Local

Mar 5th, 2020 10:37 am | By

This one is in an area where I’ve actually been, so that’s new.

An Amazon employee in Seattle has tested positive for the coronavirus, according to an internal message sent on Tuesday afternoon.

All other employees who came in close contact with the individual have been notified, according to the message. The employee worked out of the Brazil building, which is located blocks away from the Amazon Spheres, the company’s giant greenhouse domes in downtown Seattle. The company said it defined close contact as “closer than 6ft/2 meters over a prolonged period of time”.

The Brazil building is in South Lake Union, which has a pleasant park along Lake Union so I go there sometimes. Not that I’m thinking “Ooh I probably have it,” it’s just…interesting.

It’s a bizarre neighborhood. Not long ago it was a drab uninteresting area of low-slung industrial buildings and now it’s jam-packed with glittering new glass towers.

This concludes today’s episode of me me me me.



Standing accused

Mar 5th, 2020 10:15 am | By

Another “conflict”:

A bitter conflict is escalating in the Scottish literary scene with the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) standing accused of “institutional transphobia” after it said that it would not support “bullying and calls for no-platforming of writers”.

But first we need to know what “transphobia” is, because people and institutions “stand accused” of it all too often not because they have shouted their hatred of trans people but because they have, for instance, said that women should not be persecuted for not ticking every box on the trans list of boxes to tick.

The issue was raised in the Scottish parliament on Tuesday, where the SNP’s Joan McAlpine said it was “worrying that women such as feminist poets in Scotland, Jenny Lindsay and Magi Gibson, have been subject to online mobs trying to stop them getting work or blocking their performances”.

The library stressed that it had spoken out to encourage freedom of expression. “We are a values-led organisation that embraces inclusivity, collaboration and a respect for pluralism – of languages, cultures and faiths … this does not mean that we are taking sides in any particular debate but we will not be passive if we are made aware of behaviours within our community that do not align with our values.”

The vagueness is a problem though. Vagueness is part of this whole mess. What is “transphobia”? Why is disagreement over definitions called a “phobia”? What is “gender identity”? Why are we being ordered to subscribe to a vague and woolly yet binding set of magical claims?

But in response, a group of trans and non-binary authors released an open letter that said the SPL’s position “may reflect serious institutional transphobia”, and had caused “extensive distress”.

See? More vague and woolly demands accompanied by passive-aggressive threats.

Reactions to SPL’s statement and the ongoing fallout have been varied. Scottish PEN said on Tuesday that it was disappointed, writing: “Free expression is complex and any policy that ignores such complexity can stifle the free expression of a range of stakeholders, most notably members of marginalised communities.”

But which “marginalised communities”? In what way are they marginalised? What about women – do we count as a marginalised community?

On Wednesday, more than 200 writers including author Lionel Shriver and comedian Graham Linehan put their names to an open letter of support for the “unequivocal stance” of the SPL: “From universities to arts organisations, libraries and government departments, the no-platforming and bullying of anyone holding views not actively endorsing extreme gender ideology is destroying our cultural life,” says the letter, although the SPL had [not] mentioned not gender. “Scotland has always been an example of progressiveness in arts, education and culture, and we are proud that the first stand against this aggressive chilling of intellectual debate and thought has been taken by Scotland’s national poetry library.”

I signed that letter too.



If only they had thought of that

Mar 5th, 2020 9:38 am | By

Warren is out, so we have to choose between Biden and Sanders to get the sack of shit out of office. I’m disgusted.

The sack of shit thinks his random thoughts are more authoritative than the informed thoughts of people with relevant education.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday night spun a web of theories minimizing the coronavirus’ threat to Americans, accusing the World Health Organization of dispensing inaccurate facts about the outbreak, and suggesting that those with the disease could be safe going to work.

During expansive remarks on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s program, the president continued to break with public health officials’ more dire messaging regarding the international crisis and forcefully contradicted the WHO, which earlier in the week pegged the global mortality rate for the coronavirus at 3.4 percent.

