All entries by this author

Hey, how about interviewing the people at Ma’s Pie Shop?

Dec 29th, 2019 3:33 pm | By

Oh please.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron agreed that both of their papers have to do a better job of covering President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Not this crap again. They do cover Trump’s supporters. We hear endlessly about forgotten people in forgotten small towns and their forgotten hatred of immigrants; we hear far more about forgotten small town Murika than we do about big city Murika, where a vastly larger percentage of people live.

Baquet and Baron joined NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday to talk about how the Trump administration has waged war on fact-based reporting, and what news outlets should do to push back against disinformation. When asked

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Scratch their eyes out

Dec 29th, 2019 10:44 am | By

Cute.

Festive Xmas message from the Coalition Against Trans Antagonism:

2019 CATA community Transmas

“Pin the tail on the TERF / SWERF fascists!”

Haw haw obliterate their eyes, geddit?

https://twitter.com/holly_hutt_1/status/1211170423968165888

Oh those people. Yes, I remember them.

Scrolling down the Facebook page I get the feeling the “group” is one very angry person. Possibly as many as two.… Read the rest



More epithets than ever

Dec 29th, 2019 10:12 am | By

Trump is ratcheting up the crazy and disgusting.

Which they should be able to do very easily – oh yes it’s dead easy to provide abundant housing for non-rich people in a week or two, especially in a system that is categorically hostile to all forms of public housing.

Read the rest


Spot the denialist

Dec 29th, 2019 9:44 am | By

Hmm. Science! And skepticism! Science and skepticism! Together! Jonathan Jarry’s Twitter profile:

Science + skepticism for the public. Podcasting, writing & talks.
@McGillOSS
. One half of The Body of Evidence (w/
@DrLabos
). Feelings don’t care about facts.

Sounds good. Yay science, yay skepticism, yay for the public. The slogan makes more sense as “facts don’t care about feelings” but maybe he’s being playful.

Any trends to talk about?

https://twitter.com/crackedscience/status/1210724744053420033

How much time do you have?

https://twitter.com/crackedscience/status/1210960657035780103

Uhhh…denialists? Seriously? It’s “denialism” to say that people can’t change sex? (And it’s the opposite of denialism to say that men are not men if they say they are not men?)

Read the rest


Emphasizing differences

Dec 28th, 2019 11:31 am | By

Psychology Today:

Here’s what really happened: On November 21, Kayum Ahmed, a South African and an adjunct member of the Columbia University Law School faculty, spoke at Fieldston about apartheid. In the Q & A, which was recorded on video, in response to a student’s question, he said that “xenophobic attacks are a shameful part of South African history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators,” and that he uses the same example in talking about the Holocaust. “Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel,” he told them, “today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable.”*

If a speaker had made comments such as these

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It doesn’t matter if you disagree

Dec 28th, 2019 9:50 am | By

Also in Peak Philosophy, Veronica Ivy explains that laws cannot be questioned or criticized, much less flouted (goodbye civil rights movements and protests all over the world). If it’s the law it’s pointless for you to say it’s mistaken or sinister or just plain evil. Nazi law? Slave state law? Saudi law? Never you mind whether they’re just or not, they’re the law. Sit down.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1210963252039032832… Read the rest


The appropriate authorities have been contacted

Dec 28th, 2019 9:44 am | By

DOCTOR Veronica Ivy Rachel McKinnon is being peak philosopher again.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1210609187744624640

Peak philosopher Ivy McKinnon is framing a disagreement about the ontology of the category “woman” as hate speech which must be reported to “the appropriate authorities” and flagged up to Michael Robinson’s sponsors, clearly in the hope that they will all drop Robinson instantly and with public opprobrium.… Read the rest



To persuade a straight, male audience to identify with a woman character

Dec 27th, 2019 5:24 pm | By

Meryl Streep made an important point in this 2012 interview on Fresh Air:

GROSS: You gave a terrific commencement address at Barnard in 2010. And one of things you talked about was that the hardest thing in the world is to persuade a straight, male audience to identify with a woman character. It’s easier for women because we were brought up identifying with male characters in literature. It’s hard for straight boys to identify with Juliet or Wendy in “Peter Pan,” whereas girls identify with Romeo and with Peter Pan. What led you to that conclusion?

STREEP: What let me to that was I have never – I mean, I watch movies. And I don’t care who is the

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Finally time to include men in women’s sports

Dec 27th, 2019 3:39 pm | By

The smug piece on CeCé Telfer was written by Dawn Ennis, who is

  1. the editor-in-chief of Outsports
  2. a trans woman

But of course.

So it’s an Outsports award, and Dawn (formerly Don) Ennis is the editor in chief of Outsports, and Dawn Ennis is trans, so a trans woman gives a woman’s award to a trans woman. Bros before hos am I right?

Read the rest



Sprinting to the top of the list

Dec 27th, 2019 3:30 pm | By

The Outsports Female Athlete of the Year is

you know this one already

not a female.

The LGBTQ sports world was blessed in 2019 with an abundance of choices for Female Athlete of the Year. Readers nominated several women, among them:

– USWNT icon Megan Rapinoe, who made an indelible mark during the Women’s World Cup.

