuts it off, saying “I don’t want to give him protagonism” (sounds better in Spanish; in English something like “I don’t want to make him the star”).
Clarification: the question I quoted came at the end of their first interaction; later when he came back he tried to gaslight her (“Tell the truth”) and she basically (not literally) told him to fuck off.
Oh, I like that – we should have “I don’t want to give him protagonism” in English.
My wife was looking for one of those devices that allow a woman to pee while standing up, and found this one on Amazon,
But it’s not only for women! Noo, it “for Women, Non Binary, & Trans Men”. They go on to explain it is “GENDER INCLUSIVE: Whatever your gender, if you can’t already stand to pee while fully clothed, the pStyle is for you!”
In the product description, they go on to talk about the many potential users of this device:
Snarky comment withheld for now.
Hahahahahaha good lord.
A surprisingly good article in The Guardian on the confusion and misinformation around dealing with kids’ gender issues in schools.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/17/teachers-need-guidance-to-resolve-issues-gender-identity-in-classroom
Not quite as surprising when you notice it’s by Sonia Sodha.
I think I was more surprised because it’s The Guardian, and I’m used to seeing anything in there written from a GC viewpoint being liberally (sic) spattered with scare quotes around any words or phrases that the interminably fragile may find offensive, presumably added by over-cautious editors not wishing to cause offence.
Is the tide actually beginning to turn?
PZ almost-but-not-quite getting it…again.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/19/the-zeitgeist-is-white-and-male-i-guess/
Well you see human-to-spiders=tricky, but man-to-woman=a doddle.
Yup, and he is the expert biologist, after all. Seriously, though, I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s done this, to the extent that I sometimes* wonder if he’s consciously !or unconsciously) daring people to apply his words to the trans ideology.
*Only sometimes, though. The rest of the time I imagine an increasingly suppressed voice in the back of his mind fruitlessly crying out for him to remember he’s a scientist and a sceptic, while an increasingly loud voice closer to the front demands it shuts up lest the mob hears its cries.
Two teachers in a Southern California school district sued in federal court to challenge a district policy that requires teachers to withhold from parents any information about their child “gender transitioning” at school. The federal court granted a preliminary injunction in favor of the teachers (prohibiting punishing the teachers for violating the policy keeping the child’s gender transition at school confidential from the parents), and denying the motions to dismiss the actions, brought by state educational officials and by district officials.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F158feab2-da20-4871-ab6a-96fb6cce3543_1167x634.png?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:f0db3b50-7d23-4348-9e66-21a55756aa54
I hope the links work.
As to PZ and spider-kind:
Men can change into women because that’s microevolution. They are the same Kind. However, there’s no such thing as macroevolution, because the Bible says you can’t change into a different Kind.
But the Bible also says that God turned inert clay into a sentient being, and that has to be much more difficult than a mere change of species.
The Bible also says that God created everything by saying a few words, “Let there be…”.
No dirt involved.
Frankly I hope the teachers are ruled against… shouldn’t be snitching on their students. That said there shouldn’t be a policy preventing it or requiring it.
I know Meghan Murphy has gone full right-wing, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong about everything on all occasions.
Also, “snitching”? It is part of a teacher’s duty to inform parents if a child is in serious psychological trouble isn’t it? Is suicidal, or the target of bullying, or making rash self-destructive decisions? For instance if a child is anorexic – aren’t teachers supposed to give the parents a heads up?
Monica Hesse, in a column on abortion tourism, grudgingly mentions women, but just once, near the end. Otherwise, it’s all about “pregnant people” and “patients”.
An important study on puberty blockers released.
The majority of children in a landmark study on puberty blockers experienced positive or negative changes in their mental health, new analysis suggests.
The original study of 44 children, who all took the controversial drugs for a year or more, found no mental health impact – neither benefits nor harm.
But a re-analysis of that data now suggests 34% saw their mental health deteriorate, while 29% improved.
Note: The study has not been in a peer-reviewed journal yet
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66842352
Ophelia @ 271
Yes: ‘It is part of a teacher’s duty to inform parents if a child is in serious psychological trouble’. Absolutely. This is well understood and in the UK it is set out in government guidance. There are exceptions in cases where informing the parents is believed to carry a risk of harm to the child.
And in the case of college students, there are also some requirements that teachers inform, not parents, but appropriate authorities of any indication of problems. We had a special notification system set up at our school, and I imagine most colleges do.
Things are trickier in college, but there are still duties to inform. Not tattle. In fact, when speaking with a student, I was required to inform them that I might have to reveal information to proper authorities.
I’m gonna be a bit more nuanced here:
One, I’m imagining the teachers are appealing on 1st Amendment grounds and while I think they’re being dicks, I am a firm defender of free speech.
That throat clearing done, I’m pretty sure y’all would not be cool with teachers informing on Hector kissing a boy, Sarah having an abortion (admittedly a bit more serious but I doubt y’all’d defend it), a Mustafa’s change in religion, Heinrich practicing tarot, and other fairly harmless things. Calling yourself Colin and insisting on male pronouns is a tattling offense and unlikely to be especially harmful.
Now if little Colin is using the boys’ changing room/restroom, yes, you should do that because it’s risky behaviour. Can’t see how you shouldn’t be informing the parents of that, breast binding, cutting, or other sorts of risky behaviour and self-harm.
As to Meghan Murphy, of course she’s right about some things, but I don’t need someone who abandoned her principles because people were mean to her to tell me men aren’t women. Men aren’t women, full stop. The trannies are liars and bullies whose bullshit should not be indulged. It’s like joining the fascists because you hate commies.
The extremist trans activist Alejandra Caraballo is promoting an article in the Smithsonian Magazine that claims the Nazis persecuted transgender people:
The Nazis came for trans people, burned the first trans clinic, and murdered the first trans woman who ever got bottom surgery.
To deny this is to engage in holocaust denial.
https://nitter.poast.org/Esqueer_/status/1704891642245795971#m
I keep hearing this claim put about by many trans activists. The obvious purpose of this claim is to smear anyone who disagrees with puberty blockers, men in women’s prisons, men competing in women’s sports, etc. as being a similar type of murderous bigot that the Nazis were.
Has anyone researched this? I know Malcolm Clark has looked into the issue.
The Nazis persecuted and murdered tens of thousands of homosexual men. A number of these homosexual men were what used to be called “transvestites”, who wore women’s clothing for most or all of the time. One of them was “Liddy” Bacroff, who has been described as a homosexual and a transvestite.
So it seems the “trans” people that Caraballo is talking about were actually homosexuals who liked to cross-dress.
Their suffering was tragic and deserves to be commerated, but such people were not the main target of the Nazis, like Jews and Roma were. Nor is there any ideological connection with disagreement with “gender ideology” and Nazism.
Link to Malcolm Clark’s tweets about “Liddy” Bacroff here:
https://nitter.poast.org/TwisterFilm/status/1663726178589392897#m
Looks like there’s a tropical storm a-brewin’ in the Atlantic, just when we’re scheduled to fly to Spain to visit my mother-in-law.
You’d better not ruin our vacation, Ophelia.
It’s not me, it’s the toddler next door!
(Fact. There really is such a toddler next door.)
Flapping his butterfly wings again?
[…] a comment by Mostly Cloudy at Miscellany […]
NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League), more recently NARAL Pro-Choice America, has changed its name to Reproductive Freedom For All. In the current political climate, “for all” is a red flag for me, so I went looking for what the organization was after with this name change. Information was meager, but eventually I found this interview in Elle magazine:
‘We Have to Rethink Everything’: Why the Abortion Advocacy Group NARAL Is Changing Its Name
The interview is with Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All. I liked what she had to say. The organization isn’t shying away from the word “abortion”. They are moving away from the “choice” label, because with the many barriers to access and availability and other issues it really isn’t about choice per se. The “for all” bit is meant to emphasize women of color and women from various economic backgrounds. Good points made. It’s all about women, and not one word is mentioned about “transmen can get abortions, too”; the only nod to gender ideology is the notion that NARAL at the beginning was “by and for cis white women”.
A nod? Looks more like an extended middle finger.
See You In The Funny Papers:
“Harry Potter panel at London Comic Con pulled after LGBTQ+ charity complaint”.
https://archive.vn/hnwb3
There’s no evidence that the HP panel was going to discuss the Trans issue or any other political issue, but they can’t have anything by That Woman in their Safe Space.
Interesting profile by Hadley Freeman of Graham Linehan:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/6f23ce7c-596a-11ee-a62b-d21c2c8f0b9b?shareToken=1866ce87afbbbce63bc7738fe3ae8953
Yikes for New Orleans!
“The Mississippi River is forecast to reach ‘historic lows over the next several weeks,’ Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said during a Friday news conference.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/23/us/freshwater-new-orleans-saltwater-mississippi-river/index.html
If you’re going to virtue signal, maybe make sure the person you choose as the signal is actually virtuous, before getting all misty eyed.
Sounds like the sort of hero Ukraine needs right now, doesn’t he?
Ooops.
Not the hero Ukraine needs, and not the example to pull from a magician’s hat when Russia and its allies point out Ukraine’s Nazi past and accuse Zelensky et al of being Nazis from whom Mother Russia is bravely defending the world.
However, as Canada legally mandates Men are Women and Women are Bitches, I guess an Old Nazi is also a freedom fighter.
https://edmontonsun.com/news/canada/nazi-parliament-standing-ovation/wcm/c3f454d7-d5a3-496d-ae06-23c20028fc13
(…)
A couple of recent articles in the esports (CSGO) world looked interesting:
story #1
a player in a female team got kicked out of the team for racist remarks
story #2
another player in same female team is kicked/suspended for “allegations of cheating” (presumably cheated under another identity, then evaded any ban/punishment)
(btw, a full team is 5 players)
apparently uncovered by “esports’ favourite terf” (twitter)
#288 David
I saw that reported everywhere and wondered: is he still a Nazi believer? It is of course very possible that he is, but mention of him cites as evidence his membership with an SS unit… about 80 years ago. That’s a hell of a long time, and easily long enough to change his views. Has anyone asked?
