Saying the quiet part out loud

This is sickening. Some of the Gender Critical assholes think they’ve achieved critical mass to begin their program of eradicating transgender people.

Helen Joyce says every person who is transgender is damaged and is a huge problem to a sane world and we’re going to have to accommodate them for 50,60,70 years, and their solution is reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. This is some kind of Nazi shit. But she’s not being heartless, oh no! It’s for the greater good! You gotta dehumanize your target (they’re damaged), present them as a “problem”, suggest the preliminary step is to prevent them from proliferating, and then the ground will be prepared for the final solution.

I can recognize eliminationist rhetoric when I see it.

What is going on in Ohio?

The state seems to be a magnet for bad political ideas, and is striving to become the Yankee Texas. Recently, it was the extreme gerrymandering that no one wants to fix (hey, maybe political parties shouldn’t be in charge of defining districts?), and now…this new law.

If you’re unhappy that you lost a contest in high school, just accuse your opponent of being transgender, and demand a thorough investigation. Ohio Republicans will help by demanding that their pants be pulled down to inspect their genitals, followed by an invasive internal inspection, then a blood draw to have their testosterone levels measured, and a cheek swab to check out their chromosomes. FREEDOM! They’re the party that is going to get the intrusive legislation of Big Government off your backs by legislating that your school can insist on ad hoc genital, hormone, and chromosome inspections, all in the name of protecting women’s sports.

Yeah, that’s exactly what women athletes have been demanding, that others can request gynecological exams at will.

CFI disappoints me again, as expected

William had to go and remind me that CFI still exists. I used to have to roll my eyes at Ron Lindsay’s editorials, but now that Robyn Blumner is in charge, they’ve gotten even worse. Take a look at their latest: Identitarianism is incompatible with humanism. I agree with the title! But we immediately run into some problems. She starts by defining her terms (good), but her definition is insane.

Identitarian: A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. (Source: Urban Dictionary)

Wait, what? Her source is Urban Dictionary? That might be find for some obscure slang, but not for a topic that a presumable rationalist is about to jump headlong into with an op-ed. Who are the people she’s addressing here? I’m confused already.

If we take a small step upwards and look at the definition on Wikipedia, it’s radically different.

The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a pan-European nationalist, far-right political ideology asserting the right of European ethnic groups and white peoples to Western culture and territories claimed to belong exclusively to them. Originating in France as Les Identitaires (“The Identitarians”), with its youth wing Generation Identity, the movement expanded to other European countries during the early 21st century. Building on ontological ideas of the German Conservative Revolution, its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, who are considered the main ideological sources of the movement.

Identitarians promote concepts such as pan-European nationalism, localism, ethnopluralism, remigration, or the Great Replacement, and they are generally opposed to globalisation, multiculturalism, Islamization and extra-European immigration. Influenced by New Right metapolitics, they do not seek direct electoral results, but rather to provoke long-term social transformations and eventually achieve cultural hegemony and popular adhesion to their ideas.

Some Identitarians explicitly espouse ideas of xenophobia and racialism, but most limit their public statements to more docile language. Strongly opposed to cultural mixing, they promote the preservation of homogeneous ethno-cultural entities, generally to the exclusion of extra-European migrants and descendants of immigrants. In 2019, the Identitarian Movement was classified by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as right-wing extremist.

By the way, it begins with an important note: “Not to be confused with Identity politics.”

Anyway, that’s what I associate with the word Identitarian, far right nationalism and ethnocentrism. Not whatever she found on Urban Dictionary. And then she starts writing, and it’s clear what she’s really targeting: it’s those danged Wokeists again, who are not Identitarians, who oppose Identitarianism, who think Identitarians are racists and fascists.

Here’s who she’s whining about.

Today, there is a subpart of humanists, identitarians, who are suspicious of individuals and their freedoms. They do not want a free society if it means some people will use their freedom to express ideas with which they disagree. They see everything through a narrow affiliative lens of race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic category and seek to shield groups that they see as marginalized by ostensible psychic harms inflicted by the speech of others.

