The Independent on our new overlord:

Musk’s latest post – “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” – follows a streak of messages from the world’s wealthiest person on his newly acquired platform that increasingly has amplified far-right and conspiratorial content.

The early morning post – hinting at support for Covid-19 conspiracy theories while offending transgender and nonbinary people – was met approvingly by far-right members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andy Biggs, who indicated that the incoming Republican-controlled House of Representatives will investigate Dr Fauci.

For…? Benghazi was it? Emails? Communists in Hollywood? Jews under the bed?

At the onset of the pandemic, Musk relied on the platform to downplay the magnitude of the crisis. He also wrongfully believed [said] the pandemic would be over within weeks, called public safety guidelines “dumb” and “fascist” as he sought to preserve his heavily scrutinised Tesla manufacturing business, and echoed far-right protesters and Republican officials across the US who have sought to cast [sow] doubt about the dangers of the public health emergency and intimidate health officials and experts who correctly warned the public of its impacts.

…

Shortly after he acquired the platform, Twitter announced it would no longer enforce its policy against spreading Covid disinformation, while its new owner frequently interacts with and replies to posts from far-right personalities, accusing the platform of suppressing “information” about the pandemic that has been labeled false or misleading.

It’s all so intersectional. It’s the intersection of unchecked capitalism with arrogance with powerful social media. Hitler plus multibillionaire plus Twitter. Not good.

Sigh. I remember the good old days when I didn’t have to spend any time paying attention to Elon Musk. I took full advantage of the luxury and paid him no mind at all. Those days are over. The guy’s dangerous.

The Times runs another generic “they’re going after the trans folx!!” piece, disguised in the usual way as being about the LGBTQ.

Since far-right social media activists began attacking Boston Children’s Hospital over the summer for providing care for transgender children, the hospital has received repeated bomb threats.

No, the issue wasn’t “providing care.” That’s worded to make it sound as if Nazis protested a hospital’s treating children for Covid or pneumonia or other diseases. Boston Children’s was (and I assume is) providing “gender-affirming surgery” and bragging about being the first to do so.

Doctors across the country who do similar work have been harassed. 

Doctors who cut off children’s and teenagers’ breasts or penises have been “harassed”? Is it really harassment or is it saying “stop mutilating children and teenagers who’ve been confused by a hideous destructive fad”?

The Times shows a large photo of protesters with signs saying “say NO to males competing as females” with the caption “Demonstrators in Washington in June protested the inclusion of transgender women on women’s sports teams.” Inclooooosion; how could anyone protest incloooooosion? Why would women not want to inclooooooood men in their sports? Just a few men, that is; it wouldn’t do to have too many or then it would just be men competing against men again and the whole point is to give a select few men the fun of cheating women out of their own sports. The Times of course doesn’t so much as whisper anything about all that.

Conservatives say they are trying to protect children from irreversible treatments and ensure women’s sports remain fair; in midterm election ads, right-wing groups argued that transition care amounted to “radical gender experiments” and that allowing transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their gender identity would “destroy girls’ sports.” 

Liar liar liar liar. Much of the left is besotted with the trans ideology, yes, but not all of it.

(The treatments offered to transgender children are endorsed by medical associations and have been shown to reduce suicide risk, and few transgender women and girls seek to participate in women’s and girls’ sports.)

So the fuck what? So what if few men seek to participate in women’s and girls’ sport? One is one too many. It doesn’t become ok because not many men do it, and in any case it will become more and more men doing it over time.

This could be something to look forward to:

Rupert Murdoch rarely has to answer for the alternative realities presented by his hugely profitable US cable network, Fox News.

Its conspiratorial claims of a parade of cover ups from the 2012 Benghazi attack to the climate crisis and Covid-19 have been lapped up by Fox viewers and scorned by much of the rest of America, and then the world moved on.

Well…the world moved on but with more people believing Fox lies about Benghazi and the climate crisis and the pandemic. It’s not “Fox tells lies and then we move on and nothing bad happened”; it’s Fox tells lies and people believe them and this is why we can’t have nice things.

But on Tuesday, the 91-year-old billionaire media mogul will be obliged to answer difficult questions under oath about the inner workings of Fox.

