Wayne Couzens has admitted murdering Sarah Everard. You’ll never guess what his secret hobbies were.

…underneath the veneer of respectability was a sexual deviant who, fuelled by extreme pornography, was driven to ever more depraved actions to slake his desires.

Extreme porn isn’t all that deviant though; it’s not rare enough to be deviant. It seems that a lot of men like watching women get beaten and tortured.

Despite being an armed officer tasked with protecting politicians, dignitaries and VIPs, Couzens admitted regularly cavorting with prostitutes and was also suspected of taking dangerous body-building steroids.

Cavorting? I doubt they spent the time skipping and jumping around.

…privately Couzens is suspected of having a dangerous addiction to extreme pornography.

“Extreme” doesn’t mean extra extra sexy, it means violent.

So anyway, a woman’s life is taken away because a man is addicted to violent porn. Whatevs.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die tell us the biggest threat is not another insurrection but a steal.

The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election.

They’re energetically at work on it now, like for instance all that voter suppression in Texas we were just reading about.

Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and attempted to overturn election results. Rather than oppose this attempted coup, leading Republicans either cooperated with it or enabled it by refusing to publicly acknowledge Trump’s defeat. In the run-up to January 6, most top GOP officials refused to denounce extremist groups that were spreading conspiracy theories, calling for armed insurrection and assassinations, and ultimately implicated in the Capitol assault. Few Republicans broke with Trump after his incitement of the insurrection, and those who did were censured by their state parties.

This is very very very bad. The Republicans are one of the two “respectable” parties, the majority parties, the as if official parties. They’re half of what they’re is – and they’re doing their best to become the only party.

From November 2020 to January 2021, then, a significant portion of the Republican Party refused to unambiguously accept electoral defeat, eschew violence, or break with extremist groups—the three principles that define prodemocracy parties. Because of that behavior, as well as its behavior over the past six months, we are convinced that the Republican Party leadership is willing to overturn an election. Moreover, we are concerned that it will be able to do so—legally.

You know…between global warming and the pandemic and far-right parties grabbing power in country after country, things are not going swimmingly for the human project right now. I kind of think we’ve messed up.

Democracy’s primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries, but rather politicians—Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who eviscerate democracy’s substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality.

…Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities (e.g., the oval on the ballot is not entirely penciled in, or the mail-in ballot form contains a typo or spelling mistake). Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic, for it denies suffrage to many voters. Crucially, if hardball criteria are applied unevenly, such that many ballots are disqualified in one party’s stronghold but not in other areas, they can turn an election.

Do we think they will if they can? In a heartbeat, and institutions will help them.

Competition’s effects are being undermined in the U.S. today by what political scientists call countermajoritarian institutions. We believe that the U.S. Constitution, in its current form, is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis. The Constitution’s key countermajoritarian features, such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, have long been biased toward sparsely populated territories. But given that Democrats are increasingly the party of densely populated areas and Republicans dominate less populated areas, this long-standing rural bias now allows the Republican Party to win the presidency, control Congress, and pack the Supreme Court without winning electoral majorities.

They go on to say we should reform all that, which is true, but what are the odds. So that’s cheery.

Somebody seems to have Marxism confused with theocracy. They’re not quite the same thing.

The game’s afoot.

Steerpike tells us:

It’s not just the boardroom where such clashes are being played out. Mr S hears word that the editorial floors of the Guardian and its Sunday sister the Observer have become riven with tensions over the perennial problem of trans rights. WhatsApp groups are ablaze with talk that Observer commentator Sonia Sodha could become the next feminist hounded out of the group, following Suzanne Moore’s purging in November.

Sodha has incurred the displeasure of the Guardian’s vocal trans-rights faction for daring to suggest that women have a right to free speech and should not be threatened for having opinions. She now faces public attacks on Twitter from Guardian contributors, attacks that go unchallenged by executives at Guardian Media Group, which publishes both papers and has largely merged the two titles’ staff.

Well she’s a woman you see. It doesn’t do to challenge people who are attacking women. Women don’t matter plus they can be terfs.

