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.

This super-villain must be stopped

The Kentucky legislature was finally fired up to enact laws to prevent a terrible crime. No, it wasn’t to finally do something about that blight, Answers in Genesis, that is robbing them blind and promoting ignorance — both houses in Kentucky are dominated by Republicans, and that stuff is their stock in trade. What they decided to do was pass a law absolutely prohibiting trans kids from participating in sports. The trans menace must be stopped in its tracks!

In this case, it’s one (1) trans girl in the entirety of the state. Here she is. Her name is Fischer Wells.

I wonder how it feels to have your nefarious plan to play field hockey with your friends foiled by the entire weight of the Kentucky Republican party being brought to bear on you? The governor tried to veto the law, but over a hundred Republicans got together to override the veto. More than a hundred bullies made sure to shut down one trans 13 year old.

They’ve already put up some high hurdles against trans kids, and this is just the final bit of bullying.

Although it’s unclear if other Kentucky trans students are also competing in school sports, even qualifying to play for a school team is extremely difficult due to burdensome requirements imposed by the Kentucky High School Athletic Association (KHSAA). The KHSAA guidelines mandate that trans athletes must undergo gender-confirmation surgery prior to participating on sports teams that align with their gender, which bars the vast majority of youth from competition.

Kick those trans kids while they’re down, Republicans! You must be so proud.

How do people actually listen to Ben Shapiro?

The Gay Agenda? Or the Disney Agenda?

I saw an ad with Ben Shapiro in it on YouTube. I was quick, I only saw 5 seconds of it before I clicked it off. But wait, what was he complaining about? Disney? Disney, mega-corporation, monopolist, and enforcer of traditional values, is a radical leftist organization? That high-pitched, rapid-fire, nasal voice had succeeded in drilling into my brain. I had to look it up.

So I read a Shapiro op-ed.

In late March, reporter Christopher Rufo…

Yikes, I only got six words in before I had to use the puke bucket next to my desk. This is going to be hard. I’ll try again.

In late March, reporter Christopher Rufo released footage of top Disney employees vowing to inject their radical LGBTQ agenda into children’s programming.

Disney producer Latoya Raveneau told an all-hands meeting that her team works to push a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” in programming aimed at kids and sought to add “queerness” to such content. Disney corporate president Karey Burke announced that she was the mother of “one transgender child and one pansexual child” and that she would try to achieve a quota system whereby half of all Disney characters would be LGBTQ or people of color. Disney diversity and inclusion manager Vivian Ware stated that Disney’s beloved theme parks would be eliminating any mention of “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls.”

Oh, really? You mean Disney is trying to broaden their reach and convince gay people to spend money on their product? I thought Shapiro loved capitalism! That’s all this is! Diversity pays, you know.

OK, look, I got through a whole two paragraphs of Shapiro. Let’s take a break and look up this terrible “queerness” video, and also get refreshed with the happy enthusiasm of Latoya Raveneau.

That’s on the channel of a right-winger and the comments are full of people talking about “groomers”, but ignore that. This is a Disney-branded promotional video. Shapiro talks about this as if it is a deep dark secret that Ace Reporter Rufo broke to the public, but it’s no big deal. It’s something Disney was proud of. What’s the problem?

It’s an opportunity for Shapiro to ramp up the hysteria.

This prompted a well-deserved firestorm for the Mouse House. Disney has long been left-wing on social issues — but in the aftermath of ginned-up controversy surrounding Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which protects small children from indoctrination on sexual orientation and gender identity, an angry coterie of employees pushed management to signal fealty even harder. So Disney’s brass did, announcing that they opposed the Florida bill and then turning over the company to its most radical contingent.

For indoctrination on sexual orientation and gender identity, read “teaching tolerance and acceptance”. Shapiro hates that. It’s not radical for people to reject the screaming homophobia of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, it’s actually a minimally humane position to take. Also, the “Happiest Place on Earth” would kind of like to avoid being identified as the “hatefulest place in America”, a title Florida and Texas are vying for.

The Left, caught with its hand in the kiddie jar, immediately swiveled and accused the Right of initiating this culture war. Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times lamented that she felt terrible for Raveneau, who, after all, was just “step[ping] up to defend the company’s queer friendliness, only to become a national object of right-wing fury and disgust,” and whose injection of LGBTQ propaganda into children’s content was “sweetly anodyne.”