Whatever the answer, mobbing up with them is nothing to venerate, it just bugs me that everyone speaks in the present tense as to his being a Nazi, despite his affiliation being a lifetime ago.
Well also, how much would any of us complain if the Proud Boys showed up to fight against China or Russia if they happened to be on the same continent instead of impossibly far away?
Wouldn’t be singing their praises later obviously…
Considering what Stalin did to the Ukrainians in the 1930s I can’t totally condemn any Ukrainians who fought on the side of the Germans invading the Soviet Union in the 1940s.
Did they *all* commit atrocities against Jews etc.?
is there a “joke” somewhere in the world that goes like:
“*everyone* was in the résistance”?
I might be misremembering/making it up
Roz Kaveney is grumbling again:
The doubtless well-intentioned mendacity of many GCs – who I assume tell lies knowingly in the belief they serve a greater good – debases intellectual currency, enables cruelty and drags them towards default irrational Right politics. Why do they not see this?
My point is, believing that the end justifies the means corrodes them and the society around them.
It saddens me that a number of people I once liked have become too ghastly to contemplate.
https://nitter.net/RozKaveney/status/1707131487139565801#m
One for “Pseud’s Corner” in “Private Eye”, I think.
Gee, how sad that he’s “saddened.”
” Too ghastly to contemplate” – note the complete *dehumanization* of Kaveney’s former friends, as if uttering mild criticism of puberty blockers and Jordan Gray exposing male genitalia to millions was the apex of mankind’s capacity for evil.
Interesting critique of Ibram X. Kendi and his ideas by Tyler Austin Harper:
https://wapo.st/45hAyul
After reading PZ”s awful justification of the cancellation of the session at the anthropologist conference, I made the mistake of reading the comments. Ever seen something so wrong that you couldn’t not get involved?
They really have nothing to back up their claims, do they? Every point I made was met with little more than insults: highlighting the lack of logic in their ideology was countered with irrelevance, twisting of my words, lies, and several comments that just made no sense at all (too many they and thems in a sentence tend to hamper understanding).
I won’t list it all (but the thread worth a look if you have ten minutes to kill and fancy a giggle) but one series of exchanges will suffice as an appetiser.
It started after I’d criticised PZ’s trick of dismissing individual sex markers: one day he’ll say that chromosomes are only a guide, not a foolproof method, the next it’s body types that are not always in line with sex, then it’s genitals, reproductive organs, gamete production, etc. I said that when dealt with individually, of course no single method was foolproof, but that what PZ was failing to mention was that when taken as a whole, all of the sex markers had the inconvenient habit of all falling on the same side of the binary for any given person, so in combination they were indeed very accurate ways of determining sex. Enter Brony:
I replied:
Raging Bee jumps in with:
Hmm, how could sex possibly continue in the absence of humans? I can’t believe it needed spelling out but I did so anyway:
Along came PZ:
This is where the the bolded part of RB”s comment is relevant. RB thinks that the end of mankind will mean the end of sex and PZ accuses me of making it up!
That exchange is far from everything but, long story short, I am now banned from Pharyngula. Hey ho.
Link to that post: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/29/anthropology-panels-elizabeth-weiss-and-the-devious-self-serving-propaganda-of-gender-critical-bigots/ above
Now there’s a surprise.
There has been a severe glitch in the matrix. I’ve just seen pictures of Trump entering the courthouse in New York. He’s wearing a BLUE tie!
Fox News (sorry): Satanists condemn leader, demand he reaffirm trans rights after taking photo with anti-woke atheist
In the event that you haven’t come across news of the current kerfuffle about Lucien Greaves, spokesperson for The Satanic Temple (TST), this article is probably a good summary. There was a lengthy and paywalled discussion in The Atlantic that was my introduction to the topic.
Greaves met with David Silverman, former head of American Atheists, and was photographed with him. Silverman has a lot of baggage, including allegations of sexual misconduct, which led to him being pushed out of American Atheists. Silverman also initiated an atheist presence at CPAC. Silverman of late has been expressing disagreement with trans ideology.
Members of TST are upset because Greaves associated with someone who disagrees with trans ideology. Not a person pushed out of a leadership position over sexual misconduct allegations, not a person who seeks better representation at a conservative conference, but a person who disagrees with trans ideology, that’s the only important point. The members are demanding that Greaves recite the appropriate mantras due to his contamination with the unclean. Something like that.
I really liked this piece at WaPo. I’ve never heard of the author (Kate Cohen) before.
I would summarize it as:
1. There are a lot of people who are actually atheists but don’t declare themselves as such. Not just the “nones” who list no religious affiliation, but plenty of people who call themselves Catholics, Protestants, etc. Folks who have invented new definitions of “God” (e,g, God is love, God is the sense of wonder I get from looking at a sunset) so they can say they believe.
2. Atheists don’t have the luxury of believing that our fate is decided by God, and that shows up in data: atheists are more like to vote, be politically active, etc.
3. Atheists have a role to play in being able to reject Christian nationalism and religious-based politics.
4. With understandable exceptions for people who would be persecuted, atheists should “come out.”
This feels very much like a throwback to the days of “New” Atheism. I’m interested to see if it will spawn much reaction. (There are over 10,000 comments at WaPo, but I know better than to wade into the comments section at a major media outlet.)
This is a good sentence from that excerpt:
Kate Cohen is generally pretty good, but she’s bought into the alphabet soup.
I’d like to ask Cohen why she thinks kids have a gender identity, but not a soul. If they feel like they do then they do, right?
Anyway, here’s a bio of her from FFRF that some here might find of interest:
https://ffrf.org/ftod-cr/item/42400-kate-cohen
I can finally retire “Cynical Theories” as a means of understanding the Wokies, eat shit James Lindsay!
“The Identity Trap” by Yascha Mounk is miles better (though it focuses primarily on race it basically treats the gender goblin shit and similar as interchangeable because intersectionality as popularly understood makes it so).
The Nation magazine, in looking over the political magazine scene, makes a gratuitous swipe at a certain writer:
…compared with the more demagogic anti-woke venues that have proliferated in recent years—
Quillette, Unherd, Compact, The Free Press, or any number of lucrative Substacks—Liberties isn’t creepily obsessed with the supposed threat of trans-affirming medical care. In fact, the one article on the topic, by Laura Kipnis, skewers J.K. Rowling and encourages a live-and-let-live approach to gender expression.
http://web.archive.org/web/20231002141251/https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/review-liberties-journal/
Sorry, the quote from the magazine should be in italics.
What a long and uninteresting piece of writing, too.
The gentleman behind that article is David Klion, a prolific US journalist.
He’s infamous for falsely accusing politician Amy Klobuchar of anti-Semitism.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Enough_Sanders_Spam/comments/bcno79/klionjpg/
J. A., it’s interesting how she sees the point about the god question – we need to be able to ask the hard questions – but then relates the ‘anti-trans’ side to the ones not asking the ‘hard’ questions…Blinders, much?
Well the god botherers think women were made from a dude’s rib and were cursed forever for eating a magic fig… not convinced they really know what a woman is either. They get the right answer on accident.
Now when we apply the scientific method to all this…
There’s an online course being offered next week where I work (until the end of the year, when I’ll be retiring) titled: Expanding Psychological Safety for LGBTQ Employees. Here’s some detail about that:
“Allyship is an action, psychological safety is an environment. Allyship best practices will change over time but psychological safety is a measured and sustained experience. Psychological safety is a knowing that LGBTQ employees don’t have to cover who they are and that vulnerability, no matter which employee is expressing it, is not a punishable offense. Learning objectives for this session include: I can list which of the common behaviors that employees may practice to cover their identities. I can practice and hone strategies that created a psychologically safe workplace and supports my teams’ authentic selves and I can identify what a psychologically safe workplace looks like.”
I could go on, but to cut to the chase what this is about is having employees understand that if another employee brings their authentic self to work and uses a bathroom that doesn’t line up with their sex, my response is to not raise any objection because of their psychological vulnerability. (Cis-gendered women’s actual vulnerability to males in same-sex spaces is not the object of this training, obviously.) I also will adopt a common behavior of wearing a “my pronouns are” badge to also help foster said psychologically safe workplace and of course extend that to my email signature not only to other co-workers but to the public at large because psychological vulnerability is everywhere and my allyship should extend beyond the workplace as well.
Should I sign up? As a short-timer I don’t have much to lose if I do raise some objections or perhaps more wisely ask some hard questions that other participants might hear and ponder.
From Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter dated yesterday (but published today):
Jesus. What amazes me is that so many of his supporters call themselves patriots and supporters of the military—no doubt many would call for the death penalty for the likes of Eric Snowden—and yet when Trump casually reveals some of our most sensitive military information, they don’t bat an eye.
Jeeeezus.
(Sorry about the hold; a couple of typos in your sign-in.)
Figured as much. Looooong day of travel plus commenting on my iPhone—not a good mix.
Well thank you for the alert!
Interesting interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on RNZ this morning.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018910111/kim-stanley-robinson-imagining-the-future-and-finding-hope
Oh, hey, another guy who can’t pay his legal bills over the election fraud claims.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/election-denier-and-mypillow-guy-mike-lindell-confirms-he-s-out-of-money-can-t-pay-legal-bills/ar-AA1hNV9w?OCID=ansmsnnews11
He should have stuck to just pillows.
For those who aren’t aware of it, Daniel Dennett’s autobiography I’ve been thinking is now out. I’m a few chapters in. What I enjoyed most so far, is the introduction, where he writes about how he nearly died from a serious health problem, and how he reacted to friends telling him they had prayed for him. First he appreciates their concern, then he forgives them for being so wrong-minded about it. That’s an interesting take. I’ve had people praying for me too, over much less serious health problems – and I never quite knew how to deal with it. For sure, I too can appreciate the thought, but the notion of forgiveness hadn’t occurred to me.
The book is of course quite different from his other work, full of anecdotes from his student days. But his writing is clear and lucid as always, and I find it hard to put the book down.