Last month, the Observer published a leader about feminism and trans rights, in the wake of the Maya Forstater and Jess de Wahls cases. Forstater won an employment tribunal ruling that her ‘gender critical’ view that transwomen remain biologically male was legitimate and not hateful. The Observer argued that women who hold such views should be free to express them without harassment or abuse…

You might think an argument that women are entitled to speak would be uncontroversial, not least at the right-on Guardian. But the leader poked the wasps’ nest of trans rights advocates around the paper, who were left buzzing with fury.

Among them was Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who tweeted to denounce the Guardian’s sister-paper as ‘on the wrong side of history’ and criticising the leader for coming ‘during Pride month and on the weekend of Trans Pride’. The desperation of some executives to keep Jones, who is already making lucrative sums from his Patreon account, from walking out is thought to be a factor in the apparent absence of any public rebuke from his editors.

Imagine being desperate to hang on to Owen Jones.

The journalists are still chilled by the fate of Moore, who left the paper after being denounced by more than 300 staff members in a letter to Guardian management after writing a column also defending women’s right to raise concerns about trans rights policies. 

Editor-in-Chief Editor Kath Viner failed to stand up for Moore during that row, and is said to live in fear of the paper’s woke readers and staffers. Some of her colleagues are wondering if she will again stand by while another feminist colleague faces attempts to bully her out of a job.

Any bets?

Originally a comment by Sastra on Gendered language at the abortion clinic.

James Randi used to do an experiment where college students who had previously given their birth dates were each presented with a paper written by a “master astrologer” describing what the stars said about them, specifically. After they finished their personalized readings, they were each asked to rank how accurate they were on a 10 point (?) scale. There were lots of 8s and 9s, and even some 10s. On the whole, they were all impressed, and gave the astrologer high marks, too. Then they were asked to pass the papers to the student in the next desk.

It was the same reading, of course, with the sentences mixed up so they’d appear to be different if anyone glanced over. What they thought surprisingly unique about them was also “unique” about everyone else.

Enbees strike me as little different than the students who ranked the Super Special Just About You astrology reading a 9 or 10. It’s just that they’re holding tight to that paper because it’s totally, totally THEM.

What next? Bus drives are Nazis if they don’t let you throw bottles at people on the bus? Servers in restaurants are Nazis if they don’t let you push over all the tables? Bouncers are Nazis if they eject you from the bar for throwing a punch? Dog walkers are Nazis if they don’t let you kick their dogs?

Fox News pushing boundaries again:

Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren on Thursday joined a growing number of right-wing pundits and politicians comparing covid-19 restrictions to Nazism.

To Nazism. Because of what? Are there concentration camps? Is there forced labor? Are there extermination camps? I’m not seeing the Nazism. I’m not seeing the Fascism and I’m sure as hell not seeing the Nazism.

Being told “No” is not the same as Nazism.

Lahren took issue with some flight attendants’ enforcement of federal mask mandates on airplanes during a segment on the show “Outnumbered.”

“There are so many good flight attendants out there, but there are some flight attendants out there that take their job as the mask police to extremes, becoming almost Nazis of the air,” Lahren, a host on the Fox Nation subscription service, said. “And it’s ridiculous.”

No that’s not what’s ridiculous.

Lahren’s remarks come as some conservative politicians have drawn fire for comparing the enforcement of coronavirus policies to Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called the people aiding President Biden’s push to encourage Americans to get vaccinated “medical brown shirts.”

Yes, because sound medical advice is exactly like street violence in aid of a future Nazi dictator.

Greene’s comments came weeks after she visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and apologized for previously comparing face-mask policies to the Nazi practice of labeling Jews with Star of David badges, The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez reported this week.

Actually the street violence seems to be coming from the other direction.

“If you talked with some flight attendants, they would certainly say this is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” Nelson said, less than a month after a passenger allegedly knocked out a flight attendant’s teeth. “It’s pervasive. There is constant conflict on board.”

Who are the brown shirts?

Time to grow up now, people.

The headline:

Why Emma Corrin is using a chest binder

Oh I bet I know the answer to that one – because, like many others, she’s found a new way to be special and attention-worthy.

