Medical advice from random podcasters is not one of our best inventions.

Hugely popular US podcast host Joe Rogan has backpedalled on his comments that young, healthy people could forgo the coronavirus vaccine.

“I’m not an anti-vax person,” Rogan said. “I believe they’re safe and encourage many people to take them.”

But Rogan did not walk back his suggestion that the young and healthy do not “need” vaccines, which drew backlash from White House officials.

Why call it “backlash”? What a stupid word to use. Rogan shouldn’t be making such reckless and destructive “suggestions,” and the government is entitled to say he’s wrong and must be ignored. This isn’t a game.

Asked about Rogan’s comments, top US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci repeated guidance from experts that unvaccinated, asymptomatic people can still transmit Covid-19.

“Even if you don’t have any symptoms, you’re propagating the outbreak,” Dr Fauci said.

And the thing about that is, Fauci knows what he’s talking about and Joe Rogan is a comedian.

Rogan made the comments during a 23 April episode of his podcast, which was first reported by Media Matters this week.

In that episode, Rogan told listeners that he would not suggest the vaccine to a healthy 21-year-old. “If you’re a healthy person, and you’re exercising all the time, and you’re young, and you’re eating well…like, I don’t think you need to worry about this.”

Responding to the criticism on his podcast on Thursday, Rogan said the argument that young people need the vaccine “for other people” made sense. “But that’s a different argument,” he added.

And Rogan stressed that he should not be a source of scientific advice. “I’m not a doctor,” he said. “I’m not a respected source of information, even for me.”

Then don’t offer advice, at least not advice that contradicts what the actual scientific advisors are telling us. Just shut up about it.

The placid sense of male entitlement just takes my breath away sometimes.

Classic. It’s women’s fault when men kill men!

Update:

Dan Arel tweeted

Um, TERFS are Nazi though.

Also LOL at people calling me a misogynist for believing that trans women are women.

TERFS get trans women killed. End of story.

Feminists don’t kill men who say they are men, but feminists somehow “get” such men killed. They must be witches!

In fact when you think about it, really think about it, all women are bitches. They all make men do things. Men are pure and perfect and guiltless, but women put their witchy magic on the pure perfect men and “get” bad things done by those men.

It’s scary scary stuff. Medical science needs to hurry up with those uterus transplants into a few good men.

Male athlete says it’s “fundamentally unfair” to have athletic teams for girls or women.

A Canadian transgender athlete says it’s “reprehensible” that some U.S. states are trying to ban trans women and girls from playing for female sports teams.

Of course he’s a male himself, and competing against women gives him a huge advantage, so that could be why he’s saying that. Just a thought.

“What they’re really doing is fighting for what one might call the non-existent rights of [non-transgender] women and girls, while treating trans girls and trans women as not real girls or women,” said Veronica Ivy, a two-time track cycling world champion.

Yes it’s our old pal Rhys McKinnon, talking about “the non-existent rights” of real women and girls which he wants to replace with the “right” of men and boys to take their places. (What he doesn’t say is that he wants other men not to do this if it means they will be competing against him. He wants the advantage for himself, not for other men.)

“It’s fundamentally unfair,” she told The Current‘s Matt Galloway.

He’s such a comedian. Of course what’s fundamentally unfair is for preening assholes like him to elbow women out of women’s sports, but the CBC is too dim or too cowardly to tell him so.

Republican lawmakers in states across the U.S. have introduced more than 100 bills related to transgender issues this year, according to Human Rights Campaign, the largest U.S. organization fighting for LGBTQ equality. Many of those bills aim to prevent transgender women and girls from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams. 

Proponents of such legislation argue that allowing transgender individuals to play on women’s sports teams gives them an unfair physical advantage over other players. 

And why do they argue that? Because it’s true, that’s why.

Ivy called it “unconscionable” that legislators would use these bills to attack children and their right to play with their peers. “This idea that trans women are going to suddenly take over sport has not happened,” Ivy said. “And it’s unlikely to ever happen.”

One, he doesn’t know that, two, it’s easy for him to brush it off because it’s not his ox being gored, three there is no reason women and girls should give up any wins or places on teams to men who claim to be women. It doesn’t matter if it’s only a few (so far), it’s still taking something away from women and girls and giving it to men and boys, when women and girls have rights just as men and boys do.

