The myriad ways women are treated differently from men, not in a good way, are so myriad they’re hard to exhaust. We keep learning of new ones. Jill Filipovic points out that young men have promise while young women are incompetent.

There are several youngish men jostling for the presidential slot, and maybe this is why.

But whether a youngish candidate is bright, brilliant and promising or inexperienced, off-putting and ruthlessly ambitious depends on whether the young thing in question is male or female.

“Promise” itself is gendered. Research consistently shows that in American workplaces, women tend to be promoted once their managers see them perform well; men are promoted if managers believe in their potential to do well. We’re running the same experiment in politics: Voters, donors and journalists are all excited by the great leadership potential of young men who leapfrog up the political ladder. They expect women to prove themselves before they move forward.

And so women don’t move forward as quickly. Women are more likely than men to enter politics later in life, having spent years shoring up the experience, accomplishments and recognition necessary to be considered credible contenders for higher office. Women start low and climb up, which means they may not climb as high. Women also tend to run for more collaborative legislative positions (school board, state legislature, Congress) rather than executive ones (mayor, governor, president). Men do the opposite, seeking executive roles, starting early and skipping ahead.

That’s interesting. I’ve just written a column for Free Inquiry arguing that we should value those collaborative positions more and not be so obsessed with the executive ones, because focusing on the One Top Dude gets us atrocities like gods and criminal presidents. (I’m not expecting the idea to catch on.)

Unfortunately for women, age poses an unsolvable problem: They are seen as too young and inexperienced right up until they are branded too old and tedious. Ms. Warren, for example, finds herself put in the same “old” category as Mr. Sanders and Joe Biden, even though both men are nearly a decade older than she is.

Men who are more or less the same age as Ms. Warren — Sherrod Brown (66), John Hickenlooper (67), Jay Inslee (68) — are not lumped in with the white-hairs. If women in their 40s are “in a hurry,” and women in their 50s are old news, and women in their 60s are just old, when, exactly, is a woman supposed to go to the White House?

Oh, we all know the answer to that one.

More on the trans women running with women in the Boston marathon last year issue:

Transgender women will race in next week’s Boston Marathon, officials say — a decision sparking controversy among experts who disagree on whether runners who identify as women but were born male might hold a competitive advantage.

At least five openly transgender women are signed up to run April 16. And while they aren’t the first, they’re helping bring clarity to the race’s stance on transgender runners.

“We take people at their word. We register people as they specify themselves to be,” said Tom Grilk, chief of the Boston Athletic Association, the group behind the race. “Members of the LGBT community have had a lot to deal with over the years, and we’d rather not add to that burden.”

Unlike women, who have had nothing but love and support and encouragement since time began.

That decision could prove controversial, said Bob Girandola, associate professor in the Department of Human Biology at the University of Southern California. He said if transgender runners produce higher levels of testosterone than their female competitors, that’s an issue.

“If they still have male gonads, they will have an advantage over other women — there is no way around that,” Girandola said. “It gives them an unfair advantage. Maybe they have to have a separate category if they’re going to do that. It’s a dilemma.”

Others disagree. For transgender women who lower testosterone levels, medical experts say there’s no evidence of an athletic advantage.

“That’s a misconception and a myth,” said Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, director of education and training programs at the Fenway Institute, a health and advocacy center for Boston’s LGBT community. “There’s no physiologic advantage to being assigned male at birth.”

So the biologist says there’s an advantage, and the unspecified Dr. who is a director of education says there isn’t. Why should we believe the latter? What does he know about it? Plus…seriously? There’s no physical advantage to having a male body?

They just don’t even bother, do they. Make it up, lie, lie more than Trump lies – whatever. Men are actually oppressed by women, and pigs have wings.

There are prizes in the Boston Marathon. Money prizes.

The fastest overall man and woman each win $150,000. Second place for each category gets $75,000, and third takes home $40,000. The rest of the top 15 win prize money as follows:

• Fourth: $25,000
• Fifth: $15,000
• Sixth: $12,000

And smaller down to $1,500 for 15th.

So trans women will have a shot at stealing money prizes from women too.

Trump called asylum seekers at the southern border “animals” yesterday and yet

As President Trump threatened to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border in recent days, his Department of Homeland Security nearly doubled the number of temporary guest worker visas available this summer.

Well, that’s different. That’s cheap labor; that’s a whole other story.

