Speaking of cruise ships…

The Crystal Symphony left Miami on Jan. 8, as scheduled, on a two-week cruise. On the way back, things took an unexpected turn.

The climate changed?

The ship was scheduled to arrive in Miami on Saturday, but mid-trip, a United States federal judge ordered the cruise ship seized over a lawsuit regarding unpaid fuel bills. The ship changed course for Bimini, in the Bahamas, according to a cruise tracker, rather than sail into the clutches of federal authorities.

In other words the ship went on the lam. Such an ethical industry.

Steven Fales, 51, an actor and playwright, was on the cruise with a couple of friends “hoping that the pandemic would end and trying to do something adventurous.” The adventure came to an abrupt end when they learned the cruise was being rerouted.

Is there anything less “adventurous” than getting on a cruise ship? Cruises aren’t about adventure, they’re about eating a lot while being on a very large ship. Being rerouted is more adventure-like than staying on course.

Then again, going on cruises in defiance of CDC advice is at least risky, so maybe that should count.

H/t Sackbut

The Gwent cops certainly seem terrified about these OffenSive posters.

“Safely” remove – because they’re radioactive, you see, and poisonous, and wired to explode, and laced with razor blades. Stay 500 feet back and summon the helicopters.

Well no wonder they’re mad at women. Male cops are standing up for themselves at last!

The dangerous sticker-poster tells the story herself:

Meanwhile rape is hardly ever prosecuted. Let’s look at the stats in Gwent, shall we?

MORE than 500 alleged rapes were reported in 2021 – but only five charges were made, according to Gwent Police figures.

Only five charges have come from the incidents, however a large majority of the reported cases – 436 – are still under investigation. Nineteen of the cases have completed investigations with no identified suspect.

Well they probably just don’t have time, when they’re so busy interviewing disabled women in the middle of the night.

Strange doings.

In other words, We Are Fair Cop received a direct message about the arrest of a woman for feminist graffiti and stickering. They didn’t stop with arresting her though. They held her until 3:30 a.m. and then threw her out to get home on her mobility scooter, without her phone, which she always keeps with her in case the battery on the scooter dies.

Word is there may be a valid charge of vandalism…but the police have added “hate crime.” What, because domestic violence doesn’t happen? Or it’s women doing it to men? Or what? Where’s the hate crime? What in hell is wrong with them?

Trump thinks it’s very very very unfair that anyone is investigating his darling little children who just want to play with their teddy bears in peace.

Former President Donald Trump believes that his children are being targeted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 commission and the New York attorney general to deflect attention from President Joe Biden’s failings.

Or – and hear me out for a second – it could be that they did illegal things.

“It’s a very unfair situation for my children. Very, very unfair,” he told Secrets in a telephone call.

You know how he could have avoided it? By maintaining a wall of separation between them and his crimes. Instead of course he raised them to commit crimes, and he allowed Princess Ivanka to install herself and her sinister husband in the White House.

“They are using whatever powers they have. They couldn’t care less. They are vicious people,” Trump said of the panel.

Did Trump use whatever powers he had (and some he didn’t have)? Was he able to care less? Is he a vicious person?

He suggested that the commission investigation is a smokescreen to cover for Biden’s missteps. “It’s a disgrace, what’s going on. They’re using these things to try and get people’s minds off how incompetently our country is being run. And they don’t care. They’ll go after children,” Donald Trump said.

“Children.” Princess Ivanka is 40.

“They’ve done a great job,” he said. “You know Ivanka very well, and you know the quality of her,” he added. “For them to have to go through all this stuff is a disgrace.”

They wouldn’t have “had” to if he hadn’t involved them in his crimes.

It’s Nominate a Queer Icon Time.

Meat Loaf, arguably the most unlikely musician to have ever become a full-fledged pop star, has reportedly died at the age of 74…He was also known, at least by some of us, as an icon of queer masculinity—an inspirational and aspirational figure of manhood and butch lesbianism for people of all genders.

Ooh, Mabel, how queer is that. An icon of manhood and butch lesbianism! I’m so out of touch I can remember when those were two different things, not the same thing with different labels. That’s the joy of queering things though: you get to talk complete nonsense and pretend it’s “iconic.”

Gay and queer aesthetics are known for stepping outside of stereotypical categories for male/masculine and woman/feminine, but they often they make that step in one fairly predictable direction that we call androgyny.

Blah blah blah fucking blah. What “aesthetics”? You mean your clothes, hair, makeup, piercings, tatoos? You boring self-involved trivial nitwit?

Guess what: nobody cares. The world isn’t high school, and in the world nobody cares what other people wear. Nobody is taking notes on your “aesthetic.” We.don’t.care.

