Ok there’s this: Laurier university starts independent probe after teaching assistant plays clip of gender debate.

Oh no, not clip of gender debate!! Say it isn’t so!

Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University, said she ran afoul of school authorities after she aired a clip in two tutorials of a debate on gender-neutral pronouns featuring polarizing University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

As I just mentioned the other day, I don’t see Peterson as a serious or interesting source, but that’s way beside the point here. Shepherd was doing a “here are examples of opposing points of view on this subject,” not a “here are two of my very favorite thinkers for you to admire.” Peterson is conspicuous for his views on gender and pronouns, so it would make sense to use him for one pole.

The excerpt from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda shows Peterson, who has famously refused to use gender pronouns other than “he” or “she,” defending his position against a professor who argued it was necessary to use the pronouns that a person prefers to be called.

Shepherd said she was chastised by her superiors for failing to condemn Peterson’s remarks outright and told her neutral approach to the clip was tantamount to remaining neutral on other objectionable views such as those of Adolf Hitler.

The university would not confirm what was said to Shepherd, but said it had enlisted an unidentified “neutral third-party professional” to “gather the facts” of the situation.

Well guess what, there’s a recording, and excerpts from it have been published. (Shepherd is very clear and her inquisitors are farther away and much less clear, so I assume it’s Shepherd who both recorded the inquisition and gave it to the press.)

I urge listening to it. It’s a little over 9 minutes, and it’s deeply disgusting.

I transcribed some. Do listen, though, to get the full sanctimony and confidence of her torturers.

Man: “It is discriminatory to be targeting someone due to their gender identity or gender expression. So, bringing something like that up in class, not critically – and I understand that you’re trying to, like –

LS: “It was critical. I introduced it critically.”

Man: “How so?”

LS: “Like I said, it was in the spirit of debate.”

Man: “Ok. In the spirit of the debate is slightly different than being like, ok, this is like a problematic idea that we might want to unpack – “

LS: “But that’s taking sides.” [1:48]

[skip ahead]

Man: “You’re perfectly entitled to your own opinion, but when you’re bringing it into the context of the classroom, that can be problematic.” [3:02]

Woman: “Let me mention the gender violence, the gender and sexual violence policy…doesn’t mean just violence but that does include targeting folks based on gender, so that includes transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, all those sorts of things are protected under the policy.”

She doesn’t mean “protected,” obviously, she means the opposite.

It’s awful. Awful. She’s there alone and they’re accusing her of all this nonsense, full of smugness and disapproval.

Back to the Star:

For Shepherd, the incident has raised fundamental questions about the purpose of a post-secondary institution.

Silencing unpopular opinions is not true to the spirit of an institution that purports to encourage intellectual exploration, she said, adding that launching a third-party investigation only reinforces that impression.

“This was an opportunity for the university to be like ‘it’s true, we should be able to have a debate, we’re sorry it became an issue and we’re happy to foster debate in the university environment,’ ” she said. “Instead, they’re being weird about it.”

Shepherd said the lesson to her communications tutorial class was focusing on the complexities of grammar.

Shepherd said she was trying to demonstrate that the structure of a language can affect the society in which it is spoken in ways people might not anticipate. To illustrate her point, she said she mentioned that long-standing views on gender had probably been shaped by the gender-specific pronouns that are part of English’s fundamental grammatical structure.

The clip of Peterson debating sexual diversity scholar Nicholas Matte, she said, was meant to demonstrate ways in which the existence of gender-specific pronouns has caused controversy.

Shepherd said a student complained about the clip, which she showed to two tutorials of roughly 24 participants each. In response, she said, her supervisors censured her for airing the clips, told her she was “transphobic” for playing them and said she ought to have spoken out against the positions Peterson expressed during the excerpt.

They’ve told her she has to submit lesson plans and put up with people spying on her classes any time they feel like it. She’s strongly considering leaving.

Yesterday Kashif Chaudhry went to a conference in Virginia – a conference about hating Ahmadi Muslims. Kashif is an Ahmadi Muslim, and a cardiologist. He’s writing up the conference, and in the meantime he has this public Facebook post about it:

Every American, but especially American Muslims, should be worried about this and must condemn it loudly. Whether its Islamophobes hating on Muslims, Neo-Nazis hating on Muslims and Jews, or Sunni extremists hating on Shia and Ahmadi Muslims, all Americans must condemn the hate and protect our values of pluralism and inclusivity.

