Somehow I’m not very reassured.

Royal College of Nursing chief denies hostility to women

The chairman of the Royal College of Nursing was suspended over allegations that he was “openly hostile” towards women weeks before the organisation cancelled its annual congress.

I wonder if anyone thought to appoint a woman as chair of the Royal College of Nursing. Wild, I know, but it just might work.

Dave Dawes, a bondage expert who has led workshops in the practice, was suspended last month over the allegations, which also include that he was dismissive of staff concerns about discrimination and included sexual references on his own social media account. He was suspended weeks before the decision to cancel the conference over allegations of sexual harassment which Dawes says are separate.

A “bondage expert”? Why does the Times drop that in there as it might drop “an amateur violinist” or “a birdwatcher”? I suppose possibly as a hint at some of the reasons for thinking he’s hostile to women (cue the cries of “kink isn’t hostile to women!!”) but who knows.

One of the complaints against him includes sexual references in social media accounts dating back more than a decade. Dawes is openly poly-amorous and has led workshops on open sexual relationships and rope bondage.

I don’t need to know all that…unless it has something to do with the claims that he’s hostile to women.

And then sometimes it just goes terribly wrong.

She thinks that “inscribed on the body” makes her sound clever.

Uh oh. Emma’s a biologist.

Aaaaaaaaand there you have her, the true LP, claiming “abuse” and crying with exhaustion, because she’s in way over her head.

One lie after another, not to mention the laughable idea that Emma could get “genuine learning” from Laurie and should be sitting at her feet to drink in the wisdom.

Don’t be that activist.

Honesty research and fake data:

A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data.

Now there is a lede. Crisp, clear, and a great punchline.

According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. A seemingly cheap and effective method to fight fraud, it was adopted by at least one insurance company, tested by government agencies around the world, and taught to corporate executives. It made a splash among academics, who cited it in their own research more than 400 times.

The paper also bolstered the reputations of two of its authors — Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a psychologist and behavioral economist at Duke University — as leaders in the study of decision-making, irrationality, and unethical behavior. Ariely, a frequent TED Talk speaker and a Wall Street Journal advice columnist, cited the study in lectures and in his New York Times bestseller The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves.

But now some outside researchers have found one of the experiments underlying the data was faked. It’s not clear who faked it.

And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular. In a famous 2008 study, he claimed that prompting people to recall the Ten Commandments before a test cuts down on cheating, but an outside team later failed to replicate the effect.

Why “the Ten Commandments” in particular I wonder. I suppose because it’s the only Official List of Rules that nearly everyone has heard of, but that’s tragic because it’s such an awful list of rules. Several of the items are wasted on how best to grovel to the imaginary deity, and the rest are so obvious they’re pointless. There’s not a word about generosity or mercy or solidarity or any such social goods.

Behold the Female Motivational Speakers Agency:

The Female Motivational Speakers Agency is a booking bureau dedicated to inspiring businesswomen, female athletes and equality advocates across the globe.

Established in 2003 and based in London, we are part of a larger agency launched in the early 2000s. Such relevancy combined with decades of professional experience makes our team the best in the business. Our booking agents have years of experience working with some of the biggest brands and female speakers on the circuit, ensuring your event is in safe hands.

It has a treat for us: ten quotes to “empower women” in prepraration for International Women’s Day 2022, all from clients of the agency.

Here’s Joanne Lockwood’s empowering wisdom:

“Diversity is good for business, but it is also the primary factor of being good for people.”

Awesome.

Katie Neeves:

“Nature doesn’t do black and white; it is a whole spectrum – so is sex and gender.”

So empowering.

Kellie Maloney:

“We all want to be included in the human race – that’s the most important thing…”

Empowerful.

All three of these empowering women are men. “Ten quotes to empower women,” three of which are from men who call themselves women. Somehow I don’t feel all that empowered.

Professional Judy at Lesbian and Gay News on that Manchester Pride incident:

As far as I can tell a mob – including self-described “queer woman” April Preston – surrounded Alex, the crowd chanting ‘Trans Lives Matter’ in the same way football hooligans chant their thought-terminating mantras against the other side before using beer bottles to smash their heads in. Preston later tweeted: “Five mins in got a terf removed – happy with that #mcrpride”. 

If you can stomach it, the video is harrowing. You can feel the tension and the naked rage from the crowd whipped up into a frenzy by people like Preston, who is the Liberal Democrat’s candidate for Withington, and I found myself genuinely worried about poor Alex’s safety. He is pushed at one point, his hat is stolen, and the police have to intervene in order to keep him safe.

(Not all that worried, surely, since Alex was known to be safe by the time anyone saw the video. A small detail, but I like accuracy in details.)

