Oops.

When woke Language Reform turns out to be not so much a reform as a mistake:

As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.

That is, non-Hispanic academics and activists, apparently.

But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.

Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.

More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.

You know what that sounds like? It sounds like women not wanting to be called “cis” thank you very much, and wanting nothing to do with anyone who does call us that.

Disgusting narcissistic pig.

No we fucking don’t. We have to keep working for women to be able to talk about violence against us, not violence against men in lipstick.

And it’s violence against women – it’s not “GBV.” Men in red dresses don’t get to rename it GBV so that they can pretend it happens to them too. Get your self-obsessed kicks somewhere else you creep.

This just in (well, an hour ago) –

It’s not great that it takes extreme gerrymandering to get the DoJ involved.

If only we could go back to reserving voting for white men of property.

Please, CBC, tell us more about this insulting and offensive move.

A transgender woman in Prince Edward Island has been invited to speak at a Montreal Massacre memorial service being held today by the P.E.I. Advisory Council on the Status of Women.

Monday marks 32 years since 14 women were killed at École Polytechnique.

Since 14 women were killed for being women, by a man who said that was why they were being killed. It was an explicitly, avowedly misogynist massacre of women.

“I was deeply touched,” said Anastasia Preston. “It is a huge honour for myself and it’s a huge honour as a trans woman to be included in an event like this.”

But there shouldn’t be “honour” given to a man on an occasion to mark the woman-hating massacre of 14 women. Preston shouldn’t be “touched,” he should be appalled. The event is not about him and it’s not about trans women.

“For decades, trans women have been kept out of the conversation around gender-based violence.”

No not “gender-based violence” you clueless fuckhead, woman-hating violence. Of course that conversation is about women and not men who call themselves women. Of course it is. It’s not a privilege to be massacred with your classmates you know. A memorial for the massacred women doesn’t need to be “inclusive” of men who want to intrude.

Government data does not have accurate records of the number of transgender women murdered in gender-based violence, Preston said. 

Fuck off. This one is about women.

During Monday’s event, Preston said she will speak about some of her experiences of harassment on P.E.I. She hopes her stories can raise awareness.

Oh jesus. He actually is going to change the subject. He actually is going to make it about him and his kink. It’s beyond disgusting, into a whole new territory without adjectives to name it.

There are four more paragraphs in which he talks about himself and his red dress and being groped.

Words fail me.

Talk about adding insult to injury…

What does a man who says he’s a woman have to do with the Montreal massacre? Those women were slaughtered by a misogynist man because they were women and he was a misogynist man. Men who say they are women have nothing to do with this subject.

CBC P.E.I. is more concerned about the man than it is about the massacre or the misogyny.

To reduce harm. What about the harm CBC P.E.I. is doing? What about the harm the man in lipstick is doing? What about women?

You don’t want Rachel Dolezal speaking at a memorial for the Tulsa Race Massacre. Why have the equivalent speak at a memorial for massacred women?

Piggy as ever.

In remarks to diners at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday night, Donald Trump called the American media “crooked bastards” and Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a “fucking idiot”.

The meandering, foul-mouthed speech to Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, was streamed by Jack Posobiec, a rightwing blogger and provocateur.

…

“The country is at a very important, dangerous place,” Trump said, amid familiar lies about his defeat in the 2020 election, which he says was the result of electoral fraud.

“We have no press. The press is so corrupt. We don’t have a press. If there is a good story about us, a good story about any of the people that are Republicans, conservatives, they make it a bad story. And if it’s a bad story they make it the worst story in history. It is the most dishonest group of people.”

His vocabulary and syntax remain as impressive as ever.

Trump said he asked [Milley]: “You think it’s cheaper to leave it there so they can have it than it is to fill it up with a half tank of gas and fly it into Pakistan or fly it back to our country?

“‘Yes, sir, we think it’s cheaper, sir.’

“That’s when I realized he was a fucking idiot.”

Sir, it’s the other guy in the conversation, sir.

I wonder if Zuckerberg ever lies awake at night thinking about the Rohingya. They think about him.

Facebook’s negligence facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar after the social media network’s algorithms amplified hate speech and the platform failed to take down inflammatory posts, according to legal action launched in the US and the UK.

The platform faces compensation claims worth more than £150bn under the coordinated move on both sides of the Atlantic.

A class action complaint lodged with the northern district court in San Francisco says Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in south-east Asia.”

It adds: “In the end, there was so little for Facebook to gain from its continued presence in Burma, and the consequences for the Rohingya people could not have been more dire. Yet, in the face of this knowledge, and possessing the tools to stop it, it simply kept marching forward.”