This is what people do as a substitute for creativity or intellectual activity or politics or anything else demanding and significant. It’s a shortcut to being interesting, but the trouble is that it’s not interesting. Some shortcuts turn out to lead to the town dump, and this is one of them.

Trump had perhaps his worst week ever:

It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The week ended with the leaking of a document showing that Trump at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

Aka his attempts to steal the election in order to make himself unelected dictator.

It is that Department of Justice investigation into the deadly Capitol assault, parallel but separate to the 6 January House committee, which harbors the most legal peril for Trump. Some believe sedition charges for members of the Oath Keepers militia indicate that the inquiry has moved into a higher gear.

…

At a rare press conference earlier this month, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, did not mention Trump by name but sought to reassure critics of his investigation.

“The justice department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” he said in a carefully worded address.

“At any level.”

Sonia Sodha on the triumph of the karenphobes:

Last week, it was announced that [Kate Clanchy] and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work.

The book that prompted this is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her memoir of a 30-year teaching career. Rave reviews and an Orwell prize gave way to mixed reactions from readers: some adored it, others thought she used racial and ableist stereotypes to describe her diverse students. Among the readers of colour I know, reactions were just as mixed: some found her descriptors offensive, others thought they were OK, especially in the context of her honesty about her own naivety and prejudices.

She and Pan Macmillan apologized, she intended to rewrite the book, but it wasn’t enough.

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

All very well but she’s a Karen.

How to make sense of her ostracism? Some people are desperate to see the world cast in black and white. Clanchy’s worst crime is not to fit this mould. Of course she doesn’t: none of us can rise above the imperfectly human. Look at her in the round and it’s obvious she’s done more good than most. This is why the strand of anti-racist thinking that is obsessed with the blame and shame all white people should bear for structural discrimination is so corrosive to common cause and understanding. White people who do nothing to challenge racism are terrible, but white people who trip up when trying to do something about it are even worse. The societal misogyny that infects this movement means it sees older white women as the very worst of all. Any expression of distress is the weaponisation of “white women’s tears”. The witch is not permitted to have feelings; they distract from her role as lightning rod for anger at all of society’s ills.

She’s permitted to have them, in fact it’s good that she has them, so that we can gloat, but she’s not permitted to object to having them. She just has to take it.

Pan Macmillan’s overreaction has caused huge collateral damage – it will no longer publish a new anthology of poems by Clanchy’s students – and is no substitute for working at becoming more diverse. “Sensitivity readers”, people who comb manuscripts looking for the potentially offensive, are a crass development: it outsources responsibility and plays on the idea that if a book has the potential to offend, it shouldn’t be published.

Especially in a world where “the potential to offend” can be something as commonplace as saying that a man is not a woman.

Anna Slatz on the Cork outrage:

Susan Stryker, a transgender Professor of gender studies at the University of Arizona, is the first of three keynote presenters at the 25th Lesbian Lives conference, which is being held in March at the University of Cork in Ireland. Its 2022 theme is “solidarity.”

Stryker was one of the first academics who sought to apply critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” to males who insisted they could become women. In 2020, Stryker wrote an article for Time Magazine drawing and relying on the history of racial segregation to claim that women were merely a social construct. Such comparisons have been extensively decried by Black feminists.

Thus performatively underlining what a man he is – entitled, domineering, contemptuous of women. Women simply can’t pull off that kind of dominance display because everyone would just laugh.

But Stryker’s most infamous work is a 1993 essay subtitled Preforming Transgender Rage, in which he describes himself as a “Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell.”

Oh it’s “dildo-packing” now. How “playful.”

A conference. University College Cork. In March.

The 25th Lesbian Lives Conference will take place in University College Cork, Ireland from 4th-5th March 2022. The LGBT+ Staff Network of University College Cork, in conjunction with the community organisation LINC and scholars from University College Dublin, Cambridge University, and University of Brighton Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender Research, are delighted to host the conference.  

Cool.

The theme for the 2022 Lesbian Lives Conference is Solidarity.  

Uh oh. We’ve learned that that can have some oddly limited applications – that it can, weirdly enough, mean not solidarity with lesbians but solidarity with men, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a Lesbian Lives Conference at all if you ask me.

The confirmed Keynote Presenters at the Lesbian Lives 2022 Conference are:  

– Professor Susan Stryker, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Institute of LGBT Studies, University of Arizona   

Who is a trans woman. Top of the list, keynote speaker, at a conference called Lesbian Lives. Shut up, women, this conference isn’t about you, who the hell do you think you are?

