Mermaids is doing “gender training”:

@ACCJulieCooke opening our third day of training sessions delivered by @Mermaids_Gender. Fantastic trans awareness and education for our staff and partners! @MerPolCEU @MerpolLGBT pic.twitter.com/m5nmJdfH2p

— Christian Owens (@genderspaceuk) February 12, 2019

At the top of this image the slide informs us: Gender identity is also on a spectrum. We all have our own unique identity.

Do your arms stick out a little bit? Have you measured how far? That measurement would be your exact unique gender identity. If that’s too hard to measure you can check to see if you have things flapping out at the sides of your head, or if you have a waist, or if you wear a triangle. That is, those of you lucky enough to be 1 through 5. You unfortunates who are 6-12 are a good deal more limited. To tell the truth I can’t see a whole lot of difference between you.

The Guardian on the Ligue du LOL’s campaign of bullying women and Other races:

The group, believed to have had about 30 members, is said to have spread pornographic memes online and doctored photos to humiliate its victims.

What group members claim started as dubious humour in private exchanges, however, appears to have soon degenerated and spread on to the wider web mostly through Twitter.

Even “humour” in private exchanges doesn’t have to involve, say, pornographic memes and doctored photos. There are other ways to be funny and even other ways to gossip about people’s flaws.

They’re posting lengthy apologies / explanations on Twitter, saying they didn’t realize how nasty it all was for the people they did it to.

Doucet wrote on Twitter: “I was a member of the Ligue du LOL for two years. I left the group six years ago … in the small world that was then Twitter, I saw that certain people were regularly targeted but I never guessed the depth of the trauma suffered…

Hervaud wrote a long message on Twitter apologising for “condescending” tweets he had posted on Friday when the scandal first broke, and said he offered “sincere if belated apologies to those he had hurt”. He said the Ligue “never aimed to coordinate hateful campaigns targeting anyone. But it doesn’t serve to minimise or deny the evidence. The permanent spirit of mockery and cynicism of the group obviously influenced the actions of certain more borderline members, notably those covered by anonymity, who, by the snowball effect inspired other internet users outside the group.” He admitted some of the victim statements had “literally twisted my stomach”.

…

In an apology published on Twitter, Glad said he had “created a monster that escaped”.

“The object of the group was not to harass women, just to amuse ourselves. But quickly, our way of amusing ourselves became very problematic and we didn’t realise this. We thought that everyone visible on the internet, by a blog, or Twitter account or something else, deserved to be mocked,” Glad wrote. He added that he didn’t realise that this could “become a hell for the people targeted”.

Well why the fuck not? How fucking stupid or callous do you have to be to fail to realize that?

And I don’t really believe it anyway. If it’s true it just means they’re callous self-centered shits, but it probably isn’t true and they’re just trying to save themselves. The reality is they probably knew perfectly well and didn’t care even the tiniest little bit, because they were having fun and that’s all that mattered to them.

Capucine Piot, a former journalist now in marketing, said she had been the victim of several “mocking” photomontages and videos criticising her appearance. “It was very hard for a developing young woman. After reading so much dirt about myself … I was convinced I was worthless,” she tweeted.

Other victims have remained anonymous. “Those guys, they thought they were making jokes but they were ruining our lives,” said one. France’s minister for digital affairs, Mounir Mahjoubi, described the men behind the Facebook group as “losers”.

“It is a group of guys high on their power at being able to make fun of other people. Except that their mockery had an effect in real life,” he said.

Of course it did, and saying they didn’t realize it would be unpleasant for the people they did it to is just horseshit.

BuzzFeed reports:

A secret group of mainly male French journalists have been accused of coordinating a sprawling, yearslong campaign of harassment abusing women writers, feminist activists, people of color, and LGBT people.

The group, Ligue du LOL, or LOL League, has been operating for about a decade. So far, three journalists have been suspended, one has resigned, and one has been fired since the accusations were made public online. People working at four of France’s biggest news outlets have been implicated.

Journalists – you know, people who help shape our opinions and worldviews.

The LOL League started as a Facebook group in 2009 by journalist Vincent Glad, who now works at one of France’s largest newspapers, Libération. The group operated as a shitposting space for people in French journalism and advertising who were popular on Twitter.

