Man approves of man being nominated for women’s prize.

https://twitter.com/GarthGreenwell/status/1379783066302971907

Easy for him. He’s a man, so he doesn’t get overlooked and forgotten and tucked away on the pink fluffy shelf the way women do.

https://twitter.com/GarthGreenwell/status/1379783419715059714

He’s apologizing to himself in case any of the ugliness on Twitter has been directed at him. How sweet.

https://twitter.com/nanalanfann/status/1380076206809178114

Oh yes, that’s so funny, women and little girls are so funny for being afraid of male strangers getting all kinky and ironic in their toilets and pageants.… Read the rest

Yeah, god damn it, open up the cruise industry again, because how could that possibly be at all risky in the midst of a pandemic?

The state of Florida is suing the Biden administration to reopen the cruise industry “immediately” and allow cruises to “resume safely,” Florida’s governor and attorney general announced Thursday.

“Safely” how? A cruise ship is a small place where thousands of people are packed together like tuna in a can.

“We don’t believe the federal government has the right to mothball a major industry for over a year based on very little evidence and very little data. And I think we have a good chance for success,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news

… Read the rest

The Babylon Bee:

LITTLE ROCK, AR—In a huge blow to trans-species rights, Arkansas has passed a controversial law banning the dismemberment and surgical altering of children if they want to be a different creature. 

But trans mermaids are mermaids!

“I’ll never forget the day my daughter Belle was splashing in the tub and said, ‘Look at me, Mommy! I’m a mermaid!'” said local progressive mother and part-time librarian Zindy Derple. “I knew that day she was different. A mythical fish-creature trapped in a human girl’s body.”

Belle’s dismemberment surgery has now been canceled due to Arkansas’s new law. 

“Now, we can’t even get her the compassionate leg-removal medical care needed to turn her into her true mermaid self,” she

… Read the rest

Greg Sargent at the Post notes the determination of the Republicans to enforce evil on all of its foot soldiers via the example of Georgia governor Brian Kemp.

Kemp’s travails are detailed in a great new piece in the New York Times. It examines Kemp’s frantic efforts to atone for the heresy of refusing to help then-President Donald Trump overturn his Georgia loss, and then defending the loss as a legitimate outcome.

That is, the heresy of refusing to help Donald Trump break a bunch of laws in order to steal the election.

The central revelation is that Kemp sees his advocacy for Georgia’s new voting law as a way to win back GOP voters still fuming over his

… Read the rest

The Republican “we’re gonna TELL on you” ploy is getting more attention.

The National Republican Congressional Committee debuted a bright-yellow prechecked recurring-donation box on its donation page with a startling ultimatum.

The message from House Republicans’ campaign arm — which caught the eye of many reporters on Wednesday — told people that it needed to know it hadn’t “lost you to the Radical Left” and that if they opted out of making their donation a recurring one and “UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems.”

It’s interesting how stupid that message is, and how cheerful the Republicans who thought it up must be about telling their own people “We … Read the rest

The insult of nominating a man to win a women’s writing prize is compounded by the fact that the book is badly written as well as stomach-turningly sexist. (I haven’t read the whole book, but I have read snippets, and writing that bad is not confined to snippets. The snippets are as it were diagnostic. Someone who writes that badly writes that badly all the time.)

"Standing for decency." Lol. pic.twitter.com/kr606laHtY

— International Lesbian Solidarity ⚢ (@theomegalesbian) April 8, 2021

It just couldn’t get much worse. It’s a prize for women so the people in charge nominate a man who calls himself a woman, for a book in which he writes that “feminization” is all about being the object of … Read the rest

Some people think much too well of themselves.

Former reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner is talking with political consultants as she actively explores a run for governor of California, three sources with direct knowledge of her deliberations tell Axios.

Based on what? Being a self-obsessed nitwit? What possible qualifications could that boring vain narcissistic twerp have for being governor of a state that’s larger than many countries? Not to mention the fact that he killed a woman by crashing into her car when she was stopped at a red light. Who would want a governor who killed someone by driving badly?… Read the rest

Sian Cain, scolder of women who don’t agree that men are women if they say they are, tweets.

Hey wonderful @secondshelfbks – how many copies of Detransition, Baby have you sold in the last 24 hours?

— Sian Cain (@siancain) April 7, 2021

She also retweets.

A statement about eligibility for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Our full terms and conditions of entry can be viewed on our website: https://t.co/nAkInbbiUZ pic.twitter.com/gEsAEuszUF

— Women's Prize (@WomensPrize) April 7, 2021

I don’t know what to tell them. It’s nice that (according to them) the Women’s Prize has always aimed to honour, celebrate and champion women’s voices, but the reality remains that they’re not doing that by making men eligible for the prize. … Read the rest

Sian Cain at the Guardian writes:

The Women’s prize for fiction has issued a strongly worded statement saying that it “deplores any attempts to malign or bully” authors nominated for the prize, after trans novelist Torrey Peters was targeted in an open letter.

In other words the Women’s prize for fiction has issued a statement maligning and bullying women who say the Women’s prize for fiction should be for women as opposed to men who claim to be women. So I guess the Women’s prize for fiction isn’t for women any more.

