His heart’s desire!

Jordan Peterson announced a while back that he was leaving Twitter for good. Strangely, he was back to posting frantically only a few hours after that.

You’d think a psychologist would be able to recognize an addiction when he sees one.

Anyway, now Twitter has suspended his account. Over this:

I’ve had people try to tell me that Peterson is not transphobic –he’s just highly principled and dedicated to the ideals of free speech. That tweet was just hate and disgust and contempt for others. So much for admirable principles.

He’s been off Twitter for a couple of days. His daughter is begging Elon Musk to help him. He might be able to console himself with his new ticket to the right-wing gravy train.

Peterson, who joined the staff of conservative podcast outlet Daily Wire on Thursday, is infamous for his anti-trans stance. He once claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that being transgender is a result of a “contagion” and similar to “satanic ritual abuse.”

The TERFs have science on their side!

A remarkable letter sent to Julie Bindel congratulating her on her ‘service’.

The remarkable bit is this paragraph:

The usual number scientists talk about is 200,000 years for modern humans, give or take. She’s only off by about 2500 times.

She beat the creationists, who claim humans have only been around for 6000 years, so they go the other way, but are only off by about 33 times. Yeah, they also claim that the whole dang planet has only been around for 6000 years, rather than 4.5 billion, so they do get somethings even more wrong.

What’s cute about her 500 million year guess is that puts us back in the Cambrian, and the basal state for chordates (actually, for all animals) was almost certainly hermaphroditic, back then.

It’s never actually about women’s sports

The Washington Post ran an Katie Ledecky, a swimming champion. She looks impressive.

In truth, there’s no debate. The greatest D.C.-area athlete in history — by far — is Bethesda’s Katie Ledecky.

She is the greatest women’s swimmer in history — also not a subject for debate. She added to her legacy this past week at the world championships in Budapest, winning gold medals in the 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyle. She added a fourth gold in the 4×200 freestyle relay, charging from behind on the third leg to give the United States the lead for good. The 200 is Ledecky’s “weakest” race, yet she produced the fastest split among the 32 swimmers competing in the relay final.

The article is all about her and her abilities and how successful she has been. Twitter addresses it a little differently.

On the one hand, there are the people who look at her and announce that she is trans. She isn’t.

Then there are the bigots who know she’s AFAB, but are so wedded to the idea of trans women’s inherent physical superiority that they’re sure she couldn’t compete against a “biological male”.

No, Lia Thomas (a trans woman) does not perform anywhere near the exceptionally high level of Katie Ledecky.

There is a lot of back and forth along these lines. There are apparently many ignorant “gender criticals” who are happy to embarrass themselves.

Katelyn Burns is collecting primo examples of this behavior.

These people are shameless idiots. The ones I feel sympathy for are Katie Ledecky, whose victories are being belittled by dumb ideologues, and Lia Thomas, whose abilities are respectable, but she has the pressure of being inappropriately compared to a world-class gold medalist.

Leave them alone, you pathetic wankers.

Capitalism wins!

It’s impressive that Lyft can profit off women getting raped in their cars. Lyft just paid out $25 million in a lawsuit that accused them of failing to protect passengers from predatory drivers. You might assume that money went to the victims, but no.

According to Alison Turkos, one of the survivor-plaintiffs suing Lyft, neither she nor any of the other survivors harmed by Lyft are receiving a dime. She told Jezebel in a phone interview that she fears people who see Thursday’s news will read “$25 million” and “settlement” and conclude that Lyft is paying survivors.

It’s not.

In 2017, Turkos was held at gun-point and kidnapped by a Lyft driver, taken to an abandoned park and gang-raped by him and several men. Now, Lyft is paying its ultra-rich shareholders $25 million. They say they were the ones who were harmed—because Lyft cost them money by mishandling sexual assault allegations. Lyft did not immediately respond to Jezebel’s request for comment for this piece.

Holding shares in Lyft is an investment in profiting off rape.

The detritus of GamerGate is still washing up on our Western shores

What kind of attitude goes with a Silicon Valley tech-bro crypto-dude? You probably won’t be surprised by this:

Jesse Powell, a founder and the chief executive of Kraken, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, recently asked his employees, “If you can identify as a sex, can you identify as a race or ethnicity?”

He also questioned their use of preferred pronouns and led a discussion about “who can refer to another person as the N word.”

And he told workers that questions about women’s intelligence and risk appetite compared with men’s were “not as settled as one might have initially thought.”