The “under oath” bit is significant, because it means he’ll have problems if he lies and they can prove he lied. Murdoch and Fox are all about lying, so not lying will be tricky for him.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing the cable news station and its Murdoch-owned parent company, Fox Corp, for $1.6bn (£1.3bn) over repeated claims that it rigged its voting machines as part of a conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.

The suit shines a spotlight on Fox News’ part in promoting Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign and its hand in driving the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But legal experts say that Dominion, which supplied voting machines to 28 states, appears to be building a wider case that Fox News has a long history of misinformation and steamrolling facts that do not fit its editorial line.

Fox’s “alternative realities” and “misinformation” are not what news outlets should be dealing in. Journalism shouldn’t tell lies.

Fox got in trouble with Trump when they called the Arizona vote for Biden in 2020. So…

Fox News put a parade of Trump lawyers, advisers and apologists front and centre over the following weeks to promote a myriad of conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from Trump, including by rigging the voting machines.

Alongside them, some of Fox’s biggest names took up the cry of fraud. NPR revealed that during the discovery process, Dominion acquired an email written by a Fox News producer begging colleagues not to allow one of those presenters, Jeanine Pirro, on the air because she was spreading conspiracy theories about the vote. Pirro, a former district attorney and judge who is close to Trump, continued broadcasting.

Lawyers have also obtained rafts of internal messages that are “evidence that Fox knew the lies it was broadcasting about Dominion were false” and part of a culture of politically loaded reporting and broadcasts far from the network’s claim to be “fair and balanced”.

Maybe they think the truth should be balanced with lies.

It reminds me of the left over the past decade or so. Some of us say we can’t just keep repeating these stupid lies over and over, and others of us say we can and we must and you who refuse are evil murdering demons.

Fox argues that Hannity and the other presenters are protected by journalistic privilege but that position has been complicated by the Fox host’s own description of his role.

In defending his overt bias in favour of Trump and Republicans, Hannity has more than once said he is not a journalist but a talk show host, and so does not have to adhere to the profession’s ethical standards. He took the same position earlier this year after the January 6 congressional committee exposed dozens of his messages to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, offering advice and seeking direction as the White House challenged the presidential election result.

He’s a talk show host who identifies as having journalistic privilege.

Originally a comment by YNnB (yes, again) on Elon Musk does not have imposter syndrome.

Then there’s working on shit to make it livable… solving that problem would also be useful making Terra more habitable even as it undergoes massive ecological shifts.

Maybe I’m just a “glass half empty” kinda guy, but I’m not so sure that it would work this way. Those “massive ecological shifts” are our fault. We already know that much of what we’re doing to the Earth shouldn’t be done, yet we do it anyway. A Mars colony will be a distant, isolated luxury bubble where everyone knows they have to be careful lest they do something stupid that kills everyone. We’re already living in a planet-sized bubble subject to the same rules, it’s just taken a few millenia for our numbers and mistakes to catch up with us. It’s taken more of them, but their effects will turn out to be equally lethal. There’s nothing a Mars colony will teach us that we don’t already know. We already know we shouldn’t dump toxic wastes into the air, water and soil we rely on to breathe, drink, and grow food. The world has become smaller, and it’s all interconnected. We’ve learned too late that “over there” is “right here,” and that you can’y throw anything “away.” We already know that the Earth’s ability to absorb these wastes is limited. We are running into the limits of the bubble in which we already live, and upon which we are utterly, inescapably dependent. If we can’t make things work here, colonies elsewhere (which will themselves remain dependent upon Earth) are pointless, as we will be taking our mistakes with us.

It took just under twenty years for the lessons of the Apollo One fire to be forgotten. The Challenger disaster did not prevent the pressures and complacency that resulted in the destruction of Columbia seventeen years after that. (And that’s just the American space experience; the Russian track record has its fair share of incompetance and heedless, expedient risk-taking.) Any Mars colony will have its own version of shoddy construction, O-rings and foam-shedding. We as a species have already blown through any number of the equivalents of faulty wiring, O-rings and tile damage. We are seeing the very real possibility of a planetary scale loss of mission, loss of vehicle, loss of crew, yet we push on with what NASA’s repeated inquiries called “go fever.”

