Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on To scour the text.

And, of course, it often doesn’t even work. Sensitivity readers are self-selected (if not to say self-identified), claiming to speak for a particular group or so-called lived experience. Yet nobody (but nobody!) can realistically claim to account for every perspective within a group or class of people who share similar life experiences, and so anyone claiming to offer this is selling a bill of goods.

All too often, despite having engaged one or more of these charlatans, a work is still held up for a roasting by professional rivals or overenthusiastic “fans” who’ve attempted to fill the void of meaning in their lives with obsessive policing of other people’s creative output. Such heresy hunts are especially common in YA Twitter (which is to say among any author who wants to publish in YA at all). Occasionally a foment will rise so high that an agent will throw an author under the bus, as I believe B&W has already covered.

This is wokeness moral panic in a nutshell; insisting that everyone engage in a certain action and, at the same time, insisting that this action has no actual power, either in intent or in effect. It is in the same epiphenomenon class as a religion insisting that God made each individual human special, and that every human is a wretched sinner. The carrot and the stick, wrapped in one, with the only true answer being to give ever more power to the priests and priest-aspirants.

You don’t have to like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even be to the left of Lindsey Graham to find it disturbing that Fox personalities single her out for sustained personalized bullying.

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.

“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.

A “Karen.” It’s interesting how right-wing men and left-wing men join hands to abuse women.

Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.

From the Bronx? That doesn’t tell us much. Puerto Rico at least hints at Hispanic, though of course it’s possible to be from there without being Hispanic, but the Bronx hints at…what? Could be anything.

Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.

“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!

“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”

As I say – disturbing. It’s not commentary, it’s not politics, it’s certainly not news – it’s just abuse. What’s the point of it other than to gin up hatred?

Maybe it’s the permafrost that’s doing it. Anything to distract us from the realization that the pot is heating up.

News from Ottawa:

Canadian police on Saturday deployed pepper spray and stun grenades in a continuing effort to break up the blockade of trucks and demonstrators that has occupied downtown Ottawa for more than three weeks in a protest against pandemic protocols.

More than three weeks seems like ample time to get a point across. It seems like way too much time when the point in question is such a selfish and dimwitted point as refusing to get vaccinated during a pandemic.

In a tweet addressed to the truckers, police said: “We told you to leave. We gave you time to leave. We were slow and methodical, yet you were assaultive and aggressive with officers and the horses.”

The horses ffs. As if it’s their fault.

Peter Tatchell should look in the damn mirror before he yells “SHAME!” at women.

So tell us more about sensitivity readers.

The Times explores the question:

Joanne Harris*, the author of Chocolat, took umbrage: “I think you’re confusing sensitivity with weakness . . . It takes courage for an author to admit they may not have all the answers.” Dickens had revised his depiction of the Jewish character Fagin in Oliver Twist, she argued, removing many references to the character’s religion after corresponding with a Jewish critic, Eliza Davis. “He showed the capacity to grow. Perhaps that’s what makes a great writer.”

*The Joanne Harris who declined to remove a “fuck” from her latest novel for a US publisher.

But a Jewish critic who enlightened Dickens isn’t a “sensitivity reader,” she’s a reader with knowledge of a particular subject – a particular set of people – that Dickens didn’t have.

Other writers are incensed by sensitivity readers. None more so than Kate Clanchy, the author who was accused of using racial tropes in her 2019 memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. After the furore, her former publishers, Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, sent the book to a number of sensitivity readers to scour the text for problematic content before it was reprinted.

But hang on. Who are these sensitivity readers, and what is their training? What do they know and how do they know it? How do publishers know what they know and how they know it? How does any of this work?

Clanchy also claims that a sensitivity reader flagged her use of “gay”, saying that she should have used “LGBTQ”…

Like hell! The meanings are sharply different, and it’s not more “sensitive” to use the ever more useless catchall LGBTQ+#%&&%@. T is not at all the same as L and G, so no, that is bad wrong illiterate flagging.

Sensitivity readers are hired by editors and authors to review manuscripts before publication. They check for stereotypes, dialogue that doesn’t ring true or language that may cause offence. Although much of their work focuses on race, advice is offered in subjects ranging from “dating while fat” to “tiger parents” and age-gap relationships.

That’s all interesting but again I ask: how do they know any of this? Where do they get their expertise? How does anyone know they know more about it than we do? Where are the Sensitivity training colleges or academies or institutes? Who are these people?

Those who welcome sensitivity readers see them as a way to ensure authenticity when writing about communities a writer does not belong to, in the same way a sci-fi writer would consult a scientist. “I don’t see them as being antagonistic to free speech; it’s more a different layer of research,” Harris says.

