Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Some responses to the ACLU’s triumph in Connecticut:

He’s right you know. This will work for them only if it doesn’t become universal. If all the men and boys start doing it they’ll be right back where they started, competing against men without any unfair advantage. Meanwhile women’s sports will have ceased to exist.

1. (Aaron Walker [↩]

It never ceases to amaze, the smugness, the shy self-flattery, the absolute indifference to the concerns and rights of women.

He will be (and was) proud to vote to take rights away from women and hand them over to men. What a thing to be proud of.

He starts from the position that, as a socialist, he believes in equality. What does equality have to do with pretending that some men are women? What does it have to do with ignoring all the women who object?

“Trans people are among the most discriminated against,” he sermonizes, while ignoring the fact that women are at least as “discriminated against” as men who call themselves women. Those men will never be forced to keep a pregnancy they don’t want or to give birth when they don’t want to; they will never be charged with a crime for having a miscarriage, or need to travel hundreds of miles to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Of course “trans rights are human rights,” because trans people are human, so they have human rights – but if he means new and peculiar “rights” like forcing everyone to agree they are women: those are not genuine rights.

He says he would never support anything that he believes would deny or undermine women’s rights…but it’s not his call, is it. Our rights are not his to give away, are they. He doesn’t give a shit, but he does want everyone to think he does. What courage.

What utter morons.

“Historic day for equality” – what’s it got to do with equality????

Not one thing. It’s not equality to get governments to affirm that you are something you’re not. If a small segment of people decided to start identifying as bears it wouldn’t be “equality” for the government to pass a law saying those people really truly are bears. It would be ridiculous, embarrassing, baffling, weird, incomprehensible, but not For Equality.

If a small segment of bears decided to start identifying as people it wouldn’t be “equality” for the government to pass a law saying everyone has to welcome the bears and give them all the rights and privileges that people have.

It’s not “equality” for governments to try to force women to pretend men are women just as women are, and thus never a threat to women or obstacles to women’s rights or cheaters in women’s sports.

Governments trying to coerce people into pretending to believe other people’s fantasies about themselves has nothing what so ever to do with equality.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Working with.

WAIT!

WE NEED A LOGO!

It’s gotta fit into a corner of our poster-like images. We could use it on our letterhead, if we ever bothered to commit anything to paper. Or pay for postage. Our logo has to be something convincing enough to make people think we’re more authentic and bigger than we really are boldly dynamic, engagingly synergystic, with exponentially mobilized potential to leverage strategic, global-stakeholder partnerships. Something Institutional. Without one, how will anyone be able to tell our Official Institute Communications from those of some ersatz, wannabe “Institute” that’s just somene else with a laptop? We have to have some way for our marks supporters to be able to distinguish OUR laptop from everyone else’s, so that the money reaches our hot little hands this most worthy of causes.

Do we design the logo in-house, or farm it out and write it off as an expense? (If one of us happened to become a “Graphic Design Company” we could do both at the same time! Which reminds me, we’ll need a book-keeper. Ethical standards Hours flexible.)

There should be a committee. Maybe a “Standing Committee” or an “Ad Hoc Committee,” whichever one sounds like it would be something you’d find in an Institute. (We could form a Committee to look at the use of committees by other Institutes. Just so we follow standard Institututional Committee Practice.) Once that Committee reaches its conclusion, we can use those findings to form the Logo Design and Approval Committee.

T-shirts. There have to be T-shirts. (Or at least pictures of T-shirts (or pictures of a T-shirt mock-up.)) Until an Official Logo is designed and approved, we could use a Provisional Logo for the T-shirts, so everybody knows we’re a Real Institute, (or soon will be) that means business. And has T-shirts. (Or at least pictures of T-shirts. (Or pictures of T-shirt mock-ups.))

Originally a comment by John Wasson on Chiseling away.

Loss of glaciers and sea ice means less sunlight is reflected.

As glaciers grind over ground they free up mercury in rocks and 42 tonnes may be released from south-west Greenland ice sheet. Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/s4a561-021-99753-w

New Scientist May 29 2021 p. 21

As the world warms and the Greenland ice sheet melts, its fresh cold water is expected to slow down a dominant conveyor belt of ocean currents: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). An AMOC collapse would leave an excess of heat in the tropical South Atlantic, which would trigger a series of air-pressure changes that ultimately strengthen the Pacific trade winds.