The best thing we could be doing is reducing our ecological footprint, reducing the pressure that humans are putting on the rest of the living and non-living environment. Even without anthropogenic climate change, human overshoot is an ongoing crisis. Our sheer numbers limit our ability to do this; having eight billion humans places a certain minimum level on the level of activity which must take place to keep all of them alive and healthy, but we’re not even doing a very good job of that, thanks in part to extreme, grotesque inequalities of wealth distribution (Hello Mr. Musk. Fancy meeting you here!). Decreasing the human population is key to the drawdown of human demands upon the planet. It will happen, one way or another. If you think human dictatorships are bad, wait ’til you see Nature’s idea of draconian measures. We can try to manage our numbers ourselves, or they will be managed for us. If we do not step back, we will be stepped on.

The continued pursuit of a suicidally unsustainable way of life will result in disaster for ourselves and many other living creatures. That we allow ourselves to be led along such a path by those who can make a quick buck off of it while the ride lasts seems to be a lethal flaw in our make-up. That all of us have heard of and have been forced to pay any attention at all to the likes of Elon Musk (or Donald Trump!) and anything he thinks or does is a symptom of this. That his wealth gives him such power and influence is a sign of our weakness and immaturity as a society and a species. This mind-set cannot be fixed by throwing engineering at it. Our technological development has outstripped our ability inclination to use it wisely.

In the next few decades, we’ll likely be facing massive disruptions of weather patterns and climatic zones, with cascading follow-on effects on agriculture, and whatever surviving natural biomes that might yet be hanging on. Add rising sea levels and island/coastal inundation, and you have the foundation for the collapse and disappearance of nations (some of which are armed with nuclear weapons) and the mass movement (and death) of hundreds of millions of people. Even if we avoid actual armed conflict, the damage, destruction and displacement will make the two World Wars combined look like the proverbial Sunday school picnic. Unless its life support systems were wildly chaotic, and its inhabitants unpredictably violent, I’m not sure that there are many lessons we could learn from a Mars outpost that would be applicable to living on Earth That’s Almost Here.

Jennifer Bilek talks about gender ideology as corporate fiction:

The creation of this corporate fiction is one step toward attempting to overlay a virtual reality onto the natural world and to construct a religion out of technology.  Elites at the highest levels of our technocracy have been speaking about technologies so advanced that they provide us with god-like qualities for at least fifty years, probably longer. 

Ring a bell? Sound like Elon Musk at all with his cheery plans to move humans to Mars?

The current iteration of this ideology, established by the technocracy we live in, is meant to ensconce us in a virtual or cyber world to which the natural world is subjugated. With its massive propaganda apparatus, it has only taken a decade to convince the populace that there is a unique type of human, untethered to the biosphere like the rest of us, mere “biological people.”

Let’s just put the magic helmet on and spend the rest of our lives dreaming.

Corporations, banks, international investment houses, governments, legal institutions, and influential non-governmental organizations (NGOs) market the idea that we are not a sexually dimorphic species. They don’t care about the identity issues of a minuscule part of the population. It is patently ridiculous to think so.  They are marketing disembodiment. “Gender,” currently being promoted as a revolutionary human rights movement to set us free, is an industry posing as social progress for the people.  It seeks to deconstruct human reproductive sex for profit and human engineering. It is posited that our freedom will emerge when technology takes over where human reproduction ends. When this purported dead weight of human reproduction ends, male & female will be obsolete. We can then live as our “authentic selves” beyond male and female, youth and adult, beyond material existence and its limitations.

I know little or nothing about this but it’s an interesting thought. It sounds like Avatar. I found Avatar extremely creepy and gruesome, a geeky boys’ fantasy run amok. Yay we can sit comfortably on flying horses without being snapped off by physical forces because it’s all just a video game we live in forever. Who the hell wants to?

Maybe the gender-is-magic people do.

The male sexual fetish of transsexualism, a compulsion to own female biology for oneself, has been rebranded to “transgenderism” because a male fetish would be a tough sell to any population.  “Transgender” sounds cool and edgy & feels mutinous for teens filled with the rebellious spirit of youth who are clueless about the repercussions of being sterilized by the drugs & surgeries being marketed to them. Claiming synthetic sex, a corporately manufactured illusion, has become the medical-tech generation’s counterpart to getting a secret tattoo.  These kids adopting synthetic sex identities have grown up online with cyber identities & have had their personalities medicalized since they were old enough to talk, while previous generations were out exploring the real world.