Ah but it’s not “in the same way” at all. Presumably a sci-fi writer wouldn’t just consult a random scientist, but someone with specific knowledge of a specific subject. “Sensitivity” isn’t specific. What is it about sensitivity readers that makes them informed about all “communities”? Please do explain, I’m fascinated.

Maybe the brief isn’t “inform the author about this particular community or issue” at all but rather “search for everything anyone could possibly fly into a rage about.” If you hire “sensitivity” people to search for “sensitive” writings, they’re going to find them, so that you’ll hire them again. Baby needs new shoes.

A cancel-cancel:

The bestselling author Joanne Harris has turned down a US book deal after the publishers demanded she take out an “f-bomb” from the novel.

Well done that woman.

The Chocolat author, who lives near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, tweeted on Saturday: “Today I turned down a book deal in the US because they wanted to edit out my use of ‘the f-bomb’. I refused for two reasons: one, because I don’t use words accidentally. They matter. And second, because I don’t believe my use of the word ‘fuck’ harms anyone.”

Exactly so. I do a bit of writing myself and I don’t use words accidentally. I thought we’d agreed as a society or a grown-up reading public that the word “fuck” doesn’t harm anyone several decades ago.

Which reminds me of a thing. My first ever bad edit, and in this case I was not given the option of rejecting it. My senior year at the tiny girls’ school I’d attended since kindergarten I won the story contest so my story was published in the yearbook – and when the yearbooks arrived shortly before graduation I found that a word had been changed. I was enraged, and my English teacher who was also the yearbook supervisor was annoyed too if I remember correctly. It’s hard to figure out what gave a company whose job it was to put a book between hard covers the right to change the content without asking. We were the editors, not the company. Anyway, the word – I’d had a character exclaim “Shit!” in anger or shock, and they changed it to “Shoot!” It’s not just that it’s ooh no swearing, it’s that the substitution is terrible. A character exclaiming “Shoot!” is just stupid. So, yeah, rock on Jane Harris.

Harris added: “I gave it some thought, and the decision was mine to take. That’s how publishing works, and I’m happy with my choice.

“In context it was a characterisation device, and would have sounded weak if I’d taken it out.”

Exactly.

She’s not annoyed at the publisher though.

Harris said that she did not feel offended by the request from the publisher, which she described as a house with a strong “cosy” branding, adding, “I understand, but that’s not me”.

“I made my choice and so did they,” she said. “I don’t remotely feel as if I’ve been ‘cancelled’.”

Fair enough.

Harris said she chose to make the decision public on the back of a discussion on social media prompted by John Boyne, the author of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, criticising the increasing use by authors and publishers of “sensitivity readers” to ensure that they are representing certain groups correctly or to avoid causing offence.

Harris was quoted in the media on her thoughts, and expanded on them on her blog, where she wrote: “I think a lot of people (some of them authors, most of them not) misunderstand the role of a sensitivity reader. That’s probably mostly because they’ve never used one, and are misled by the word ‘sensitivity’, which, in a world of toxic masculinity, is often mistaken for weakness. To these people, hiring someone to check one’s work for sensitivity purposes implies a surrendering of control, a shift in the balance of power.”

I think it’s a little more complicated than that…

Indiana ACLU turning its back on girls and their civil liberties.

Transgender girls aren’t girls.

THE ISSUE ISN’T TRANS KIDS.

The issue is boys destroying girls’ sports.

Nobody is saying trans students don’t belong in sports. The issue is trans students who are male intruding on students who are female.

There’s nothing to “protect” them from; they’re not in danger. It’s girls who are in danger of losing their sports and their privacy.

Talk. Like. Grownups.

If only this discussion could get out of the baby talk stage. Let trans girls play sports!! Yes thank you nobody is trying to stop them.

A controversial bill to ban transgender girls from playing girls sports in school has passed a key committee, signaling it’s on its way to becoming law.

…

Last week, lawmakers heard hours of testimony from individuals on both sides of the bill. There are supporters of the bill, who are concerned what impact the participation of transgender girls may have on girls’ sports. They say transgender girls may have unfair physical advantages that would make it harder to cisgender girls to secure a spot or compete on an even playing field.

Of course they do, at least if we’re talking about post-puberty boys. This is part of the baby talk: pretending we all have no clue that males have physical advantages over females.

Those opposing the bill, though, say transgender kids should have the same opportunities to compete and play that their cisgender peers enjoy. And, they say, there are already transgender kids playing school sports.

They would still have those same opportunities. Stop with the baby talk. And the issue isn’t “transgender kids” it’s boys. And if boys are already cheating by competing against girls then that’s a bad thing and unfair to the girls.

