Screechy Monkey alerted us to a piece by Matt Yglesias on trans issues. It’s far from the usual disdain and hatred for all who don’t obey all The Imperatives, but it is more cheery about the whole subject than I think is quite justified. He starts from a column by Jamelle Bouie that emphasizes dignity.

Bouie skillfully elevates these controversies out of the weeds and into the level of principle — “in the democratic ideal, we meet one another in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges” — and argues persuasively for a politics of dignity. He notes that while we best know Frederick Douglass as an

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Heather Cox Richardson on regulations and railroads:

Biden appears to be trying to turn the nation to a modern version of the era before Reagan, when the government provided a basic social safety net, protected civil rights, promoted infrastructure, and regulated business. Since the 1980s, the Republicans have advocated deregulation with the argument that government interference in the way a company does business interrupts the market economy. 

But the derailment of fifty Norfolk Southern train cars, eleven of which carried hazardous chemicals, near East Palestine, Ohio, near the northeastern border of the state on February 3 has powerfully illustrated the downsides of deregulation. The accident released highly toxic chemicals into the air, water, and ground, causing a massive fire

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I’m reading a piece from 2018 by Massimo Pigliucci on Jordan Peterson and Stoicism, so you get to read some of it too.

The question at hand is not whether there are some similarities between what Peterson writes and what the Stoics teach. Such similarities are indubitably there. Then again, “pick yourself up and do the right thing,” or “endure what life throws at you” are not exclusively Stoic concepts. They are found pretty much everywhere, in one form or another, from Christianity to Judaism, from Buddhism to Confucianism. And yet I’m not aware of anyone making the argument that Peterson is a Stoic-Christian-Judeo-Buddhist-Confucian. The issue, rather, is whether there are sufficient deep similarities between Peterson and Stoicism. I

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It seems to be true.

AP News February 2018:

In October, DOT published a notice inviting the public to recommend which regulations should be repealed, replaced, suspended, or modified. Accompanying the notice was a list of 20 potential candidates, including 13 of the most significant transportation safety rules of the past decade.

Airlines, automakers, railroads, pipeline operators, trucking companies, chemical manufacturers and others responded to the notice with their wish lists. After the comment period closed, DOT said it would repeal a 2015 rule opposed by freight railroads requiring trains that haul highly flammable crude oil be fitted with advanced braking systems that stop all rail cars simultaneously instead of conventional brakes that stop cars one after the other

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Oh jeez. If this is true…

CNN: "When President Obama tried to make [new, more effective brakes] mandatory after a bunch of derailments in 2014 … the lobbies fought it hard. They gutted it. … In 2018, the Trump administration, Elaine Chao was the transportation secretary, rolled it back entirely." pic.twitter.com/Ys8YjyrVc1

— Media Matters (@mmfa) February 16, 2023

The CNN story is that there was a better braking system, the Obama administration said great, let’s make it mandatory for trains carrying hazardous materials, and the Trump administration said no let’s not and canceled what the Obama administration had done.

Please, tell us more about what a hero Trump is to The White Working Class.… Read the rest

We’re too busy mopping up after climate disasters to try to prevent climate disasters.

The damage caused by global heating across the globe is increasingly clear, and recovering from climate disasters is already costing billions of dollars. Furthermore, these disasters can cause cascading problems including water, food and energy crises, as well as increased migration and conflict, all draining countries’ resources.

Sounds kind of tipping pointish, doesn’t it.

The report said: “This is a doom loop: the consequences of the [climate] crisis draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to higher temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.”

And this is while it’s all … Read the rest

Yet another casual insult.

https://twitter.com/dstlmod/status/1624428381465878534

You’ll be amazed to learn that’s not a woman.

https://twitter.com/fairplaywomen/status/1626004881080213505… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Beth Clarkson on Greasing the wheels.

I agree with you both that it’s blatant corruption and that it shouldn’t be shrugged aside as unimportant and also agree that it isn’t a big deal. My Trump supporting relatives point to Hunter Biden regarding his well-paid Ukrainian corporation position. I can’t say that doesn’t look like corruption. It does. Turning a blind eye to this sort of thing is why so many working-class Americans are MAGA people. I just point out that the Trump children were even more blatant about cashing in on their fathers position, both foreign and domestically. Doesn’t matter of course. They love Trump. He hasn’t done anything wrong in their opinion. Then we … Read the rest

Robin Moira White gets confused from one paragraph to the next.

The stabbing of teenager Brianna Ghey in Warrington is a terrible tragedy for her family and my heart goes out to them. It is not clear whether the fact that she was trans was a factor in the events in Linear Park, Warrington, but shock at her death has rippled through the trans community.

I cannot help but feel this kind of tragedy was waiting to happen. Anyone who followed the Conservative leadership contest will have seen the candidates vying with each other to stoke “debate” over trans people’s lives; and such sentiment is something I, as Britain’s only trans discrimination barrister, have to cope with every day.

So………….”it’s not … Read the rest

Stop that.