Donald Trump is not someone who should be “forcefully” correcting the WHO, because he can barely find his own ass in the dark.

“Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor,” Trump said.

Hunch shmunch. His hunches are not relevant to anything, and he should keep them to himself. He’s a pig-ignorant real estate huckster, and he has nothing to tell us about COVID19.

“You never hear about those people. So you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and — or virus. So you just can’t do that,” he continued. “So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work but they get better.”

Look at him. He thinks the people telling us about the estimates don’t know that.



Academics worldwide

Mar 4th, 2020 2:52 pm | By

Oh please.

Academics? Why academics? That makes it sound as if it’s a technical term, and a product of expertise and research. It’s not. It’s a political label, and a very silly one. It puts a modifier on sex to make pretend-sex seem more legitimate and science-based and…you know…real. It puts it there to make it seem as if “trans woman” and “cis woman” are just two kinds of woman, when in fact the “trans” in “trans woman” literally means “not.” You can’t use “not woman” and “woman” to mean two kinds of woman. Trans women are men who

  • identify as
  • pretend to be
  • want to be
  • wish they were
  • fantasize they are
  • play at being
  • imagine they are

women. There is no need for a pseudo-technical word to express not being that kind of woman but the other kind, the kind who just is a woman.

Furthermore, “cisgender” is of course not “used by academics worldwide to mean “not transgender” because most academics, like most people, don’t talk about the subject at all, and have no interest in it.

https://twitter.com/dinahbrand2/status/1235291958878359559

There is no need for a word to say “women who are not pretending to be women.” No need at all.



“But What Was She Wearing? “

Mar 4th, 2020 2:12 pm | By

Vaishnavi Sundar finds out what it’s like to be canceled:

I am a filmmaker, writer and a women’s rights activist. I spend my time advocating for equal opportunities, contraceptive rights, education and the empowerment of women and girls. I centre women in all my work. When I started screening my film on workplace sexual harassment across India, I was hoping to raise public consciousness. But What Was She Wearing? was India’s first feature-length documentary on the subject.

However, I encountered strong resistance to the film from liberal feminist gatekeepers. Women who would send me private messages asking for professional favours and contacts, and congratulate me on the film, refused to acknowledge my presence on their public timelines or retweet anything about the film. At first, I thought this was my eternal bad luck or some flaw in my personality.

Then the rejections started, from lefty publications that had snapped up everything she sent in the past.

Last month, I discovered the reason I had become a social outcast in liberal-feminist bastions. I was in the US for an exchange programme, and I wanted to use the opportunity to screen my film at various places while I toured the country. One screening was scheduled in New York, organised by the Polis Project. The proverbial i’s were dotted, posters designed and I was even introduced to a female Indian moderator. But a week before the screening, the organiser (also a woman of Indian origin) sent me an email. She said the event would be cancelled because of my ‘transphobic’ views.

So feminist work on subjects like sexual harassment is worth nothing compared to the outrage of “transphobic” views. In other words the hell with what women are concerned about, are they being accommodating enough to men???? This from left-wing outlets.

Many moons ago I got into a Twitterspat about pre-op trans women in women’s shelters, prisons, bathrooms and women’s sports. And someone had brought the tweets in question to the organisers’ attention. As a result, the Polis Project thought it was only fair to shelve a screening of a film about a pressing topic that affects women across all social strata in society. All because the filmmaker believes biological sex is not a social construct, that women’s sex-based oppression is real, that housing people with male genitalia in spaces with victims of male sexual violence can be harrowing to women inmates, that mental illnesses like autogynephilia and other dysphorias can cause dangerous, irrevocable damage, and that gender theorists are erasing women, much like patriarchy does.

Feminism just doesn’t matter now because men who long to wear fuck-me shoes matter so much more.

I have since confronted the editors of the publications that blacklisted me. It appears that Indian trans-rights activists googled my name and wrote to every outlet I had ever been published in, telling them about my ‘TERFy’ tweets.

That’s the way to win hearts and minds.

