Imagine getting Covid because Fox News told you to.

The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.

Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent. (Look up your county.)

It seems a high price to pay for the fun of having a jackass in the White House.

Well I couldn’t pass that up.

So I read it.

I have never had much interest in faith versus science debates. They simply did not resonate with me. I believe God created the world, but I never felt the need to nail down the details or method of creation. 

Well naturally not! “God created the world” is just a claim of magic, and there’s no nailing down the details of that, or the “method” either. You could pause to wonder what “God” means and how anyone knows, but we wouldn’t want you to go to too much trouble. “God did it” is the easy way out.

I have long been influenced by early church theologians like Augustine of Hippo, who understood the biblical creation account as primarily making theological claims instead of offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins.

You don’t say. It seems to me you don’t really need to go to Augustine for that, bless his North African heart, because obviously the biblical creation account is not offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins – it says nothing explanatory at all.

She was happy with this arrangement until churchy anti-vaxxers started messing up her head. Why weren’t they being churchy and pro-science like her? What had gone wrong?

I asked Haarsma who is to blame. Is it the fault of religious communities for denigrating science or the scientific community for denigrating faith? She laughed and said there’s plenty of blame to go around.

At times, a vocal minority of prominent scientists have marginalized religious communities. Haarsma cited a tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a prominent astrophysicist, from Christmas morning 2014: “On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton.” That’s clever, but it appeared to mock Christians on one of our most sacred holidays. These sorts of messages spur needless animosity. If the cultural conversation requires people to choose between their faith and science, most will choose faith, but we don’t have to ask people to choose. This is a false choice.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said happy birthday to Isaac Newton, so god-botherers are spreading the virus to their friends and neighbors. Makes sense.

“Sometimes people say things like, ‘If everyone would just accept the science, the world would be great,’” Haarsma said. But she notes that science doesn’t solve everything and that scientific communities have to “acknowledge the value of religion as a way of answering life’s biggest questions.”

No, actually, they don’t, because religion has no such value, because it isn’t a way of answering life’s biggest questions. It may be a way of cheering yourself up, but answering questions (in the sense of giving an answer that’s truthful), no.

Originally a comment by J.A. on A set of contingencies that can be played with.

You mean that if I really, really, really, love my velveteen rabbit enough that someday it will really will become real?

That said, the story of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams is a classic and deservedly so, because it shows how human love and affection can be imparted to what is an inanimate object in a fictional tale, and it’s impossible to read that story to a child without there being a bit of a tear in one’s own eye. We humans are capable of feeling affection for animate beings like puppies and kittens and by extension their inanimate imitations.

Children though don’t then believe that veleveteen rabbits really do become real. They do however understand the fictional truth of the story of how the velveteen rabbit has a happy life with the boy until it is discarded and to be burnt (which is truly a horrible end) and then have the velveeteen rabbit saved by magic because of the love the boy had for it as a toy. That by magic it then becomes a real rabbit makes for a very happy ending.

Now getting back to my first sentence and why fantasizing about changing sex doesn’t actually change sex, to cut to the chase it’s about making a category error where wishes are held to be actual fishes. While one can certainly pretend to be something they’re not, or mimic it to the extent they appear to be something they’re not, they still aren’t the sex they’re not because reality isn’t a fiction and philosophers as well as scientists tend to be a bit tetchy about such things. Q.E.D.

Fantasy spreads until it pervades everything…

Grace Lavery back in June explaining how it really really is true that you can change sex.

Berkeley News: Your work in trans feminist studies focuses on the belief that transition works — that it is truly possible to change sex. Can you talk more about what you’ve found in your research? Did you begin to explore the idea during your own transition?

Grace Lavery: I suppose, on some level, I’m bound to cop to that: Research is me-search, as they say. I think what my research has come to demonstrate is that for the past 150 years or so, roughly since the time that people started performing transition or transitioning or whatever you want to call it, there has been this enormous public effort or attempt to produce a cast-iron reason why it doesn’t work or why it is suspicious.

It doesn’t work for the same reason it doesn’t work to “perform transition” or “transition” or whatever you want to call it to a horse or a table or Mars. It doesn’t work because fantasy is fantasy, pretending is pretending, the mind isn’t magic.

There is a kind of conservative feminist position that argues that sex is set in stone, is assigned at birth. And I don’t agree with that. Most scientists I’ve spoken to seem pretty comfortable with the idea that sex, like any other biological category, is not a cast-iron law, but rather a sort of set of contingencies that can be played with and culturally reinforced or not culturally reinforced.

Oh yes that definitely sounds like how scientists think. Everything “can be played with” and once you’ve played with it long enough and whimsically enough, the magic happens and the biological category is…something else.