The current controversy started when Slate France journalist Thomas Messias tweeted cryptically last week about a “model reporter” who “used to have fun in a pack of feminist stalkers.”

That is, not feminist stalkers but feminist-stalkers, i.e. stalkers of feminists.

Messias’s tweet was quoted by Libération journalist and LOL League member Alexandre Hervaud, who sarcastically called it a “brave subtweet” and said he wasn’t sure whom Messias was talking about. Then another Twitter user, @IrisKV, asked Hervaud directly about harassing her. Her tweets were the first recent mention of LOL League. Everything seems to have kicked off from here.

…

By Friday, the #ligueduLOL hashtag was trending throughout France.

Hundreds of testimonies from victims who say they were targeted by the group flooded Twitter all weekend. Slate France contributor Lucile Bellan accused them of years of systemic harassment that undermined her confidence as a journalist. A French marketing manager named Benjamin LeReilly wrote a Medium piece accusing them of anti-gay and anti-feminist harassment that started eight years ago and has gone on for years.

I wonder how many American groups of the kind there are – specifically of journalists, I mean; I know there are plenty of generic ones.

Journalist Melanie Wanga tweeted that she was chased off Twitter by the LOL League in 2013. She described an inner circle of LOL League members surrounded by “cool girls” in French media who protected them and helped them pretend to be liberal and progressive in public.

It’s all so very familiar.

Currently, the main outlets implicated are all liberal and left-leaning: Libération, Les Inrocks, Slate France, and Télérama. Glad, the founder of the LOL League, wrote in a statement on Twitter that the group was “a monster that he had lost control of” and apologized for his involvement. He was suspended this week from the magazine he’s currently writing for. Doucet was also suspended from Les Inrocks as a precautionary measure.

As the scandal has grown over the weekend, private sexist groups similar to the LOL League have been outed. Similar groups were revealed to have been operating at Vice France and HuffPost France.

The more powerful setting up little online enclaves for the purpose of harassing the less powerful. So that’s what humans are like.

Bellan, the Slate France contributor who has since come forward about her years of abuse by the LOL League, published a piece this week about her experience watching LOL League member Christophe Carron become the editor of Slate France in 2017.

Bellan in her piece writes that Carron becoming editor made her fear for the column she was working on at the time.

“Over the years, the LOL League has become a terrifying kind of hydra,” she wrote. “If we decided to never collaborate with people who had been connected to all of this, it would have been easier to just change jobs.”

Sound familiar? Sounds like the debacle of New Atheism, to me.

Oh come ON.

I dunno. I guess you could study this systematically and someone probably should. It does seem like when women are running, the threshold is lower for controversies that are deemed to overshadow a campaign, e.g. Warren/DNA, Gillibrand/Franken, Klobuchar/staff (or Hillary/email).

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 10, 2019

Oooooooh yes I guess you could systematically study whether or not women are subject to more disparaging commentary than men are, why has no one ever thought to do that???

Much acid rejoindering.

Decades of studies about this issue, as well as a profusion of regular, on-going work examining implicit bias and sexism/racism in media. I’ve got to believe you know this, but this makes critical commentary sound like a matter of shallow opinion and sensitivity.

— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) February 11, 2019

Just could be…. I dunno either:)

— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) February 10, 2019

https://twitter.com/glosswitch/status/1094978799316422657

Priorities. On the one hand, permanent brain damage; on the other hand, profits. We all know which one wins; it’s The American Way.

Former NBC sports commentator Bob Costas says the network pulled him from its football coverage after he criticized the NFL and its handling of the concussion crisis. In an interview with ESPN’s E:60, Costas revealed that NBC executives removed him from its Super Bowl LII broadcast after he spoke at a 2017 journalism symposium. “The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains,” he said during that discussion. After an ensuing series of media appearances, Costas says NBC Sports’ executive producer texted him, “You’ve crossed the line.”

What line? I guess it’s the line between rah-rah coverage of football and factual reporting on how football as currently played features a great deal of head trauma.

