Via Heroic Women to Inspire Game Designers –

Lego NASA Women:

AMAZING NEWS: It’s official — Lego NASA Womenhas been approved by the LEGO Ideas Review Board and will soon be a real LEGO set. Everything is AWESOME!!!

Designers at LEGO are already hard at work planning the set’s ultimate look and feel. Set creator Maia Weinstock will continue posting updates as they become available, so stay tuned… As ever, THANK YOU to everyone who’s supported and cheered for this celebration of all the women who’ve contributed to NASA History!

Update: For those asking, an on-sale date is not yet determined, but will be sometime late 2017/early 2018.

From the LEGO ideas blog:

Women of NASA
A big congratulations to 20tauri on becoming the next official LEGO Ideas fan designer! As a science editor and writer, with a strong personal interest for space exploration as well as the history of women in science and engineering, Maia Weinstock’s Women of NASA project was a way for her to celebrate accomplished women in the STEM professions. In particular those who’ve made a big impact through their work at NASA.

We’re really excited to be able to introduce Maia’s Women of NASA set for its inspirational value as well as build and play experience.

Uh oh. Uh oh uh oh. A woman said a wrong thing, again. A feminist woman. A feminist woman who is an author and widely respected. Uh oh uh oh uh oh; everybody get ready to throw things.

Feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has found herself at the center of a controversy over gender identity after comments she made about transgender women during an interview, which can be viewed in the clip above, recently went viral.

I like that “has found herself” – it’s so passive-aggressive.

Speaking earlier this week with the U.K.’s Channel 4, Adichie, who is promoting her new book Dear Ijeawele Or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, said, “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women.”

Her argument appears to stem from her idea that because many trans women have been assigned and raised male from birth until whatever point they decided to transition, she believes the male privilege they may have received fundamentally sets their experiences apart from those of cisgender women.

Originally a comment by Rob on A personal and professional impossibility.

Both the BBC and RNZ (our version of the Beeb) have a long and proud tradition of long running shows that cover a wide range of issues that broadly fall within a generic header. The presenters are expected to be expert in this field, to be able to collate years, even decades long shows that maintain interest by being fresh, topical and challenging. Whatever your interpretation of the printed standards and your supposition about what is in an employment contract – let alone the interpretation of that – the practice promoted by both organisations is to expect and encourage the presenters to use their expertise to bring the greatest value possible from an interview.

Every god-damned day I hear presenters express personal views, couched as questions, which are designed to challenge the interviewee and thus draw forth more information. Sometimes these conversations are collaborative, an intellectual dance in which each participant takes inspiration from the other and the interview takes on an organic life of its own, returning to the pre-scripted questions only when an interesting thread is exhausted. other times the interviews become combative, when one side or the other feels a statement or position is bullshit and requires challenging. Sometimes the interviewee gets eaten alive, sometimes it’s the interviewer.

This is what I, and many others I think, expect and want from such shows. Not a pissing match or an exposition of one persons views. A real life discussion that brings in the listener as a silent but active participant who is forced to consider, to really think about, the competing views being argued.

In my opinion Murray has done nothing less than her job and the BBC should be ashamed of its unjustified and downright weasily editorial interference. Murray’s job is to be an expert on things that affect women. She is. She distanced herself, carefully and explicitly, from hate speech against trans people, but took to task a specific aspect of the actions and philosophy of a certain class of tran-activism. One which frankly seems to adopt something halfway between pre-feminist thought and the wishy washy choice-feminism that has zero intellectual and political backbone.

The Washington Post reports that the Marines-sexual shaming scandal is spreading throughout the military.

Sunday, March 5:

The Naval Criminal Investigation Service, or NCIS, said it was launching an investigation into the drive, while Marine officials said the drive had been taken offline. Additionally, the Marines’ highest-ranking officer, Gen. Robert B. Neller issued a statement calling the incident “distasteful” but did not address the investigation directly.

“Distasteful”? My god, that’s feeble. It sounds as if he’s concerned about the nakedness instead of the lack of consent, the stalking, the degradation, the loathing.