Postponed.

The government’s much-hyped information campaign targeting perpetrators of violence against women will not be launched until next year, the Observer has learned. This comes just as new research indicates the vast majority of females have experienced unwanted violent, aggressive or sexual behaviours on UK public transport.

Sorry and everything. We’d hurry if it were important but as it’s only women, we’ll get to it when we get to it.

As part of the home secretary’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls launched in July, Priti Patel promised a “multimillion communications campaign with a focus on targeting perpetrators and harmful misogynistic attitudes”.

Like calling women terfs and cunts and telling them “suck my dick” when they hold a conference? Those hateful misogynistic attitudes?

However, concern is growing that the campaign will not be up and running until 2022, with sources saying it remains at a “concept” stage more than three months after it was unveiled. The delay means it will not be launched until after Christmas – a period that tends to witness a rise in domestic violence – but also comes against a backdrop of concerted calls for the government to start prioritising measures to tackle violence against women and girls.

But they might be terfs. Surely you can see the problem.

The Telegraph article that Priyamvada Ghopal mentioned:

The Telegraph has spoken to academics, who wish to remain anonymous, who claim that Prof Alison Phipps, a former colleague of Prof Stock’s, was one of those leading the criticism of her, which ultimately led to her resignation.

Prof Phipps was a professor of gender studies at Sussex University, and has recently taken up a post as professor of sociology at Newcastle University. 

Now, it has emerged that she posted a series of tweets suggesting that “gender critical feminists” are also “racist and ableist”, and accused colleagues of being “bigots”.

Screenshots of the now-deleted tweets show that in January, Prof Phipps wrote: “I’d be interested to hear how many people with a prominent ‘free speech warrior’* at their workplace – whether that’s a racist, a transphobe and/or another flavour – have been subject to threats or official complaints from said warrior after criticising them in public.”

She followed this up with an asterixed “*bigot” and with another tweet saying: “(Any resemblance to my own workplace is, of course, entirely coincidental).”

In another tweet, posted in July 2020, Prof Phipps said: “Of course ‘gender critical’ feminists are also racist and ableist: their politics based on entitlement to define, speak for and dominate others makes all sorts of things possible, and a one-dimensional analysis of gender means a lack of intersectionality across the board.”

Except “of course” that’s not true. It’s not even a little bit true.

In January 2020, Prof Stock challenged Prof Phipps to a debate, saying: “Each time a news article about gender critical academics comes out, you tweet that Sussex Uni trans students and staff are made unsafe by us. 

“Instead why not engage with me in public debate at Sussex or elsewhere?”

Prof Phipps responded: “‘Reasonable debate’ cannot counter unreasonable ideas. History has shown this repeatedly. Insisting on ‘debate’ is about giving credibility where there is none.”

So the thing to do is lie about gender critical academics on Twitter.

Prof Phipps wrote the book Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism, which questions whether white feminists need to ask themselves whether they are causing harm when they fight sexual violence.

She’s the sociologist of Karen.

“White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetuate through white supremacy,” she wrote.

The book, which faced criticism after it was recommended in an Oxfam staff training document, says “privileged white women” are supporting the root causes of sexual violence by wanting “bad men” imprisoned.

The book faced criticism after people read it, because it’s so bad.

Ugly.

I think that “false flag opportunists” remark borders on libel. Yes it’s so opportunistic to get bullied out of a job you love.

For anyone laughing off the very idea that anti-Semitic tropes and images and movies and plays are something to object to, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a collection you could take a look at.

Anti-Jewish hatred has pervaded Western art, politics, and popular culture for centuries. Perceptions and understandings of Jews throughout history were manifested in objects—from fine arts and crafts for the elite to everyday toys and knickknacks and household items. Many of these objects promoted negative attitudes and stereotypes about Jews.

The Katz Ehrenthal Collection—acquired through the generosity of the Katz family—consists of over 900 individual objects depicting Jews and antisemitic and anti-Jewish propaganda from the Medieval to the modern era, created and distributed throughout Europe, Russia, and the United States. The same hateful stereotypes reappear throughout the collection, spanning centuries and continents. Not all of the objects are antisemitic, however, a small portion of the collection documents or combats specific antisemitic episodes.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi propagandists used these same stereotypes with deadly consequences. For example, feature films, newsreels, toys, and games helped intensify negative stereotypes of Jews. Already portrayed as second-class citizens, they were increasingly characterized as “degenerates, criminals, and racially inferior corrupters of German society.” Some of the same beliefs are still prevalent in Western countries today.

This isn’t over-indulged students squawking about imaginary transphobia.