Updating to add:

More on the Huxley issue:

Imperial College must not “disown” one of its founding fathers, Thomas Huxley, eminent scientists have warned as they urged the university not to remove his bust or rename a building named after him.

…

In a letter to The Telegraph, a group of 39 leading scientists – including 17 from Imperial College – are imploring Imperial College not to turn their back on him.

“Huxley was an ardent abolitionist who fought the virulent pro-slavery scientific racism of his day and publicly welcomed the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865,” they say.

“From childhood poverty, Huxley rose on merit to become President of the Royal Society and Privy Counsellor. ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, he fought for the theory of evolution, and first demonstrated our evolutionary descent from an ape-like ancestor.”

The letter acknowledges that early in his career he believed in a hierarchy of races but added that “as he aged he became sceptical of racial stereotypes”.

It goes on to note that Huxley “reformed London’s schools, was a principal of a working men’s college, wrote volumes of journalism, gave lectures for working people and opened his classes to women”.

The letter says: “He was instrumental in founding the Royal College of Science, later Imperial College, the very institution that now seeks to disown him.”

Statues of men who got rich off the slave trade are one thing, and Huxley is quite another.

Starts well, and then messes it up.

When Sapna Palep was younger, she was mortified by conversations about menstruation. “It was like, ‘Let’s not talk about this, I need to leave the room,’” said the 43-year-old mother of two. The mere mention of periods evoked “pure embarrassment and fear.”

Ms. Palep’s 9-year-old daughter, Aviana Campello-Palep, in contrast, approaches the topic with zero self-consciousness or hesitation. “When my friends talk about getting their period, they just talk about it,” Aviana said. “It’s just normal in a girl’s life.”

These frank conversations have led Ms. Palep and her daughters, Aviana and Anaya, who is 8, to create Girls With Big Dreams, a line of undergarments for tweens, which includes reusable period underwear that offers an environmentally friendlier alternative to disposable pads and tampons; their brand will launch in early February and be sold online.

Cool. Good idea.

The Campello-Palep girls are representative of two emerging trends that have become clear to period advocates, and anyone who casually follows #PeriodTok: Members of Gen Z and beyond are more forthcoming about their periods than generations past, and they are more likely to care whether the products they use are environmentally sustainable. The convergence of the two ideals may signify a cultural shift in how young people are approaching menstruation.

Hmm. Getting a little wobbly there.

“This whole movement is youth-driven,” said Michela Bedard, executive director of Period Inc., a global nonprofit focused on providing access to period supplies and ending period stigma. “Young menstruators are having a completely different experience in terms of managing their periods with reusables throughout their life.”

Aaaaaaaand we’ve lost the plot.

Reusable products represent only a fraction of menstruation supplies purchased in the United States — Americans spend $1.8 billion on pads and $1 billion on tampons yearly, which dwarfs sales of all other products combined.

American women, that is. Men don’t have this particular expense.

But the market share for reusable products is expected to grow through the next decade, according to forecasters, largely fueled by the wider acceptance and availability of menstrual cups in Western countries. Still, the average menstruator can use thousands of tampons in their lifetime.

This time it’s the Times itself calling women “menstruators,” and not someone they’re quoting.

Still, some young people can’t afford reusable products, especially in communities where period poverty — or the lack of access to menstrual products — is an issue. “Even though the investment in a $25 pair of underwear or a $60 cup would save you money, a lot of people don’t have that money every month,” said Ms. Bedard, whose organization serves the economically disadvantaged.

Again, this isn’t about people, it’s about women. It’s only women who have this financial burden. It’s not good journalism to conceal that fact.

The cultural stigma that plagues menstruation also stubbornly persists, despite the best efforts of young people to normalize periods. Patriarchal taboos around virginity, purity and “dirtiness” in many cultures and religions quash conversation and can impede the use of internal menstrual products, such as tampons or cups.

And the patriarchal taboos are aimed at? Female people. Not generic people, but specifically the female ones. It’s female people who are seen as dirty contaminants.

Corporate messaging still largely emphasizes discreteness and cleanliness, which makes periods seem dirty or bad, said Chella Quint, a menstrual activist, educator and author of “Own Your Period: A Fact-filled Guide to Period Positivity.” “For a long time, the disposable menstrual product industry was hugely responsible for propagating and perpetuating the sort of negative taboos that keep people down and frightened,” she added.

Sad that Quint is too down and frightened to say “women” instead of “people.” It’s not men who are kept down and frightened by these taboos.

Menstrual health is a public health issue and has no gender, Dr. Natterson said. To combat taboos around the subject, anyone, even those who don’t menstruate, should be able to speak freely about periods too, she said. Dr. Natterson said she’s made sure her 16-year-old son knows to hand his sweatshirt to a classmate who has a blood stain on their pants, and to have a tampon or pad to share.