Transgender kids don’t pose a threat to girls’ sports, say advocates for the LGBTQ community.

Then they’re lying. Boys do pose a threat to girls’ sports once they’re past puberty. Everybody knows this. Journalists keep hiding it with this baby talk about “kids” instead of “boys.”

The ACLU of Indiana has said it will oppose the bill in the courts, should it be signed into law.

The ACLU of Indiana is all over it. It’s not a civil liberty for boys to play on girls’ teams.

Originally a comment by Freemage on Imagine.

Okay, I’m gonna leap down this rabbit-hole for a moment, because I think it really gets at the critiques of Rowling and Harry Potter from the TRAs:

H. P. Lovecraft was the creator of the Cthulu “mythos”. He pretty much invented, whole-cloth, the idea of ancient gods who are so far beyond human experience that to apply mortal morals to them is absurd, and to contemplate them directly is to invite insanity. Just as Mary Shelly created the first real Sci-Fi Horror story, Lovecraft pretty much invented the whole genre of Existential Horror. His writings have inspired scores of other writers to produce work in the same genre, as well as art, music and parodies. (I’m fond of the HP Lovecraft Christmas Carol book, personally.)

He was also a flaming racist. And not just by modern standards; even by the standards of a white man in the early 1900s, he was an extremist. (He also was terrified by science and technology, including the notion of air-conditioning.)

And these views are rife throughout his writings. The view that anyone who isn’t a high-born WASP is in some way not merely inferior, but actually dangerous, is [integral] to his stories.

Naturally, this has created some difficulties in the modern era. When retelling his stories in new adaptations, or in new works based on his mythos, writers, filmmakers and others generally take considerable effort to excise the elements that are so offensive. One of the biggest triumphs in the remake category comes from Jordan Peele, whose Lovecraft County takes pretty much everything that’s fun and enjoyable about HP’s writings, and then infuses it with a strong anti-racist vibe. Perfect subversion.

I went on this tangent to show that it’s possible to ‘imagine the art without the artist’. But now, let’s look at the billboard slogan again.

What, exactly, would be changed in a Harry Potter-verse that was written by someone who wasn’t J.K. Rowling? Well… pretty much absolutely nothing. At most, there might’ve been a greater diversity of skin-tones among the characters. But there’s no intrinsic social or political views that are driving her world-building the way there is with H.P.’s. You can’t eliminate her ‘transphobia’ because there’s nothing in the work that contains her views on sex-based differences in the first place, other than the existence of boy’s and girl’s bathrooms.

Another tantrum.

“transphobic scholarship” “pain and suffering” “the damage caused” “injurious scholarship” “directly and indirectly harmed” – it sounds like something really terrible, doesn’t it.

“harmful scholarship”

How dare those traitors be unoffended by the content? How dare they not do everything they can to get it removed and rejected and forever silenced?

“personal safety” “harmful scholarship”

“unwaveringly correct decision” “harmful and problematic”

Melodrama is a powerful drug.

Useful summary of state of play.

Harriet Hall on Charles Windsor as self-proclaimed Enemy of the Enlightenment:

Edzard Ernst has a new book out: Charles, The Alternative Prince: An Unauthorized Biography. I wrote a full book review that will appear in the next issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, but I wanted to give my readers on Science-Based Medicine a heads-up.  Charles’ efforts to promote alternative medicine have been mentioned many times on SBM, but readers may not appreciate the depth of his folly. I know I didn’t, until I read this book. The full story has never been told until now.

Ernst uses Prince Charles’ own words to demonstrate his ignorance of science and medicine. He thinks conventional medicine is nothing but “pills and procedures”. At the age of 34, he had the chutzpah to lecture to the members of the British Medical Association on the power of spiritualism, urging them to follow their intuition rather than look for scientific evidence. He has always been intuitively averse to scientific materialism and was drawn to mysticism.

He has the chutzpah to lecture everybody on everything. He lectures architects on architecture, scientists on science, city planners on city planning. He thinks he’s much much much cleverer than he is. Dunning-Kruger to the max.

Perhaps the worst thing is that he is proud of being called “the enemy of the Enlightenment”. He is clearly anti-science. He calls for more research into alternative medicine, but he doesn’t mean what we mean by research. He doesn’t want research to ask “if” a treatment is effective, he wants it to demonstrate that it is effective, and that it would save money (which it would not).

He identifies as right about everything.

CNN “reports”:

Lia Thomas, a transgender woman swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania, won the 500-yard freestyle race at the Ivy League women’s swimming and diving championships on Thursday night in 4 minutes and 37.32 seconds, beating her next closest competitor by 7.5 seconds.

