The North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public for health reasons, following an emotional debate about the wisdom of the proposal.
So people with compromised immune systems just have to stay home or die. Peak liberty!
The proposal faced strong opposition from Democratic lawmakers, community activists, and advocates for people with health issues — who are concerned about the consequences of the proposal.
House Bill 237 would ban everyone, not just protesters, from wearing masks in public for medical reasons if it becomes law. It passed 30-15, with every Republican in favor and every Democrat opposed.
“It’s unconscionable,” said Sen. Lisa Grafstein, D-Wake.
Nah nah nah, it’s liberty. People’s faces are public property, and we get to control them.
Democratic lawmakers proposed different ways to amend the anti-mask bill to protect people who want to wear masks for health concerns. Republicans shot each of those proposals down, without explaining their opposition.
Oh come on, what is there to explain? Everyone knows masks are a communist plot to steal our faces and make us eat granola.
As Republicans have shrugged off Democrats’ concerns, they’ve said they trust police officers not to abuse the power to arrest anyone for wearing a surgical mask out in public. Newton said Tuesday that it wasn’t intended to “prosecute granny for wearing a mask in the Walmart.”
You have got to be kidding. Republicans said that? Republicans said oh just past a law restricting what people can wear and trust that the cops won’t enforce it?
Schools in England should not teach about gender identity, according to new draft guidance from the government. Government sources told BBC News about plans to ban sex education for under-nines, as well as teaching about gender identity, on Wednesday.
…
Under the plans, secondary-school pupils will learn about protected characteristics, such as sexual orientation and gender reassignment. But the updated guidance makes clear schools “should not teach about the concept of gender identity“, the government says.
There’s a problem already: what is “gender reassignment”? How will these pupils learn about it minus the concept of “gender idenniny”? In short why not delete “gender reassignment” from the curriculum too?
It said it was right to take a “cautious approach”, adding teaching materials that “present contested views as fact – including the view that gender is a spectrum” should be avoided.
But then what does “gender reassignment” mean?
The pathetic truth is that “gender reassignment” should be kicked out too, but it can’t be, because a bunch of damn fools made it a “protected characteristic” so schools are stuck with it.
Ms Keegan said the new guidance had been motivated by a request from teachers “to provide more clarity” on age-appropriate sex education, but she had also seen reports of “campaign groups’ or lobby groups’ materials” being used in classrooms. She said she had received evidence of lesson slides including “things like choosing lots of different genders and identities and saying which ones of these are gender identities – the spectrum. The sort of, ‘it can be a spectrum, it’s fluid, you can have different genders on different days’ or ‘there’s 72 of them’. That kind of thing”.
Quite so, but unfortunately you’re still stuck with gender reassignment, which is as bullshit as the rest of it.
The purpose of the thought experiment, indeed any thought experiment, is to force you to confront the intersection of your intuition and your reason. It is not to stack the deck and make one choice seem absurd.
It is exactly the thing that we do when we work in idealized frictionless environments of perfect elasticity. If you, as a physics student, refuse to answer the exam question because the real world is messy and not frictionless, you’re missing the point. We idealize the situation in full knowledge that it’s unrealistic. Why? Because it allows us to focus on the interactions and consequences of specific theoretical frameworks. Extracting value from the idealization requires playing along with it.
We construct idealized philosophical thought experiments the same way, in full knowledge that they’re unrealistic and that there are many interesting, relevant things left not captured. The question posed by the Trolley Problem is not, “What ought you do when there’s a trolley hurtling toward civilians?” If that’s how you approach it, you’re doing it wrong. Rather, the experiment asks, “Consequentialist, how far does your imperative to maximize aggregate good go? Are numbers really sufficient to decide? Deontologist, how far does your injunction against treating people as ends go? Can you really never take numbers into account? Virtuist, what happens when there’s no Aristotelian mean? Is one extreme preferable to another? All of you, how does this square with your intuition? If it doesn’t, how so, and what would need to change to make it jibe?” Refusal to engage with the problem is a refusal to engage with these questions. If you, as an ethics student, instead object that the fat man is too massive for you to move, you’re missing the point. Extracting value from the idealization requires paying along with it.
