Hey this is boring let’s open everything up now! Right now! Never mind that vaccinations are only getting started, let’s do it now!

That’s Texas asshole governor Greg Abbott’s take anyway.

With less than 7% of Texans fully vaccinated and another Covid-19 surge potentially imminent, Texas is flinging open businesses to full capacity while simultaneously ending its highly politicized mask mandate, the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, announced on Tuesday.

“It is now time to open Texas 100%,” a maskless Abbott declared to cheers at a crowded restaurant in the city of Lubbock.

Yeah! Let’s have surge number 4!

When Abbott’s policy changes go into effect next week, Texas will be the most populous state in the country that does not require residents to wear masks. Restaurants and other businesses can choose to maintain their own mask policies, but without government backing to do so.

So all the performative libertarians will go to those restaurants and businesses without masks and dare anyone to object. Fun times.

Other states and cities have likewise started rolling back precautions. In Mississippi – another Republican stronghold – Governor Tate Reeves also announced on Tuesday that the state was lifting rules for businesses and doing away with county mask mandates.

Yes that’s great. Mississippi can well afford to have its hospitals fill up. It’s the poorest state in the country but what the hell, it can sell Girl Scout cookies if the Girl Scouts will share.

Abbott’s announcement – which comes after about 43,000 Texans have died from the virus, and while many Texans are still ineligible for the vaccine – sparked immediate and vehement backlash, from Democratic mayors to workers’ advocates infuriated that Texans of color will once again be the hardest hit.

Tsss of course they will – they do the crappiest jobs for the least money, and those jobs don’t tend to feature a lot of good managers who work hard to keep their workers safe and healthy. That’s how we do things in America.

“I think this is a slap in the face of working people, especially frontline workers, who have been risking their lives,” said Emily Timm, the co-executive director of Workers Defense Action Fund.

She’s just virtue-signaling, am I right?

Never mind, spring break is coming up, let’s party.

As most meaningful coronavirus-related restrictions disappear from Texas, the state is simultaneously staring down what could easily be a series of superspreader events over spring break.

South Texas beach towns in Corpus Christi and the already hard-hit Rio Grande Valley have long been popular destinations among party-going college students from around the country, and as tourists pack into bars and restaurants, none of them will have to wear masks or socially distance.

“You think we had a horrible spike on Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July, and during the holidays?” Hinojosa said. “The spike that this state will experience in coronavirus cases will be extremely high – and will cause many, many more deaths than any responsible governor should have allowed.”

Booya!

It’s Women’s History Month and Robin Buckallew is again doing a writing marathon for it.

I’m back! Here we go again, another Women’s History Month, another marathon. Year four and counting. I hope you can follow me all the way through, right to the end. I could use someone else making this journey with me.

It feels so much like women’s rights are waning sometimes, doesn’t it? Recent Supreme Court appointments suggest that may not be an illusion. We still have so much of a fight ahead, and women around the world are facing much worse things than we face. It’s tempting sometimes to say to hell with it, go back to bed, take a bubble bath, binge watch TV (I would fill in a show here, but I don’t really watch TV, so I don’t have a show to fill in; put in your favorite for me).

So, tonight, I begin my little part. Another story I have snatched from my life. It is a little thing, maybe seeming trivial. It becomes large because it is on top of so many other little things. You can put the smallest of pebbles in a pile, and at some point, they qualify as a heap. When? I don’t know. I leave such questions for the philosophers and the mathematicians to fight out. It is not a question for a scientist, because there is no scientific answer to that question. It is a matter of perspective.

Tonight’s story is very much the real thing. I changed the names to protect the innocent, the guilty, and everyone in between. So here it is, Day 1 and counting.

Read on.

The Beeb reports the return of the kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria:

The girls were abducted by unidentified assailants from their boarding school in Jangebe, Zamfara state, on Friday and taken to a forest, police said.

The state’s governor said on Tuesday that the 279 girls had been freed.

Such kidnappings are carried out for ransom and are common in the north of the country.

…

The governor of Zamfara state, Bello Matawalle, tweeted that it “gladdens my heart to announce the release of the abducted students“. “This follows the scaling of several hurdles laid against our efforts,” he added. “I enjoin all well-meaning Nigerians to rejoice with us as our daughters are now safe.”

