Now there’s a profound question.

Will Boystown become Queerville, Legacy Street, New Town or Spectrumville?

Spectrumville??

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Boystown? What the hell is that? I thought it was some corny movie about Catholic priests with a deep interest in boys.

Under pressure from a Change.org petition that complains about the gendered nature of the name Boystown, particularly in the context of local incidents of sexism, racism and transphobia, business leaders in Chicago’s most prominent LGBTQ neighborhood have begun the process of considering a name change.

Oh, that’s what it is. Seems confused. Why Boystown if it’s for L as well as G?

More than 900 people have signed a Change.org petition calling on

Breathtaking. (Literally. I don’t think I’m the only one who finds herself holding her breath for several seconds when reading an exceptionally foul news item.)

The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings of the U.S. coronavirus response.

As a pandemic soars out of control thanks to the malevolent incompetence of the people in the aforementioned White House.

In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official said Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.”

Florida is breaking records.

The grim news from Florida continues: The state reported 15,000 new cases on Sunday. That breaks not only the record for a state in the US in a single day but is also more new cases than any European country has reported in a single day during the pandemic. Only the US, Brazil and India have reported more new cases in a day than Florida did on Sunday.

Yikes.

Florida’s population is 21.5 million. Germany’s is 83 million.

Hospitals are under strain in Florida as the virus surges, and the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has refused to introduce a statewide mandate requiring people to wear masks in public. He has also pushed for

The campaign to get us all killed continues.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls on schools to reopen despite CDC guidelines that say children meeting in groups can put everyone at risk: "There is going to be the exception to the rule. But the rule should be that kids go back to school this fall" #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/UPuYa7wGwo

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) July 12, 2020

She’s right that being kept out of school is itself a health risk for children, especially children with fewer resources. But that’s pretty much all she’s right about.

“Where there are little flare-ups or hotspots, that can be dealt with on a school-by-school or a case-by-case basis,” she said, without providing any recommendations for

Matt Lodder, who just had to apologize for tweeting damaging lies about Maya Forstater, is an academic. It’s my impression that academia has strong norms against lying – that, like the legal profession, it has powerful vocational reasons for valuing truth and truth-telling and disfavoring lies and slander.

Caroline Dodds Pennock is also an academic – a historian.

Solidarity with @mattlodder, fellow “so-called academic historian” and fighter of good fights. If the winged monkeys are after you, you must be doing something right. pic.twitter.com/NWaNqriiTU

— Caroline Dodds Pennock (@carolinepennock) July 12, 2020

That was about eight hours ago, before Matt Lodder admitted he’d told lies about Maya. But this is after he admitted it:

I think it aged PERFECTLY.

Dude tells lies, bad lies, about a woman. Dude is firmly informed the lies are lies, and bad lies at that. Dude gives the most minimal grudging apology possible.

He casually announced, on Twitter, that Maya harassed and bullied people. It’s a lie. He learned that it’s a lie. He said he apologizes for “any distress [he] caused her.”

What does he mean “any”? Why does he limit it to “distress”?

This academic dude announced publicly that a woman harassed and bullied people which is not true, and instead of apologizing for publishing damaging lies about a woman he simply apologizes for potential bad feefees that may have resulted. It’s basically “I’m sorry you’re so upset that I … Read the rest

The thought-terminating cliché strikes again.

Rowling isn't transphobic, everyone. It's all settled now. She's merely challenging the humanity of trans people under the umbrella of debate. https://t.co/qUIVLKxJey

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) July 9, 2020

Except that she’s not “challenging the humanity of trans people.” Not even close.

Disputing some of the truth claims made by some trans ideologues is not challenging the humanity of trans people. Rowling is not challenging any claims of the type “trans people are human” or “trans people are human and deserve human rights” or “trans people are human and should not be persecuted.” Not even close, not even slightly.

Fight fair for a change.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on It’s almost as if there’s a pattern.

I do not think it was ‘vast swathes’ of Japanese intellectuals who suppressed or discounted the Nanking Massacre. Certainly a number of nationalists, many of whom could barely be called ‘intellectuals’, did (and do). Modern Japan had the misfortune to be re-born as a modern nation at the height of Western imperialism and racism, and was one of the only Asian nations never to be made a colony. In 1919, Japan proposed a ‘racial equality’ clause to be included in the Treaty of Versailles. This was turned down by Anglo-Saxondom – the British because of the Empire, the Australians because of the ‘White Australia’ policy, … Read the rest

Also Trump is playing the “not you” game with Fauci.

… as the Trump administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.

Because Trump’s personal grudges are way more important than the survival of hundreds of thousands of people.

During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” And when Greta Van Susteren asked him last week about

Dipshit has allowed himself to be persuaded to wear a mask this one time, but he’s not going to go all politically correct and say they should be worn whenever necessary. Dipshit must get his way! Ok so it costs millions of lives, but Dipshit don’t care.

President Donald Trump — who has stubbornly refused to wear a mask in public, ridiculed those who have and done little to encourage his supporters to embrace the common sense public health measure — has said he will wear a mask during a visit to Walter Reed National Medical Center on Saturday.

He is also expected to be photographed wearing it, a photo opportunity that some of the President’s aides practically begged

I’m reading some of the comments on Sophie Grace Chappell’s letter to Rowling, and # 7 by Jean (comments don’t have separate links there) is…informative.