We use imaginative thought experiments rather than just asking the questions directly (even though we often do that, too) because imagination elicits more of our intuition. Things we’re fine with saying in the abstract (e.g., never ever lie!) suddenly collide with sentiments we might not have expected (e.g., a Nazi knocks on your door asking about Jews, and you have a Jewish family hiding in your attic.) This confrontation between conviction and intuition, between conviction and conviction, or between intuition and intuition forces us to see their limits.
This is in the Guardian?? Oooooh she gonna be in TRUBble.
I have some inspiring news for heterosexuals who may be struggling with their lifestyle choices: Dannii Minogue has bravely come out as straight.
She has a long-term boyfriend, see, but she was doing a presser and was asked if she fancies women.
Minogue replied: “You girls are hot. You know it. I love it. I’m here for it. Is that an answer?” Not really, to be honest. Still, she also helpfully clarified that she identifies “as queer in a weird way”.
Whoops, the Australian singer obviously thought, when she looked at the papers the next day and saw a million headlines along the lines of “Dannii Minogue ‘fights back tears’ as she announces she identifies as queer”. She quickly explained that she didn’t mean queer queer, she meant queer as in straight but spicy.
Which in turn means…well…nothing.
It’s probably fair to say that Minogue’s awkward expression of LGBTQ+ allyship was overblown by the media. But you know what? It’s also fair to think that if someone says they’re queer, that means they’re not a zero on the Kinsey scale.
Why is it fair? Because that’s one of the meanings of the word right now, hence the Q in LGBTQ.
In recent years the word queer, always an amorphous term, has become essentially meaningless. Can Straight People Be Queer? Vice asked in a 2016 article, capturing the general vibe. The answer to that seems to be: “Yes, if they’ve done their homework.” Last month, for example, Glee star Darren Criss, who is straight but played a character in a gay relationship on the show, said he’s “culturally queer”. He went on to elaborate: “The things in my life that I have tried to emulate, learn from and be inspired by are 100% queer as fuck.” So for the avoidance of future Minogue-like embarrassments, let’s all agree on this new definition, shall we? Queer now means a heterosexual who has read Oscar Wilde.
Good punchline! And to think it’s in the Graun of all places…is the giant ship beginning to turn?
The local politician Sofyan Mbarki believes the major problem is Amsterdam’s image as a place where anything goes. With the quiz, he hopes to change the way visitors think about the city. But the truth is that a problematic image can’t be changed overnight. You will actually have to adjust reality too.
The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is aware of this. Five years ago, she boldly proposed closing the window brothels in the red light district – an audacious move considering that many local people still considered window prostitution an integral part of the city’s folklore. Gradually, more people are realising that what goes on in the red light district has nothing to do with folklore.
Isn’t that fascinating? Pause for a second to think about it. Many local people think that women sitting in windows offering paid fucks are a charming bit of local folklore. How about carving the women up and putting them on platters in the windows along with a nice Chianti? Would that be delightfully folkloric too?
Halsema has often faced fierce opposition. Interestingly, it was leftwing parties (including her own GreenLeft party) that resisted her plans.
Interestingly? It’s not a bit interesting. It’s typical of leftwing parties these days; they love to blither about “sex workers” and “sex positivity” and how awesome it is for other people to be prostitutes.
Sadly, this is not unusual. Even if the crew are issued shore passes, they may still be blocked from stepping ashore. Many ports in the USA are private property, and therefore declare crewmembers trespassers if they leave the ship. Many ports, globally, do not allow crew changes anymore, as they ban non-company vehicles from entering. This was common before 9/11, but afterwards it became virtually impossible in too many ports (here’s looking at you, Oakland, New York, Norfolk). Seattle, LA and San Francisco used to allow crew swaps, but then a mariner has just 24 (or in some cases 12) hours to leave US territory, on pain of arrest. My company preferred Vancouver, Halifax or Singapore to swap crew. Twice I had to extend a voyage, as the US blocked anyone leaving the ship. (Only Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait had enforced laws banning even stepping off the gangway, keeping a machine gun handy in case anyone was foolish enough. And using a camera on deck, even taking a picture of the ship, was illegal. But several US ports had armed guards patrolling the quay).