Mr Matawalle has denied paying for the girls to be released, but last week President Buhari admitted state governments had paid kidnappers “with money and vehicles” in the past and urged them to review the policy.

What a mess.

Gender-neutral language outrage ensued.

Streaming platform Twitch has backtracked on a new policy to change its spelling of “women” after criticism from transgender communities.

Oh good, it’s extremely urgent to have “transgender communities” in charge of what language we can use. Women, on the other hand, can be ignored. [whispers: they’re just Karens.]

The company had said it would use the term “womxn” in order to be more gender neutral in its language.

How can you be “gender neutral” about women? That makes no sense of any kind. “We will use the term ‘mushrooms’ in place of ‘women’ in order to be more gender neutral.”

Ben Hunte has “analysis” for us.

Many social media users are still confused about who exactly Twitch’s “all the womxn” approach was actually aimed at. Trans women call themselves women, and many have fought to do so. Non-binary individuals do not refer to themselves as women at all.

And women? What do they think? Oh who cares – certainly not Ben Hunte, who doesn’t mention the stupid little pests.

So former heads of state can be prosecuted? And found guilty? And sentenced to prison? Whaddya know.

French ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy has been sentenced to three years in jail, two of them suspended, for corruption. He was convicted of trying to bribe a judge in 2014 – after he had left office – by suggesting he could secure a prestigious job for him in return for information about a separate case.

Sarkozy, 66, is the first former French president to get a custodial sentence.

His lawyer says he will appeal. Sarkozy will remain free during that process which could take years.

Or not. Anyway we all know of a pasty white guy with a fake goldy combover who’s sweating bullets today.

News from the white nationalistosphere:

Rep. Paul Gosar spoke Friday night at a Florida event organized by a white nationalist.

To make the appearance at the far-right AFPAC, an extremist alternative to the annual CPAC gathering of conservatives, Gosar, R-Ariz., had to skip voting in person on the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that passed the House early Saturday. He had notified the House in writing that he couldn’t be physically present in Congress because of the ongoing pandemic.

The ongoing pandemic of dogs eating his homework.

AFPAC stands for the America First Political Action Committee and was put together by Nick Fuentes, an anti-immigration conservative who attended the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and last year was banned from YouTube for repeatedly violating its rules against hate speech. 

Then the next day he went to CPAC and pretended to disapprove of white nationalism.

ABC News reported that Fuentes, the organizer, spoke after Gosar and told attendees that if the U.S. “loses its white demographic core, then this is not America anymore.” 

I wonder if he realizes that to many of his fellow white nationalists, the name “Fuentes” gets you an automatic expulsion from the “white demographic core.”

In his letter Friday extending his voting by proxy, Gosar said, “I continue to be unable to physically attend proceedings in the House Chamber due to the ongoing public health emergency and I hereby grant the authority to cast my vote by proxy to the Honorable Yvette Herrell of New Mexico, who has agreed to serve as my proxy.”

In other words a manatee ate his homework.

Gosar wasn’t the only Republican to sidestep in-person voting in the House. Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., were among those who also filed for proxy voting and were scheduled to take part in CPAC events. They, too, cited the ongoing health emergency for their absence in Congress.

Manatees ate their homework! It’s pervasive whitenationalistophobia!

Life is very dangerous for girls in Nigeria.

Families in Nigeria waited anxiously for news of their abducted daughters after more than 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by gunmen from a government school in the country’s north last week, the latest in a series of mass school kidnappings in the West African nation.

Worried parents on Sunday gathered at the school, guarded by police. Aliyu Ladan Jangebe said his five daughters aged between 12 and 16 were at the school when the kidnappers stormed in. Four were taken away but one escaped by hiding in a bathroom with three other girls, he told The Associated Press.

…

Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the abductions and called for the girls’ “immediate and unconditional release” and safe return to their families. He called attacks on schools a grave violation of human rights and the rights of children, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

And specifically of girls – who tend to be raped and impregnated once they’re kidnapped.

The most notorious kidnapping was in April 2014, when 276 girls were abducted by the jihadist rebels of Boko Haram from the secondary school in Chibok in Borno state. More than 100 of those girls are still missing.