While Alphonso David, president of Human Rights Campaign, said he appreciates the argument that transgender women may have a natural advantage over other female athletes, “that’s all it is, is an argument.”

“The myth that transgender women are dominant competitors in women’s sports is pure disinformation,” he said.

No it’s not.

“And it’s important to also recognize that this disinformation is dangerous for the health and the safety and the very lives of transgender youth and adults alike.”

What about the health and safety and the very lives of girls and women? Why don’t they matter? Why is it only trans women who matter?

The old “right to have access to a woman’s genitals” take.

How sensitive and humane to frame women as a resource men have a right to use.

In other news, one of the 87 Duggar kids from the “87 and counting” tv show about religious fanatics trying to break world records on how many children one woman can push out – one of those kids has been arrested.

But he was just joking joking joking. When Tucker Carlson scowled into the camera and told his dupes to call child protective services if they see any kids in masks, he was just JOKING.

After the Erik Wemple Blog posted a Twitter thread with updates on the states’ responses, some Carlson allies claimed we were taking all of this too seriously. “It should go without saying that no, you should not, in fact call the police or CPS on parents with kids in masks outdoors. It should also go without saying that Tucker Carlson is not, in fact, seriously telling his viewers to do that,” wrote the author of a piece on Twitchy that helpfully aggregates the sentiment.

Why should it go without saying? He didn’t look like a guy being funny. He didn’t act like a guy being funny. What he said wasn’t funny. Why should it go without saying?

In light of that reaction, we asked Fox News: Was Carlson kidding or just engaging in satire here? Whatever the answer, it’s a wonderful world where you say something with a straight face — and then, when critics point out how offensive or dangerous the remarks were, your supporters flock to the just-joking defense. For further examples of this dynamic, look no further than President Trump, who took this exit ramp over and over during his time in the White House.

Bonus because Trump has no detectable sense of humor.

Let’s assume that the Twitchy crowd is right — Carlson was joshing or engaging in a thought exercise, and we here at the Erik Wemple Blog failed to pick up on the signals. That would mean that Carlson was satirically calling on people to report parents to child protective services — an instrument that ruins lives when it misfires. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg tweeted this point along with a link to her 2015 story in the Nation about the “threats and intrusions poor, minority families have long endured” from CPS.

And in conclusion, libbruls can’t take a joke.

It’s Mary Beard’s turn to get some random policing and name-calling, it seems.

What “nonsense” has Beard “spouted”? As far as I can tell, none. As far as I can tell (people have been locking accounts or deleting them altogether, so some evidence is missing) someone whined at her for followcrime, and others rushed to join the fun.

There aren’t enough scare quotes in the world to convey how not progressive all this is.

New homophobia much like the old.

Thick and fast come the apoplectic accusations from the LGBT+ lobby against members of the authentic and historical lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) community and other gender-critical people. We are repeatedly told that we are guilty of transphobic “hate” and that our organisations are “hate groups”. Simply insisting that sex is a biological and immutable characteristic, and that the settled definition of “sex” underpins LGB and women’s rights, is even enough to get you accused of being a terrorist or a neo-Nazi sympathiser, no less.

…

We must ask ourselves, however, how much damage the LGBT+ lobby is doing to the mental health of the young LGB people who gravitate towards it, given that these are people whose experience of being same-sex attracted is being overruled and negated by the lobby, which tells them they are “genital fetishists” if they restrict their partners to members of the same biological sex and if they do not centre extreme demands from a subgroup of the transgender-identified community.

But you see that subgroup of the subgroup of the transgender-identified community is the most oppressed group of all time ever. End of discussion.

This business of saying (as Index on Censorship did) that we have to “build bridges” with people who say men are women if they say they are made me think there must be a handy label for that, like “gaslighting” and “sealioning” and similar, but I couldn’t think of one. I did what any sensible person would do and asked Twitter. “Motte and bailey” is close but it leaves out the building bridges bit.

This at least names the Index on Censorship part.

Ahhh yes. I haven’t incorporated that label into my vocabulary, and maybe it’s time I did. Wikipedia:

Flying monkeys^[1] is a term used in popular psychology, mainly in the context of narcissistic abuse,^[2] to describe people who act on behalf of a narcissist towards a third party, usually for an abusive purpose (e.g. a smear campaign).^[3][4]

It’s not an exact fit, but it’s helpful.