It sounds horribly plausible, doesn’t it.

Technocratic elites have spent years discussing the virtual reality they seek to create. We will be enclosed and connected to everything and everyone else via bodiless minds without any roots in the biosphere.  Elon Musk promotes his Neuralink, Ray Kurzweil, a Singularity, Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem movement, and Lifenaut organizations tout immortality in cyberspace. Mark Zuckerberg promises a utopia in his Metaverse, and Yuval Harari’s technological god will rid us of the cumbersome world of nature for something much more significant.  Elites and corporations are investing in humans framed as otherworldly and not like the rest of us, rooted in biology, because they see profits and believe this is our future. The fascination of elites in “gender ideology” takes on a new light when seen in context. 

A lurid new light. To repeat, I know little or nothing about this, but I think there’s at least something to it. It’s pretty grim.

Originally a comment by Sastra on They are appalled.

I just watched the film. It’s mostly just talking heads with a few sometimes awkward special effects thrown in, but still worth seeing. It’s worth seeing even if you believe TWAW, so you understand the concerns. I’ve read enough of the other side to guess what they’d object to, and why.

… it endangers trans* people on campus and beyond, erasing their identities and encouraging the spread of hateful portrayals.

Sometimes hyperbole like this makes it harder to maintain my natural sympathy and respect for trans people because it diminishes their stature. Instead of ordinary human beings struggling with difficult problems and searching for meaning and happiness, they start to sound like emotional basket cases on the verge of a breakdown, incapable of coping with disagreement or thinking straight. They, on the other hand, seem to think this fragility ought to move our sympathy for what must surely be such a horrible situation it would break down even the strongest.

I’m reminded of a time when PZ announced he was going to desecrate a blessed communion wafer and this got picked up by some online Catholic groups. The devout started pouring into the comment section of Pharyngula in various stages of distress. One overwrought woman informed us that treating the Consecrated Host with disrespect caused her so much anguish that she’d rather her 6 year old daughter was raped, then for that to happen. That little revelation didn’t inspire pity. It inspired contempt for the system, yes — but also for her. She’d lost her perspective.

Thinking about this, I’m starting to wonder how the transgender-identified male would deal with this Sophie’s Choice. Would they rather 1) be socially thought of as men who believe they’re woman and consequently denied a right to enter at least some single-sex spaces or 2) be raped, beaten, and left for dead? If they honestly think it’s the latter, well, I think they ought to sort out their priorities, as Ron would say.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What does bullshit mean?

And there’s no obligation to “trust” that anyone is “who they tell you they are.” Do banks and government institutions do this when you’re filling out forms? No. They require proof of identity; that is “identity” as in being the individual human being you purport to be, not the “identity as inner sense of self=personality.”

Being compelled to believe what people tell you to believe is not a thing, unless you’re living in a dictatorship. Even then, in your heart of hearts, you have the right to doubt, the right to say “no.” Whether you can say so out loud is a test of your freedom.

As a matter of politeness, one might give a stranger the benefit of the doubt, that they are what they say they are. In casual conversation you’re not going to ask for diplomas and licences if someone tells you they’re a lawyer, a doctor or a pilot. But if you’re going on trial, under the knife, or stepping onto a plane, you’re assuming that someone, somewhere has asked for, and been provided with, the requisite credentials that certify that the person holding them has the training and knowledge entitling the lawyer, doctor, or pilot to plead your case, wield the scalpel, or fly the plane. Any time someone succesfully cons their way into any regulated profession without the proper training and vetting, it is treated as a major failure of the system in question, and rightly so. We regularly place our lives in the hands of such individuals; such fields of trust, skill, power and knowledge should be off limits to frauds, charlatans, and amateurs.

This is the danger of the so-called “right” to change one’s sex on a birth certificate or passport. Being “officially” declared the sex you are not is a legal fiction carried too far, and one that should be reversed. Immediately. Governments would never allow someone to “legally” claim to be a different height, or age, or species. Claiming to be the sex one is not is equally as impossible and nonsensical. Even without documentation, we’re supposed to believe that males who claim to be female are as safe to be around as women, that they are no longer men, so no longer a threat. “Trust me when I tell you who I am!” To quote some Olympic women weight lifters, “No thank you.”