Seven years with Boko Haram. It’s got to be hell.

A male reporter on Eastwood a couple of weeks ago:

BOZEMAN — When you’re a transgender athlete, and it seems the world is taking aim at what you are instead of trying to understand who you are, a walk — or run — on the wild side is the straightest path to clarity and balance and resilience.

As always, the issue isn’t being “a transgender athlete,” the issue is a male person competing against female people. It’s beyond annoying that journalists keep obscuring this point. Nobody is “taking aim” at what or who Eastwood is, but many of us are saying male people shouldn’t race against women, for the simple reason that it’s unfair. It’s unfair to all the women in the race, and they matter too.

Though it has been more than a year since Eastwood last competed at UM, and much of her focus now is on earning a post-graduate degree in environmental philosophy from the school, she has resurfaced publicly now that the Montana Legislature is back in session. House Bill 112, authored within days of the opening gavel by Whitefish representative John Fuller, seeks to ensure that sports designated for women or girls are open only to those who were female at birth.

Supporters hail it as the “Save Women’s Sports Act”. Eastwood sees it as an attempt to disenfranchise an already-challenged class of women.

Except that it’s not a class of women. It’s a class of men who say they identify as women. We used to know that it’s not possible to change physical reality with the power of thought, but now that magical idea is not just accepted, it’s embraced and mandated with menaces.

“That’s unfathomable to me,” she said of male athletes making such a dramatic physical and emotional transition simply to win medals. “If you’re comfortable in your body already, there would be no reason to transition. I don’t think anybody would ever do that to win some race or have a competitive edge in sports.”

Why? Why wouldn’t anybody ever do that? Why is Eastwood so sure no one would? Or is he just pretending to be sure? That’s the thing, you see – people can pretend. It’s not unheard-of. They can also genuinely feel as if they ought to be the other sex, or as if they “are” the other sex, but that feeling is just a feeling, it’s not by itself a reversal of reality.

Eastwood immersed herself in her running, especially with her UM teammates, many of whom will be “lifelong friends.” Sports, she said, enabled her to be with people who were less concerned by what she is than who she is.

“For me, that’s what running is all about — more about community and friendship and self-development than winning a race. That’s just a cherry on top in the process,” she said.

Fine! Brilliant! There’s the solution – do the running and the community and friendship and self-development but stay out of the actual races. Get all the community and friendship you want, and refrain from doing harm to those female people you say are your friends and your community.

Well we always knew that Biden is a conservative Democrat and that the Democrats in general are very conservative.

… we have seen Democratic senators prepare to surrender the $15 minimum wage their party promised by insisting they are powerless in the face of a non-binding advisory opinion of a parliamentarian they can ignore or fire.

That explanation is patently ridiculous and factually false, so Democratic apologists are starting to further justify the surrender by suggesting that even if the party kept a $15 minimum wage in the Covid relief bill, conservative Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would block it anyway.

So persuade them. Do the work.

And yet, whether you call this all deliberate deception or learned helplessness, this fantastical myth of the Powerless President will inevitably be used to shield Biden from criticism for abandoning his pledge to fight for a $15 minimum wage.

The apologism is particularly absurd because unlike his predecessor Barack Obama, who was a relative newcomer to politics, Biden’s major selling point was that he knows “how to make government work”. The guy explicitly pitched himself as the best Democratic presidential candidate by suggesting that in an era of gridlock, he knows how to make the Democratic agenda a reality and Get Things Done™, like master of the Senate Lyndon Baines Johnson.

…

…the White House continues to say it is “fighting our guts out” for Neera Tanden’s nomination, even though it might not have enough Senate votes for her confirmation. And yet, the same White House is simultaneously retreating on the minimum wage, seemingly unwilling to force a floor vote on the issue, even though presidential pressure, legislative brinkmanship, and negotiation could change the outcome.

So…confirming Neera Tanden is worth fighting for but a raise in the minimum wage isn’t?

The real story, then, is that Biden seems unwilling to use the same influence to push as hard as possible for a minimum wage increase that would boost the pay of millions of Americans during an economic emergency.

Pathetic.

How about Nazis? War criminals? Genociders? Torturers? Rapists? Sadists?