How can so many liberal feminists call themselves ‘liberal’ and laud pornography, an industry in which women are brutalised (and often killed)? How can you encourage children to be ‘drag queens’ performing sexual acts for adults, in the name of gender ideology? I wish they wouldn’t call it a movement anymore. It is a cult that extols men, who are often not really ‘queer’ but who want to take advantage of ‘self-identifying’ as a woman in order to gain oppression points and external validation.

Feminism 2020: all about the men now.



Recognize

Mar 4th, 2020 11:43 am | By

Lisa Nandy did an interview with the Guardian the other day. She sounds quite good in many ways. But…

We are meeting a couple of days after Harvey Weinstein received his guilty verdict in a New York courtroom. Nandy says she is appalled that there are women in the Labour party whose sexual harassment cases have still not been resolved years after they made complaints. “We’ve failed a lot of women over recent years,” she says. “It’s very reminiscent of what happened with antisemitism where there are a number of cases which quite simply haven’t been dealt with. It gives the green light to people who harass women to believe they can find a home in the Labour party.” She says she would allow a committee of women to determine what harassment is, introduce an independent complaints process, and robust protections for whistleblowers. Aiming fire at Jeremy Corbyn she says: “There cannot be one rule for friends of the leader and another rule for others.”

Recently Nandy has landed herself in hot water with some feminists over her decision to sign, along with Long-Bailey, a pledge from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights that calls for the expulsion of members who hold “bigoted, transphobic views”. It describes Women’s Place UK – which wants to protect single-sex spaces – as a “hate group”. Does she regret it? “No, I don’t. I care deeply about safe spaces for women. I know from personal experience there is a generation of women who fought very hard to create and protect safe spaces, that it matters. Where you have women who want to have a genuine debate about how better to protect them, it’s a very welcome debate. But that has to start with the recognition that trans men are men, trans women are women and that they exist.”

And if it doesn’t then that’s a “hate group.”

We have to start with “the recognition” of a lie, that men who think of themselves as women literally are women. We have to, and if we don’t, Lisa Nandy will call us a hate group.

Progressive movements of the past haven’t ordered people to “recognize” lies. They didn’t say workers were plutocrats, much less that plutocrats were workers. They didn’t order us to “recognize” that white people who want to be black actually are black. This is a new thing on earth, and it speaks of a truly deep contempt for women, so deep that women share it too.



No leadership, no courage

Mar 4th, 2020 10:26 am | By

Keir Starmer talks a lot of crap and makes a lot of false analogies, as Allison Bailey points out.

Cowley is an car-factory town just outside Oxford. The juxtaposition is rather like Columbia/Harlem or Yale/New Haven or Berkeley/Oakland.



Let’s have a little respect for family life around here

Mar 4th, 2020 9:54 am | By

There’s something missing in this story…I can’t quite put my finger on it…

BBC reports:

A transgender man who has given birth to a child has begun an appeal to be legally registered as the “father” or “parent”, rather than the “mother”.

Freddy McConnell is fighting a decision made by a High Court judge last year that a person who carries and gives birth to a baby is legally a mother.

Mr McConnell, a single parent from Kent, lives as a man following surgery, having been assigned female at birth.

What is it, what is it…what is being left out…oh yes, I get it!

This shithead is suing to ensure that her child will have no mother.

Not “no mother” as in the mother died or left, but no mother as in there never was any mother.

Is shithead thinking at all about the child? At all about what the child might want as it grows up?

Notice also that the BBC used the fatuous “assigned at birth” for the reality of what sex McConell was born as and remains.

Mr McConnell has said the High Court’s decision breached his human right to respect for private and family life. If the appeal succeeds his son would become the first person born in England and Wales to not legally have a mother.

And is that a good thing? Is that a first that anyone aspires to for a child? Is McConnell really showing more respect for family life than the judge is?



There is an equitable solution

Mar 4th, 2020 9:03 am | By

Iain Macwhirter at The Herald Scotland:

WHEN I started writing about the trans self-identification issue nearly two years ago it was with the utmost trepidation. Questioning, or even discussing, the proposal that men should be able legally to become women merely by making a declaration of such, was regarded as transphobia, homophobia, bigotry.