Costas had been at NBC since 1979 and often used his platform to discuss controversial topics. He had covered concussion-related illnesses on Football Night in America before, but the ESPN story notes that NBC nixed a monologue he intended to read during a 2015 Sunday Night Football game relating to the release of the Will Smith movie Concussion. “I remember the reaction almost verbatim,” he tells ESPN. “They said, ‘This is a very well-written piece, wouldn’t change a comma. We can’t air it.’ ” Shortly thereafter, Costas drew ire from NBC executives by mocking the NFL’s “Football is Family” ad campaign in outside interviews.

After his 2017 appearance at the University of Maryland journalism symposium, NBC released a statement saying, “Bob’s opinions are his own, and they do not represent those of the NBC Sports Group.” Costas was subsequently informed that he would not be part of the network’s Super Bowl broadcast at the end of that season, which was already slated to be Costas’ last Sunday Night Football appearance.

Well now who matters more here? The workers or the bosses? The players or the owners? Silly question, isn’t it, this is America, where unions have faded to ghosts and the boss always wins.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Hurtling down the path to extinction.

In War of the Worlds, the Martians meet their demise through lack of foresight, because they have no resistance to Earth germs; they are killed “after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” Now, with our devices and technology working all too well, and plenty of warning (but still, no foresight, beyond the quarterly statement), we may bring about our own end by killing off the insects. Who knows, this might have a bigger, faster impact on human thought (and numbers) than the comparatively slow motion disaster that is climate change.

Time to nationalize agriculture.

I’m not sure that would really help at this point. We would probably have to internationalize agriculture. For the time being, because of our numbers, I think we are trapped in industrialized, mechanized, chemical and energy intensive agriculture. Shifting over to methods that are less destructive would likely require more people working in the agricultural workforce. It would take time, and a lot more state intervention in the economy than many are going to welcome, but whatever we do, whatever happens, there is going to be massive societal and economic disruption as knock on effects of the ongoing ecological and climate disruption we have loaded the system with. The longer we wait to act, the less we will be able to control or mitigate that disruption, and the worse it is going to be. We are racing headlong into crisis and the earth is going to slough off a few billion humans (and countless other species) before it reaches some new equilibrium.

Too few people (and certainly too few people in power) are aware of the fundamental connections between the human sphere and the biological foundations from which it arises and upon which it depends. We’re still learning about those connections in our slow, halting way. Traditional societies that are/were more immediately tied to the cycles of the living world around them might have had some awareness of this, but perhaps in too much of a mythological or metaphorical sense (where propitiation of spirits might be seen as more important than not actually overhunting an animal or exhausting the land), rather than the nuts and bolts causality that the scientific method offers. Whatever traditional awareness of the intimate bond humans have to all other life, that awareness was lost, set aside or ignored as we adopted agriculture and adapted our ways to it.

Bad Astronomy:

That lovely photograph was taken on February 3, 2019, by the Chinese Longjiang-2 satellite, which is orbiting the Moon. It’s a small photo, just 640×480 pixels, but what it shows belies its size; that is the Earth and Moon in one shot, a single image framing all of humanity.

Doesn’t the Moon look strange? That’s because you’re seeing the far side — in fact, the geometry dictates the only way to see the Earth and Moon together in one shot from lunar orbit is if you are over the far side at the time.

But that’s the side forever pointing away from Earth, so we cannot see it from the ground, or even low Earth orbit. To see this terrain you have to go to the Moon and then a bit past it; this view is a gift of the space age.

As is the famous earthrise photo.

It’s sad, isn’t it. We start to discover amazing things about space and even land research vehicles on Mars, and at the same time we wipe out all the insects and keep racing down a path leading to environmental disaster.

Oops.

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

That’s not good. Lots of mammals, birds and reptiles eat insects, so you do the math.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

The human species turns out to have been just intelligent enough to destroy planetary life but not intelligent enough to stop doing that.

The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.

More efficient (intensive) agriculture–>more people–>need for even more efficient agriculture–>repeat repeat repeat–>goodbye insects–>goodbye everything.

One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.

The way to stop the decline would be to stop intensive agriculture. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that would go well.

This again. University of Bristol Free Speech Society:

We are saddened to inform you that due to Student Union bureaucracy we have been forced to cancel the invitation we extended to Angelos Sofocleous to be on our panel discussion on free speech. We have given the SU plenty of notice for this event. But they felt it proper to cancel his attendance in the last minute, citing “security concerns”. For context, Angelos is a full time student at Durham University who lives amongst students on campus. We leave it to the public to reach their own conclusions with regards to the SU’s intentions.