Of course, being a pretentious libertarian, Mr Powell has written a philosophical manifesto for his company.

This month, Mr. Powell unveiled a 31-page culture document outlining Kraken’s “libertarian philosophical values” and commitment to “diversity of thought,” and told employees in a meeting that he did not believe they should choose their own pronouns. The document and a recording of the meeting were obtained by The Times.

He talks about valuing “diversity of thought,” but at the same time he has an “ideological purity test” for his employees. He does not seem to be aware of the contradiction, or that his company is no better than Answers in Genesis in this regard.

He also insisted that some workers subscribe to Bitcoin’s philosophical underpinnings. “We have this ideological purity test,” Mr. Powell said about the company’s hiring process on a 2018 crypto podcast. “A test of whether you’re kind of aligned with the vision of Bitcoin and crypto.”

Here’s where I get really annoyed: to defend his argument that women have inferior brains than men (because they prefer real cash over crypto junk!), he pulls out a Shapiroesque claim that he’s just talking about science and biology.

“Being offended is not being harmed,” Mr. Powell responded. “A discussion about science, biology, attempting to determine facts of the world cannot be harmful.”

I call bullshit. I hope his whole company gets sucked into a vortex of destruction as the crypto market implodes.

Would you want this guy to influence your children?

I’m curious to know which of the two individuals below you might think would be a more traumatic sight for children visiting a library story hour.

The drag queen?

The Proud Boy?

If you need a little more information to come to conclusion, what the fuck is wrong with you? Here’s the context, though.

A group of men displaying Proud Boy colors stormed a Drag Queen Story Hour at the San Lorenzo Library on Saturday afternoon shouting homophobic and transphobic threats after anti-LGBTQ online activist Chaya Raichik – who runs the anti-LGBTQ LibsofTikTok account – posted information about the event online.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said that police responded to a report of a disturbance at the library at around 1:30 p.m. and discovered five men “described as members of the Proud Boys organization,” “extremely aggressive with a threatening violent demeanor causing people to fear for their safety.”

Right. So in order to “protect” the children, they charged into a children’s story hour to disrupt what should have been a quiet, friendly event with threats and abuse.

Libs of TikTok, which encourages this kind of hate, still has a Twitter account…and is also on Facebook, Parler, Truth Social, Rumble, Gab, GETTR, Instagram, and YouTube. All the social media sites participate in encouraging this kind of frenzy of conflict.

The curse of the middle-aged white man

Pity me! I’m part of the most oppressed demographic in the world! I know because my fellow middle-aged white men tell me they’re suffering.

Look! Here’s James Patterson!

James Patterson, a best-selling author with an estimated net worth of $800 million, opened up about how difficult it is for white men to find work in publishing and Hollywood.

The thriller novelist said white male writers experience “another form of racism” in an interview with The Times published Sunday, lamenting the plight of older white males. “What’s that all about?” Patterson mused. “Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.”

It’s so hard to be a mystery writer who churns out formulaic pot-boilers that grace the shelves of every airport bookstore in the country.

And what about Christopher Eccleston?

Christopher Eccleston, star of Doctor Who, Thor: The Dark World, and The Leftovers, said in a new interview that straight white males are “the new pariahs of the industry,” though he also acknowledged that more diversity in film and television is a good thing.

In a conversation with Times Radio (via Deadline), Eccleston noted, “Quite rightly I’m a dinosaur now. I’m white, I’m middle-aged, I’m male, and I’m straight. We are all seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein et al. And I can feel that the opportunities are shrinking, as they should do.”

I love how these articles always set the stage by first telling us how many hundreds of millions of dollars they have or what movies and TV shows they starred in, before quoting their sad little whimpers. You know, this isn’t a case where these people have lost opportunities or are making less money — they’re just finding that now they might have to rub elbows with people who are not middle-aged straight white men. Patterson is correct, it is another form of racism…it’s just that the racist here is himself. Maybe it’s just the same old racism?

If we’re seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein, though, you have to recognize that one reason is that a lot of straight white men enabled him and profited from him and tolerated his behavior.

The right heart, but too few

A small group of women disrupted (in a small way) Joel Osteen’s megachurch protesting their stance on women’s rights.

More of this. The only reason Osteen could ignore it is that there weren’t enough protesters. If you live near one of these hideous, oppressive megachurches, do try to get out now and then and let them know what you think of their ideas. They had 13 activists in the pews, they were kind of swamped out by this gigantic, opulent temple to gullibility.

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.