It’s a kind of hostage-taking. We, the aggressor, take a hostage and then force you, the victim, to Build Bridges with us and we’ll let you visit the hostage every other Tuesday.

We need a good label for it.

People have only been saying that trickle-down economics is crap for decades.

To be more specific, trickle-down economics is just lovely for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk but not so great for people at the bottom of that trickle.

Still, it is surprising to see Biden get a clue. He’s been a very conservative brand of Democrat most of his career.

The US president was a young politician when the idea that cutting taxes on the well off would be good for the poor first came into vogue in the 1970s. Now he has used his first address to a joint session of Congress to call on the US’s top 1% to pay for his $1.8tn American families plan – higher spending in areas such as education, childcare and infrastructure.

Anticipating pushback from Republicans on Capitol Hill, Biden had a simple message. It was time, he said, to build the country from the middle and the bottom outwards not from the top down. “Trickle down has never worked,” he said.

It sure hasn’t worked here. We have massive wealth inequality, massive rates of poverty, massive rates of homelessness, a huge chunk of the population in prison, and on and on. Unions are weak where they exist at all, corporations are strong, de facto segregation in housing and schools and neighborhood resources is everywhere – the US is a miserable place to be poor.

Index on Censorship steps up:

This week Index on Censorship took the unusual step of legally intervening in an employment appeal tribunal.  As always our focus was on the core principle of free expression and protecting free speech in law. The tribunal has now concluded and has reserved judgment – we expect to learn the result in the coming months.  Much will be discussed and written about in the coming days regarding the Maya Forstater tribunal, but for your information on what Index provided to the court please access our skeleton argument here.

Whatever the outcome of the Employment Appeal Tribunal the toxic nature of the current conversation on gender and trans rights is doing little to build bridges or solidarity.  As promised by our Chief Executive, in the coming weeks Index will seek to provide a platform for considered debate and engagement.  We plan to publish the words of those people who are being silenced and provide a space for people to highlight their lived experiences without fear or favour.  So watch this space.

To be perfectly honest I’m not as worried about building bridges or solidarity as I am about being free to tell the truth. I don’t really want to cross a bridge that leads to people who want to force me to call men “women.” I don’t want to sign a treaty or make peace or give concessions on the question that should never have been a question, “are women the only people who are women or can men be women too?”

As has been pointed out many times, it’s a kind of blackmail or con game. If Boris breaks into your house in your absence and changes the locks and won’t let you in, you don’t have to build bridges with Boris. You just get Boris out, and that’s the end of your dealings with Boris. You don’t owe him anything and he doesn’t get to commit an outrage against you and then offer a “compromise.” Boris is the aggressor and thief and Boris gets nothing in reward. Women don’t owe men anything for refusing to agree that men too can be women if they say so.

It’s not women’s job to build bridges to men who have stolen the word “women” from women, and refused to give it back, and flung threats and insults at women, and gotten women fired and shunned and socially punished, merely for continuing to say that only women are women.

More eccentric claims from Maya’s appeal.

I don’t see how that can be slander. I think people who believe in a god are deluded; is that slander? They think people like me are deluded because we don’t believe in a god; is that slander? I don’t think so. Discussions can get rude, sure, but just thinking a belief is deluded isn’t slander.

What? How can someone’s saying something deny someone else a right to do anything, including transition?

And not believing that men can be women is not an existential threat to men who say they can. It doesn’t make them disappear and it doesn’t make them any less women than they already are.

It’s bullying, this constant inflation of the “dangers” and “threat” of women who don’t believe that men can be women. It’s bullying via emotional blackmail and even legal jeopardy. It’s behavior rooted in male entitlement, thus ironically making it all the less convincing that the men doing it are women.

The threats were just playful.

A New York City man charged with making online threats to murder members of Congress told a jury on Tuesday that the threats weren’t meant to be taken seriously.

Brendan Hunt acknowledged he had written the online statements but dismissed them as “blather” produced under the influence of marijuana and alcohol.

“I was really just letting off steam,” Hunt said, according to The Associated Press. “It was really more online blather than anything else.”

…

On Dec. 6 he allegedly wrote on Facebook: “Trump, we want actual revenge on democrats. Meaning, we want you to hold a public execution of pelosi aoc schumer etc. And if you dont do it, the citizenry will. We’re not voting in another rigged election. Start up the firing squads, mow down these commies, and lets take america back!”