Her. Her pants. Hers. Get rid of the taboo on menstruation but don’t replace it with a taboo on mentioning women.

Libs of Tik Tok is probably not a potential comrade from my point of view, but this is…piquant.

It’s about “ways to support your LGBTQ students” – which rather assumes “you” will have lots of them, which in fact is unlikely.

Step one, she says, is to “normalize pronouns in your classroom.”

You what? Nobody needs pronouns “normalized” in a classroom or anywhere else – they’re a core part of our language, which we start learning by osmosis in infancy. Children aren’t stumped for how to express “you” or “I” or “them” or any other pronoun, they’re dab hands at it by the time they’re in school.

A great way to do this, she goes on, is to use pronouns in “an icebreaker activity.” But…you use pronouns in any activity where you use language. There’s no need to make any special effort to “use” them because you use them constantly.

“So, ask for your students’ pronouns reeegardless of their idenniny.”

But your students don’t own any pronouns. That sounds like a very confusing question to ask young children, and I’m assuming she “teaches” young children because she seems too ignorant to teach older ones.

She also “shares” her own pronouns, which is again, of course, meaningless gibberish. She might as well talk about sharing her own verbs or conjunctions. Language doesn’t have “own” things because it has to be public and general as opposed to private and individual.

Another front in this exciting war, she says, is greetings. No gendered greetings, no no – she doesn’t use words like “guys,” she says, or “ladies n gennlemen” – well no, teachers of little children wouldn’t be saying “ladies n gennlemen,” that would be silly. Instead she uses words like “folks” or…”guys gals n nonbinary pals.” Yes she really says that: she doesn’t say guys, instead she says guys.

I’m hoping she’s not a teacher at all but just identifies as a teacher.

Scientists write a letter to Nature:

Once again a group of us—this time a different group—got together not to protest an article in Sci. Am. or Nature, but to make a public statement in Nature about the impending defenestration of a great scientist: Thomas Henry Huxley. As the Guardian and other sites have reported, Imperial College in London is pondering—and almost certainly will execute—the relocation of a statue of Huxley, and is also considering renaming one of its structures, the Huxley Building.

That’s annoying. Huxley was a progressive guy, more so than Darwin.

The Guardian wrote:

An investigation into Imperial College London’s historical links to the British empire has recommended the university remove a statue and rename buildings and lecture theatres that celebrate scientists whose work advocated eugenics and racism.

The recommendations by the college’s independent history group are intended to address racial inequalities and improve inclusivity at the Russell Group university.

The report identified a number of problematic renowned scientific figures who have been honoured with buildings, rooms and academic positions in their names.

For example, it calls for a building named after the English biologist and anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley, lauded for determining that birds descended from dinosaurs, to be renamed due to his racist beliefs about human intelligence.

The report says Huxley’s essay Emancipation – Black and White “espouses a racial hierarchy of intelligence, a belief system of ‘scientific racism’ that fed the dangerous and false ideology of eugenics; legacies of which are still felt today”.

Jerry Coyne responds:

As you’ll see if you investigate Huxley’s life (and I’ve put some relevant facts below the fold), while he said a few things that might be considered “problematic” today, he was nevertheless far more liberal and abolitionist than nearly all of his peers. His early views on races also changed over his life, becoming more tolerant. More important, he was an ardent advocate of evolution (Darwin was too timorous to defend it in person), and an advocate of women’s rights and of the education of working people. He spent much of his later life actually giving science courses to people from the working class, and trying to enact educational reform. There is nobody who can claim that, on balance, his life caused more harm than good.

In light of the misleading accusations of Huxley’s inherent racism, claims that can rest only on either ignorance or an drive to efface the past to make it palatable to today’s standards, a group of us from the U.S. and the U.K. wrote a short letter to Nature.  I’ve put it between the lines below. Nature summarily rejected our letter on the grounds of “we don’t take petitions”, but that’s completely disingenuous. It’s not a petition but a comment or a letter, and I can guess why Nature didn’t touch it.  (They are, of course, very woke.) As one of my colleagues said, “Cowardly f*****s—they have loads of self-righteous letters. Calling it a petition is a way of ducking the issue.”

Cowardly fuckers, that is. I don’t know why JC is squeamish about the word – maybe it’s to encourage restraint in his very large group of commenters.

Jupiter from the James Webb telescope September 12, 2019.

See comments for correction.

No racism here folks, move along.

Hours before a failed effort by Democrats to pass a voting rights bill in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was asked in a news conference on Wednesday for his message to voters worried about access to the polls during the midterm elections.