A tiny bit of venting.
I happened upon a video in which the host was listing which authors had the most film treatments of their works. It was presented in countdown style by number of works, and it was clear from the beginning that the “winner” was going to be William Shakespeare. Along the way various other authors were mentioned and occasionally discussed briefly.
The host got to, I think the 11-work mark, and (paraphrased): “There are two people at this position” – photos are shown – “Um, one person” *smirk*.
There were two photos shown. One was the author the host went on to mention. The other was JK Rowling.
Apparently she is not even a person now, in this host’s eyes. I guess he agrees with all of the political and social views of all the other nine authors mentioned, or at least finds their faults sufficiently minor to allow for their names to be mentioned and their personhood not to be rejected.
Isn’t it interesting how the trans Movement claims it’s dehumanizing not to believe people are the other sex, while so many trans believers make literally dehumanizing “jokes” like that?
My apologies in advance for this being so long, and I hope it doesn’t violate any comment rule. I think for once that TL;DR won’t suffice though, and that it’s best to read the whole damn thing. So, here’s what I received from my employer’s HR department this week (I’ve redacted my employer’s name from it) about how they’re going to go forward with being more inclusive. I’m glad I’m retiring at the end of this year because I don’t want to bring my honest opinion about this to work.
God almighty. It is of course FAR too long, but not for here – it’s far too long for a workplace policy.
Is it ok if I guestpost it?
I’m fine with it being a guestpost, as it deserves further scrutiny (as well as editing).
Excellent; further scrutiny is exactly the goal.
[…] J.A. at Miscellany Room, a little missive from his HR […]
Things heard from a young woman’s mouth: [speaking of potential romantic matches] “I would definitely want someone open-minded but not a freak. So … you shouldn’t be into feet, but, you know, a little choking’s [indistinct] fun, you know.”
Can we start this humanity thing over from level one? Where’s the reset button?
Some women are into it… That said, it’s edge play and thus risks serious injury or death. It shouldn’t be seen as casual “spice”. People should receive education to that effect (and an understanding that if you kill her on accident it’s 100% on you and the law should treat it as such). I’ll certainly not engage in it regardless of what a potential partner is into.
I know some women are (or claim to be) into choking, and I don’t care. They’re wrong.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is promoting, for “LGBTQ History Month”, the creation of the Gay Pride flag 45 years ago. Their caption:
They correctly note, in the image and in the caption, that it was a “Gay Pride flag” and it was for use in a “Gay Freedom Celebration”, but they nonetheless insist it was intended as a symbol of “LGBTQ+ pride” and for the “LGBTQ+ community”, despite there not being such a thing 45 years ago.
Crap. Borked the link HTML. Please repair. Sorry about that.
“Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”
J. K. Rowling isn’t going for the pronoun nonsense:
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/jk-rowling-would-happily-do-two-years-in-jail-hate-crime-wrong-pronouns/
Margot Polivy has died. I have to admit that I had never heard of her, but I knew her work. She was one of the drivers of the push to enact Title IX. There was a lot of opposition to it at the time, but as she pointed out much of that was more about money than misogyny.
She eventually drafted some anodyne language that had the effect of assuaging those fears.
On the effects of Title IX:
No word on how she felt about the current threat to Title IX from the trans movement.
It isn’t really the money, you know. Or maybe it is, but not because the school’s are making money off the football team. They like to say that; I hear it all the time, but almost all schools are losing money on sports. It could be they don’t want to lose more money by adding women’s sports, but saying that would be admitting what a revenue sink the damn football team is.
Now where would schools actually gain something by a program? Why, science grants! (Maybe other departments, too, probably, but I don’t know as much about them). My major professor when I was doing my doctorate was bringing more money into the school than any other professor on campus. His research grants made him a man to reckon with. The football team, on the other hand, was losing not only games but money. So what was the response of administration? Build a new stadium! Now they lose games in a better stadium.
Pop quiz: Keeping in mind which department draws in more money, do you think the school will build a science building before a stadium? Of course not. Stadiums are big flashy places everyone goes to, and that might be seen on TV. Donors donate to them. Science buildings are ordinary looking buildings (only with microscopes and skeletons) that no one watches on TV because it isn’t all that interesting to watch students in class.
Rishi Sunak is an absolute disgrace.
So Rishi Sunak has given in. Faced with a backlash to his mild remarks about biological sex at the Conservative Party Conference, it looks as though the Government intends to go ahead with a complete ban on “conversion therapy”.
https://unherd.com/thepost/rishi-sunak-has-caved-on-conversion-therapy/
It looks like Britain’s jails are going to fill up with doctors who disagree with drugging and mutilating minors.
@iknklast,
Oh, yes, I know about the lie of big sports money and universities. I was fortunate enough to go to a school that had dismantled a onetime highly successful football program, and built a library where the stadium had stood. It was (and still is) extremely well-funded.
But I think Polivy had a point–the people in power saw and benefited from the flow of money, even if the universities didn’t. (The NCAA is basically a money-printing organization.)
Yes, I imagine. And the universities benefit from the visibility. Great libraries don’t get you publicity; they don’t give people a reason to go to your school (though they should, especially if the academic programs are equally good).
Et tu, Bob? Even “Quirks and Quarks,” a show that has been giving me great info on science for years, is now being infested with trans “queering of science.” I was listening on what may be my last good MC ride of the season today, and this segment came in:
A new book lays out why women’s bodies may have driven evolution which was going great in discussing the importance of the differences between the sexes wrt evolution until Cat Bohannon started rambling about how the cocktail of hormones that transwomen take to breastfeed their babies is the same as those given to women who don’t naturally produce much milk and need some help.
Early summer there was a segment on how “queer scientists” put on a show in Toronto to wow the audience with how queer science can be. I’m sorry CBC, I used to respect you.
It wasn’t long ago that athletes could get suspended by the NCAA for accepting a ride from the coach during a blizzard, while the coach could make millions with a shoe contract by requiring the players wear a certain brand.
Carole Hooven has found something alarming in the journal “Hormones and Behavior”:
“We [are] well-positioned to implement this deconstructionist approach in lieu of binary sex frameworks, to move away from this hypersimplistic sex model…’Sex’ is a constructed category, not a biological variable – and our science should reflect that.”
https://nitter.net/hoovlet/status/1715419698878173570#m
Based on the abstract, there’s nothing to that ludicrous Hormones and Behavior paper but hot air. Sokal wept.
I am appalled.
Wow. What could possibly go wrong.
From the Palestine Mandate, entrusted to Britain by the Council of the League of Nations in 1922:
Did a great job there, then.
This bit from a report on a trans mentorship program in the Twin Cities definitely has me wondering what’s going on:
Behold the power of suggestion on young minds, I’d say. And beware too.
Here’s a link to the report, if anyone’s interested in reading it. It’s clear to me that Minnesota is where transgender ideology is firmly entrenched.
‘There are other people like me’: New nonprofit connects LGBTQ+ youth with mentors
FWIW, the report I linked to is a personal story and it doesn’t take a critical approach to the subject of gender and mental health. That the minor had been suffering from overall mental distress was noted, but with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and subsequent affirmation there was improvement seen and the mentor program is also noted as a positive factor in that improvement. So the narrative of the report is a positive one and there’s nothing to question, other than the 40% figure in that survey I noted.
Except that such narratives may be persuasive when presented in schools, both to kids as well as adults.
I’m guessing that extra attention of any kind, even outside of “affirmation” would have been helpful, and that a mentor of any kind, even a non-trans one, would have resulted in improvement. That 40% figure sure sounds like social contagion and band wagoneering rather something real. Special treatment, extra attention, a trans day or month of something or other several hundred times a year; how many wouldn’t think about maybe signing up for that?
Eighth grade is right about the point where kids are in puberty. Eighth grade is an awful place to be, because you are changing so rapidly physically, and while you’re starting to feel sort of adult, you aren’t an adult. And for girls, they are usually growing breasts and curves, and boys are starting to notice them, not always in a positive manner. It seems like the ideal spot for trans activists to target young people, because kids and their identities are so wobbly at that point.
There has now been a mass shooting in Maine:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-67225016
The suspect is still at large, Maine residents in two-three counties are told to shelter in place (it’s not particularly close to me, but who knows?). A Maine congressman has reversed his stance on assault weapons bans, and is now calling for just that.
The world has gone totally insane.
Oh, and it looks like this guy is the sort of guy they would usually think of when they say “a good guy with a gun”. It never occurs to them that a good guy with a gun can become a bad guy with a gun with only small nudging over the line in some cases.
Eighteen people are dead. Let’s hope we get more than thoughts and prayers.
CBC has done a big report into whether or not singer Buffy Saint-Marie is actually indigenous or not: https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/buffy-sainte-marie
Bitterly ironic as it accepts that men are women without batting an eye, and are complicit in forcing this belief on the rest of the country through its dishonest reporting (TiMs in women’s prisons, sports, politics, etc.).
Bitterly ironic indeed.
I see that the topic on Buffy Saint-Marie has been closed (for perfectly good reasons), so I’ll add a few thoughts here.
I am yet again struck by the conflict between ancestry and cultural heritage. Buffy Saint-Marie is a member of a tribe. She speaks the Cree language well enough to teach it to others. She worked with indigenous youth. She has been strongly involved in advocacy for indigenous people. She has participated in many tribal events. Isn’t that important?
Someone born to American parents who is adopted by an Italian couple and grows up immersed in Italian culture, is it acceptable to call that person Italian? I think that person is a better representative of Italian life and culture than someone who grew up in the US outside of an immigrant community who only discovers Italian ancestry through a DNA test.
I understand that truth is important, and whether her claims of indigenous background are true, mistaken impressions on her part, or falsifications, is thus also important. But I don’t get the impression she used her (possibly inaccurate) indigenous ancestry for self-aggrandizement.
Well the CBC article did mention prizes and awards she got for being indigenous.
I take your point but I think she could have called herself an advocate for indigenous people (or a friend, or admirer, or a list of similar things) rather than claiming to be indigenous.
