How to diversity and inclusion: invent some diverse speakers to promote your conference and then on the day say they all have food poisoning.

After an event organizer, Eduards Sizovs, was accused of making up fake female speakers to attract high-profile speakers to an online developer conference called DevTernity, several of the event’s top-billed speakers promptly withdrew.

…

On Monday, Sizovs confirmed that the conference, DevTernity—which sold tickets for as much as $870 a pop and anticipated 1,300 attendees—was cancelled.

The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday. Orosz alleged that out of three women—Kristine Howard, Julia Krisina, and Anna Boyko—scheduled to speak at DevTernity, Krisina and Boyko were fake profiles created by the event organizers to make the event look diverse in order to “successfully attract some of the most heavy-hitter men speakers in tech.”

Which is so interesting because another way to make the event look “diverse” would be to invite some actual women. I wonder if he thought of that at all.

“The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone,” Sizovs posted on X. “But I won’t defend myself because I don’t feel guilty. I did nothing terrible that I need to apologize for. The conference has always delivered on its promise. It’s an awesome, inclusive, event.”

That post has a community note—X’s fact-checking method—that says, “Sizovs has been shown creating fake female speaker profiles for his conferences. He is claiming one of them was a test/bug, but investigation uncovered he’s done this for multiple years with multiple fake speakers. This presented a fraudulent focus on diversity.”

And also underlined his determination to exclude women from speaker roles at his conferences. If you pretend you’ve invited some when you haven’t, that just makes it clear you don’t want to and don’t plan to. It underlined the fact that this is deliberate with malice aforethought exclusion of women.

Orosz alleged that DevTernity’s addition of Boyko to the lineup was “not a one-off.” He posted what he said is evidence from past years of more fake speakers that were advertised at both DevTernity and other events organized by Sizovs, and 404 Media also claims that a hugely popular female tech influencer Instagram account called Coding Unicorn may have been secretly managed by Sizovs.

According to 404 Media, Coding Unicorn bills itself as the “most popular coding account on Instagram.” It’s allegedly managed by a real woman named Julia Kirsina, but 404 Media found that IP logs, a YouTube video, social media posts, and other evidence seems to suggest Sizovs controls the account.

Perhaps most glaringly obvious, coders revealed to 404 Media that “some of Kirsina’s Instagram posts are word-for-word copies of Sizovs’ LinkedIn posts, sometimes published more than a year later.” In addition, “some of the images [Kirsina] posted on Instagram show computer monitors with code that show her logged in under Sizovs’ name.” But perhaps most striking is the fact that an administrator told 404 Media that both Sizovs’ and Kirsina’s accounts were banned “multiple times” by the Lobste.rs coding forum for “sockpuppeting”—using a false identity to deceive others—in 2019 and 2020.

“At a minimum,” 404 Media concluded that Sizovs has been “heavily influencing” Coding Unicorn’s posts and seemingly had access to at least one of Kirsina’s accounts.

There are no good enough women. They’re all too stupid and too frivolous, so a guy has to fake them to tick the diversity boxes.

H/t Sackbut

The Telegraph on the NHS organ inventory lunacy:

Doctors are being asked to tick whether patients have a penis or vagina under a new NHS medical form being rolled out at some hospitals.  

Medics are being faced with “nonsensical” forms asking for a patient’s “organ inventory” at NHS hospitals using a new £450 million IT system.

The new “sexual orientation and gender identity form” makes up part of someone’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) on the new system, regardless of the care or relevance to any treatment they are receiving.

It’s kind of like getting used to a new laptop – all kinds of bells and whistles you didn’t ask for and don’t want.

It asks for information around a patient’s sexual orientation, gender, sex assigned at birth, preferred pronouns, if they have transitioned, to what extent, and what future plans they have, if any, to change gender.

It’s the normalization plan. Pretend that almost everyone wants to have special gourmet gender idenninies, and that if you don’t you’re weird and abnormal and kind of wrong.

The medical forms then go on to ask staff to fill in “organs the patient currently has”, “organs present at birth”, “organs surgically enhanced or constructed” and “organs hormonally enhanced”.

It looks even crazier the second time we read it, doesn’t it.

The forms also provide default answers to questions. For example around gender identity, a patient will be by default labelled as “cisgender”, a term used to describe someone who identifies as the sex they were born as.

