So, doop-de-doo, I’m doing daily hobby-reading, in this case about why the Large Hadron Collider has been such a bust. I mean, sure, it found the Higgs, but we were expecting that at these energies it would reveal new physics, not merely confirm that last little bit of the Standard Model.
Friend working on a crossword puzzle: I need a 6 letter word for “a chilly sea”. I have _ _ p t _ _
Me: Hmm.
Friend: I know, right?
I have determined that I’m $5 Canadian and a purple gel pen.
What’s your gender?
I rarely do this outside of classrooms, but I’m going to give folks here some definitions that are in common use among people that seriously study gender. Why? In part because Andy Lewis seems to think that there is no coherent definition of gender generally and woman specifically because gender is an inherently incoherent concept while sex is an inherently coherent concept and that to the extent that we use the words gender or woman or man we should use them only in reference to underlying, coherent categories of sex. The Andy Lewises of the world appear to believe that this definitional challenge – and the poor response most people give when asked to meet it – proves the fundamental rightness of an anti-trans*, pro-TERF feminist philosophical position.
So, I deliberately stayed out of PZ’s When humanists go bad thread. But y’know, I didn’t realize it had gone on quite this long. When I saw a spate of comments all directed to that thread, however, I had to check in again just to know what is keeping that thread alive.
The answer? Andy Lewis.
Content Note: Child Sex Abuse
So, we here in my head are, as you might expect from the title of this blog, quite interested in both perverts and perversion. We believe that our blog name can and should be interpreted in 2 ways:
But despite our interest in these topics, we never expected to have to defend motels from non-consensual obscene photography. Yet, apparently there is such a need. The following is an actual quote from Rawstory:
The AAP is not down with what’s been happening to immigrant children of immigrants (both those who seek to cross within the law and those who seek to evade it). In addition to putting out a statement,
And what did Kraft find?
The shelter in question held 60 beds and had a little playground for children. Rooms are equipped with toys, books and crayons. …
But the child who caught the paediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. This little girl – no older than two – was screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. Yet staff members could not comfort the infant because of the rules prohibiting physical contact.
That’s right: no hugs for toddlers is the law, because Democrats and their awful, no good, very bad refusal to capitulate to everything the Orange Tyrant wants, forever.
Or at least, I guess that what the Rs are saying today.
Ishtar fucking Inanna with the Strap-On of Birth Control, there are no words.
Paul Selden, a paleontologist with enthusiasm for ancient arthropods, went crazy discussing spider/acarine interactions that helped him interpret a new find in which a spider-silk wrapped tick was found in Burmese amber:
“Just last year, I was on a field trip in Estonia and took a photo of a Steatoda spider wrapping up a red spider mite,” said Selden. “That was serendipitous.”
Ooh, baby: talk academic to me.
Over on Pharyngula, a discussion has been started about the propriety of using “accomplice” as a better word to describe the people that we have sometimes described as “allies” when discussing people that are not targeted by a specific form of oppression but nonetheless choose to work against it.
I started to write a comment over there about why I believe accomplice is appropriate, but it ended up becoming a treatise*1 about a woman named Irene Morgan*2. I decided that the thread shouldn’t be cluttered by a comment quite as long as I was writing, but that Morgan deserved better than cutting that treatise short. So I’ve moved it to Pervert Justice as a post for your reading pleasure.
Content note: brutally racist and anti-semitic language
In a recent Pharyngula thread, it was suggested by billyjoe that, “We can’t go about accusing people,” so long as some people accused incur disproportionate or otherwise unjust consequences.
On that thread, I made it clear that it is not the accusation that is the problem.
Paxoll then chimed in to support this statement, simultaneously saying that others can’t know whether or not an accusation is true and that billyjoe was only speaking of false accusations (despite being unable to tell them apart … and despite billyjoe doing nothing to mention truth or falsity as important in deciding whether or not we actually can go about accusing people).
Although I replied to Paxoll in that thread, I thought the concept might need its own post here even before I finished up my comments and opened up RawStory to find this headline: