Heather Cox Richardson on regulations and railroads:

Biden appears to be trying to turn the nation to a modern version of the era before Reagan, when the government provided a basic social safety net, protected civil rights, promoted infrastructure, and regulated business. Since the 1980s, the Republicans have advocated deregulation with the argument that government interference in the way a company does business interrupts the market economy. 

But the derailment of fifty Norfolk Southern train cars, eleven of which carried hazardous chemicals, near East Palestine, Ohio, near the northeastern border of the state on February 3 has powerfully illustrated the downsides of deregulation. The accident released highly toxic chemicals into the air, water, and ground, causing a massive fire and forcing about 5,000 nearby residents in Ohio and Pennsylvania to evacuate. On February 6, when it appeared some of the rail cars would explode, officials allowed the company to release and burn the toxic vinyl chloride stored in it. The controlled burn sent highly toxic phosgene, used as a weapon in World War I, into the air.

Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine has refused federal assistance from President Biden, who, he said, called to offer “anything you need.” DeWine said he had not called back to take him up on the offer. “We will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem or anything, but I’m not seeing it,” he said. 

Of course, he has his eyes closed, and a bandage wrapped around his head for good measure.

Just over the border, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said that Norfolk Southern had botched its response to the accident. “Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars—in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’—yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders. Norfolk Southern’s well known opposition to modern regulations [requires] further scrutiny and investigation to limit the devastating effects of future accidents on people’s lives, property, businesses, and the environment.” 

Shapiro was likely referring to the fact that in 2017, after donors from the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns, the Trump administration got rid of a rule imposed by the Obama administration that required better braking systems on rail cars that carried hazardous flammable materials. 

According to David Sirota, Julia Rock, Rebecca Burns, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writing in the investigative journal The Lever, Norfolk Southern supported the repeal, telling regulators new electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT) would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.” Railroads also lobbied to limit the definition of HFFT to cover primarily trains that carry oil, not industrial chemicals. The train that derailed in Ohio was not classified as an HHFT.

Let’s have more and bigger releases of hazardous chemicals into the air and ground!

I’m reading a piece from 2018 by Massimo Pigliucci on Jordan Peterson and Stoicism, so you get to read some of it too.

The question at hand is not whether there are some similarities between what Peterson writes and what the Stoics teach. Such similarities are indubitably there. Then again, “pick yourself up and do the right thing,” or “endure what life throws at you” are not exclusively Stoic concepts. They are found pretty much everywhere, in one form or another, from Christianity to Judaism, from Buddhism to Confucianism. And yet I’m not aware of anyone making the argument that Peterson is a Stoic-Christian-Judeo-Buddhist-Confucian. The issue, rather, is whether there are sufficient deep similarities between Peterson and Stoicism. I will argue that not only the answer is no, but that the sort of worldview Peterson advances is, in fact, anti-Stoic.

The first bit of Petersonian advice we encounter in Vacula’s post is “clean your room and get your life in order.” Which is good advice, the sort that my mom used to give me. But that didn’t make her a Stoic. The crucial part of the Stoic advice is that it tells us how to get our life in order: by practicing the four cardinal virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance; and it explains to us why we ought to do it: because virtue is the only thing that is always good (it can’t be used for bad, by definition), as argued by Socrates in the Euthydemus.

Peterson, by contrast, gets this imperative from his adoption of Carl Jung’s views about the perennial opposition between logos and eros, where logos represents order, and it is masculine, while eros represents chaos, and it is feminine. From which Peterson further derives that it is both good and natural for men to control women (order has to overcome chaos).

It’s pretty hilarious when you think about it. All those wars humanity has been afflicted with over the millennia? Those are women’s doing are they? (Of course they are! What was the Trojan War but a war over a woman? Totally her doing, obviously!)

But more than hilarious it’s profoundly irritating. Ho yus, we’re order and you’re chaos and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that we can break your jaw with a punch, it’s entirely because YOU ARE CHAOS, BITCHES.

Updating to clarify: Massimo of course goes on to say Jung is talking “a lot of pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical nonsense.” I’m laughing/shouting at Jung & Peterson, not Massimo.

It seems to be true.

AP News February 2018:

In October, DOT published a notice inviting the public to recommend which regulations should be repealed, replaced, suspended, or modified. Accompanying the notice was a list of 20 potential candidates, including 13 of the most significant transportation safety rules of the past decade.