Who is she? An actor. She played narcissistic PrinCess DiAna in The Crown. Typecasting, it seems. So a different woman, poshly named Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, instructs us on how meaningful all this is.

Your response to the above may be largely generational. In the middle of the millennial age bracket at 33, I didn’t know about non-binary pronouns at school or even at university…But it’s a very small adjustment for me, personally, to make, isn’t it? Just swapping one word for another. I don’t see the problem — any problem — with it. Do you?

Yes, of course. I see the problem of people making demands for special language to refer to Special Them. It’s not “just swapping one word for another,” it’s making the effort to contradict your own perceptions in order to avoid making a “mistake” that isn’t in fact a mistake. It’s also ratifying and flattering an exercise in narcissism and greed for attention.

It’s not even good for the people demanding it. This stupid nonsense isn’t going to flourish forever, especially not when more towns and cities burst into flames and burn to the ground in a matter of hours. We have serious shit to pay attention to, and some self-absorbed goon’s demand for reality-denying pronouns is not serious. It doesn’t matter. It’s trivial. It’s tiresome adolescent attention-seeking.

I’m a straight, white, cisgender woman and people’s assumptions of my sexuality, race and gender are always right. I have never been misgendered to my face, though people often assume from my name that I’m male when talking to me over email (they’re usually more respectful when they do so).

I find myself reflected everywhere: in books and songs, on TV, at the cinema. There are women who look and feel and identify as I do everywhere: broad reflections of me wherever I look for them. So I can’t imagine what it must be like when there are no yous visible in our culture, or how much it must mean to find out that this talented, award-winning actor is like you in some way.

Well lucky lucky you but not all women are as lucky or as smug as you are. There are some women and girls in the world who are oppressed as women and girls – kept out of school, ostracized when menstruating, married off at age 12, beaten, kidnapped, murdered. Women are not the dominant or privileged sex. Don’t wave some vanity-drunk actor in our faces as an emblem of pronoun oppression. Get a clue.

Another damn fool tries to erase the existence and needs of women, and thinks she’s progressive for doing it. I wish these people would hurry up and become adults.

I got pregnant four years ago, when I was 26, and had an abortion in my first trimester. At the time, I wasn’t in a position financially or emotionally to be a parent. I was unemployed, and I knew that choosing to have a child would make it very hard to get a job in the near future. I wasn’t in a living situation where I had room for a baby.

I didn’t feel ashamed about having an abortion. It was an easy decision for me. But as a non-binary transgender person, my abortion experience led to a lot of gender dysphoria. Every clinic had the word women’s in the name, all the pamphlets used gendered language and featured images of gender-conforming people…

Because it’s women who have babies, and thus it’s women who have particular needs, such as abortion and pregnancy care. The self-absorbed protagonist of this ridiculous piece wants to pretend she’s too Special to be a woman, and she ought to be put on the Naughty Stool for about 50 years.

It felt dehumanizing. I had to emotionally disconnect from the experience entirely because of how gendered it was.

Of course it’s fucking gendered you absolute halfwit – what else would it be? It would be a good educational experience for you to try to get a man pregnant; maybe after a decade or so you would catch on.

Pink News exclaims

Non-binary people are valid!

In other words…there is no descriptor for non-binary, you just are it.

So…what does the word mean then?

And why are we supposed to care?

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Idolatry.

So, once again: Muslims are people, and as such they can be the targets of bigotry and racism. Islam itself is a set of abstract, philosophical ideas about theology, metaphysics, ethics etc. to which concepts like bigotry and racism don’t apply. It’s perfectly possible to be critical* of the ideas and practices of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism) for reasons that have nothing to do with what people look like, where they’re from, or who their ancestors were. It’s even possible to oppose Islamists and white racists at the same time.

Whatever’s legitimate about the term “Islamophobia” can be expressed better – because more precisely – by terms such as “anti-Muslim bigotry” or, even better, “racism against people of Middle-Eastern / North-African / South-Asian descent” (It’s not in fact “bigotry” to say that all Muslims are proponents of Islam, nor is it necessarily bigotry to see that as a problem in itself. Specifics matter). Failing to make such basic distinctions only devalues the concepts of bigotry and racism, and nobody should be more pissed off by this than anti-racists.

