Originally a comment by Claire on It would totally work.

The only way to do it is to emulate how we breed animals and plants for specific traits: you have to very carefully select for the traits you want and literally force them to breed. People wouldn’t have any choice on who to breed with or indeed whether to breed at all. And any inferior offspring would be killed. It’s even more dystopian than Brave New World.

Anyway, electing for high intelligence would probably be in contradiction to docility. In authoritarian regimes, killing off the intellectuals is fundamental for a reason. You can’t have a docile herd without it. And we are not naturally herd animals, whereas most domesticated animals are. They’re easier to handle.

I’m not defending Dawkins here but I can see where he’s coming from in a way that would probably be lost on most people outside of biology. It’s easy for me to see this dispassionately, as Dawkins does, with humans as just another animal. Unlike Dawkins, I appreciate the concepts of sociology, anthropology, and psychology – humans (and some of the non-human primates) are not in fact quite like other animals. Although, for clarity, I don’t consider him a part of my field. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not a geneticist. And frankly, not a particularly good one, just a loud one.

But most importantly, he’s wrong.

Francis Galton, who is considered one of the fathers of genetics and in more specific terms one of the pioneers of my specific field. He was a big fan of eugenics and was Darwin’s cousin. He spent years studying trait variation in populations and this led naturally (naturally at the time, this was the 19th century) to considering how to improve the stock of the human race. I won’t go into more detail because it’s a whole lecture series on its own but he actually invented a number of methods and approaches we still use today.

This is the context that Dawkins has stripped from this conversation. Twitter is not the right medium for this kind of discussion.

It’s an uncomfortable heritage (the irony of which is not lost on me). Those of us in population genetics, genetic epidemiology, and statistical genetics owe a lot to Galton, but some of his ideas were hideous. We have to accept that.

So, why are Dawkins and Galton wrong?

When we raise cattle for milk or pigs for meat or wheat for flour, we observe traits and deliberately select for the ones we want. But to do that, we have to account for the traits that come with that. Cattle raised for milk or meat would not survive in the outside world. Their biology has been distorted to the point that they are reliant on humans to support characteristics that evolution would otherwise select against.

The idea of breeding (or genetically engineering) a superior human is biological nonsense. You select for one trait, you’re selecting for and against a bunch of others and you never know what they are in advance. Most genes are pleiotropic (which means they have more than one function) and they interact, so it’s just impossible to engineer either by breeding or by engineering a “superior” human, whatever your metric of superior is. They wouldn’t be able to survive.

tl;dr Any species that can’t afford to be reliant on another’s care for survival cannot survive on its own. All species survive by being adaptable. A human herd bred for “superiority” would die off pretty quickly because evolution is no longer working with the environment of the outside world. The environment always wins.

I saw that “Dawkins” was trending on Twitter so I had to look.

But what is meant by “work” here? What is the “eu” in “eugenics”? What kind of “eu” are we talking about? What “facts” are we invoking?

He didn’t say. The tweet just stands alone, with nothing leading up to it and no elaboration following it. He did later respond to the fact that people responded though.

So the “eu” he has in mind is faster running or higher jumping?

If so…I still don’t see what his point is. The “could” in “we could breed” leaves out the fact that it would take a whole new arrangement of society to do that – which is to say no, actually, we couldn’t, unless you think we “could” also install a Brave New World type of social structure that would be stable for generations. It’s not true that we “could” do that for the simple reason that no woman is ever going to agree to gestate babies for the purpose of Higher Jumping.

Plus I still don’t see what his point is because who disagrees with what is apparently his basic point that it’s theoretically possible to breed humans for particular desired traits? It’s also theoretically possible to breed humans for food; we know that; it’s not really something we need to be told.

Even people who aren’t 100% “trans women are the most oppressed ever and you have to give them whatever they demand” are still desperately cautious about how much they’ll let women keep. Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian for instance:

When Nandy told a recent hustings that “trans women are women” there were whoops of delight. But ask around for women feeling alienated from Labour over this issue and they’re easily found.

