Originally a comment by Cluecat on Summation.

This is something that seems very strange – how is it that *this* is what the “So Very Skeptic Atheist Bros” have thrown everything away for. Really.

They’ve quite literally gone from “Hurr, Religiot! Humans don’t have souls! You’re all stupid to insist on it!” to “Hurr! Of course I have a pink sparkly feeeeeemale identitay! You’re all stupid to deny it!”.

They’re right back agreeing that souls exist, and that they can be in the “wrong” bodies (by some mechanism that’s never made clear). Do they understand this, these Big Skeptic Bros?

It’s embarrassing, frankly. It’s the antithesis of everything they have been claiming when it comes to any other area. Unlike those who have been seriously considering the ideas and discussing what this *means* for practical life (in addition to intellectual implications), they’ve just been calling believers stupid. So it’s looking like they just wanted an excuse to feel Very Superior Doodz, and be dicks to people. All that Skeptic Stuff, and the Deep Thinkers, and the Rational Bros, and… they’ve thrown it away. For a bunch of fetishists in dresses.

Seriously!

So embarrassing.

Hmm. So the Supreme Court answers to no one, so the Supreme Court justices can…do whatever they like.

It was a short letter. John Roberts, chief justice of the US supreme court, was brief in his missive to Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. Citing “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence”, Roberts declined to appear before the committee to discuss disturbing recent revelations of ethics violations at the court.

What about ethical concerns and the importance of preserving judicial non-corruption? No? Nothing?

Congress is meant to exert checks on judicial power – to investigate or even impeach judges who abuse their office or interpret the law in ways that violate its spirit, and to affirm that the elected branches will hold more sway over policy than the appointed one. But the chief justice’s show of indifference to congressional oversight authority reflects a new reality: that there are now effectively no checks on the power of the court – at least none that Democrats have the political will to use – and that the justices can be assured that they will face no repercussions even if they act in flagrant violation of ethical standards. It seems that they intend to.

Clarence Thomas in particular. Harlan Crow? Conflicts of interest as far as the eye can see?

During his long tenure on the court, he has repeatedly had trouble filling out his financial disclosure forms correctly. Once, he failed to report more than half a million dollars in income that his wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation. He said at the time that he had misunderstood the forms. That was also his excuse regarding Harlan Crow’s largesse.

You know…you’d kind of expect a judge who has a seat on the Supreme Court to be able to figure out what the rules are. You’d kind of expect him to have the requisite smarts and knowledge and understanding and resources and commitment to ethical norms to do that much. Wouldn’t you?

Republican Supreme Court rules gerrymandering is totes legal.

Barely a year after Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court said new maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts were partisan gerrymanders that violated the State Constitution, a newly elected Republican majority on the court reversed course on Friday and said the court had no authority to overturn those maps.

The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled State Legislature to scrap the court-ordered State Senate and congressional district. boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in their favor for elections in 2024.

Can legislatures fix elections in advance? Sure sure sure, no problem. (Unless the legislature happens to be majority The Wrong Party.)

Oops.

Right?? Who the hell ever heard of “race” and “critical” being discussed in the same breath?

Oh wait…

Not amazed. Not triggered. Not convinced.

Ok so then bring out the big guns, argumentatively speaking.

You can’t have equality between the sexes if sex is determined by rhetoric rather than reality.

“Legal sex” here means “fictional sex.” It’s ridiculous. It’s not workable or reasonable to base laws on fictional “identities.” Eventually you’ll have everyone identifying as heir to the throne and entitled to all that cash.

I wonder how Lady Haldane would rule if a lot of people started identifying as military veterans entitled to the benefits that go to such veterans.

In surprise twist, violent man turns out to be violent man. Who could have seen that over the horizon?

Barbie Kardashian under Garda investigation for allegedly threatening to rape female prison officers

Dangerous inmate Barbie Kardashian is facing the prospect of more jail time – after gardai began an investigation into allegations she threatened to rape female prison officers.

The Mirror has confirmed that the [male] transgender prisoner is alleged to have threatened to sexually attack several female prison officers at Limerick Prison this week.

Kardashian, who is legally a woman after she secured a gender recognition certificate, is alleged to have issued the threats after she refused orders to clean up the shower area of the prison’s women’s section after she had used it.

He’s “legally a woman” but physically a man and mentally/morally a violent sadist. What could possibly go wrong?

Male prison staff had to intervene to protect their female colleagues and bring Kardashian back to her cell.

We keep telling you. This is why you can’t just merrily say all men who say “I’m a woman!!” get to be ValiDated as women at all times in all circumstances.