Today, I went to an anti-Ahmadi “Khatme Nabuwat” conference in Virginia, a fundraiser by an extremist organization. I can’t believe the hatred that was being spewed by the extremist Sunni clerics in attendance and I was shocked at the extent of radicalization of Muslim youth occurring right here on American soil (America was repeatedly referred to as the “land of the infidels”) at the hands of these extremist clerics. I will be writing about the whole experience and sharing quotes of the speakers soon. For now, I will just share one interesting encounter. During the Q/A session, after letting the speakers know I was an Ahmadi Muslim, I asked Omar F. Khan (speaking in the picture), the director of the institute that organized the event and who reiterated how Ahmadis were infidels, how he defined a Muslim.

Me: “Maulana Sahib, how do you define a Muslim?”

Omar Khan: Anyone who recites the Kalima.

Me: I recited the Kalima loudly, turned to the crowd, and then back at the Maulana and asked if I was a Muslim by his definition now.

Omar Khan: “No. you have to believe in Khatme Nabuwat also.”

I recited verse 33:40 in which Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is called the Khataman Nabiyeen and said I believe in this verse 100%. Now what?

Another speaker interrupted and said mere words were not enough, and that I had to believe in his interpretation of Khatme Nabuwat.

Me: I asked them to come up with a definition of a Muslim and be consistent. I then asked Omar Khan what he thought of the Shia Muslims. “Are the Shias Muslims in your eyes because they believe in your interpretation of Khatme Nabuwat?”

Omar Khan: “No, the Shias are Kafirs (infidels). They cannot be considered Muslims.”

American Muslims must NOT allow such Takfiri, divisive, hateful, extremist-minded clerics to speak for us on US soil. It is these bigots who give us all a bad name. We must be the first to call them out. There is much more. Stay tuned for a comprehensive piece on my experience.

Tabatha Southey at MacLeans explains about Jordan Peterson.

“Postmodern neo-Marxism” is Peterson’s nemesis, and the best way to explain what postmodern neo-Marxism is, is to explain what it is not—that is, it is entirely distinct from the concept of “cultural Marxism.”

“Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values. “Postmodern neo-Marxism,” on the other hand, is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values with “cultural” taken out of the name so it doesn’t sound quite so similar to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory of “cultural Bolshevism.”

Ha. good to know. I’ve wondered in the past what “Cultural Marxism” might be, without feeling motivated enough to google it. It was a popular epithet among the he-man skeptics for awhile…or maybe still is.

To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

A Peter Boghossian type, in other words, except he’s had way more success at making it pay.

As far as I can tell, Jordie—and not the cool “Geordi” from Star Trek either— rewards the devotion of his Patreon patsies with regular rants against “political correctness,” and relationship advice I can only call “Angry Oprah Says.” For USD $29.99, Petersonites can get access to the Self Authoring Suite (a USD $119.92 value!). Those looking for further opportunities to give him money can pay USD $9.99 for “100 question phrases” which “can be found, along with similar question sets, elsewhere on the web” so that they might learn how your personality compares to 10,000 others.

Pro tip: just take a personality test from the back of an issue of Glamour; you’ll only be out about five bucks, and you might find a free perfume sample.

He also gives book recommendations apparently drawn from a high-school English-class reading list. If somehow you missed them, Mistress Peterson is the portal to such obscure works as Animal Farm, OfMice and Men, and that cornerstone of the Western canon, Flowers for Algernon.

There is no polite way to put this, but since Peterson claims that “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward,” I’m just going to say it: Spend half an hour on his website, sit through a few of his interminable videos, and you realize that what he has going for him, the niche he has found—he never seems to say “know” where he could instead say “cognizant of”—is that Jordan Peterson is the stupid man’s smart person.

That too is familiar. The he-man skeptics seem to be fatally drawn to them.

It’s easy to assume Peterson is deserving of respect. A lot of what he says sounds, on the surface, like serious thought. It’s easy to laugh at him: after all, most of what he says is, after fifteen seconds’ consideration, completely inane. But in between his long rambling pseudo-academic takes on common self-help advice and his weird fixation on Disney movies, is a dreadfully serious message.

What he’s telling you is that certain people—most of them women and minorities—are trying to destroy not only our freedom to spite nonbinary university students for kicks, but all of Western civilization and the idea of objective truth itself. He’s telling you that when someone tells you racism is still a problem and that something should be done about it, they are, at best, a dupe and, at worst, part of a Marxist conspiracy to destroy your way of life.

Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream?

Here’s why legalized use of women for sex is so fabulous: it means that Good women won’t be attacked, only Bad Slutty women will.

https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/931240149391835136

See? Great. Herd the rapey men off into this area over here where the women it’s ok to rape are. Problem solved!

https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/931240695498547200

Not counting the “street prostitutes” of course, and why would we count them? They ask for it.

Legalizing prostitution is a sustainable route to stop sexual assaults by curbing sexual frustration and increasing access.

— Erik Stanger (he/him) (@erikforCO) November 16, 2017

Yes, increasing access! It’s a terrible mistake to restrict access by allowing women to say no to sex when they want to. Women are a natural resource, like air, and it’s not up to them how much access there should be. It’s up to the men who want increased access to decide.

Bill O’Neill – that Ohio judge who told us all what a large number of extremely attractive women he’s had sex with – has apologized.

Kidding; he hasn’t really.

If I offended anyone, particularly the wonderful women in my life, I apologize. But if I have helped elevate the discussion on the serious issues of sexual assault, as opposed to personal indiscretions, to a new level…I make no apologies. Suggesting the admitted conduct of Senator Al Franken and the alleged conduct of Judge Roy Moore are on the same level trivializes the serious subject at hand.

There are Democrats out there who are saying neither one of them pass the purity test to sit in the United States Senate. And that is sad.

And telling us what a large number of extremely attractive women he’s had sex with is exactly the way to fix it.

The Tampa Bay Times:

If you are an evildoer wishing to bring harm to the members of River at Tampa Bay Church, don’t expect congregants to turn the other cheek.

They’ll blast you.

So says a sign at the church, at 3738 River International Drive in Tampa, that delivers a stark warning to anyone thinking of wreaking havoc.

“PLEASE KNOW THIS IS NOT A GUN FREE ZONE,” it reads. “WE ARE HEAVILY ARMED — ANY ATTEMPT WILL BE DEALT WITH DEADLY FORCE — YES WE ARE A CHURCH AND WE WILL PROTECT OUR PEOPLE.”

The message is signed “THE PASTORS.”

The sign at the 21-year-old church was put up about a year ago, said Associate Pastor Allen Hawes.

If I were a churchy person that sign would make me turn around and find another church.

Super-right-on dude Owen Jones tweeted a classic of mindless phrase-mongering a couple of days ago.

Imagine being an opponent of trans rights and believing this was the one exception of history looking kindly on opponents of a struggle for minority rights. It is not going to happen. You are a) going to lose and b) be damned by history forever.

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) November 16, 2017

Imagine being an opponent of trans rights and believing this was the one exception of history looking kindly on opponents of a struggle for minority rights. It is not going to happen. You are a) going to lose and b) be damned by history forever.

Why is that mindless?

One, because he is talking, of course, not about people who actually are “opponents of trans rights” but people who disagree that “identify as” is a magic phrase when it comes to sex but not when it comes to anything else. Two, because he is assuming that all “struggles for minority rights” are progressive and awesome and to be cheered on. It’s all formula and no thought.

On the first: I don’t know of anyone who thinks trans people should not have rights. The disagreement is over what is in fact a right. The core contested “right” in this dispute is the “right” to have one’s self-description accepted instantly and without question no matter what…in the case of trans people but not other people. Gender-critical types are not convinced that this is a genuine right.

How could it be a genuine right? If you try to apply it to other possible “identities” and self-descriptions its absurdity becomes immediately obvious. We’ve heard the strenuous efforts to explain why it works for sex but not for race or nationality or ethnicity or profession, but we don’t find them convincing. There is no such “right” as the right to compel the rest of the world to accept your personal conception of yourself. Would we even like it if there were? Hardly. It’s that basic morality issue: it might be great fun for you but how would it work if everyone did it? Badly, therefore you don’t get to be the one exception.

On the second: it’s just laughable that Owen Jones assumes all “struggles for minority rights” are good things. How difficult is it to think of minorities that are ruthless and power-hungry and cruel? White supremacists are a minority, Nazis are a minority, mass murderers are a minority, Ponzi schemers are a minority. Members of those groups as individuals have human rights, but do we want their groups to have rights particular to them? Nope. Jones didn’t actually mean “struggles for minority rights” – he meant something more like “struggles for approved-minority rights,”  but then that just begs the question. If the minority “right” in question is “Accept my claim about my sex no matter what” then we don’t agree that it’s a genuine right, and the word “minority” doesn’t change that.

