This helpfully isolates one point of contention.

https://twitter.com/ILoveUTigerLily/status/1036185866018811906

No. Really not. Everyone has a sex, a complicated one in the case of trans-sexual people. “Gender identity” is a neologism and what it names is just an idea about the self. It’s a particular, local, time-specific, constructed, contentious, culture-bound idea about the self, and one which not everyone signs up to, to put it mildly.

You might as well say everyone has a height identity or a species identity or an age identity. You might as well but you wouldn’t, because “activists” have not yet declared that that is 1. a thing and 2. mandatory for all. But they have declared that about “gender identity,” and that’s a pity, because it’s not true.

About those racist robo-calls in Florida…

If nothing else, the minute-long audio clip is a clear sign of how quickly racism — subtle in some cases, overt in others — has entered the contest to determine who will lead Florida.

“Well hello there,” the call begins as the sounds of drums and monkeys can be heard in the background, according to the New York Times. “I is Andrew Gillum.”

“We Negroes . . . done made mud huts while white folk waste a bunch of time making their home out of wood an stone.”

…

A disclaimer at the end of the robo-call says it was produced by the Road to Power, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group based in Idaho. The Southern Poverty Law Center has noted a recent rise in robo-calls across the country, describing them as a “new, high-tech, computer-delivered brand of hate,” according to the Times.

The Road to Power is also the group behind the most unsubtle attempt to turn the killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa into anti-immigration policy and a 2018 campaign talking point.

…

The suspect, Cristhian Rivera, is an undocumented immigrant who worked on a dairy farm, and conservatives said Tibbetts’s death highlights the need for stronger immigration laws and even a wall on the southern border. Tibbetts’s family has pushed back against that argument, with her father speaking favorably of the local Hispanic community.

“If after her life has now been brutally stolen from her, she could be brought back to life for just one moment and asked what do you think now, Mollie Tibbetts would say, ‘Kill them all.’ ” an Iowa robo-call says. “Well, we don’t have to kill them all, but we do have to deport them all. The Aztec hybrids known as mestizos are low IQ, bottom feeding savages and is why the country they infest are crime-ridden failures.”

According to the Des Moines Register, the man producing the robo-calls is named Scott Rhodes, of Sandpoint, Idaho. He has been linked to similar campaigns in California, Alexandria, Va., and Charlottesville.

I don’t know what Idaho ever did to become the headquarters for white supremacists.

Look, her tit was right there, what was he supposed to do, not grab it? But he said he was sorry anyway, just in case.

The bishop who led Aretha Franklin’s funeral has apologised to Ariana Grande after being accused of groping her on stage.

Or, in fact, after groping her on stage.

The preacher said he hugged all artists, male or female, during the ceremony commemorating the Queen of Soul.

But viewers began posting images from the service when Ariana got up to sing Aretha’s song (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

https://twitter.com/ArianaToday/status/1035659644319014912

I don’t care what you think about Ariana Grande, her music or her dress. This is wrong. That bishop’s hand should not be on her breast: I just saw this because I’ve been working and not watching https://t.co/ixVhgYBJTN

— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) September 1, 2018

I’m not sure I think his apology was entirely sincere.

Bloomberg on the drought:

The sweltering summer turned lush fields brown and led to shortages of fodder for the country’s millions of cows. Months of drought and heat have also caused problems across the European Union, the top milk exporter. Farmers from Ireland to Germany have had to cull herds or stop milking months early.

For the EU’s $12 billion dairy industry, parched fields have raised animal-feed costs, squeezing farmers’ profits. Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority expects dairy farms to earn half as much as last year. The feed situation could become critical and milk production may drop in the coming months, according to Arla Foods, the Nordic region’s biggest dairy company.

“In July, we brought in grass that should have been for winter feeding,” said Pat McCormack, who has 100 dairy cows in Ireland’s County Tipperary, where he’s worked for 21 years. “For a farmer with no grass, no silage, no money and kids going to college, it’s a big mental challenge.”