As I have said many times, the battle against Islamism is not a battle between whites and non-whites. What we have are some non-whites against other non-whites, with white, Western apologists on both sides. So the question that white, Western liberals and progressives need to be asking themselves is “Which non-whites do I support? Those who share my values (feminists, gay rights activists, secularists etc.), or a far-right movement that I would be the first to condemn if it were dominated by white people?” You cannot have it both ways.

Which is not to say that racists are not going to grab onto whatever legitimate criticisms they can find to bolster their cause. Of course they will! If you single out the ideas of certain ethnic groups for special criticism, that’s clearly racism, but it’s still ultimately targeted at people and not the ideas themselves. The obvious example being movement atheists who spend every free moment bullying women online and defending every sleazebag, sexual harasser, and rapist out there only to suddenly turn so concerned for the treatment of “Dear Muslima” as soon as the conversation turns to Islam. It still doesn’t mean that the treatment of women in Islamist societies is not a problem, though, let alone that we have to shut up about it. Everything that can be exploited, politicized and weaponized for ideological purposes will be, e.g.:

(a) There are legitimate criticisms to be made of specific ideas and practices associated with the religion of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism).

(b) The fact that (a) is cynically and opportunistically seized upon by hardcore racists and bigots to portray all Muslims (or even just people from majority “Muslim” countries, whether they are in fact practicing Muslims or not) as dangerous fanatics and extremists.

(c) The fact that (b) is seized upon by Islamists and their apologists on the far Left to portray any criticism of Islam (or even Islamism) as “Islamophobia”, racism, bigotry and hatespeech.

(d) The fact that (c) is seized upon by the far right to portray any talk of racism and bigotry as “witch-hunts”, “thought police” and “political correctness gone insane”.

(e) The fact that (d) is seized upon by the far left to portray any criticism of leftist cancel-culture, no-platforming etc. as a defense of bigotry.

(f) Etc…. etc…

If we have to self-sensor about everything that can be exploited for nefarious ends, we might as well have our lips stitched together right now.

* In full disclosure, I really am quite “phobic” of ideas such as these:

One

Two

Three

Four

Ari Berman on voting rights in Texas:

Texas law makes it monumentally difficult to register voters…

And voting in Texas could soon get even harder. On Thursday, the GOP-controlled legislature is beginning a special legislative session that will revive a sweeping voter suppression bill that was blocked at the 11th hour in May when Texas House Democrats staged a dramatic walkout before a midnight deadline, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass it. So Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to pass new voting restrictions, along with far-right priorities like banning critical race theory and preventing trans-gender athletes from competing in Texas sports. 

He’s wrong on that last one, but anyway.

The voting bill, known as SB7, restricted every means of voting in Texas when it was introduced in the last session. It eliminated innovative voting methods such as drive-thru voting, curbside voting, and extended voting hours that helped increase turnout in large urban counties like Harris County in 2020. It banned mail ballot drop boxes and required voters with disabilities to show proof of their disability to qualify for a mail ballot. It cut Sunday voting hours, when Black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” voter mobilization drives. It made it a felony for election officials to give a mail ballot request form to a voter who has not requested one and subjected election workers to criminal penalties for 14 kinds of actions, such as obstructing access for partisan poll watchers and modifying state election procedures. And, to top it all off, it made it easier for candidates to petition judges to throw out election results.

It’s pure haves v. have-nots. Restrictions on voting impinge on have-nots more than on haves, and guess who mostly votes which way.

Texas limits mail-in voting to people over 65 and voters who are out of town during the election, in jail, or have a “sickness or physical condition” that prevents them from going to the polls. (It was one of only five states that did not expand mail-in voting during the pandemic in 2020.) Voting in person requires showing certain types of IDs—a list that seems designed for partisan skew. Under the state’s voter ID law, a handgun permit is an acceptable form of identification but a state-university issued ID is not.

So it’s not pure having and not having, it’s also pinko intellectual effete elitist college student and studly manly John Waynely gun-totin’ manman.