There’s so much bad, impoverished, sloppy thinking behind this whole thing, and so much bullying substituted for actual thought, that it’s a tragedy. I think that’s what history is going to damn.

A student newspaper published by the School of Humanities of the Catholic St. Edward’s University proudly reports that St. Edward’s joined the list of right-on silencers who invite Julie Bindel to talk and then later call her back and say no we changed our minds. Who knew that Catholic universities were that “intersectional”?

Universities across the country have been facing backlash over their decisions to host or cancel speakers. Last week, St. Edward’s University joined the national conversation by cancelling a talk by British feminist and political activist, Julie Bindel, based on views she had expressed about the transgender community.

Jesus – it sounds as if they’re excited about being invited to join the cool kids’ table. “Hey everybody’s talking about all this no-platforming and now we’re one of the no-platformers!”

Bindel was scheduled by the Social Justice LLC to speak about her book, “The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Worker Myth” on Nov. 8. Bindel, a self-described radical feminist, is co-founder of the law reform group, Justice for Women. The group opposes violence against women and helps women who have been prosecuted for killing violent male partners.

So you can see why the Vatican wouldn’t like her…but it wasn’t the Vatican who called her up to say we don’t want you after all. It was people who fancy themselves lefty and social justicey and right on.

Early on the scheduled day of her talk, Bindel said she received a call rescinding the invitation. Kris Sloan, associate professor of education and director of the Social Justice LLC, confirmed that it was ultimately his decision to cancel Bindel’s appearance. She spoke at the University of Texas-Austin on Nov. 9.

On the day of her talk. That is so fucking rude and mean. And it’s nothing to do with social justice.

“This was my decision, I made this call,” Sloan said. “Was it right? I hope so. At the heart of my decision was the link to the living and learning, not just to the 96 students in that room, but the larger community and wanting to be good allies to the trans community and the gender non-conforming community on this campus.”

Oh shut the fuck up. Julie was there to talk about pimping, and she was invited, and she was no threat to “the trans community and the gender non-conforming community.” There was no shadow of a need to tell her hours before her talk “we don’t want you after all so nyah.” It’s display and nothing else, and what it displays is stupid and narrow and of no use to anyone.

Doing US book tour. Invited to a college by dept. head to talk about harms of sex trade. Queer ISIS trans cabal and allies bullied college into cancelling. This is not about *MY* free speech, just McCarthyite silencing of feminists who expose male violence and abuse.

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) November 8, 2017

It’s disgusting.

Concern from transgender student Marcus Kearns sparked the conversation about whether to host Bindel. Kearns Googled Bindel after Professor Laurie Heffron, who teaches the class Kearns is taking in the LLC,  announced the upcoming  lecture. He discovered articles Bindel had published that he considered to be transphobic, including a 2004 article in The Guardian entitled, “Gender benders, beware.”

Thirteen years ago. She’s apologized for the way she worded that article. She doesn’t word things that way now. She does outstanding important work. This whole thing is revolting and outrageous.

Bindel told Hilltop Views that the decision to cancel her talk was made by “cowards”  whom she called “morally bankrupt.”

“Everybody knows that I am no threat to trans people,” Bindel said. “There is absolutely no way that this group of people, the bullies, have read anything that I’ve written or said that has warranted this response. This is merely a tactic to shut down the voice of feminists that protest against male violence.”

Kearns was glad that the event was cancelled.

“Am I happy it did get cancelled?” Kearns said of the talk. “Yes, but it wasn’t my intention going in.”

“That can have really bad effects on people when you trust a school to bring in voices that are going to help you grow but they instead bring someone who tears you down,” he added. “If you’re going to have controversy, it has to be grounded in mutual respect.”

But she was going there to talk about her book, which is about pimping.

After considering feedback from the class, Pride, linked faculty, and a number of transgender individuals, Sloan made the final decision to cancel the event early Wednesday morning.

Citing Bindel’s confrontational tendencies and the risk to the community as major reasons, Sloan said that there was “no real value” to come of hosting her and that it wouldn’t “be a productive use of our time.”

But she had already been invited. They told her they’d changed her minds the day of her talk. It’s way too late to decide oh well there’s no real value to this and it wouldn’t be a productive use of our time so we’re going to call her up hours before her talk when she’s thousands of miles from home to tell her we’ve changed our tiny flea-bitten little minds.