Airlines, automakers, railroads, pipeline operators, trucking companies, chemical manufacturers and others responded to the notice with their wish lists. After the comment period closed, DOT said it would repeal a 2015 rule opposed by freight railroads requiring trains that haul highly flammable crude oil be fitted with advanced braking systems that stop all rail cars simultaneously instead of conventional brakes that stop cars one after the other.

Emphasis added.

The advanced brakes can reduce the distance and time needed for a train to stop and keep more tank cars on the track in the event of a derailment, DOT said two years ago when it issued the rule.

Freight railroads, which say the rule’s safety benefits are marginal and don’t justify the cost, persuaded Congress to require DOT to revisit the rule. The department now says its revised analysis shows costs would outstrip benefits.

Yeah yeah but the real point is that owners and bosses profit from weaker safety regulations while it’s mere workers, and people who live near the tracks, and the environment who benefit from stronger safety regulations. Who ya gonna pick? Owners and bosses, duh.

This is making me rather angry.

Oh jeez. If this is true…

The CNN story is that there was a better braking system, the Obama administration said great, let’s make it mandatory for trains carrying hazardous materials, and the Trump administration said no let’s not and canceled what the Obama administration had done.

Please, tell us more about what a hero Trump is to The White Working Class.

We’re too busy mopping up after climate disasters to try to prevent climate disasters.

The damage caused by global heating across the globe is increasingly clear, and recovering from climate disasters is already costing billions of dollars. Furthermore, these disasters can cause cascading problems including water, food and energy crises, as well as increased migration and conflict, all draining countries’ resources.

Sounds kind of tipping pointish, doesn’t it.

The report said: “This is a doom loop: the consequences of the [climate] crisis draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to higher temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.”

And this is while it’s all too obvious that nobody is really doing anything in the first place. Nobody can. Tell people to stop flying? Tell the airlines to shut down? Tell people to stop driving? Let the price of oil skyrocket? Tell corporations to stop making cars? Close the freeways? Shut down the cruise industry? Tell people to get out of Florida and Arizona and much of California?

Not going to happen.

Yet another casual insult.

You’ll be amazed to learn that’s not a woman.

Originally a comment by Beth Clarkson on Greasing the wheels.

I agree with you both that it’s blatant corruption and that it shouldn’t be shrugged aside as unimportant and also agree that it isn’t a big deal. My Trump supporting relatives point to Hunter Biden regarding his well-paid Ukrainian corporation position. I can’t say that doesn’t look like corruption. It does. Turning a blind eye to this sort of thing is why so many working-class Americans are MAGA people. I just point out that the Trump children were even more blatant about cashing in on their fathers position, both foreign and domestically. Doesn’t matter of course. They love Trump. He hasn’t done anything wrong in their opinion. Then we talk about other things.

IMO, the most serious corruption affecting us is the issues of industry capture of regulatory agencies. It is pernicious throughout the federal U.S. regulatory system. I don’t have any solid feeling about what it would take to turn those agencies back into defenders of citizens rather than corporations. Terrible tragedy maybe? That seems inevitable if we don’t figure out a better solution to improving that situation. Sadly, this one doesn’t even make anybody’s radar as a thing to focus on.

Actually, on second thought, the solution isn’t that hard. We have a lot of research about what we need to do regarding this problem. But it’s devilishly hard to implement because it would require a power shift within each of the agencies.

Robin Moira White gets confused from one paragraph to the next.

The stabbing of teenager Brianna Ghey in Warrington is a terrible tragedy for her family and my heart goes out to them. It is not clear whether the fact that she was trans was a factor in the events in Linear Park, Warrington, but shock at her death has rippled through the trans community.

I cannot help but feel this kind of tragedy was waiting to happen. Anyone who followed the Conservative leadership contest will have seen the candidates vying with each other to stoke “debate” over trans people’s lives; and such sentiment is something I, as Britain’s only trans discrimination barrister, have to cope with every day.

So………….”it’s not clear whether being trans was a factor, but being trans was definitely a factor and I have to cope with it every day.” That’s some high-class reasoning right there.

But wait, it gets better! He cites Montgomerie of all people.

Katy Montgomerie, a trans social media commentator, was recently assaulted on a night out with friends, just for being trans. She wrote about it on Twitter.