No, a term used by a few lunatics to describe people who aren’t trans, in other words 99.9 percent of people.

“People are automatically cisgender unless they are classed as trans, even though most people in a hospital wouldn’t know what that means, let alone being classified as something,” a staff member familiar with the new system said.

Well quite. It’s like putting a label on people who aren’t from Mars, or 100 feet tall, or 500 years old. We don’t need to label people as not-this-thing-nobody-is. Everybody is “cis.” Some people claim not to be, but they’re either delusional or lying.

Women’s rights campaigners have blamed activists for trying to impose it “by stealth”.

Helen Joyce, author and director of advocacy at Sex Matters, said the “anti-scientific fringe ideology has been imported wholesale from America”.

Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. I apologize for my people.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Personalized organ inventories.

There are default settings for men and women as “cisgender” if they do not express a trans identity.

This is like hearing hoofbeats and assuming zebras. They might as well just come out and call us all “non-trans.” We still haven’t gotten ourselves out of the age in which “male” was the standard and default for everything, with women being considered aberrant, non-standard, or flawed. Now “trans” is the standard, and everyone else is ho-hum, run-of-the-mill “cis.” It’s an attempt at normalizing the abnormal, of turning the impossible into mental wallpaper instead of a material and moral imposition.

To be honest, when I saw the title of the post, and started reading it, I’d thought some rich dude was subverting the NHS to come up with lists of personal potential organ donors, should they ever need to harvest one at short notice. I think that would have been less sinister. This sneaking in ideology via software is pretty scary, as well as a stupid waste of time and money. It’s about as worthwhile as building a system in which it is assumed that everyone has polydactyly, and forcing staff to go in and enumerate the number of digits on each hand ad foot of every patient, and then ask whether or not patients ever planned to have digits added or removed. Are the parties responsible going to plead ignorance, or fall on their swords? This is a little more involved than adopting US software where there’s nothing more awkward being imported than the American spelling of words like “colour” and “neighbour”. This is much less benign, and intended to be so.

Malcolm Clark at Spiked is very amusing about luxury pronouns.

Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.

A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, ‘The Star Beast’, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?

Not, we can be pretty confident, of the very longstanding convention of referring to all generalized people (lawyers, voters, workers, students etc) as “he” in the singular, as if males are normal and females are some eccentric aberration.

You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its ‘progressive’ radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.

I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.

Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.

It’s a sign of the bubble Davies has blown around his throbbing ego that he thinks the notion of genderfluidity is a jaw-dropper. I hate to break it to Davies, but his central protagonist routinely breaks the laws of actual physics by time travelling. In comparison, breaking the laws of our Earth-based mammalian biology is no biggie.

I do like the image of a bubble blown around a throbbing ego.

Sex Matters reports An Epic crisis is unfolding in the NHS.

Since October, several NHS trusts in England have been using new £450 million NHS patient-data software produced by US-based IT company Epic Systems. This has been programmed by local teams to record the “gender identity” of babies. For adults, the system has been programmed to register patients according to their “legal sex” rather than their actual sex, and to record men and women who don’t express a trans identity as “cisgender”. It asks medical staff to complete “organ inventories” of the reproductive features of all patients. 

The new electronic patient record software was launched at the start of October at hospitals including King’s College Hospital, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital. It is also being used by Frimley Health NHS Trust, South London, Maudsley NHS Trust and several other hospitals across London and England.

On 26th November, the Mail on Sunday reported that a whistleblowing midwife had evidence that babies were being registered according to “gender identity” on discharge forms under the new system at London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, and King’s College Hospital, which Sex Matters’ Maya Forstater called “absurd and chilling”

How can babies possibly have a gender identity?? They don’t have any kind of “identity” of the kind that means “how I think of myself inside my head” – they don’t even know they’re babies, or human, or alive, or on Planet Earth. They don’t really “know” anything at all – because they’re babies.

On the form, patients are registered according to their “legal sex” rather than their actual sex.

There are default settings for men and women as “cisgender” if they do not express a trans identity. As reported by The Telegraph, the form asks for information on a patient’s sexual orientation, gender, sex assigned at birth, preferred pronouns, if they have transitioned, to what extent, and what future plans they have, if any, to change gender.