Oh wait wait wait everybody, it turns out everything’s ok after all. This one judge in Ohio had lots of awesome sex with 50 very attractive females (his words) so there’s nothing to worry about. Whew!

Now that the dogs of war are calling for the head of Senator Al Franken I believe it is time to speak up on behalf of all heterosexual males. As a candidate for Governor let me save my opponents some research time. In the last fifty years I was sexually intimate with approximately 50 very attractive females. It ranged from a gorgeous blonde who was my first true love and we made passionate love in the hayloft of her parents [sic] barn and ended with a drop dead gorgeous red head from Cleveland.

Now can we get back to discussing legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis. I am sooooo disappointed by this national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago.

Peace.

What a relief, right? Imagine if they hadn’t all been very attractive? Imagine if there had been only forty of them, or [shudder] thirty?

Yeah but for real – dude missed the point, didn’t he. The issue isn’t having sex. The issue certainly isn’t how attractive Male Candidate X’s sex partners were or were not. The issue is harassment and assault and rape. I think the distinction is pretty obvious. You’d hope it was one that judges were well aware of.

That item about Jordan Peterson’s plan to create a List of courses he considers “neo-Marxist”  blah blah got my attention. As It Happens reported last week:

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson’s stated plan to build a website aimed at reducing enrolment in university classes he calls “indoctrination cults” has drawn the ire of his University of Toronto colleagues, who say it will make them the target of harassment.

“As a science professor, I’m not specifically targeted, but I still believe this website is morally wrong,” U of T physics professor A.W. Peet told As It Happens host Carol Off. “A number of students and faculty members who I’m in correspondence with are concerned about his plans.”

Peterson, who rose to fame in right-wing circles after his outspoken refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns, says he wants to use artificial intelligence to scour university curriculums for what he “calls post-modern neo-Marxist course content.”

“We’re going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be designed to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them,” he told CTV’s Your Morning in August.

“I’m hoping that over about a five-year period a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West. So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.”

Grandiose much?

In a speech posted to his YouTube page on July 9, Peterson elaborates on what type of courses he aims to target with the website.

“Women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go and the faster they go the better,” he said. “It would have been better if they had never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell.”

“Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worse offenders are the faculties of education.”

That’s not scholarship or dissent (or dissenting scholarship), it’s bullying.

The Globe and Mail:

Dr. Peterson has gained a high profile over the past 18 months for his criticism of what he believes is the dominance of Marxism, socialism and postmodernist ideas among university professors and students.

In the United States, a political advocacy group runs a website called Professor Watchlist that seeks to advance right-wing and libertarian ideas on college campuses. A professor in California who was identified on Professor Watchlist as having a “radical agenda” went into hiding after she received death threats, according to media reports.

Right-wing and libertarian ideas can be extremely “radical.” Radicalism is not confined to the left.

Dr. Peterson seems to suggest universities should teach a limited set of disciplines. Social sciences, law and humanities have all been infected by postmodernism, he says, as well as women’s studies and ethnic and racial studies.

Just a little bit sweeping?

Jordan Peterson has the solution to all this sexual harassment everywhere.

With all the accusations of sex assault emerging (eg Louis CK) we are going to soon remember why sex was traditionally enshrined in marriage…

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 10, 2017

Ho yus, that will fix it. Women were never sexually harassed until…what year was it again? 1964? If only women could be permanently imprisoned by marriage, all would be well.

Rachel Giese is not quite convinced.

[C]onsider his recent conversation with fellow provocateur Camille Paglia. Expressing his frustrations with women who disagreed with him, Peterson said that men can’t control “crazy women” because men aren’t allowed to physically fight women. “I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassed against me,” he said. “The parameters for my resistance are quite well-defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.”

It’s like Peterson has been cribbing talking points from Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. He adds that men unwilling to throw a punch are contemptible. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.”

So does that also mean if you [“you” are obviously a man here] are talking to a woman then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect? I think it can be safely assumed of most women that they won’t voluntarily “fight with” a man in the sense of throwing punches, so in Peterson’s world that must mean they’re contemptible, yes?

Peterson has said elsewhere that socialization has a role to play in addressing aggression among boys and men. But talking to [Camille] Paglia, he laments that his own socialization prevents him from taking a swing at a lady. Referring to a woman who accused him of being a Nazi, he said, “I’m defenceless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me.” It’s hard to decide which is creepier: Is it the suggestion, in Peterson’s rueful tone, that he’s kind of bummed out about the fact that he can’t hit women? Or is it the implication, if you were to follow his argument to its conclusion, that because women can’t be hit, they shouldn’t be allowed to participate in civil discourse with men at all?