Oxford Police said an Arkansas woman is facing charges for making bomb threats in Rebel territory. 29-year-old Lily Mestemacher is accused of false reporting of placing explosives. https://t.co/a9o3A8VHGc

— WCBI News (@WCBINEWS) February 13, 2023

That’s not a woman. Stop pinning men’s crimes on women. Stop falsifying the statistics. Stop lying. Stop confusing the public. Stop lying and faking the stats and pinning men’s crimes on us to pander to men who pretend to be women. Stop it.… Read the rest

What a mess we are.

As more and more details emerge about the recent unfortunate exercise in Second Amendment freedoms at Michigan State University, there are a couple that not only stick in the throat, but also make you wonder even more deeply what kind of madhouse in which we’ve all been living for the past few decades. From Fox2 in Detroit:

When Jackie Matthews was 11 years old, she was inside a classroom in Newtown, Connecticut, when children were shot and killed. Now at 21, she’s a Michigan State student and was just a few feet away from where a gunman killed at least 3 other students. Jackie shared her story on TikTok, recounting the moment she

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Dennis Kavanagh has a stemwinder of a thread on Sturgeon. Since so many of you are allergic to T_____r I’ll quote it instead of showing.

1/ The fall of Sturgeon is an object lesson, a parable even, in what happens when you subcontract equalities policy to extremists. Scottish voters (and women in particular) have, in effect, delivered a decisive blow to government by Stonewall and govt by insulting your own people pic.twitter.com/pZb1qkwwff

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) February 15, 2023

2/ Sturgeon embraced an unreal, elite fad because she mistook it for gay rights 2.0. It should have been obvious from the start this was not the case had she listened to women and gay groups making the point that

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BBC Live on Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation.

One snippet:

Ms Sturgeon says she has found public opinions about her have become “barriers” to debate.

She says issues that are controversial “end up almost irrationally so” – though makes no specific reference to Scotland’s gender reforms.

That’s probably especially true when the issue itself is rooted in an irrational belief system.

Another:

Sky News touches on the row around transgender prisoners. The FM is asked whether this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She is also asked – was it a failure of her leadership not to deliver independence?

Sturgeon says she will “leave other people to judge” her record and says “no, that issue wasn’t the final straw”.

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Walter Shapiro in The New Republic:

Maybe I’m expecting too much from Biden, but a small incident recently reported by Annie Linskey in The Wall Street Journal troubled me. Toward the end of a nuanced article about the president’s many, many ties to the University of Pennsylvania, Linskey revealed that one of Hunter Biden’s daughters was rejected for early admission to Penn in 2019. That setback prompted Biden—then a private citizen about to declare for the presidency—to speak to the dean of admissions at Penn. Probably not coincidentally, Biden’s granddaughter ended up among the 7 percent of applicants eventually admitted to Penn in 2019.

Of course it did, and of course she did, because this is the guy who … Read the rest

The Telegraph on the Tavistock:

The Tavistock clinic ignored evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness, a new book claims.

Not to mention the general confusion and partial information and rudimentary critical faculties that go with being very young.

Staff at the NHS facility were so determined to push a pro-transgender policy that children who might not have been trans were treated as “collateral damage” by clinicians who labelled doubters “transphobic”, a whistleblower says.

So the question becomes “why?” WHY were they so determined to do that? What is it about the trans ideology that was so attractive to people at a … Read the rest

It’s funny (or sad, or both) when they do the very thing they’re warning not to do. Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, the title says. Spoiler: it’s because they blend right in.

Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of

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It’s no picnic being a girl, and it’s apparently getting worse.

Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking

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It seems someone went too far.

https://twitter.com/josephjames94/status/1625161673941176323 https://twitter.com/josephjames94/status/1625161679699955714

His friends line up to continue his valiant work.

https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1625326894068408320… Read the rest

Chase Strangio is in battle gear.

We will be suing in Tennessee if/when they pass these bans on care for trans adolescents. See you in court. https://t.co/C9E2NNhgZu

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 13, 2023

In 2016 I began lobbying against anti-trans bills in state legislatures. At the time we were fighting back against the proliferation of the anti-trans bathroom bill and the false and weaponized narrative that trans people posed a threat to women and children in bathrooms.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 14, 2023

Did Tennessee ban care for trans adolescents though? Did it pass a law saying trans adolescents can’t have health care?

The ACLU press release is more precise than Strangio on Twitter.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The

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There’s no such thing as misogyny.

On Saturday night, Wiebke Hüster, a German dance critic, was taking a break from watching a ballet program at Hanover’s main opera house when the choreographer Marco Goecke appeared in front of her.

That morning, Ms. Hüster, 57, had published a review of Mr. Goecke’s latest work, and it wasn’t positive. Watching his new dance, “In the Dutch Mountains,” audiences would feel like they’re either “going insane” or “being killed by boredom,” she wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major German newspaper.

So it was perhaps unsurprising when Mr. Goecke, 50, the ballet director at the Hanover State Opera, confronted her, asking why she wrote so negatively about him.

Oh … Read the rest