Even the Army?

A colonel has claimed he was forced to quit the Army after he was criticised for stating that “men cannot be women”.

Dr Kelvin Wright, 54, had been a Reservist commanding officer with 14 years’ unblemished service, including two tours in Afghanistan, before his “honour was attacked” with a transphobia complaint and an investigation he described as “hellish”.

In May, he shared a post on his private Facebook account from Fair Play for Women, a campaign group that works with governing bodies to preserve women’s sport for those born female, which consisted of a quote from Helen Joyce, a feminist campaigner backed by the author JK Rowling.

The quote, shared without any additional comment, said: “If women cannot stand in a public place and say ‘men cannot be women’, then we do not have women’s rights at all.”

So the heresy-sniffers leapt into action.

This prompted a junior officer to warn him that his gender-critical views could be at odds with Ministry of Defence transgender policies, before what Dr Wright calls the Army’s “LGBT champions” allegedly drew up a seven-page dossier about his “substandard behaviour” – which he was not allowed to see.

Isn’t it interesting how women have never had this kind of instant intense rushing to punish people for disputing our rights, but when we have the gall to say men are not women and if we’re not allowed to say that then we can’t have our own rights – then the hammer comes down. The hammer comes down so hard that it hammers even army colonels who say it with us.

Dr Wright, who led a team of 60 troops in 306 Hospital Support Regiment alongside working as an NHS intensive care consultant, has this month felt forced to retire six years earlier than planned, slashing his total Army pension in the process.

He is being supported by the Free Speech Union, which has appointed an employment barrister to defend him, as the investigation is still ongoing.

Dr Wright told The Telegraph: “This attack on my honour made my position completely untenable. I could no longer remain in an Army which treated its officers with such disrespect.

“What message does it send to women in the Army, that merely for noting the existence of women and women’s rights even a colonel can be placed under investigation? I therefore feel there is no other choice but to make this matter public.”

The message it sends to women in the Army is absolutely horrific. He’s a good man for giving a damn.

Extremely rich man who pays no taxes gets extremely expensive new sword paid for by people not as rich as he is.

A new sword will be presented to King Charles when he receives Scotland’s crown jewels at a ceremony in Edinburgh.

The King will be presented with the Honours of Scotland at a service in St Giles’ Cathedral on 5 July.

Named after his late mother, the Elizabeth sword was commissioned because the existing 16th Century sword is too fragile to handle.

So don’t handle it then. Skip the sword-handling, or use another sword from the cupboard.

The Elizabeth Sword cost £22,000 to make and was designed by Mark Dennis and worked on by a number of expert Scottish craftspeople.

A bargain, am I right?! And worth every penny.

Huh. I thought Choss was supposed to be such a keen environmentalist.

King Charles’s private country estate at Sandringham in Norfolk has been linked to the deaths and disappearances of a string of legally protected birds over the past two decades, a Guardian investigation has found.

The cases include the alleged poisoning, shooting and disappearance of some of the UK’s rarest birds of prey. One of the cases involved the mysterious loss of eastern England’s last breeding female montagu’s harrier, a critically endangered species whose future in the UK is now looking bleak.

The Guardian has identified 18 cases since 2003 involving suspected wildlife offences or the alleged misuse of poisons, linked to the royal estate and neighbouring farmland owned by the king.

But that’s all right, he sells Duchy Organic Shortbread, so it all balances out.

Many of the cases are detailed by official regulators in internal documents that have been released under freedom of information legislation.

The documents reveal how the police and enforcement officials have regularly investigated the Windsors’ private estate, which spans about 8,100 hectares (20,000 acres) of parkland, farmland and forestry. The latest investigation ended earlier this year.

The documents also reveal how the estate appears on occasion to have hindered official investigations. In 2016, Natural England, the conservation regulator, recorded that it was unable to investigate the suspicious deaths of up to 40 wood pigeons on the estate as it appeared the area had been “cleaned up” early one morning.

Shhhh. Have a cup of tea and an organic shortbread.

The disclosures could be particularly uncomfortable for the king since the late Queen Elizabeth II had been patron of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) since 1952. Prince Philip was patron of the British Trust for Ornithology until his death in April 2021.

Oh come on. That’s a whole different thing. It’s not about giving a shit about birds, it’s about PR.

Is the heat really such a problem? Who needs fish and plants anyway?

The UK’s hottest June on record caused unprecedented deaths of fish in rivers and disturbed insects and plants, environment groups have warned. Nature is being “pounded by extreme weather without a chance to recover”, the Wildlife Trusts said.

…

“The reports of the number of fish death incidents in rivers for this time of year has been unprecedented. I would normally expect rivers to be affected later in the summer when it’s hotter and drier,” Mark Owen, from the Angling Trust, told BBC News. In one case, sea trout were found dead on the River Wear in north-east England, he said.

The deaths are partly caused by less oxygen in the water as river levels decrease. Fish also die when dried-up pollutants from cars and lorries on roads wash into rivers during flash storms. The Environment Agency said it received more reports of dead fish than the same time last year.

…

Many flowering plants, including orchids, wilted in the high temperatures, meaning insects like bees and butterflies that feed on nectar and pollen will have less to eat, Ali Morse from the Wildlife Trusts told BBC News. Species with short lifespans are particularly badly affected. Many butterflies are adults for only a short time, and if they cannot access food in that period, it stunts the population.

The race to the edge of the cliff continues.

Hottest so far.

The UK had the hottest June on record, the Met Office has confirmed. The average monthly temperature of 15.8C (60.4F) exceeded the previous highest average June temperature, recorded in 1940 and 1976, by 0.9C.

Climate change made the chance of surpassing the previous joint record at least twice as likely, scientists also said.

…

“It’s officially the hottest June on record for the UK, for mean temperature as well as average maximum and minimum temperature,” said Met Office’s Climate Science Manager Mark McCarthy.

“An increase of 0.9C may not seem a huge amount, but it’s really significant because it has taken the average daytime and the night time temperature for the whole of the UK,” Paul Davies, Met Office chief meteorologist and climate extremes principal fellow, told BBC News. “That’s significant in a warming climate and because of the consequential impacts on society,” he added.

He also said that while the UK recorded a higher one-off temperature of 40.3C last summer, the difference last month was the sustained heat both day and night.

On the upside, it hasn’t cooked us yet.

A pusher of the dogma tells us how to push the dogma, which is to say, Helen Webberley says

Saving trans lives is simple:

Believe them.

Yes, that is simple, but it can’t be a general rule, for reasons that ought to be obvious if you think about it at all.

It can’t be a general rule that you must believe X brand of people, because people can be mistaken and people can lie.

Webberley is using the fact that, socially speaking, we generally do believe what people tell us if there’s no obvious reason not to. If we ask a stranger where the nearest grocery store is, we assume she’ll tell us the truth, because why wouldn’t she? If friends tell us something we believe them, because they’re friends. There’s a lot of ground between those two types of default belief. There is also a lot of ground where we’re on high skepticism alert – like the claims of advertisers for instance, or Trump saying anything at all.

So no, we don’t have to believe trans people when they tell us the very thing we don’t and can’t believe because it’s physically impossible. Even if it will make them happy, we still can’t do it. Some of us may be willing to pretend to do it (which is how we got into this mess), but most of us can’t actually do it. We also shouldn’t do it, because the sooner this ideology finds itself on the scrapheap alongside Scientology and Heaven’s Gate the better.

So can men breastfeed infants or no?? Some say yes; some even say yes of course they can and you’re a bigot for saying no.

Suzanne Moore says

Stunningly obvious that ‘lived experience’ matters. Many women here are talking about babies/breastfeeding and how difficult it can be. Then a load of ideologues telling us that men can breastfeed who clearly have never done it or ever looked after a baby? Latch on. To reality.

James Esses says

The NHS actually has official guidance on ‘Dads and breastfeeding’.

You know what it says? “Some men really like the changes in their partner’s breasts during breastfeeding”.

You know what it doesn’t say? “Men can breastfeed”.

Why?

Because they can’t.

Jean Hatchet says

My piece for @TheCriticMag on Mika Minio-Paluello being platformed by ITV claiming to be a mother. This was written before he posted a picture “breastfeeding” or it would be angrier still. ‘Men are not mothers’. Motherfaker.

Lachlan Stuart says

The image of a transwoman in a breastfeeding pose with a very young infant is deeply disturbing. Be whoever you want to be but a baby is not a prop, it is helpless and utterly dependent human. Feeding it some chemically induced goo to validate your own sense of self is abuse.

The image in question is this one:

Michael Eric Dyson writes:

This is the face of a man who climbed the ladder of affirmative action to his present perch of power only to help destroy the very ladder on which he ascended. This is not only the mark of deep ingratitude & disavowal of history, but a withering betrayal of justice & democracy.

The face belongs to Clarence Thomas.

To be fair, I think you can accept a benefit while thinking the benefit is a bad idea, without necessarily being a hypocrite. I also think you can accept a benefit and then over several decades develop views on why the benefit is a bad idea without being a hypocrite.

But I also think Dyson has a point. I’m wishy-washy.

The Chronicle of Higher Education looks closely at the DEI orthodoxy-sniffing at UCLA:

Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him.

At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.

But his skepticism wasn’t (and isn’t) about the value of diversity, it was simply about the efficacy of diversity statements. A difference of opinion on that seems like a mind-numbingly stupid reason to petition the university not to hire someone. It’s like firing a carpenter for pointing out that this power saw doesn’t work.

The situation illustrates how diversity statements have become a live wire nationally, with several university systems and states banning their use in hiring over concerns about their legality or potential use as a “political litmus test.”

What is a diversity statement? Google answers:

A diversity statement is a polished, narrative statement, typically 1–2 pages in length, that describes one’s accomplishments, goals, and process to advance excellence in diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging as a teacher and a researcher in higher education.

It’s not at all clear why an opinion on whether such a statement does or does not advance excellence in DEI should be a litmus test for hiring.

[Inbar] told the hosts of Very Bad Wizards [last Tuesday] that his meeting with the diversity-issues committee was one of several “strange things” that happened while he was on campus. At the end of the meeting, in which the committee asked standard questions about his approach to diversity in his teaching and research, Inbar said he had been asked about a December 2018 episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers.

In that episode, Inbar said that diversity statements “sort of seem like administrator virtue-signaling,” questioned how they would be used in a hiring process, and suggested “it’s not clear that they lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups.”

Well, is it clear that they lead to better outcomes?

The committee asked: Was he prepared to defend those comments now?

“To be honest, I wasn’t, because this episode is like, four and a half years old,” Inbar said on Very Bad Wizards. But he explained his current stance: “The very short version is, I think that the goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.” …

The UCLA faculty members “seemed satisfied” with Inbar’s answer, he said. “Then one of them said, kind of almost apologetically, ‘Well, you know, we have some very passionate graduate students here, which is great, but what would you say to them if they were upset about this?’” Inbar said he didn’t know what he’d say beyond explaining his views, as he had to the committee.

Not good enough! Ostracize that man!

On Tuesday, during the Very Bad Wizards episode, Inbar said the graduate students who opposed his hiring had missed the nuance in his remarks about diversity statements.

“You can pull out selective quotes that make me sound like I’m a rabid anti-diversity-statement person, which I’m really not,” Inbar said. His main concern is with their effectiveness, he said: “What you want is somebody who’s going to be able to teach and to mentor people from diverse backgrounds. But what you get is somebody writing about what they believe, and perhaps what they’ve done to demonstrate that.”

Saying you’re not convinced X works is a long long long way from saying the goal of X is worthless. Really really long.

Now people who know that men are not women are having their bank accounts closed.

Wings Over Scotland:

Well well. The head of “financial tracking” at HSBC, the bank that just closed all my accounts for no reason, isn’t just a transwoman, but he and his transman partner are the top two names on the list of Patrons of controversial under-investigation trans “charity” Mermaids.

We’re done.

The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.

As envoys gathered in Bonn in early June to prepare for this year’s annual climate talks in November, average global surface air temperatures were more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for several days, the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

These “climate talks” are a weird charade when we can all see that nothing is being done and nothing will be done.

Though mean temperatures had temporarily breached the 1.5C threshold before, this was the first time they had done so in the northern hemisphere summer that starts on June 1. Sea temperatures also broke April and May records.

“We’ve run out of time because change takes time,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climatologist at Australia’s University of New South Wales.

China is cooking. The US is cooking.

Parts of North America were some 10C above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the U.S. East Coast in hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million metric tons.

Well let’s have a meeting. That will fix it.

Still refusing to report the subject accurately:

A woman who lost out on a job after tweeting gender-critical views is to get a £100,000 payout after a decision from an employment tribunal.

She didn’t “lose out on” a job; she lost the job she had. She lost her job.

Ms Forstater, the founder of campaign group Sex Matters, believes biological sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.

She doesn’t “believe” sex is immutable, she knows it is. Knowing that people can’t change sex isn’t a “belief”; it’s just awareness of a reality. [Yes, philosophically speaking knowledge is justified true belief, but the BBC isn’t speaking philosophically, to put it mildly.]

Casting it as “belief” isn’t just sloppy, it’s a massive elbow on the scales.

Ms Forstater was congratulated in a tweet by Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who has courted controversy with her own statements on trans issues.

That’s a snide and stupid thing to say. We don’t “court controversy” when we reject claims that men can magically become women; we make an effort to get the truth out there.

Commenting on the July 2022 ruling, charity Stonewall said the decision did not “change the reality of trans people’s workplace protection”.

It added: “No-one has the right to discriminate against, or harass, trans people simply because they disagree with their existence and participation in society.”

Why quote Stonewall? Why insinuate that women who know men are not women want to discriminate against or harass trans people? Much less “disagree with their existence”?

But this never happens and never will happen.

A boy has been arrested by police investigating reports of serious sexual assaults in a gender neutral toilet at a school. Essex Police said it was working closely with the school and local authorities while inquiries continued.

The boy, under the age of 16, has been bailed with conditions. Essex County Council confirmed it was working with police and relevant authorities on a “safeguarding matter” at a school.

No, on a series of sexual assaults. The kind which never happen.

Originally a comment by James Garnett on It’s not about being a disruptor.

Sort of a side-note, but: it’s practically a truism among those of us who are involved in dangerous activities that it’s “never the gear that fails”. That is, it’s human miscalculations that lead to accidents and death. It’s not snapped ropes or slipped gear or failed parachutes, it’s almost always a bad decision somewhere along the line. Of course, yes, sometimes it’s failed gear, but it happens so rarely in our highly regulated and tested worlds that the exceptions just serve to prove the rule. There’s an entire publication dedicated to analysis of climbing accidents in North America that is published each year, “Accidents in North American Mountaineering” and time after time after time it’s a bad human decision that leads to the accidents. Even when the gear fails, it is usually traceable to a bad decision, like the death of Todd Skinner in October, 2006: Skinner, a famous Yosemite pioneer climber, died when the belay loop on his harness snapped, on a climb just before which he acknowledged that his harness was over-worn and dangerous and should be replaced. Yes, the harness failed, but the real failure was Skinner’s decision to risk one more climb on a piece of safety gear that was past its usable lifetime–and he knew it.

Similarly, the real failure here was Rush’s belief in his own opinions at the expense of the certification of the gear that he was using. After SAR missions, we hold debriefings in which we try to determine what decision was the trigger that led to the callout. What human decision started the chain of events that led to us being out in the field trying to rescue a person, or worse, trying to recover a body? There is always something. The skier who decided to make tracks in the backcountry even though he knew that NWAC has predicted “extreme avalanche hazard” in the skier’s preferred area, perhaps. Or the climber who decided to climb one more time on a rope that had suffered too many factor-two falls and was beyond its usable life. Or the amateur submariner who didn’t understand materials science who thought that those people who did were all Chicken Little.

The fact is, reality doesn’t care. Reality doesn’t give a dry fart about anyone’s bloated opinions of themselves and their presumed expertise. At the risk of introducing levity where perhaps there shouldn’t be any this soon, I like to tell my mountaineering students (when I had them, as I don’t teach those classes at the moment) that reality is like a cat: we conform to its ways, it doesn’t change to fit our expectations.

Here’s why Elon’s cunning plan is so stupid:

Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said.

In a tweet of his own, Mr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts a day.