Trans activists might wave around their wee scraps of paper that “declare” they are actually female when they are not, using them as licences to access facilities, spaces and opportunities to which they should have no right. but these doctored documents do nothing to change the facts of the matter, any more than the “incorporation” of a company magically creates an actual person, ex nihilo. Unlike the professions, there is no “training” or “skill” that lets you change sex. Things just don’t work like that, and all the lipstick and high heels in the world can’t change it. Such an edit might be validating and affirming on paper, but reality isn’t listening. Neither should we.

There are many larger issues at stake, alongside the safety of women and girls (which is large enough in itself.) Do we really want official government documents to be as malleable as a Wikipedia article? Do “gender fluid” folk get to have the sex indicated on their passports in pencil? Do we render our statistics and book-keeping null and void because some men are now legally “women?” It is a bad idea, a legal fiction taken too far. It’s not “kind” it’s not “inclusive” it’s just stupidity that will redound upon the legitimacy of government institutions themselves, rendering the basic identification information we are supposed to trust less believable and authoratative than one of those novelty certificates you can buy that grants you ownership of real estate on the Moon, or even a star. At least the Moon and stars actually exist.

Yet another FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYONE burble, this time from The Irish Examiner.

When I discuss feminism with my students, I stress that feminism is for everyone. It is a social and political ideology intended for all human beings. Feminism is about equality, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or creed.

No, it is not. Of course it’s not. Look at the “fem” part. Take as long as you need.

In a way, all rights struggles and equality struggles are about everyone. The core ideas of equality, fairness, rights, justice are for and about everyone. Human rights benefit all humans, yes. But the reality is that rights and equality struggles are struggles: they have to be struggles because we don’t in fact have perfect human rights and freedom and justice. Many categories of people have to struggle harder for their share. Those categories of people get to carry out that struggle, without being told that their struggle is for everyone.

I go on to explain that this fight for equality is blighted by male violence. I explain that male violence is also a problem for men, who are attacked by other violent men. But more so for women.

But more so for women plus male violence toward men isn’t a feminist issue and isn’t a problem women are required to solve. But Jennifer Horgan thinks it is, because otherwise the men won’t listen. She says we must raise our boys to be allies.

There is a brand of feminism now, stuck on an anti-trans argument, that seeks to destroy this alliance, thereby returning us to an unhelpful and overly simplistic ‘us versus them’ gender-focused struggle.

Yes, sure, it’s frightfully simplistic, but it’s also frightfully simplistic when men beat up women or rape women or refuse to promote women or take over women’s spaces.

Hayley Freeman wrote in the Sunday Times last week that feminism is becoming a dirty word. 

Great job. She means Hadley Freeman, not Hayley. Top quality feministing here.

Why? Well, according to Freeman, it is becoming a dirty word because it is no longer OK for biologically born women to criticise trans women (born male) accessing female-only spaces. She claims that LGBTQ+ rights are trumping women’s rights.

Liar. She does no such thing. She doesn’t lump trans people in with LGB people.

She goes on for several more paragraphs, dismissing concerns about men in women’s prisons with the breezy confidence of the safe and comfortable, and telling us more about “dirty feminism.” It’s grotesque.

The UN should not be saying nonsensical harmful dreck like this:

The first reason the UN shouldn’t say things like this is because they’re not true. Everyone does not “have an internal sense of their own gender.” That’s a lie foisted on us by gender ideology, and like all lies, it’s not true. We call lies “lies” because they’re not true. The UN should not be shoving lies in our faces.

This particular bit of trans ideology confuses what we know with a particular (and peculiar) “sense” but that is in fact a confusion. We know what sex we are for a billion reasons that start in infancy, but that doesn’t make the knowledge “an internal sense” of anything. What sex we are has plenty of external clues, along with the internal ones that we learn about in biology class.

There is no “internal sense” that’s “different from the sex you were assigned at birth” because the sex is what you are. There’s also no “internal sense” that you’re a human as opposed to a chimpanzee or a gibbon. It’s not about mystical inner knowledge. We have the external physical evidence and that’s what settles the matter.

People can feel it’s a bad fit. They can feel they would match the other sex much better. They can wish they’d been born the other sex. None of that makes it ok for the UN to inform us that we all have a magical inner sense that we in fact don’t have.

Weird (and long) headline.