Tuesday, March 7: 

Female Marines subjected to online harassment on Marines United and other pages began to come forward, detailing that the problem was larger than any one group.

“It’s Marine Corps wide,” Marine Pvt. Kally Wayne, 22, told The Washington Post. Wayne joined in 2013 and was removed from the service three years later for disciplinary problems.

Erika Butner, a Marine who left the service recently, told American Military News that “this scandal has never been a new incident within the military, but I am glad it is finally getting the recognition it deserves.”

“As a rape survivor, I can tell you that this exact behavior of sexualizing and objectifying women is why so much sexual harassment runs unchecked in the Corps. It’s become so normalized in the military that women just have to deal with it alone,” she added.

Sexualizing and objectifying and at the same time expressing hatred and contempt: eros linked to loathing – that too is normalized.

Wednesday, March 8:

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat of the House Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel, said on the House floor that “heads should roll,” and called on Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to remove the Marines who participated in the incident. Speier had issued a similar statement Saturday. After another incident in 2013 involving unofficial Marine Corps Facebook pages, Speier called for greater oversight.

Neller also issued a video message Wednesday to the Marine Corps, saying that the incident is “embarrassing to our Corps, to our families and to our nation.” Neller mentioned the guiding ethos of the Marine Corps and that “unfortunately, it appears that some Marines may have forgotten these fundamental truths, and instead have acted selfishly and unprofessionally through their actions on social media.”

Jeezus, he really has no idea what the problem is.

Thursday, March 9

James LaPorta, a journalist and former Marine, shared with CNN that the Marines United Group had splintered and formed another group, called Marines United 2. LaPorta also said that the original cache of photos that Marine officials said were taken down had actually migrated to a new Dropbox folder and was still being shared.

Semper fi.

The military site Task and Purpose also reported Thursday that service members and veterans from the Marines United page had begun uploading images and videos to pornography websites following the War Horse’s initial report Saturday.

I guess that’ll teach those bitches not to make a fuss.

Katie Hopkins done for libel:

The writer and food blogger Jack Monroe has won a libel action against the Daily Mail columnist Katie Hopkins and been awarded £24,000 damages, in a row over tweets suggesting Monroe approved of defacing a war memorial during an anti-austerity demonstration in Whitehall.

…

The case centred on a Twitter exchange in May 2015, in which Hopkins confused two well-known anti-austerity commentators: Monroe and Laurie Penny, a columnist for the New Statesman. Penny had tweeted about a memorial to the women of the second world war in Whitehall having been vandalised with the words “Fuck Tory scum” during an anti-austerity demonstration.

Commenting on the graffiti, Penny tweeted from her account @PennyRed that she “[didn’t] have a problem” with the vandalism as a form of protest, as “the bravery of past generations does not oblige us to be cowed today”.

Hopkins attributed the opinion to Monroe and tweeted to her then account @MsJackMonroe: “Scrawled on any memorials recently? Vandalised the memory of those who fought for your freedom. Grandma got any more medals?”

When Monroe, who is from an armed forces family, responded furiously and demanded £5,000 for a migrants’ charity on threat of a libel action, Hopkins deleted the original tweet but followed it up with one asking what the difference was between “irritant Penny and social anthrax Monroe”.

Shortly after Hopkins’ original message, Monroe, a contributor to the Guardian, tweeted in response: “I have NEVER ‘scrawled on a memorial’. Brother in the RAF. Dad was a Para in the Falklands. You’re a piece of shit.”

Monroe later sent a second message asking Hopkins to apologise: “Dear @KTHopkins, public apology + £5K to migrant rescue and I won’t sue. It’ll be cheaper for you and v satisfying for me.”

Hopkins deleted the first tweet but shortly afterwards tweeted: “Can someone explain to me – in 10 words or less – the difference between irritant @PennyRed and social anthrax @MsJackMonroe.”

Monroe’s lawyers argued that the second tweet carried an innuendo that Monroe approved or condoned the vandalism, which would cause lasting damage to her reputation. Monroe told the court the exchange had led to abuse from others on Twitter including death threats, and that the affair had been “an 18-month unproductive, devastating nightmare”.

I wonder if the verdict will have a dampening effect on Twitter abuse. That’s a branch of “free speech” I would be happy to see die out.

Further to that discussion of the BBC’s rebuke of Jenni Murray for writing a think piece about whether or not trans women are women in every sense – the BBC puts it this way:

4.4.31

BBC staff and regular BBC presenters or reporters associated with news or public policy-related output may offer professional judgements rooted in evidence.  However, it is not normally appropriate for them to present or write personal view programmes and content on public policy, on matters of political or industrial controversy, or on ‘controversial subjects’ in any area.

Does that cover their rebuke of Murray, or not? Is she a presenter “associated with news or public policy-related output”? Does that describe Woman’s Hour? Was she in fact offering her professional judgement rooted in evidence?

She presents Woman’s Hour. Suppose a bunch of men started writing editorials and tweets saying Woman’s Hour should be about men. Would it be not appropriate for her to write an editorial saying Woman’s Hour should be what it says on the tin? Wouldn’t that be a relevant bit of professional judgement from her?

I never knew Krazy Kat was genderfluid, but it’s so. Gabrielle Bellot at the New Yorker has the skinny:

“Krazy Kat,” George Herriman’s exuberant and idiosyncratic newspaper comic, was never broadly popular. From the beginning, though, it found fans among writers and artists. P. G. Wodehouse compared it favorably to Wagner’s “Parsifal”; Jack Kerouac later said it influenced the Beats. The strip ran from 1913 until 1944, the year that Herriman died. It is set in a dreamlike place called Coconino County, where a black cat named Krazy loves a white mouse named Ignatz, who throws bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy interprets the bricks as “love letters.” Meanwhile, a police-officer dog, Offisa Pup, tries to protect Krazy, with whom he is smitten. The structure of the strip was built on reversals: a cat loves a mouse, a dog protects a feline, and, at a time when anti-miscegenation laws held sway in most of the United States, a black animal yearns for a white one.

Herriman was mixed race but “passed” as white; Krazy Kat plays with racial identity as well as gender.

Krazy’s gender, to the consternation of many readers, was never stable. Herriman would switch the cat’s pronouns every so often, sometimes within a strip; in one, from 1921, Krazy switches gender four times in a single sentence. When Krazy is portrayed as male, the comic becomes the story of one male character openly pining for another—in some touching scenes, the characters even nestle together to sleep. For all his pestering and punishing of Krazy, Ignatz ultimately seems to have a soft spot for the ingenuous cat; when Krazy plants a kiss on a sleeping Ignatz in one daily, Ignatz’s dreams, suddenly visible to the reader, become filled with little cupids and hearts. In two strips from 1915, Krazy wonders aloud “whether to take unto myself a ‘wife’ or a ‘husband.’ ” In a strip from 1922, an owl attempts to find out Krazy’s gender by knocking on the cat’s door and asking if the lady or gentleman of the house is in, only to find that Krazy answers to both titles. At the end of the exchange, Krazy charmingly self-identifies simply as “me.”

Both and neither; simply me.

Some fans of “Krazy Kat” were mystified by all of this. In his autobiography, the director Frank Capra described a conversation he had with Herriman on the subject. “I asked him if Krazy Kat was a he or a she,” he writes. Herriman, Capra tells us, lit his pipe before answering. “I get dozens of letters asking me the same question,” Herriman told Capra. “I don’t know. I fooled around with it once; began to think the Kat is a girl—even drew up some strips with her being pregnant. It wasn’t the Kat any longer; too much concerned with her own problems—like a soap opera. . . . Then I realized Krazy was something like a sprite, an elf,” he continued, according to Capra. “They have no sex. So the Kat can’t be a he or a she. The Kat’s a spirit—a pixie—free to butt into anything.”

Puck and Ariel are like that.

I asked Tisserand if he thought Herriman’s own experience with racial identity and his depiction of gender in the strip were linked. Tisserand pointed me to a 1914 strip, in which Ignatz asks Krazy about sometimes being a “Miss” and sometimes a “Mr.” “It’s a sed story, ‘Ignatz,’ which will move you to a tear,” Krazy says. “When us ladies first got the ‘votes,’ I went to a voting boot to vote. The man said to me, Is you ‘Miss,’ ‘Mrs.,’ or ‘Mr.’? Not to offend him, I said, Any one which you like sir, or all three should you rather have it that way. Well, it’s here my sedness begun,” Krazy concludes. Tisserand said, “Herriman wouldn’t have had that exact experience, but would have, at the age of nineteen, while living in a boarding house at Coney Island, had to choose his own racial designation, for the first time in his life.” Herriman, like Krazy, might have decided “to choose whatever wouldn’t give offense,” Tisserand proposed. In a world that required rigid demarcations, being someone who didn’t fit neatly could feel both dangerous and demeaning.

Broadly speaking, not fitting neatly can be quite a fine thing. Fitting neatly can be terribly limiting. I recommend fitting sloppily.

That thing about closed-minded versus close minded? Whaddya know, I was wrong.

The Online Etymology Dictionary tells the story:

close (adj.)late 14c., “strictly confined,” also “secret,” from Old French clos “confined; concealed, secret; taciturn” (12c.), from Latin clausus “close, reserved,” past participle adjective from claudere “stop up, fasten, shut” (see close (v.)); main sense shifting to “near” (late 15c.) by way of “closing the gap between two things.” Related: Closely.

Meaning “narrowly confined, pent up” is late 14c. Meaning “near” in a figurative sense, of persons, from 1560s. Meaning “full of attention to detail” is from 1660s. Of contests, from 1855. Close call is from 1866, in a quotation in an anecdote from 1863, possibly a term from the American Civil War; close shave in the figurative sense is 1820, American English. Close range is from 1814. Close-minded is attested from 1818. Close-fisted “penurious, miserly” is from c. 1600.

Oh that “close.” I knew that but forgot about it. In the 16th century the close stool was the exciting new technology.

Props to Maureen Brian for alerting me.

LGBTQ Nation reports:

Last Friday, a Maine high school raised a rainbow flag, becoming the first school in the state to do so. The flag came down yesterday as one student didn’t want to attract media attention to the school.

The Rainbow Flag went up in front of Kennebunk High School after work by the school’s GSTA (Gay-Straight-Trans Alliance, presumably) put it up. The school’s Feminist Club caught the event on video and posted it to Twitter.

It’s true, they did:

But.

The flag attracted limited local media coverage, including the short article from a radio station linked above.

KMTW, the local ABC affiliate, is now reporting that the flag was removed because a transgender student did not want to attract media attention. No other details about the removal are available.

That seems extremely sad, and counterproductive. But! There’s another but – another peripateia. In checking the Feminist Club’s Twitter I found up to date news:

Discussion on the take down of the pride flag occurred today. Issue is being resolved and flag will be flying in the future. DM for info.

— Kennebunk GSTA (@kbk_glsta) March 8, 2017

They talked, and the issue is resolved. Awesome! That’s how these things should go.

The Guardian reports:

Kellie Maloney hits back at Jenni Murray’s trans women comments

Hm. Perhaps not the best headline ever chosen, seeing as how Kellie Maloney, back when she was called Frank Maloney, tried to strangle her wife.

Getting undressed for bed, Tracey tells him the only time she sees him happy is when he is drinking.

The red mist descends. He snaps and lunges at her, closing his hands around her neck. He sees fear flood her face. Then their two young daughters burst into the room screaming…

Kellie takes a deep breath as the ­flashback to 2005 subsides. “Who knows what could have happened,” she says.

Oh well. That was twelve whole years ago. Let’s find out about how Maloney hits back at Jenni Murray.