Once the Dali left the berth, and was heading out of US waters, any shore passes can be, and probably were, voided. As her next port was in Asia, immigration can simply refuse to re-issue new passes. The only time the crew might leave now is wearing handcuffs. If the ship comes alongside, expect the Coastguard to make their lives hell: drills, searches, interrogation, ripping the accommodation apart as they go. From the very bitter experience of having 9mm pistols pointed at me, because I was sticking to the international law that allows seafarers to have a locked cabinet in their cabin. CG broke it open when they found it locked, and then threatened me with arrest when I returned to my cabin to find broken furniture. It was not a pleasant day, and that made me seriously question how safe we were. And that was a British ship, with a British crew!
Once repaired, the crew of the Dali might be allowed to leave, without setting ashore, when she sails. But they are probably terrified of arrest.
Serious students of language have a hard time knowing what to do with this all-too-familiar use of like. They call it “filler,” and it’s hard not to regard it as something bordering on the sublinguistic, an almost intolerable torturing of the magnificent instrument bequeathed to us by Shakespeare and his successors. For those of us who teach and spend a lot of our time talking to young people, the endless supply of self-interrupting likes that litter their speech and impede the flow of their thoughts can be very hard to take.
I’ve been noticing that lately – the way the filler-like has expanded to the point that it excludes other words almost entirely. How do I notice it? By being on buses, overhearing those Young People. It’s no longer the single “like” that introduces a noun or verb, it’s a stuttering of “likes” all through a short sentence, such that there is more “like” than anything else. I don’t know how they can stand each other. They don’t have time to say anything of interest, because they have to fit in so many empty “likes.” They’re making noise at each other, but they’re not talking.
The redoubtable linguist John McWhorter has written entertainingly and well about the ubiquitous like, and he mostly approves of it. One might even be justified in saying that he likes it. Yes, he is willing to admit that its use does betray a certain diffidence or “hesitation,” a fear of “venturing a definite statement.” But in the end, he contends that like as verbal filler is better understood as “a modal marker of the human mind at work in conversation,” of thought in motion.
I can buy that when it’s used relatively sparingly. I used to do it myself. But expressing hesitation ten times in one short sentence is way beyond the necessary or desirable. It becomes just maddening clutter that displaces actual meaning.
As a controlled explosion rocked the Dali on Monday, nearly two dozen sailors remained on board, below deck in the massive ship’s hull. The simultaneous blasts sent pieces of Baltimore’s once iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge into the dark waters of Maryland’s Patapsco River, seven weeks after its collapse left six people on the bridge dead and the Dali marooned.
Authorities – and the crew – hope that the demolition will mark the beginning of the end of a long process that has left the 21 men on board trapped and cut off from the world, thousands of miles from their homes.
They’re bound to be used to being trapped on the ship for long periods, but not that long, and not with nothing to do but wait. Makes me claustrophobic just thinking about it.
The crew, made up of 20 Indians and a Sri Lankan national, has been unable to disembark because of visa restrictions, a lack of required shore passes and parallel ongoing investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FBI.
Jeez. You’d think officialdom could come up with some way to keep track of them but still let them off the ship.
Among those who have been in touch with the crew is Joshua Messick, executive director of the Baltimore International Seafarers’ Center, a non-profit organisation that works to protect the rights of mariners. According to Mr Messick, the crew has been left largely without communication with the outside world for “a couple of weeks” after their mobile phones were confiscated by the FBI as part of the investigation.
“They can’t do any online banking. They can’t pay their bills at home. They don’t have any of their data or anyone’s contact information, so they’re really isolated right now,” Mr Messick said. “They just can’t reach out to the folks they need to, or even look at pictures of their children before they go to sleep. It’s really a sad situation.”
The owners and bosses of course remain free and comfortable.
He’s not a “transgender golfer” – he’s a transgender man, aka a man who claims to be a woman. “Golfer” is not a gender.
This careful evasiveness seems to be universal in mainstream journalism, which is maddening. It’s not the job of news outlets to protect men who are working 24/7 to destroy the rights of women.
The caption under the photo at the top of the story is even more evasive:
Hailey Davidson, a winner earlier this year on the NXXT Tour, missed qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Open by one spot.
Nothing even hints that he’s not a woman.