You don’t know which people are those things on sight, but then you don’t know that about cops and “terfs,” either. (Unless the cops are in uniform but then they wouldn’t be, would they.)

What a world, when women who know that men are not women are considered more evil and shun-worthy than Nazis, war criminals, genociders, torturers, rapists.

The dogma is digging away its own foundations.

In other words everything has to be about “the trans community.” Even rape, and rape victims, and the solidarity rape victims may feel or seek with other rape victims. That has to be about trans people in some way, and this sociology grad student won’t tolerate our refusal to agree that men are women if they say they are.

By “a space here” all she means is replying to her tweets. Some people take a weirdly grandiose view of their own Twitter accounts, and treat them like exclusive clubs. Not being able to reply to someone’s tweets isn’t the loss of or banishment from “a space,” it’s just not being able to reply to someone’s tweets. It’s not a big deal. It’s so pompous and self-admiring to threaten people with it, as if it’s like being banished from a university or union or political party.

It’s almost as if all this performative shouting about “the trans community” isn’t really about “the trans community” at all but about the narcissism of the shouter. “Look at me look at me I’m saying something bravely pugnacious about thetranscommunity! Look how heroic and correct I am!”

Originally a comment by latsot on Talk about imperfect timing.

And as for (over) sharing in general…. When I was an academic computer scientist, a lot of my research was about privacy. I’ve expanded on this work a little since for people with actual money and for the book I’m supposed to be finishing (I’ll do it in a minute, OK, stop nagging.)

Anyway, without going into detail, one of the things I talk about a lot is the idea of privacy as a community enterprise. We have a tendency to see secrets, for example, as things we own. But we don’t; most secrets are shared with other people and if they’re not, the mechanisms by which we keep secrets are shared. Think of codes of silence or village huts with very thin walls; we pretend not to hear or we give people space if we think they need it. We work at producing environments in which we can keep secrets or share them (either implicitly or explicitly) under some mutual understanding that if you blab, the tables could be turned.

It’s all a lot more complicated than that of course but hopefully you get the idea.

Anyway, it should be obvious that social media is not built according to this model. It encourages over-sharing and the custodians of our privacy are no longer people we kinda-sorta trust, working in mudily mutual self-interest. I hypothesise that this is one of the reasons that social media is so batshit insane. It’s not anonymity as such that’s the issue, it’s a mistuning of inhibition because the space we’re operating in is fundamentally different to how we think it is and the nature of our interactions is not what we believe it to be.

So, to badges announcing our pronouns, sexualities, love of the Klingon language and cycling proficiency test scores. There’s a technical term (really) in privacy research called “ick.” Ick is when something doesn’t feel comfortable. It feels like oversharing. Someone knows a bit too much about you or you know a bit too much about them. For instance, one night when he was drunk, my dad told me out of the blue that he was circumcised. I didn’t know what to do with that information and now neither do you. It’s icky. It didn’t fit the expectations of our interaction. There were no rules within that interaction that told me whether or not it was appropriate for me, for example, to share that information on a public blog. Ickiness muddies the rules. That unexpected item (or lack of it) in the baggage area (so to speak) ruins the reasonable expectation of privacy. It also creates a prompt to over-share; he told me something personal… am I supposed to tell him something personal to balance things out? Ick can feel like a debt even when you didn’t want the information you’ve learned in the first place.

You can see where I’m going with this. Interactions between a patient and a doctor are intimate but now the patient is being bombarded with whatever information the doctor has chosen to broadcast. It’s icky, it changes the balance of power and it creates an expectation to over-share. Am I supposed to tell my doctor about my sexuality? Is she expecting it, or just open to hearing it? Is she open to hearing about it? Just because she showed me hers, it doesn’t mean she wants to see mine. Or does it? Who the fuck knows any more?

OK, I’m quite aware that I’m having badges do quite a lot of heavy lifting here, but I hope you see my point: the reason they seem icky is because they violate our tacit expectations of how that kind of formal but intimate relationship is supposed to work and we have no idea how to react. As when we use social media, the environment is taken out of our hands and placed in those of people who do not have our best interests at heart for reasons we don’t fully understand.

And we don’t know how to react. And it’s icky.

Trump got to put on his party suit and give a speech again!