…

In Ireland, snow at the start of the year soaked fields so much that farmers began dipping into fodder reserves before the drought then hurt grass growth, causing them to use up next winter’s supplies this summer. Some have had to buy feed at extra cost with no crops of their own left to feed cattle.

Those who couldn’t afford to do that have culled herds. Since June, about 16 percent more cows than last year have been slaughtered weekly, according to Ireland’s agriculture department. In Germany, culling is up as much as 50 percent from a year earlier, farmer’s group DBV estimates.

It’s grim.

Tiggerthewing has been telling us about the drought in Ireland, so let’s read more:

Ireland has been listed as one of the countries “most significantly” impacted by drought conditions over the summer months, according to a newly-published European Drought Observatory (EDO) report.

Comparing results for August to a previous assessment at the end of June, the report – carried out by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) – found that the overall situation “worsened” over Scandinavia, and substantially over Ireland and the UK.

…

Concerning agriculture, the report highlights that in the drought-affected zones, some national governments are discussing aid to farmers amid damage claims.

In addition, the livestock sector in many member states is also affected due to a lack of fodder.

The report states that yield for winter and spring cereals were confirmed as “seriously reduced” by the dry and hot weather that followed up in July.

Last month, a bulletin from the JRC on winter crop yield forecasts for Europe reported that water stress, associated with exceptionally dry and warmer-than-usual conditions, affected the flowering and/or grain filling of winter crops and spring cereals in large regions of northern central and northern Europe.

Winter and spring cereal yield forecasts were revised downwards in practically all northern and central European countries – including major producers Germany and Poland.

Not cheerful.

Oh not this again.

Thousands of Islamists have set off on a protest march in Pakistan to demand Imran Khan’s new government sever diplomatic ties with the Netherlands over a “blasphemous” cartoon competition.

The march, organised by Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), a political party dedicated to the punishment of blasphemy, presents the first major test of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration. Last year, a similar protest by the TLP shut down the capital, Islamabad, for almost a month.

In June, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam MP who leads the Netherlands’ second largest party and has been found guilty of inciting hatred, invited submissions of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, which Islam forbids. The $10,000 (£7,700) competition is due to open in November, with 200 entries so far.

That phrase “which Islam forbids” is meaningless. Islam isn’t the boss of us, so it can forbid until it’s blue in the face but we don’t have to obey. In reality even Muslims don’t have to obey, it’s just that some of them choose to be under its domination, and others don’t exactly choose to be but aren’t really free not to be. The Netherlands, at any rate, in no way has to pay any attention to what Islam forbids, and even if it did, it couldn’t extend that to Geert Wilders, unless it passed some very repressive laws.

People in Pakistan can march up and march down, but they can’t stop people in the Netherlands drawing cartoons, nor should they be able to.

Khadim Rizvi, the firebrand cleric who founded the TLP, said that condemnation of the contest by the Pakistani government was not enough and “only jihad” was the solution.

Before Pakistan’s general election last month, Rizvi said if he had the power he would order a nuclear strike against the Netherlands if its government allowed the competition to go ahead.

The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, has termed the event “disrespectful” but defended the right to hold it on the grounds of freedom of expression.

On Monday, Pakistan’s senate passed a resolution condemning the competition and Khan vowed to take up the issue at the UN general assembly in September. He said Islamic countries should cooperate to create laws against blasphemy similar to those against Holocaust denial in European countries.

“If they [western countries] feel pained discussing the Holocaust, why haven’t we been able to convey to the west how much we feel pained when they do blasphemous things against Islam and our beloved Holy Prophet, peace be upon him?” said Khan.

Because it’s not the same thing, obviously. The genocide of millions of people is not the same thing, or category of thing, as a Special Feeling about a religious figure. That’s why.

Oh and about that warming Arctic Ocean?