This has given rise to a corrosive cultural environment awash in controversial speakers being shouted down on college campuses; even liberal professors and newspaper editors losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; the cancellation of great historical figures for being men of their time; and a range of outlandish claims of microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and other crimes against current orthodoxy.

Oh. You know, these people who hate freedom (and are probably also ugly and smell bad) don’t exist. There are people who object when some people promote objectionable ideas. The humanists I know with ‘radical’ ideas about justice, for instance, don’t see simple discrete categories that deserve special protection, they see everyone as unique, with variations that ought to be respected and not judged through the lens of “good” and “bad” or “superior” and “inferior”, and insist that no one deserves to be singled out with a simplistic label. Everything about culture and experience and biology contributes to identity, and you don’t get to erase it. Blumner is taking the familiar “I don’t see color” claim of the privileged and trying to white every variation out.

Humanism should not reduce everyone to generic plastic people. It should recognize the variety of social forces that shape us all and make us each different. That’s not identitarianism, it’s a basic recognition of the diversity of human experience. She should have ended the essay with this:

There are a couple of tells in her complaint. losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; who is she to decide what is a tiny slight? Some of those slights are long historical slanders that have deeply harmed people! men of their time; there’s a poisonous phrase, suggesting that it was OK for slavers, for instance, to oppress and torture other human beings because, well, everyone else was doing it. There are humanist principles that are the next best thing to universal, and ‘treat others as you would want to be treated’ is one of them, and once, I would have thought, central to humanist thinking. And then, current orthodoxy. Is the status quo and orthodoxy something atheists and humanists necessarily support?

Then, who are the victims of this corrosive cultural environment? Name them. Give specific examples. As it stands, this is just bad essay writing, showing that she’s afraid if she did get specific, someone might track down the examples and find that the slights weren’t so tiny, that other men and women of their time were quite vocal about the wrongs they were doing, or that the microaggressions were severe enough that everyone should know better. And she’s right to be afraid, because she does name one person, and her motivations are clear.

Good people with humanist hearts have been pilloried if they don’t subscribe to every jot and tittle of the identitarian gospel. A prime example is the decision last year by the American Humanist Association (AHA) to retract its 1996 award to Richard Dawkins as Humanist of the Year. The man who has done more than anyone alive to advance evolutionary biology and the public’s understanding of that science, who has brought the light of atheism to millions of people, and whose vociferous opposition to Donald Trump and Brexit certainly must have burnished his liberal cred became radioactive because of one tweet on transgender issues that the AHA didn’t like.

Oh, yes, keep in mind that Robyn Blumner was appointed to her position by Richard Dawkins, and that she is the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Conflict of interest much?

It was more than one tweet, and it exposed that he had a bigoted perspective on those transgender issues. It is correct that the American Humanist Association didn’t like the idea of having given a distinguished award to a bigot, and one who has gone on to consistently take the wrong side in every matter of trans rights. He just recently got together with Jordan Peterson in a mutual back-patting session to say that he “totally agrees” with him that those transgenders are oppressing good wealthy white cis-het men like themselves. That wasn’t some trivial slip of the tongue, it’s what Dawkins actively believes and promotes, so why should AHA ignore an ethical violation like that?

But then, Blumner, and by association, CFI, have a crude and biased understanding of gender issues themselves. The clue is in the image they chose to illustrate the essay.

Get it? It would be unnatural to plug your VGA port and a USB cable together. Used to illustrate an article defending the primitive and simplistic views of a man on gender issues. The subtext is not very sub.

She might as well have illustrated it with this.

I was silent

Could he look more like a sleazy dirtbag? Maybe that’s what they mean by “authentic.”

To make excuses for myself, it was a court case, and my perspective wouldn’t have made a difference — I’d have just been one of the thousands or more yammering on the internet about a trial. I’d been through this before, in the OJ Simpson case, where the cacophony of noise did not contribute to justice, but almost certainly skewed the fickle court of public opinion in unfavorable ways.