The good news is that Greenland will somewhat rebound with the loss of weight of the glacier which would decrease the increase in sea level.

“There’s a plan to save Greenland glacier” (New Scientist, Oct. 29 2022, p. 8) by constructing a physical barrier of heavy, premade concrete foundations to slow the ingress of relatively warm water at the base of the glacier which would take 30 years to complete and do nothing to slow surface melting by warmer atmosphere. Geoengineering on this scale is unlikely to materialise any time soon. A green revolution for the necessary reduction in fossil fuel use must continue. (Poul Christoff, U of Cambridge).

When news outlets and dictionaries lie:

Fact Check-Cambridge Dictionary expanded, not replaced its definition of “woman”

When it comes to definitions, expansion can be replacement. If you expand the definition of “apple” to include bananas, cherries, apricots, papayas, and tangerines, it’s no longer a definition of “apple.”

The Cambridge Dictionary updated its definition of the word “woman” to include a further definition that includes transgender women. However, social media users sharing the new definition mistakenly claim the dictionary replaced existing definitions of “woman” with the description.

See above. If you “expand” the definition of “woman” to include “trans woman” then the definition is no longer a definition of “woman”; you have replaced it. The social media users were not mistaken. Reuters is mistaken, the Cambridge Dictionary is mistaken.

Just depressing. Adult human female mocking adult human females who don’t believe in magic gender. Adult human female who is a Lib Dem councillor mocking adult human females who don’t believe in magic gender.

Hur hur, so funny. Why won’t women just shut up and wave all their rights goodbye?

Bray is a councillor in Wokingham, and that’s not even a joke – it’s a real town, 7 miles from Reading.

On a more cheerful note – South Ken Natural History Museum T rex gets Xmas jumper:

The animatronic T.rex is sporting the festive knit, which has been made by a family-run firm in Leicester.

British Christmas Jumpers has previously produced sweaters for Ed Sheeran and the Houses of Parliament.

Director Snahal Patel said the latest design was the company’s biggest job yet and took staff 100 hours to complete.

When did we all decide that it’s ok to invent new rights out of thin air and then impose them on everyone else no matter how batshit zogborst they are?

I say we never did all decide that, it’s just that a few people did, but they’ve had amazing and horrifying success in imposing this sleight of hand on the rest of us.

Like so:

What rights? What rights?? What rights of trans people are we talking about? There is no human right to force everyone else to believe one’s fantasies about one’s own precious self. That. is. not. a. human. right.

How did so many people so swiftly let themselves be convinced that it is? Especially governments and political parties and rights organizations?

The NY Times first reported Hannity’s admission that he lied.

On Nov. 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was “corruption all across the country, in countless districts,” in a plot to steal re-election from the president, Donald J. Trump.

At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used “to trash large batches of votes.”

Mr. Hannity interrupted her with a gentle question that had been circulating among election deniers, despite a lack of supporting proof: Why were Democrats silencing whistle-blowers who could prove this fraud?

Did Mr. Hannity believe any of this?

“I did not believe it for one second.”

But he pretended to believe it on the air.

Mr. Hannity’s disclosure — along with others that emerged from court on Wednesday about what Fox News executives and hosts really believed as their network became one of the loudest megaphones for lies about the 2020 election — is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.

Freedom of the press in action.

Oh, interesting.

Fox News star Sean Hannity – one of former President Donald Trump’s strongest allies on the air and one of his closest advisers off it – admitted under oath that he never believed the lie that Trump was cheated of victory in the 2020 presidential election by a voting tech company.

That stands in contrast to what played out on some of Fox’s biggest shows – including Hannity’s. On television, Fox News hosts, stars and guests amplified and embraced such wild and false claims, made by Trump, his campaign lawyers and surrogates, presenting them to millions of viewers.

“Stands in contrast to” is a euphemism for “this purported news reader lied repeatedly”…thus helping the liar Trump to incite an insurrection.

This country is so broken.

Hannity and a top Fox News executive who oversees prime-time programs told a different story about Trump’s false claims of fraud under oath and in front of attorneys, during separate depositions in a $1.6 billion defamation suit. While the depositions happened in August, their statements emerged yesterday in a Delaware Superior Court hearing relating to a series of motions by the two sides in the case.

“I did not believe it for one second,” Hannity testified, according to an attorney for Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems, who was offering it as a precise quote.