The Arctic is in hot water, literally, following the discovery that heat has been accumulating rapidly in a salty layer of the Arctic Ocean 50 metres down. Currently, it’s being held at that depth by a less dense layer of freshwater overhead, but if the two layers start to mix it could melt all seasonal sea ice, accelerating the already-rapid loss of polar ice cover.

Researchers discovered the heat time-bomb after analysing publicly available data on ice cover, and at different depths on sea temperature, heat content and saltiness over the past three decades. The data was gathered around the Canadian Basin, a major basin of the Arctic Ocean fed by waters from the North Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia.

Over this timespan, the heat content of the salty layer doubled, from 200 to 400 million joules per square metre, enough to reduce overall Arctic ice thickness by 80 centimetres.

The root cause is global warming, which has seen temperatures in the Arctic rise by 2 degrees from pre-industrial levels–twice the global average—leading to record-low sea ice coverage. The researchers found that with sea ice retreating, heat absorption by exposed surface waters has increased fivefold in 30 years, mainly from direct sunlight, which no longer gets reflected by ice.

5 x in 30 years…that seems like a lot in a little.

Winds are pushing the waters around now that there’s no ice in the way, and winds could cause the two layers to mix.

Not good.

Colleen Flaherty at IHE on the campaign to delegitimize Lisa Littman’s study in PLOS ONE.

Brown University and PLOS ONE have distanced themselves from a controversial, peer-reviewed published study on “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” or gender identity issues that present not early and over a lifetime but quickly, in teenagers and young adults. The study, which has been criticized by transgender activists and allies as promoting the idea that being trans is a fad, and as relying on an unsound methodology, was based on anonymous survey responses from about 250 parents of (primarily female) teens and young adults who’d abruptly expressed gender dysphoria.

It’s almost funny that there’s outrage at the idea that being trans is a fad. Really? At the very same time as you’re engaged in trying to enforce the fad by shouting down anyone who asks questions? How, in this climate, could being trans not be a fad? It could certainly be other things too; it could be both a fad and a real experience or syndrome or whatever you want to call it; but at this point it can hardly escape being a fad too. It’s hyped like mad, it’s treated as sacred, it’s taboo, it’s sanctified, it’s retroactively diagnosed (Elizabeth Tudor? didn’t know that, didja!), it’s celebrated and defended and promoted all over social media. An adolescent would have to be superhuman not to be at least curious.

[T]he study also raised questions about whether social factors, rather than biological ones, influenced the young adults’ trans identities. It found that many young adults had requested and been offered medical interventions at the time of coming out, with possible lasting implications for their fertility and health, and that most doctors who evaluated these young adults didn’t ask questions about mental health, trauma or other possible reasons for sudden gender dysphoria.

The doctors are subject to social contagion too, though not as powerfully as adolescents. But the dogma is that if X says “I am trans” then that’s the end of the matter – it’s “transphobic” to wait and see.

A Brown news release about the study posted last week quoted its author, Lisa Littman, an assistant professor of the practice of behavioral and social sciences at the university, as saying, “This kind of descriptive study is important because it defines a group and raises questions for more research. One of the main conclusions is that more research needs to be done.” But Brown removed the story from its website this week, replacing it with an open letter from Bess H. Marcus, dean of public health, saying, “In light of questions raised about research design and data collection related to the study on ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria,’ the university determined that removing the article from news distribution is the most responsible course of action.”

Questions raised by whom?

By @SadistHailey.

thank you for bringing this to our attention. We take any concerns raised to us seriously and are already in the process of investigating these.

— PLOS ONE (@PLOSONE) August 24, 2018

Really. The person (or persons) managing the PLOS ONE Twitter account responded in all seriousness to that tweet from that “activist,” and then PLOS ONE removed the article. [My mistake.]