Dylan Mulvaney Gives Tampons to People Who Need Them. Transphobes Are Mad

In a video posted to TikTok on Thursday as part of her popular “Days of Girlhood” video diary, Mulvaney explained she was “so tired over sticking up for myself for something that was so pure intention,” referring to her carrying a tampon around in case someone else needs it.

…

“The bigger problem,” Mulvaney went on, “is that you feel me carrying a tampon around is a threat to you and your womanhood. How is someone doing something nice so repulsive to you?”

Where to begin.

I guess with “something nice.” It’s not something nice. It’s creepy and intrusive at best.

That’s not a thing. Women don’t carry tampons around just in case some Fellow Woman might need one any more than people carry extra coffee around in case some Fellow Coffee Drinker has run out. Nobody carries extra anything around in case someone needs it. Where would we begin? Where would we end? How would we carry it all?

Anyway needing a tampon isn’t that big a deal. You can use a big wad of toilet paper, or grab some paper towels and use those. Maybe you’ll ask someone at the sinks to pass you some towels over or under the partition. But the spare tampon thing? Get out of here.

So, no, I don’t believe for a second that Mulvaney is “doing something nice,” I think he’s doing something prurient and passive aggressive and creepy. Is that repulsive? You bet it is, Dylls.

This isn’t the students, this is the adults – the academic staff. This is the adults talking silly childish jargon and pulling their hair out in clumps because someone says men are not women.

Man is expert on feminism again.

The abstract of Feminism will be trans-inclusive or it will not be: Why do two cis-hetero woman educators support transfeminism? :

As two cis-hetero woman feminist educators, we provide an educator’s perspective on trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourses.

The stupid starts with zero delay. “Cis-hetero” is stupid. Cis and hetero are two different things so what’s the point of treating them as one thing? Of course “cis” is also not a real thing, which makes the mashup doubly stupid.

 We begin by discussing the heterosexual matrix and the gender violence that it produces in schools as well as other socializing institutions.

What’s a heterosexual matrix? I can help with that! Professor Google says

“Heterosexual Matrix” comes from Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”. It describes an invisible norm which does not appear to be constructed but comes through as “natural” – a norm that defines everyone and everything as heterosexual until proved differently.

Yeah ok I get that – there are a lot of invisible norms of that kind. Everybody’s white, everybody’s middle class, everybody lives with a mommy and a daddy, and on and on. But does the heterosexual norm produce “gender violence”? It produces a lot of bad feelings once kids are old enough, no doubt, but I suspect they’re using violence to mean more than, you know, actual violence.

The socially constructed sexual binary constrains identity production to adhere to the heteronormative, at the same time excluding those who transgress this normativity.

Of course it does. The sociology jargon makes that sound more impressive than it is.

 We then critically analyse some of the increasingly belligerent popular discourses promoted by TERF groups since the 1970s, appropriating feminist discourses to produce arguments that contradict basic premises of feminism.

Nope nope nope nope. It’s not a “basic premise of feminism” that men are women. Never has been. We’re not the ones appropriating feminist anything.

We trace possibilities for a collaborative response by reinforcing alliances between transfeminism and other feminist movements.

The hell with “transfeminism.” Transfeminism would be feminism that calls itself feminism but is the opposite of feminism because it’s all about letting men do whatever they want all the time. That may identify as feminism but it isn’t feminism.

Mike has another excellent post:

I could understand why there are kids who want to avoid puberty, especially if they are gender non-conforming. The whole masculine – feminine gender expectation thing is very hard to navigate. It is for everyone, because it’s hard to understand exactly what is going on when it comes to gender. Kids are taught through examples of their family, external socializing and through all of the media they have access to, that boys and girls are different. They learn not only the physical differences, such as the external genitals, but the toys they have available to them and the choices in dress they are presented. They learn that girls wear bows and boys wear caps.

They learn that girls are made of sugar and spice, like pink, and carry dollies around. Boys are made of snakes and snails, like blue, and play with toy tractors. They are learning that masculinity comes with expectations, but also with benefits. Boys are favored by adults and receive privileges over girls, even among those adults who try to avoid sexism.

Girls grow up to be The Real Housewives of Wherever while boys grow up to be a long long list of things, all of them more interesting than being Real Housewives.