In other words William Thomas, a man, won the 500-yard freestyle race at the Ivy League women’s swimming and diving championships on Thursday night in 4 minutes and 37.32 seconds, beating his next closest competitor, a woman, by 7.5 seconds. Which is to say, a man won a women’s race by blatantly gaming the system. This should not be allowed to happen, end of story.

Her dominance in the pool has raised questions about the NCAA’s policies toward transgender women athletes and the proper balance between inclusion and fairness.

Fuck “balance.” Women’s sports should be for women. “Inclusion” in that context should mean all women, all kinds of women, women of all classes and races and ethnicities. It should not mean men.

Huh. Subway ads for the New York Times attacking JK Rowling. That’s a new level.

The New York Times has come under fire for an ad that describes a woman imagining what Harry Potter would be like without its author JK Rowling.

Setting aside the morality of a major newspaper singling out a woman for hatred in its advertising, that’s just plain a stupid thing to say. Let’s imagine what The Trout Quintet would be like without Schubert. What would King Lear be like without Shakespeare? Wuthering Heights without Emily Bronte? Fallingwater without Frank Lloyd Wright?

At least it’s an easy exercise. The answer is nothing. Zero. An empty space.

And as for the morality…well. It’s beneath contempt.

The advertisement is part of the paper’s new brand marketing campaign, ‘Independent Journalism for an Independent Life’, which according to a press release aims to give an insight into the lives of several New York Times subscribers.

By singling out a woman for abuse because she has an independent mental life.

Why isn’t everyone there booing?

Julia Beck on that ratbag who got her kicked off a city commission and has now “detransitioned.”

Four years ago I was ousted from a city commission, all because I said “sex” is important. Now I hear the man who took my place, the man who then called himself a lesbian and led the charge against me, has since detransitioned. I welcome every person’s decision to detransition or desist, and at the same time abusers must be held accountable for their actions. Sure, finding yourself in life is a process, but it never requires traumatizing women, or pretending to be one.

I wouldn’t even mind the pretending to be one all that much if it were called that. I would mind it some, because men’s idea of what it is to be a woman can often be quite irritating, but I wouldn’t mind it nearly as much as I mind the “we are women every bit as much as you are and we do it better” nonsense.

In 2018 I was living in Baltimore, Maryland. To defend lesbian rights, I joined the city’s LGBTQ Commission and then was elected to a leadership position on the Law and Policy Committee. It’s a fact that lesbians, despite beginning the alphabet acronym, are erased left and right. There are very few lesbians in positions of power or influence these days. So, as an out lesbian, I was glad for the opportunity to represent women like me. It wasn’t long before my feminist politics came out, too; my committee was asked to review a list of proposals from the police department which I criticized for replacing “sex” with “gender identity.” I argued that policies which use this ideology are easily manipulated by male perpetrators, like male rapists in women’s prisons.

And bam, along came an I Identify As A Woman to punish her for knowing what a woman is.

[H]e accused me of committing “violence” against the “transgender community” and called for a vote to kick me out. This man personally identified as transgender and apparently empathized with the male perpetrators of Baltimore City. At the time, he called himself a “transbutch” and abruptly claimed my position. Did he truly intend to dominate the only lesbian on the committee? Or was his entire political scheme merely a ruse for narcissistic validation? In any case, he was celebrated in the local press for being a pride-month hero, while I became “the most hated lesbian in Baltimore.”

Who knew that men make better lesbians than women do?

It sure takes a lot of balls to call yourself a lesbian, run an actual lesbian out of her elected position in city government, and then years later boast about your enlightenment from living for a few years in girl mode. I wonder how many women were harmed in the making of his ego.

Too many, we know that much.

The crook and his crook kids have to testify.

Donald Trump and two of his children have been ordered by a New York judge to appear for a deposition within the next three weeks, as part of the billowing investigation over alleged fraud in the valuation of assets belonging to his family business.

The ruling by Judge Arthur Engoron to force Trump and his two eldest children – Donald Jr and Ivanka – to comply with subpoenas amounts to a sharp escalation of the legal perils that are rapidly tightening around the former president.

I know, I know, he keeps getting away with it, but you know, you can play with fire 153 times and not get burned and that still doesn’t mean you won’t get burned the next time. He’s gotten away with it before (though not entirely) but it doesn’t follow that he’ll inevitably get away with it forever. Jeffrey Epstein got away with it until he didn’t.