Some are survivors of domestic violence who resent being told to “educate yourself”. Others are bewildered that decades of loyally knocking on doors seemingly hasn’t earned them the right to be heard. They long to hear someone defend what is still Labour’s official policy: promoting trans equality but defending powers in equality law that let organisations exclude trans women from all-female spaces in exceptional circumstances.

In exceptional circumstances? Women’s organizations should be required to include men (who say they are women) unless the circumstances are exceptional? We can’t just have women’s organizations as a matter of routine, because women need to organize and we have a right to organize as women? Being able to say men aren’t invited isn’t allowed unless we have a damn good reason, with other people deciding what “damn good” means?

That’s like saying labor unions have to include bosses in ordinary circumstances. It’s like saying LG organizations have to include straight people unless they have a damn good reason not to. It’s like saying women don’t have a right to organize, basically.

Yet it’s still not too late to find common ground. No compassionate human being should want a woman who has been raped or brutalised to feel traumatised all over again by sharing counselling or refuge services with someone they perceive as a threat. Even a person who poses no danger whatsoever can inadvertently frighten a traumatised person, if something about them – a sound, a scent, a habit – triggers flashbacks. But nobody should want trans people to feel unsafe or cast out, and barring a trans woman from women’s services seems the cruellest of personal repudiations.

No, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I can think of much crueller ones. It seems at most disappointing for men who want to be accepted as women. Women need women’s services in a way that men don’t, even men who say they are women. Being a man who thinks of himself as a woman is not the same kind of thing as being a woman, and all this pressure to pretend it is is just more oppression and I’m sick of it.

Some refuges have now accepted trans women (excellent risk assessment helps, and careful laying out of accommodation). Some schools absorb gender-questioning pupils without fuss; teens queue happily for mixed Topshop changing rooms; and with time, maybe we’ll wonder why unisex loos were ever an issue.

Because by then men will have stopped raping and molesting and spying on women? Hahaha that’s funny, of course not. So why then? No reason, just a pious hope that ignores the reality of being (not pretending to be) a woman.

Huh. Trump is basically invading US cities he considers insufficiently harsh to immigrants.

THE TRUMP administration will send specially trained officers from the southern border to so-called sanctuary cities to help with immigration enforcement operations in a clear escalation of President Donald Trump’s ongoing conflict with localities that limit law-enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities.

Not specially trained in the sense of being humane, scrupulous, cautious, but in the sense of being extra violent.

The officers will be sent by Customs and Border Protection, the agency which houses Border Patrol, to aid in arrest operations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Operations will take place in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit and Newark, New Jersey, according to The New York Times, which first reported the development.

Not Seattle. We’re a sanctuary city. Maybe they don’t like rain.

The officers being deployed include those assigned to specialized tactical teams within CBP, like the elite Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC.

BORTAC agents have training similar to special forces personnel and often wield specialized equipment. They carry out high-risk security operations along the border, such as raiding drug stash houses or targeting individuals known to be violent.

In other words, they’re an invading army. Awesome.

The move to send the agents to aid ICE appears in part aimed at sending a message to immigrants in the 10 cities where operations are scheduled to take place and could escalate what are otherwise normal enforcement actions.

And the message is: “we hate you and want to unleash violence on you so that you will go away and never come back.”

The border agents will reportedly be used for backup on ICE operations and providing a show of force.

In case we’ve been coming across as a bunch of pacifist sissies.

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph – the Telegraph, please note, not the Guardian, even though she’s a Guardian columnist. The Guardian must have refused to publish it.

I am well aware that Twitter is not the real world. But then nor is the Labour Party. Out of all the issues that might be bothering the leadership contenders – anti-Semitism, a reconnection with lost voters, a plausible response to Boris Johnson – instead, a bizarre set of pledges has been issued on trans rights.

Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey have signed it. It suggests the expulsion of “transphobic” members from the party and says that organisations such as Woman’s Place and the LGB Alliance, which are concerned to keep same sex spaces for women, are hate groups that have to be fought.