The lede:
Transgender golfer Hailey Davidson missed qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Open on Monday by one stroke. Davidson finished in a three-way tie for third in the 36-hole qualifier at Bradenton (Fla.) Country Club with rounds of 70-73, emerging as the first alternate from the event. She tied two-time LPGA Tour winner Jasmine Suwannapura and Louis Olsson Campbell of Sweden. Suwannapura is the second alternate.
People who don’t pay attention to the Trans Wars could easily read that without realizing that Davidson is a man who claims to be a woman. “Transgender golfer” doesn’t mean anything, and the entire rest of the paragraph simply reads as if he’s a woman.
It’s not until the third paragraph that Golf Digest admits he’s a man.
We’ll be seeking an explanation from Anneliese’s office, as well as reassurances on the Labour leadership’s policy commitments to LGBT+ people – including Trans people – on hate crime, healthcare, conversion therapy, gender recognition reform and more. (2/2)
I’m just catching up on the news about a teacher who was abruptly fired, apparently for teaching critical thinking. It seems the school also seized his personal laptop and is keeping it, which…how is that legal? It’s either that or he was writing a book on a school computer and not backing it up on a computer of his own, which…why tf would he do that?
7 days ago I was fired from my school after 4 years of teaching. I recorded this the following day in order to share my perspective – honestly & in good faith – in order to move forward and put this experience behind me. I have no desire to cause complications or bring unwanted… pic.twitter.com/Bf61VC2dD1
I’m only halfway through because I stopped to look for background information so that I could make sense of what he says. So. That quest led to this video and, starting at 1:25, the core of this whole shitshow – not the one around this teacher but the one around the ideology. You know the one.
Student to Smith: It was deemed transphobic – ok – like, I myself –
Smith to student: Do you find that transphobic yourself?
Student: Uhhhhh – I don’t really have an opinion on it, but, I’m just going with what a lot of other people have said
BAM!
Slam down on that stop button, suspend all search for background on this story, in order to shout as loudly as possible YES, EXACTLY, YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE, AND THAT IS HOW WE GOT HERE.
Imagine everyone’s surprise when all the questions are asked and it finally becomes too obvious to deny that that’s what EVERYONE is doing AND THAT’S WHY THIS IS SUCH A GARBAGE FIRE of a movement and an ideology and an attempt at “liberation” or “inclusion” or “equity” or whateverthefuck these robotic goons think they’re doing.
“I’m just going with what a lot of other people have said” – yes and guess what, sonny, so are they. It turns out that’s all ANYONE is doing. You all think someone somewhere must have gotten hold of the right end of the stick somehow, so there’s no need to think further. Well you are WRONG about that. No one did. There is no right end of this stick. It’s a crock of shit from top to bottom.
Now back to learning more about Warren Smith…now that the outlines are pathetically clear.
The NY Times reported several weeks ago that Republicans are hard at work purging voters.
A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.
Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.
…
The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.
Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.
The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.
The bigger risk, they note, is disenfranchising voters.
The even bigger risk is electing that monstrosity again.
He reported directly to Mr Trump, on “whatever concerned him, whatever he wanted”, Cohen said, calling his ex-boss a micromanager. “Everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off,” he said.
At the same time, Mr Trump was careful about paper trails, Cohen said. The Trump Organization founder never had an email address, telling Cohen that “emails are like written papers”.
“There are too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said Mr Trump once told him.
Gone down, eh? As in, been exposed as criminals? If Trump did say that it tells us he knows he’s a crook and takes steps to hide his crookery. Granted, that’s a no shit Sherlock, but it’s interesting to see it spelled out like that. “We don’t use email here, because it could be useful to the cops.”
Many many people, especially women, are asking why the BBC keeps promoting drag and why it doesn’t equally promote blackface. It’s a fair question.
Amir Dean, also known as Lady Bushra, is one of the UK's most well-known British Asian drag artists.
Since debuting Lady Bushra four years ago, Amir has travelled the world performing with the hope of encouraging people to "be more like Bushra" pic.twitter.com/KL7lZjRSOJ
— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) May 14, 2024
His “true self” being the woman he is not. His fake true self, his pretend true self, his fantasy true self. Back in the before times a true self meant something along the lines of a self not repressed and stifled by convention. It didn’t mean childish fantasy. Adults didn’t prance around saying their true selves were birds or race cars or space travelers or Nobel laureates or ponies. Fantasy and delusion are now what’s real, so I guess truth and sanity are fake.