Cultural and health bodies, and even the Scottish Government, were ceasing to use the very word “woman” in case it offended male-bodied transwomen. Bizarre substitutes like “womxn”, “menstruators” and “ciswomen” were being deployed in the cause of inclusivity.

Which – to belabor the obvious – is a very warped way to use the word “inclusivity.” The word should mean not excluding people from public events and institutions and the like for no good reason: a public quarantine during an epidemic is a good reason; misogyny and xenophobia and racism are bad reasons. The word should not mean including white people in the category “black people” or bosses in the category “workers” or gentiles in the category “Jews” or men in the category “women.”

Inclusivity used to mean including all women in the category women, and more specifically doing the work to include all women, by reaching out and recruiting and making room. It did not mean including men, and it didn’t give a rat’s ass how men “identified.” But that was then.

Nicola Sturgeon evidently regarded Self-ID as the new frontier of progressive legislation. With the minimum of public discussion, she committed the Scottish Government to abolishing the very definition of woman as “adult human female”. (That phrase is regarded as hate speech by some police forces).

Well, times change. This issue is now out in the open. More and more women are speaking out against the undermining of sex-based rights.

Influential figures in the SNP, like the former communications guru, Kevin Pringle, are now urging Nicola Sturgeon to follow the UK Government. But the Scottish Equalities Secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, apparently intends to press ahead with legislation to allow self-ID. Mr Pringle is speaking for many in the party who now realise that the growing backlash against Self-ID could threaten the SNP’s chances in next year’s Holyrood elections.

It has been left to genuinely courageous women like Joan McAlpine MSP and Joanna Cherry, MP, to fight for reason. For doing so they have been the target of astonishing abuse on social media, and from the trans activists embedded in the SNP.

But there is an equitable solution. Of course allow transwomen to identify as female without needless bureaucratic obstacles. But the Government should make clear in the legislation reforming the Gender Recognition Act that this does not mean abolishing the biological definition of sex or infringing women’s sex-based rights under the Equalities Act.

You’d think that a feminist like Nicola Sturgeon would regard that as self-evident. Perhaps she does. But if so she needs to say it loud and clear before half the voting population – women – turn against the SNP.

Here’s hoping.



Featuring a panel of powerhouse womxn

Mar 4th, 2020 8:31 am | By

Now you want to know what damn fool or set of fools was doing a Womxn’s Day Speaker Series, right? Well it was the Gates Foundation, blast their eyes.

We’re celebrating International Womxn’s Day by hosting the United Way’s Emerging Leaders 365 Speaker Series here at the Discovery Center, featuring a panel of powerhouse womxn who are entrepreneurs and doing incredible work to give back to our community. Moderator: Mika Yamamoto with Panelists including Laura Clise – Founder & CEO of The Intentionalist, Nourah Yonous – Founder and Executive Director at African Women Business Alliance, and Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno – Co Founder of Future For Us. Admission is a suggested donation of $10 to United Way’s Emerging Leaders 365.

STOP CALLING WOMEN WOMXN. Stop lumping women in with people who are not women by changing the E to X. Stop it. Women are not a formless lump of matter that anyone gets to redefine just by swapping out a letter or two. The word “women” is not up for grabs any more than the words “black” or “lesbian” or “working class” or “disabled.” Knock it off.

The Gates Foundation is about a 20 minute walk from where I live. Maybe I should go down there (it’s at the bottom of the hill) and yell at them.



Only six months of dreck left

Mar 4th, 2020 8:22 am | By

You can’t escape it even when it’s not the topic. I’m reading a piece from NBC on how the virus is affecting Seattle, and then thud.

Down a normally crowded hallway, Market Magic & Novelty Shop also remained quiet. A family bought a small keepsake and then walked out. No one came in after.

“We’re rethinking our business model, that’s for sure,” owner Sheila Lyon said. “People are scared. They don’t want to be in public spaces.”