Monty says a guy threw a drink over him. We don’t know that he’s telling the truth. We don’t even know that he knows the difference between truth and fiction, which is one reason this ideology is so toxic. If he believes he’s a woman he could believe a lot of other bizarre things.

A law lecturer says White should know better. White spits venom.

It escalated.

Stop that.

That’s not a woman. Stop pinning men’s crimes on women. Stop falsifying the statistics. Stop lying. Stop confusing the public. Stop lying and faking the stats and pinning men’s crimes on us to pander to men who pretend to be women. Stop it.

What a mess we are.

As more and more details emerge about the recent unfortunate exercise in Second Amendment freedoms at Michigan State University, there are a couple that not only stick in the throat, but also make you wonder even more deeply what kind of madhouse in which we’ve all been living for the past few decades. From Fox2 in Detroit:

When Jackie Matthews was 11 years old, she was inside a classroom in Newtown, Connecticut, when children were shot and killed. Now at 21, she’s a Michigan State student and was just a few feet away from where a gunman killed at least 3 other students. Jackie shared her story on TikTok, recounting the moment she sat crouched in a classroom in Newtown when a gunman shot and killed kindergartners at Sandy Hook Elementary. She said that she suffered PTSD fracture in her lower back and every time she is in a stressful situation, the pain flares up. “The fact that this is the second mass shooting I have lived through is incomprehensible,” she said.

That’s not even the only one, Charles Pierce tells us.

And from another recent exercise in Second Amendment freedoms just a few miles up the road from MSU. From The New York Times:

Ms. Riddle, the Oxford High graduate who is now at Michigan State, remembered hiding in the band room in high school the day of that 2021 shooting. On Monday night, she and her roommate barricaded their dorm room door with a dresser and their bathroom door with a hamper, and hid under their desks. “I was trying to make myself as small as possible,” she said.

Sssssssshhhhhhhhh. Guns are more important than people.

Dennis Kavanagh has a stemwinder of a thread on Sturgeon. Since so many of you are allergic to T_____r I’ll quote it instead of showing.

2/ Sturgeon embraced an unreal, elite fad because she mistook it for gay rights 2.0. It should have been obvious from the start this was not the case had she listened to women and gay groups making the point that without sex, there is no same sex attraction as a great woman said.

3/ The FM not only embraced the madness of dangerous legislation, she took on the clothes of those who push this extremism in the form of their disinclination to debate and contempt for any dissent and she did so claiming to be a champion of Scots democracy.

I like that metaphor – disinclination to debate and contempt for any dissent as clothing.

4/ The result was pure absurdity. A FM inventing the three sexes of M, F and rapist. A FM saying TWAW but not that one, that’s an individual. A FM calling more than half the country homophobes, racists, transphobes, you name it. This is governing against your people, not for them.

5/ The corruption of gender runs deep and this amateur hour experiment with the safety of women and the right of homosexuals to have single sex spaces extended to process. Groups were shut out of the GRA process or told concerns were “not valid”.

6/ Such well founded, obvious, and inevitable concerns turned out to be well founded within a matter of days of the legislation. Locked in the gender prison, Sturgeon was unable to adjust course or construe any comment as anything other than hate.

He’s a dab hand with the metaphors, Dennis is.

7/ This is what happens when democracy becomes gendocracy. When you prefer the ideological male voice from the UN over the two female ones concerned with VAWG and, disgracefully so far as her record goes, torture. To achieve a comment from the latter in a Western State is galling.

That last sentence is confusing. Maybe “a comment” is a stray; the sentence makes sense without it.

8/ The core of the ideology the FM embraced cannot hold; with characteristic foresight Joyce subtitled her book “when ideology meets reality”, precisely what happened here. The cosy merry go round of gendocrats met the real world – the legacy is chaos and a diminished figure.

9/ Sturgeon leaves office having set back the cause of independence. Of achieving remarkable polls in which Scots support a Tory SoS deploying s35. She leaves office with the plausible criticism her policies exposed the most vulnerable women there are to danger.

10/ This is the epitaph of gender. “No debate” means no feedback mechanism. Bad policies just get worse. Bad governance becomes more insular and self repeating. Even good politicians begin to look like amateurs. This is what happens when you govern from outside the real world.