Marching forward for the market penetration.

In the US and UK, the allegations against Facebook include: Facebook’s algorithms amplified hate speech against the Rohingya people; it failed to invest in local moderators and fact checkers; it failed to take down specific posts inciting violence against Rohingya people; and it did not shut down specific accounts or delete groups and pages that were encouraging ethnic violence.

The US complaint cites Facebook posts that appeared in a Reuters report, with one in 2013 stating: “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn Kalars [a derogatory term for Rohingya people].” Another post in 2018, showing a photograph of a boatload of Rohingya refugees, says: “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster.”

You know, you’d think once it’s a national news story it would be worth taking action, if only to cover the corporate ass.

The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has alleged the platform is fanning ethnic violence in countries including Ethiopia and is not doing enough to stop it. She said 87% of the spending on combating misinformation at Facebook is spent on English content, while only 9% of users are English speakers.

Facebook says no no it has a strategy, really it does.

About that “Moms for Liberty” complaint:

A Tennessee chapter of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty has tried to use the state’s new law aimed at banning “critical race theory” in school to ban a book about Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a feeling the “Moms” for liberty are for liberty for themselves but not so much for other people – people who teach history that isn’t all We Have Always Been Awesome, for instance.

Tennessee Republicans earlier this year passed a law in response to the conservative panic about “critical race theory,” barring the teaching of certain concepts in classrooms including “teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another; ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes to a specific race or sex; that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist or that a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist,” according to The Tennessean. Critics argue that Republicans in Tennessee and around the country are trying to ban the teaching of history they don’t like.

I’d be more specific about it: history they don’t like because it doesn’t claim we have always been flawless.

The first complaint filed to the state came from Robin Steenman, chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Williamson County, just south of Nashville. The 11-page complaint claims that the state’s widely used Wit and Wisdom literacy curriculum has a “heavily biased agenda” that makes kids “hate their country, each other and/or themselves.”

There’s a book about Martin Luther King, there’s a book about Ruby Bridges (which naturally includes the fact that enraged white people tried to prevent her from going to a “white” public school), there are photos of civil rights campaigners being blasted with fire hoses. News flash for the “Moms”: all that is part of US history, and not a minor part at that.

“The classroom books and teacher manuals reveal both explicit and implicit Anti-American, Anti-White, and Anti-Mexican teaching,” the complaint said. “Additionally, it implies to second grade children that people of color continue to be oppressed by an oppressive ‘angry, vicious, scary, mean, loud, violent, [rude], and [hateful]’ white population and teaches that the racial injustice of the 1960s exists today.”

Instead they should be taught that all that was stamped out no later than 1966 and everything has been completely fabulous ever since?

The state said no for this time because the paperwork was late, but urged another try.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A different story.

Several Sussex colleagues publicly denounced her on social media, although strangely, she says, not to her face. “No peer ever said to me: ‘Look, I really object to what you’re saying and I’d like to discuss it with you.’ They immediately went to Defcon 1: ‘She’s a bigot… arguing for single-sex spaces is like the Jim Crow laws [that historically enforced racial segregation in the American south].’” She remains fascinated by the performative aspects of social media debate. “The important thing is to show your tribe that you have the right morals and you could show that by saying, ‘I’m not with her.’”

Performative indeed. Just like India Willoughby’s faux geniality in and around the radio debate, followed by social media transperbolic accusations of “genocide.” The impersonal distance offered by the interposing technological channel allows and encourages extremism that would be stilted and inappropriate in personal, face to face meeting. You’re less likely to deploy boilerplate sloganeering (or a bullhorn) in an actual discussion with another person, than you are when playing for an audience of fellow true believers, where both the message and intended recipients are completely different. A genuine expression of hurt, or a sincere request for understanding and sympathy from someone you feel has wronged you, is not at all the same as a pearl-clutching rallying of the troops to come to your defence. One behaves differently in front of witnesses than in front of an audience.

There is always the danger of “our side” doing the same, though I daresay there seem to be few examples of this behaviour that I’ve seen coming from the feminist or gender critical side. The fact that trans activists must twist and misrepresent even the mildest statements in support of women’s spaces and boundaries into TERF “dog whistles” that are in reality denials of trans “existence,” and calls for trans “elimination,” is a pretty good indication of the fact they have no better evidence of explicit feminist malevolence. If they had any such evidence, they would use it.