DHS and the Labor Department plan to grant an additional 30,000 H-2B visas this summer on top of the 33,000 H-2B visas they had planned to give out, the agencies confirmed.

The H-2B visa is for foreign workers to come to the United States and work for several months at a company such as a landscaper, amusement park or hotel. About 80 percent of these visas went to people from Mexico and Central America last year, government data show.

Because why? Because the pay is bad. Those are the jobs that pay minimum wage (or less if the bosses can get away with it) for hard physical work, and that makes them harder to fill.

Trump says there is a national emergency at the southern border because too many people are trying to come to the United States. On Friday, he implored migrants to turn around and go home.

“We can’t take you anymore,” Trump said Friday while standing at the border in California. “Our country is full.”

But his administration is giving a different message to some short-term workers. With the additional visas, the Trump administration is on track to grant 96,000 H-2B visas this fiscal year, the most since 2007, when George W. Bush was president.

Republicans may hate immigrants but by god they love cheap labor.

EPI, a left-leaning think tank, put out research this week showing that H-2B visa workers are typically paid less than American workers who do the same jobs. For example, landscaping workers on the visa are paid an average of $12.94 an hour, more than a dollar less than the $14.28 average wage paid to U.S. workers, according to an analysis of data from the Labor Department and H-2B visa applications.

It’s ok though. They’re temporary. We can throw them out any time we feel like it, for instance if they ask for better pay.

This has happened before.

The FBI has joined the investigation into a string of suspicious fires at historically black churches in Louisiana. Three churches have burned in less than two weeks in St. Landry Parish near Baton Rouge.

The fire at Greater Union Baptist Tuesday burned from the roof to the pews. For Pastor Harry Richard, whose grandfather helped start the church more than 100 years ago, the damage is personal.

“He left a legacy for me and I was trying to fulfill that to the best of my ability,” he said.

The suspicious fires began early last week, with the most recent one on Thursday. All three historically black baptist churches are just a few miles apart in St. Landry Parish.

“We do believe that this fire is suspicious. We do believe a crime has occurred,” said Louisiana State Fire Marshal H. Butch Browning.

Historically, the burning of black churches was used to intimidate communities and parishioners here are on edge.

That is, the burning of black churches by organized white supremacists was an easy way to terrorize black people, especially civil rights workers and voter registration activists.

Trump has woken up some demons.

Speaking of the ACLU…

FACT CHECK: Supporting trans athletes hurts no one.https://t.co/zQ9peh1zwt

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

They say, captioning a photo of two boys who Identify As girls winning a race against girls.

Women and girls do not need protecting from the same people who are pushing abortion bans, removing Title IX protections for all girls, and rolling back the clock on gender justice.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

Girls who are trans are girls. PERIOD.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

No one is hurt when trans people live authentically.

Not in the restroom.

Not in the locker room.

Not on the court, field or track.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

FACT CHECK: Many Olympians and other professional athletes support the inclusion of transgender and intersex people in sports.https://t.co/eVPJjrUffm

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

Women with high levels of testosterone are women.

Women who can't or don't want to get pregnant are women.

Women who are trans are women.

Stop policing women. https://t.co/bvPpNNxugB

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

I’m sensing a pattern.

Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.
Trans women are women.#EqualityAct

— Human Rights Campaign (@HRC) April 2, 2019

TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.
TRANS PEOPLE WON'T BE ERASED.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

Elie Mystal on what a rat bastard Neil Gorsuch is:

We live in a culture that fetishizes vengeance. Nobody is going to cry if Tony Stark blasts Thanos’s face off this summer. Nobody is going to care if Game of Thrones returns with a ritualistic burning of the Lannisters. Morally, our society is more at peace with the death penalty than it might seem.

Compared to moral philosophy, the law offers a much more compelling case against capital punishment. Some would argue that the first law is a law against capital punishment: thou shalt not kill. And if Charlton Heston is not your idea of a law-giver, political philosophers will tell you that the only reason we’re even in a “society” is because “law” was the only way to stop the endless cycle of revenge-killings that we would clearly engage in without it. The law has ever tried to mollify our thirst for vengeance.

