Originally a comment by Holms on Marjorie.

For the last twenty years or so, there has been a strong push for movies, tv shows, theatrical productions (etc.) to have more widely representative characters and casts. Fewer male characters, more female; fewer white, more of every other ethnicity; fewer straight, more of other sexualities. It was emphasised that these characters were not to be reductive cliches. Further, this popular push emphasised that this was especially applicable to the lead role.

The reasoning was simple, and well understood by the left. People of demographic combinations other than ‘white male’ deserve to see themselves represented in movies, and not as insulting caricatures. Kids especially deserve to see their sex and/or skin colour as the hero, as the genius, as the object of desire, as the virtuoso, and so on. Broader representation was positive, perhaps even inspiring those kids to push themselves to become that themselves.

But bring up female representation in sport and all of that goes away. I’ve seen it argued for example that a person that needed to see champions demographically similar to themselves in order to be inspired to push themselves was never particularly interested in the first place. But worse is when that reasoning goes away for women but remains in force for trans women. Actual women are weak if they need someone else to feel validated and inspired, but trans women need to have visibility in sports so as to have heroes to admire and aspire to become.

Up with representation of demographics that aren’t straight white men! Then sotto voce: but feel free to forget about the female sex. Supplant them in sports, it’s a net positive because it helps males that wish they were women.

Originally a comment by latsot on Where are the skeptics?

Harald Hanche-Olsen@22ish

Your point reminds me of the characterisation of social media as Skinner Boxes, which I’ve written about here before. The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear and obviously designed to encourage people to take increasingly outspoken positions in the everlasting hunt for likes as returns diminish.

And of course once you’ve gone down one trouser leg of validation, it’s rather hard to come back. I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy is quite up to describing this effect because the increasing apparent conviction is based on diminishing returns for increasingly wild claims.

This is the only explanation I can come up with for the constant over-reaching of gender identity ideology and politics. If activists were to say, for instance, that TWAW is a linguistic argument; that we should change what “woman” means because of some greater good, then we’d have something to talk about. I wouldn’t agree, but we’d have the basis of a good argument about how to determine public policy, at least.

But that doesn’t happen. If arguments like that are ever made, they are motte-and-bailey’s or switched bait.

To make an actual, coherent, evidenced, logical argument, the proponent would have to inch back up toward the… er.. crotch of the trousers of validation (I now regret making that analogy). Every step in that direction loses more in terms of validation than even the decreasing returns gain in heading to the turn-ups (these are 80s trousers, in my analogy).

This is an obvious weakness of human brains. Arty talked about it in the latest Mess as brains being hacked by arseholes. The way it’s done could well be as simple as diminishing returns in likes, I reckon.

I think you were being a bit too glib about this, NiV; it’s easy to see what PZ does as a performance now that we have reason to condemn it. Of course there was always an element of performance, but the questions have always been about the crowd to which he was performing and whether and how that changed. And to what extent he was complicit in it.

My silly abstract model might be right as far as it goes. It might help us gain some insight into how people of conviction can so quickly and easily forget what they were actually convinced about in the first place and embrace the opposite. Or it might not.

But it’s not enough.

Robert Reich points out that the Republican party veered into incoherence when it tried to combine libertarianism with cultural conservatism.

That kind of incoherence is inevitable though, when you have on the one hand two political parties and on the other hand more than two political philosophies or orientations or whatever you want to call them. It applies just as much to the Dems – they’re way too conservative on most issues for my liking, but they’re all there is.

The party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby created an opening for a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.

Or centering on whatever exactly it was that they saw in Trump. Greed? Conceit? Cruelty? Rage? Pussy-grabbing?

Enter Donald Trump, the con artist with a monstrous talent for exploiting resentment in service of his ego.

Trump turned the Republican party into a white working-class cauldron of bitterness, xenophobia, racism, anti-intellectualism and anti-science paranoia, while turning himself into the leader of a near religious cult bent on destroying anything in his way – including American democracy.

I think that’s pretty accurate. Trump doesn’t really have any politics, he just has that urge to be the worst loudest guy in the room.

What we are seeing played out today in the contest for the speakership of the House involves all of these phases – what remains of the small-government establishment, the cultural warriors and the hate-filled authoritarians – engaged in hopeless, hapless combat with each other.