What we witnessed happening to him on that video for that crime is the culmination of a campaign of lies and smears that has stretched right back to LGB Alliance’s inception. A vicious war of hate played over social media directed at the only group standing up for same-sex attracted men and women. A group whose crime is to assert the biological reality of sex and to highlight that it’s key to the rights of LGB people. A group who can count among their members trans people, and a group who has spoken in support and defence of trans people around the world when they’ve faced persecution.

Yes but they don’t include the T. That’s literally all that matters.

Of course, in their haste to align themselves with the mob they’ve helped to create, Guardian writer Owen Jones and soap actor David Paisley don’t really mention those sickening tweets directed towards a gay man for being a gay man, but they instead glorify the baying mob and present it as the most wonderful thing they’ve seen.

They are in blood stepped in so far, that, should they wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Not in your case though.

Sometimes, maybe, but in your case? No. Telling an indifferent world what “your” pronouns are, and prefacing it with “Your Saturday reminder” as if we’d asked you – that’s attention seeking, and also attention expecting, for a completely fatuous detail about how you see yourself and your plans to make us see you the same way. Of course it is. Talking about yourself when no one asked is always attention seeking to some degree. Some people can be interesting or informative or inspiring when doing that, but it takes a lot of qualities you don’t seem to have.

Ida from space:

It’s Katrina all over again, but worse.

The storm surge is what was so lethal in 2005 – it filled the basin of New Orleans like filling a bathtub, and that’s why so many people drowned. It will happen again because the hurricane developed too quickly for a complete evacuation.

And sheltering in place is grim advice in N.O. in a hurricane because much of it is below sea level, so “in place” means underwater. This is going to be another nightmare.

Owen Jones is happy though.

Note: the LGB Alliance is not “anti-trans rights.” It doesn’t want to take human rights away from trans people – of course it doesn’t. It opposes new, made-up “rights,” claimed rights that aren’t rights at all: to be “accepted” as whatever one claims to be, to be “validated” as X when one is Y, to be “included” as LGB when one is straight. Trans rights are indeed trans rights, because they’re not rights at all.

This isn’t just wordplay or pedantry, because it’s central to the war on terfs. We’re not arguing for the persecution or isolation of trans people, we’re arguing against our own persecution and isolation. We’re arguing for our ability and our right to recognize men as men when it’s relevant. That doesn’t take any actual right away from trans people, it just denies them the right to impose a personal fantasy on the entire world.

And of course Owen Jones is completely wrong to say the LGB Alliance doesn’t represent the exact people it does represent.

More on the Manchester Pride bullying via JL at the Glinner Update:

Alexander Braham was at Manchester Pride, wearing a hat and t-shirt bearing the LGB Alliance logo. While he was attending a march to protest cuts to LGB+ charities, his hat was stolen and he was abused and attacked to such an extent that police had to remove him for his own safety.

All over Twitter, people were congratulating themselves that a gay man was subjected to this violent and abusive behaviour and forced to leave a Pride event.

It seems that April Preston was one of the ringleaders. She is the Liberal Democrat candidate for Withington in the forthcoming local council elections and a member of the Lib Dem Federal Board.

Preston’s Twitter is currently locked.

Earlier this year she authored an open letter about trans rights in which she stated, “Any suggestion that trans women be segregated or restricted on the basis of their trans identity is a transphobic one… Trans women have the same right to exist in women’s spaces as any other woman.”

Her concern for ‘marginalised women’ clearly doesn’t extend to the women in prison, the women in domestic violence refuges or the women in rape crisis centres who desperately need single-sex spaces. Nor does it extend to the women whose faith or culture makes it impossible for them to share intimate spaces with males.

Not to mention the women who just don’t fucking want to, which I think is probably around 99% of us.

Oops.

A conservative radio host from Florida who criticised coronavirus vaccination efforts – and called himself “Mr Anti-Vax” – before contracting Covid-19 himself has died, his station said on Saturday.

Another crappy first sentence. Allow me. “There’s this radio host in Florida who criticized Covid vaccination efforts, calling himself ‘Mr Anti-Vax.’ Then he contracted the virus himself, and he died yesterday.”

Anyway. However you word it, don’t be that guy. Don’t campaign against vaccinations during a pandemic, and if you won’t refrain for moral reasons, refrain so that you won’t look like a pathetic jackass if you get Covid and die.

Annnnd

So now there’s a video, and my Twitter is all over it.

I’m not sure if he was rescued or expelled. Either way, he was mobbed and screamed at because he was wearing a shirt that mentions a lesbian gay alliance. So now lesbians and gays are evil? At Pride?

