Don’t. I despise it, and it will cause me to re-evaluate your intelligence downward, drastically.

That probably doesn’t worry you at all, especially if you’re the kind of person who whines about political correctness. What ought to worry you more is that James O’Brien might hear you and grind you into a feeble slime for using it.

Man, that is beautiful. He just asks the guy what he means by it, and has him babbling after a few minutes.

I also liked “Thoughtleaders are more of a marketing gimmick than a philosophy,” and generally enjoyed this video immensely, in part because I detest the horseshoe theory and think that centrists are just polite fascists with a faint sense of shame.

I did disagree with one comment, though: “Islamists” are a thing. It’s a term used by Muslims and ex-Muslims to describe extremist religious fanaticism; it’s intent is to distinguish general, ordinary, non-fanatical Muslims from the raving loonies who use their religion to excuse violent, abhorrent behavior, so it is a useful word, just as “Christianist” is handy to distinguish, say, Theocrat Mike Pence from the more casual and benign faith of my mother.

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A very nice summary:

Nature magazine has run a piece titled — brace yourself, it’s ridiculously bad — “Removing statues of historical figures risks whitewashing history”. It is subtitled “Science must acknowledge mistakes as it marks its past”, just to make it a little bit worse.

The objection is that people are clamoring to tear down a statue of a doctor and scientist, J. Marion Sims. How dare they question the honoring of a scientist?

The statues of explorer Christopher Columbus and gynaecologist J. Marion Sims stand at nearly opposite corners of New York City’s Central Park, but for how much longer? Both monuments have been dragged into a nationwide debate about memor­ials to historical figures who have questionable records on human rights. The arguments are long-standing, but were thrown onto the world’s front pages last month when protests against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, produced racially charged violence.

Last week, the Central Park Sims statue — one of many that stand in numerous US cities — was vandalized. The word ‘racist’ was spray-painted alongside his list of achievements, which include life-saving techniques he developed to help women recover from traumatic births. Yet many protest about the lionization of this ‘father of modern gynaecology’ because he performed his experiments on female slaves.

Yes, let us remember that Sims did save women’s lives. Sims pioneered a surgical treatment for vesico-vaginal fistulas (VVF), a common outcome of difficult labor that produced tears between the bladder and vagina and led to constant leakage of urine into the vagina. It was debilitating and shame-producing. Sims worked out a way to close off the fistulas. We don’t want to forget that!

Another thing we don’t want to forget is how it was worked out. That little line I highlighted up there, “because he performed his experiments on female slaves”, is minimizing what he did, and that also is a whitewashing of history, and failing to acknowledge a “mistake”, if we can call willful infliction of pain on unconsenting people a “mistake”. If we’re going to talk about the good that he accomplished, we also have to consider the evil of his method. I’ve read some justifications for his surgeries that say that because black slaves also suffered from VVF, it was legitimate that he experimented on them — they benefited too from his work! But let’s not forget that the reason he operated on these women is that he did not have to get their consent, and that part of his excuse is the belief that black people are less sensitive to pain.

And what he did was horrendous. Even acknowledging that all surgeries in the early 19th century were horrendous, he treated women like experimental animals. Here’s an account of his first experimental subject:

The enslaved women were not asked if they would agree to such an operation as they were totally without any claims to decision-making about their bodies or any other aspect of their lives. Sims used a total of seven enslaved women as experimental subjects; permission was obtained from their masters. They were in no way volunteers for Dr Sims’s research.

Nevertheless, Dr Sims was so positive that he was on the verge of making an astounding medical discovery that he invited local doctors to witness his first operation and what he thought would be a historical event. He performed his first operation on a slave-woman named Lucy.

Lucy was operated on without anaesthetics as Sims was unaware of the advances which had been made in this area of medicine. The surgery lasted for an hour and Lucy endured excruciating pain while positioned on her hands and knees. She must have felt extreme humiliation as twelve doctors observed the operation. Unfortunately, the operation failed as ‘two little openings in the line of union, across the vagina … remained although the larger fistula had been repaired’.

Lucy nearly lost her life, due to the experimental use by Sims of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, as she became extremely ill with fever resulting from blood-poisoning. In recounting the episode in his autobiography, Sims says, ‘I thought she was going to die . . . it took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation’.

Sims’ method belongs in the history books, and no one is proposing erasing this protocol from the annals of medicine. But ignoring the suffering and degradation of the women in this experiment, as we have to do to think Sims deserves the honor of a prominent monument, erases a shameful era in our history, all while Nature protests that those who understand the full range of Sims’ actions are the ones doing the erasure.