The parents who are fully committed to avoiding gender-based play for their kids are not doing so in isolation. Children play with other children, meet other adults, watch television, listen to radio, overhear parents talking, have older brothers and sisters. Gender has social momentum with millennia propelling it.

And the older the kids get the less the parents can do to replace or contradict the external socializing.

“Everyone” doesn’t need access to abortion.

It’s interesting that the ACLU shows us a photo that’s all women but doesn’t say the word.

It matters that it’s women who need abortion rights. It matters to say it. Women are the sex that’s shoved out of the spotlight all too often. Women are the sex that have to fight for equal rights with men. Women are the sex subject to forced gestation and childbirth. It matters that women exist and have rights and are deprived of those rights in all too many places and situations.

Fresh Air did an entertaining and informative discussion of Elon Musk’s bull in a china shop approach to Twitter yesterday with tech journalist Casey Newton.

Terry Gross: SpaceX and Tesla have been considered such big success stories, and credit has gone to Elon Musk. Twitter is showing a different side of him – indecisive, making decisions then retracting them. Twitter is losing money and advertisers under his leadership. He’s making decisions that are driving away Twitter users. Are you surprised by what kind of leader he’s turned out to be as the owner of Twitter?

Newton: You know, I really am. I had not paid a lot of attention to what Musk was doing at Tesla and SpaceX, but as you note, he was having a lot of success with those companies. And the Twitter that he inherited, while it had its challenges, was not a company in crisis. It made about $5 billion last year, has hundreds of millions of active users. And while it clearly needed to evolve, there was sort of no pressing need to blow it up and start over. And yet from the moment that he stepped into that job, that seems to be exactly what he decided to do.

He has now eliminated close to three-quarters of the staff. He has implemented a bunch of ideas and then quickly reversed himself. And more than anything else, I think he’s given the impression that rather than operating according to some set plan, he’s really managing Twitter more by whims and what seems to him to be a good idea in the moment. And so that’s led to a lot of chaos.

Chaos is good, chaos is creative, yadda yadda. Let’s blow up some hospitals and start over.

GROSS: One of Musk’s strategies that seems to have backfired is dealing with verification. Can you describe what verification is and what Twitter’s policy had been before Musk took over?

NEWTON: Yeah. So Twitter started a verification policy in 2009, and the basic idea was that it needed a way to verify that the owner of an account was who they said it was. So if you were a politician, a journalist or a celebrity, if you were really that person, Twitter would verify that, and then you would get this little blue check mark on your profile. That’s how it had always worked. Musk came along and said he wanted verification to be open to a much wider number of people, which, by the way, I thought was a pretty good idea. I think there are a lot of good reasons why you might want people to be able to optionally verify their identity on Twitter. It can just sort of be good for the service overall.

But he made one really bad decision, which was that not only did he offer everyone a verification badge, it was no longer actually connected to any sort of idea of verification. All you needed to do was pay $8. You could create any account; you would get that little badge. And so people started to pretend to be brands. They started to be celebrities. They started to pretend to be Elon Musk. And that same blue verification badge that had only ever meant you are who you say you are all of a sudden now meant I have $8.

I laughed as hard as Terry Gross did.

GROSS: So getting back to the idea that Musk is kind of blowing up Twitter to remake it his way, he’s losing so much money in the process. I mean, other ways that he’s losing money – ’cause you’ve pointed this out – is re-platforming people and making all these changes. They’re really expensive. It requires a lot of engineering changes in order to make these changes on Twitter. Plus, there’s no longer as many engineers there now. So it’s almost like he’s sabotaging himself in trying to remake Twitter.

NEWTON: Yeah, I think, you know, for some leaders, it’s not a good idea unless they came up with it, right? And so people who worked at Twitter had all sorts of ideas about how you could improve the service, make it more profitable. Elon has gotten rid of most of those people, and he’s fixated on a few core ideas that he thinks are going to be spectacular. Subscriptions is probably the biggest one although there are others. And he’s just going to go for it.

You know, this is probably one of the most self-confident people in the entire world, right? Elon Musk does not have impostor syndrome. He wakes up every day convinced that he is the only person who knows how to fix this company. And, you know, as me – for me, an observer, I just sort of sit back and think, like, none of this is working, you know? And so to me, the question is, will he ever acknowledge that other people have better ideas for this company than he does? Or will he just sort of continue to charge ahead with his own ideas, you know, regardless of if they’re successful or not?