But who cares about her, she’s just a boring commonplace woman. They’re a dime a dozen, yawn. Outsports can do better than that.

But in terms of making an indelible mark on sports history, CeCé Telfer of Franklin Pierce University sprinted to the top of the list with her groundbreaking victory at the May 2019 NCAA Division II National Championships

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Guest post: Read the methods first

Dec 27th, 2019 3:06 pm | By

Originally a comment by Claire on Researchers found.

I can’t access the paper because it’s behind a paywall and I’m not at work. The appendix has the methods and detailed description of how they collected the data and that’s all I really care about. I always read the methods first. If I think the methods are garbage then the paper is garbage and I can devote my valuable time to something else.

PNAS is a good journal and I’m a little shocked that the paper was published. Statistically, this paper is flawed in many ways. Firstly, none of the methods adjusted for confounders. Confounders are elements that you have not accounted for in a study that may be coincidentally … Read the rest



The government having a conversation with itself

Dec 27th, 2019 10:51 am | By

This explains a lot – trans activism gets massive government funding while feminist resistance to the parts of trans activism that harm women gets…can you guess?…zero funding.

It’s called “policy laundering” according to Mary Harrington. Useful term.

In its most blatant form, policy laundering looks like government departments using taxpayer money to pay lobbyists to influence government…

Let us consider an example: the Scottish Trans Alliance. This is a project funded by the Scottish Government Equality Unit and delivered by the Equality Network, which is largely funded by the Scottish government as well as by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (funded by UK government).

The project delivers research, advisory, and training, including to government-funded bodies, who

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Researchers found

Dec 27th, 2019 9:47 am | By

There’s a study, you see. A study. Be impressed.

Transgender children may start to identify with toys and clothes typical of their gender identity from a very young age, a recent study suggests.

Children identify with their clothes? I think not.

They mean, of course, something like “identify with the role that is purported to belong to this sex as opposed to that,” but hey, that would make everyone stop reading.

And their confidence in their gender identity is generally as strong as that of cisgender children, whose identity matches their sex assigned at birth, researchers found.

Except that doesn’t mean anything. What shirt you wear is not organically connected to what sex you are in the way that … Read the rest



Not entirely social

Dec 26th, 2019 5:31 pm | By

One of these is not like the other, one of these doesn’t belong.

https://twitter.com/LtHarker/status/1210289444000915456

Can YOU see it?… Read the rest



Boxing Day fame

Dec 26th, 2019 2:03 pm | By

The BBC is reporting on it.

The RSPCA is looking into claims made by a prominent lawyer that he killed a fox with a baseball bat.

Jolyon Maugham posted on Twitter on Thursday morning: “Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?”

The animal welfare charity tweeted that the claim was “distressing”.

Which is so sad because he meant it to be funny. Jokes are such a personal thing.

Government guidelines state you can use cage traps and snares to catch foxes and you must “humanely kill any fox you catch while it’s in the trap or snare”.

Humanely doesn’t mean “with a baseball bat.”… Read the rest



SORRY you were UPSET

Dec 26th, 2019 12:54 pm | By

Jolyon Maugham QC’s fox-smashing exploit has garnered him considerable attention, and not the good kind. Maybe being a preening sadist isn’t such a great marketing ploy after all?

https://twitter.com/Fisher_Download/status/1210253653828886528 https://twitter.com/Law_Rhetoric/status/1210140158231642112

So I smashed it with a club.… Read the rest



Do you believe in magic

Dec 26th, 2019 11:39 am | By

“Charlotte” Clymer, who gained fame as a patronizing male “feminist” under the name Charles Clymer, has a piece in the Washington Post telling JK Rowling what to do.

Woven throughout the narrative is an insistence on love and community and integrity and inclusion, which is why it has broken my heart in recent years to see Rowling’s inexplicable replacement of justice-minded imagination with a bigotry-driven rejection of science and reality.

So Team Trans gets to claim both imagination and science & reality, while taking them away from Rowling?

In her tweet, Rowling effectively dismissed [the judge’s ruling in Maya Forstater’s suit], suggesting that Forstater was being fired for “stating that sex is real,” a common transphobic assertion that has

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But they don’t play baseball over there

Dec 26th, 2019 7:11 am | By

Odd thing to brag about.

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1210110735189233665

A great many people have pointed out that the RSPCA has a 24-hour hotline for exactly this purpose. The RSPCA have pointed out that what Maugham claims to have … Read the rest



10% grocery discount

Dec 25th, 2019 1:27 pm | By

In further news of holiday cheer, Walmart doesn’t pay overtime for those very same holidays.

Walmart is one of several big-box retailers who are open on Thanksgiving Day and will start its Black Friday sale at 6pm.

Walmart is also one of the few big companies that does not offer employees increased hourly wages for working shifts on a holiday. At Target and Amazon, workers are paid time and a half for each hour worked.

“Walmart doesn’t offer holiday pay. They have a discount you have to work certain days to receive and one discount only lasts two days,” said a Walmart worker in Idaho who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. They are re scheduled

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The shark bites

Dec 25th, 2019 1:05 pm | By

God almighty. These people.

Republican of Arizona.

https://twitter.com/RepGosar/status/1209504003307868160… Read the rest