Marcus of course is the one who wrote that “The School of Public Health has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community,” as I pointed out a couple of days ago. You know, Gwyneth Paltrow has perspectives too – shouldn’t Brown’s School of Public Health be protecting her perspectives also, by letting her write an article promoting jade eggs up the vagina? If it’s one set of perspectives it should be all of them, no? How about anti-vax perspectives? How about homeopathic asthma treatment perspectives? Won’t somebody please think of the perspectives?

While the “spirit of free inquiry and scholarly debate is central to academic excellence, Marcus said, “we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work. This process includes acknowledging and considering the perspectives of those who criticize our research methods and conclusions and working to improve future research to address these limitations and better serve public health.”

So then I guess that is what she means – all perspectives welcome, including on public health research. Never mind evidence and statistics, just collect all the perspectives, put them in a box, shake it hard, and then use the soup that results.

An additional university statement on the page cites PLOS ONE’s social media statement about the study.  The journal has said it’s “aware of the reader concerns raised on the study’s content and methodology. We take all concerns raised about publications in the journal very seriously, and are following up on these per our policy” and other international publication ethics guidelines.

They’re aware of the concerns because random people on Twitter @ed them. Much science, very seriously.

Littman, the study’s author, declined comment on Brown’s or PLOS ONE’s actions. But she said she stood by her methodology. “My study is a descriptive study,” she said via email. “And like all descriptive studies there are limitations which are acknowledged. And although descriptive studies may be one of the less robust study designs they play an important role in the scientific literature primarily because they are a first description of a new condition or population and they make it possible to conduct additional, more rigorous research.”

She added, “When analyzing the methodology of my paper, it should be done in the context of other descriptive studies, not compared to studies employing other research designs. The methodology in my study is consistent with methodologies that have been used in other descriptive research and it has similar strengths and weaknesses, which I acknowledge in the paper.”

Well yes, but some activists made a stink on Twitter, so that settles it.

New editor of student philosophy journal announces no tolerance policy for questioning of pet ideology.

https://twitter.com/latesebastian/status/1035561285918842881

Since the label “TERFs” is used to bully and ostracize women who dispute parts of the rapidly evolving but nevertheless mandatory dogma of trans activism, the new editor of the student philosophy journal is congratulating himself on a policy of not tolerating analysis of a new and ever-changing political dogma that is noisily and explicitly hostile to feminism and, in practice, to women in general.

Oh god can we just stop with this?! Axios reports:

An Idaho-based neo-Nazi group is sponsoring racist robocalls made to Democratic voters in Florida mocking Andrew Gillum, the first African American to win a major party nomination for Florida governor, with jungle noises playing in the background, the Tallahassee Democrat reports.

Why it matters: These automated calls come days after GOP nominee Ron DeSantis called Gillum an “articulate” spokesman for socialism and warned Florida’s voters not to “monkey up” their finances. DeSantis’ campaign denounced the calls and continues to push back against accusations of racism regarding his comments.

“Monkey up” is not a thing. People don’t say that. It’s not an expression, a meme, an idiom, a bit of slang. It’s not anything. It’s no more a thing than “zebra up” or “reticulated python up” is. Ok there is a rather antiquated usage to “monkey with” as in “don’t monkey with that socket wrench or I’ll tan your hide,” but that’s a different phrase and it means a different thing. “Monkeying up” finances is gibberish. So yes, it’s a racist dog whistle, even if an accidental one. (“Got monkeys on your mind, Mr DeSantis? Why’s that exactly?”)

And goddam racist robocalls from an Idaho group; just fucking perfect.

Louis CK made a “surprise return” to standup comedy the other day.

https://twitter.com/mixielot/status/1034527783190290433

A standing ovation could make sense if he’d been away because of a broken leg or drug rehab or writing a book, but since in fact he was away because it became public that he likes to abuse women sexually, the standing ovation is pretty much a hard punch in the face to women. Again.

If a coworker sexually assaulted you at the office, then turned up unannounced after a ten month vacation, and just sat down at his desk and resumed working, and everyone welcomed him back with applause, that’d be pretty fucked up.