A long long speech which started 50 minutes late because he couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.

Who you calling impotent?!

90 minutes they’ll never get back again.

Ructions!

Oh no! Splitters! Where did it begin? This maybe?

Sad sad sad. Next you’ll see Mike Pence falling out with Donald Trump and then where will we be?

Or maybe this is where it started?

Who knows. Anyway it’s funny.

That explains it.

Leading gay, lesbian and bisexual rights charity Stonewall has recognised CQC’s commitment to equality in the workplace by placing it in the top 100 UK employers in the Stonewall Equality Workplace index for the first time.

They forgot the T.

That was back in 2015. They’re not forgetting it any more. Not allowed to, mate.

The top 100 list is based on the results of Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index 2015, the eleventh published by the charity. The index is based on a range of key indicators which include a confidential questionnaire of lesbian, gay and bisexual staff, with over 9,700 participants. This consistently revealed that employees from organisations ranked in Stonewall’s Top 100 exhibited higher levels of staff satisfaction and loyalty. CQC has been placed 94 in the index, a rise of 17 places from a ranking of 111 last year. Over 800 employers took part in the index.

Still no T. What a difference 6 years can make.

It’s on Facebook, too. Not faring well.

Many sharp comments.

I would find it rather creepy/threatening and definitely intrusive if I was being cared for by a health professional who was wearing badges, written in a faux childish script, announcing ‘I am straight’ and ‘I like women’.

As a doctor myself, I would be concerned that some patients might take it as a license to be inappropriate as well. Plus, given how little time I have as it is to see patients – regrettably – I just don’t have the time to get into chats about ‘music’ and ‘cats’ and I wouldn’t want to set up expectations that I couldn’t fulfil in the moment.

These badges are unprofessional and possibly dangerous. Sexual feelings are largely concealed in the workplace for a good reason! Who you want to sleep with shouldn’t be relevant to your day job in health and social care and this gimmick is potentially damaging to HCW/patient relations. Please put a stop to it. It’ll only lead to trouble.

Another experienced professional:

Is this meant to be serious?

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding it deeply disturbing.

I worked in the NHS for most of my working life. It was not considered professionally appropriate to bring your sexuality, your personal life and your political views into work.

Being at work is not All About You.

It’s rather like religion. We don’t want people in medical settings greeting us bedecked with religious symbols either. It’s not our concern, and we don’t care. That’s not what we’re there for.

Why have professional organizations forgotten this basic fact?

And speaking of changing everything for the sake of a handful of narcissists…

In a medical setting? People getting vaccinated or treated for Covid are supposed to want all that in their faces? Are you joking?

Philosophy academic at Georgetown:

That’s a puzzlement I’ve always had about the trans issue – the whole business of reversing everything we know about sex, dimorphism, who is which, feminism, oppression, language, and more, because a tiny fraction of the populace has emotional reactions.

But that’s not what this is.

What??? Women who can’t pretend that men are women are an example of the impulse to organize everyone’s entire world around the emotional reactions we have? We’re an example of that while the people who order us to do so are not?

Bonkers.

How can we stop this troublesome woman?

More bullying, and more, and more, and more! There can never be enough!

So much hilarity.

Another bad thing undone:

The Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management on Friday rescinded a grazing permit that was granted to Eastern Oregon ranchers who were previously convicted of arson on public lands.

It reverses the decision by former President Donald Trump’s Interior secretary, David Bernhardt. He had granted the permit to Dwight and Steven Hammond on Trump’s final day in office. The permit gave the Hammonds the right to graze livestock on public land for 10 years.

…

In its notice, the BLM wrote that it had remanded the decision for additional consideration after finding flaws in how the previous administration had made its decision to issue the permit. The government failed to immediately alert the public, resulting in confusion and preventing people from having the full 15-day period to object to such a decision, as required by federal rules.

Remember these guys?

The Hammonds’ arson conviction in 2012 led to the revocation of their previous grazing permit. The case was central to the armed takeover in 2016 of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which devolved into a 41-day armed standoff. A jury later acquitted leaders of the takeover, including brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy.

A jury acquitted them even though they did the whole thing out in the open.

Trump pardoned the Hammonds two years later.

Of course he did.