But there’s also the creepiness of his casual assumption that it’s just normal to throw punches at men who accuse you of being a Nazi. People are supposed to grow out of that assumption in the course of childhood and adolescence. Peterson is an adult academic and he apparently clings to it.

But maybe it’s just something he says. Maybe he doesn’t mean it.

Just a few weeks after he posted his conversation with Paglia, however, there was a surprise retreat from his latest attention-grabbing escapade. Over the weekend, Peterson announced he was shelving his plans to create a website warning university students away from “corrupt” courses in programs like ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, English literature and women’s studies. After a group of University of Toronto faculty released a statement saying that Peterson’s proposed site “created a climate of fear and intimidation,” he capitulated, tweeting the project was on hiatus: “I talked it over with others and decided it might add excessively to current polarization.”

Why didn’t he just punch them all instead?

Grim:

A North Korean soldier who was shot while fleeing across the border has an extremely high level of parasites in his intestines, his doctors say.

The defector crossed the demilitarised zone on Monday, but was shot several times by North Korean border guards.

Doctors say the patient is stable – but “an enormous number” of worms in his body are contaminating his wounds and making his situation worse.

His condition is thought to give a rare insight into life in North Korea.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician,” South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient’s intestines was 27cm (11in) long.

How did he get them? Probably via food grown with untreated human intestinal output.

Humans can get parasites through eating contaminated food, by being bitten by an insect or by the parasite entering through the skin.

In the case of the North Korean defector, the first case is most likely. Parasites which enter the body via contaminated food are often worms.

The soldier’s food may have been contaminated because the North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as “night soil”.

Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters: “Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead.”

If these faeces are untreated and fertilise vegetables that are later eaten uncooked, the parasites get into the mouth and the intestines of the person.

Night soil is a good idea if it’s treated, but ya gotta treat it.

While some don’t cause any severe symptoms, others can be life-threatening, explains Prof Peter Preiser from the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“What they all do is take nutrients away from your body,” he told the BBC. “So [even] if most of them might go unnoticed, they all indicate a poor health status. To put it simply: people who have parasites are not healthy.”

And they don’t feel all that wonderful.

It’s pretty tragic.

I saw this in the Sun last week.

GENITOOL 
Doctor dumped boyfriend because he criticised the smell of her vagina – and wants other women to follow suit

I saw that some typical goons had talked about it on their podcast hur hur hur. I read Jen Gunter’s blog post on it. Now it’s in the Times, as is only fair.

For 25 years she’s been listening to women tell her they’ve been told how Wrong and Gross their genitals are.

These women all shared something: They were told these things by men. While I admit this is anecdotal data, my years of listening to secret shame about healthy vaginas and vulvas seems to suggest it is largely, if not entirely, male partners who exploit vaginal and vulvar insecurities as a weapon of emotional abuse and control.

But it was the Vicks VapoRub that put me over the edge.

Around the internet I am known as the gynecologist who debunks unnecessary and often harmful vaginal trends. Vaginal steaming, douches, glitter, tightening sticks — these are all born from the same need to tame the normal female genital tract. Whether these products are sold by big companies or a lone purveyor on Etsy, whether sold as medicinal in drugstores or marketed under the guise of “natural” and artisanal by brands like Goop, the intent is the same: to monetize intimate fears about intimate places. The idea is to profit from our society’s inability to have public, non-sophomoric discussions about the vagina and vulva. These products and their messages are no different from the Lysol ads of the 1950s telling women they could be like the “the girl he married” again.

Now, apparently, folks were suggesting that it was a good idea to put a mentholated petroleum product in one’s vagina. (It is not.)

Fed up, I wrote the story of how a man had tried to shame me about my healthy vagina. Once, I had dated a man who told me I would be desirable, if only my hair were straight, or if only I lost the weight, or if only I dressed differently. The metric for my supposed perfection kept changing, so it was a herculean task to keep up with my failings, which I now gather was the point.

But while I may not have complete confidence in my appearance, I have professional confidence in spades. There are few people, if any, who know more about the lower genital tract than I do. So when this man began to tell me how my healthy vagina could be better, I dumped him.