If you don’t use Twitter that might sound reasonable, like the Guardian and the Washington Post and similar saying you can read X number of articles for X price. (They don’t do that, but they could.) But Twitter doesn’t work like a newspaper, because what you see is what Twitter decides to show you. It mostly works because what Twitter decides to show you is shaped by what you’ve liked in the past, but this is new Elon Twitter, and lately it’s been regularly showing me garbage that seems purely random. The future will be “here are your 600 random garbage tweets, there you go, see you tomorrow.”

So everyone will leave, and Elon will be saying “What just happened?”

The New Yorker has an in-depth piece on the recklessness of the amateur Let’s Make a Submersible guy. It’s like reading an in-depth piece on why the Challenger exploded. Spoiler: he was determined to go ahead, safety be damned.

Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

But Rush went right on thinking it is about being a disruptor as opposed to the laws of physics. It’s weird when people do that.

Rush had grown up scuba diving in Tahiti, the Cayman Islands, and the Red Sea. In his mid-forties, he tinkered with a kit for a single-person mini-submersible, and piloted it around at shallow depths near Seattle, where he lived. A few years later, in 2009, he co-founded OceanGate, with a dream to bring tourists to the ocean world. “I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,” he recalled. “If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?”

The same kind of mistake, in a different form. It’s not about business, it’s about the laws of physics. You can’t “access it” because it’s water and humans evolved on land. We can swim, but we can’t just move into the deep ocean and stay there.

“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” McCallum recalled. “At the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition trips to Titanic. Stockton’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle specifically for this multi-passenger expedition.” McCallum gave him some advice on marketing and logistics, and eventually visited the workshop, outside Seattle, where he examined the Cyclops I. He was disturbed by what he saw. “Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.’ And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub’s thrusters. There were multiple points of failure.” The system ran on Bluetooth, according to Rush. But, McCallum continued, “every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason—that if the signal drops out, you’re not fucked.”

Also:

Rush eventually decided that he would not attempt to have the Titanic-bound vehicle classed by a marine-certification agency such as DNV. He had no interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he saw it, “need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

That marked the end of McCallum’s desire to be associated with the project. “The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that’s when I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t be involved,’ ” he told me.

You don’t want to do your wild n crazy innovating thousands of feet under water.

The director of marine operations handed in a report containing a long list of design flaws, and so he was fired. Yes that’s the way to fix design flaws.

McCallum tried to reason with Rush directly. “You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place,” he e-mailed. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.”

There is is again – instead of treating safety as its own thing, he treats it as a rival to “innovation.” Innovate shminovate: you can’t innovate your way out of the laws of physics.

People who know better do this. NASA did this with the Challenger. Mountaineers do this when they get within sight of the summit of Everest too late to reach the summit and get down again. They know it’s too late but they keep climbing anyway.

He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” he wrote.

So he imploded himself and four other people.

But who says that’s even a thing?

A controversial policy change that bars teachers from using a student’s preferred pronouns without parental permission will soon go into effect in New Brunswick despite pushback. It has caused political turmoil in the Canadian province.

See the way that’s worded suggests that “preferred pronouns” are the normal everyday established form of pronouns when in fact they’re the invention of crazed magic-gender ideologues. There’s no such thing as “preferred pronouns.” That idea is a new and stupid invention. Teachers shouldn’t be paying any attention to them at all, and neither should students.

In May, under Premier Blaine Higgs, New Brunswick announced that a policy to create a safe space for students who identify as LGBT in schools will be amended, with the changes coming into effect on 1 July.

The amendments to the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity policy – also known as Policy 713 – removed explicit mention of allowing students to participate in extracurricular activities, including sports teams, that reflect their gender identity.

Notice how careful the BBC is to be unclear. The issue there is boys ruining girls’ sports by invading them, but the Beeb pretends it’s just a vague neutral “sports teams” versus “gender identity.” If they were clear about it, most people would think “Well obviously boys shouldn’t be ruining girls’ sports.”

More controversially, the changes – as explained by the province’s education minister Bill Hogan – also forbid teachers from using [to use] the chosen preferred names and pronouns of a student under the age of 16 without the consent of their parents.

Again, the casual normalization of the absurd. There’s no such thing as “chosen pronouns” because we don’t get to tell other people what pronouns they can use. We get to tell people what name to call us, because that relates just to us. We don’t get to tell people what verbs or conjunctions or pronouns to use because that’s way too broad.

Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in, igniting a debate on the issue at the federal level.

At a Pride event earlier in June, Mr Trudeau said that “trans kids in New Brunswick are being told they don’t have the right to be their true self, that they need to ask permission”.

But it isn’t their “true self.” That’s the whole point. It’s their imaginary, fantasy, pretend self. People are allowed to have such fantasies – I even think they’re a good thing in a lot of ways, especially for kids. Use your imagination by all means. Share your fantasies in like-minded groups if you want to. But demanding that the whole world join in is demanding way too much.

Don’t miss Jesse Singal’s piece on the grotesquerie at UCLA when a handful of fanatics decided Yoel Inbar is not Perfected enough to be on the faculty.

There was a little bit of weirdness when, during one meeting with a small diversity committee now enmeshed in the UC hiring process, Inbar was told that it had been brought to their attention that (four and a half years prior) on Two Psychologists Four Beers, he’d expressed skepticism of the mandatory diversity statements the University of California system had adopted around that time for anyone seeking to get hired as faculty. Inbar is a political liberal and very much favors making campuses inclusive; he just thinks diversity statements are unlikely to accomplish anything, and are much more about a sort of easily faked signaling that one has the “correct” political values. He explained these views and thought the conversation was fine, even if he was surprised to be discussing a very old podcast episode. His interlocutors also asked him what he would say to the department’s “very passionate” (Inbar’s paraphrasing) grad students who might be upset about this. Inbar responded that he wasn’t sure — he’d probably just explain his views as he just had.

“Very passionate” meaning fanatical and determined to make the perfect the enemy of the good. He has some reservations about diversity statements, while still being a fan of diversity, but it seems that’s just not good enough for the Cathars of UCLA.

Despite these minor hiccups, Inbar flew home to Toronto confident he’d be offered the job. Not long after, he got an alarmed email from one of his allies within UCLA: a letter was circulating, signed by dozens of psychology grad students, urging UCLA to not offer him a job.

Why? I’m sure you can guess. Inbar was deemed Problematic. According to this counter-letter disagreeing with the original one, students received the don’t-hire-him letter at 1 a.m. and were told they had to choose whether or not to put their names on it by 4:00 p.m. that day — and they knew that decision, which was being framed as an urgent matter of social justice, would be public to their classmates. Grad students tend to be overworked and overscheduled; it’s basically impossible anyone unfamiliar with Yoel Inbar (which most of the students would have been) could have possibly checked all the letter’s claims in time.

But they signed it anyway, not wanting to be the next bodies on the pyre, so there’s this letter with a great long list of signees, which makes it look as if Inbar is the worst thing since Donald Trump.

Read on.

For those who can still see tweets…

Maya’s statement is way better than Center for Global Development’s.

[Updating to add summary:

CGD basically just says here’s our statement, with a link.

Maya replies with “Here’s mine” with her image from the deck of cards, and text saying CGD was ordered to pay etc.

Maya’s basically saying neener neener haha; it’s quite droll.]

The CGD statement:

London – Today, The Center for Global Development (CGD) released the following statement, in relation to the Employment Tribunal judgment in the case brought by Maya Forstater against CGD:

“Following the Employment Tribunal’s remedy judgment, the case brought against CGD, its President, Masood Ahmed, and CGD Europe by Maya Forstater will come to a close.

“CGD has and will continue to strive to maintain a workplace that is welcoming, safe, and inclusive to all.

“The resolution of this case will allow us once again to focus exclusively on our mission: reducing global poverty and inequality through economic research that drives better policy and practice.”

That’s it; that’s the statement.

Too bad they didn’t manage to maintain a workplace that is welcoming, safe, and inclusive to all including women who know that men are not women.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on One law for the rich and.

When ProPublica asked Alito questions, he instead responded with a defensive, pre-emptive op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Does this mean if someone asks me an embarrassing question, I get to not respond by writing an opinion piece in a compliant publication? Cushy!

Boss: Did you remember to lock the door before you left?

Me: Read my latest in the Globe and Mail; that should explain everything.

Boss: What happened to the $2000 that was in the cash register?

Me: Check out my op-ed in the Free Press.

Boss: Why are you carrying a suitcase?

Me: See my column in tomorrow’s Star. Gotta run!