In other words Labour has said a big “fuck off” to women.

But this is not actually about trans folk at all. It is about a denial that women need safe spaces, whether that’s in prison or refuges.

That and more. It’s about a denial that women are oppressed or marginalized, it’s about barely disguised hatred of women, it’s about expecting women to give way to everyone else, it’s about hostility and contempt and venom that doesn’t have to be hidden any more.

Feminism and gay rights didn’t happen via Momentum. Some of us are aware that competing sets of rights may clash and we need to talk. I merely note that this discussion is always about trans women and not trans men.

Why is that? And who is the enemy of trans people? Who rapes and kills them? Feminists? Or men? The last time I saw threatening male behaviour was outside the Woman’s Place meeting at Labour conference.

Enough of us have had enough of being told what a woman’s place in the Labour Party is. We will go elsewhere. We already have.

And we won’t be handing out sandwiches.

Walter Shaub thinks Trump’s strong-arming of New York is not getting nearly enough attention.

Or (or and) it could be that in the firehose of bad shit that Trump sends out every day it becomes very difficult to spot the top maximum utmost worst things.

Trump does think he is in effect a king. Someone surely must have told him that in fact the powers of a president are not those of a king, but he equally surely must have paid no attention.

And Barr is his enabler.

Barr was once seen as a potential check on Trump’s overt desire to take command of the justice department, deploying its investigators and prosecutors at his whim and his will. But this week, critics warn, the attorney general has been revealed as an eager accomplice in eroding norms meant to insulate the criminal justice system from political interference, threatening the bedrock principle of equality before the law.

I’m not sure who once saw Barr as a potential check on Trump’s overt desire to take command of the justice department; the way I remember it there were some faint hopes that he might be more principled than Sessions (let alone Whitaker), but also plenty of pessimism.

“We fought a revolution against kingly prerogative,” said [Paul] Rosenzweig. “At its most extreme, Trump’s actions post-impeachment in the last week reflect his belief that he really has, as he said, an absolute right to intervene anywhere in the executive branch. And there’s a word for that.

“People with absolute rights are kings.”

And presidents don’t bounce around shouting that they have an absolute right to do X…unless they’re Trump. He’s a first that way; he’s the first to be that unselfconsciously authoritarian and that reckless about saying so, and he’s the first to be historically and institutionally illiterate enough to think it’s true.

“Bill Barr has turned the job of attorney general and the political appointee layer at the top of the justice department on its head,” said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton.

“In past administrations of both political parties, the function of the political appointees at the justice department has been to insulate the rest of the department from political pressure. And Bill Barr instead has become the conduit for that political pressure.”

All for…what? An end to abortion rights? A permanent Republican stranglehold on elections? Lower taxes for billionaires? Copper mines in all the national parks?

Barr has not been untouched by the turbulence of the last week. Reported threats of additional resignations drove him on Thursday to grant a TV interview in which he complained that Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job” and vowed: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

A Trump spokesperson said the president’s feelings were not hurt. Barr was said to have warned the White House of what he was going to say.

And nobody believed a word of it.

The interview was met with outrage and eye-rolls among critics who saw a wide divergence between what Barr said and everything else he has been doing.

“I think Bill Barr is shrewd, deliberate, smart, calculating, careful, and full of it,” tweeted the former US attorney Preet Bharara.

The real Barr, critics say, has a 12-month track record as a spearhead for Trump’s attack on justice, beginning with public lies about the report of special counsel Robert Mueller and running through his intervention in the case of Roger Stone.

In short he’s a hack and a very bad man.

More on Fair Cop:

Harry Miller was visited by Humberside Police at work in January last year after a complaint about his tweets.

He was told he had not committed a crime, but it would be recorded as a non-crime “hate incident”.

He hadn’t committed a crime, yet the plods “visited” him at work. No crime, but punishment anyway.

The court found the force’s actions were a “disproportionate interference” with his right to freedom of expression.