Yeah. Watch the video. She was talking about allowing two cartoon characters of the same sex kiss in the background. It is pretty anodyne stuff, unless you’re one of those frothing fanatics who gets upset at the sight of two men possibly holding hands. Disney is not ever going to promote, say, a line of gay porn children’s cartoons.

For decades, the social Left has made inroads by arguing that they simply want to be left alone. The Right, by contrast, has argued that the Left’s agenda is far broader, that the Left demands cultural celebration of its sexual mores and that it will stop at nothing to remake society in order to achieve its narcissistic goals. Disney’s latest foray into the culture wars proves that the Right was correct, that the Left’s stated agenda was a lie and that its “not-at-all-secret” agenda targeted the most vulnerable Americans.

Disney shows no signs of backing away from the extremism its all-hands meeting unmasked before the world. And other corporations are following Disney’s lead, pushing wild Left advocacy instead of catering to the broadest possible market.

For narcissistic goals, read “request that you stop killing gay and trans people”. The most vulnerable Americans are the kids who don’t fit the conservative norm, who are bullied and abused, sometimes rejected by their families, treated as evil by people like Shapiro. Normalizing being different is not an attempt to recruit more people into a gay lifestyle — you can be whoever you want to be, which used to be an American ideal — it’s to get the people poisoned by the Shapiroesque mentality to stop harming them.

Society is already diverse, it’s not extremism to recognize that fact, nor is it wild Left advocacy. Cranky ol’ Ben is just going to have to wake up to the reality-based truth that 13% of the population are black, 13% are Hispanic, 7% are openly gay, 9% do not believe in gods, and that they all have a right to pursue happiness in America.

Disney and all those other corporations aren’t being Leftist, they see those percentages as slices of market share that they must absorb. Nothing more. They are steps on the path to total capitalistic domination.

You are meddling with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Shapiro. And also being kind of an ass.

A trans Tory?

A member of parliament, Jamie Wallis, has come out as the first known trans MP.

Jamie Wallis, who was elected in 2019, is the first MP to come out as trans.

The Conservative MP for Bridgend said a man sent pictures to his family and demanded £50,000 in 2020. He said he was raped in a separate incident.

Mr Wallis wrote that after he was raped “things have taken a tumble. I am not ok.”

The MP confirmed that he fled the scene of a car crash two months after he was raped.

A car crash? Wait, what does this have to do with anything?

Mr Wallis was arrested last year on suspicion of driving while unfit, following an incident where a car hit a lamppost at Church Road in Llanblethian, Vale of Glamorgan.

“When I crashed my car on the 28th November I fled the scene. I did so because I was terrified,” he wrote.

The MP said he suffered with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and “I honestly have no idea what I was doing except I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of fear”.

I think this person has problems that have nothing to do with his trans status. Wallis has been a fringe pseudoscientist for a long time, as I pointed out a few years ago. Their only “scientific” publications are with Chandra Wickramasinghe, on panspermia, and are best summarized as uninformed, credulous kookiness. Unfortunately, this means that the Gender Criticals are going to elevate Wallis as representative of trans Bad Science. It’s already happening. I got cited by a homophobe in a long thread on Twitter that is trying to discredit opposition to conversion therapy by pointing out all the other stupid things Wallis believes.

This is a tactic the GCs love: find the rare trans rapist, the weird trans pseudoscientist, the trans activist arrested for jaywalking or whatever, and make them the face of the movement so they can slander the whole group as kooky jaywalking rapists. Never mind all the legitimate, credible biologists who can tell you that sex and gender are more complex than you can imagine, or the law-abiding, thoughtful trans folk who just want to be left alone — it’s all guilt by association. Jamie Wallis is going to be elevated as the face of trans science now, despite the fact that they were recognized as a very silly person for years before they came out, and was never regarded as a particularly credible authority on science at all.

It’s funny how Fred Hoyle was definitely far loonier than Wallis, yet we don’t trot out his cis-het status as evidence that there’s something wrong with all of the normies. Why, it’s almost as if wisdom was totally orthogonal to gender preference!

Republicans defining “woman”

Our own American version of upper class twits

After making such a big deal about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s deferral after being asked, “What is a woman?”, you’d think they’d be prepared with a good answer to the question themselves. They aren’t.

“I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) informed the audience at a GOP event after namechecking Jackson. “This is an easy answer. We’re a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband’s wife.”