She could have refrained from calling herself indigenous. If she is not indigenous, and knew that. Perhaps she did. I’m not clear on the facts of the matter in the situation.
Part of my concern, though, is that so many of these prizes and awards are for people with a particular ethnic background, when at least some of them could be for representation of a particular culture. Best Italian meal at a restaurant may not require that the chef actually have Italian ancestry, just to throw out an example. There was much controversy when a non-Japanese wrestler rose to the top of the sumo rankings; his skill and his knowledge of the sumo culture really should have been more important, in my estimation, but a bunch of people wanted the laurels to go only to Japanese wrestlers.
So that’s what I’m wrestling with, you might say. Or I might. :-)
I think this fellows story is relevant to the current Buffy St. Marie issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Owl
I’ve long been uneasy with my role in manufacturing weapons of war… but that was when it was really just for the War on Terror. Making stuff to kill people felt morally dubious (but earning a paycheck is what you do). Now though? Seems like a lot of people need killing these days, so I’m considerably more sanguine about the whole thing…
Dunno…
Point of clarification on Buffy Ste. Marie being “adopted,” because I was confused, too.
The family that raised her (the Santamarias) was white. Her story has been that they adopted her as an infant, but the recent CBC reporting is that there’s no record of that, and it appears that they are actually her birth parents — there’s a birth certificate from Massachusetts listing her as being born to the Santamarias (and listing her and the parents as white). The adoption story seems to have been invented by her sometime in her 20s, and it’s shifted around a bit as to whether she knew her birth parents, what tribe they were, etc. Her family members have disputed it, only to be threatened with lawsuits. (One now-deceased brother was apparently threatened that if he disputed Buffy’s heritage, she would accuse him of sexually abusing her. The abuse may of course have happened, I have no way of knowing, but obviously it’s a little suspicious when it’s raised in that context.)
As an adult, she was “adopted” by a Cree couple, which is apparently a cultural practice that has significance to the tribe. But that’s obviously very different from the story she’s told, and from the hypothetical posed by Sackbut.
Oh daaaamn that’s seriously cruel. First pretending her family isn’t her [birth] family, then threatening them.
Important post on The Free Press website: ‘Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It’ by Finnish psychiatrist Riittakerttu Kaltiala.
Thanks NightCrow, interesting article and it provides links to some really fascinating/alarming and carefully argued publications.
Daft UK celebs sign petition calling for legal “trans away the gay” laws:
https://nitter.net/Jebadoo2/status/1720081103627911518#m
Russell Tovey, Alan Cumming, Mae Martin, Juno Dawson, Munroe Bergdorf, Rina Sawayama…shame on you populist authoritarians!
Epic–I mean, EPIC–takedown of a man minimizing the assault on Maria MacLachlan by JK Rowling. She hands him his butt on a platter and seasons it for him.
https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1720520410666594327?s=20
If anyone finds a comma lying around, it belongs after “Maria MacLachlan” in my comment above. JKR did the takedown, not the assault on Maria!
Why yes, that is quite epic.
Belgian MP on Freedom, Women, and Islamophobia-themed hate crime legislation:
https://x.com/SafaiDarya/status/1720772190235132396?s=20
(for the x-less:)
Darya Safai, MP, includes two photos of herself – one in headcovering and one in freedom.
Thanks for the link to the J. K. Rowling post; that was a great way to start a morning. I love the comment about being about as interested in his opinion as in how much dust is under her fridge.
Mike, thank you for that.
iknklast, I loved that too!
A friend gifted me this link, sorry it may be paywalled. Really interesting analysis of how and why US democracy has fallen from being world leading, to one of the least democratic democracy’s in the world.
You forgot the link. This?
Apologies Ophelia, I was very tired yesterday. It was from the Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-constitution-norway/675199/
Possibly similar.
Abigail Thorn is in an aggressive mood:
In order to #BanConversionTherapy we need to invest in housing so queer youth have somewhere to go when parents won’t affirm. We need to disrupt online spaces where parents are radicalised. We need to treat pro-CT groups like anti-vaxxers.
And as always, desegregate the NHS.
https://nitter.net/PhilosophyTube/status/1721869977374859284#m
“Disrupt online spaces?” Is Thorn talking about going after the websites of Thorn’s political opponents?
That’s certainly what it sounds like – some kind of forcible silencing.
The phrasing makes it sound like Thorn wants people to go after places likes Mumsnet and Transgender Trend, where parents worried about gender ideology can discuss issues together.
Also, can I say the whole campaign against “conversion therapy” (actually the “watchful waiting” therapy) is the purest example of a “Moral panic” that I can think of?
A mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behaviour or group of people is dangerously deviant and poses a threat to society’s values and interests.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100208829
This is a “moral panic” – that there’s a epidemic of “conversion therapy” promoted by “powerful transphobes” in Britain, and it’s harming children and teenagers (“trans children” and Thorn’s “queer youth”).
Jezebel, the American feminist website, has gone under.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/09/jezebel-news-shut-down-layoffs-go-media
Some of Jezebel’s articles were criticised on this ‘ere website:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/whats-most-glaring/
And here:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/a-lesser-plea/
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/dirt-bag/
A post over on Pharyngula brought me up short – apparently, male and female kiwis (the birds) have different calls. But how do they know which is which???
Uh oh uh oh – sounds like blasphemy.
@Holms – those stupid birds don’t realize they can assign their hatchlings’ sex. Here’s a WaPo article about color vision deficiencies in children, and it starts off badly:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/07/colorblind-children-testing-school/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_ideas
have a $29 annual digital-only subscription and they’re so captured that I don’t plan to renew it in April.
It seems obvious to me that one way to help countless children from having the problem is to assign them female.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali says she’s found God. She now says she has abandoned atheism and become a Christian.
Ali says “Western Civilization” is under threat from Russia, China and the Islamic world, and secular philosophies can’t protect West. Civ. from the enemies.
So She writes.” The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
Interesting she doesn’t seem interested in Christian ideas like the Resurrection and Original Sin – it’s Christianity as a means of social cohesion that she seems to be interested in.
Mostly Cloudy @382, I think that’s always been one of the major attractions of religion. I don’t think that all that many people really care about the details of the belief, and certainly not about the specific doctrinal beliefs that seperate say one christian church from another. It’s that pull to belong, to feel a part of a community where you are involved, loved, and supported. We’ve probably all met people for whom that is the case. There was that English philosopher a few years back who proposed ‘atheist cathedrals’ just so that atheists could have that experience of community through shared ceremony and procedure. Some people displace that into following a sports team, gamer culture, family, politics, social causes. All of which can be constructive, but all of which can become pathologically destructive as well. Just like religion.
The Judeo(cultural appropriation)-Christian tradition is as much an enemy and stumbling block to Western civilization as the Islamists and Slavic barbarians are; moreso even in some respects because it makes us stupid. Enemies you can shoot at, stupidity is harder to kill.
Bet she’ll be full Bret Weinstein within a year…
The wrong Trump sibling died.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/2023/11/13/maryanne-trump-barry-donald-sister-dies/edce7968-8258-11ee-924c-6e6807155e36_story.html
Neglected to mention: The Slavic barbarians are also defenders of the True Faith, so Jesus is already on their side.
Yes. Orthodox Christianity is a non-Western tradition of Christianity over a thousand years old, and the Russian faction of it largely supports Putin (who seems to be a practicing Christian).
I did not know until today that there’s a senator named Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma. A Republican, of course. Anyway, it seems he’s a tough guy. At least when he’s grilling a union boss in a Senate hearing.
I don’t have an independent source for this, but a Facebook friend who was at the pro-Israel rally yesterday had this to say:
So once again women are forced to be silent in the name of “diversity”.
A pool player named Lynne Pinches forfeited her chance to win a national title rather than play a trans-identified man. And she had the support of the room.
More of this, please!
EXCERPTS:
A pool player has forfeited her chance to win a top national title in protest at the sport allowing a transgender woman to compete against natal females.
Lynne Pinches told Telegraph Sport she has turned down an invitation to turn full-time professional amid her despair at a “U-turn” in international rules.
On Saturday, Pinches was cheered by spectators as she packed up her cue and refused to play as the final of the Ladies Champions of Champions got under way. Her opponent, Harriet Haynes, reacted with bemusement before later picking up the trophy by default.
“Walking out was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do in the game in my life,” said Pinches, 50, from Norwich. “I have played 30 years and I’ve never even conceded so much as a frame, never mind a match. This was only my fourth final ever but the trophy or money meant nothing to me without fairness, and that’s what I said to the tournament director afterwards….
***
“The devastation I have felt, I can’t even explain,” said Pinches, whose son, brother and father all played pool or snooker at elite levels. “I didn’t eat or sleep properly for two days. I was crying until 3am. I was devastated. My son Tommy, who plays on the Ultimate Pool Challenger Series, messaged me and said, ‘I know you must be absolutely devastated mum, because I know that you’ve you’ve hated this since the beginning’. He really wanted to write it on his Facebook but he was worried he’d get banned. And that’s what pushed me over the edge to be honest. I thought ‘you’ve silenced me for years. You’re not silencing my child as well’. I’m not putting up with that…”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2023/11/14/lynne-pinches-harriet-haynes-transgender-pool-player/
@WaM #389:
This has been my recurring point, beyond one being the aggressor why are we rooting for Stalin instead of Hitler? They’re fundamentally the same sort of people, atavistic barbarians to the core.
Our old friend Gretchen Felker-Martin has apologised after making an appallingly *offensive* tweet defending Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center:
https://nitter.net/SamAsherwriter/status/1725611735518708140#m
What is that Maya Angelou quote the wokies love?
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
He never apologized to women, did he.
I’m getting strong autogynephile vibes off Gretchen Felker-Martin:
https://nitter.net/antenacactus/status/1725575975696769548#m
I’ve got a title for his autobio : Memoirs of a Sly Pornographer.
Heh.
I support the rights of Palestinian people to live in peace, to farm their land, and to return to their ancestral homes. I do this, not because they are Muslim, but despite their religion. I do it because it is a humanitarian thing to do.