Michael Tomasky says never mind Carlson, get Murdoch.

As Tucker Carlson begins to slither out of the news cycle, here’s a reminder to keep our eyes on the prize. The prize—that is, the real enemy of standards and decency and integrity—is Rupert Murdoch. Carlson was a symptom. An unusually disgusting and purulent (great word, look it up!) symptom, but a symptom all the same. The disease is Murdoch.

He has been destroying journalism for 50 years. I’ll get into some of that below. But right now, let’s focus on something that’s happening in England, which I can assure you is something that Rupert is worried about—maybe even more worried than he is about Smartmatic.

He means Britain or the UK, not England. It’s about Harry v Choss and Harry v Murdoch and the fact that Harry is a real threat to Murdoch and his foul empire, which causes me to feel suddenly optimistic.

Harry is part of a large group suing Murdoch’s British media empire, News Group Newspapers, over the old phone-hacking scandal, which Harry and other litigants claim went on far longer than known and extended to the Murdoch property The Sun (so far, only The News of the World, shuttered after a massive settlement, has been implicated). In papers released Tuesday, Harry alleges that Queen Elizabeth II wanted to go after Murdoch’s media empire legally but that Charles called her off. This was allegedly because he wanted to stay on Rupe’s good side for the sake of Camilla—that is, so that Murdoch media outlets didn’t make any waves about her becoming queen.

The tiny things that sway important matters. Murdoch is a one-man pandemic, and Charles Windsor wants to protect him because of his, Charles Windsor’s, sex life.

The internal royal squabbling is an interesting curiosity. But what concerns us more over here is Harry’s crusade against Murdoch. Clive Irving explains in The Daily Beast: “Harry’s attack on the ‘grotesque and sadistic’ London tabloids is likely to bring more reputational harm. Murdoch’s lawyers know this. Harry’s refusal to settle out of court—as thousands of other hacking victims have done because they lack his kind of wealth to support protracted litigation—means that damning documents uncovered during discovery would suddenly be made public in court.”

Harry is out for blood. And unlike the thousands of regular-person victims of the phone-hacking scandal, such as the grieving parents of dead children, Harry has the money to go toe-to-toe with Murdoch in the courtroom. He doesn’t want to settle. He wants all the facts out there, and he wants Murdoch crushed.

Does he now.

I wish him all the luck in the world.

I saw a cruise ship heading from Puget Sound into Elliott Bay this morning for the first time this year. I saw another one at a pier a few days ago. April to October they ply to and fro, burning up their 80 thousand gallons of fuel per day.

Meanwhile Spain is hot.

Spain recorded its hottest ever temperature for April on Thursday, hitting 38.8C according to the country’s meteorological service.

Seattle got that hot two years ago, but not in April.

The record figure was reached in Cordoba airport in southern Spain just after 15:00 local time (14:00 BST). For days a blistering heatwave has hit the country with temperatures 10-15C warmer than expected for April. It’s been driven by a mass of very hot air from Africa, coupled with a slow moving weather system.

…

The high temperatures come on top of long running drought in many parts of Spain. Reservoirs in the Guadalquivir basin are only at 25% of capacity. This combination is raising the prospect of early forest fires, with the national weather service warning that large swathes of the country would be at risk. Spain saw the most land burned of any country in Europe in 2022.

Climate change is very likely playing a role in this heatwave, according to experts in the field.

…

This heatwave in Spain is not an isolated event – all across the world high temperatures in the first few months of this year have shattered records.

Oh well. Book a cruise to take your mind off it.

First of all the headline.

Narrow legal definition of sex in Montana bill would jeopardize protections for trans people

What “narrow”?!! It’s just the definition. A small set of people are trying to force all of us to “broaden” the definition so that it means nothing. If sex stops meaning “female/male” then it’s just random. (Of course there are other meanings of “sex,” in particular the activity, but the definition PBS means here is the one that names female or male.)

A bill advancing through Montana’s statehouse would legally define a man as someone who produces sperm and a woman as someone who produces eggs — and apply that definition to 40 aspects of the state’s legislative code, from employment protections and school sports teams to burial records and marriage licenses.

The 60-page bill, which is being considered in the House after being passed by the state Senate on March 17, is an extreme example of a trend growing across the country this year: anti-trans bills that focus on narrowly defining sex.

But it’s no more “narrowly” than excluding bananas and peaches from the definition of “cherries” or rabbits and raccoons from the definition of “birds.” Definitions are a kind of thing you don’t want to make wider or broader, because then they can’t do the work of defining. It sounds conservative in the sense of mean and pinched and joyless, this business of “narrowly” defining sex, but that’s a rhetorical ploy. Definitions are necessarily narrow; a “liberal” definition is a useless definition.

