Mostly Cloudy alerted us to a piece by “a clickbait-spewing hack called Katherine Alejandra Cross” who disapproves of Jesse Singal. There’s this one bit in the piece…

Your average New York Times subscriber is not Extremely Online but is increasingly being fed opinions and ‘analysis’ from writers who are, and who find themselves increasingly angry at all the annoying people who spoonerise their names and troll them on platforms.

Trans people are a good example of this. Some small group of angry trans people harangues a journalist—rightly or wrongly—for being a bigot, and then this feeds a resentment that others like Jonathan Chait or Matt Yglesias give shape and form with plausible, lib-pleasing moderate language that, in turn,

… Read the rest

Steve v Elon: when ratbags fall out.

Donald Trump’s one-time White House strategist Steve Bannon warned Elon Musk Tuesday that he and other MAGA diehards are going to “rip your face off” unless Musk smartens up and stops pushing visas for skilled foreign workers to take good-paying [well paid] tech industry jobs away from Americans.

He told Musk to sit back and study. That sounds very likely, doesn’t it. Both Musk sitting back, and Musk taking orders from Bannon.

“They’re recent converts,” Bannon said Tuesday on his War Room podcast, referring to Musk and other tech-world Trump supporters.

“We love converts,” Bannon noted. “But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years

… Read the rest

Laurence Krauss joined the people reposting Jerry Coyne’s heretical piece, and a reader named Maria Comninou added a valuable comment:

For me, the asymmetry in the debate about transgender rights, i.e., the fact that it focuses on or originates from transwomen and requires biological women to define their womanhood is indicative of covert misogyny, perpetrated even by those who expound their transgender rights credentials. I do not see articles asking “what is a man?” or answering “I do not know what is a man”. Some of the transactivist language towards biological women conceals an effort to denigrate or erase them and is consistent with male behavior towards females. It betrays the very masculinity they want to deny. 

It’s true … Read the rest

As promised or threatened, continuing with Mister Friendly and his hostility to people who don’t fervently endorse every claim of every branch of trans ideology.

He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics) etc etc…

Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.

Notice that trans people are called a “community” while people who interrogate broad claims about what being trans means are not. Mehta might as well talk about the white hat people and the black hat people, or the good people and the bad people, or the angels and the vermin. Or even the … Read the rest

Hemant Mehta, self-declared “friendly” guy, is not as friendly as all that.

It’s always helpful when the trash takes itself out.

My piece on why three well-known atheists just resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation—and why they won’t be missed.https://t.co/gj8qsaLlBH

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) December 30, 2024

“The trash.” Not all that friendly, is it.

Somehow, there are even more updates to the anti-trans controversy I first wrote about on Saturday.

In case you missed it, the short version is that biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. 

No he didn’t. He did not trash transgender people. He … Read the rest

Be careful what you believe.

Two men were found dead in a remote forest while searching for Sasquatch, also commonly known as Bigfoot, according to authorities in Washington State.

The two men from Portland, Oregon, were found dead after a three-day search was launched on Christmas Day after a family member reported that the pair had not returned from a trip to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to search for proof of the mythical hairy, forest-dwelling, bi-pedal primates.

See that’s just pointless. Not even a hike in the forest for the sake of a hike in the forest, but a hike in the forest in hypothermia-friendly weather for the sake of “finding evidence” of something that doesn’t exist.

The

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on A “so” doing a lot of work.

How does failure to believe a claim = erasure of the claimant? There’s no connection. The world would have to be entirely imaginary for that to work.

Person A: “I’m a unicorn.”

Person B: ” There’s no such thing!”

Person A: vanishes without so much as a puff of smoke.

Unfortunately for him, there really is an actual material reality which isn’t affected by his imagination. Unfortunately for the rest of us, if absolutely everyone else suddenly agreed that there’s no such thing as ‘trans’, he would go on stubbornly existing.… Read the rest

You have been warned.

https://twitter.com/SophieMolly_OFF/status/1873763346270634030 The chain of reasoning is impressive. He won’t let [insert target here] erase the existence of trans people; he is trans; so [insert target here] are erasing his existence. He won’t tolerate it.

Does the reasoning apply to all possible existences? Will he let [targets] erase the existence of flying horses, talking dogs, red-headed ghosts, pedantic extraterrestrial visitors? Will he claim to be a talking dog or a pedantic extraterrestrial? Will he try to claim that because he is a talking dog therefore [targets] are erasing his existence? Will he refuse to tolerate it? How will his refusal to tolerate it manifest itself?

These are deep questions.… Read the rest

We’re now the vassals of domineering right-wing billionaires. Resistance is futile.

The German government has accused Elon Musk of trying to meddle in the country’s election campaign with repeated endorsements of the far-right party AfD.

“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” said the government spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann after Musk’s X posts and an opinion piece published at the weekend backing the anti-Muslim, anti-migration Alternative für Deutschland.

People are allowed to express their opinions about elections in other countries, but even so, when the people doing the expressing are billionaires who own popular social media platforms, it becomes more than expressing an opinion.

Musk has often weighed in on German

… Read the rest

Another cheat cheats his way into a marathon.

A trans-identified male who previously sued a spa for not allowing him to bathe with women has announced that he has been accepted to compete as a “woman” in the 2025 Boston Marathon. Riya Young Suising, born Robert Chien Hwa Young, has placed on the winner’s podium at multiple women’s running competitions.