I trust there is also a place on the form for vampires, and one for werewolves, and one for gremlins, and one for witches, and…

Staff are then asked to fill in an “organ inventory”, including “organs the patient currently has”, “organs present at birth”, “organs surgically enhanced or constructed” and “organs hormonally enhanced”. 

Under each section is a list of possible organs to add, including penis, vagina, uterus, cervix, breasts, prostate, testes and ovaries. Healthcare staff then have to click “add” on the relevant organs to specify which genitalia the patient has, and at which point they were acquired.

And by the time staff have finished all that it’s quitting time, and the patient has to make a new appointment.

As Helen Joyce said in The Telegraph, this anti-scientific fringe ideology has been imported wholesale from America. Activists within the NHS have attempted to impose it on the UK’s healthcare system by stealth. What they are trying to do is incredibly dangerous, and will damage patient care. It’s also anti-democratic, since it’s being presented to NHS users as a fait accompli. 

The fact that healthcare employees have not felt able to raise concerns about a grossly flawed new process shows the extent of the fear that now dominates NHS workplace environments, thanks to gender-ideology indoctrination.

Oh you mean fear of shunning and hostility and bullying? For this noble cause of pretending everyone is like a doll with an extensive wardrobe of customized organs?

It can be hard to identify the facts in reporting of this kind, because of the usual careful obfuscation. Starting with the headline:

Broward high school principal reassigned amid investigation involving transgender athlete

What kind of transgender athlete?

The kind it always is, of course. The male kind. I wonder if the news media Five Families had a meeting at some point and agreed that male transgender athletes must always be identified as simply “transgender” with no mention of the m word. Why would they do that? Because women and girls have very obvious material reasons not to want males bouncing into their sports. Men and boys don’t have those very obvious material reasons. Therefore it must always be concealed that it’s male transgender people who are the problem in a given story.

The principal of a high school in Broward has been reassigned amid an investigation into a transgender student athlete playing on a girl’s sports team, sources told NBC6.

The principal at Monarch High School in Coconut Creek, along with several staff members, have been reassigned to non-school sites pending an investigation into allegations of improper student participation in sports, officials with Broward County Public Schools said in a statement Monday.

The statement didn’t give further details on the investigation. Students at the high school told NBC6 that the investigation involved the girl’s volleyball team.

“Although we cannot comment further, we will continue to follow state law and will take appropriate action based on the outcome of the investigation,” the statement read. “We are committed to providing all our students with a safe and inclusive learning environment.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that with all this careful tiptoeing around we can’t be sure what the statement means. Safe and inclusive for girls? Safe and inclusive for boys who call themselves girls? Both? We can’t tell. If only we were all allowed to tell the truth on this subject.

Sources with Broward County Public Schools told NBC6 the reason for the reassignment has to do with a transgender student athlete playing on a girl’s sports team.

Again – what kind? Transgender what? Given that it’s the girls’ team we’re left to decide for ourselves that the student is male, but that would be a mistake, because it could be a girl who’s on steroids. This is crap reporting, and it’s everywhere.

A Florida statute says athletic teams or sports designated for females, women, or girls are not open to male students, and says a “statement of a student’s biological sex on the student’s official birth certificate is considered to have correctly stated the student’s biological sex at birth if the statement was filed at or near the time of the student’s birth.”

“He should not be able to play on the team,” a student told NBC6. “If he is a biological boy, I don’t think he should be able to play on a girl’s team.”

There it is at last. Finally we get clarification.

Some students were mobilizing for a protest and a possible walk-out in protest of the reassignment and in support of the transgender community.

“If we were to just sit here and just get them to go to the boy’s team, then it would look like we are not supportive of people’s perspective on things, like, being a girl or a boy or whatever, and this school is really big on LGBTQ+ clubs and stuff like that, so, it kind of would look more hypocritical on our part,” another student said.

Yes it’s all about “people’s perspective on things” and not at all about inconvenient facts. Or whatever.

Owen Jones is still desperately trying to defend Hamas.

There is a video doing the rounds related to Hamas’s barbaric pogrom of 7 October that is difficult to watch. It is making viewers wince and recoil. It shows the madness that can flourish when people retreat from reason. I am speaking, of course, about Owen Jones’s reaction vid to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities; that arch Guardianista’s 25-minute YouTube musing over what he saw Hamas do. It is a disturbing watch. It provides the starkest proof yet of the collapse of moral reason and plain decency that has occurred on the middle-class left these past seven weeks.