Lyon and her husband make up a little money on the weekends, but every day seems to bring fewer and fewer customers. As a result, Lyon, who has owned her business for 47 years, is turning to social media to entice customers. But even that comes with a caveat, she said.

“Our wholesaler gets his supplies from China,” she said. “He told me he only has six months’ worth of products left.”

Kind of an odd example to choose – someone who sells imported tat to people trawling for tatty souvenirs. Pike Place Market also has crafts shops and of course food, so why single out a “novelty” shop? Maybe because it gets its tat from China. Still makes an odd example for a story on how a disease outbreak is affecting shoppers and sellers.

But that’s not what I was getting at. What I was getting at is…

Lyon is worried about how the emergency declaration will affect her bottom line. King County has already canceled big events scheduled for this week, such as the Womxn’s Day Speaker Series and the Cultural Crossroads Festival.

Oh for fuck’s SAKE – not again. I didn’t know there was such a series, and I would have been fine not knowing.



This utter garbage fire

Mar 3rd, 2020 3:58 pm | By

This person didn’t like Suzanne Moore’s piece at all.

https://twitter.com/JessicaLond0n/status/1234606350585548801

What’s next after what threat? There was no threat. There was a woman saying that Selina Todd should not have been told not to give her talk and that Woman’s Place UK clearly isn’t a hate group and that female is a biological classification that applies to all living species. None of that is any kind of threat, or anything like a threat, and women do have a right to organize and campaign as women without being screamed at and accused of terrorizing helpless male employees who identify as women. Jess was never in any danger from Suzanne Moore.

So today…

The Huffington Post UK has details:

A deepening row about The Guardian’s coverage of trans rights issues saw a trans woman dramatically announce her resignation in front of colleagues on Tuesday, HuffPost UK understands.

It is the third resignation from the paper’s UK office in months over the issue.

The worker confirmed to HuffPost UK she had handed in her notice a few weeks earlier, but chose to speak out in the busy news meeting on Tuesday over what she called “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

That is, the worker decided to leverage his resignation into a new way to bully and manipulate anyone who doesn’t agree that men become women by Saying the Words.

The Guardian’s approach to covering trans rights issues has been the subject of internal battles. In 2018, three of the paper’s US staff publicly criticised the decision to run an editorial that they said “promoted transphobic viewpoints”.

Meaning, they published viewpoints that aren’t identical with the reality-denying bullshit that is trans ideology.

Last year, BuzzFeed reported the Guardian had lost two trans employees over its coverage of the issue, with one accusing the newspaper in an email to staff of being “an incredibly transphobic organisation”.

Meaning, an organization that includes some people who don’t agree with every item in the reality-denying bullshit that is trans ideology.

It’s not phobia to decline to believe or pretend to believe reality-denying bullshit. We have a right to resist lies and bullshit. That right is considerably more important, and of longer vintage, than the mythical “right” to be ratified as the sex one is not.



Another day off ruined

Mar 3rd, 2020 11:32 am | By

All about…her?

So many people telling her to take as many days off as she likes.

Jane on the other hand has some tips.

H/t KBPlayer for the LP tweet.



Identified

Mar 3rd, 2020 10:00 am | By

Even in Missouri?

It’s “Women’s HERstory Month” at Missouri State so…

The Office of Multicultural Programs and the Department of Gender Studies are excited to announce the return of the annual Womxn of Distinction Awards.

I assume the Office of Erasing Women and the Department of Centering Men were involved too.

A yearly part of Women’s HERstory Month, the Womxn of Distinction Awards honor women and femme identified individuals who have excelled academically, contributed to the success of the Missouri State and Springfield communities, and demonstrated commitment to positively influencing the lives of others.

Women and “femme identified” people…because women can’t have anything that’s just for women any more. We have to share everything with men who claim to be “femme identified” (whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean) now.