That’s the fun thing about being a man running in women’s competitions: you get to win!

The Boston Marathon has age and gender qualification categories. Genders include male, female, and “non-binary.” Notably, the “non-binary” category has identical qualifying times as the corresponding female categories.

In Suising’s case, he had to demonstrate a time of 4 hours and 5

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Buhbye.

Of course secularism (i.e. separation of church and state) does not imply atheism, and atheism does not imply critical thinking. I still think the consistent application of critical thinking leads to “atheism”, but that doesn’t mean atheism leads to critical thinking. Atheism is just a specific conclusion. There is no shortage of people who arrived at this conclusion for reasons that have nothing to do with critical thinking, whether it’s in protest of the historical crimes of the church, a reaction to the horrific misogyny, homophobia, or general nastiness of the Bible, being offended by self-appointed representatives of God telling others what to do, a fallout with their religious community, or … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Sastra on Imprisonment by dogma.

Having a “trans child” in the family is like having a psychic child, a reincarnated child, a child with Multiple Personality Disorder, or a child who’s been to Heaven and returned to tell us about it. If you’re in a milieu which values their acceptance or which insists that it’s important to always believe and support your children, then a child’s insistence, sincerity, and suffering will be considered good evidence. You were skeptical, but swayed. You listened. You checked things out thoroughly from all sides, your evaluations are fair and your recollections reliable. So are theirs.

Being close gives you an advantage. Having “skin in the game” gives you … Read the rest

The punchline of the now notorious “What is a woman?” by Kat Grant that has caused all this marching up and down is one of the silliest punchlines ever punched, and the need to say why has been bugging me for a couple of days now.

Remember it? Short, and absurd. “A woman is whoever she says she is.”

And by “she” Kat Grant means anyone who says she is, by which she means anyone who says she is, by which…

Infinite regress, but also, infinite nonsense. Is that a special privilege granted to women? Do men have to stick to the truth while women get to claim to be anything and everything and it will be true because it’s … Read the rest

The third musketeer slaps the glove across the face (very gently). Jerry Coyne tells us:

Well, that makes three of us. Steve Pinker, I, and now Richard Dawkins, have all decided independently to resign from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).  The organization’s ideological capture, as instantiated in throwing in their lot with extreme gender activism and censoring any objection to their views—as well as in the increasing tendency of the FFRF to add Critical Social Justice to their mission alongside their original and admirable goal of keeping church and state separate, has motivated us in different degrees to part ways with the group. I emphasize again that the FFRF did and still does engage

… Read the rest

Steven Pinker follows suit. Jerry Coyne reports:

Like me, Steve Pinker has resigned from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).  His resignation was sent yesterday. Steve is an even bigger macher than I am both intellectually and, in this case, because he was Honorary President of that Board. I put below his two emails, reproduced with permission.

The core of what Pinker told them:

With sadness, I resign from my positions as Honorary President and member of the Honorary Board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The reason is obvious: your decision, announced yesterday, to censor an article by fellow Board member Jerry Coyne, and to slander him as an opponent of LGBTQIA+ rights.

My

… Read the rest

Jerry Coyne leaves FFRF:

Dear Annie Laurie and Dan,

As you probably expected, I am going resign my position on the honorary board of the FFRF.  I do this with great sadness, for you know that I have been a big supporter of your organization for years, and was honored to receive not only your Emperor Has No Clothes Award, but also that position on your honorary board.

But because you took down my article that critiqued Kat Grant’s piece, which amounts to quashing discussion of a perfectly discuss-able issue, and in fact had previously agreed that I could publish that piece—not a small amount of work—and then put it up after a bit of editing, well, that is

… Read the rest

Over here men make better women than women do.

Over there……….

https://twitter.com/NiohBerg/status/1873123435737747796 No windows. No fresh air, no sun or rain or moon, no ability to breathe freely outside, no singing, no talking, no laughing, no poetry…and now no windows.

Over here it’s men stealing everything we have, over there it’s men forbidding women to have anything.… Read the rest

Trump and bird flu converge. What could go wrong?

Nearly a year into the first outbreak of the bird flu among cattle, the virus shows no sign of slowing. The U.S. government failed to eliminate the virus on dairy farms when it was confined to a handful of states, by quickly identifying infected cows and taking measures to keep their infections from spreading. Now at least 875 herds across 16 states have tested positive.

Well, thanks for that, US government.

Experts say they have lost faith in the government’s ability to contain the outbreak.

“We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “I don’t

… Read the rest

Kat Grant – FFR’s women-explainer – has a long post responding to Jerry Coyne’s. It’s quite remarkably sloppy and badly written/reasoned.

Originally, I had planned on launching this blog in the New Year. It seemed like a good, solid time to launch a new project, allowing everyone to get through the holidays with minimal issue.

Wat? Everyone? Because the whole world is agog waiting for this blog?

If you are in the state-church space you may have seen that the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently posted a column by biologist and old guard atheist thinker Jerry Coyne, “rebutting” my “What is a Woman” blog, also written for Freethought Now. 

Oof. Terrible writing. Only the third sentence and … Read the rest

Musk turning up the volume. So to speak.

The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.

Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2024

…the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.

Why doesn’t FFRF send him a rude letter instead?… Read the rest