…

Mr Justice Julian Knowles said the effect of police turning up at Mr Miller’s place of work “because of his political opinions must not be underestimated”.

He added: “To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom.

“In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

Funny to edge toward it on behalf of men who say they are women.

Janice Turner writes that Lisa Nandy brands herself as Labour’s truth teller:

Rational, grounded, fearless of factions, the only leadership candidate prepared to tackle the self-delusion and disconnect which lost four elections, she’d won many prospective votes, including mine. Until Tuesday, when Nandy signed up to a witch-hunt of thousands of (mainly female) party members, including me.

It’s that “expel the transphobic bigots” pledge, which Turner calls astonishingly totalitarian.

It not only demands signatories “accept there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights” but says anyone who disagrees is a bigot. It names Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance as “hate groups” whose supporters are transphobic and must therefore be expelled.

News flash: not wanting to surrender our rights to men who say they are women doesn’t make women “transphobic.”

I mention Nandy because although every leadership candidate except Sir Keir Starmer has now signed this pledge, she has doubled down. There are no spaces at all, she said on Radio 4’s Today programme, where male-bodied people should be excluded.

Maybe it’s not that gender critical women are transphobic but that gender not-critical women are transphilic? They certainly do put the claimed needs and firm demands of trans women ahead of ours. Women just have to put up with male bodies in formerly women’s private spaces whether we want to or not? Isn’t that a tad rapey? Or does transphilia excuse all?

Nandy is not the first politician who, sucked into the gender vortex, loses all reason. This week Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle confounded biologists by saying that “sex is not binary”. During the election Lib Dem Dr Sarah Wollaston denied that a baby’s biological sex is observed at birth; potential Lib Dem leader Layla Moran believes women can differentiate male predators from self-identified trans women by looking into their souls.

And the window for that is where, exactly?

How have LGBT issues, in particular gender self-ID, become such a moral test of politicians in progressive parties? Sociologists speak of how organisations can be overwhelmed by “purity spirals”. This is when a group grades its members by a single value, which has no upper limit or agreed interpretation. Those who seek power must demonstrate their purity in ever more abstruse ways: those judged “impure” are denounced and destroyed.

That makes sense. The single value and the no upper limit is exactly what we encounter day in and day out.

Working on the 2019 Labour manifesto, Lachlan Stuart observed that LGBT activists were not “driven by a motivation to improve the quality of life for trans people” such as increased mental and physical health provision, only “to erode or erase the political rights of female people.” Their alarming central goal was to open up all female single-sex spaces to anyone who identified as a woman.

How will voters, who have hitherto been unaware of this arcane debate, feel about a Labour Party fully committed to ending historic safeguards? To a party which believes any male person should be allowed to legally change sex without qualification or checks, leaving women and girls vulnerable yet unable to object? Will Labour leaders pull out of the purity spiral and heed the fears of thousands of women members? Or will they, as that nice Lisa Nandy demands, simply chuck them out?

Get out of the purity spiral while you still can.

Trump will be blowing another gasket in 10, 9, 8, 7…

Reuters:

The U.S. Justice Department is closing its criminal investigation into whether former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to investigators about his communications with the media without bringing any charges against him, his attorneys announced in a statement on Friday.

In a letter his lawyers also released from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., prosecutors said that “based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”

Trump can always console himself by remembering he put McCabe through two years of hell and took away his pension.

More from the Barr is dirty files:

The New York Times is reporting that attorney general Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to “scrutinize the criminal case” against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.

The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.

“Highly unusual” as in “unprecedented in living memory,” according to prosecutors Rachel Maddow talked to yesterday. This is not what the Justice Department is supposed to do. The fact that it’s doing it in a case that Trump has loudly and frequently bellowed about makes it all the more grotesque.

I don’t think Bloomberg should be running, let alone elected, but he is in a good position to give Trump what he dishes out.

Trump knows that’s true and he hates it.

Yasssssss.

Police officers unlawfully interfered with a man’s right to freedom of expression by turning up at his place of work to speak to him about allegedly “transphobic” tweets, the high court has ruled.