…

The FBI said two days after the Capitol riot, Hunt posted a video of the assault titled “KILL YOUR SENATORS.” In a rambling narration he called on people to show up at the “so-called” inauguration of Joe Biden with guns to “put some bullets in their fucking heads.”

The jury found him guilty today.

There was a guest appearance by the Holocaust, because of course there was.

Is it a violation of the dignity of others to fail to pretend they are something they are not?

I think you could make a case that it’s the other way around. It’s not all that dignified to be humored in your fantasies about yourself. A component of dignity for adults is being treated like an adult. Adults don’t humor other adults in fantasies.

At any rate, See also lack of belief in the Holocaust is well-poisoning at best.

Why Rudy is trending.

Federal agents executed a search warrant Wednesday at the Manhattan apartment of Rudy Giuliani, advancing a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors that has been underway for months, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the Manhattan US Attorney’s office declined to comment. The New York Times was first to report the search.The Times reported that investigators seized Giuliani’s electronic devices, according to one person with knowledge of the matter.

Trump may have to testify in another matter.

Trump may have to testify in court to address claims that his personal bodyguards assaulted protesters outside Trump Tower in 2015, following a Tuesday court ruling cited by The Daily Beast and the New York Post.

On September 3, 2015, a group of demonstrators heckled Trump outside Trump Tower in New York City, saying the then-president candidate was peddling racist narratives about Mexican immigrants.

Trump’s security detail approached the group and were filmed manhandling several members, and wresting placards from them.

He was able to get out of it at first because sitting president blah blah, but that card has now expired.

From the Maya Forstater hearing day 2:

Let’s stop there to talk about this business of “the enormous pain of misgendering a TW.”

These are adults we’re talking about, not children. This is a workplace we’re talking about, not a nursery school. These are grown men, not toddlers with soggy diapers. These are grown men with a fantasy of being women. Why are we talking with such solemnity about the putative “enormous pain” they feel when other people don’t join them in their fantasy? And if we must talk with such solemnity about that, why are we not also talking about the Enormous Pain of women forced to pretend that a man in their workplace is a woman? Why does his claimed Enormous Pain cancel out hers? Why is the assumption that he has Enormous Pain and she just has – what – some cruel bullying desire to call him a man just because he is one? How did we get here?

“Creating.” Yes, it’s all Maya’s idea, that women are women and men are not women. How dare a woman see women as women and men as men?! It’s beyond the pale!

I’ll never understand how we got here. Never.

Katha Pollitt on Philip Roth and Blake Bailey and dudely misogyny:

By now the whole world knows why Norton made its decision. Four former students from [Bailey’s] days in the 1990s teaching middle school have accused him of showering them with sexualized attention in eighth grade and after, and then pouncing on them as young adults. One has accused him of rape. (Another subsequently came forward to accuse him of attempted rape in 2005.) A few days later, Valentina Rice, a New York publishing executive, went public with a claim that he raped her in 2015.

Just the guy to write a biography of Philip Roth, frankly.

I have so many questions. Could the Times have dug deeper? It published multiple pieces around the book, including a laudatory profile of Bailey by Mark Oppenheimer, an affectionate guide to all things Roth by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a mixed review by Parul Sehgal, and an adulatory one by Cynthia Ozick (“a narrative masterwork”). As for Norton, of course they should have followed up with Rice, but beyond that, what? Rejected the book on the basis of an accusation? Hired a detective? I’m not making light of the women’s charges—I believe them—but I don’t know that publishers are equipped to adjudicate claims of wrongdoing by their writers even if they wanted to. And where does it all end? Rape is a crime, but “grooming” eighth graders and coming on to them after they turn legal is not.

Nor is being a misogynist or a creep. I heard Bailey speak recently, via Zoom, to the New York Institute of the Humanities and had no trouble picking up on his manly self-delight and nudge-nudge-wink-wink smutty “humor” (they bonded over Roth’s missed opportunity, as he claimed, to date Ali McGraw), complete with a Southern “gay” accent when he quoted Truman Capote. His hero worship of Roth was on full view: He clearly thought it was funny that Roth badgered a girlfriend into listening to him masturbate on the phone while she was at work.

It’s all so…dull, frankly. Boring. Junior high.