The state has closed 750 polling places since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, more than any other state, disproportionately in Black and brown communities.

John Roberts said they could.

Texas Democrats say they need congressional Democrats to pass federal legislation that would roll back voter suppression efforts. The For the People Act, blocked by a Republican filibuster on June 22, would enact nationwide automatic registration and a ban on partisan gerrymandering; the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which has not yet come up for a vote in Congress, would require states like Texas to once again get any voting changes approved by the federal government.

Hopes are not high.

The hotness was most likely because of hotness.

The searing heat that scorched western Canada and the US at the end of June was “virtually impossible” without climate change, say scientists.

In their study, the team of researchers says that the deadly heatwave was a one-in-a-1,000-year event. But we can expect extreme events such as this to become more common as the world heats up due to climate change.

If humans hadn’t influenced the climate to the extent that they have, the event would have been 150 times less likely. Scientists worry that global heating, largely as a result of burning fossil fuels, is now driving up temperatures faster than models predict.

That is worrying. If it gets too much faster everything will simply burn up.

Beating records by several numbers is virtually unprecedented, the BBC says. Seattle is one of the places that happened. 108 F. ONE OH EIGHT.

Since the start of the heatwave, people have linked the unusual and extreme nature of the event to climate change. Now, researchers say that the chances of it occurring without human-induced warming were virtually impossible.

…

Co-author Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, explained what the researchers meant when they said the extreme heat was “virtually impossible” without climate change.

“Without the additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in the statistics that we have available with our models, and also the statistical models based on observations, such an event just does not occur,” she explained. “Or if an event like this occurs, it occurs once in a million times, which is the statistical equivalent of never,” she told a news briefing.

So basically we’re sitting on a stove burner that is on.

But why is this political? Why is it right v left? Why is it Republicans v Democrats?

It’s not political, it’s technical. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Either the vaccine protects against the virus or it doesn’t. General vaccination either slows the pandemic or it doesn’t. The vaccine is either safe or not. Those are not political questions. Nobody wants to get the virus, so why is anyone making the issue political?

Is it just because “fuck you, that’s why”? Because it’s so urgent to be An Individual that people are willing to get a horrible disease to make their point?

Take-home question: Would Ayn Rand have gotten the vaccination?

Revisiting the quest for a new blasphemy law:

Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, [Labour MP Naz] Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.

This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008.  Shah told the Commons:

As a Muslim, for me and millions of Muslims across this country and a quarter of the world’s population who are Muslim too, with each day and each breath there is not a single thing in the world that we commemorate and honour more than our beloved Prophet, Mohammed, peace be upon him. 

If that’s true it’s tragic. It’s tragic in its narrowness as well as its delusion. All there is in the world to value, and religious zealots focus on just one guy who lived 14 centuries ago. It’s such a waste.

But when bigots and racists defame, slander or abuse our Prophet, peace be upon him, just like some people do the likes of Churchill, the emotional harm caused upon our hearts is unbearable, because for 2 billion Muslims, he is the leader we commemorate in our hearts and honour in our lives, and he forms the basis of our identity and our very existence.

Again: that’s a pathetic thing to admit. It’s a pathetic way to live.

Disgraced loser Donald Trump held a “press conference” today to tell an indifferent world that he’s suing Social Media for not letting him use its platforms to incite a civil war.

The funniest part is the photo, titled Let’s Pretend This Is Still the White House.

He’s at his New Jersey golf club.

Hah!

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Playing a skeptical maverick.

As I have said many times, I cut all ties to Movement Skepticism™ specifically because of the misogyny issue, but now I don’t even think the movement did very well on the science front. For example skeptics tended to let climate change denialists (some of whom were even considered “thought leaders” of the movement) off the hook far too easily, and enter false balance territory whenever the issue came up, while congratulating themselves on how clever they were for not believing in homeopathy or Bigfoot.