A Slate article a couple of years ago explained why “women and femmes” is such a stupid pairing:

Before we go into what’s wrong with “women and femmes” as a linguistic device, maybe we should clear up what femme means (for those who don’t know their Ellen Page from Ellen DeGeneres). Femme is a term that comes from working-class lesbian culture. It was originally used to describe lesbians who were feminine in their appearance and clothing, and sat in opposition to butch lesbians, who were masculine in their appearance and clothing. (If you’re interested in reading more about the height of butch/femme culture then I suggest reading Leslie Feinberg’s seminal novel Stone Butch Blues.) Femme was about femininity released from the chains of obligation to men and their gazes. It was a defiant and knowing femininity, performed for oneself and for other women, rather than in service of the heteronormative status quo, which maintained that women were naturally feminine, men naturally masculine, and that the only acceptable desire was between these two kinds of people.

In short it applied to women. It was about women. It came from women. It was by women.

But then it got appropriated. Of course it did.



There are more of us than you think

Mar 3rd, 2020 8:46 am | By

Suzanne Moore says some things in the wake of the disinviting of Selina Todd:

The radical insight of feminism is that gender is a social construct – that girls and women are not fated to be feminine, that boys and men don’t have to be masculine. But we have gone through the looking-glass and are being told that sex is a construct. It is said that sex is merely assigned at birth, rather than being a material fact – actually, though, sex is recognisable in the womb (which is what enables foetal sex selection). Sex is not a feeling. Female is a biological classification that applies to all living species. If you produce large immobile gametes, you are female. Even if you are a frog. This is not complicated, nor is there a spectrum, although there are small numbers of intersex people who should absolutely be supported.

Female oppression is innately connected to our ability to reproduce. Women have made progress by talking about biology, menstruation, childbirth and menopause. We won’t now have our bodies or voices written out of the script. The materiality of having a female body may mean rape or it may mean childbirth – but we still seek liberation from gender. In some transgender ideology, we are told the opposite: gender is material and therefore can be possessed by whoever claims it, and it is sex as a category that is a social construction. Thus, sex-based rights, protected in law, can be done away with.

And that would be bad. Doing away with women’s sex-based rights would be bad, because we need them.

I know from personal experience the consequences of being deemed transphobic by an invisible committee on social media. It has meant death and rape threats for me and my children, and police involvement. I also know that the most vicious stuff takes place online and not in real life. Still, I can’t stand by. As Roman Polanski was being rewarded for his latest film at the César awards, Todd was being silenced.

Always gotta get back at Mommy, right?

If the idea of women organising autonomously is transphobic you are walking into a cul-de-sac, which absolutely traps people in boxes that benefit the patriarchy. Because there is nothing the patriarchy fears more than women who no longer rely on male authority. We revert to a society where women have to be chaperoned, not trusted to make decisions about their own reality. Meanwhile, men-only spaces are how half the establishment operates and no one considers that to be transphobic. None of this discussion is about men giving up space for trans men; it is always about what women must accept.

Which is all the more ironic given the fact that women are no threat to men but men are a threat to women. Trans men aren’t going to be raping men if they share their locker rooms; we can’t state the obverse so confidently; yet it’s women who face all the bullying. It makes no kind of sense.

Women have the right to call out the violent men who rape. We have the right to speak and organise without being told that speech is itself dangerous. You can tell me to “die in a ditch, terf” all you like, as many have for years, but I self-identify as a woman who won’t go down quietly.

There are more of us than you think.

And we’re pushing back.



His apparent lack of understanding

Mar 3rd, 2020 6:45 am | By

Thick as ten short planks.

President Donald Trump held a Cabinet Room meeting with pharmaceutical executives Monday, pressing them to deliver a vaccine for coronavirus as the epidemic spreads across the U.S.

Helpful. I’m sure they’re just being lazy, and if he presses them they’ll sigh and say “Oh all right” and come up with the vaccine by this afternoon.

At one point, Trump asked whether the normal flu vaccine could be used to prevent the spread of the current COVID-19 strain of coronavirus that is causing global disruption. “You take a solid flu vaccine,” Trump said, “you don’t think that would have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

“No,” came the response. Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Disease, added, “Probably not,” as the president nodded.

A really solid one? Not one of those flimsy ones that break so easily, but a really solid one with good foundations and steel I-beams?