Wait, are you saying that a fictional character’s being named Hershel Fink suggests that the character is Jewish??? The Royal Court theatre is shocked shocked to hear it.

[Al] Smith, the author of a new play coming to the Royal Court theatre this week, had given a lead character the name of Hershel Fink. But publicity for the production prompted angry complaints about Jewish stereotyping. In response, the famous venue on Sloane Square in London has now apologised and agreed to change the name, admitting that it was “unconscious bias” that had led to the Silicon Valley billionaire in the work being given this identity.

Being given this name, I think that should read. The Royal Court people claiming the character wasn’t given Jewish “identity” and that the name was…just a name.

In an official statement, the theatre management added that the character in Smith’s play, Rare Earth Mettle, which stars former Doctor Who actor Arthur Darvill, is not Jewish and that there is no reference to his faith or Jewishness in the show.

Except for the name. Ohhhh the name, says the Royal Court. We didn’t notice.

“The Royal Court claims they didn’t realise ‘Hershel Fink’ was a Jewish name. Hmmm. Somehow it just sounded so right for a world-conquering billionaire,” Baddiel posted on Twitter. This February, Baddiel’s new book, Jews Don’t Count, argued that antisemitic bias is the one prejudice that remains largely unpoliced in the “culture wars”.

Discouraging.

Huh. That’s quite a nice salary for helping men harass women.

LSE has an explainer for Athena Swan too, mostly quoting Athena Swan (or Athena SWAN as they call it) but tweaking the wording a little in places.

Athena SWAN was established in 2005 to encourage and recognise commitment to advancing the careers of women in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) employed in higher education and research.

So far so good.

In May 2015 the charter was expanded to recognise work undertaken in the arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law (AHSSBL), in professional and support roles, and for trans staff and students. The charter now recognises work undertaken to address gender equality more broadly, rather than just barriers to progression that affect women.

Ok wait.

I once was blind but now I see, eh? We used to address gender inequality by working to advance the careers of women, but now we know better. Now we do it more broadly. More broadly than what?

There are two sexes. Just the two. Historically they have been unequal. Addressing that inequality means making the subordinated half of the pair equal instead of subordinated. How can one do that more broadly?

There’s only the one disadvantaged sex. Not two, not seven, not a thousand. Just. the. one.

The passage of time since 1970 hasn’t changed that. There are still two sexes. The female sex is still disadvantaged compared to the male. It’s still that simple. So what can it mean to “address gender inequality more broadly”? There is no more “broadly.” There’s only the female sex.

What is this Athena Swan Charter? According to Athena Swann:

The Athena Swan Charter is a framework which is used across the globe to support and transform gender equality within higher education (HE) and research. Established in 2005 to encourage and recognise commitment to advancing the careers of women in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) employment, the Charter is now being used across the globe to address gender equality more broadly, and not just barriers to progression that affect women.

Ah, that’s very helpful – they tell us what treacherous idiots they are right in the first paragraph. They used to campaign for women and now they know better, now they look beyond “just barriers to progression that affect women.” Not just women but ALL the genders. Stupid women, thinking they get to hog everything.

Considering sex and gender 

We recognise the evolving social and legal landscape regarding data monitoring and rights in relation to sex and gender. Like many organisations we are reviewing our guidance. We also work closely with the sector on the ongoing development of the charter through the Athena Swan Governance Committee. In response to the changing landscape in relation to sex and gender we will continue these efforts to ensure it is fit for purpose and inclusive. 

By which we mean, inclusive of people who are not women, because it would be wicked and exclusionary and not in sync with the changing landscape to let women hog everything.

They do talk about women though. Maybe they’ll still have to be punished.

We commit to advancing gender equality in academia, in particular, addressing the loss of women across the career pipeline and the absence of women from senior academic, professional and support roles.

We commit to addressing unequal gender representation across academic disciplines and professional and support functions. In this we recognise disciplinary differences including:

the relative underrepresentation of women in senior roles in arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law (AHSSBL)

the particularly high loss rate of women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM)

And so on. It’s not all about The New Genders, but the chipping away has begun. They are Reviewing their Guidance.

This is how it’s done – make yourself part of the Diversity N Incloosion infrastructure and bam, you get to make your crank ideas mandatory for all people who are part of that infrastructure. Stonewall seem to be the best at it but they’re not the only ones.

Lawyers and campaigners say that a university training scheme on gender identity is “totalitarian and unlawful”.

Imagine having to attend university training on “gender identity” when you don’t believe that’s a meaningful concept.

The latest row centres on a scheme called Athena Swan that is offered by Advance HE, formerly the Higher Education Academy, a charity that advises education institutions.