And it doesn’t help that it’s Owen Jones doing it – the scruffy middle aged man who appears to identify as barely out of his teens and adorable. It palls. The little boy hair, the perpetual T shirt, the dreadful high-speed gabble – the whole schtick – it palls.

Israel felt compelled to put out this gross footage of anti-Semitic mass murder because there has been so much 7 October doubt in influential circles in the West. It was the atrocity denialism of unhinged Israelophobes that forced Israel to say: ‘Okay, here are the atrocities.’ They showed the film in London last week and Mr Jones was in attendance.

To be clear, Jones does not deny that Hamas committed ‘grave war crimes’ on 7 October. He is not an October denialist as some on the viscerally anti-Israel left are. And yet his reaction to the footage is chilling nonetheless. He casts doubt on many of the claims about 7 October. He sows seeds of suspicion. It is a masterclass in moral obfuscation. Yes, Hamas did wicked things, he says, but where’s the evidence for the really wicked things it is said to have done? The beheaded babies. Raped women. Children killed ‘intentionally’. There’s no ‘conclusive evidence’ for that, he says. I am trying my best to understand the mind that can see images of the corpses of Jewish children and wonder, ‘But were they killed intentionally?’.

Well, Owen, Hamas didn’t trip over something and accidentally kill children.

Even in this era of virtual narcissism, even with the fashion for filming oneself saying and doing all sorts of self-abasing things, Jones’s video stands out for its creepiness.

…

When the well-to-do journalist Kate Maltby said she received sexual advances from a Tory MP, Jones raged against our ‘culture that fails women who speak out’. Yet when the IDF shows him an image of a stripped, brutalised young woman he essentially says, was she raped though? That poor woman can’t be ‘listened to and believed’, of course, because she was murdered by medieval reactionaries.

But look here, maybe he’s just doing good journalism, good critical thinking, asking for more or better evidence. Maybe he’s just trying to nail the story so firmly it can’t be pried up.

I find it hard to believe Jones has had a Damascene conversion to the old-fashioned journalistic task of always asking for evidence. This is a man up to his neck in identitarian bollocks and trans mysticism. If a 6”5 bloke called Dave were to identify as a lesbian, Jones would believe him instantly. He would say Dave is literally a woman, and literally a lesbian, and only a bigot would say otherwise. Yet when he sees a real woman murdered and burnt and denuded of her underwear, suddenly he wants evidence. ‘Show the rape.’ 

He wants to watch.

Originally a comment by guest on We like to live in the just world.

All of these comments are making me realise what an excellent course this would make – a history of the causes of the Industrial Revolution/justification for current global economic inequality, from the canonical roll-call of clever Englishmen (and Scotsmen) through naturalistic, cultural and institutional explanations to the story emerging today based on new research methods, connections among disciplines and information sources. I cannot possibly be the first person to think of this (though you never know, I’ve been surprised before) – over winter break I’ll ask around and see if I can find people who have done this/are doing this, and if I do come across any good course outlines or reading lists I’ll share.

One of these new research methods is prosopography, the study of social networks – up until about 20 years ago prosopographical tools were used almost exclusively by classical and ecclesiastical historians, but since then a lot more people have become aware of the usefulness of mapping social networks in understanding knowledge transfer and the workings of power. They also help set the ‘great men’ of technology into their social context, helping us see them not as ‘lone geniuses’ but more as foci for the contributions required for innovation to happen. A great example of this is one historian’s lockdown project of linking all the named people involved in creating the SS Great Britain.

I’m not sure what anyone’s actually used this for yet, but it’s a unique – I think? – visualisation of the personal connections required for innovation to happen. I’d love to see more of these (but I can appreciate that they are a hell of a lot of work, and I wouldn’t wish for another lockdown just so more historians get bored enough to do this).

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Nasty snobbish gatekeepers.

iknklast:

In order to provide equity and justice in medicine, we must be aware of sex, ethnic background, country of origin, and other characteristics. We do not need medicine centered on those characteristics, though. We need medicine centered on medical expertise.

You’d think that obvious, but this ideology-first movement has been in action for a while now. Sort of like how the warnings of (some) lesbians and (some) feminists regarding nascent Genderism went unheard, so too have the warnings regarding the spread of Social Justice Lysenkoism. Here’s a Boston Review article from March 2021 entitled “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine” that argues for “medical restitution”. One form of redress the authors propose is “race-explicit protocol changes (such as preferentially admitting patients historically denied access to certain forms of medical care).” Yes, you read that right: explicit endorsement of racial discrimination in healthcare.

Pretty good example of DEI gone mad, I should think, but at least it’s not CR … Oh. … Oh, my.

Our path to this realization, as with nearly all advancements in social medicine, took us outside our discipline—through the field of critical race theory (CRT), in particular. … Recognizing this problem, public health scholars Chandra Ford and Collins Airhihenbuwa brought CRT’s legal approach to the public health realm in 2010 with their landmark proposal of a Public Health Critical Race Framework. Following their lead, we have sought to implement that framework in our own advocacy and clinical work on equitable heart failure admissions.

Well, now I have to take a look at that 2010 proposal. … … … Holy wow. No hiding the CRT here, just pure praise. We even get the discipline’s usual straw man version of colorblindness:

Colorblindness, which is both an attitude and a school of thought, posits that nonracial factors (e.g., income) fundamentally explain ostensibly racial phenomena. … Only colorblindness, however, precludes explicit examination of racism’s potential contributions to inequities.

Great googly moogly.

More everything means the opposite of everything news:

Britain’s human-rights watchdog could be downgraded and blocked from United Nations rights bodies over its recommended definition of sex. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is set to undergo a “special review” by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (Ganhri). This process could mean the removal of the EHRC’s accreditation as an “A status” National Human Rights Institution, meaning it would not be able to sit on the UN Human Rights Council.

The review comes after 30 LGBTQ+ and human-rights organisations expressed concern to Ganhri about the EHRC.

Let me guess. It’s because they know men are not women, isn’t it.

The EHRC’s role is to provide guidance and enforce legislation to protect against discrimination. Ganhri’s accreditation of watchdogs such as the EHRC allows countries access to the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies.

In a statement, EHRC chairwoman Baroness Falkner said: “We take seriously our duty to protect and promote equality and human rights for everyone. That includes considering, carefully and impartially and on the basis of evidence, how the rights of one person, or group, might be affected by the rights of another.”

Well, sorry, but that’s not allowed. The “rights” of men who claim to be women are inherently and eternally more important than any rights women might claim to have.

In April this year, the EHRC advised the government that changing the legal definition of sex in the Equality Act to “biological sex” would make offering single-sex services more straightforward and provide clarity in a “polarised and contentious” area.

Well, if sex under the Equality Act is not “biological sex” then there is no way women can have rights under the Equality Act. They can just be defined out.

The advice was criticised by some campaigners at the time. UN independent expert Victor Madrigal-Borloz wrote in May that the EHRC’s advice around changing the legal definition of sex “was to offer the government a formula through which it could carry out discriminatory distinctions currently unlawful under UK law”.

Mr Madrigal-Borloz added that he was “of the opinion that this action of the EHRC is wholly unbecoming of an institution created to ‘stand up for those in need of protection and hold governments to account for their human-rights obligations’”.

Which just demonstrates exactly how indifferent to the rights of women he is.

LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall is one of the organisations that lodged the complaint with Ganhri against the EHRC.

…

Other countries whose human-rights watchdogs have been stripped of “A status” by Ganhri include Madagascar, Hungary, Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

So knowing that men are not women is comparable to Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Interesting.

Just for fun.

Deborah Cameron explains exactly what was so enraging about that disembodied legs ad the other day.

The installation consists of five large display boards arranged in a line. Mounted on each of the middle three boards is a disembodied pair of crossed female legs. They’re like the legs you see on mannequins in the hosiery sections of department stores: long, slender, and carefully positioned for aesthetic effect. They begin at the top of the thigh and end in Barbie-style feet wearing high-heeled court shoes. They are “diverse” insofar as they represent a range of skin colours, but there is no diversity in relation to age, body-size or personal style. The imaginary woman these legs belong to is clearly young, slim, and conventionally feminine. On its own the visual element of the display could easily be mistaken for a lingerie ad: it’s far from obvious what legs have to do with cervical cancer. But the connection is spelled out in the verbal message, which is split between the two outer display boards. Both parts address the viewer directly and in the imperative: on the left, “don’t keep ‘em crossed”, and on the right, “get screened instead”.

While there are many things to object to about this installation, the thing I found so shocking that it rendered me temporarily speechless was that injunction “don’t keep ’em crossed”. It’s offensive because the crossing and uncrossing of a woman’s legs is a well-worn metaphor for sexual continence or incontinence. That’s the real reason why girls are taught that it’s “ladylike” to sit with your legs crossed (and “unladylike” to sit with them apart): while this is often presented as a matter of aesthetics or good taste, what it’s really about is modesty, in the sense of chastity. By adopting a posture that completely conceals her genital area, a woman signals that she is not available for sex.

That and even more, I think. It’s about modesty/chastity but also about disgust. It’s a love/hate thing. The female genital area is a site of whoopee yay hooray but also ew ugh gross.

The flipside, of course, is that the uncrossing of a woman’s legs becomes a sign that she is open to sexual propositions. When I was growing up in the 1970s people often said, about both rape and unwanted pregnancy, was that all a woman had to do to prevent it was “keep her legs crossed”. This was a commonplace form of victim-blaming and slut-shaming, but it also had a flipside which might be called “prude-shaming”. The woman who did “keep ’em crossed” could be accused of denying men access because she was “uptight”, frigid and sexually repressed. Which is also what “don’t keep ‘em crossed/get screened instead” implies—that it’s uptightness that stops women from getting screened.

More damned if we do and damned if we don’t. That thing between the legs is desired and despised.

the NHS and cancer charities have form for this. In 2021 the health app myGP ran a bizarre online campaign suggesting young women could remind their social media followers about the importance of regular smear tests by posting a picture of the type of cat (long-haired, short-haired or hairless) that best represented the current state of their pubic hair. The cat, obviously, was code for the explicitly sexualized term “pussy”. And it’s not just cervical cancer that gets this treatment. One Twitter commenter reminded me that in 2020 the Sun newspaper, which for several decades was famous for featuring a daily topless pin-up photo on page 3, ran a campaign to encourage breast self-examination whose title and slogan was “CoppaFeel!”. And in Canada a campaign to raise awareness of ovarian cancer renamed the ovaries “ladyballs”: its slogan was “have the ladyballs to do something about it”.

Men are people; women are a collection of sex organs.

Originally a comment by guest on Over in seconds.

Chipping in late, as I was away :)

The issue of slavery as a generator of wealth (which provides the ability to take advantage of ‘innovation’) has been considered at least since the 1960s.

Research is still ongoing – the initial findings of the Legacies of British Slavery project give the subject a surprisingly superficial treatment.

But I and others beg to differ – there is a lot more to say about the magnitude and direction of the ‘giant pool of money’ from slavery ‘compensation’ funds suddenly available for private investment in the 1830s. I believe a young man named David Turner is currently working on this.

With respect to the United States, a series of books was published in the last couple of decades overturning the ‘progressive industrial North vs backwards rural South’ story we learned in history class; in my opinion this is the best of these.

We, particularly the English, like to believe in the just world – that we’re more successful on the global stage because we’re just innately smarter, more imaginative, more hard-working and more willing to take high-stakes risks than the rest. But to me it seems pretty clear that we’re more successful because we’re uniquely unethical. I personally believe that has to do with Protestantism, but I’m certainly open to other explanations.

Let’s replace expertise of all kinds with equity n inclooosion!

Warning

EDI can be bad for your health! In this internal document from the @Royal_College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, there is a proposal from the EDI group to prioritize social justice over medical expertise. This is bonkers.

A new model of CANMEDS would seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice rather than medical expertise, they say.

Relationships rather than the individual physician as a gatekeeper of professional knowledge, they say.

It seems unlikely that anyone in a position to act on this will pay any attention to it, but still, you have to wonder how people manage to be so absurd and stupid and lost in the fog.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Allo allo!

My laptop dropped dead late last night so I dashed out and got a new one this morning and it’s clearly going to be WEEKS before I get used to all its novelties. Just so you know. Posts will probably be sparse for a bit. But I haven’t vanished off the planet yet.

Originally a comment by Freemage on Will they cover mild distaste?

Generally, US Hate Crime laws work very well, to the extent that they’re applied as written. It can be easily understood that, for instance, vandalism is one thing (a nuisance property crime), but a swastika on the side of a Jewish cultural center is another (an active threat, meant to cause fear to a segment of the community). Similarly, a violent attack to gain the victim’s wallet, and an equally violent attack against a person solely because of his skin color are different beasts–again, the latter is deliberately meant to terrorize not only the victim, but also any others sharing his skin color in that neighborhood. More victims = bigger crime. (Elliot Rodger was a clear-cut example of a hate crime against women, as another example. He wasn’t shooting just to express social frustration, but to actively create a fear-response in women who say no to sex with men.)

So in the US, hate crime laws seek to regard bias as a modifier to the punishment criteria of an actual crime. No actual crime, no ‘hate crime’.

There’s two main issues that come up.

First off, women are notoriously under-represented in hate-crime legislation, and even in places where the law does recognize them as a protected class, prosecutors are unwilling to pursue crimes against women-for-being-women as hate crimes. There are plenty of cases of rape, in particular, where the perpetrator is clearly acting out of not merely a desire to sexually dominate a single woman, but rather to ‘put women in their place’. Serial rapists should almost always get hate-crime kickers, for instance.

The second issue (again, in the US) isn’t so much with law, as with law-like codes (such as university policies) that seek to treat the opinion and the deed as not merely morally/ethically equivalent, but also as ‘legally’ equivalent. This is vastly more shaky ground, and prone to both abuse (targeting someone whose speech isn’t anywhere near actual attempts to provoke violence) and lopsided approaches (look at social media policies that punish anti-trans-idology speech with rabid fervor, but look the other way at straight-up rape threats against women).

Germany has a historical/cultural reason for wanting to keep the lid on speech, and other European nations often seem to want to follow suit. But it’s still a huge risk to civil liberties to cross that line.

Philip Bump in The Washington Post last February:

Fox News’s incessant focus on “critical race theory” (CRT) over the past few years — a term derived from an academic discipline that has been inflated to cover a wide range of race-focused issues — has evolved along with the discourse to focus on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI). The thrust of each, in the presentation of Fox News and its allies, is that the toxic left is seeking to divide the United States by race.

Critical Race Theory is not the same thing as Diversity Equity Inclusion. Yes the same brand of excitable zealot is often enamored of both of them, but all the same they don’t go together like sugar & spice or bread & butter.

I’m tired of seeing the epithet CRT/DEI thrown around, and I might even decide to banish it, the way a certain “website”-haver banished the word “blog” from his blog.

Republicans are as likely or more likely to say that Whites face discrimination in the United States than they are to say that gay or Black people do. The idea that Whites are a target of discrimination was a potent contributor to Donald Trump’s support in 2016.

That sentiment, stoked by Trump, Fox News and others, was an outgrowth of the surge in attention paid to immigration and race in 2014 and to increased awareness of the country’s changing demography, as illustrated above. The election of Barack Obama was an immediate presentation of that change: a young non-White guy taking power.

A young non-White guy who is vastly more intelligent and eloquent than the loudmouth from Queens. That’s the part that really burns Trump and the Foxers. How dare he?? How dare he be so good at thinking on his feet, be a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, be slim instead of bloated? Does not compute; must be blamed on crtdei and her evil plots.

Trump grudgingly left office, and a new administration — one sympathetic to racial justice arguments — took power. The right had a wonderful new foil. Discussions of “critical race theory” blossomed on the right generally and on Fox News specifically.

Again, the criticisms of CRT were not about CRT as such but of an intentionally constructed caricature of CRT aimed at tying together a wide (and often cherry-picked) array of race-tangential issues as useful targets. Like “woke,” “CRT” came to mean a vague sense of race- or diversity-related things and, therefore, bad things.

And so a new kind of tedium was born.

Well it’s kind of futile (as well as intrusive and dictatorial and so on) to pass laws against hatred. How would you enforce them? How would you know when they’d been broken?

Reuters tells us:

Ireland’s prime minister pledged to modernise laws against hatred in the coming weeks after 34 people were arrested for rioting in Dublin on Thursday night.