Best of all is a statement that is blatantly, manifestly false. Like 1 equals 3. Or trans women are women. If you claim to believe something like that, they you are committing yourself to the group that says that, and burning your bridges to the reality-based community.

And at that point, Stock’s colleagues stopped being colleagues and became Inquisitors, more interested in proclaiming their own orthodoxy (and protecting their own skin) than in coming to any sort of understanding or compromise. To compromise with Evil is itself Evil.

Live free or die.

Well not free to teach about slavery OBVIOUSLY. Other free. Good free.

The Washington Post last July:

A majority of New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s diversity council has quit after he signed new restrictions into law that affect educators as well as public employees.

Language in the state budget Sununu signed in late June implicitly rejects the idea of systemic racism by directly prohibiting teachers and anyone leading diversity training for public employees from saying that any group is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, even if unconsciously.

More on how this is playing out:

They’re playing the “no you’re the racist” game. It’s “I don’t see color” but meaner.

In this column, white people with huge guns. In this other column, Ruby Bridges is a racist. Your deal!

ALL genders get pregnant, all of them, ALL OF THEM I tell you.

Gaby Hinsliff at the Guardian chatted with Kathleen Stock. Some interesting points came up.

“I’m excited in a weird way, excited about my future,” she says. There is relief, too, at escaping what she felt was an “aggressive, intimidating environment” at her workplace of 18 years. Interestingly, while some blamed the Sussex standoff on a generation of students unable to tolerate views they dislike, Stock tells a different story. “Most of the students I encounter are completely open-minded and even if they disagree with me, which I’m sure a lot of them do, they wouldn’t hold it against me as a personal character flaw.” The problem, she says, was her peers.

Who are older, and thus, you might think, should know better.

[T]he backlash really began with a 2018 interview she gave to the local paper in LGBT-friendly Brighton, arguing that while most trans women wouldn’t dream of harming anyone, they shouldn’t have unrestricted access to places where females undress or sleep because “many trans women are still males with male genitalia”, words some find instantly offensive. Under the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall’s preferred definition of the term, denying a trans person’s stated identity is transphobic. 

But first of all, Stonewall isn’t the boss of us. No one died and made Stonewall god. Stonewall can prefer what it likes, but it doesn’t get to force us to define words the way it prefers. That’s all the more true when its preference is both stupid and dangerous. It can’t be some kind of firm principle of social justice or humans rights that everyone is required to agree with how people “identify” with no questions asked. Obviously. I could claim to be you and take all your stuff, and vice versa. We could all “identify as” Joe Biden; now what?

No. Just no. A “stated identity” that contradicts our perceptions can’t be imposed on us by law and bullying.

Several Sussex colleagues publicly denounced her on social media, although strangely, she says, not to her face. “No peer ever said to me: ‘Look, I really object to what you’re saying and I’d like to discuss it with you.’ They immediately went to Defcon 1: ‘She’s a bigot… arguing for single-sex spaces is like the Jim Crow laws [that historically enforced racial segregation in the American south].’” She remains fascinated by the performative aspects of social media debate. “The important thing is to show your tribe that you have the right morals and you could show that by saying, ‘I’m not with her.’”

Yes but why is that the way you could show it now? Why is it that and not other, better things? Why can’t you show your tribe you have the right morals by saying feminist things instead of reality-denying anti-feminist things? Why has this become the New, Improved, More Sensitive filter?

Festive.

On one level it’s obvious enough: it’s a big fuck you to everyone who doesn’t want to live in a weaponized social world.

Ok, noted, message received, but going beyond that – it’s a very odd piece of iconography. The massive guns don’t harmonize well with the big cheery grins. What are those people so happy about? They’re apparently at war with someone (or perhaps everyone), and that’s not a situation that generally causes people to sit down wreathed in smiles to get a photo taken.

What are all these guns for? Besides “fuck you”? Rep Thomas Massie is a Rep, i.e. a member of the House of Representatives, for a district in Kentucky. Does that translate to needing all those guns? Are his constituents trying to kill him and his family? (I’m assuming the other people in the photo are his family.) Is that why they have all that firepower?

Or is it the other way around? Has Thomas Massie declared war on the people in his district, or in Kentucky, or in the US?

Many wags are pointing out that he might as well have posed them all with giant dildos instead.

They just can’t get it right.