In the government’s guidance for students on free speech released last year it states, “Students should not be deterred from organising events due to over-bureaucratic procedures”. Ironically, the first question we intended to put before our panel – ‘is there a problem with free speech on campus?’ – has been answered for us loud and clear.

Our event will still be going ahead with the other panellists and will be open for students as well as to the public. We encourage anyone who cares about free speech to turn up to show their support for the cause. Tickets are free, but mandatory.

We are happy to give statements to the press. Message us on our page.

That “citing ‘security concerns'” is an especially nice touch. What security concerns? The ones about the rumpus we will raise if you don’t cancel the invitation to Sofocleous. We know there will be a fuss because we will create one. Nice little place you got here, would be a shame if you provoked me into smashing it up.

Angelos comments:

https://twitter.com/Sofocleous_A/status/1094631188789149696

Which, being interpreted, means not so much that his appearance might spark anything, as that people there would see to it that his appearance met with boisterous opposition. If opposition is boisterous enough it can be said to be a security concern, and boom, there’s your pretext for telling this person whose ideas you dislike to stay away.

Spotted at the Trump Hotel earlier tonight – Matt Whitaker, post-testimony.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) February 9, 2019

Let’s see, can we improve on that at all? Matt Whitaker after that grotesque performance at the hearing going to the Trump Hotel and…ordering the dolphin steak, painting “Mueller is a witch-hunter!!” on the wall, wearing a “Bring Back Rape!” T shirt?

They just don’t get it.

The bishop, who has maintained his innocence, will be charged and face trial by a special prosecutor on accusations of rape and intimidation, the police investigating the case said. But the church acknowledged the nun’s accusations only after five of her fellow nuns mutinied and publicly rallied to her side to draw attention to her yearlong quest for justice, despite what they described as heavy pressure to remain silent.

“We used to see the fathers of the church as equivalent to God, but not anymore,” said Darly, her voice shaking with emotion. “How can I tell my son about this, that the person teaching us the difference between right and wrong gave him his First Communion after committing such a terrible sin?”

The church is an institution that divides humanity into two halves for the purpose of making one half subordinate to the other. If you do that, there is going to be abuse. It can be the Mafia or the church, it makes no difference; telling people that these other people over here are your inferiors is an invitation to abuse the putative inferiors. That’s how humans work. An institution that not only does that but makes it sacred and holy and mandated by an all-powerful god who belongs to the superior caste is making it all but mandatory. Of course priests rape women; priests have been trained to look down on women, under instruction from Mister God Himself.

“The church is losing its moral authority,” Father Vattoly said. “We are losing the faith of the people. The church will become a place without people if this continues. Just like in Europe, the young will no longer come here.”

Good. Find a better source of moral authority, one that doesn’t carve people up into superior and inferior.

Via clamboy – a long thread on Seattle and SOME INCHES OF SNOW OMIGOD.

I’ve never witnessed anything quite like Seattle grocery stores when locals are preparing to brave 4-5 inches of snow.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

Oh no. They’ve started looting. People running out of stores with armfuls of Yerba Mate tea.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

People are bartering monogrammed yoga mats for just a single slice of cauliflower pizza.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

I awoke to the sight of Dickensian orphans picking through my compost. I don’t even know where they found those flat caps. The snow is still 10 hours away. #SeattleSnowpocalypse #Snowmageddon

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

The snow has started falling eight hours ahead of schedule. People are resorting to the politest cannibalism I’ve ever seen.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

They just ate Howard Schultz.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

People are crocheting beanies as fast as they can.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

It’s been snowing for an hour and a half, and the roads are now white. People are gathering on their roofs, but no rescue is coming.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) February 8, 2019

That’s only a small sample. Guy has a fertile brain!

This is hilarious.

Seattle hears snow forecast, descends on grocery stores like the apocalypse is coming

The weatherman said that, worst-case scenario, 14 inches of snow might blanket Seattle over the weekend.

Hearing this, Seattle made like Supermarket Sweep and bought, literally, all the things.