She talks about vaginas all day long. It’s the idea that that’s gross that is behind all this experimentation with Vicks VapoRub. (Are you KIDDING me?) So naturally along came a gutter tabloid to say EW GROSS.

What happened next was an article showed up in the The New York Post with the incorrect headline “My boyfriend dumped me because of my vagina smell,” accompanied with a big picture of me. The article itself was accurate — easy enough, since it was essentially quotations from my blog.

And then the men came. They came to share their opinions regarding my vagina, writing on my blog and at me on Twitter. They flocked to my Instagram and my Facebook. One group of gentlemen, in at least their 40s, even decided that this story of me being dumped supposedly because of my vagina was worthy of a laugh on their podcast.

This rash bombarded me in both public and private comments. Men wondered if I had washed “that thang yet?” One man wrote that I “must be INTO smelly ones! How nice for you — we prefer FRESH as a daisy ones!” Another man warned me that “We men had a meeting, all 3.5 billion of us.” At the meeting they had apparently decided to “double down on calling out” my smelly vagina.

A man said I should call my ex and thank him “for alerting me to my smelly vagina.” There was also the #notallmen contingent, who felt it was impossible that my personal experience and 25 years as a gynecologist could offer any evidence that men ever try to control women by preying on insecurities. Obviously it was just my vagina that stank.

Isn’t it nice to know what so many men really think? Isn’t it?

The state of my healthy vagina brought more scorn from men than anything I have ever written about — and I write about second trimester abortions, so that is saying something.

To the women who have been told they were too wet, too dry, too messy, too smelly, too gross, too saggy or too bloody, I have heard you. I know you stand in drugstores wondering why there are all these hygiene products if they are unnecessary. I know you stare into the internet and wonder, if celebrities say they steam their vaginas, or have 10-step vaginal prep regimens, then maybe vaginal neglect really is a flaw that ruins relationships.

All I can say is, if you have a medical concern, see a doctor. And: If someone speaks to you about your body with anything but kindness and concern, it is he who has a problem. And: The vagina is like a self-cleaning oven.

To the rash of mansplainers and The New York Post, thank you. This experience proves that shaming women about physiologically normal and functioning vaginas is epidemic. The cure for this rash is information. You can either listen and learn or you can take a seat in the back of class and shut up. The era in which men can shame women for their perfectly healthy vaginas is now coming to an end.

The other day Bjarte recommended Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan. The library found it quickly so I’m reading it. There’s a bit on page 28 in a chapter on willful blindness in love:

“Success confers its own blindness,” says Brown. “Successful people believe they can get away with it. I talked once to a group of men who’d all become millionaires before the age of forty and who’d had affairs. They don’t even see the danger! It isn’t a love of risk. They think the wives will never know, so where’s the harm? Everything else in their lives has worked out, so they think they have some kind of magic, that their success has meant that they can have everything they want and they’re invulnerable. And they were completely blind to the harm that they had done.”

It sounded kind of familiar.

In annals of Things I Neglected in the Hail of All the Other Things, there is the move by Republicans and Trump to halt a rule requiring big companies to collect data on how they pay their employees. The ACLU in September:

Last night, 223 members of the House of Representatives voted against equal pay for our nation’s workers.

If asked, these members of Congress would almost certainly say that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work and that pay discrimination based on gender and race is a scourge that should be eliminated. Yet when the opportunity arose to support an equal pay initiative that is critical in achieving these goals, they voted no.

Believe what they do, not what they say.

The DeLauro-Frankel-Scott amendment that came to the House floor yesterday for a vote would have preserved federal funding for a new equal pay data collection initiative by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces our nation’s antidiscrimination laws. This initiative was developed during the Obama administration and updated an existing survey, called the EEO-1 report.

The original survey, which has been around for 50 years, requires large employers to provide the EEOC and other federal entities with information about the race, gender, and ethnicity of their workforce by job category. The updated EEO-1 report would have required these employers to also provide information about what they pay their employees.

The EEOC equal pay data collection was developed after years of study and two rounds of public comments, and it would have taken effect in March 2018. It is an essential tool in our fight against pay discrimination because it would have lifted the cloak of secrecy that shrouds pay decisions in this country.

But but but then it would be harder for companies to go on paying people less on the grounds that they’re not white men.

While women’s rights and civil rights advocates have found their arguments to be wholly self-serving and unconvincing, members of Congress and senior officials in the White House were, unfortunately, more easily swayed.