This, or Afghanistan.

BBC Live on Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation.

One snippet:

Ms Sturgeon says she has found public opinions about her have become “barriers” to debate.

She says issues that are controversial “end up almost irrationally so” – though makes no specific reference to Scotland’s gender reforms.

That’s probably especially true when the issue itself is rooted in an irrational belief system.

Another:

Sky News touches on the row around transgender prisoners. The FM is asked whether this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She is also asked – was it a failure of her leadership not to deliver independence?

Sturgeon says she will “leave other people to judge” her record and says “no, that issue wasn’t the final straw”.

“It’s not the case that this decision is because of short-term issues,” she insists. She does regret not being able to bring a “rational approach” to debates, but cites her track record of standing up for women’s rights and marginalised groups in society. Again, she avoids being drawn into questions about transgender issues.

Yes but “marginalised groups in society” can mean anything or nothing. Women are marginalised, and trans ideology is one of the forces that adds to that marginalization.

Walter Shapiro in The New Republic:

Maybe I’m expecting too much from Biden, but a small incident recently reported by Annie Linskey in The Wall Street Journal troubled me. Toward the end of a nuanced article about the president’s many, many ties to the University of Pennsylvania, Linskey revealed that one of Hunter Biden’s daughters was rejected for early admission to Penn in 2019. That setback prompted Biden—then a private citizen about to declare for the presidency—to speak to the dean of admissions at Penn. Probably not coincidentally, Biden’s granddaughter ended up among the 7 percent of applicants eventually admitted to Penn in 2019.

Of course it did, and of course she did, because this is the guy who let his son leverage Dad’s status into a lavishly paid job that he had no qualifications for. It’s the same old crap. Biden is Mister Important and he uses it. It’s smug and sleazy and not as different from the trumpy network as it should be.

In a world of overhyped fake scandals—where everything is the greatest outrage since Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton—this is a nothing-burger. 

I don’t care. I don’t care how it ranks. It’s using privilege in backstage ways to advance oneself and one’s friends and family at the expense of people who don’t have that privilege. It’s corrupt. Yes there are much worse forms of corruption, but that doesn’t make Biden’s okay.

Perhaps Hunter Biden’s daughter would have gotten into Penn on her merits during the regular admission period, but thanks to Grandpa Joe’s intervention, we will never know. In all likelihood, someone else was denied admission to Penn so there would be a slot for Biden’s granddaughter.

And why? Because she’s Biden’s granddaughter. That’s not a good enough reason.

The Telegraph on the Tavistock:

The Tavistock clinic ignored evidence that 97.5 per cent of children seeking sex changes had autism, depression or other problems that might have explained their unhappiness, a new book claims.

Not to mention the general confusion and partial information and rudimentary critical faculties that go with being very young.

Staff at the NHS facility were so determined to push a pro-transgender policy that children who might not have been trans were treated as “collateral damage” by clinicians who labelled doubters “transphobic”, a whistleblower says.

So the question becomes “why?” WHY were they so determined to do that? What is it about the trans ideology that was so attractive to people at a medical facility?

Seven in ten children had more than five “associated features” such as abuse, anxiety, eating disorders or bullying, and a social worker estimated that as few as 1 in 50 children treated at the clinic would have stayed transgender for life if they had not been given controversial drug therapy.

Well I can estimate that as few as 0 in 50 children would have even thought of being “transgender” before this social contagion came whirling down out of the Bullshit Mountains.

The claims are made in Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, by Hannah Barnes, a BBC Newsnight journalist, which is published on Feb 23.

Time to think indeed. Way past time to think if you ask me.

Less than two per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder, but according to Gids’s own data, around 35 per cent of its referrals “present with moderate to severe autistic traits”.

Among such traits could be literal thinking, which could make it hard to grasp that people can’t literally change sex, especially when crowds of people are assuring you they can.

It’s funny (or sad, or both) when they do the very thing they’re warning not to do. Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, the title says. Spoiler: it’s because they blend right in.

Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Lefties of the 1960s were indeed dismissive and contemptuous of women. That’s one reason “second wave” feminism happened.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence[1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

See it? See where it loses the plot?

Sentence one: We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved.

Immediately followed by: There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

First, WE MUST TAKE MISOGYNY SERIOUSLY AS A PRIMARY EVIL, second, MISOGYNY IS A SYMPTOM OF ALL THESE SERIOUSLY BAD THINGS.