The Movement also includes some of the most staggering examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect ever seen. Even the smartest, best educated, most knowledgeable person who ever lived, is only personally familiar with <<1% of all the scientific knowledge that’s available, and of that very tiny fraction <<1% is first-hand knowledge, And yet it’s quite common to hear skeptics talk as if they had personally done all the science (or even derived all of science, mathematics, epistemology, logic etc. from first principles without ever taking anything on trust) when all they’re really doing is repeating back half digested, half understood layman’s explanations from books, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos etc. We see this whenever skeptics tell others (guilty as charged!) to just “follow the facts where they lead”, “let the evidence speak for itself” etc. which makes is sound like “following the facts where they lead” were a straightforward matter rather than something that requires vast amounts of experience and accumulated pre-knowledge in its own right. The truth of the matter is that the evidence never speaks for itself. As I have previously written, I could probably provide a decent layman’s explanation of the evidence for things like evolution or climate change based on books I have read, but I wouldn’t personally be able to derive any useful information about past climates from tree-rings or ice-cores.

I remember reading an article (I wish I could remember by whom) about skeptics debunking pseudoscience with bad science of their own. The author made the point that while self-identified “pro science” types may be more likely to reach a (somewhat) accurate conclusion than others, it doesn’t mean that their methods for arriving at those conclusions are that different from those of their opponents. It’s just that rooting for “Team Science” confirms their particular tribal identity. As much as movement skeptics like to think of themselves as Spock and elevated above all that touchy-feely “value” stuff, it seems to me that true critical thinking is at least as much about attitude as it is about skills. Without the proper self-questioning attitude acquiring the tools of critical thinking only gives you more excuses for rejecting any conclusion you happen to dislike for ideological, tribalistic or purely self-serving reasons.

Also, it now seems to me that skeptics have developed a few myths of their own. E.g. we’ve all heard how the system of (pre and post publication) peer review ensures that only those ideas that can withstand the most merciless criticism and attempts at falsification survive in the long run. My current understanding from reading about the replication crisis etc. is that the peer-review process often fails and in most cases no replication is ever even attempted. We have also heard how scientists like nothing more than having their pet theories disproved because it means there’s something new to learn, “it gives them something to do” etc. I think Max Planck was probably closer to the truth when he said that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.

Another commonly heard trope is the idea that freeze peach guarantees that the best supported ideas will rise to the top in the marketplace of ideas. The unstated – sometimes even stated – premise being that those who have science and logic on their side always enjoy a decisive advantage in the battle for public opinion. This never seemed right to me, even in my movement skeptic days. If critical thinking should have taught us anything at all, it’s that the strongest indicators of truth vs. falsehood – objectively speaking – rarely coincide with what seems most subjectively persuasive to laypeople. Playing by the rules of science is nothing if not limiting, while the purveyors of bullshit are free to say whatever will impress people. Without the necessary pre-knowledge and critical thinking skills all your average layperson can be expected to get out of the exchange is that one side comes across as far more assertive, aggressive and confident while the other side is forced to use conservative language (“seems to indicate” etc.), acknowledge uncertainty, and introduce caveats, conditions and qualifiers at every turn. No need to specify which side is the scientific one.

Isaac Schorr at National Review:

Tracey Lambrechs is not quieting down.

Lambrechs — a female weightlifter from New Zealand who took bronze in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, silver at the 2015 Pacific Games, and competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — has retired from the sport. But that retirement appears to have lent her her voice back after several years of being cajoled into silence.

Those several years are the years when “Laurel” Hubbard was breaking records.

In 2017, Lambrechs was gearing up to compete in the 2018 Commonwealth Games when she was informed that if she wanted to participate, she would need do so in a different category than she was accustomed to.

“I was told if I wanted to go to the next Commonwealth Games I needed to lose 18 kilograms [the equivalent of almost 40 pounds] in three months or retire” Lambrechs told National Review. “Losing that much weight quickly was not ideal for my health and I suffered some severe migraines and started passing out a lot.”

When she raised her concerns over both Hubbard’s participation and its very visible consequences on her body and career, Lambrechs was instructed to be “resilient.”

Schorr forgot to explain what Hubbard has to do with telling Lambrechs to lose weight though.