Indeed, in July, House Republicans adopted an amendment that cut off federal funding to implement the program. In August, the Trump administration halted the data collection altogether. Although the administration ordered an ill-defined “review” of the program and suggested that the EEOC should resubmit a revised data collection package, there are deep suspicions about the administration’s true commitment to working with the EEOC to ensure the implementation of a similar initiative.

Danielle Paquette at the Post in October:

A coalition of more than 90 civil rights groups is preparing to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to halt an Obama-era initiative aimed at fighting employer discrimination against women and minorities.

Emily Martin, general counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said she and attorneys at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have requested copies of emails, voice mails and other communications among the federal officials who opted in August to freeze a rule that would have required companies to file data broken down by race, ethnicity and gender on what they pay workers.

The rule compelling companies to submit additional information about employees and wages to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was finalized in September 2016 and would have taken effect next year.

Would have, had a reasonable adult human won the presidential election last year, but alas it was not to be.

After Trump launched his deregulation agenda, Neomi Rao, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, stayed the rule, saying in an Aug. 29 letter to the new acting head of the EEOC that the requirement was unnecessarily burdensome and lacked “practical utility.”

Victoria Lipnic, whom Trump appointed in January as acting chair of the EEOC, publicly expressed concerns in April about the burden the rule could put on businesses. (Neither Rao nor Lipnic responded to requests for comment.)

Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, supported the administration’s decision to halt the rule. The first daughter and adviser to the president has positioned herself a champion for women, advocating policies that support female breadwinners.

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” she said in an August statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, OMB, Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”

I did comment on Princess Ivanka’s ludicrous self-serving “statement” at the time:

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” said the first daughter, who recently published a book called ‘Women Who Work’ and markets a clothing and accessories line to working women.

How the hell does she know? Who is she to make that claim? What is the source of her expertise?

Activists who focus on pay equality have blasted this decision, with the executive director of Make It Work, a nonprofit aimed at improving women’s economic lives, calling it “a blatant attack on women.”

“To suspend a crucial Obama-era initiative aimed at increasing pay transparency and reducing the gender and racial pay gap is an unacceptable and deliberate attack on women in the workplace, especially black and Hispanic women who are currently paid only 63 cents and 54 cents to the dollar white men are paid, respectively,” said Tracy Sturdivant, who cofounded the Make It Work campaign.

But Ivanka Trump knows better because…what?

Oh wait, I know – it’s because she’s an employer and a purchaser. She doesn’t want to pay her employees more and she doesn’t want to pay more for the merch she sells. It’s not that she actually thinks it wouldn’t work; she’s lying just like Daddy about that – it’s that she thinks it will cost her money.

So far I don’t see any reason to change my mind about that.

Speaking of narrow authoritarian impoverished versions of “morality,” there’s this sheriff in Texas who is all worked up about…the word “fuck” on someone’s personal vehicle.

A sheriff in Texas is looking for a truck bearing a profanity-laced anti-Trump sticker and said authorities are considering charging its owner with disorderly conduct — a threat that immediately raised alarm among free speech advocates.

I wouldn’t call it “profanity-laced” – it’s too succinct for that. It says simply: Fuck Trump and fuck you for voting for him.

Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy E. Nehls posted a photo of the truck Wednesday on Facebook after, he said, he’d received several complaints about the display from unhappy people in the Houston-area county.

The photo is no longer on Facebook, but it’s easy to find lots of photos of the type via Google images. Here’s one:

Not really an enhancement of the public landscape, but not a police matter, either.

“If you know who owns this truck or it is yours, I would like to discuss it with you,” the sheriff wrote. “Our Prosecutor has informed us she would accept Disorderly Conduct charges regarding it, but I feel we could come to an agreement regarding a modification.”

The Houston Chronicle said the truck’s owners have no plans to remove the custom graphic, which they ordered after Trump’s election.

“It’s not to cause hate or animosity,” Karen Fonseca told the Chronicle. “It’s just our freedom of speech and we’re exercising it.”

Wellll it’s a little bit to cause animosity – the “fuck you for voting for him” part.

At a news conference Wednesday, after his Facebook post went viral, Nehls said he supports freedom of speech, according to the Associated Press.

“We have not threatened anybody with arrest; we have not written any citations,” Nehls said. “But I think now it would be a good time to have meaningful dialogue with that person and express the concerns out there regarding the language on the truck.”

A meaningful dialogue with the police…which is rather different from meaningful dialogue with random fellow citizens.