I oppose the Israeli government’s repression of Palestinians, and its support for the “settlers” in the West Bank, almost all of whom have just stepped off a plane from Europe. Every day, West Bank Palestinians are being evicted from homes their families have lived in for generations. If they resist eviction, they are likely to be shot by “settlers”. If they fight back, they will be shot by the IDF. I do not do this because they are Jews, but despite their religion. I do it because it is a humanitarian thing to do.
Coyne may be right on some aspects of Islam and this current conflict, but his article is like so many I have read this last month that equates Islam as evil and Israel as the tough little guy standing up for ‘Western Values’.
Do I think the attack by Hamas was evil? Yes, I do.
Do I think that Israel’s response was proportionate? No, I don’t. Israel has the right to defend itself, but the right to self defence does not, or should not, be the wholesale destruction of civil infrastructure. Israel is losing the propaganda war, it is losing some of the support it has traditionally held from around the world. And it is desperately spinning the narrative to try to keep looking like the “good guys with guns” when the reality is the IDF and Hamas are two sides of the same coin.
Right now, just like the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel is creating a breeding ground for the next batch of Hamas and other terrorists. When you leave people with no hope, they also have nothing to lose.
Not all Israelis are Likud. Not all Palestinians are Hamas.
While Islam has some regressive theology it hasn’t always been that way. It has often been like Christianity and Judaism, where the holy books are full of evil ideas, but the adherents choose which bits to follow and which bits to ignore. There are Jews who eat shellfish, Muslims who drink alcohol, and Catholics who use birth control and all still see themselves as faithful followers of their religion.
Your great ally in the ME, Saudi Arabia, is the exporter to the world of the worst form of Islam, Wahhabism. This is the origin of the worst aspects of modern day Islam. Historically Muslims lived in peace with their neighbours, and countries like Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Lebanon once had thriving, secular societies where people were free to worship or not, where women were educated, owned wealth, and chose their own partners. This didn’t change because the people decided to become more religiously conservative, it changed because of outside forces that created a feeling of oppression
In Australia, we have one of the world’s greatest train journeys, from Adelaide to Alice Springs, and later extended to Darwin. It is called “The Ghan”; short for “The Afghan Express”. It is named for the Afghan cameleers who created the route from Adelaide to Alice, who carried the goods on their camels, who built mosques and who often intermarried with local Aboriginal tribes. They helped build society, they did not tear it down, oppress women, or attempt to overthrow the government.
And finally, while there is much in Islam to despise, while there is much of Islam that is anti-women, the same can be said for sections of Judaism. I recall a number of articles here about Jewish men forcing women out of their airline seats, Jewish men who insist their wives both produce vast numbers of children and earn an income so the men can spend their days studying their holy books.
There is much angst in Australian indigenous communities over the legal fiction of Terra Nullius that was used as the excuse for colonising a continent and pretending that there were no pre-existing communities. The same justification is used by apologists for Israel. You’ll hear/read there never was a country called Palestine, there was no government between the river and the sea until Israel was formed. There is a sliver of truth there, but total ignorance of the fact that people lived, worked, played, and yes, worshipped there long before modern Israel was a twinkle in Balfour’s eye.
To paraphrase the Bard
Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Palestinian wrong a Jew, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Jew wrong a Palestinian, what should his sufferance be by Jewish example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Thank you for the move.
Me replied to Rev David Brindley:
Thank you Reverend David Brindley for your eloquent statement.
Whoever knew that explaining why Israel might be responsible for some of the anger that exists against it meant that one was celebrating the Hamas attack?
I guess the same people who knew that explaining the roots of 9-11/2001 were actually justifying it. (I suppose.)
Who knew that not wanting thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza to be slaughtered meant total support for all aspects of “Muslim societies”?
The same people who say that opposing the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is Jew-hating fascism (as well as misogyny). [Waitaminnit! Aren’t some of the 12,000 dead and the tens of thousands traumatized FEMALE???]
It’s been appalling reading commenters here saying that Israel has every right to bomb hospitals. To read people saying with a straight face that the IDF is trying to minimize civilian casualties when IDF spokespersons and Israeli politicians have said quite clearly that they want to create a “city of tents” and that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, and the ELECTED Netanyahu is babbling about doing what the Israelites did to the people of Amalek in the Bible, which was to kill them all as well as their animals so that nothing of their society remained. To read how the failure of any “peace process” has mainly been the fault of the Palestinians when it has always been the Israelis who have the most power in this equation and who have been using this power to steal the Palestinians’ land and to smash them when they resist.
THREE TIMES I mentioned Israeli snipers deliberately shooting innocent people (including nurses and children) during a peaceful Palestinian protest in 2018 and each time it was as if I’d never mentioned it.
While 12,000 innocent people are killed, and over a million more are being deprived of the necessities of life, let’s post about how people angry about this might be protesting in bad taste. Apparently the worst thing about this is that Israel’s barbarism has given antisemites an opportunity to spew their racist garbage. How dare they take advantage of Israel’s barbarism like that!!!!
If I were to have posted links to news stories about women convicted of false rape or abuse allegations during the “Me Too”/Jeffrey Epstein moment, I would expect that people would think I had an agenda.
If I were to have posted links to stories about Black people killing each other or about vandalism and riots during the George Floyd/BLM protests, I would expect that people would think I had an agenda.
Again I say: If you want to understand how otherwise decent, intelligent people (especially women) can have gotten the whole “Trans vs. gender critical” debate so titanically wrong, some of you should review how you have responded to this tragedy.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, true, and his license tag reading “zero emissions” is not completely correct. But people do no realize just how much energy goes into the production and delivery of petrol to your pump, with emissions being pumped into the atmosphere along the way. There is the extraction, the distribution of crude to refineries, refining, distribution logistics to the pump, pumping, and then burning an inefficient product, with another set of emissions. This is what we are trying to reduce in moving to electric vehicles. For gasoline and diesel engines, it’s a continuous need for energy in all these phases in order to get to transportation.
An EV uses mined minerals, some of them rare earth minerals with a cost to the environement. An EV also relies on a source of electricty. Some of it is from renewable sources, but yes, most of it is still carbon-based. However, the amount that’s coming from renewable sources is increasing. In Minnesota, more than 31% of our electricity comes from renewable sources, and while 69% comes from carbon-based, it’s changing. We are still in a nascent phase of moving from carbon to other energy sources. But I don’t know what people expect we should do and perhaps you can help.
Should we wait until we can flip a switch from all-carbon to all-renewable?
Cobalt is one element that is frequently mentioned as a reason that EV’s are bad. But more cobalt is currently used for jet engines by a long shot than is used for EV batteries and new technology is being developed to make batteries using lithium, which is an abundant element. And cobalt can be recycled when batteries reach the end of life.
If we use cobalt and other elements as the reason that we don’t move to EV’s, should we also stop using computers, cell phones, watches, TV’s and everything else that requires such elements?
The thing is, if the car I bought in July uses some carbon based electricty for power now, it will use less in five years and even less five years from then. But if I had bought a gas powered car then it would always be a gas powered car. And I have yet to see a gasoline powered car that can generate more gas in my tank as I break or coast. My car has regenerative breaking.
And it has also saved me a ton of money on what I was paying for fuel.
Good points all Mike, thanks. I’m not against electric cars, that’s the future. I think if electric vehicles could be produced without using fossil fuels, and operated and maintained likewise, then a “zero emissions” plate would make more sense. Hybrids make sense too, storing and releasing otherwise wasted energy. I understand the way these systems work, and I don’t think the technology is bad, or the idea of drastically reducing our dependence on fossil fuels isn’t absolutely necessary, because it is. As you say, it will be a gradual thing, and the infrastructure will have to catch up. I think we agree on this.
I think I object to the misleading marketing mostly, and the hype that surrounds Musk in particular. I do tend to go on about that, but I really don’t understand the exaltation of, what I think is, a successful businessman. Not a genius, not an enigma, not a savant, just a successful businessman. Sure he’s eccentric, but aren’t we all?
Also not lost on me is the fact that EVs are subsidized, so we taxpayers are contributing to the producers of EVs, even if we object to who’s profiting and how.
Yes, much of the marketing is misleading, and I wish they wouldn’t do that. But then, much of marketing depends on being misleading.
@396:
Is there such “wholesale destruction” though? From what I am seeing in photos like those in the following article, the damage to infrastructure in Gaza is limited to buildings that Hamas fighters are using, either to launch missiles or attack IDF forces. It’s targeted, not indiscriminate.
Article: Satellite photos show punishing campaign as Israel pushed into Gaza
And who was it who told you “the damage to infrastructure in Gaza is limited to buildings that Hamas fighters are using”? On what basis do you believe this claim?
Have you not seen the TV reports of Palestinian civilians being pulled from the rubble of bombed buildings?
I guess you were taken in by the staged photos of weapons neatly laid out in a hospital ward, rather than being shown in situ. You probably also believed the other photos the IDF published showing Hamas have so much free tIme their vehicles are wearing a spotless showroom shine.
@403
I’m not claiming that all IDF attacks are only hitting Hamas targets. What I am claiming is that the IDF is not indiscriminately bombing civilian infrastructure. The basis for my claim is the satellite imagery showing that most of the infrastructure is still there.
The news coverage deservedly focuses on the damage that has been done and it’s impossible to have not seen and heard about civilians being killed in Gaza, and I’m skeptical about the claims Netanyahu made about the cache of weapons found in said hospital. I’m also skeptical about claims that the IDF is deliberately targeting civilians.
“the IDF is not indiscriminately bombing civilian infrastructure.”
I’ve seen before/after comparisons of satellite imagery showing entire blocks of building shattered, even amongst residential areas, so I don’t see how that claim bears up at all.
@405
As the IDF continues to advance in northern Gaza, the fighting is resulting in more destruction as Hamas forces resist, so I will revise my claim accordingly. That said, southern Gaza is not being attacked.