No, they would say. No, of course not, it’s the missing inclusion of our trans siblings that makes the screaming necessary.

But why? Trans isn’t the same thing, so why can’t some people focus on the lesbian and gay part?

Never you mind. They just can’t, that’s all.

More bragging about bullying a gay man out of Manchester Pride March:

Now LP is complaining that some people are not impressed by her “reminder” that she has special luxury pronouns.

(Calling it a “reminder” is itself conceited and self-important, because it assumes the entire world was informed of her pronouns. [I see I’ve already “misgendered” her three times, only now it’s four – it wasn’t on purpose, it’s just automatic, which is one major reason I don’t do luxury pronouns: it’s way too much effort.] Not everyone was informed, not everyone is on the Laurie Penny News list.)

Media? Are tweets “the British media”? I think of “the media” as being professional, i.e. produced by people whose job it is. Twitter is just anybody who wants to say things saying things.

Because calling a person the name the person is called is a normal social thing to do, plus it’s right there on her tweets so if people are tweeting about her tweets there’s her name, right in front of them. It’s simple. Remembering not to call her “her” is not simple that way. As I said: it’s an effort.

It gives them something to talk about though. (Who? Them who? The people of pronoun.) Maybe that’s all there is to it – something to talk about, and a way to extort extra attention without having to be interesting.

Charming.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha WHAT PART OF A WOMAN IN LOVE WITH A MAN DON’T YOU GET AS BEING TWO LESBIANS IN LOVE????????????

This is just some commercial promotion, but worth pointing at anyway.

That’s so sweet, but…

What “gender options”??? What gender options are there on commercial airlines? There aren’t any. They don’t bring you 10 miniature pretzels in a tiny bag that is either pink or blue, they don’t bring you anything that is either pink or blue, so what “gender options” are they talking about?

This shit gets stupider by the day.

Success! This is exactly the goal.

Yesssssssss – because if you endeavour to commit someone’s Special Pronouns to memory, that means you’re devoting extra time and attention and effort to that someone. Achievement unlocked! Getting people to pay extra attention to Self is the goal here and it’s working!

Sarah Ditum on Cleese and comedy and censorship:

What has John Cleese ever done for free speech? Absolutely nothing, according to the reaction to this week’s announcement that the 81-year-old comedian and actor would be fronting a documentary for Channel 4 about cancel culture. The show, which will “explore why a new ‘woke’ generation is trying to rewrite the rules on what can and can’t be said”, was met with derision before it had even been broadcast.

…

The sneering also came from fellow comics, the stand-up Robin Ince among them. Ince, 52, also seemed to think that Cleese’s age disqualified him from having an opinion: “Somewhere in middle age, the ‘young people nowadays’ gene is turned on,” he tweeted.

Which is hilarious because in fact no new idea introduced by young people is ever wrong or destructive. That’s a law of nature.

What does earn Cleese the right to an opinion is the fact that he’s spent his whole career bumping up against the limits of the sayable in comedy. That’s most obviously true in the case of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which came out in 1979. Even though the Biblical satire was explicitly not about Jesus (it was about a man who gets mistaken for the Messiah), it succeeded in offending Protestants, Catholics and Jews with roughly equal force. The Rabbinical Alliance of America told Variety: “Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before.”

The various bans, protests and attacks that targeted the film didn’t stop it from being a success, but they did make things fairly unpleasant for the Pythons. Even before Cleese found himself at the centre of this furore, he had made a concrete commitment to liberal values by instigating The Secret Policeman’s Ball in 1976, a comedy benefit for Amnesty International, which was then focused on supporting prisoners of conscience.

…

After all this, it must be baffling to find yourself positioned as the enemy of all that’s right and good. Cleese has been consistent in his principles, right through to last year when he signed a letter in support of JK Rowling’s right to speak about gender. What’s changed is that free speech is no longer as valued as correct speech. A whole strand of cultural criticism today judges comedy first on whether it’s making jokes about the right things, and a distant second on whether those jokes are funny.

I think “correct speech” should be “correct” speech – I think there should be scare quotes on the “correct” bit, because the issue isn’t truth but approval. In a great many contexts incorrect speech is and should be less valued than free speech, because there are a great many contexts where truth does matter. (Such as? Pandemics. Journalism. Science. Medicine. History. Stuff like that.) The joke with the “gender” issue is that it’s riddled with lies and fantasies, along with bullying threat-laden demands for “respect” for those lies and fantasies.

Really?

I don’t believe it. “Women with penises” were not a topic, much less an entity, in the 80s. That insulting oxymoron is only a few years old. She can wink wink all she wants to but it’s still bullshit.