I’m speaking of the Amber Heard trial, which was decided yesterday in favor of Johnny Depp. I’ve avoided news of the case because enough snippets had leaked through to leave me sickened. On YouTube and social media, it was made clear that Depp was the affable rogue who made light of Heard’s case; Heard, on the other hand, was the conniving sociopath who could turn on the waterworks at an instant’s notice, and then, moments later, revert to stone-faced heartless bitch. Obviously, she was lying. Obviously, Captain Jack Sparrow was a misunderstood rascal.

Except…whenever I watched a clip of the trial, what I saw was a woman in pain, controlling herself because she didn’t want to play into the public perception of women as hysterical, while Depp was just an asshole. Even more poisonous was the Depp camp, which seemed to consist largely of the usual bros who were gleeful about an opportunity to shriek insults at a woman while not getting the usual social opprobrium. It was a repulsive spectacle. While I averted my eyes and avoided the trial news as much as I could, Rebecca Watson dug deeper, and I agree fully with her take.

Now the case has been settled. Depp won. This is going to have serious consequences.

…on Wednesday after a jury in Fairfax, Virginia, found Amber Heard guilty of defaming Depp in a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, in which she identified herself as a public face of domestic abuse survivors, without explicitly naming Depp. Despite presenting photos of her injuries, video recordings of Depp’s meltdowns, and witness testimony supporting her claims of abuse, Depp was awarded $10 million plus $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was also awarded $2 million for winning one point in her countersuit.

But in truth, the highly publicized trial was decided in the court of public opinion weeks ago. As it played out over the last few weeks, with people on social media overwhelmingly aligning with the beloved Pirates of the Caribbean star, millions of stans and even brands and celebrities have excoriated Heard and accused her of fabricating the allegations against Depp, causing hashtags like #AmberTurd and #JusticeForJohnnyDepp to trend worldwide.

“This is basically the end of MeToo,” Dr. Jessica Taylor, a psychologist, forensic psychology Ph.D., and author of two books on misogyny and abuse, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the death of the whole movement.”

As the verdict came in, sexual assault survivors expressed their disappointment with the decision, even if they were not surprised by it. “I don’t think it’s unexpected. But it’s horrible,” says one survivor, who herself faced a defamation claim after coming forward against her own abuser (and requested her name be withheld for legal reasons). She says the claim was dropped, but that watching Heard be dragged through the mud during the trial brought back memories of her own experience, which she says was traumatic and led her to consider suicide.

“I feel really glad to think my case didn’t go ahead. And stupid to think I could have won it,” she says. “Men always win.”

And I kept my mouth shut throughout. I’m always disappointing myself.

Rebecca didn’t mention the one case that impressed me with her point, that I mentioned at the beginning: the “trial of the century”, the OJ Simpson murder trial, which OJ won, because “Men always win.” Even after brutally chopping up Nicole Brown Simpson, he got off.

Well, sort of.

We all knew he did it, and his behavior after the trial confirmed it. His career in movies was dead, and you can’t even watch his old movies anymore without cringing deeply. I’m sure not going to watch a Naked Gun movie, ever again. It’s a similar situation now; knowing that Johnny Depp is a wife-beating arrogant dudebro means I’m not going to ever be able to watch a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, or any movie starring Depp, without feeling a little bit of disgust at the main character.

Not that that could be the slightest consolation to Amber Heard or especially Nicole Brown Simpson. At least Heard has escaped without being stabbed to death. This verdict makes it a little less likely that other victims of domestic abuse will get away with their lives.

Slippery slope to stupid

This woman is deeply, painfully stupid.


She seems to think there is some biological trend. There isn’t. Heterosexuality will always be common, and so will homosexuality.

Except, here’s the future liberals want: everyone is free to choose whom to love without shame or punishment. Kids are free to explore who they want to be, without their church or the government dictating which subset of the populace they are allowed to form loving relationships with; boys can love boys, boys can love girls, girls can love girls, girls can love boys, boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and if they don’t find fulfillment in sexual relationships, they can do something else. All the people who get pregnant will be those who want babies. Families will come in all flavors, and no one will find it at all unusual, let alone want to tell other people how they are supposed to live.