LGBTQ+ advocates say it’s part of an attempt to totally push transgender people out of public life by excluding them from as many areas of law as possible.

If that really is what LGBTQ+ advocates say then they’re lying. The attempt is to prevent addled “activists” from defining women out of our rights.

“With SB 458, they’re just jumping right to the finish line,” said SK Rossi, a longtime LGBTQ+ activist and lobbyist based in Montana. “They essentially just decided to wipe us from the code . . .  which means you actually can’t function in public spaces or public systems as yourself without either lying to the state or to your local government about the gender you were given at birth, or misgendering yourself at every juncture of your public life.”

Wut? Where does the necessity to lie to the state or to your local government about the gender you were given at birth come in? The point is to tell the truth about the gender/sex you were determined to be [not “given”] at birth.

Logan Casey, senior policy researcher and adviser for the Movement Advancement Project, which monitors LGBTQ+ policy, has tracked 15 active bills introduced this year across 11 states that aim to define, or redefine, sex…Not every bill is focused on defining men and women by their reproductive capacities, but all aim to make a legal distinction between men and women based on their characteristics at birth.

Because that’s the distinction that counts. People don’t pop out male and then become female 10 or 20 or 50 years later. It doesn’t work that way.

Shawn Reagor, director of equality at the Montana Human Rights Network, said that the state has seen a “disturbing” rise in the quantity and harm of anti-LGBTQ+ bills compared with its last legislative session — and that more Republicans are rallying around them.

Montana’s proposed bill to define sex creates many unknowns, Reagor said — how it would be funded, how it would be implemented and how it would be enforced. It has the potential to impact transgender people in nearly all parts of their day-to-day life — through housing protections, identity documents, employment and health care.

“It entirely eliminates the existence of intersex people. It tries to force trans and nonbinary folks to misidentify their gender. And it has huge implications for the rest of the state, taking us back hundreds of years,” he said.

Hundreds of years? So we’ve had these new exciting progressive definitions of “women” and “men” for hundreds of years? Any citations for that?

Ezra Ishmael Young, who teaches constitutional law at Cornell Law School, said Montana’s bill clearly violates the state’s own constitution, as well as the federal Constitution. In the 1970s, Montana added an “individual dignity” clause to its constitution — stating that “no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws” or discriminated against by the state on the basis of sex.

Montana’s Supreme Court has held that the plain meaning of the dignity clause protects the intrinsic worth and basic humanity of its citizens — which is “directly at odds with what this bill aims to do,” Akilah Maya Deernose, staff attorney at the ACLU of Montana, told reporters at a virtual briefing on Wednesday.

I don’t see it. That’s a less batshit claim than many of these claims, but I still think it’s wrong. I don’t think the worth and basic humanity of people relies on a right to lie about oneself and force everyone else to agree with the lie. In fact I think this line of argument pulls in the other direction – I think it’s infantilizing. It amounts to saying we all have to humor everyone’s delusions about the self, when a huge part of growing up involves shedding delusions about the self. “Oh, actually, I’m not more important than everyone else, I’m not more special than everyone else, I don’t deserve better treatment than everyone else, I’m not a miraculous miracle compared to everyone else.”

The ACLU continues to cheer on teenagers to get their genitalia mutilated.

It’s completely disgusting and dishonest to call it “vital health care.” It’s not. Being unhappy with your gender or sex or both is not the same as being ill or injured. It’s not “vital health care” to kill people so that they can be with god sooner, and it’s not “vital health care” to try to swap out people’s genitals.

Peak incoherent headline:

Montana governor lobbied by non-binary son to reject anti-trans bills

What the hell is a non-binary son?

The son of the Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, met their father in his office to lobby him to reject several bills that would harm transgender people in the state, the Montana Free Press reported.

Hahahahahahaha “their father” – this stuff gets dumber every day.

David Gianforte told the paper they identify as non-binary and use he/they pronouns – the first time they disclosed their gender identity publicly.

How exciting! How glamorous! How first time disclosing! How center of attentioning!

They told the outlet they felt an obligation to use their relationship with their father to stand up for LGBTQ+ people in the state.

How altruistic! How kind! How enlightened! How inclusive! How equityish!

Republicans across the US have moved to restrict transgender rights. Ten bills in the Montana state legislature this session target transgender people, according to translegislation.com, an online tracker.

Those bills including measures that would deny gender-affirming care to minors and limit the definition of sex in state law, which could limit legal protections for transgender people.

Slow down there, Guardian. Who says there is such a thing as a “right” to “gender-affirming” care? How can anyone be sure the care in question is “gender-affirming care” and not mutilation? You could ask that about other surgeries, but there is generally a medical answer. Some surgeries are cosmetic, but is it really cosmetic to cut off a penis or to try to construct a pseudo-penis from tissue taken out of the arm?

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on What is up for debate.

It’s difficult to represent the strongest form of their argument, not because their argument is bad, but because they have multiple arguments pointing to multiple conclusions that are mutually exclusive. The ends of their motte’s arguments are different from the ends of their bailey’s arguments. The arguments deployed in the motte are actually logically incompatible with those deployed in the bailey, so we’d have to handle each of those separately.

Even restricting our attention to just the motte or just the bailey, however, we find mutually exclusive arguments in terms of both premises and conclusions. In the motte, for instance, some arguments proceed from the premise that gender has no biological components, while others proceed from claims about neurology. Some conclude that we ought pretend that TWAW; others conclude that TW literally AW. Some don’t even go as far as pretending TWAW, and instead retreat past the gender motte all the way to freedom of belief.

We can’t steelman conclusions. We steelman arguments for given positions. It’s fundamentally impossible to steelman an argument for a position until you decide what that position actually is. Genderists intentionally don’t do that, in the same way and for the same reasons that the Karen Armstrongs of the world, the apophatic theologians and apologists, refuse to take a defined position on the nature and attributes of God. By leaving their conclusion formless and void, they’re free to deploy whatever arguments they want according to rhetorical expedience, and perhaps more importantly, they’realways free to say that their interlocutors are not engaging with their actual conclusions.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll have realized that this is precisely the motte and bailey. Make an argument for a conclusion and retreat when pressed, accusing your interlocutor of attacking a phantom. The trick works because we do on occasion misinterpret people’s intent. So we do have to acknowledge that sometimes our opponents really were always in the motte, and we only imagined that they’d attempted to occupy the bailey. (It’s a big reason I tend toward pedantry: it minimizes, but unfortunately doesn’t eliminate, this sort of honest misunderstanding.) Apologists, whether theists or Genderists, exploit this necessary conversational concession.

Pay close attention at 1:25.

Penny Mordaunt says, in replying to Joanna Cherry, that historically the LGBT movement has given lesbians a lower profile. Yes it has, and all the more so now. Joanna Cherry nodded agreement when Mordaunt said that.

That film needs to be shown at Edinburgh, and then shown again, and again, and again.

More insults.

Yes so nurture, much positive.

One of those physical interactions was when he tried to push her off her bike.

Speaking of rights, and violations of same –

The BBC:

The screening of a controversial film about transgender issues has been cancelled for a second time by the University of Edinburgh after student protests.

Gender-critical documentary Adult Human Female was due to be shown at a lecture hall in George Square on Wednesday. But the university said protestors were restricting access to the venue and the event was cancelled on safety grounds. A similar protest in December stopped the first attempt to screen the film.

Adult Human Female, made by independent filmmakers Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne, is billed as an “explainer about the issues, how far things have already changed for the worse for women and how difficult it has been to be heard, to be listened to”. Some university staff and student groups had called for the screening to be called off, claiming the documentary contained content that was “a clear attack on trans people’s identities”.

I wonder what would happen if they all identified as Tucker Carlson.

Holly Lawford on trans YouTube celebrity Natalie Winn:

At one point, Wynn spends a substantial amount of time describing, and then attributing to Rowling, so-called “motte-and-bailey” rhetorical tactics. These are arguments by which a person puts forward a difficult-to-defend claim (analogized to a lightly defended low-walled medieval courtyard known as a bailey), and then retreats to a more defensible claim (the metaphorical motte, or castle) when challenged, without conceding that the latter differs from the former.

But then Wynn uses this same strategy to impugn Rowling, first arguing that saying “transwomen are men” is transphobic (the bailey), and then retreating to a far more defensible position, expressed implicitly by means of the following rhetorical question: “Is it really hysteria to react with strong emotions when your basic inclusion in society is up for debate?” The sleight of hand here is aimed at convincing the audience that the widely accepted proposition—that everyone in society should be “included”—simply restates the far more dubious original statement.    

Unfortunately, this sort of motte-and-bailey trick has become a common feature of the gender debate. And so one must constantly remind oneself that the motte and bailey are very different things: trans people’s basic inclusion in society isn’t up for debate (or, at least, not among gender-critical feminists). Whatever universal human rights there are, gender-critical feminists support trans people having them. What is up for debate is whether transwomen, by virtue of self-identification as such, should have access to rights specifically reserved for women.