Yes. Eastasia has always been at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
You’re obvs not very good at keeping up with the news.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/18/israeli-air-strikes-kill-28-palestinians-in-southern-gaza
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/why-is-israel-attacking-south-gaza-after-telling-people-go-there-2023-10-25/
@OB #397
Your house. Your rules.
I’m staggered at the number of GC women I follow on Xwitter who are all in on the “Israel is Holy and infallible” brainfart.
We often say that it isn’t up to women to solve men’s problems. To me, modern Israel is in the same basket. Europe forced the Palestinians to “fix” Europe’s problem with Jews. There was no bar to Jews living in Palestine, there was no need to forcibly create Israel on Palestinian land.
A new homeland for Europe’s Jews should have been carved out of Bavaria and Austria.
@407
I should have been clearer and said attacked by ground forces, which is what’s responsible for most of the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza.
Israel has said that they’re going to attack Hamas wherever they are in Gaza, so the announcement by leaflets of an imminent ground attack by the IDF on Khan Younis in the south was covered a few days ago, I know.
For what it’s worth, I’m not following the war closely so I don’t mind your criticism. Any recommendations you may have regarding accurate coverage would be appreciated.
Fuck that, I want them here… Their genetics are wasted on Europe…
J.A., I understand. As for “accurate coverage”, that’s almost an oxymoron these days.
I like Al Jazeera as they have so many resources so close, but even they are not immune to some bias.
I discount almost anything that comes from a Murdoch source, especially Fox and the NY Times.
Anything from an overtly Jewish or Arabic source is likely to be biased, particularly if that source isn’t media but political/social/ethnic clubs.
Whenever Israel makes an announcement by leaflets of an imminent ground attack by the IDF all they are doing is pretending they care about civilians. Just what do those leaflets say?
Wassup, guys, we’re about to bomb the shit out of your homes, so pack your camel and leave. NO! Civilians ONLY, Hamas, you stay right where you are so we can bomb you.
Rupert Murdoch controls the Wall Street Journal, Fox, News Corp, and the New York Post. A.G. Sulzberger’s family trust runs the New York Times (Sulzberger is the publisher).
Sometimes I wonder if PZ knows he is talking shit, and is giggling at the people he fools. Otherwise, I have no explanation for how thick his blinders must be to not see the problem with what he just posted:
Alpha males are male. Beta males are male. Gamma males are male. Females are female. Just the usual two sexes, and the same facetious drivel as his much older comment about there being seven sexes of horse (mare, stallion, gelding, freemarten, etc.).
Non-binary Montrealer on hunger strike to get ‘X’ gender marker on Quebec health card
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/other/non-binary-montrealer-on-hunger-strike-to-get-x-gender-marker-on-quebec-health-card/ar-AA1kmVtS?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=e4e88497d16c43e6a8d28025044193f9&ei=100
But haven’t we been told numerous times that sex and gender are two completely different things? Yet here’s someone who thinks their gender identity means that they are no longer male or female.
An addendum to the above:
An unreasonable demand for recognition of an impossible thing, backed with emotional blackmail. I think that’s a trifecta. Or, since this is Quebec, a hat-trick.
And from the Toronto Sun (sorry):
Trans woman breaks New Jersey college swimming record after switching from men’s team
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/sports/golf/trans-woman-breaks-new-jersey-college-swimming-record-after-switching-from-men-s-team/ar-AA1kiUNz?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=b449df561ef546f4ba2f5c175b39abe1&ei=11
But there was pushback from Riley Gaines on Twitter, so a congratulatory post from the college that allowed the cheating to happen was deleted.
How many of those “insulting” comments would have simply been pointing out that he was a male and a cheat. If you can’t handle the truth, stop pushing your goddamn fantasy on the rest of the world. And what of the insult to the women on “his” team, and the insult to the woman who was pushed aside to make way for this narcissist? What of the other women from all the other teams you cheated against? I guess pointing out cheating is worse than cheating itself.
And who was the cheat’s inspiration? “Lia” Thomas.
Why should you feel bad for someone who was justly criticized for cheating and violating women’s spaces? Your role model is a toxic, entitled asshole. I’ll say this much for you; you’re doing a good job following in his footsteps. Like him, you wanted the fruits of cheating without facing the resulting disapprobation. Like him, you have others at the college coaching and administration levels running interference for you*. Funny how empathy never seems to extend beyond the bounds of their own thin skins. You deserve each other. A few more like you and you’ll have your own division, and you’ll be able to leave women’s swimming the fuck alone.
*Had there been any justice, the coaches and members of the governing swim federation would have stood up for all the women against your invasion of their team and their sport. You should have been laughed out of the room and told to go jump in the lake, not into a lane. Instead, they paved the way for you, and women are left to their own devices as you cheat and their places and their medals.
YNnB, for the coaches, it’s all about winning. Oh, they give lip service to “it’s the competition, not the outcome” and to doing it for love of sport, but they know if they don’t win often enough, their job will go to someone else. The administration is all about winning, too. Good PR. That’s why faculty get pressured to make sure athletes pass (I’m not so sure that’s the case with women athletes, though; I don’t remember ever being asked to provide a progress report on a woman athlete, though I did have to provide a progress report on e-sports athletes).
And for the fans it’s about winning. They don’t mind if it’s a good, well matched game as long as their team wins. If it’s a blow out, even better. (Growing up in Oklahoma, I learned that winning 10-7 was not enough; they wanted to “STOMP” the other team).
Trans athletes can give them all that…until the day all the other teams have trans, too. Then there is competition again, no more just steam rolling over the opposition.
#417 YNNB
“Second! See? Trans women are not guaranteed to win! Therefore no advantage.”
YNnB @ 415, good luck getting insurance companies to become blind to sex. They know only too damn well that your sex relates directly to lifetime risk of certain factors that will relate to how much money they will spend on you. They’re not going to give that tool up easily.
Can we make a diversion into popular culture? Transervant Russell T. Davies is being lauded by critics for filling a TV show for families with identarian propaganda:
Doctor Who’s first 60th anniversary special is a Terf’s worst nightmare
Doctor Who not only has a trans character, but an entire trans storyline – and not even that, but trans joy…..Yasmin Finney stars s Donna’s daughter, Rose, and her being trans is more than just an inclusion for the sake of it – it’s a major plot point in a hugely positive light.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231125205745/https://metro.co.uk/2023/11/25/doctor-first-60th-anniversary-special-terfs-worst-nightmare-19789309
I never liked Russell T. Davies’ version of “Doctor Who” – it was filled with numerous mentions of soap operas and reality shows like “Big Brother”, as if Davies was ashamed of liking something as unfashionable as a low-budget family SF show. I always preferred the DW episodes written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss instead.
Of course we can make a diversion into popular culture!
Another instance of CRT madness: check this out!
Of course you can have things both ways in the wonderful world of Critical Theory!
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/11/28/the-double-irony-of-classes-voluntarily-segregated-by-race/
(Jerry Coyne has been posting a lot about this lately.)
P.S. O, may be time for a new Miscellany post. Takes a while to scroll down to the bottom of this one!)
Lady M — just press the “end” key, and it goes straight to the bottom of the page! [That works for me at any rate.]
Thanks, Peter! No End key for me; all I have is my smartphone.
[Bass-baritone]: I’ll just keep scrollin’ along.
Where is this “end” key?
Hmm.
Ars Technica: Backlash over fake female speakers shuts down developer conference
Male organizer also accused of secretly running female coder Instagram account.
So, this was a case of non-existent women being promoted as real women, and a man using a female persona as director of a coding platform. At least some of these actions were intended to create the appearance of “diversity”. One of course wonders if actual speakers had been found who were men-claiming-to-be-women, would that make it even better for “diversity” because they would count as both “women” and “trans”. Part of the problem with a number of simplistic diversity initiatives is that they inadvertently encourage playing games like this.
Argh!
Eventually, I will have to come out of the closet in the Minnesota DFL (Democratic party) as a TERF-supportive male. I am seeing a runaway trans train here when the Democrats have a tri-fecta government. The only people who are standing against the steamrollers are the Republicans, and I simply cannot change parties to that odious group for several reasons. But, I need to find some ally that will help me here. I just received an invitation to an event being held by the Minnesota Atheists, of which I was once a board member. It’s a meeting to join in support of the revived push for an ERA ratification in the State Constitution. But, it’s been re-worded now to include a kitchen sink of cultural minorities. And while sex is generously included, well, see for yourself what the proposed wording says:
Emphasis mine, of course. But, it’s kind of sneaky how it’s buried in there. I do not believe that anyone should be discriminated against due to their perceptions of gender, but I am afraid that the provision will be used against women. There is a built-in self-contradictory set of clauses that will tie up the courts in interpretation.
If you, or any of your friends, know someone else in Minnesota who remains a gender critical Democrat, please have them contact me. I’m at a loss for how to stand up to this on my own.
A modern update of Hans Christian Andersen:
The Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital. All the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, “Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!” No one would admit these much-admired clothes could not be seen because, in doing so, he would have been saying he was either a simpleton or unfit for his job.
“But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” said a little child. “Listen to the voice of the child!” exclaimed his father. What the child had said was whispered from one to another. “But he has nothing at all on!” at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was upset, for he knew that the people were right. However, he thought the procession must go on now! The lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold, and the Emperor walked on in his underwear.
And then a voice cut through the throng. “Blasphemer! Seize that boy!” The cries of the people died down, and were soon replaced by chants of “Misapparelist!” and “Invisible clothes are clothes!” Rough hands grabbed the boy and dragged him to the castle, through endless corridors and down steep stairwells, till finally they threw him into a cell in the deepest, dankest dungeon. A table was brought in, and the boy was shoved into a hard wooden chair, with burly guards standing at each side, ready to push him down if he tried to escape. Candles were lit on the table, and mirror set so that the light from the candle burned into his eyes, all but blinding him. From the dark faceless voices began to interrogate him.
“Did you not see the Emperor’s clothes?”
“Well, no,” stammered the boy. “All he had on was his underwear.”
“Pervert!” shouted one, and “Are you always this obsessed with other people’s undergarments?” hissed another.