Following a two-hour hearing on Thursday, Engoron delivered a blunt rebuttal to arguments put forward by Trump lawyers that the former president should not be subjected to questioning in the civil case because the information could be used against him in criminal proceedings that are running in parallel. The judge went so far as to say that had James not subpoenaed them, it would have been “a blatant dereliction of duty”.

Responding to the news, [NY Attorney General Letitia] James said that it showed that “no one will be permitted to stand in the way of the pursuit of justice, no matter how powerful they are”.

And Trump isn’t all that powerful now. He’s not president any more.

He can plead the Fifth Amendment but that has its own problems.

In legal arguments before Engoron delivered his decision, lawyers for Trump argued that he could not feasibly plead the fifth without hurting his potential criminal defense.

“If he goes in and follows my advice, which will be you cannot answer these questions without … immunity because that’s what the law provides, and take the fifth amendment, that’ll be on every front page in the newspaper in the world. And how can I possibly pick a jury in that case?” said Ronald Fischetti, Trump’s criminal defense lawyer.

Politically, the deposition is also likely to be awkward. In the past, Trump has poured scorn on those who remain silent under questioning. During his 2016 presidential election campaign, he ridiculed the practice, saying “the mob takes the fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the fifth amendment?”

Oops.

The James investigation, combined with its criminal Manhattan equivalent, are now top of the league of a plethora of legal troubles facing the former occupant of the White House. A Guardian tally this month found that Trump was facing a total of 19 legal challenges, six of which involve alleged financial irregularities.

Well at least he won’t get bored.

The one with Andy Lewis and Aaron Rabinowitz.

I’ve watched only a clip so far, in which Helen asks Aaron if he thinks Lia Thomas has a right to be in the women’s changing room and Aaron says yes.

One way of looking at it is that critics of trans ideology are obsessed with the subject [and by implication kind of weird and crazy for being so obsessed].

Maybe, but on the other hand, maybe they have interests at stake, aka genuine concerns, and thus know more about it than you do, and thus just possibly are right while you – knowing less about it – are wrong. It may be that they think more about it than you do and care more about it than you do, and thus just possibly get it mostly right while you get it mostly wrong. Or not. Caring can of course distort too, but I don’t think Aaron should just ignore the knowing more=getting it right possibility.

Originally a comment by James Garnett on Triple threat.

I’m not a climate scientist, but my professional work is in control theoretic modeling of real, nonlinear systems. It’s difficult to underscore just how frightening a positive feedback runaway can be; the results are catastrophic for the system in question, even for small things. For example, induction motors form the basis of modern processing engineering, so their function and use are taught in most electrical engineering programs. One aspect of these motors is that when they are running, if one opens the field circuit while the driving circuit is still energized, the torque of the rotor becomes infinite (in theory), because the field acts as a negative feedback control mechanism.

Some years ago I witnessed what this really means when a student did exactly this to a half-ton induction motor bolted to the floor of a lab with one-inch bolts: in a matter of seconds it tore itself free of its anchors and proceeded to fly around the room, wreaking devastation to every inch of it; it was only by sheer luck that nobody was hurt or killed.

Now scale that scene in your mind up to the entire planetary climate: that’s what we’re facing. This is why climate scientists often seem to use such hyperbolic language, but what is frustrating is that due to the nonlinear nature of the overall system they cannot make accurate predictions of when this will happen. All we can really say about such systems is that when the bad stuff truly gets going, it’s going to get really bad, really fast.

More on permafrost:

Thawing Arctic permafrost laden with billions of tons of greenhouse gases [threatens not only] the region’s critical infrastructure but life across the planet, according [to] a comprehensive scientific review.

Nearly 70% of the roads, pipelines, cities and industry — mostly in Russia — built on the region’s softening ground are highly vulnerable to acute damage by mid-century, according to one of half-a-dozen studies on permafrost published this week by Nature.

Another study warns that methane and CO2 escaping from long-frozen soil could accelerate warming and overwhelm global efforts to cap the rise in Earth’s temperature at livable levels.

Exposure of highly combustible organic matter no longer locked away by ice is also fueling unprecedented wildfires, making permafrost a triple threat, the studies report.

The second item is the scariest – it means the whole thing could race off out of control and…well, don’t look up, I guess.

The feedback loops are looping.

Rising temperatures are not the only driver of accelerated melting.

Arctic wildfires rapidly expand the layer of permafrost subject to thawing, the researchers point out.

As the climate warms, these remote, uncontrolled blazes are projected to increase 130% to 350% by mid-century, releasing more and more permafrost carbon.

Indeed, thawing renders buried organic carbon more flammable, giving rise to “zombie fires” that smolder throughout frigid winters before igniting again in Spring and Summer.

We’ve cooked it.