…

This week, Gorsuch wrote a majority opinion that was both shockingly cruel and entirely consistent with arch-conservative thought. The case is called Bucklew v. Precythe. Russell Bucklew is a convicted murderer whose depraved crimes are not in dispute. He was sentenced to death in Missouri. Missouri is a lethal-injection state, but Bucklew has a rare medical condition that would cause him to be in extreme pain as the lethal drugs do their work. Bucklew appealed his sentence, arguing that the pain would be a violation of his Eighth Amendment protections, and asked for alternative methods of death that are not sanctioned under Missouri law.

Gorsuch, writing for a 5-4 majority, denied his appeal. Gorsuch wrote: “The Eighth Amendment forbids ‘cruel and unusual’ methods of capital punishment but does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death.” That’s about the most heartless-bastard thing I’ve read in a while, and I work on the Internet.

It does seem harsh.

The Eighth Amendment should not be caged and hobbled in accordance with the wishes of the simple and bigoted minds who wrote it. It’s not our fault that these hypocrites blurted out a principle that would honor human dignity more than they had the will to in their own time. Way back in 1958, the Supreme Court said that the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” The Eighth Amendment isn’t an artifact; it’s a challenge. It’s not something to hide behind; it’s something to live up to.

But Neil Gorsuch, and a legion of conservative legal “thinkers” like him, don’t want our society to mature and evolve. They want it to arrest and ossify. They don’t view the Constitution as a floor upon which we can build a better society;, they view it as [a] ceiling which we are doomed to forever struggle against.

People will suffer because of this opinion. More people will spend their last moments on this earth in agonizing pain, because of this decision. That primarily (though not exclusively) “bad” people will suffer is the only reason Gorsuch thinks he can get away with authorizing such suffering. (I’ll spare you Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in this case, because it’s just a thoughtless contemplation of firing squads. He sounds like a child who’s just figured out he’s strong enough to pull the wings off a fly.)

This decision is immoral. It is painful. It is evil. You don’t even have to be morally against the death penalty to understand what has been done here. You just have to be more decent than Neil Gorsuch.

Do you ever feel as if we’re living in a nightmare?

It’s all so technical, and I don’t have a gender identity degree. It’s over my head I’m afraid.

even in that instance though they still wouldn’t be a trans woman if they were afab, similar to how I am both trans and a lesbian but I am not a trans lesbian bc that’s appropriative of the identities of transfemme ppl.

— fagdyke friday (@bigdoggenergy) April 5, 2019

Damn I’m lost already. People are allowed to be agender/genderless and still call themselves women because they see it as a sociopolitical label…so…does it matter what kind of body they have?

Oh maybe it does, because they’re not allowed to be trans women if they are women with women-type bodies, because that’s…appropriative of the identities of transfemme people? But it’s not appropriative of the identities of women for men to be trans women. Why? Why is it ok for trans people to appropriate the identities of everyone but not ok for people in general? What rule is that?

Also, what are “transfemme people”? What does that mean? “Femme” used to describe lesbians and gay men who played the girly role, but what is “transfemme”? It can’t be the same as trans woman because that means trans woman, so…what, it means a straight person of either sex who…no, I can’t figure it out. It can’t be “puts on a skirt” or similar because that would just be “femme.” And why is “lesbian dad” both trans and lesbian but not a trans lesbian?

You see what I mean; the technicality is mind-boggling.

if they legit see themselves as both agender and a woman though a way to express that without appropriating trans women’s identities would be nonbinary woman.

— fagdyke friday (@bigdoggenergy) April 5, 2019

If they legit see themselves as both agender and a woman? Legit???? Isn’t that the worst crime of all, doubting the legit of somebody’s stated identity? How dare lesbian dad qualify people who see themselves as a logical contradiction, both agender and a woman? How can lesbian dad question their lived experience that way? Is it because lesbian dad has all the technical knowledge at herhisherhisherhis fingertips?

People are allowed to self define but your self definition can impact others and so should be done with care not to harm marginalized groups. At this point I’m decently sure you’re just trolling, because saying you’re a woman because you’re female fits much more as a terf talking

— fagdyke friday (@bigdoggenergy) April 5, 2019

Aw, was that really a pesky woman trolling lesbian dad with all his technical knowledge? Just sad.

Huh. Really?

Admin official slams House Dem demands for Trump's tax returns: "This is a hill and people would be willing to die on it… we will see you in court."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 5, 2019

People would be willing to die on the hill of Trump’s ability to keep his tax returns secret? Really? That’s their noble cause?

Maybe it’s just the one spokes. Maybe everybody else in there is saying “Nope, nope, not me, get yourselves some other fool to die on that hill, I’m not interested.”