Now social media is replete with attacks on Bailey from well-known women writers: Parul Sehgal, Mary Karr, Moira Donegan, E. Jean Carroll, and many more. Ruth Franklin has tweeted her rightful anger at Bailey’s Wall Street Journal review of her biography of Shirley Jackson, which he accused of being excessively “feminist” and insufficiently sympathetic to Jackson’s flagrantly unfaithful husband.

Bitches are so demanding and unfair.

But the first wave of reviews was almost all flattery.

Of the early reviews, only Laura Marsh at The New Republic really took the measure of Bailey’s disdain for every woman in Roth’s life who didn’t behave exactly as he wanted when he wanted her to, beginning with his two wives, Maggie Martinson and Claire Bloom, whom he portrays as selfish harpies. “Women in this book are forever screeching, berating, flying into a rage, and storming off,” writes Marsh, “as if their emotions exist solely for the purpose of sapping a man’s creative energies.”

It sounds just like Roth himself. Why didn’t it jump off the page at the reviewers?

Given Roth’s genius and stature, did reckoning with his biographer’s excessive masculine solidarity seem unsophisticated, too crude a reading, too “feminist”? At the Institute of the Humanities Zoom, no one asked a question that got within a hundred miles of women.

Well, women, you know – such a trivial subject. You might as well talk about whether Roth was kind to poodles or not.

Hey did you know Jolyon Maugham had been on a humbling journey away from know-it-all-ism? Because I sure didn’t know that. I have to say I think he must have gotten off at the wrong stop.

First it’s Tucker Carlson on Fox ranting that wearing masks is a crime against human rights, now it’s a New York Post reporter quitting after she was forced (she says) to write a lie about Kamala Harris. The right-wing “news” media really aren’t very scrupulous, are they.

The New York Post reporter whose byline was attached to a false story that kicked off a days-long right-wing media outrage cycle has quit.

“Today I handed in my resignation to my editors at the New York Post,” reporter Laura Italiano posted to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon. “The Kamala Harris story—an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against—was my breaking point. It’s been a privilege to cover the City of New York for its liveliest, wittiest tabloid—a paper filled with reporters and editors I admire deeply and hold as friends. I’m sad to leave.”

Is “liveliest” code for “most dishonest”?

Last week, the Post published a story claiming federal officials were distributing Vice President Kamala Harris’ book Superheroes Are Everywhere “in welcome kits” to migrant children held in a temporary immigration facility at the Long Beach convention center in Southern California.

The report, which appeared to be based on a single photograph spotted at the facility, was parroted in multiple segments on Fox News and blew up across conservative media. One reporter from Fox even posed a question about the book to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki during a press briefing last week.

But then it fell apart.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post published a fact-check citing a Long Beach city spokesperson who said the facility only had a single copy of the book, which had been donated as part of a book and toy drive for migrant children.

“The City of Long Beach, in partnership with the Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau, has a citywide book and toy drive that is ongoing to support the migrant children who are temporarily staying in Long Beach at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shelter,” city spokesman Kevin Lee told the Washington Post. “The book you reference is one of hundreds of books that have already been donated. The book was not purchased by HHS or the City.”

No low too low.

Is this “cancel culture”? Or is it something else?

More than 200 members of staff at Simon & Schuster have signed a petition calling for the publishing house to cancel its seven-figure book deal with former vice-president Mike Pence and commit to not signing any more book deals with members of Donald Trump’s administration.

I think it’s something else. Mike Pence is no intellectual giant or eloquent advocate or free spirit with a lifetime of experience to enlighten us with. He’s a pipsqueak and a religious fanatic with nothing of interest to say, and he’s also a coward. Nothing of value is lost if Mike Pence doesn’t write a book. (In any case he will write a book, of course: someone will publish it even if Simon & Schuster doesn’t.) He’s also a representative of an evil government, which is different from being a racist or sexist opinion-monger.

The petition warned management not to treat “the Trump administration as a ‘normal’ chapter in American history” and criticised Pence for discriminating against marginalised groups with racist and sexist policies.

…

Last week, S&S president Jonathan Karp responded to staff concerns after the petition began circulating in the business.

“We come to work each day to publish, not cancel, which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives,” wrote Karp – despite the fact that S&S had cancelled Republican senator Josh Hawley’s book deal over his part in the Capitol riot.

Yes but they don’t go to work each day to publish everything. They choose. They didn’t have to choose Pence.

But they did choose Pence, so to cancel now would be…well, another cancellation. Not a good look.

But Pence. Honestly.