Morris misses her own point. That’s not an easy thing to do!

If you’re telling people to take misogyny seriously as a bad thing in itself, not just as a bad thing because it’s a gateway to much more important bad things, then you don’t go straight from “misogyny is bad” to “it’s a gateway to these other things!!”

It’s no picnic being a girl, and it’s apparently getting worse.

Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.

Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.

Never mind that; let’s bemoan the plight of trans girls instead. Paying attention to the problems of female people is so last millennium; the cool kids are all about male people who idennnify as female.

Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling so persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous year that they stopped regular activities — a figure that was double the share of boys and the highest in a decade, CDC data showed.

Girls fared worse on other measures, too, with higher rates of alcohol and drug use than boys and higher levels of being electronically bullied, according to the 89-page report. Thirteen percent had attempted suicide during the past year, compared with 7 percent of boys.

I seriously wonder if one reason for that could be that feminism has abandoned them in favor of cooing over males who pretend to be female. I do. Feminism isn’t there for them any more, it’s there for male people who claim to have gender issues.

Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said there is probably not a single cause to explain the data but rather interacting causes that vary by race, ethnicity, class, culture and access to mental health resources.

Even so, he said, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” he said.

And guess who gets to be the target of that aggression.

It seems someone went too far.

His friends line up to continue his valiant work.

Chase Strangio is in battle gear.

Did Tennessee ban care for trans adolescents though? Did it pass a law saying trans adolescents can’t have health care?

The ACLU press release is more precise than Strangio on Twitter.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Tennessee, and Lambda Legal are promising the transgender youth of Tennessee they will bring immediate legal action against proposed restrictions on their health care currently being considered by the state legislature.

SB 1 and HB 1 would ban the only evidence-based care for gender dysphoria for transgender people under 18. State senate committees have thus far ignored the warnings of transgender youth, their families, and their medical providers about the potential harms of these bills, and similar restrictions in Alabama and Arkansas have been enjoined by federal courts.

There we go. So it’s not health care in general, or health care for adolescents in general, it’s “health care” for gender dysphoria…so presumably puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones and/or surgeries.

The problem of course is that these are drastic measures, and some people who have taken such drastic measures now regret it. This isn’t straightforward medical treatment, it’s attempts to change the body to make it match the opposite sex. There are side effects.

There are also effects to not taking these measures, but it’s not simply a fact that the drastic measures fix everyone and do no harm and never end up with bitter regrets. They don’t fix everyone, they do harm at least some people, and they do end up with regrets in some cases.

But the ACLU is aboard the trans train and making it go faster and faster. Too late to jump off now.

There’s no such thing as misogyny.

On Saturday night, Wiebke Hüster, a German dance critic, was taking a break from watching a ballet program at Hanover’s main opera house when the choreographer Marco Goecke appeared in front of her.

That morning, Ms. Hüster, 57, had published a review of Mr. Goecke’s latest work, and it wasn’t positive. Watching his new dance, “In the Dutch Mountains,” audiences would feel like they’re either “going insane” or “being killed by boredom,” she wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major German newspaper.

So it was perhaps unsurprising when Mr. Goecke, 50, the ballet director at the Hanover State Opera, confronted her, asking why she wrote so negatively about him.

Oh I don’t know, I think it’s a little surprising for an artist to confront a critic, especially in person. Bad reviews are part of the life of an artist.

What was a surprise was that Mr. Goecke — who is known for his pet dachshund, Gustav, as well as for his work — then pulled a bag filled with dog excrement out of his pocket and rubbed the feces on Ms. Hüster’s face.

As one does.

Would he have done that to a male critic? Not unless he wanted his nose broken.

The Hanover State Opera said in a statement posted on its website that it had suspended Mr. Goecke from his position as ballet director, a role he has held since 2019. His “impulsive” action had not only offended Ms. Hüster, but “massively damaged” the ballet company, it added.

It wasn’t “impulsive.” People don’t carry dog shit in their pockets. It was planned, which is the opposite of impulsive.

The opera house has asked Mr. Goecke to explain his actions and said it would wait to hear from him before deciding on further steps, the statement said.

There is no “explain.”

I decided for some reason we needed some Lift Every Voice and Sing.