Finally Trump has stopped whining about Alabama.

Kidding! No he hasn’t!

The Fake News Media was fixated on the fact that I properly said, at the beginnings of Hurricane Dorian, that in addition to Florida & other states, Alabama may also be grazed or hit. They went Crazy, hoping against hope that I made a mistake (which I didn’t). Check out maps………This nonsense has never happened to another President. Four days of corrupt reporting, still without an apology. But there are many things that the Fake News Media has not apologized to me for, like the Witch Hunt, or SpyGate! The LameStream Media and their Democrat……..partner should start playing it straight. It would be so much better for our Country!

“Check out maps………” But that’s what everyone did, and the maps all showed him to be wrong. That was the point.

On the one hand, why would anyone ask Siri about feminism in the first place? On the other hand, people are people and will do whatever silly thing comes into their heads, so Siri should say “That’s not my department” and leave it at that. But “she” doesn’t.

An internal project to rewrite how Apple’s Siri voice assistant handles “sensitive topics” such as feminism and the #MeToo movement advised developers to respond in one of three ways: “don’t engage”, “deflect” and finally “inform”.

The project saw Siri’s responses explicitly rewritten to ensure that the service would say it was in favour of “equality”, but never say the word feminism – even when asked direct questions about the topic.

Herp derp. We can tell what’s coming – all lives matter, I don’t see color, all men are created equal.

“Are you a feminist?” once received generic responses such as “Sorry [user], I don’t really know”; now, the responses are specifically written for that query, but avoid a stance: “I believe that all voices are created equal and worth equal respect,” for instance, or “It seems to me that all humans should be treated equally.” The same responses are used for questions like “how do you feel about gender equality?”, “what’s your opinion about women’s rights?” and “why are you a feminist?”.

Bingo.

Bad move, Apple. Just have it say “not my brief.” Don’t have it give a stupid substantive answer.

The Institute of Arts and Ideas have now published a Retraction Statement by philosophers Robin Dembroff, Rebecca Kukla and Susan Stryker, explaining why they didn’t want to be part of a debate with philosophers they consider not just wrong but worse than wrong on the questions around trans gender identity. That’s ok, but some of the content of what they say is not.

We welcome genuine dialogue and mutually respectful exploration of the complex and contentious social realities that characterize contemporary transgender issues. We devote a large part of our working lives to these issues, and we have much at stake in them, personally and politically. We object, however, to any “debate” that questions transgender people’s fundamental legitimacy as people who are entitled to the same respect as any other person.

Does that describe the other participants in the discussion, Holly Lawford-Smith, Kathleen Stock, and Julie Bindel? Do those three question “transgender people’s fundamental legitimacy as people who are entitled to the same respect as any other person”? No. Of course not. But it makes them sound evil, so I guess that’s a good-enough reason for saying it?

We reject as a starting place presuppositions held by some voices included in the IAI forum that transgender people are by definition mentally ill or delusional, and that respecting transgender people irreparably conflicts with the interests of cisgender women.

More subtle, but still dishonest. They don’t presuppose that transgender people are by definition mentally ill or delusional, they argue that it’s not the case that people can change their sex. That doesn’t translate to: trans people are delusional.

These presuppositions are uniformed, and fly in the face of evidence as well as years of feminist thought and activism. They preemptively delegitimate transgender people as speaking subjects.

The presuppositions aren’t what Dembroff, Kukla and Stryker say they are, and if they were they wouldn’t necessarily “preemptively delegitimate transgender people as speaking subjects.” That’s just a kind of rabble-rousing meant to make The Enemy look bad. We’re supposed to think they’re bad people who want to harm the helpless transgender people, like mean bullies in the playground.

We consider the right to occupy spaces in which our basic safety is not at risk to be a right that should not be up for debate.

But what about women’s safety?

We refuse on principle to engage in any discussion that treats such positions as up for abstract intellectual debate, in the same way that we would refuse to participate in a conversation that debated whether the Holocaust actually happened, or whether corrective rape should be used to cure lesbianism, or whether or not the white race is superior to all others.

Dirty dirty pool. Gender-skeptical feminists are not comparable to Holocaust deniers or advocates of corrective rape or white supremacists. Filthy pool. They should be embarrassed.

There are limits to civil and intellectual discourse beyond which speech acts are simply acts of violence.

We believe that the discourse of some invited participants in the original IAI forum goes beyond those limits. We refuse on principle to “co-platform” with those who seek, under the guise of “debate” with us, to persuade an audience that it should partner with them in advocating harm to us.

Filthy pool. They should be embarrassed and ashamed.

And another thing. The AP reports:

Trump had raised eyebrows and drawn an emphatic fact check from the National Weather Service on Sunday when he tweeted that Alabama, along with the Carolinas and Georgia, “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

You know, in ordinary times presidents talk to us about approaching hurricanes in order to give relevant useful advice. They can advise people to leave or to hunker down or to relax because the hurricane has faded out. What presidents say has an impact on what people do. Something I’d forgotten until I watched a NOVA on hurricanes last night is that in 2005 people in Houston died trying to evacuate, because the traffic locked up and they were stuck in the heat.

Hurricane Katrina had devastated the U.S. only a few weeks earlier. And with Hurricane Rita – documented as the strongest Gulf storm on record – on track to bash East Texas, Houstonians heeded the call to evacuate. That’s the moment residents remember best a decade later.

…

In the Houston area, the muddled flight from the city killed almost as many people as Rita did. an estimated 2.5 million people hit the road ahead of the storm’s arrival, creating some of the most insane gridlock in U.S. history. More than 100 evacuees died in the exodus. Drivers waited in traffic for 20-plus hours, and heat stroke impaired or killed dozens. Fights broke out on the highway. A bus carrying nursing home evacuees caught fire, and 24 died.

Evacuations themselves are dangerous, which makes sense as soon as you think about it. Trump really shouldn’t be out there squawking random bullshit about hurricane danger that doesn’t exist, and he shouldn’t be pitching a fit now about being corrected on the subject. He should act as if our health and safety were the issue, not his enormous prickly ego.

At Psychology Today, Michael Moscolo explains that identity isn’t something we can determine all by ourselves. He starts with Yaniv’s ball-waxing caper.

Yaniv’s actions should not be taken to be representative of transgender individuals. Nonetheless, Yaniv’s actions illustrate the deep conceptual problems that arise when we think of gender a form of “self-identification.” I want to show that regardless of one’s views on transgender issues, it is an error to think that gender identity—or any other identity for that matter—[i]s something that can be completely determined by one’s self.

…

These actions underscore the problem of using self-identification as the sole criterion on which to establish a person’s gender identity.  Although Yaniv identifies her gender as a woman, Yaniv’s biological sex is male.

In an individualist society, we prize the values of freedom, autonomy, equality and self-determination. We believe that people should be free to pursue their own agendas, to become whomever they wish to become, provided that they do not hurt others along the way.

Well, yes and no. Yaniv isn’t the only kind of “no”; Trump is another clear example. Trump “identifies as” all kinds of things that he emphatically is not, and he became president of the US partly by doing that, as well as partly by stealing, cheating, pussy-grabbing, racism-spouting, and other deplorable actions. I don’t think people should be free to do that. I think Some Restrictions May (and should) Apply.

From this view, it is easy to see how we might want to sanction the idea that gender—one’s experience of self as man or woman, masculine or feminine, as non-binary, or even non-sexed—as something that a person defines for oneself.  But this is neither true of transgender identities nor of any other type of psychological or social identity.

I do not and cannot create my identity by myself.  Identities are created in interactions that occur between people using public as well as personal criteria. Like it or not, I cannot establish an identity by myself; it must be negotiated with and validated in my relations with others. This does not mean that I have no role in establishing my identity—it simply means that I cannot and do not do so by myself.

You can have a fantasy by yourself. You can have a fantasy about yourself by yourself. That’s possible, and it makes conceptual sense. But the minute you start trying to impose your fantasy about yourself on other people, the Some Restrictions start to Apply. You can’t force us to believe your personal fantasies. It won’t work and it isn’t right. It isn’t possible and it isn’t a reasonable demand. Here’s the good news: the same applies to you. You don’t have to believe my fantasies about myself, either.

Mascolo chooses politics as his not very useful example – you can say you’re a Democrat but then if you vote and talk Republican, etc. It’s not very useful because it’s already purely external and social as well as voluntary. Better examples are race, nationality, and the like, or skilled occupations that can’t be just picked up in a moment.

The point here is not that one’s personal experience is irrelevant to one’s identity—it is indeed foundational. The point is that it is simply not sufficient. We need more than what someone says in order to establish and verify an identity.  We need to be able to point to public and shareable expressions of the person’s experience in order to verify the person’s identity. A person can claim an identity as a Democrat, but without voting for Democrats, espousing Democratic principles and acting on those principles, a person’s self-identification has no warrant.

Or, more usefully, a person can claim an identity as an immigrant or a lawyer, but without actually being either of those things what are we even talking about?

Originally a comment by iknklast on No, please, Geoff, tell us more.

I’m not sure what the problem is understanding this. (1) It is a stock photo. (2) It has the standard set up of a photo with both men and women, where the man dominates the photo and women are subordinate. (3) There are different possible ways of reading the photo. These seem to be agreed on.

The problem isn’t whether the photographer intended a sexist message. It isn’t with whether everyone in the world sees this particular photo with a sexist message. It isn’t even with the fact that in many ways, this is probably a reasonably realistic portrayal of one small moment in time.

The problem is the fact that pictures, movies, stage plays, works of art, literature, textbooks, news articles, etc, are overwhelmingly (1) dominated by males, with (2) females in subordinate positions. It is a build up of message after message after message, and it normalizes that view of things to the extent that people can argue (perhaps in good faith) like Skeletor and Nullius above that there is no overt sexism seen in the picture. For most people, this one single image looks like a small hill to die on, even if they accept the picture as being a dominant male and subordinate female. Well, things like that can happen at least sometimes in a perfect world, right? The male talking? Him sitting in comfort? The women backgrounded and in listening mode? It doesn’t have to be a problem.

But…it is merely one point in a wash of similar images that surround us nearly non-stop, messages that our brain takes in without recognizing them, normalizing conditions that privilege men over women and give our brain instructions that this is how the world works. In a world where women and men enjoyed true equality, and gained equal respect for hard won skills, this picture would not be a problem, and Skeletor and Nullius would be right.

In the world we actually live in, however, this stuff needs to be pointed out, dealt with, and discussed honestly, not by treating the picture as a stand alone, non-threatening object. Because it doesn’t exist alone, it exists in context with millions of other pictures that we want to deal with individually because it is easier than trying to deal with the problem at the root.

The wall is paid for!

A billion won’t cover it though – I guess that’s just an installment? Needs to be eleventy billion at least.

R. McKinnon, Assistant Professor of Philosophy linking to the Pink News article on woman-hating vandalism at Vancouver Rape Relief:

There’s a high likelihood that they’re doing it themselves to drum up more anti-trans hate and fear.

Hours later he was tweeting about hate mail he got from Breitbart readers.