The US writer, who is nominated for the £30,000 award for her debut novel Detransition, Baby, was the subject of a letter published online on Tuesday

… Read the rest

In Georgia news:

A district attorney in Atlanta said Wednesday that she will not pursue charges against a Georgia state lawmaker who was arrested during a protest of the state’s sweeping new election law.

Probably because she didn’t commit a crime.

“After reviewing all of the evidence, I have decided to close this matter,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an emailed statement. “It will not be presented to a grand jury for consideration of indictment, and it is now closed.”

Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat from Atlanta, was arrested March 25 after she knocked on the door to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office while he was on live television speaking about the voting bill he had

… Read the rest

Hey Siri,

Define grace.

pic.twitter.com/cTmuKD8AqQ

— Dr. Jonathan N. Stea (@jonathanstea) April 7, 2021

… Read the rest

James Kirchick on the new and not improved ACLU:

“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive liberal organization,” [former Executive Director Ira] Glasser says about Anthony Romero, an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy,

… Read the rest

It seems the Republican National Committee thought Trump’s sneaky theft of money from supporters is such a brilliant idea that they’ll do it even more so.

UPDATE: The @NRCC has an even worse alternate prechecked recurring donation box that says they will "tell Trump you are a DEFECTOR" if unchecked. h/t @iankoski cc @ShaneGoldmacher https://t.co/TH8sURaZ9P https://t.co/et4wN88OiW pic.twitter.com/FhDphhmNkY

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) April 7, 2021

I checked Snopes and they don’t have it yet, though they do have the Trump one and rate it true.… Read the rest

The reporting is always so incomplete, not to say distorted.

Arkansas bans transgender youth treatment

It’s not “treatment” though. It’s not medicine to cure a disease. It is, at the very least, disputed whether or not it’s a good idea to give adolescents who say they are the other sex surgeries and/or puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. None of that is straightforwardly “treatment.” Given the fact that some people who have gone through one or more of those interventions now regret it, it’s all the more dubious to call it “treatment.” Being female or male isn’t an illness, and doesn’t in itself require treatment. Responsible journalism should be cautious about adopting terminology that assumes there is an illness or condition … Read the rest

Steve Benen at MSNBC:

Donald Trump has an unusually ugly record when it comes to separating those he perceives as fools from their money. As we’ve discussed before, the Republican ran a fraudulent charitable foundation and created a fraudulent “university” that was designed to do little more than rip off its “students.”

Not to mention all those overvalued condos he sold.

But his new trick is really breathtaking.

The New York Times reported over the weekend on Trump’s 2020 political operation and the brazenly underhanded tactics it employed to swindle its unsuspecting donors. The article began by featuring a financially unstable cancer patient in Kansas City, who chipped in $500 last September after hearing Rush Limbaugh talk about

… Read the rest

Leila Miller at the LA Times tells us:

Kelly Blackwell longs to escape her life as a transgender woman in a California men’s prison, where she struggles every day to avoid being seen in her bra and panties and says she once faced discipline after fighting back when an inmate in her cell asked for oral sex.

If Blackwell doesn’t want to be seen in his bra and “panties” why does he wear them? Skip the bra and wear underpants with no frills; problem solved.

After more than 30 years, and two decades since Blackwell began hormone therapy, her chance to leave arrived last fall when groundbreaking legislation gave transgender, intersex and nonbinary inmates the right, regardless of anatomy,

… Read the rest

I’m curious about something.

I randomly saw this painting in a book and the name of the painter popped up in my brain (and I checked and it really was the painter), and the thing about that is that I don’t know why. I don’t know how I knew and I don’t know why it was so quick and automatic. I “recognized” the painter but I don’t know why I did. We’ll talk about who it is eventually but for now I’m curious to see if anyone else recognizes the painter, with or without knowing how.

There are other paintings by this painter that are what’s called “iconic” – instantly recognizable, and no surprise about it. But to me … Read the rest

“Grace” Lavery is a fake woman but by god he’s a genuine troll.

Just realized: someone alive today will become the first trans woman to get an abortion. <3

— Prof. Grace Lavery (@graceelavery) April 5, 2021

So adorable. Teehee. Only a man could think that would be funny.

No, no one will ever become the first trans woman to need an abortion, let alone to have one.

In any other context Lavery would probably make erudite fun of the idea that technological progress is so relentless and inevitable that some time in the next 40 years or so men will be able to get pregnant. In any other context Lavery would probably realize that by then climate change will … Read the rest

In baseball news –

Texas governor Greg Abbott said on Monday that he won’t throw the ceremonial first pitch as planned at the Texas Rangers’ home opener, the latest jab in a fight that is pushing corporate America into the political battle over voting rights.

I suppose “home opener” means the first game of the season which is being played in the home town of the Texas Rangers. I guess we’re all supposed to be fluent in Baseball.

The Republican governor informed the Rangers via a letter, citing Major League Baseball’s decision to move the MLB All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new voting laws, which include new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on To be seen.

It’s not difficult to train face recognition to work with black people. If you trained the machine learning systems with plenty of black and white faces, it would be fine with both.

However, most facial recognition software has historically been trained on mostly white people, so has a problem reacting to dark skin. It presumably didn’t occur to the people who trained the systems that some faces are not white.

There are lots of other examples of software that has taken on the racism of its trainers. For example, many police forces in the US (and some in the UK) use software to predict where crime is likely to happen … Read the rest