“Misandry” ffs. Have they been hanging out on shock jock Twitter or what? Women get killed by abusive husbands or partners. Women get raped with impunity because the rates of arrest are abysmal, of prosecution worse, of conviction worse again. Women get bullied and assaulted, women have their sports and prizes taken away, women are told to obey or be punished. “Misandry” is not a thing and men are not at risk from women, with very very few exceptions. West Yorkshire Police have had grooming gangs under their noses for years, but here they are whining about non-existent “misandry.” It’s embarrassing.

This was a Facebook post yesterday because it’s just personal and kind of chit-chatty, but actually the subject matter is of broader interest so what the hell, I’m reposting it here. Everybody should know about Chuck Pilling.

For a few years in the late 80s and early 90s I lived in north Seattle, and in my neighborhood lived a guy I knew of from working at the zoo, a self-taught bird man, who had a pond with all kinds of ducks on his property. It was about a 20 minute walk from me and I went there often to admire the ducks and the world he’d made for them. Then I moved, and that was that.

Today I took Cooper out exploring as usual, and ended up in my old nabe, at a tiny but mighty park called Licton Springs…which got me thinking about the bird man, and trying to remember his last name, which I couldn’t do. Chuck _____?? And I wasn’t sure exactly where the pond had been. He was a geezer in the 80s so I knew he wouldn’t be around still, but I thought maybe I’d read somewhere that his place was still there. I thought I would try Googling later, so we went back to Cooper’s car and I went toward that general area just in case, and at a corner where I thought it might be there was a great concrete emptiness in front of a huge new building…but then beyond the emptiness was a massive solid wall of trees and bamboo and I yelled “I think that’s it!” So I parked (and left Cooper, who was tired), and hustled down the block – the new building is a primary school – and the closer I got to the wall of trees the more I thought I recognized it, and I passed the wall of trees and there was a pond and an outbuilding and THE DUCKS.

IT IS STILL THERE.

I can’t explain how happy that made me, but it did.There’s an information graphic now, explaining the whole history. Chuck Pilling was the FIRST to breed hooded mergansers in captivity, also two other ducks. He got awards for it. He was a legend. He helped design the waterfowl exhibit at the zoo (which is a very fine one). I got teary as hell reading it.

Wikipedia on Pilling’s Pond.

The infographic that made me want to blub:

Add billions and egomania and what do you get? Egomaniacal billionaire paying part of the cost for a student dormitory in which most of the rooms have no windows.

The 11-story, 159-foot-tall Munger Hall dormitory was designed by 97-year-old billionaire Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the approximately $1.4 billion project under the condition that his designs would be followed exactly.

He’s not an architect. He’s not a designer.

Cramming thousands of students into a residence hall where only 6% of the rooms have windows to some seems like a social experiment, but a similar concept has been executed at the University of Michigan with the Munger Graduate Residences.

Munger Graduate Residences opened in 2015 at the University of Michigan, housing up to 630 graduate students in an eight-story 380,000-square-foot building. Munger, a Berkshire Hathaway vice chair who donated $110 million towards the $155 million project, wanted to bring a “transdisciplinary” living experience to graduate students.

A transdisciplinary windowless experience.

Janice Turner on the UK’s proposed ban on conversion therapy:

That young people were once tortured, raped, drugged and subjected to exorcism-like religious rites to make them heterosexual seems not just abhorrent but absurd. How could our hardwired desires be changed? Indeed, such practices in Britain are now, thankfully, vanishingly rare and, as the consultation states, “physical violence in the name of conversion therapy” is illegal already.

Yet the proposed ban applies to both sexuality and the more nebulous concept of gender identity. This has led to grave concerns, not from social conservatives but liberal, compassionate therapists, some LGBT themselves, who for a decade have noted a drastic rise in young female clients, typically same-sex attracted, mostly with profound mental problems such as depression, anxiety, undiagnosed autism or self harm. Many have suffered homophobic bullying, some sexual abuse. Now 75 per cent of referrals to the Tavistock GIDS clinic are female, a phenomenon reported worldwide.

There is good reason to think this phenomenon is socially influenced, but it can be risky to say so.

But therapists are already impeded by their own professional bodies, including the NHS, who have signed a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) prohibiting therapy that challenges a client’s avowed gender identity. Rather, they must only “affirm” their belief and help to facilitate transition, via referral for hormones and perhaps surgery.

There are at least two reasons that’s profoundly mistaken. One is that sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing or the same kind of thing. Another is that affirming sexual orientation requires zero further action, while affirming gender identity, as Turner says, leads on to transition and drastic physical interventions.