Modern or medieval, they’re still futile.

“We will pass new laws in the coming weeks to enable the Gardai (police) to make better use of the CCTV evidence they collected yesterday, and also we will modernise our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general,” Varadkar told a news conference on Friday.

Incitement is one thing and hatred is another.

There are other things we can do about hatred, after all. We can attempt to persuade against it. We can make arguments. We can talk about consequences. We can lecture, scold, preach, satirize, whine, mock – we can tell stories, paint pictures, write books, make arguments.

But force isn’t going to work, because there’s no solid surface we can find and then push.

In London today:

Tens of thousands of people have marched through central London at a demonstration against antisemitism. Organisers estimated 60,000 took part in the first march of its kind since the Israel-Gaza war began, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Er, make that “Organisers estimated 60,000 took part in the march, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. It was the first march of its kind since the Israel-Gaza war began.”

The rally comes amid a steep rise in hate crime, especially against the capital’s Jewish community. English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson – who was asked not to attend by organisers – was removed by police.

But Tommy Robinson is a member of the English Defence community, so doesn’t that change everything? In other words I wish the BBC would stop using the word “community” that way. It never will but I wish it would. If Jews are a community then anti-Semites are a community. Being in a notional “community” of this kind isn’t an automatic badge of virtue.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism estimate Sunday’s march to be the largest gathering of its kind since the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when British Union of Fascists supporters were stopped from marching through east London, an area with a high Jewish population at the time.

Hey hey hey that’s the community of British Union of Fascist supporters to you.

Crimes against Jewish people motivated by racism have increased dramatically since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict. There were 554 reports of antisemitic offences in London between 1 October and 1 November in London, compared with 44 in the same period last year.

The antisemitic community is being active.

The Times:

The Labour MP Rosie Duffield is being investigated by her party for liking a tweet which it claims is antisemitic, but allies fear she is being targeted because of her views on transgender issues.

Allies can see she’s being targeted. The “antisemitic tweet” claim is utterly ludicrous. But also – the Times? Even the Times??

She was branded transphobic for “knowing that only women have a cervix” and campaign[ing] against people with male genitalia who identify as women being allowed to enter female-only spaces such as changing rooms.

Excuse me? Since when does the Times say “people with male genitalia” when it means “men”? Since when does the Times substitute the ridiculous “”people with male genitalia” for the quick easy and simple word “men”? And if it’s going to do that why doesn’t it say “people with male genitalia who identify as people with female genitalia”? In short has it lost its fucking mind?

Insiders claim that an investigation was launched into her conduct at the end of March after she liked a tweet by the Father Ted comedy writer Graham Linehan.

Labour investigated her for liking a tweet. Nothing is too petty to punish and abuse women for.

He was responding to a tweet by the comedian Eddie Izzard who wrote: “I’m a trans superhero — but if I’d lived in Nazi Germany I’d have been murdered for it.”

Linehan responded: “Ah, yes, the Nazis, famously bigoted against straight white men with blonde hair.” Duffield liked Linehan’s response, which immediately triggered a furious backlash led by LGBT Labour, a campaign group, and Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor at the left-wing media platform Novara Media.

Sarkar tweeted to her 400,000-plus followers: “This is Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP, liking a tweet that contains Holocaust revisionism. Trans people and gay people were sent to die in concentration camps by the Nazis. This is a historical fact, and it is disgusting that a sitting Labour MP would approve of its denial.”

It definitely makes sense to trust Ash Sarkar on this subject when she’s confusing concentration camps with death camps.

Within days of liking the tweet, Duffield, who is a vice-chairwoman of the all-party parliamentary group on antisemitism, was asked to “unlike” it by her whip, Chris Elmore.

She is understood to have agreed to the request, while continuing to deny the tweet was antisemitic, explaining that Linehan had been sarcastically mocking Izzard’s comment identifying with the victims of the genocide of Jews, despite belonging to none of the identities targeted by the Nazis.

That kind of thing is normally condemned as “appropriation” by trendies like Sarkar, but I guess when an opportunistic “trans” person does it it’s brave n stunning. Also of course the Jews. I mean…you know…were they really the victims here? Shouldn’t we be centering all the martyred trans women instead?