Mr. McConnell described those worries as a ginned-up controversy, and misleadingly cited data on voter turnout.

“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he responded.

Note that he thinks African Americans are not Americans.

Leaving that aside however – come on. The issue is future elections, not past ones. The Republicans have been busily making it harder for African Americans to vote ever since the Shelby ruling and especially ever since Trump. There are new obstacles that won’t be in the statistics yet.

[H]igh voter turnout and perceptions that voting was easy in past elections do not prove that concerns about voting access in future elections are “misplaced,” as Mr. McConnell suggested. At least 19 states passed laws in 2021 restricting voting access. Georgia’s efforts in particular may have an outsize impact on Black voters.

What I’m saying. There are new restrictions. McConnell is a very bad man.

Today I learned there’s a thing called Pop ‘n’ Olly, which bills itself as “LGBT+ and Equality ‘Edutainment’ for children and young people”…without of course saying anything about what qualifies it to educate children and young people (or for that matter to edutain them).

It showed us…this.

It is – surprise surprise – absolutely dire. It starts by “explaining” how infants are “assigned” a sex and then says gender is different…without bothering to say what “gender” is. “A person’s gender is who they feel that they are,” it says in a smarmy voice, but of course that’s not what they mean at all, they just mean the usual gender bullshit. Here’s an interesting thing: there’s more to “who people are” than their sex or gender. Little children aren’t going to hear “who they feel that they are” and think girl or boy and nothing else.

Smarmy voice continues with “examples,” such as female, male, both, or neither, and then immediately proceeds to “Gender is usually something a person just knows about themselves.” The whole world of “who people are” is boiled down to female or male in an instant. It’s about as educational as a bowl of sick.

Also, by the way, what sex children are is not something they “just know” about themselves; they get told it. They get told it as they get told everything, as part of their development. Adults don’t remember being told it, so the gender fanatics among them jump to the conclusion that we “just know” it, which is a measure of how deeply stupid the whole ideology is.

I can’t watch past the first minute right now because it’s too nauseating.

The police can’t cope.

Scotland’s national police force has warned that it cannot comply fully with the demands of new hate crime laws until next year, as officers struggle to cope with a surge in reported offences caused by Twitter rows.

In its quarterly report Police Scotland said there were “hurdles to overcome” if officers were to carry out their duties within the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, passed nine months ago, with training and guidance still to be addressed, along with a requirement for new IT systems.

They want to postpone because they’re having trouble keeping up with people who call the police because they’re OfFended by something on Twitter.

A 76 per cent rise in reported crimes in which transgender issues was the aggravating factor contrasted with 6.1 per cent growth in all hate crime reports, and reflected the impact of online rows about trans rights and gender identity, according to the Scottish Police Federation.

And we know which side of those rows is calling the cops. It’s not the side that defends the rights of women, it’s the side that is outraged to be told it can’t trample all over the rights of women.

A Scottish government spokesperson said: “Work in conjunction with justice partners is underway to ensure effective implementation of the Hate Crime Act so that, once in force, it offers greater protections to those targeted by hatred and prejudice.”

Spokesperson has the tedious bureaucratic jargon down pat, at least.

“Whilst the rise in hate crimes recorded by the police including a trangender identity aggravation may be attributed to a greater frequency of crimes occurring, it may also be attributed to an increased confidence in the reporting of instances of hate crime to the police – something that is to be encouraged.

“However, these figures are a reminder to redouble our efforts to tackle hate and confront prejudice towards our LGBTI communities.”

But not toward women of course. God no. Who gives a fuck about women?

Parody or serious effort to delete the word “women” from the language? It can be hard to tell.

According to two former competitors, players with vaginas received extra underwear on the latest season of “Survivor,” which aired in 2021. 

…

Wallace said it “makes sense” to give players with vaginas more than one pair of underwear because “we got stuff going on own there” and they have different needs than those with penises. 

…

Insider has reported that wearing the same underwear and clothes for an extended period of time can have potentially life-threatening consequences, with the health risks, such as severe urinary tract infections, being higher for people with vaginas. 

According to Wallace, shortly after she and her tribemates voiced their concerns, showrunners gave players with vaginas extra underwear. 

“They decided, yes, it makes sense to give people that have a vagina two pairs of underwear,” Wallace said. “That was something cool that I think is going to continue.” 

It’s unclear if players with penises also received extra underwear. 

Has to be parody, right?

This would be just one more example of a man who identifies as a woman verbally abusing feminist women, but this one is “Lead therapist for” GenderGP.

Trans people are human, but feminist women are animals. Hm.