I am so exhausted by all this. I’m disappointed that you only engaged with one point of the 5 Rowling made, but OK, I’ll meet you on the ‘bathroom’ issue. It’s extraordinarily disingenuous for you and others to assume that the ‘bathroom’ issue is about ordinary women going about their days. It is not. It’s about trauma and whose rights matter more.

I live on the west coast of Canada, where Trans dreams have largely all come true. And here is what I know:

I used to volunteer extensively at a charity for vulnerable

“Sophie Grace” Chappel wrote an open letter to Rowling last month; it was posted at Crooked Timber.

There are several paragraphs about the way Chappel derived understanding of his trans nature from reading fantasy novels including Rowling’s, and an expression of sympathy for Rowling’s experiences of abuse, and then the “but you’re wrong” part.

But I urge you to look a little more closely, and from a different angle, at some of the issues that you’re raising.

First, a quick harrumph of exasperation. You wrote on twitter that “If trans people were suffering discrimination on the basis of being trans then I would march with them”. To be honest, that tweet took my breath away. If we were suffering

The headline:

UK’s only trans philosophy professor to JK Rowling: Harry Potter helped me become a woman

So a trans philosophy professor is not a professor and knows nothing of philosophy?

Anyway, tell us a story.

In the autumn of 1969, a five-year-old boy called Timothy Chappell, in his first term at school, had an idea. Could he, he asked his mum, go to class as a girl? “My mother looked at me,” says Timothy – now Sophie-Grace – “and there was both terror and fury in her eyes. And she said to me: why?”

“Sophie-Grace.” Ffs. It’s as bad as “Sophie Labelle” who does that gruesome “Assigned Male” cartoon. Man becomes woman, names self wise-grace. But hey this movement … Read the rest

Glamour magazine had a long talk with that most glamour lady of all, Munroe Bergdorf. Glamour asks a profound question:

How have you learnt to become at one with yourself in that sense what have been some turning points in your kind of discovery of your sense of self?

In other words tell us more about your Self, which Bergdorf is only too happy to do.

As a trans person you’re forced to find who you are in a world that really doesn’t have any space for you. You’re forced to exist within the world that constantly wants to tear you down and invalidate your feelings, invalidate your identity, invalidate your contributions, invalidate your possibility of having what we would

The Post’s editorial board on Trump’s criminal pardoning of a criminal who crimed on behalf of Trump, who pardoned him:

Though Attorney General William P. Barr moved to reduce Mr. Stone’s sentencing recommendation after conviction, even he called the case against Mr. Stone a “righteous” prosecution. [Stone] was sentenced to 40 months in prison and was due to surrender on Tuesday — thus prompting Mr. Trump’s Friday night action.

As Mr. Trump discussed granting clemency to his criminal friend, Mr. Barr publicly defended the sentence, perhaps to prevent a mutiny among Justice Department staff who signed up because they believe in the rule of law, not the arbitrary rule of an unusually petty man in the White House.

The arbitrary rule of … Read the rest

These sleazy fucks.

Attorney General William Barr persistently pressured Manhattan’s former top federal prosecutor to resign during a June 18 meeting at a New York hotel and in a subsequent phone call, the ousted prosecutor, Geoffrey Berman told lawmakers Thursday, detailing for the first time the series of events that led to his removal the next day.

Berman, in a written statement to the House Judiciary Committee, said Barr repeatedly attempted to coax Berman into resigning his post by suggesting he consider other positions in government, including the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission or the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

That’s interesting, because it means not only is Barr corrupt and sleazy, but also he … Read the rest

Trump is so excited about “acing” that cognitive test.

In a live phone interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump bragged about his test score on a cognitive exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after Hannity invoked presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, asking the president whether he believed Biden had the “mental alertness” to be president.

Trump said he didn’t think the Democrat could pass the cognitive exam like [as] he did.

“I actually took one very recently when, you know, the radical left was saying, ‘Is he all there? Is he all there?’ I proved I was all there, because I aced it,” Trump told Hannity. “I aced the test. … He should take the

Fabulous.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is leading a Trump administration effort to demand the Food and Drug Administration reverse course and grant a second emergency authorization for the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

They’re not medical experts. They shouldn’t be demanding any drug be authorized, because they don’t know what they’re talking about. They should stay out of it.

Navarro, armed with a controversial new study that he says shows the drug’s effectiveness, is being cheered on by President Donald Trump, who has long touted the drug as a “game changer” and even used himself as a possible preventive measure. Trump praised the study on Twitter earlier this week,

How to cognitive pic.twitter.com/YM51OJ58qA

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) July 10, 2020

… Read the rest

Desecularization in Istanbul:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the Hagia Sophia museum, one of Istanbul’s most famous landmarks, to be converted into a mosque.

He made the announcement Friday, hours after a top court cleared the way for him to make the change.

The Hagia Sophia, a major draw for tourists, has a long and complicated history. The architectural marvel was built as a church by the Byzantines in the 6^th century and then converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

In 1934, Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s cabinet decreed that it be turned into a museum. It is widely regarded as a symbol of peaceful religious coexistence.

But we don’t … Read the rest