“No. I mean, it was obvious…”.
“And yet you were the only one who noticed? How… convenient.”
“I’m sure that others noticed,” said the boy, gathering his courage. “It’s just they were too scared to say anything.”
At this the voices broke out into a confused cacophony. “Bigot!” “Blasphemer!” “Misapparelist!” “Visibilist scum!” And then one strident voice rose above the others. “I have just one question for you. Answer yes or no. Are the invisibly beclothed beclothed? And be forewarned: any answer other than an unequivocal ‘Yes’ will brand you for life as an invisible misapparelist!”
“Of course they’re beclothed,” reasoned the boy, “in a sense. I mean, they’re not actually beclothed, obviously, but I’m willing to say that they believe they are beclothed.”
The interrogators gasped as one. And the strident voice called out, “Bring forth this boy’s father!”
The boy’s father came through the crowd and stood next to the boy. A voice intoned, “As this boy’s father, you are responsible for his discipline. We will abide by your decision on his punishment, whatever it may be.”
“Father, surely you know I was right!”
The father looked down at his son, a solitary tear running down his cheek, and said, more in sorrow than anger, “Son, I have always brought you up to think freely, and I have always supported your right to speak your mind, even when I disagree. But in this case, I fear you have gone too far. The invisibly beclothed community is the most oppressed in our society, and anything less than our unequivocal and unquestioning support of their rights and truth is the greatest sin a visibilist can commit.” Turning to the interrogators, he began, “I sentence my son to…”.
But before he could pronounce his sentence, the boy escaped through a small crack in the wall and ran off to a secret cottage by the sea, where he lived out his life, surrounded by a small group of friends, chasing butterflies and frolicking with the otters.
Henry Kissinger has died. As always, he’s provoked bitterly divided reactions:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2023/nov/30/henry-kissinger-dies-tribute-world-leader-diplomat-latest-updates
I didn’t like him. I remembered his disgraceful conduct in Vietnam and Chile.
Mike, I know a couple of people in Minnesota. Unfortunately, they are theatre professionals, and if they have not yet drunk the Kool-Aid, they will almost certainly pretend they have. “What? There’s no Kool-Aid lying behind me on the floor! I did not throw my Kool-Aid over my shoulder! I drank my Kool-Aid! And if I offended anyone by not drinking my Kool-Aid quickly enough, I apologize and will do whatever penance you require!”
Mike, I live across the river from the Twin Cities in Wisconsin and I have friends who are politically involved with the DFL or follow politics closely. The one time on Facebook I raised the issue of gender versus sex (via what J.K. Rowling said about Maya Forstater) there wasn’t a single one of them who sympathized with the gender critical position. It was mostly civil thankfully, but there was one acquaintance who rather than answer a polite question about what they thought the difference between sex and gender was, cursed and unfriended me. Oh well. But it did show me how entrenched the mindset is regarding the topic of gender identity among Democratic-leaning folks. They didn’t want to acknowledge that sex also matters in ways that affect women.
Given how politics on the left is driven more and more by the goal to achieve social justice, it’s hard to be critical of any part of it. I remember after the riots when George Floyd was killed saying to some that burning down businesses wasn’t right, only to be told property mattered less than lives. What? Two wrongs don’t make a right. I understood how anger over Floyd’s death would drive some to commit acts of arson and vandalism, but we shouldn’t excuse such acts either, even politically.
And now the DFL is struggling with the issue of the Israel-Hamas conflict and it’s not pretty, as divisions between Jewish and Muslim DFLers are growing, so as the saying goes, It Could Be Worse.
Correspondence shows internal divisions among DFL lawmakers about Israel-Hamas war – (Minnesota Reformer)
chigau at #426 — on the standard Windows keyboard, it’s one of the six keys on the upper-right, between the letters and the numbers. If you’re in Apple-land, I can’t help you! I saw one once — the mouse only had one button! I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without right-click!
Nice surprise ending WaM @ 430!
I do like a happy ending.
In the news today:
US Department of Education is opening an investigation into Sun Prairie locker room incident –
Trans student shower allegation in Sun Prairie will be reviewed for Title IX violation
Very nice WaM @430, although I now suspect that either iknklast ghost wrote that with you, or you are in fact her sock puppet. TOAO!!
On a standard Apple keyboard the ‘end’ key doesn’t exist (at least on laptops. If you get an extended apple keyboard it sits just below the ‘home’ key. The one button Magic Mouse is a thing of beauty, surpassed only by the touch pad. On the rare occasions I’m forced to use a mouse these days I feel like I’m being forced into some kind of arcane test.
@Rob,
Trust me, if iknklast had written it, the dialog would be much more realistic.
So in a bit of a different direction, Jesse Singal mentioned in a recent news letter some interest in doing an episode of Blocked and Reported about the Atheism Plus train wreck… Any interest in collaborating on a FTB-related episode? There’s just so much stuff, some of which I’ve only heard about… The Slymepit, Richard Bukkake, Avicenna, obviously OB’s public backstabbing, gross stuff with Zinnia Jones, etc…
There is indeed so much stuff.
Who collaborating how?
Maybe we can remind transactivists again (as they so like to remind us when it suits them) that “sex” and “gender” are not the same, and that locker room facilities are segregated by sex alone. Being “transgender” does not change one’s sex, and males remain male however they “identify.” “Gender identities” don’t change clothes, or run races or swim laps, or ride bcycles; sexed bodies do. One’s “gender identity” has no bearing on the facilities and positions one is allowed to access, if they were originally apportioned on the basis of sex. You can play around with word meanings, but you can’t change sex. Some day sanity will return and people will wonder what the fuck people in the early 2000s were smoking.
My real computer is not Apple.
I don’t know if it is a “standard Windows keyboard” but there is a shed-load of keys on the upper-right, none of which are between the letters and the numbers.
chigau — sorry you’re having problems. The most common PC keyboard layout has some buttons between the letters and numbers , being the four arrow keys, and, above those, a group of six keys labeled insert, Home, Page Up, Delete, End, and Page Down. End should jet you to the bottom of a web page, and Home to the top.
You may have the slightly more compact keyboard layout with those keys arranged vertically along the right side of the letter keys.
If that doesn’t help, let’s solve this! Email me at nothpj{at}gmail.com.
Peter N
Thanks. But it’s not really a problem.
@Ophelia #442:
Well I was thinking about pitching an episode and Jesse and Katie would probably at least want to do e-mail or text interviews. Probably not the most flattering to everyone involved, but you know where Jesse stands on most of this stuff. B&R is an entertainment program, but they do do actual journalism as well.
Someone with the grandiose name of Jude Ellison S. Doyle is interviewing Roz Kaveney for Xtra Magazine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231201020603/https://xtramagazine.com/power/activism/roz-kaveney-writer-activist-260077
Ellison says Kaveney has “has spent almost 50 years actively fighting the British TERF movement” (Goodness me!).
Ellison also says: ” The anti-sex movement translated seamlessly into the “gender-critical” movement because they rest on the same core principles.
Both movements insist that political ideology can and should determine how other people relate to their own bodies; there is a direct line between the idea that getting consensually spanked is “aiding and abetting grievous bodily harm” and the argument that voluntary top surgery is self-mutilation.
Really? Then who’s writing books for small children telling them that they’re “given an assigned gender at birth based on their perceived biological sex?” Books for small children full of political ideology determining how they should relate to themselves?
Certainly not “internationally notorious TERF” Julie Bindel or Linda Bellos.
This is the link for the B&W piece discussing the children’s book teaching them trans ideology:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/define-suitable/
I guess it’s lost on Ellison and Kaveney that it’s trans ideology making demands about how other people must relate to trans bodies. Lesbians can also have penises, and all that nonsense.
Blood Knight – well, go for it if you wanna. I can probably help you find stuff.
Mostly Cloudy hahaha that’s great – there WAS no “British TERF movement” 50 years ago, or 40 or 30 or 20.
I was going to read it, but then Ellison got into the biography bit and I couldn’t go on. I just don’t care that much about Roz Kaveney. In fact I don’t care about him at all.
As mentioned elsewhere, I recently finished reading Cynical Theories [1] by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. While I have some issues with the author’s take on specific topics, I do recommend it to anyone struggling to make sense of questions like:
• What is “Identity Politics”, or “Wokism”, or “Social Justice” (capital S, capital J), and how (if at all) do these differ from a general commitment to fighting bigotry and oppression, i.e. social justice (small s, small j)?
• What is “Critical Race Theory”, and how (if at all) does it differ from, say, speaking openly and honestly about the role that racism has played (and continues to play) in Western societies?
• Why did such a large (or at least vocal!) faction of the Left turn 180°, from trying to get away from boxes and labels and sweeping generalizations about whole demographics of people, to treating boxes and labels and generalizations (under the guise of “identities”) as the only relevant features of a person?
• Which fucking “Theory” (capital T) are you talking about? “Theory” of what?!