Probably.

So they’ve noticed.

UK ministers have called on Nicola Sturgeon to scrap plans to let Scottish people “self-declare” as the opposite sex over fears it could lead to “legal chaos” and undermine women’s rights in England. 

Of course it “could undermine women’s rights in England.” Of course it can and does and will continue to undermine women’s rights everywhere. It renders them nonsensical. If men can become women by saying so then what are women? Nothing; just another word for “people.” They don’t need women’s rights because they have people’s rights. Rape, childbirth, child care, differences in size and strength, are all irrelevant, because everyone is a person. Giving away women’s rights slightly more gradually than Scotland is still giving away women’s rights.

Senior UK government figures fear the move, which is not available to people in England, could allow biologically male Scottish prisoners in English jails to demand to be placed in female-only prisons.

So what’s the problem? Just because they’re a risk to the people formerly known as women is no reason to trample on their True Selves.

Currently anyone wanting to change their sex in the UK needs to apply for a gender recognition certificate. To be successful applicants need to have been medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria and been living in their affirmed gender for at least two years.

Blah blah blah. But what real difference does that make? It slows things down but that’s all. Slowing things down is better than speeding them up, to be sure, but it’s still bad for women to pretend that men can become women by “affirming” their “gender” for two years.

The Scottish move would remove the need for a medical diagnosis and reduce the time limit to six months. It would also allow under-18s to change their gender for the first time.

But it’s basically the same in both. The core claim is the same.

Serial suitcase guy who works for the government:

An energy department official is accused of stealing luggage from Harry Reid International Airport, the 8 News Now Investigators learned Thursday.

A felony warrant was issued for Sam Brinton, a deputy assistant secretary, sources said. The charge is for grand larceny with a value between $1,200 and $5,000, records showed.

Brinton is a deputy assistant secretary of the office of spent fuel and waste disposition, according to the Office of Nuclear Energy’s website.

Brinton faces charges for a similar incident at the Minneapolis airport. He was on leave after charges were filed in connection with that incident, an energy department spokesman said in November.

Brinton is a non-binerrreeee lifter of other people’s suitcases. Pride! The Daily Beast is more polite about his pronouns than the AP:

 Sam Brinton, who was recently appointed head of spent nuclear fuel management, has allegedly been accused of grand larceny with a value of between $1,200 and $5,000, 8 News Now reports. The accusation comes after Brinton—who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns—was charged with stealing someone else’s bag from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in April. Court filings in that case claim Brinton said they initially denied taking the suitcase belonging to another person before later contacting airport authorities to say they were “tired and took the suitcase thinking it was theirs.”

The airport authorities are adamant that they were not tired and did not take the suitcase thinking it was theirs.

She Identifies As an independent.

Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced Friday that she now has registered as an independent…

But she was elected as a Democrat. Wouldn’t it be more fair to the voters to wait to go all mavericky up in there until her next election?

In a video explaining her decision, she said: “Registering as an independent and showing up to work with the title of independent is a reflection of who I’ve always been. … Nothing’s going to change for me.”

Then why did she run and get elected as a Democrat?

I found myself thinking about topsoil and the west so I went to the search engine. Nebraska Public Media has a piece from last April:

A few years ago, Isaac Larsen attended a wedding at a pioneer church in Minnesota. After the ceremony, he wandered around a cemetery by the church.

He noticed the cemetery, which had never been tilled, was at least a foot higher than a corn field just on the other side of a fence.

Tilling erodes soil.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst geosciences professor and his co-researchers have released a new study that found topsoil in the Midwest is eroding at an average rate of 1.9 millimeters per year. They measured elevation differences between native prairie and farm fields at about 20 sites, the majority in central Iowa, with some in Illinois, Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska.

The researchers estimate the Midwest has lost 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil since farmers began tilling 160 years ago. This erosion, Larsen said, makes it more difficult and more expensive to grow crops.

“We’re going to need to feed more people in the future,” he said, “and degraded soils that have lost their organic rich horizons just aren’t as productive.”

We might not need to feed more people in the future though. The consequences of the other ways we’ve eroded and degraded the world we live in are already thinning populations and it’s not looking as if we’re going to slow that down much.