I think it would be absolutely wonderful if no one were “straight” anymore, in the Marjorie Taylor Greene sense of the word: compelled to live in a narrow little box, no matter what their heart tells them. That does not imply that heterosexuality will be discouraged or punished, although the MJTs of the world will always project and think that what they do to minorities is what will happen to them.

What kind of sicko goes to a Bill Maher show?

(I apologize in advance. The previous post was all about cat vomit, and now this one is all about Bill Maher. It’s all getting worse and worse, isn’t it?)

Imagine you are a liberal, of the waffling center right type. You’ve got a good middle class job, maybe you’re in management or you own a tire store. You don’t like Trump at all, because he’s rocking the boat and you really, really want the boat to stay on its current course. You also really dislike AOC and those far left extremists for the same reason. You like to watch Bill Maher because he dresses like a well-off banker, looks like a Republican, talks like a Republican, but reassures you frequently that he’s really liberal, just like you. He invites guests on his show from a wide spectrum of political perspectives–well, the fun ones are always right-wing buffoons– which is how you think “balance” works. The status quo is in good hands with Maher. He also isn’t very bright, just like you, so you can trust him to normalize all your vague notions about how the world works.

You score tickets to his show. You know what’s expected of you — you’re going to whoop and holler at his jokes, which is easy to do: when he pauses and looks smugly at the audience, that’s when you laugh, even if what he just said isn’t particularly clever or insightful. You’re in luck tonight, because he delivers a monologue catering to your vague unease about sexuality. You get to watch the old fart mock the queers, in the name of his version of science.

He gets off with a great start, playing on the audience’s ignorance. There are more openly gay people now than there were in previous generations, an increasing number of Americans are willing to identify as LGBTQ now. Invoke the slippery slope fallacy: therefore, we’ll all be gay in 2053.

Long pause. Smile smarmily. Audience goes wild.

I’m just saying, when things change this much, this fast, people are allowed to ask what’s up with that?

Yeah, Bill, but we know you won’t ask the right questions. The way things used to be are assumed to be right and proper; don’t question the evidence of generations of oppression, just suggest that there’s something wrong with people nowadays being comfortable with who they are, and imply that the numbers suggest that there’s a mass conversion going on.

His next ‘joke’: the ACLU said that abortion bans disproportionately harm certain people. He then borrows the outrage of Fox News and Helen Lewis by claiming that the list left off women. It didn’t. Here’s the tweet:

Uh, Bill: every single one of those bullet points is about the effect on people. Women are people. So are trans men. The list is about groups of people who are most affected by the bans, and the point is that wealthy Republican white women aren’t going to feel the pain, but all these groups that are already marginalized by society will. The clue is that this is an “urgent matter of racial and economic justice.” Abortion rights are human rights, you know.

He’s reciting TERFy biases when he claims that the ACLU won’t use the word “woman”. They do. They also point out that the abortion bans have broad effects that will harm plenty of other people. Bill looks at that list and somehow, annoyingly uses it as an excuse to chide gay people and say, not everything is about you. Yeah, Bill, we can read, unlike you.

Can he get even more TERFy? Of course he can. “The children!” he cries. They’re experimenting on children! His source: Abigail Shrier, in Irreversible Damage. We all knew he was a quack from his bizarre opinions about vaccines, but I guess he’s even more deeply into quackery now.

Are we done yet? Nope. His next joke is to chastise the NYC pride march, because they’ve selected 4 trans people and a lesbian as their parade marshals; where are the gay men, he querulously asks. Has he considered the fact that you can be trans and gay at the same time? No, of course not. The NYC Pride March has explained their criteria:

“At a time when LGBTQIA+ people are under increased attack, the NYC Pride March is a beacon of hope and community,” Manek said in an emailed statement. “Our grand marshals for this year truly embody the spirit of the theme for NYC Pride 2022, ‘Unapologetically Us.’ They have embraced their identities and used their platforms to help members of our community truly love and live their truth without fear or shame.”

“Gets the approval of a TERF named Bill Maher” isn’t one of them.