Pluckrose and Lindsay trace the roots of Identity Politics back to postmodernism and the work of French intellectuals like Michel Focault and Jaques Derrida in the 1960s and 70s. Postmodernism can be understood, at least in part, as a reaction to the failures of Soviet-style Communism [2] leading to a sense of despair on the Left, as well as a profound skepticism that any truly liberatory politics was even possible: Ideas and ways of thinking serving the interests of the powerful were so deeply ingrained in culture, and especially language (or “discourse” – the way we talk about things), that they came to be seen as “natural”, “normal”, “just the way it is”, and people (presumably with the exception of these intellectuals themselves…) were so hopelessly incapable of thinking outside the boxes imposed by culture and language that they couldn’t help unwittingly taking part in the oppressive power dynamics. Thus postmodernism can be understood as a “conspiracy theory without conspirators” [3]. Even science itself – including the idea that truth claims should be be based on sound reasoning, logically consistent, testable, confirmed rather than disconfirmed by empirical evidence etc. – was all just part of the conspiracy, just another oppressive “metanarrative” to elevate the self-serving ideas of the powerful to the status “objective truth” and hence unquestionable. Like any other conspiracy theory (the kind with conspirators), this one also relied heavily on unfalsifiable assertions, circular logic, and even reinterpreting disconfirming evidence and arguments as confirmation (“that’s just what
theythe systemwantwants you to think”). The early postmodernists were hardly revolutionaries. The best that could be done to thwart the conspiracy was to “deconstruct” the dominant discourses (basically nit-picking words and phrases for “problematic” assumptions) and expose the hidden biases at their root. Any attempt to replace the prevailing system with something better (the Russian revolution being an obvious example) was doomed to produce something equally oppressive.While many of the ideas and concepts coming out of this early, radical deconstructionist, phase of postmodernism held great appeal to many leftist intellectuals, its profound pessimism about the possibility of progress was hardly conducive to activism. With the rise of what the authors call “applied postmodernism” (roughly from the late 1980s to 2010), Social Justice scholarship took a more explicitly activist turn. It wasn’t enough to “deconstruct” the prevailing discourses and metanarratives. Scholarship had to become explicitly subservient to leftist political goals, hence the “applied” part. The purpose of scholarship could no longer be to describe what is (obviously, since there were no objective, politically neutral “descriptions” anyway) but to bring about what ought to be. Pluckrose and Lindsay explore the main strands of activist scholarship rooted in applied postmodernism – frequently lumped together under the common name “Critical Theory” or simply “Theory”. These include Post-Colonial Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Feminism/Gender Studies, and, more recently, Disability and Fat Studies. Despite important differences, these all revolve around two main principles:
To these two principles the authors add 4 “themes”:
The blurring of boundaries [4] should be well known to regular readers of B&W under the name “queering” and is obviously of central importance to the Gender Wars. The Orwellian idea that language determines what people are capable of thinking is apparent both in the obsession with policing language for (supposedly implicit) “problematic” content that perpetuates the existing power imbalances, and in the idea that you can literally change the way people think by changing the language. Cultural relativism is only too familiar as well. Objective knowledge, common values, and universal rights are all dismissed as metanarratives that only serve the interests of the powerful [5]. “Knowledge”, just like rights and values, is entirely “local” and specific to a culture or identity group.
Theme 4 merits special attention: The Civil Rights movement, 1st and 2nd Wave Feminism, the original Gay Rights movement etc. were all rooted in classical liberalism which saw people as individuals with universal rights and sought to render other ingroup/outgroup distinctions largely irrelevant with respect to how people were treated. These movements succeeded in bringing about extraordinary changes in no small part by challenging the dominant groups to live up to their own stated ideals (“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”) and pointing out the blatant hypocrisy and inconsistency of claiming to believe in these ideals while failing to extend them to blacks, women, homosexuals etc. As Nick Cohen once pointed out, despite frequent claims to the contrary, women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities were not asking for special treatment: What they were protesting against was precisely the fact that they were given special treatment. That’s what “discrimination” means.
Applied postmodernism and its offshoots reject this approach in favor of one that explicitly treats people differently according to group identity (race, gender, sexual orientation etc.) in order to compensate for the inherent biases built into the system, elevate the marginalized, and deprive the dominant groups of their unearned privileges. Equal treatment regardless of group identity is not just seen as unrealistic: It was never a goal worth striving for in the first place. This is indeed what distinguishes “Identity Politics” from a general commitment to social justice. While applied postmodernism rejects the idea that humans in general have any meaningful shared experiences, oppressed identity groups do (specifically the experience of being oppressed). And while no one can lay claim to speak for humanity as a whole, there is such a thing as the “authentic voice” of marginalized identity groups, i.e. those who agree with Theory. Those who don’t are either dupes suffering from internalized bigotry against “their own” kind or deserters siding with the oppressor in exchange for a more favorable treatment. Their views can therefore be safely discounted. No true
Scotsmanmember of a marginalized group disagrees with Theory. Thus the universal and the individual are both discarded in favor of identity groups, understood as homogeneous, monolithic blobs, whose collective goals and interests are entirely in line with the applied postmodernist agenda. It’s very similar to the way communist parties used to claim monopoly on representing and speaking for workers everywhere whether the latter wanted it or not.According to the closely related idea of “Standpoint Theory” members of privileged groups are blind to anything but the dominant perspective, whereas members of marginalized groups (again, provided they agree with the prevailing strand of identity politics), by virtue of living in a culture in which discourses favoring the interests of the dominant are the default, are capable of understanding both the dominant and the marginalized perspective. Hence the latter always have a more complete and accurate understanding of the World than the former, which means their views take precedence. A member of a dominant group can never have a legitimate disagreement with a member of a marginalized group. If you belong to a dominant group, all you can do is ask the more enlightened marginalized classes what to think and accept the answer as definitive and authoritative. To do anything else is inherently oppressive and an act of “epistemic violence”.
On one hand, in other words, marginalized people said to have a more accurate view of the world than the dominant. On the other hand accuracy itself is considered expendable in the name “epistemic justice” and “decolonizing” academia (again, hardly surprising if you think there’s no such thing as objective “accuracy” anyway):
This is, of course, Post-Truth Politics at it finest. If no claims to knowledge, or even methods for arriving at supposed “knowledge”, have any more validity than any other, you might as well go with whatever serves the current agenda, whether it’s increasing the representation of marginalized groups in academic research or claiming victory after losing an election.
The concept of “intersectionality” may have grown out of the perfectly reasonable idea that e.g. the injustices experienced by black women could not be simplistically reduced to the sum of injustices experienced by white women and black men respectively. Increasingly, however, the term has become virtually synonymous with mission creep and forced teaming (As I like say, “intersectional feminism” = feminism for everyone except the people formerly known as “women”). Conspicuously absent from most intersectional analyses is any consideration of economic class, the one axis of marginalization and privilege that used to be of greatest concern to the old Left. This is hardly surprising considering that the current strand Social Justice activism has never been a bottom-up, grassroots movement, but disproportionally the domain of highly educated, mostly white, comfortably middle class people who have never had to worry about putting food on the table or affording the rent. Indeed, from such a perspective, the whole ideology is beginning to look suspiciously like a luxury belief system for people who can afford to ignore economics in favor of an obsession with pronouns, entirely theoretical arguments about what is supposedly implied (intended or not) by certain wordings, or reading “fatphobic” attitudes into Moby Dick.
The current phase, which the authors call the “reification of Postmodernism”, began around 2010. This is when the ideas of activist Social Justice scholars (or a grossly oversimplified, vulgarized, or “memefied” version thereof) began to escape the academy and take over schools, the mainstream media, non-profit organizations, private companies, public institutions etc. At the same time the last trace of postmodernism’s radical skepticism towards truth-claims gave way to a dogmatic, inflexible certainty that tolerated no dissent, left no room for legitimate differences of opinion, and saw anything other than unconditional agreement in advance as conclusive proof of “bigotry”, “hate”, “phobias” etc. The result is only too familiar. Indeed, by now it’s tempting to say that postmodernism has become a metanarrative in its own right, and I guess I just did. Terms like “wokism” or “Social Justice” do not simply mean a general commitment to fighting bigotry and oppression, but imply agreement with tons of highly dubious truth claims, academic theories (based on alternative, non-scientific, “ways of knowing”), and ideological doctrines that are fundamentally at odds with the ideals of the Civil Rights movement, 2nd wave Feminism, and the original Gay Pride movement. All this extra baggage may be essential to wokism in particular, but it’s no more essential to true social justice than the Gulag was to the rights and interests of the working class.
In the last chapters of the book, Pluckrose and Lindsay make a plea for a return to the principles of classical liberalism and argue that what now passes for Social Justice activism is actively counterproductive to the interests of the people it purports to help, e.g.:
• Portraying science and reason as inherently “white” and “male” is outright insulting to women and non-whites, perpetuates negative stereotypes of women and people of color as irrational, superstitious and primitive, and deprives people of the means to make informed decisions in their own best interest. E.g. telling morbidly obese people that any talk about the health risks associated with obesity is motivated by “fatphobia” can be outright lethal.
• Splitting people into separate identity groups with conflicting interests and no shared understanding of reality that would allow them to settle their differences is more likely to spark zero-sum conflict than solidarity, a conflict that the truly marginalized are very unlikely to win.
• Telling people they can’t stop themselves from being racist, sexist, abelist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic etc. by virtue of existing, reading their every word in the least charitable way possible, and bullying into silence anyone who tries to offer a more nuanced view, gives social justice activism in general a bad name, hands free ammunition to the demagogues on the far Right, and makes them seem like fearless truth-tellers.
We have already seen the results.
_________________________________
1. The title is obviously a play on “Critical Theories”. The cynicism alluded to refers to the habit among Social Justice scholars of deliberately reading history, as well as the words and deeds of other people, in the most cynical, least charitable way imaginable.
2. As e.g. Yascha Mounk has pointed out, portraying Identity Politics or Wokism as “Cultural Marxism” fundamentally misses the point. Marxists believed in objective truth and claimed to have the one and only right answer to everything. To the postmodernists any such sweeping “theory of everything”, including Marxism, was just another oppressive metanarrative.
3. This conspiratorial mindset continues to be manifested in, say, the idea that white people can’t help being racist even if they don’t consciously hold any negative attitudes towards people of color.
4. Obviously between “sex” and “gender”, “man” and “woman”, “male” and “female”, “feminism” and “men’s rights” but also between “gay” and “straight”, “able-bodied” and “disabled”, or even between “true” and “false”, “knowledge” and “superstition” etc.
5. This, of course, raises an all too familiar problem: If nothing is true (or at least not knowable) why should we take seriously anything that these scholars themselves have to say? If there are no universal values, why should social justice itself be of any concern to everyone?
I’ve posted a link to this song here before, but as we’re approaching December 6, I thought I’d do so again.
https://soundcloud.com/getdunne/we-will-not-be-silent
Indeed. It’s the Epimenides paradox without the self-deprecating irony.
It’s also a bold bit of jiu-jitsu, attempting to style itself as the “dominant narrative, ” while denying the legitimacy of “dominant narratives.”