President Donald Trump continues to hold his ground against Democratic efforts to obtain his tax returns, with one administration official telling CNN that the President and his team are willing to fight the House Democratic request all the way to the Supreme Court.

“This is a hill and people would be willing to die on it,” the official said.

Of course, there aren’t actually militias outside the Supreme Court ready to shoot down any administration officials who approach.

Marathons threw women overboard a year ago:

The San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will allow trans athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity.

Which is to say, the San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will make it impossible for a woman to win its marathon ever again.

After the Boston Marathon announced on Monday that transgender runners will be allowed to register in the gender category which most closely corresponds with their identity, a Care2 petition urged San Francisco to clarify its policies. It notes that the Bay Area race “requires people signing up for the S.F. Marathon to select a gender, male or female” on its website.

“We would love to see San Francisco Marathon clarify whether or not it honors gender identity for transgender and genderqueer individuals,” reads the petition, which has been signed by over 8,000 people to date.

Note that “honoring” “gender identity” is far more important than women’s right to compete against women.

In a series of emails to INTO, officials said the race would affirm trans identities.

“The San Francisco Marathon is a gender-inclusive race,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco Marathon said in a brief statement. “We encourage runners to register as the gender with which they identify.”

So women will have to compete against male bodies, which means they won’t have a real prospect of winning.

“We take people at their word,” Boston Athletic Association (BAA) Chief Tom Grilk told National Public Radio. “We register people as they specify themselves to be. Members of the LGBTQ community have had a lot to deal with over the years, and we’d rather not add to that burden.”

We’d much rather dump it on women, because hey, women, who cares.

Chicago and New York also confirmed they would allow trans people to self-identify their gender.

Suck it, wims.

Although critics of trans inclusion have warned allowing transgender women to register as women would give them a competitive advantage in marathons, experts in LGBTQ health argued those concerns are based on debunked myths. Taking estrogen to reduce levels of testosterone, for instance, may lead to dehydration and fatigue – a major obstacle in a 26.2-mile race.

“There’s no physiologic advantage to being assigned male at birth,” Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, who serves as director of education and training programs at the Fenway Institute, told the Associated Press.

Oh. Ok then.

When I was a kid my brother and I liked to entertain the adults after a large meal with suggestions of gross-out combinations to make them squeal in disgust. Anchovies in chocolate sauce, cherry pie with a scoop of chopped herring; that sort of thing. Here’s another one:

If you want tickets for the forthcoming showdown between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek, which will be held later this month in Toronto, better act fast: There are two left — as of this writing, anyway — and they’re $1,500 apiece. The unlikely and unshaven pair will square off at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, which seats about 3,000, where they will debate whether capitalism or Marxism leads to happiness.

Ooooooh no I really don’t. I don’t want tickets, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to see. I’d rather eat anchovies in chocolate sauce.

[I]t’s hard to deny the rubbernecking appeal of the spectacle. How often do two garrulous, ill-tempered, theory-spouting academics fill a venue usually reserved for musicians and comedians?

It’s not hard for me to deny that. I’ve been to enough conferences that included a garrulous, ill-tempered, condescending, smug male academic or two, so I feel zero need to go anywhere to see more of that. Showstopper: two guys peacocking. Nah, thanks, I’m good.

The debate came about after Zizek criticized Peterson in a column for The Independent, poking at “the paranoiac construct which he uses to interpret what he sees as facts” and his “crazy conspiracy theory” that sinister Marxist forces lurk behind progressive social movements. The essay, though, was largely focused on what Zizek views as the failures on the left that help bolster Peterson’s popularity. When it comes to postmodernism, Zizek and Peterson are often singing from the same hymnal.

But prickly narcissistic Peterson was ruffled anyway so he challenged Zizek to a debate. Game on!

While their meeting is more UFC fight night than plenary panel, Zizek and Peterson remain very much creatures of the university. Despite the best attempts of his harshest detractors, Peterson continues to be a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Zizek holds a bunch of academic appointments, including professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London.

Despite all that respectability though, they both love to brawl.

Then again, it’s a mistake to read any of Zizek’s proclamations as necessarily earnest. His rhetorical style is ironic rapid-fire adamance — he speaks as if he’s trying to squeeze in one last insight before a buzzer sounds — and he obviously loves to provoke.