Trump has been criticized for his response to the spread of coronavirus and his apparent lack of understanding about the epidemic.

Apparent? You mean “obvious” and “staggering.”

Experts raised concerns about the president’s knowledge gap last week when he admitted he was “shocked” to learn that the flu generally kills more than 30,000 Americans each year.

And on Monday, Trump said “maybe a cure is possible” for coronavirus and that a vaccine would be ready “relatively soon.”

And that exciting things are happening, and that they’re happening very rapidly.

The president’s desire for a quick vaccine was evident when meeting with the pharmaceutical executives in the Cabinet Room. Trump told Gilead Sciences CEO Daniel O’Day that his work on a therapy to alleviate symptoms was “very exciting,” and instructed him to “Get it done, Daniel. Don’t disappoint us.”

That will make all the difference.

Fauci and Health Secretary Alex Azar noted that vaccine work is complex, time-consuming and prone to failure, pointing out the difference between having a vaccine ready for tests and one ready for the market. But the president kept returning to the executives’ promising pitches.

Because that’s how thick he is.

Trump said he had “heard very quick numbers, that of months. And I’ve heard pretty much a year would be an outside number. So I think that’s not a bad range. But if you’re talking about three to four months in a couple of cases, a year in other cases.”

Heard where? At the golf resort? Inside his head? From Princess Former Liberal Hope Ivanka?

Trump said he had “heard very quick numbers, that of months. And I’ve heard pretty much a year would be an outside number. So I think that’s not a bad range. But if you’re talking about three to four months in a couple of cases, a year in other cases.”

Just write it down somewhere with a Sharpie and then show it to us. That’ll work.



But if it’s solid?

Mar 3rd, 2020 6:17 am | By

Oh god.

https://twitter.com/ultimate__facts/status/1234820158738309120

It’s a little unfortunate that the dumbest guy in the UNIVERSE has that job right now.



Three years after what now??

Mar 2nd, 2020 4:38 pm | By

Hey, remember when liberals pinned their hopes on Ivanka Trump?

No, neither do I.

Maggie Haberman says they did though.

(I went to follow Soledad O’Brien on reading that and found that she follows me. Whaaaaat)



Making remarks

Mar 2nd, 2020 4:14 pm | By

See the man. See the man say words. See the man say words that don’t mean anything. See the man make remarks. See the man flap his lips while an epidemic takes hold and he has no clue what to do.



Guest post: Coronavirus don’t care how you identify

Mar 2nd, 2020 10:48 am | By

Originally a comment by Claire on It doesn’t.

This is actually dangerously incorrect information. Yes, for the most part endometriosis doesn’t kill (although it does slightly increase the risk of ovarian cancer). But it is a terrible condition nonetheless.

But if you say 1 in 10 people, you’ve now screwed up the statistic. It’s not 1 in 10, because almost half the population is not at risk at all. And they can’t say 1 in 10 people with a uterus because it is possible to get the disorder without one in places such as the fallopian tubes, pelvic cavity, and even the bowel.

Now imagine if we were talking about something that does kill people but has differential risks for men and women. Breast cancer is common in women but rare in men. Lifetime risk of breast cancer in women is 1 in 8, for men it is 1 in 833. If you say 1 in 8 people instead you are grossly distorting the statistics. There’s no way I can think of that positively separates those at high risk and those at low, other than the word women. Even if you have a mastectomy, breast cancer is still possible (which is why prophylactic mastectomy by BRCA1/2 positive women is not very smart). You could I suppose say cis women and trans men, but that still doesn’t cover the non-binary and whatever the hell queer is supposed to mean these days.

Here’s another, more immediately relevant example: the risk of death from coronavirus seems to be higher in men than women by a considerable degree. Now, because most of the statistics we’re relying on come from China, we don’t know if that is true or whether there is confounding by smoking (~50% of Chinese men smoke compared with ~1-2% of Chinese women). Nevertheless, if it holds up, this needs to be communicated and quickly. Coronavirus don’t care how you identify.