Kellie Maloney has said she was shocked by broadcaster Dame Jenni Murray’s suggestion that people who have undergone “sex change” operations from male to female are not “real women”.

Maloney, a fight promoter who announced in 2014 she was beginning gender reassignment, said she sees herself as a woman and would love to debate the issue with Murray.

In a room with a lot of other people, I hope.

In response, Maloney told the Press Association on Monday: “We have lived in a male-privileged world, but not by our choice. Nobody has lived in a more male-dominated world than me, but I was fighting with me, I was battling with me. This wasn’t how I wanted to live.

“You can’t choose but you can correct it if you’re wrong. That’s what a trans male or female does. I see myself as a woman and I believe I’m a woman.

“I may not have gone through everything a woman has, like childbirth, but I’ve gone through other anxiety. I would have given anything to be born a woman.”

Well we’ve all gone through anxiety. Some of us have gone through anxiety about violent men, so seeing the Guardian gloating about a man with a violent history “hitting back” at a woman for saying things is not all that soothing.

The UN says Ireland’s investigation into mother and baby homes isn’t good enough.

It says the Commission of Investigation as established may not uncover all abuses inflicted on women and girls in these homes, the perpetrators of which should be “prosecuted and punished”.

In its “concluding observations” report – following examination of Ireland last month – the UN Committee on the elimination of discrimination against women (CEDAW) says Ireland has, “failed to establish an independent, thorough and effective investigation, in line with international standards, into all allegations of abuse, ill-treatment or neglect of women and children in the Magdalene laundries in order [to] establish the role of the State and church in the perpetration of alleged violations”.

The terms of reference for the commission of investigation into the homes, “is narrow such that it does not cover all homes and analogous institutions [and] therefore may not address the whole spectrum of abuses perpetrated against women and girls”.

“The committee therefore urges the State party to conduct prompt, independent and thorough investigations, in line with international human rights standards, into all allegations of abuse in Magdalene laundries, children’s institutions, Mother and Baby homes, and symphysiotomy in order to prosecute and punish the perpetrators of those involved in violations of women’s rights”.

It continues that “all victims/survivors of such abuse [should] obtain an effective remedy including appropriate compensation, official apologies, restitution, satisfaction and rehabilitative services”.

Even though they’re only women.

Point of order.

The word is not “close-minded.” It’s “closed-minded.”

I see the former written more and more, no doubt because the two sound alike when spoken. But come on – what would “close-minded” even mean? The mind in question is closed, to new ideas or information or argument. It’s a Trump-style mind.

Thank you for your compliance in this matter.

I saw dark murmurs about a pattern on Facebook a couple of days ago and wasn’t sure how well founded they were, but now that the Independent is murmuring…

When Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations died suddenly in New York last week, he became the sixth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly since November, leaving internet conspiracy theorists trying to spot a pattern.

Vitaly Churkin, 64, was rushed to hospital from his office at Russia’s UN mission on 20 February, after becoming ill without warning on his way in to work.

It was initially reported that Mr Churkin may have suffered a heart attack, but following an autopsy medical examiners said the death required further study.

Media company Axios note that not only is Mr Churkin’s death unexplained, but it is also remarkably similar to the deaths of Russia’s Ambassador to India on 27 January, the country’s consul in Athens on 9 January, and a Russian diplomat in New York on US election day, 8 November.

Those three were also called heart attacks or, cryptically, the result of “brief illnesses.”

It could be just a meaningless cluster. On the other hand, Putin.

Two more diplomats died more clearly violent deaths in the same period: Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated by in Ankara at a photography exhibition on 19 December, and on the same day another diplomat, Petr Polshikov, was shot dead in his Moscow apartment.

Additionally, an ex-KGB chief, Oleg Erovinkin, who was suspected of helping a British spy draft a dossier on Donald Trump, was found dead in the back of his car on boxing day, 26 December. Mr Erovinkin also was an aide to former deputy prime minister Igor Sechin, who now heads up state-owned oil company Rosneft.

Meaningless cluster or Putin?