Cue photo of empty shelves.

I can confirm. I went (on foot) up to the shopping street of my neighborhood a couple of hours ago (when the snow was well under way) because I needed milk and orange juice. Safeway: no milk, no orange juice, bare shelves all over the place! Trader Joe’s: one last carton of orange juice, which I grappled to my soul with hoops of steel; no milk, empty shelves! Bartell Drugs: milk at last! But gallons when I wanted a half gallon, but never mind, I got the gallon. Also: traffic at a complete standstill. A line of cars stretching as far as I could see, not moving.

People, come on. This is a city, not the prairie. We’re not going to be pinned helplessly inside for weeks. It will be ok.

(Granted it is a little tougher where I am, because the delivery trucks can’t get up the hill, as the guy at Trader Joe’s explained to me. There might be more milk on Sunday but don’t count on it. I’m glad I remembered Bartell carries milk.)

At the Trader Joe’s in the University District a few hours earlier, lines stretched to the back of the store. Produce was still doing fine around 5 p.m., we heard, but sweet yums were out. We see you, college students.

At the Fred Meyer in Greenwood, shoppers vying to get into the parking lot caused a small traffic jam around 7 p.m.

At the Safeway in the University District, salt was completely sold out. “And it’s not just the rock salt,” said Steve Bailey, who was stocking shelves. “What was weird is that every single table salt was bought in one day.”

That makes me laugh and laugh.

Swung by the U District Safeway.

Employee tells me they completely sold out of salt yesterday. Every shaker in the building.

The other hot item: soups. #SeattleSnow pic.twitter.com/5GBJdSkwCY

— Casey Martin (@caseyworks) February 8, 2019

Soup! Soup!! Snow is on the way, we have to have plenty of soup!!!

Paul Waldman at the Post argues that Whitaker and Barr are under such fierce scrutiny now that they can’t obstruct the investigation, however much they want to.

Democrats are trying to do two things simultaneously with this hearing in particular and their broader efforts with regard to the Mueller investigation. The first is to discover whether there has been any improper interference from the White House to limit the probe. The second is to apply enough pressure that even if Whitaker — or the White House, or William Barr — wanted to hinder Mueller, they’d decide that doing so would be too much of a risk.

The truth is that Democrats have probably succeeded in the latter goal, which must be spectacularly frustrating for President Trump…

All evidence suggests that after pushing Sessions out he appointed Whitaker in an acting capacity precisely because Whitaker had been publicly critical of the Mueller investigation. Yet Whitaker was under so much scrutiny on this question from the moment he took that position, he was almost certainly prevented from doing anything significant to impede Mueller. The same is likely to be true of Barr, who despite being critical of the investigation before his appointment now knows that if he really tries to protect Trump, eventually everyone will know and he’ll be disgraced.

If Trump had actually persuaded anyone to obstruct the Mueller probe on his behalf, he wouldn’t be tweeting “Witch hunt!!!” every few days. Those are the desperate cries of a man who wishes his underlings would obstruct justice on his behalf, but isn’t getting what he wants.

Well…I’m not so sure. Trump tweets what he feels like tweeting, just as he says what he feels like saying. He doesn’t have a whole lot of impulse control, and he keeps flying into rages at the shocking way some people persist in not bowing to him.

But I hope Waldman is right about the larger point.

The Whitaker hearing is happening today. The tweets emanating from there are startling.

https://twitter.com/woodruffbets/status/1093889880260780032

Jerry Nadler asks Matthew Whitaker if he has ever been asked to approve any request or action to be taken by the Special Counsel.

Whitaker: "Mr. Chairman, I see that your five minutes is up."

The response in the room is remarkable. Via CSPAN2 pic.twitter.com/UAcOyulX46

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 8, 2019

https://twitter.com/woodruffbets/status/1093917121564811264

Whitaker makes another remark about members' time, this time in regards to Rep. Shiela Jackson-Lee.

Jackson-Lee: "Mr Attorney General, we're not joking here. And your humor is not acceptable. Now, you're here because we have a constitutional duty to ask questions." Via CSPAN2 pic.twitter.com/IY5UZh8uvU

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 8, 2019

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1093921143789142023

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1093922006381330433