Cheery stuff.

Julie Bindel at Unherd:

In 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then rape their victims before pimping them to multiple men in exchange for alcohol, cigarettes and food.

…

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national average of children in care in Blackpool.

That’s bad enough, but then there’s a plot twist.

But there is one thing I didn’t know about Blackpool, which I learned from listening to Inside the Gender Clinic, a podcast  about the much maligned Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. The  majority of referrals to the clinic are not, as one might assume, from the South, or from Brighton, but from Blackpool. This is surely the last place you’d expect to see so many trans-identified children. After all, the voices we so often hear on this issue in the media tend to belong to upper middle-class kids raised in liberal families.

But transing would be a refuge from abuse, wouldn’t it…at a horrendous price.

Claire*, who grew up in Blackpool, is working for a charity that supports female victims of male violence. She tells me that the links between the rise in young females being referred to gender identity clinics and the realities of growing up in places like Blackpool are obvious. She cites high levels of poverty and the normalisation of the exploitation of women and girls in the sex trade.

As a child, Claire, who was raised in Blackpool, was subject to men’s violence and consequently wanted to “opt out of girlhood”. She says: “The option to be removed from the harms of men would be appealing to most survivors. I am furious that we are allowing girls who need care and support to go down irreversible paths.”

Cheaper, easier, quicker – just cut their tits off.

Blackpool seems to offer a clear example of how vulnerable, damaged children are being drawn to gender ideology because it offers a “one stop shop” solution to the pain of living as a female in a hellish world of abuse. “These girls have been horrifically betrayed,” says Norma. “Why are we sending them for irreversible, damaging treatment, when what they need is protection from sexual violation and abuse?”

Because cheaper, easier, quicker, plus they’re just girls?

The Guardian heralds another first:

Missouri set to become first state to execute an openly transgender person

Progress! No, wait, that’s not what we mean. What do we mean? Uhh………..

Amber McLaughlin is facing the fate on Tuesday of becoming the first openly transgender person to be executed in the US – unless Missouri’s governor, Mike Parson, grants clemency and puts a stop to the planned lethal injection.

First transgender person but not first man.

Punishment by execution is a bad thing, but it doesn’t become worse because the executed person is a man who claims to be a woman.

There are no further court appeals pending. The clemency request focuses on several issues, including McLaughlin’s severely traumatic childhood and serious mental health issues, which the jury never heard during her trial. She was convicted in 2006 for killing a former girlfriend in 2003.

It’s the old “these aren’t our crimes” thing. Statistically men are vastly more likely to murder an ex than women are. McLaughlin was bumbling his effort to pass by killing his former girlfriend. It’s not a girly thing to do.

Two Missouri members of Congress, Democrats Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver, have been campaigning for McLaughlin’s sentence to be commuted and last week wrote to Parson urging him to scrap the execution.

To be clear, I don’t object to campaigns to scrap the execution.

They further stated in the letter: “Ms McLaughlin’s cruel execution would mark the state’s first use of the death penalty on a woman since the US supreme court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, and even worse it would not solve any of the systemic problems facing Missourians and people all across America, including anti-LGBTQ+ hate and violence, and cycles of violence that target and harm women. 

No it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t mark the state’s first use of the death penalty on a woman since the US supreme court reinstated capital punishment, because he’s not a woman. These are not our crimes.

Gee, I wonder why women get so angry about this kind of thing; I just can’t understand it.

So there you go. Shut up and take it, women.

Paul Fidalgo has an interesting piece in Free Inquiry (where he is now the editor-in-chief).

Tim Minchin Reaches across the Algorithmic Chasm

Nice title, too.

In a “lecture” portion of his show recently posted online, which is introduced as being a “TED Talk” on confirmation bias, Minchin (winner of CFI’s 2021 Richard Dawkins Award) teases apart what he sees as the worsening phenomenon of tribalism, wherein the political right has come to hold bewilderingly absolutist, contradictory, nonsensical, and bigoted beliefs, while progressives have turned on themselves, creating an endless fractal of mini-tribes that are constantly ejecting their members over increasingly minor ideological infractions.