A group called Thoughtful Therapists fears the government conversion ban will enshrine this MOU in law. Proposals state law shouldn’t “override the independence of clinicians to support those who may be questioning their LGBT status”. Yet often, distressed 13-year-old girls are not “questioning”: rather they are categoric they are trans. Will the gentlest unpicking of their feelings be classed as conversion therapy and thus criminalised?

And being categoric about being trans is surely at least partly a product of the rabidly absolutist dogma around all things trans, especially “being” trans. Ambivalence isn’t allowed, uncertainty isn’t allowed, doubt isn’t allowed. If you think you might be trans then you are trans and woe betide you if you take it back.

The absence of rigorous gender therapy has been condemned by a growing number of detransitioners, mainly women, including Keira Bell, who brought a judicial review against the Tavistock. Why, they ask, were their mental health and family problems briskly brushed aside in favour of propelling them towards irreversible hormones and double mastectomies they now regret?

Why indeed? When it’s such a drastic thing to do?

It is seldom acknowledged that transitioning is more physically dangerous for girls than boys. Not only does breast-binding damage growing tissue and cause breathing problems, but testosterone’s effect on the female body is far more damaging than oestrogen for males. A girl will have a permanently deepened voice, facial hair, vaginal atrophy, probable infertility and uterine problems that often end in hysterectomy. Transition will be necessary for some but any girl embarking on this path should be fully informed and utterly certain.

And fully informing while asking about certainty is not conversion therapy.

This is fine, this is healthy. A woman who calls herself a man says radical feminists have no place in abortion rights.

Men don’t have abortions; men don’t need abortions; men are not the sex that is oppressed and punished precisely because it is the sex that gestates humans.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Any observable and consistent pattern?

So which other patterns exist in humans? Name one.

I copied this a while back:

Woman: “ A rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity. Also: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category. There isn’t one definition.” — PZMyers

I suppose we could use that a possible answer, but it’s still not specific. Suspiciously so. Because giving a list of those “cultural cues” would involve things like long hair, dresses, loving shopping and pretending to be shy. He wouldn’t want to imply that, though I don’t see how it could be avoided.

That second sentence looks to me like the transgender version of “God is the Ground of Being.” It sounds like it’s saying something deep and profound, but it’s empty.

Mostly, I see the acceptance of sex categories immediately followed by dismissing them as irrelevant as a form of Equivocation. “Yes, ‘female’ is a reproductive category but a WOMAN is MORE than someone who can have babies.” There’s a sudden switch from biological classifications to personal choices. It reminds me of creationists denying reductive physics because a PERSON is MORE than a bunch of atoms. “ We can’t get meaning from a blind process of evolution. “ It’s a category error an atheist should be familiar with.

Those who argue against creationism also ought to be familiar with the strategy employed by the Intelligent Design folks: pick little holes in the Theory of Evolution in order to convince others (and yourself) that it’s hopelessly inadequate, and then wheel in something with BIG holes as the satisfying replacement. All biology is fuzzy at the borders, but if there were no such things as species, evolution couldn’t take place. PZ doesn’t deny sex differences. Creationists agree that there’s “change over time.” After that, it gets murky.

Urgh. The parents were asked to remove the kid from the school that day and they refused.

The parents of the teenager accused of killing four people in a Michigan high school shooting were taken into custody early Saturday after a manhunt, Detroit police said.

They tried to flee yesterday and it didn’t work out.

The county sheriff has said that James Crumbley purchased the gun used in the violence just days before the school shooting. McDonald said the pair were made aware of disturbing, violent images on the day of the shooting and were urged to get him counseling.

“James and Jennifer Crumbley resisted the idea of their son leaving the school at that time,” she said during a news conference Friday. “Instead, James and Jennifer Crumbley left the high school without their son. He was returned to the high school.” 

Images that officials said were drawn by the teenager included a gun with the words “the thoughts won’t stop, help me,” and a bullet with the words “blood everywhere,” McDonald said.

It was the day before that a teacher spotted him searching for ammunition on line, and his mother said lol not mad at you.

They were urged to take him out of school and they didn’t so he killed four people and injured more.

The prosecutor told MSNBC on Friday that the teen’s parents “had reason to believe he was dangerous. … I believe they should be held accountable.”

She reiterated that prosecutors believe the gun used in the attack was purchased for the teenager.

“We have parents who bought a weapon for their son,” McDonald said. “They posted on social that it was his gun. He posted on social media that it was his gun.”

The couple did not tell school officials Tuesday, when they were informed about the images, that their son had a weapon, the prosecutor said. Authorities believe he brought it to school that day in a backpack, McDonald said.

lol not mad at them?