That is not a workable definition. It’s actually kind of amazing that anyone in the 21st century would still believe that that old fable is literally true.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define woman, and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.” When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”

Poor slow Josh. He said it didn’t seem complicated, was immediately confronted with a complication. And didn’t know how to answer it. I wonder if there are any women in his district who will notice he just turned them all into “men”?

Some Republicans punted.

“I don’t have anything for you on that,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

“I’m not going to indulge you,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) dodged the question three times in a row, citing her policy of not talking to reporters in Senate hallways ― even though it was Blackburn who made this an issue with Jackson in the first place.

I think there must have been some panicky emails swapped around after that so they would get their story straight, because Blackburn hurried back with an answer.

In a follow-up email to HuffPost, a spokesperson for Blackburn said her definition of a woman is “Two X chromosomes.”

Except not all women have two X chromosomes, and relatively few people have actually had their chromosomes directly examined. It’s not a good criterion, you know? You can’t claim that it’s always been obvious what men and women are, and then base that distinction on a cellular property that was completely unknown until about 120 years ago, and is completely invisible now without a microscopic examination. What were the Victorians doing, just stumbling around guessing who men and women were, bumbling about and accidentally impregnating or getting impregnated?

Here come the parrots (sorry, parrots, you don’t deserve that comparison).

In a written statement, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) offered the same definition as Blackburn: “A woman is born with two X-chromosomes.”

Of course, Ted Cruz had to bungle it.

Cruz, when asked, immediately answered that a woman is “an adult female human.”

He denied that he had recently looked it up in a dictionary.

“I just happen to speak English,” Cruz said, adding: “A Homo sapien with two X chromosomes.”

It’s Homo sapiens, you doltish imitation of a human made from a sack full of cockroaches. I’m not surprised that you would get that wrong.

Cue more circular definitions.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) shouted his definition of a woman before slipping into a Senate elevator: “An adult female of the human species.”

Define “female”.

Some people didn’t get the memo.

“I have more of a traditional view of what a woman is,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).

What is that?

“My wife.”

It’s always nice to give the Ralph Wiggums a chance to speak up.

The prize for the most confused Republican answer has to go to Lindsey Graham, though.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said a woman is simply someone who is “biologically a woman,” adding that he thinks most Americans can figure out who’s a woman and who’s a man.

“The birds and the bees stuff ― it’s been a while, but I think I remember the general gist of the differences,” Graham said. “To have a hard time answering that question is kind of odd to me.”

A woman is someone who is biologically a woman. Got it. That’s helpful. Well, except that word “biologically”, which he just threw in to sound sciencey, inadvertently revealing that he’s got no scientific understanding at all, just like Cruz.

It’s also revealing that he has forgotten the details of that “birds and the bees stuff” and just remembers “the general gist of the differences”. Is it any wonder he doesn’t have any children?

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said when a reporter asked him if a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman.

How to destroy a prestigious career in less than a year

I made a prediction last summer.

The fall from grace was precipitous, but it should have happened long ago. The molecular biologist David M. Sabatini has been outright fired from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Whitehead Institute, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he also loses his tenured position at MIT soon enough. Can you guess what prompted his ouster?

Sabatini was the unpleasant combination of arrogance and entitlement that led him to think he could fake data and sexually harass his students. He lost all of his affiliated positions at various prestigious institutions, but kept his tenure at MIT.

Until now.

David Sabatini, the high-profile biologist who was forced out of the Whitehead Institute in summer 2021 after a probe found he violated its sexual harassment policies, has resigned his tenured professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His move came after three senior MIT officials recommended revoking his tenure.

“Professor Sabatini has stepped down from his tenured faculty position at MIT … without exercising his policy right to request that a faculty committee … review the recommendation to revoke tenure,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email to faculty members this afternoon.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I do wonder where Sabatini is going to end up, since he’s managed to flush his entire career down the toilet. There’s a lesson to be learned there.

I think this comment from Nancy Hopkins is also an important message for everyone considering careers in science:

Nancy Hopkins, an emeritus professor of biology who helped lead a landmark push for gender equality on the MIT faculty in the 1990s, called the Sabatini resignation “a milestone,” noting in an email, “First, MIT had rules in place that forbid the faculty behavior in question. Second, a young woman had the courage to demand that the rules be enforced. And third, she was heard.”

She added: “It is noteworthy—and another sign of progress—that the heads of HHMI and the Whitehead Institute and MIT’s Dean of Science are all women—two of them the first women to hold these positions.”

Ha! The dude-bros were right to fear the feminists!