Also over what I would consider not infractions at all. Progressives have lost their grip on the difference between reality and fiction lately. Progressives now queue up to denounce people for not believing other people’s fantasies – which is a weird thing to denounce. It’s weird when it’s religion and it’s weird when it’s ideology.

This is something I think about all the time, particularly from the position of someone who runs a secular humanist publication that is literally called “Free Inquiry.” It has to be okay to ask hard questions and to have a healthy skepticism of the beliefs held by those even within our own “tribes.” Just as it’s important to speak out against what is false, harmful, and wrong, it must also be okay to be wrong in the first place so that one can feel free to learn and grow.

Which doesn’t mean you have to be wrong about everything all the time, like Trump.

Now we get to read the texts and phone logs and such from Trump’s Big Day.

The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.

The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win.

This will keep us busy for weeks.

Hope Hicks, to the surprise of no one, was agitated about her personal future.

Trump aide Hope Hicks texted with Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff Julie Radford on the afternoon of Jan. 6 decrying Trump’s actions and lamenting that their careers were likely doomed.

“All of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed. I’m so mad and upset,” Hicks wrote. “We all look like domestic terrorists now.”

Ya that’s the important thing: Hope Hicks’s career.

There is a certain amount of humor though.

The select committee also posted a journal entry produced by Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump White House press Secretary, from Jan. 6, describing some of the chaos and interactions she observed that day.

“POTUS wanted to walk to capital [sic]. Physically walk,” she wrote. “He said fine ride beast. Meadows said not safe enough.”

You can imagine what came between that “Physically walk” and “fine ride beast.” It’s not a short walk – it’s very doable, but it’s not five or ten minutes. Trump doesn’t like to walk.

In case anyone’s feeling like shedding a tear for Pope Benny (unlikely, I know), here’s a reminder from 2009:

The Catholic Church (and Pope Benedict XVI) were presented with a public-relations powder keg in March when news broke that a 9-year-old Brazilian girl underwent an abortion after she’d been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Catholics from São Paulo to Paris were outraged by the swift public declaration of the local Archbishop, José Cardoso Sobrinho, that the girl’s family as well as the doctors who performed the abortion were automatically excommunicated.

What, just because the local archbishop valued the “life” of the process inside the 9-year-old girl more than the very actual life of the girl herself? Because the archbishop swiftly declared that the unaware unconscious unsentient pregnancy forced on the child mattered more than the child herself? Because the archbishop declared that the child should have submitted to likely death rather than halt the life-threatening process forced on her by her rapist stepfather? Yes, just because all that.

Monsignor Rino Fisichella, a solidly traditionalist Rome prelate considered to be close to Benedict, tried to soften the church’s approach to the case by writing in the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the girl “should have been defended, hugged and held tenderly to help her feel that we were all on her side.” 

Fuck that noise. You’re a million miles from “her side” when you’re forcing her to go through agony and likely death after being raped by her stepfather. Imagine being a 9-year-old girl gestating twins!! There isn’t room in a child’s body for that.

In a tucked-away “clarification” published on page 7 of a recent edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican produced a document that unequivocally confirmed automatic excommunication for anyone involved in an abortion — even in such a situation as dire as the Brazilian case.

Because priestly power matters far more than the lives of mere little sluts who probably tempted their stepfathers in the first place. Bros before hos.

Updating to add, reminded by tigger_the_wing’s comment:

Jordan Peterson is notoriously a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.

Example:

Ah yes, we live in that utopia where nobody decides were anybody can drive, so there are no freeways or highways or roads.

Oh ffs.

And Sir Keir whines and gesticulates and flails like an idiot. He finally manages to utter the complete sentence “I don’t think discussing the issue in this way helps anyone.”

It helps women you fucking fool. This exciting new fad for pretending men can become women by saying so is bad for women, and men in power brushing that off is also bad for women. It does help us to keep reminding men in power like you that letting men pretend to be women and invade our spaces and take over our sports and win our prizes is bad for us.

Yet another one of these.

“Tiffany” of course is not a woman.

Sucks for Paula James, doesn’t it.

I could find only one headline that doesn’t lie about the murder of Carlo Secondino. Even the New York Post says “woman” in the headline. Newsweek is the one truth-teller.