Then he gets to echo Shrier and claim that we’re seeing more trans people because it’s trendy. They’re just doing it to shock and challenge their parents. They’re doing it for the “likes”. If we don’t admit that some places have more LGBT people because it’s trendy, then it’s not a serious science-based discussion — hearing Maher claim the mantle of being “science-based” is rather revolting.

The rest is all one-liners based on assumptions that no one takes gender reassignment surgery seriously, with accompanying guffaws from the idiots in the audience.

I do have to address one more point though. This one:

If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.

I see that “science-based” Bill Maher takes genetic determinism for granted. What do you mean, “all biological”? Culture also shapes biology (and vice versa). The reason it is regional is that there are cultural differences as well as biological biases. The most likely explanation is that the Midwest is more conservative and is shaming kids. Surprise, Bill: more open societies aren’t pressuring kids to become trans — I think you’d be hard pressed to find a single instance of parents forcing their kids to be gay or trans, but you’ll find plenty of conservatives threatening to disown or even kill children who don’t conform to their cis and heterosexual pattern. But Maher isn’t calling them out — that’s his audience of yahoos.

The science-based position is that your sexual preferences and identity is the result of an interplay between genetics and environment. No one claims it is all biological, but that you can’t separate biology from culture and experience.

I’ve long accepted that Maher is a bigoted ignoramus, but what bothers me most is that laugh track of an audience howling at “jokes” that are nothing more than prejudice with a smirk, and those frequent cuts to his panel guests who are smiling and laughing at his horrid punch lines. That’s what I’d expect from an Adam Corolla, but jeezus, Donna Brazile, why did you accept the invitation to appear on this disgrace of a show?

I am unsurprised by the allegations against Elon Musk

If you haven’t seen the news in the last few days, I’ll fill you in: Elon Musk has been accused of sexual harassment.

The flight attendant told her friend that the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder asked her to come to his room during a flight in late 2016 “for a full body massage,” the declaration says. When she arrived, the attendant found that Musk “was completely naked except for a sheet covering the lower half of his body.” During the massage, the declaration says, Musk “exposed his genitals” and then “touched her and offered to buy her a horse if she would ‘do more,’ referring to the performance of sex acts.”

The offer to buy her a horse is an unusual detail, but apparently the flight attendant rode horses when she wasn’t working. It’s not as if Musk buys horses for every woman he propositions.

Of course, denies everything.

“I have a challenge to this liar who claims their friend saw me ‘exposed’ — describe just one thing, anything at all (scars, tattoos, …) that isn’t known by the public. She won’t be able to do so, because it never happened,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted early Friday morning.

Now that raises another question: does he even have any distinguishing scars or tattoos that someone would notice? It’s a mark of vanity that he would think his nethers are so distinctive that anyone would recognize him.

But OK, it really is a she said, he said sort of situation. So far, it’s just an accusation, and I’m not seeing the evidence. Except there is one thing that I’d like to see him explain away: the payout.

In 2018, after becoming convinced that her refusal to accept Musk’s proposal had diminished her opportunities at SpaceX, the attendant hired a California employment lawyer and sent a complaint to the company’s human resources department detailing the episode. Around that time, the attorney’s firm contacted the friend and asked her to prepare the declaration corroborating the claims.

The attendant’s complaint was resolved quickly after a session with a mediator that Musk personally attended. The matter never reached a court of law or an arbitration proceeding. In November 2018, Musk, SpaceX and the flight attendant entered into a severance agreement granting the attendant a $250,000 payment in exchange for a promise not to sue over the claims.

The agreement also included restrictive non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses that bar the attendant from ever discussing the severance payment or disclosing any information of any kind about Musk and his businesses, including SpaceX and Tesla.

Wait wait wait. She was concerned that her refusal to accommodate Musk’s sexual demands was going to affect her prospects in the company, and her complaint was very quickly addressed in a meeting with lawyers and the billionaire president of the company by cutting a quarter million dollar check? This is bizarre and damning. He folded fast and handed out an awful lot of money for ‘just an accusation’. Is this routine policy at SpaceX?

It also means there has to be a record somewhere of a payout by SpaceX and a bank deposit by the accuser. Let’s see the evidence.