How do people get to appoint themselves “charities that advise education institutions”? How do education institutions decide which charities to take advice from? How does any of this work?

One thing it seems to do is make it harder to dissent from whatever “advice” these lobbyists are handing out, because it’s an extra layer. “This isn’t our advice/dogma, it comes from Stonewall/Advance HE.” Well who put them in charge? And why?

The organisation has a pivotal role in financing academics because those bidding for funds from UK Research and Innovation must complete an equality and diversity statement that is likely to have been compiled under its advice.

So they’ve somehow woven themselves into the bureaucracy but it sounds as if they’re not accountable to anyone. Why is that?

In a letter to The Times on Wednesday, Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at Oxford University, said that Advance HE had “considerable clout” and said that it “promotes a controversial view of sex and gender”.

Why does it have any clout at all? What is the mechanism by which these organizations get to have clout?

Naomi Cunningham, a barrister who specialises in discrimination and gender claims, says that the Advance HE programme could be challenged in the courts. “I think this is pretty clearly unlawful,” adding that it constituted “direct discrimination on grounds of philosophical belief,” and therefore would breach equality legislation.

She said that it “represents a pretty totalitarian attempt to entrench gender identity beliefs at the heart of all academic endeavour”.

Which is all the more alarming given how fatuous those beliefs are.

“Oh but you can’t lump me in with the cishets, I’m QUEER.”

I bet Laurie Penny’s not “glad to hear it” any more.

Gregor Murray, the unhinged man who shouts derogatory abuse at women on Twitter, is still a Dundee councillor.

Funny thing about that – you can’t tell from his official page that he’s “non-binary.” Nobody looking at that page would have any idea that he’ll flip all the way out if you call him “him” or address him as “sir.” People looking at that page are going to just assume he’s a man, because his name is Gregor and he’s dressed in the business uniform for men and he has a beard and a receding hairline and so on – they’re going to assume it because he “presents as” a man.

So…is the “non-binary” thing just for after hours? A hobby? Part time?

Or is it perhaps not even that but just a pretext for shouting derogatory abuse at women? Maybe he’s “non-binary” solely on Twitter?

H/t latsot

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has more details about the abuse of the female goalie.

Armstrong principal Kirk Lorigan said the school is “appalled and embarrassed” at the actions of the student section and chants that the students used during Thursday’s game at Belmont Sports Complex in Kittanning. One of the chants was sexually explicit, and Mars coach Steve Meyers said his goalie was in tears after the second period. Mars has played five games this season and the female goalie has been the starter for all five games.

…

Lorigan did not attend the game but said he was “disgusted” that no one — from Armstrong parents to two security personnel — did anything to stop the chants.

What are the chants saying? What’s the point of them? Besides trying to distract the target?

They’re saying all you are is a thing for our sexual jollies. You’re not a person, you’re not a high school student, you’re not a girls with plans for her future, you’re a mouth and a cunt. You’re not a goalie, you’re not an athlete, you’re not a competitor, you’re not one of us, you’re just a couple of holes.

The joys of being a “cis” female yeah?

How is this ok?

It’s what male people say to gender critical feminists, too – suck my dick. Remember that sign at the FiLiA conference?

But please, tell us again how men who say they are women are the most oppressed Of All.

Trumpian hack refuses to answer.

Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark stonewalled the House Select Committee investigating January 6, responding to a subpoena demanding he appear for an interview with the panel, but not answering questions posed to him, sources familiar with his appearance told CNN.

He should be locked up then.

Instead, Clark provided a letter from his attorney Harry MacDougald that claimed he could not provide testimony until a court declares that his interactions with former President Donald Trump are not protected under attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.

Attorney-client privilege!!!

He worked for the country, not Trump. He was a DoJ official, not Trump’s lawyer. He never worked for Trump. Trump was never his client.

Clark was one of the officials within the Justice Department pushing to pursue unfounded claims of voter fraud in the weeks after the November election, and, according to officials who interacted with him, was in touch with Trump repeatedly.

In an effort to steal the election. That doesn’t make him Trump’s lawyer.

As a sympathizer to election fraud conspiracy theories, Clark became Trump’s most useful asset inside the Justice Department in the days before January 6. Clark helped Trump devise a plan to oust the then acting attorney general, place himself atop the department, and have the DOJ intervene in Georgia to set aside its voting results in order to sway the state toward Trump.

Gotta say, I hope he gets prosecuted for all that.

When Clark’s superiors learned of his scheming with Trump in early January, they threatened to resign en masse.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to now claim that his illegal and illicit plotting with Trump confers attorney-client privilege on the plotting.