Instead of at minimum providing support for athletes whose physical and psychological well-being was being adversely affected by Hubbard’s participation, higher-ups responsible for managing the national team told athletes “to be quiet,” with the threat of reprisals hanging over their heads, according to Lambrechs.

I’ve been wondering about that all along.

“We were told not to talk to the media and were warned that if we did we could bring the sport into disrepute and then could miss out on being selected or could be dropped from national teams. The sports national body did not know how to handle the situation, so they had a knee-jerk reaction and thought silence would be best for them.”

When in doubt, just shrug and leave it to the women to deal with.

For female athletes with the opinions on the matter of transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports that Lambrechs has — and the willingness to express them so publicly — the waters are choppy. Consider, for example, the reaction to a USA Today guest column authored by a high-school track and field athlete who had been robbed of four state titles in Connecticut.

Not only did the newspaper that agreed to publish the piece edit it without the consent of its author, it added an editor’s note apologizing for not “reflect[ing] USA TODAY’s standards” and the use of “hurtful language.”

Remember: when women do it it’s “hurtful language.” When men do it it’s stunning and brave.

Moreover, some transgender advocates are eager to paint those with Lambrechs’s views as not only mistaken, but violent and hateful. On a May New York Times podcast, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer accused American legislators seeking to protect the integrity of women’s sports of being motivated “on some level” by the “impulse” to “kill” transgender youth.

Chase Strangio? Is that you?

David Gorski asks in 2006 why not just castrate them?

Ever since I found myself critically examining the claim that autism and autistic spectrum disorders are caused by mercury found in the preservative(thimerosal) used until recently in childhood vaccines, I thought that I’d heard of every dubious or quack autism therapy there is out there. Indeed, it is from that concept (that “autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning,”, which is not supported by epidemiological or preclinical evidence) that flows all sorts of dubious therapies to “remove” the mercury. Foremost among these questionable therapies is chelation therapy, using a chelating agent like EDTA or DMSA to bind to and remove this supposed mercury excess. This therapy is touted as being extremely effective in improving the behavioral abnormalities in autism, but, contrary to what its proponents say, it is neither efficacious nor safe. Indeed, six months ago it resulted in the death of an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama at the hands of a quack named Dr. Roy Kerry in a clinic near Pittsburgh.

…

Yes, I thought I’d seen it all. I thought that no proposed treatment for autism could be so bizarre, so unbased in science, so risky, that it would shock me anymore.

Or so I thought until I read a rather lengthy account by Kathleen Seidel, who runs the Neurodiversity website about how the concept of “testosterone regulation” has risen from the underbelly of the fringe of the “mercury equals autism” community and started to make appearances in the mainstream press.

What caught my attention and shocked me so much? What therapy could once again make me wonder what these people are smoking or whether they’re on crack?

They’re talking about adding chemical castration with Lupron to chelation therapy as a “treatment” for autism.

Yes, chemical castration. Mark and David Geier, the father-son tag-team of VAERS database dumpster-divers who don’t seem to be too concerned about following Institutional Review Board guidelines while diving in, have latched on to the idea that lowering testosterone will “increase the efficacy” of chelation therapy. That’s why they want to give Lupron to children.

2006 that was.

Fifteen years is a long time, it seems.

He explains the few limited medical uses for Lupron – metastatic prostate cancer, endometriosis and uterine fibroids, and in vitro fertilization.

But we’re not talking about adults here. We’re talking about children. Are there any medically accepted uses of Lupron in children? Yes, but only one: Precocious puberty. Precocious puberty is defined as the onset of secondary sexual characteristics before 8 years old in girls and 9 years old in boys. It can be the result of tumors, central nervous system injury, or congenital anomalies.

The criteria for use of Lupron were strict – the idea was not to just start popping them for flimsy reasons.

Any bet as to whether the Geiers will adhere to these guidelines? (That is, of course, a sucker’s bet.) In my book, if you’re going to give a potent drug like Lupron to children, a drug that can almost completely shut down the synthesis of both male and female steroid hormones, you’d better have damned good evidence that it’s likely to help to make it worth the risk.

So……………………what makes it worth the risk now?

Interesting discovery.

OH REALLY???