How are we supposed to even try to show compassion for people who may or may not have debilitating dysphoria when so many of the most vocal claimants spout endless “true self” cultspeak bullshit? The conditions we’re being asked to accept aren’t just slowly creeping up, they’re exploding in our faces like a joke can of nuts filled with spring-loaded snakes.
Part of the problem with gender dysphoria — or any identity disorder, I guess — is that it’s a disorder relating to one’s relationship with their social environment, as in everyone else, as in their relationship with us — a kind of social contract that we were at one time merely asked to sign up to. At first this new social contract that the trans rights movement was establishing, with the help of the fields of psychiatry/psychology, seemed like a much more modest ask. Something like, if someone has this debilitating disorder, they’re doing the best they can to manage it, and that might entail some unconventional appearance and behaviour… and that point is where you and I and the rest of society come in: a humble request that people be understanding and compassionate and offer some leeway towards their unconventionality because of this rare condition which creates a difficult situation.
And that fits fairly well generally with liberalism: not unlike feminism, it involves chafing against social norms. Not unlike homosexuality, it involves an atypical set of behavioural preferences that others might not understand but they’re merely being asked to tolerate and to open up space for a modest footprint in the social space to go about their business in; and not unlike mental and physical disabilities, we’re being asked to apply some of our collective capital towards better accommodating those whose needs are greater than ours. It’s not unlike economic egalitarianism, too.
Not that that ideal of a functional kind of transgender rights ever worked so well in practice. It was always unstable. Because of the disorder part of the equation, and because many of the people who purported to have gender dysphoria were not being honest at all about their innermost motives. (Not honest to themselves or to others.)
The transgender social contract is no longer voluntary — we’re not being politely asked to play along but forcefully commanded, and on top of that, it’s been rewritten so that it puts 100% of the onus on us, the rest of society, and requires no work at all on the part of the patients themselves — in fact they’re not even supposed to be understood as patients anymore! Anyone can declare a transgender identity. Once you do, you’re free to make up whatever fantasy story you like about yourself, and everyone else is obligated to bend over backwards to make your fantasy seem as real as possible to you. You are automatically the boss of everyone. (Come to think of it, I’m rather surprised more men with trans identities don’t sign up to be referees. All that power to order everyone around, and you even get a whistle! Seems a natural fit.) It’s that Twilight Zone episode where the bratty kid obtains omnipotent powers and terrorizes the townsfolk, only we’re giving that power to every single fucked up, narcissistic man (and more than a few women). What were we thinking?
The field of psychiatry and psychology bears some of the blame for this: they set the ball rolling on the idea that if we ask everyone else (women especially) to carve out more and more exceptions for these patients, they’ll be better off. They didn’t see that the cost to everyone else in society was rapidly climbing, and that the sense of entitlement they engendered among many unstable people would prove too alluring to resist.
That’s embarrassing. She’s a lawyer and a journalist and that’s her reading comprehension level?
Probably not, most of the time. Probably it’s an excess of anger that caused her to miss the point so thoroughly. Let that be a lesson to us all: when in a rage, slow down and read carefully before you rush to denounce. Otherwise you’re gonna look like a damn fool in front of all those sages and wits on social meeja.
Motown and cornrows. That’s what this dizzy bitch thinks being Black is about.
« Une TERF, une balle, justice sociale » : des appels au meurtre envers @Margueritestern et moi, en plein paris, devant la police, devant l’université ASSAS à Paris où l’on s’apprêtait à donner une conférence sur notre livre #TRANSMANIA.
Cohen, a lawyer, didn’t work for Trump because he was a deft attorney, a skillful accountant or a brilliant money manager. He worked for him because he knew just enough about the law, accounting and greed to help Trump engineer end runs and cover-ups. “I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them,” Cohen wrote in Disloyal, a memoir of his Trump years. “I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.”
“Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen wrote. “In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”
I don’t know. Trump’s universe is full of people — employees, acquaintances, hangers-on, family members and reporters, for example — who all claim to have the most intimate understanding of what makes him tick. Having said that, I have spent more than 30 years covering Trump and spending lots of time with him as a reporter and biographer. I would also describe him as a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, and a con man.