Although there is also the troubling fact that Free Speech Warrior Musk made the flight attendant sign an NDA. How about waiving that, Mr Musk, and letting freedom ring?

Another argument Musk makes in his defense is that this is the only accusation made, and that his record is clean, which is a point in his favor. However, I wonder what effect his ability to drop $250,000 (or a horse!) on an accuser to silence them with legal shackles plays on that absence. Will success in breaking that NDA lead to a new collection of accusers to step forward? That’s what happened with #MeToo, you know.

Why were journalists so slow to pick up on the hate festering here?

I’ve bumped into “Libs of TikTok” a few times on social media, and was so thoroughly repulsed that my response was to immediately block them. It was good to see the author of all that hate, Chaya Raichik, exposed in the Washington Post.

Just four months after getting started, Libs of TikTok got its big break: Joe Rogan started promoting the account to the millions of listeners of his hit podcast. He mentioned it several times on the show in August, then again in late September. “Libs of TikTok is one of the greatest f—ing accounts of all time,” he said. With his seal of approval, Raichik’s following skyrocketed.

Libs of TikTok gained more prominence throughout the end of last year, cementing its spot in the right-wing media outrage cycle. Its attacks on the LGBTQ+ community also escalated. By January, Raichik’s page was leaning hard into “groomer” discourse, calling for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be “fired on the spot.”

Her anti-trans tweets went especially viral. She called on her followers to contact schools that were allowing “boys in the girls bathrooms” and pushed the false conspiracy theory that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats. She also purported that adults who teach children about LGBTQ+ identities are “abusive,” that being gender-nonconforming or an ally to the LGBTQ+ community is a “mental illness,” and referred to schools as “government run indoctrination camps” for the LGBTQ+ community.

You can see why I would insta-block her — the combination of hate and dishonesty was more than enough. That passage also explains why I don’t listen to Joe Rogan. He’s part of the same ugly mess. “one of the greatest f—ing accounts of all time” was openly anti-LGBT, with an endless parade of posts framing the existence of gay people as a great evil.

It also wasn’t that hard to discover.

“Finding these “Shaya Ray” and “Chaya Raichik” identities for Libs is OSINT 101-level stuff. The shallowest indexing of the Internet Archive’s Twitter Stream Grab turns them up. Antifascist researchers shouldn’t be the only ones doing this work,” Brown wrote.

He called it a “failure of US journalism” that “an anonymous hate account can shape a far-right national movement, influence legislation in several states, etc., and (as far as I can tell) nobody has tried to find out who is behind it,” before it became public knowledge that Lorenz was working on a story about the identity of the Libs of Tik Tok’s creator.

But then I see lots of right-wingers blowing up over the fact that a journalist, Taylor Lorenz, would dare to investigate the latest font of ignorance and hate. I didn’t get it. That was her job! You can’t object to the general idea of investigative journalism.

But of course you can. Alex Pareene explains their objective.

If you are attempting to persuade this creep’s defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep’s identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error. These people on this ascendant right don’t just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don’t just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don’t just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly. They don’t want that and don’t like it and are endeavoring to end it as a common practice. You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project.

This new right fundamentally doesn’t want “newsgathering” to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account, everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.

That’s Tucker Carlson, and the fortunately late Andrew Breitbart, and Rupert Murdoch, and the rationale behind all of Fox News, and OANN, and NewsMax. They don’t do journalism. They try to destroy it.

First, kill all the dictionaries

Jeremy David Hanson has been arrested. His crime? He threatened to murder a dictionary.

According to the criminal complaint, between Oct. 2 and Oct. 8, 2021, Springfield-based Merriam-Webster, Inc. received various threatening messages and comments demonstrating bias against specific gender identities submitted through its website’s “Contact Us” page and in the comments section on its webpages that corresponded to the word entries for “Girl” and “Woman.” Authorities later identified the user as Hanson. As a result of the threats, Merriam-Webster closed its offices in Springfield and New York City for approximately five business days.