Who Is Nikki Secondino? Trans Woman Accused of Murdering Father

A New York transgender woman has been arrested by police and is accused of killing her father and critically injuring her sister, according to reports.

Why don’t they all report it that way? Why do they say “woman” and “daughter” in the headlines?

Actual literal journalists lying about the news. That’s useful. Reporter for CBS News:

That’s all lies. His SON told police that. His SON is under arrest on suspicion of murdering his father and stabbing his sister.

The hashtag is NotOurCrimes. It gets used a lot.

Ah, I didn’t realize there was a Welsh publisher of women writers. Gwasg Honno Press: “Vibrant fiction, auto/biography, short stories, anthologies & Classics (@Honno_Clas) from Welsh women writers. Longest running UK independent women’s press.” (I still miss Virago.)

But, it turns out…

Never mind then, it’s not a women’s press after all.

Mind you, they’ll get in trouble for that “or.” It’s not “if you’re a woman or you identify as a woman” because that implies that if you identify as a woman you’re not a woman. ERROR ERROR ERROR.

Bolsonaro has urgent business up north.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been sworn in as the new president of Brazil – the third time he has held the country’s highest office.

…

Lula and incoming Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin paraded through the city on an open-top convertible before proceeding to the Senate – at the start of the formal inauguration ceremony. The men have spent the past days selecting their cabinet and appointing supporters to key state owned businesses.

In a noted change of policy from the Bolsonaro administration, Marina Silva – one of Brazil’s best known climate activists – was re-appointed to head the environment and climate ministry. She will be expected to achieve Lula’s pledge to reach “zero deforestation” in the Amazon by 2030.

Noted and vitally important to the entire planet.

Mr Bolsonaro himself reportedly flew to the US state of Florida after delivering a teary farewell to supporters.

Ah, Florida. Hoping he has friends there, no doubt. Of course Trump hates “losers” so…

The populist incumbent has repeatedly said he does not wish to attend the inauguration of his successor, where he would be expected to hand over the presidential sash in a sign of a stable transfer of power.

Aw, iddn that sweet; so trumpy. Maybe Trump will let him kiss the ring if he promises to leave immediately afterwards.

Now that’s more like it.

Scarborough’s New Year fireworks cancelled to protect walrus

Priorities. Which is more important, a walrus or fireworks? The walrus, obviously. Good job Scarborough.

A New Year’s Eve fireworks display had to be cancelled at the last minute to protect an Arctic walrus discovered in Scarborough.

The event was called off over fears it “could cause distress to the mammal”. Council leader Steve Siddons said he was disappointed but “the welfare of the walrus has to take precedence”.

The walrus, which has drawn huge crowds since arriving on Saturday, is believed to be the same one spotted on the Hampshire coast three weeks ago.

If it’s drawn huge crowds that would seem to indicate it’s given some joy to a lot of people, so there’s some consolation for the canceled fireworks. There may not be a huge amount of overlap between the fans of marine mammals and fans of fireworks, but even so.

More on the walrus, who seems to feel very comfortable catching up on sleep while the people of Yorkshire admire.

Originally a comment by Arty Morty on Where are the skeptics?

To go back to latsot’s analogy with other kinds of pseudomedicine, why is the skeptic community not going after the quack doctors peddling dangerous drugs and mutilating surgery to these genuinely distressed people?

I’ve been racking my brain for years trying to figure this out, and the best I can come up with is this:

“Gender medicine” is a treatment for a mental health disorder but people are terrified to make any kind of association between atypical gender expression and being mentally disordered. To which the obvious reply should be, “Then get rid of gender medicine, you idiots!” But instead, the reply from skeptics, progressives and everyone else is a strange collusion with the patients that they can still have all the “gender medicine” they want but they’re not disordered, it’s the whole rest of the world that needs fixing.

The hypocrisy at the heart of the gender identity movement is best exemplified by the euphemistic term “gender affirming care.” It says, we’re giving you some kind of care but it’s not medical treatment for a medical disorder, no no, my goodness no! It’s just wholesome gender-stereotype-smashing affirmative progressive feel-good “care.”

Under the “gender affirmation” euphemism, puberty blockers, genital reconstruction surgeries, synthetic hormones… none of this stuff needs the same scrutiny that any other medical treatment does, because none of it is really medical treatment, because that would imply that there might sometimes be a connection between gender expression and mental health disorders.

Of course there’s a connection between gender expression and mental health disorders — and the gender identity movement is the thing that’s perpetuating it!

Before the gender identity movement took over the medical establishment, there was the “watchful waiting” model, whose central premise was to reduce patients’ delusions about being the “wrong” sex with as much psychiatric care as possible before resorting to permanent medical body modifications, which would never literally “fix” the patients’ sex but which might help to alleviate their distress.

This seems to be where the skeptics got confused: it turns out that “gender medicine” isn’t entirely bad — some patients do seem to benefit from it. So completely abolishing medical treatment for gender distress is off the table — that would be bad, regressive, harmful. But acknowledging that this stuff is treatment for a mental health disorder is also off the table. Having a mental health disorder is the thing that leads you to seek medical treatment, but the medical treatment is the thing that makes you “trans.” Literally by definition, being trans means having a mental health condition. And that simply cannot be allowed. Their hands are tied: they have to endorse “gender medicine” in principle, because they know that it works sometimes. But they can’t allow themselves any kind of scrutiny about how it works, who it works for, what it actually does, what the risks are, etc, because that’s a foul reminder that we’re talking about a connection between “gender identities” and mental health disorders.

And right on cue, in swoop the charlatans and the quacks and the pharmaceutical hawks and all the other nasties looking to exploit a blind spot in everyone’s critical thinking. And boy are they making a killing.

It’s such a bloody mess. And all we have to do to untangle it is to collectively sit down and face the fact that the entire gender identity movement is an attempt by people with mental health disorders to feed their delusions instead of overcoming them.

Sigh. Rule number one, plus two through six or seven hundred: don’t be an asshole.

A controversial New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the billionaire owner of New York’s Empire State Building’s property outside Queenstown is understood to have caused a large scrub fire.

Why was the fireworks display controversial? Well, because of the risk of fire. Cool that the guy did it anyway.

Empire State Realty Trust chairman, president and chief executive Tony Malkin of New York had upset neighbours of his Dalefield property with plans for an extravagant 14-minute fireworks display to bring in 2023.

Because fireworks are a necessity of life?

Now, several neighbours who were watching the display closely with fears for their animals, believe that a sizeable blaze was started by the fireworks.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) said there were three separate fires on steep terrain which spanned an estimated 1.2ha of land in Dalefield near Arrowtown.

The guy could have just canceled the fireworks. They’re not in fact a necessity of life, and when they’re actively dangerous, how about just not setting them off and causing major harm?

The New York property tycoon’s fireworks plans had enraged neighbours, the majority of whom owned horses and other livestock animals.

So why couldn’t he just be a mensch, a decent neighbor, a decent human, and not do the hazardous thing?

In a statement to the ODT before the event, the [fireworks-having] property owners said they had “deep and long-lived social and charitable connections” in the area.

“As a courtesy, beyond any requirement, mindful of house pets and livestock, we have reached out to neighbours to ensure they are appraised of our plans,” the statement said.

What a complete dickhead. Just don’t do it. Don’t set your barn on fire, don’t shoot at the neighbors’ children, don’t bomb the local school, don’t pour toxic chemicals into the nearest river, and don’t set off fireworks in an area likely to burst into flames. Just don’t.

He rubbed salt into the wound by saying “We are sorry for any inconvenience.” Don’t pretend to be sorry; don’t do it.

Everything that’s yours is belong to us.

An Australian transgender woman who says she was barred from using the female-only platform Giggle for Girls has sued the social media site for alleged discrimination.

Female people must not be allowed to have anything that’s only for them. Not one thing.

In a federal court lawsuit filed on 22 December, Roxanne Tickle claims she was unlawfully barred from using Giggle in September 2021 after the firm and its CEO, Sally “Sall” Grover, said she was a man.

The activist is seeking damages, a written apology and complete access to the platform.

Oh is that all.

After initially suing Giggle and Grover in the federal circuit and family court in July this year, Tickle dropped the case, afraid of the legal costs after hearing the firm’s CEO would take the matter all the way to the high court if she had to.

Maybe he can find some other way to silence women.