There you have it. They sit there every night shouting into the camera, lying to our faces, shoring up the trumpist lies while not believing the lies for a second.

Dominion Voting Systems’ suit against Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp, is roiling the network, the corporation and the Murdoch family that controls them both. 

Good. Roil away. Roil them until they can’t lie to us for one more second.

Some replies to the ACLU’s smug triumph at trashing girls’ sports:

I kept meaning to get back to that ruling that it’s fine for huge hulking boys to compete against girls as long as the boys say they are trans girls. The ACLU is delighted to see girls deprived of opportunities and wins in this way.

They’re such liars these days. The issue isn’t “trans youth” or “transgender students”; the issue is boys invading girls’ sports. “Trans youth” are not an issue for the boys, but boys are an issue for the girls, whether they identify as trans or not. This ruling doesn’t harm boys, and it does harm girls, so that’s fine then.

“Trans youth have a right to equal and fair play,” says the ACLU smugly, no doubt via the keyboard of Chase Strangio. Sure, trans youth and all youth have a right to equal and fair play, but what does that mean? It certainly shouldn’t mean that boys who are either pretending to think they are girls or actually deluded into thinking they are girls get to destroy girls’ sport. Girls have a right to equal and fair play too, and letting boys take over isn’t that.

The fact that Strangio and the ACLU are so careful in their wording hints that they actually know perfectly well how grotesquely unfair this is.

Joan Smith on the disaster in Scotland yesterday:

So crazed are MSPs by this ideology that on Tuesday evening they voted down an amendment that would have placed barriers in the way of convicted sex offenders who seek to apply for a GRC, complete with a new female name. They even rejected an amendment — proposed by Michelle Thomson, an SNP MSP who has waived anonymity to reveal her own experience of being raped when she was fourteen years old — that would have paused the process of acquiring a certificate for men charged with sexual offences.

This is an extremely troubling development. Let’s not forget that the SNP-Green government has pressed ahead with the legislation even after Lady Haldane’s judgment established last week that a GRC changes someone’s legal sex for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act. Scottish women are now expected to accept that any man standing in front of them, waving a piece of paper, is a woman — even if they’re in court and the man is accused of raping them. 

And they’re expected to live in a country where the law doesn’t acknowledge the most basic physical realities of who is a woman and who is a man.

This is scary.

Current predictions of ice melt in the Arctic are probably way off. According to an updated model, glaciers in the icy north could be slipping into the sea up to 100 times faster than previously forecasted.

Too bad they couldn’t have been way off in the other direction. Arctic ice melting way more slowly than we thought! But no, always it’s faster.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) think they’ve figured out at least part of the problem.

Gaps in data meant that climate scientists have been plugging in observations from accessible glaciers to build models of how all glaciers melt.

But what’s happening to the Antarctic ice sheet amid rapid global warming is significantly different from what’s occurring to Arctic glaciers.

In Greenland, for example, recent observational research has found that warm ocean water in the nation’s fjords is chiseling away at parts of the floating ice sheet from underneath.

Not good news.

The “Institute” has been tweeting a lot of posters lately…including, of course, the give us money kind.

What does that mean? Works with them how? It’s very vague and general – could mean anything or nothing. Is that an accident? Or could it be because they don’t actually do anything? Except self-promotion?

Contribution for what purpose? What do they do?

A person agrees with him.

Hoo-boy – where did he get that idea? It’s not the world’s premiere anything. It’s an obscure academic and her website.

H/t Mostly Cloudy.

So, they’ve done it.

The Scottish Parliament has passed legislation which aims to make it easier for transgender people to change their legally recognised gender.

At the expense of women.

Campaign groups have warned that the reforms – which seek to make the process for people to obtain a gender recognition certificate easier – could risk the safety of women and girls.

Will. Not could, but will.

However, supporters of the changes insist that it is about simplifying the process and removing hurdles within the current requirements.

That’s not a however, it’s just an and. Of course it’s about simplifying the process and removing hurdles, which is what makes it a risk to the safety of women and girls.

Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman hailed the result as a “historic day for equality”.

It’s got nothing to do with equality. Allowing men to pretend to be women and thus invade women’s spaces and steal women’s opportunities has nothing to do with equality.

“The last three days of debate have shown the best and worst of our Parliament. But today isn’t about party politics. It is about the future and the progressive and inclusive society that we want to build.”

Burble burble burble. What even are words? Progressive how? Inclusive of what? Buzzwords butter no parsnips.

There are at least two separate forms of manipulation in this here Lemkin Institute for Genocide Protection – the “Institute” that issued a “statement” three weeks ago that said gender critical feminists are genocidal Nazis. One of them is calling themselves an “institute” when they’re not what most of us think of an institute as being. I said in my first post on the subject that I couldn’t find out much about the “institute” but I didn’t think it was a couple of teenagers and their phones, but the joke’s on me, it turns out to be pretty much that, except the “teenagers” are academics old enough to know better.

The other is helping themselves to the name of Raphael Lemkin.

Borrowing a famous name isn’t necessarily bad or wrong. What a Maroon cited the Susan B. Anthony List. But what about guest’s example of Gandhi? Not quite the same, is it. Why? I think because literal genocide or massacres or other bloody horrors. I could be wrong, I’m bumbling around among intuitions here, but the appropriation of Lemkin feels more a step too far to me than the appropriation of Eleanor Roosevelt would.

Originally a comment by latsot on Don’t call me a basket case.

I found the forbidding of ‘blind’ as in ‘blind study’ especially zogborst.

As a disabled person and wheelchair user I find that words don’t matter nearly so much as attitude. Blind people know they’re blind and if I ever forget I can’t walk it’s going to hurt when my face bounces off the deck. We’re generally not shy about our disabilities or embarrassed about them. We’ll joke about them and are happy for others to do the same providing, as tigger said, the intent is humour rather than abuse. My friend Henrietta, who some of you might know from Twitter, is paralysed from the chest down and has the biggest collection of unfortunate wheelchair accident gifs I’ve ever seen. She finds them hilarious. She’s right, they are. It’s a mixture of “yeah… done that” and “he totally deserved it”.

Those I’ve spoken to about this agree that we’d much rather people be straighforward than mangle language without ever actually consulting us. It feels performative and it makes me personally feel as though I’m expected to be grateful.

A couple of illustrations about attitude:

I’m asked very often why I’m in a wheelchair. I don’t mind this at all and I don’t think it’s rude… providing I’m asked by someone I’m already having a conversation with. It’s natural to be curious and frankly it gives me something to talk about. My conversational skills are not the best. But if someone marches up and asks me out of the blue, it no longer feels like a matter of curiosity. It feels threatening. It happens more than you might expect. I’m also asked this quite a lot by people I’m arguing with on Twitter. There, the intent is very clearly malign and it’s definitely rude.

But a lot of people are shocked when someone asks me the question in good faith. They think it’s a topic that should be avoided, for some reason. Who’s that helping, exactly? Me or them? I’d much rather they just ask than pretend I’m not very obviously in a wheelchair and they’re very obviously wondering why.

I’m also asked quite a lot if I need help going up slopes and curbs. It’s easy to see in most cases that the intent is a genuine desire to help someone who might struggle and I always decline politely and warmly. These people are not being patronising, they’re going out of their way to offer help because of simple, honest empathy. It’s not offensive at all.

It is offensive when people grab the back of my chair and push me up the slope without warning or permission. Again, this happens a lot more often than you’d think. It happened when I was doing the Great North Run, for goodness sake! Would anyone just pick up another runner and carry them for a bit, all the time grinning to their friends? It happened in London a couple of weeks ago and when I reacted with shock and some anger, the man was furious at me since he was “only trying to help”.

Was he, though? Was he really? Or was it a performance? His reaction suggests the latter. I don’t like being used as a prop. And if you hang your bag on the back of my chair in the tube or at a bus stop so you don’t have to carry it (yep, happens surprisingly often too) then you deserve the elbow that is about to make contact with your testicles.

So don’t walk on eggshells around us. Make a joke about us rolling our chairs over eggshells, if you like. Just don’t joke about our being unable to walk on eggshells, unless you know us quite well. And don’t alter language on our behalf, it just mildly embarrasses us.

I understand the need for somewhat performative language in many areas. It’s a sign that people are paying attention to issues without having to address them explicitly and personally. It’s a signal that everyone has understood the tone a conversation will take and the boundaries that have been set. And it’s an agreement that some words and phrases are unacceptable for cultural or historical reasons. It’s when people go out of their way to invent offence on behalf of other people that we get idiocy like the ‘blind’ example above.

Wait, I’m probably not allowed to say “idiocy”, am I?