Specifically, it is alleged that on Oct. 2, 2021, Hanson used the handle “@anonYmous” to post the following comment on the dictionary’s website definition of “female”: “It is absolutely sickening that Merriam-Webster now tells blatant lies and promotes anti-science propaganda. There is no such thing as ‘gender identity.’ The imbecile who wrote this entry should be hunted down and shot.”

Hanson also allegedly sent the following threatening message via the website’s “Contact Us” page: “You [sic] headquarters should be shot up and bombed. It is sickening that you have caved to the cultural Marxist, anti-science tranny [sic] agenda and altered the definition of ‘female’ as part of the Left’s efforts to corrupt and degrade the English language and deny reality. You evil Marxists should all be killed. It would be poetic justice to have someone storm your offices and shoot up the place, leaving none of you commies alive.”

It is further alleged that on Oct. 8, 2021, Hanson posted another threatening comment on the dictionary’s website and a threatening message via the “Contact Us” page that threatened to “bomb your offices for lying and creating fake…”.

This is where gender-critical fanaticism takes you. They’ve convinced themselves that science is anti-science and reject the actual understanding of science to claim an authority they don’t have. There is most definitely such a thing as gender identity — I suspect that Hanson identifies very strongly as a man.

So now he wants to kill people because he thinks dictionary definitions are powerful and magical and that, rather than describing how people use words, they actually create the meaning. Somebody needs to explain that murdering dictionary writers won’t change the meaning of words. I don’t think the Merriam-Webster dictionary entry is particularly comprehensive or thorough, but I don’t think that bombing offices will affect how people understand “female”.

What do you call your hoohah/diddly-dingle/whatchamacallit?

I just ran across this jaw-dropping thread on Reddit, where medical personnel talk about the most uneducated thing they’d heard from patients. The whole thread is horrifying, but one story struck me as particularly relevant to modern politics. It’s about teaching children what to call their genitals.

I used to teach genito-urinary exams.

Med student asks this hillbilly guy to lift his penis out of the way so she can examine his testes.

“My what?”

“Your genitalia,” she says. “Your penis.”

“My what?”

At this point I intervene. I point to his crotch. “What do you call that thing there?”

“Thomas.”

“Well, get Thomas outta the way, would ya?”

EDIT: Since people are asking.

  1. To do a testicular exam right really does take two hands. Also, we ask the patient to lift it out of the way himself because it gives him a sense of control over what can be a very embarrassing procedure. There’s a lot of the steps in GU and DR (digito-rectal) exams that are mostly just there to establish patient comfort, not to give meaningful information.
  2. This is not the only time I’ve asked someone what they called their genitals because they did not recognize the proper names. Most people are only taught euphemisms for their genitals growing up. Once upon a time, it was not discussed in school for reasons of propriety. It remains an anatomical grey zone for a lot of people – they know their thumb is their thumb because their momma called it a thumb, but their momma never told em what to call the thing between their legs.
  3. Which, BTW, time for a PSA: teach your children the proper names for their genitals early on and make sure they are comfortable discussing their genitals frankly. Which sounds weird. But when their crotch stays a gray zone, associated with embarrassment, then they are (1) less likely to examine it for irregularities, (2) less likely to tell someone in a timely manner if they find irregularities, (3) less able to communicate exactly what’s wrong, and (4) less likely/able to communicate it if an adult touches them inappropriately.

You know what a Republican would call that? Grooming.

Here’s another response.

ref: #3. This. Source: I am a detective in Crimes Against Children. When a child is interviewed and they use the non proper name for their penis or vagina it means the interviewer then has to spend time clarifying this with this children and making the child more uncomfortable having to discuss it. Also, if children understand that these are normal body parts they will be more willing to learn about body safety and won’t view it as simply a “bad part”. This makes your child safer.

Groomer!

Preschool Teacher here: If you tell your kids it’s a bad spot, they’ll think they’re bad if something happens, and think they’ll be the ones in trouble. Seriously, don’t fuck your kids up because you’re too embarrassed to say penis and vagina, you dips.

Oh my god, a pre-school teacher talking to students about their genitals? GROOOOOMER!.

Jesus, I hate this timeline.