This is the same cheap trick I keep harping on – the one where trans activists and allies shout that gender skeptics want to take away trans people’s human rights. Of course we don’t, I shout back. What we dispute is their entitlement to new fanciful invented “rights,” especially the ones that clash with women’s rights. I hadn’t thought to call it a motte and bailey.

H/t Mostly Cloudy.

But wait – an article in Prospect says Carlson is a rebel guy.

Tucker, as his enormous fan following knows him, was adored by viewers and reviled by critics for his signature incredulous stare—the slack-jawed expression he wears when he simply can’t believe what he’s being told.

That look of smirking disbelief is deliberately theatrical. But Carlson’s insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority, frequently making larger-than-life figures of the political establishment defend arguments they otherwise treat as self-evident.

Tucker’s willingness to challenge and mock ruling elites went alongside an obsessively nativist message that alienated viewers who might otherwise have embraced his populist perspective.

He didn’t challenge and mock all ruling elites though did he. He worked for a ruling elite.

His popularity with a wide audience begs [raises] the question why other nightly news shows that attacked him didn’t raise the same critiques, without the nativism.

One answer is that Tucker Carlson Tonight was an outlier in corporate-owned cable news, which is typically hostile to independent critiques of executives and political elites. The show declined to play the gatekeeping role that many of Carlson’s detractors demand of mainstream media platforms. Carlson hosted heads of state in the same week as fringe characters of both the far left and far right. He tapped into populist insights, cutting through left- and right-wing echo chambers and putting hard questions to corporate executives and members of the political establishment.

NYTimes columnist Jamelle Bouie is unconvinced.

The trouble is, to investigate this question one would have to watch a lot of old Tucker Carlson shows, or at least some of them, and…I don’t want to.

Talk about a nest of vipers. Fox has a dossier on Carlson to threaten him away from retaliation. Fox made the US a much worse place while making itself a fortune, so I hope the pair of them devour each other leaving nothing behind but the claws.

When Fox announced Carlson’s departure on Monday, the network presented the separation as amicable. But according to one former on-air Fox personality, the anchor and some of the channel’s top executives are parting ways on “the worst” and “messiest possible terms.” Indeed, in private communications released last month as part of the Dominion-Fox lawsuit, the now-fired Fox host gossiped that one such exec “hates us,” claiming she was covertly working against him and other hosts.

But if Carlson attempts to torch the network he’s leaving, Fox is prepared, the sources say.

Eight people familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that Fox News and its communications department — long led by the notoriously aggressive Irena Briganti — has assembled damaging information about Carlson. One source with knowledge calls it an “oppo file.” Two sources add that Fox is prepared to disclose some of its contents if execs suspect that Carlson is coming after the network. 

Make him an offa he can’t refuse.

The file includes internal complaints regarding workplace conduct, disparaging comments about management and colleagues, and allegations that the now-former prime-time host created a toxic work environment, three of the sources say. (Carlson is currently facing a lawsuit from a former senior booking producer, Abby Grossberg, alleging a toxic and misogynist workplace environment. The lawsuit details repeated instances of misogynist behavior at the network, including frequent lewd and sexual discussions of female guests and public figures.)

Gosh, really? I couldn’t be more surprised.

Over the years, Briganti and Fox PR’s tactics have been turned against its own most prominent talent. For instance, The Daily Beast reported in 2018 that “​​emails reviewed and verified” by the outlet “show that Fox’s communications brass have planted negative stories about some of their own top stars, including hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Stuart Varney — the latter of whom is still a Fox employee.”

Those methods for keeping personnel in line are an open secret among current and former Fox News staff. Four former Fox News personalities confirmed Briganti likes to keep “dirt files” on Fox News talent, including one on Carlson.

Is it true that Tucker Carlson is fascinating as well as repellent?

Tucker is hard to replace with just another cable-news face, Hirshman noted, because “he doesn’t just repeat things that others are saying but rather he cooks up these ridiculous issues in an ever-evolving list of grievances”.

What’s more, he’s remarkably good at capturing attention and giving his viewers the language to express their anger, racism and hate.

In that sense, Carlson is something like Donald Trump, who famously called himself a “ratings machine”. You can despise what these men are saying and still have trouble tearing your eyes from their TV presence; they possess a kind of perverse gift, like one bestowed by an evil godmother upon an ill-fated infant in a fairy tale.

I don’t think it is true. I have no trouble at all tearing my eyes from their tv presence; the only reason I ever look at either of them is because they are so destructive. Fascinating alluring evil they are not. Am I missing something?