It’s embarrassing, too, because whoever wrote this ought to know that the work of scientists isn’t honored with statuary. It’s honored with the work of those who follow afterwards.

A child is brought to the US by their illegal immigrant parents; they grow up knowing nothing but America, go to American schools, have American friends, are fundamentally American. And then Donald Trump decides that, because of their parentage, they are going to be thrown out of the country and sent to a different country that they might not know anything about. He wants to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which doesn’t go far enough in accommodating these kids. I think the DREAM Act, which would have allowed undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship with college attendance or military service, would be an excellent idea — we ought to recognize that there are people living here, who want to live here, who want to be part of this country, and that we ought to be welcoming them.

It is intolerably cruel to deny these young people anything short of full acceptance. They have committed no crime, yet Trump wants to make them suffer.

It is un-American to base people’s role in life on their ancestry — or at least, it is an overt rejection of the myth of American equality and opportunity. At least, the ideal that this was a place where you could advance yourself by studying and working hard, even if imaginary, was part of what we told ourselves made America great. The Republicans would rather your position in society was determined by inheritance, I guess.

There are a few moderate Republicans who see this, but far too many are as heartless as Trump. This anti-immigrant attitude that is sweeping through voters is chilling and horrible, too: our country is supporting an idea that the Nazis would have promoted as a matter of course.

These monsters must go. It’s not just an arbitrary political decision, it’s becoming a matter of defining the basic humanity of the American people…and the current regime is making all the wrong decisions.

It is now legal to openly carry swords in Texas because heck, why not. They’re handier for opening champagne bottles than a Glock, much more intimidating than a phallocarp, and advertises the cartoonish absurdity of the entire state legislature.

Texas: a great big state full of posturing macho rednecks.

Isn’t it neat how language evolves? Received Pronunciation isn’t how British people speak and have spoken for all time.

But if Shakespeare’s accent had hints of Classical Pirate to it, doesn’t that mean the Romans in all those movie dramas should be sounding less hoity-toity, and more like Robert Newton snarling his ‘arrr’s in that exaggerated West Country accent? It certainly would add a very different flavor to the stories.

“I came, arrr, I sawr, I conquerrrrred, aye.”

I know, the title is a sweeping generalization, and there are good cops and bad nurses. But think about the general reputations of the professions.

Nurses have a responsibility to help their patients. The whole principle of the health professions is to do no harm — they are literally working to serve people.

Cops have abandoned the whole “serve and protect” notion. Their operating principle is to punish the bad guys; their clients are assumed to be scumbags. If you find yourself in the back of a police car, “innocent until proven guilty” is thrown out the window…you’re not there for your safety, you’re there because a cop decided you were a bad guy.

It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. We’ve been watching the police get increasingly militarized, SWAT teams turned into ideals, the ascendancy of broken windows policing, which makes every citizen a criminal. You don’t join the police because you want to help people, you join because you want to bust heads.

Here’s a stark example: a policeman roughs up a nurse because she refused to violate policy and patient autonomy by drawing blood from an unconscious person for a drug test. There’s a rule that you don’t draw blood for someone else in the absence of consent or a court warrant, or if the subject isn’t under arrest for a crime. None of those conditions applied. In fact, the unconscious person was an injured bystander in a crime, and wasn’t even under suspicion. But that police officer wanted his blood, and wasn’t going to tolerate a nurse disobeying his order.

Watch. What the fuck is wrong with our police?

Here’s a chilling account of what it was like to be in Houston during Harvey. It points out that this was a disaster exacerbated by you-know-who — Republicans and their stupidity.

Texas is run by Republicans, many of whom have disavowed climate change. About six or seven years ago, when Governor Greg Abbott was the Texas Attorney General joining a climate change lawsuit against the federal government, I was still science reporter at the Chronicle, and we spoke for about an hour on the telephone. What was most striking to me is that here was a lawyer, with practically no science background, arguing against the scientific claims of scientists. How did he know more about atmospheric science than they did?

If Houston is to remain the prosperous, vibrant, great city that it was before Harvey, we are going to have to take a hard look at our unfettered development and willingness to let almost anyone build almost anywhere, including in floodplains. Our state officials are going to have to recognize that these events will be possible again, especially in a warmer world. I’m not holding my breath for all that to happen. And as dark as these last five days have been, that may be the biggest tragedy of all.

There’s also more information about disastrous policies that had disastrous effects on the region’s ability to respond to disaster: wetland destruction, uncontrolled urban development, bad zoning, etc. The people of Houston just turned their homes over to greedy developers who got their money and got out.