Harry Miller, a former police officer who founded the campaign group Fair Cop, said the actions of Humberside police had a “substantial chilling effect” on his right to free speech.

Miller, 54 and from Lincolnshire, claims an officer told him he had not committed a crime, but that his tweeting was being recorded as a “hate incident”.

At this point in the story I always pause to think about the torrents of abuse that have been poured over women on Twitter, with neither the police nor Twitter giving the tiniest fuck about any of it.

The College of Policing’s guidance defines a transgender hate incident as “any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender”.

In a ruling on Friday, the high court in London found the actions of Humberside police were a “disproportionate interference” with Miller’s right to freedom of expression.

But he said the College of Police guidance was fine. So…I guess everything is a hate incident if someone says so, but that’s not necessarily a good enough reason to show up at people’s jobs and wreck their lives.

The judge said: “The claimants’ tweets were lawful and there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet.

“I find the combination of the police visiting the claimant’s place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the claimant’s right to freedom of expression because of their potential chilling effect.”

In his judgment, Knowles stated: “I conclude that the police left the claimant with the clear belief that he was being warned by them to desist from posting further tweets on transgender matters even if they did not directly warn him in terms.

“In other words, I conclude that the police’s actions led him, reasonably, to believe that he was being warned not to exercise his right to freedom of expression about transgender issues on pain of potential criminal prosecution.”

Kate Scottow, on the other hand, lost her case.

Today’s judgement was a hard sight to bear: a 39-year-old mother of two children, one of whom is autistic, listened as the judge at St Albans Magistrates’ Court found her guilty, under the Communications Act (2003), of using a public communications network to “cause annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety”.

Again, I pause to think of the torrents of abuse that have been poured over women on Twitter, with neither the police nor Twitter giving the tiniest fuck about any of it. Real abuse, sustained abuse, deliberate calculated repeated over weeks and months abuse – which is apparently just what women have to expect if they talk in public.

The verdict means Kate Scottow is unlikely to be able to fulfil her ambition of becoming a forensic psychologist, after completing her master’s degree in the subject last year.

Her crime? To send some offensive tweets to a trans woman called Stephanie Hayden. These included describing Hayden as a “pig in a wig” and referring to Hayden as “he” or “him”. 

Note that the president of the United States does worse than that almost every day.

Yes, that’s right, frame it as “first for transgender athlete!!” as opposed to “man hopes to qualify for women’s Olympics.” Make it sound like an exciting innovation as opposed to a man cheating a woman out of a place at the Olympics.

On Dec. 8, 2019, 28-year-old Megan Youngren became one of 63 women at the California International Marathon to officially qualify for the 2020 U.S. Olympic marathon trials, the race that will determine the team for Tokyo. Her 40th-place finish in 2:43:52 came as both a relief and a reward, after four months of intense training. But it also marked another significant moment: With her qualification, Youngren is set to make history on Feb. 29 as the first openly transgender athlete to compete at the U.S. Olympic marathon trials.

In other words Youngren is a man.

In 2013, Youngren started running to lose weight and boost her health after transitioning, and now she primarily races on trails and runs up and down mountains for fun. Youngren says that running helped alleviate any lingering symptoms from a case of shingles. By 2014, she was running consistently, but with little structure to her training. An Alaska native, Youngren ran her first marathon at the 2017 Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks in 4:48, on a course with an unforgiving 3,285 feet of elevation gain and loss. Despite the difficulty and cramping, she credits that race as the one that got her hooked on the 26.2-mile distance. …

“I thought that if I worked incredibly hard and took some huge risks that I could run a 2:45,” Youngren says. “People will try to put it down by saying, ‘That’s too easy because you’re trans.’ But what about the 500 other women who will qualify? There’s probably someone with the exact same story. I trained hard. I got lucky. I dodged injuries. I raced a lot, and it worked out for me. That’s the story for a lot of other people, too.”

Not because he’s trans; because he’s male. And it’s not that it’s too easy, it’s that it’s an unfair advantage.