So does Peterson. He revels in sharp back-and-forth and appears to thrive on eviscerating would-be-challengers. Search YouTube and you’ll find that Peterson has “destroyed” or “obliterated” the following opponents: Overconfident Leftist Interviewer, British Feminist, and Entire Panel on Transgender Pronouns.

Laugh if you want to, but this stuff pays.

Such performances have helped garner a sizable, cult-adjacent following for Peterson. He has not been shy about monetizing that appreciation, recently debuting his own line of merchandise, which includes lobster-themed leggings, socks, and pillows (Peterson used lobsters once in an analogy to explain social hierarchies).  For $44.99, you can order a hoodie emblazoned with his much-repeated injunction to “STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK.”

Lobster-themed leggings!

collapses in helpless laughter

I’m still chewing on Kevin’s formulation.

Meanwhile, in reality, transgender kids are bullied for being trans; the principle effect of that bullying is psychological harm; the principle means of that bullying is misgendering; and the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people.

The transgender kids who are bullied for being trans…would they be bullied any less or more if they were not trans but nonconforming? Does Kevin know? Does anyone?

As many people have pointed out, kids are bullied for a slew of reasons, because kids seem to have a deep need to police other kids and/or take out their aggressions on them.

How does Kevin or anyone know that “the principle means of that bullying is misgendering”? Nothing about clothes, toilets, voices, preferences, names, haircuts, habits, manners?

And the bit about “the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people” really doesn’t ring true at all, unless we’re talking about teenagers (or not even then, really). These kids are explaining “I get to call you the wrong pronoun because these adults I know and trust argue in support of doing just that”? Of course not, but then how does Kevin know that’s the chain of causation?

Anyway…what’s the overarching principle? What if a kid insists she’s a tiger, and gets distraught if anyone disputes her claim? Should teachers and schools tell all the other students to talk to her as if she were a tiger, and call her by tiger-appropriate names, and so on? Which fantasies or counter-factual beliefs about the self are we required to agree with and which can we decline to believe? What principle is there that distinguishes among them?

Adults do play along with children’s pretending, but that’s a different thing. The youngest children may believe or half-believe the parents mean it, but mostly the children know everyone is pretending. Is it really an excellent plan for schools in general to mandate pretending about which sex children are on the say-so of the children themselves?

I’m not convinced it is, myself.

Mueller’s team is not happy with what Barr is doing with the report.

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

In other words, Barr is doing exactly what everyone expected him to do: he’s following up that unsolicited memo to the White House by withholding the report and misrepresenting what it says. He’s running interference for Trump and sabotaging the efforts of law enforcement to hold Trump to account.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Barr is the wrong person to be shaping the public’s understanding, because he has a clear bias in favor of The Executive Branch. (In his case it’s not obvious to me that the bias is in favor of Trump as opposed to the office he holds.)

Mr. Barr was also wary of departing from Justice Department practice not to disclose derogatory details in closing an investigation, according to two government officials familiar with Mr. Barr’s thinking. They pointed to the decision by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, to harshly criticize Hillary Clinton in 2016 while announcing that he was recommending no charges in the inquiry into her email practices.

This again, ffs. First they get Trump elected by doing that to Clinton, then they keep Trump in office in defiance of his flagrant criminality by saying oh noes we mustn’t do to him what we did to Clinton. I get that it may genuinely be a matter of “we can’t make that mistake again” but it’s still pretty exasperating to see them offer it as justification. Especially when “they”=Barr.

At the same time, Mr. Barr and his advisers have expressed their own frustrations about Mr. Mueller and his team. Mr. Barr and other Justice Department officials believe the special counsel’s investigators fell short of their task by declining to decide whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed the inquiry, according to the two government officials. After Mr. Mueller made no judgment on the obstruction matter, Mr. Barr stepped in to declare that he himself had cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.

Oh come on, guys. Can you not get it together? This shit is serious.

Mr. Barr has come under criticism for sharing so little. But according to officials familiar with the attorney general’s thinking, he and his aides limited the details they revealed because they were worried about wading into political territory. Mr. Barr and his advisers expressed concern that if they included derogatory information about Mr. Trump while clearing him, they would face a storm of criticism like what Mr. Comey endured in the Clinton investigation.

And that would never do. We mustn’t make Barr uncomfortable. The importance of dealing with the reckless criminal in the White House is trivial in comparison.

Nice snap.

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