This is exactly what happened with Louis CK.

— Hazel Hayes (@TheHazelHayes) August 28, 2018

When you think about it, it's entirely fitting that Louis CK's "comeback" involved surprising a captive audience in a tiny room by revealing himself to them suddenly without their consent.

— Catherynne M. Valente (@catvalente) August 29, 2018

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1034550879616024576

https://twitter.com/jaclynf/status/1034894365678870528

https://twitter.com/vornietom/status/1034536651165331456

The Green Party is perhaps beginning to grasp that there’s a problem.

The Green party has announced an inquiry into how the father of a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership was allowed to remain her election agent 18 months after he was charged with raping and torturing a child, offences that led to him being jailed last week.

The party said Aimee Challenor, who has insisted she did not know the full details of the allegations against her father, David, had been suspended pending the results of the independent investigation.

It’s a no-fault suspension, they say.

Several Green members have expressed alarm after it emerged that officials took no action to suspend David Challenor or restrict his activities in the party until he was jailed for 22 years for torturing and raping a 10-year-old girl in the attic of the family home in Coventry.

David Challenor’s first court appearance over the allegations took place in November 2016. But ahead of his trial, which began this month, he acted twice as his daughter’s election agent, at the 2017 general election, and in May’s local polls.

It’s not a parking ticket, or embezzlement, or failure to pay the license fee. It’s the torture and rape of a ten-year-old girl. It’s not very “green.”

One party figure said they were “agonised, horrified and furious” at the apparent safeguarding failure, and hoped the Greens, a party that remains heavily localised and largely dependent on volunteers, would learn lessons from this.

https://twitter.com/AngrierWHStaff/status/1034397704091324416

That piece of shit.

After being rebuffed in an attempt to peel back the union protections of federal workers, President Trump took aim elsewhere on Thursday: at their paychecks.

Invoking authority that he and other presidents have used previously, Mr. Trump told Congress he was canceling government pay increases scheduled for next year.

Of course he did. Huge tax cut for the already rich, wage freeze for the people who earn a paycheck.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Mr. Trump said the government would forgo an automatic 2.1 percent pay increase for federal workers scheduled for Jan. 1 and specified that there would be no across-the-board increase for 2019. The letter did not estimate the overall savings from canceling the raises, though it said a related move canceling raises that are based on the workers’ location would save $25 billion.

And it would save even more to pay them nothing at all. Trump keeps wages down at Mar-a-lago by hiring temporary workers from poor countries at the very same time as he rants and raves about keeping foreign workers out of the country.

“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” the president wrote.

But they can afford huge tax cuts. They can afford the expense of flying Trump to a golf course every third day or so, and secret service protection for his goons sons when they travel for his company. They can afford whatever luxury Trump demands, but they can’t afford to raise wages slightly at a time when the cost of housing, education, and health care is shooting up.

Mr. Trump’s letter came days after a federal judge struck down key provisions of three executive orders the president had signed in May that had made it easier to fire federal workers and limited the power of their unions. The administration appeared to be dragging its feet this week on complying with the judge’s orders, with some agencies telling managers and union officials that the new policies remained in effect until further notice.

Many legal experts were puzzled because the orders were supposed to apply immediately.

Well I don’t suppose they were really “puzzled.” Trump is a lawless monster who hates anything that benefits anyone other than brass-haired loud-mouthed millionaires from Queens.

But while saying it was still considering further action in the case, the administration acknowledged at least a temporary setback on Wednesday, when the Office of Personnel Management put out updated guidance that rescinded the portions of the instructions that the judge had struck down.

Union officials in at least one agency, the Social Security Administration, exulted as they were told that they would be allowed back into offices that managers had evicted them from when the executive orders took effect this summer.

That’s good. The eviction move had made it impossible to do their jobs.

Via Rob at Miscellany Room