I AM THE KNISHEST!

Oh, yeah, baby. I had not crafted homemade knish in, well, decades (and never by myself or even as the lead cook). Then a couple months ago I decided to give it a try, since I’m not always great at cooking for myself when I need food. I tend to only cook when others are around. But prepared food is expensive, and take out food more so, so I often eat only one meal a day, and my snacks aren’t the healthiest. So what to do? Well, I love my homemade pizza, but prechopped toppings & pre-grated cheese only goes so far. It wouldn’t be homemade pizza without homemade dough, and that takes a while. I needed quick (or at least easy) finger food. I no longer live close enough to Solly’s in Vancouver where you can buy frozen, ready-to-bake knish, but I could make them myself.*1

So I made some knish a couple months ago, but they didn’t end up with the right texture (the dough baked into more of a hard, crisp shell than is traditional (and good)).

Since then I tinkered with the recipe and the spices, opting for a samosa-inspired filling, but going out of my way to pick up fresh fennel & caraway & cumin seed. I used no caraway or fennel in the first attempt, and relied on powders for the second. Neither gave that sharp, fresh flavor after cooking that fresh cracked seed imparts, so I knew the whole seed would be crucial to my third attempt. I have a 3-day gaming retreat once per month for the last few months, and the need for easy food is particularly high during those days. It’s coming up this week, so this weekend was time to give the knish another try.

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Guy Fawkes: Good Activists and Social Change

So the first official entry in our Guy Fawkes series is from a great thread on Pharyngula about Beyoncé’s feminism. The whole thread is worth your time, but let’s pick up where beloved commenter chimera mentions

One of my favorite philosophers said something on the radio the other day that struck me. He said his favorite black civil rights leaders of the 60s were The Black Panthers because they had no pretension of being “good” (read: appropriate, upstanding, notable, conforming, respectable, moral, role model for your kids, and all that….). And that a person doesn’t have to be “good” (in that sense) to call for political change.

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Do I have to do everything around here?

Fortunately, no. No I do not. On every issue that I address, there’s someone else right here on FtB who also discusses (or has discussed) the same thing. But there are issues where I feel I have that little extra bit of expertise, or where I flatter myself that I have had a particularly good insight and start to feel, “Gosh, I really should write something on that.” My feeling of moral obligation has been expressed in many ways. A couple of my favorites are the Hebrew, “Tikkun olam,” and the West Wing quote from a fictional New Hampshire Catholic,

If fidelity to freedom and democracy is the code of our civic religion, then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received.

I just can’t seem to leave poor enough alone. But there are times when issues come up,  as has happened in the last few days, that I feel I’ve already expressed myself well on a topic, but in a comment on some thread where it is more than likely to be lost to time. Writing on trans issues can be exhausting for me. Frankly, it’s not necessarily good for my mental health. But leaving the  world in a poor state is not only bad for the world, it’s also bad for me: as a relentlessly self-critical ethicist, shirking my ethical duties only results in self loathing, which ain’t any better for my mental health than writing on difficult topics. As a result, I’m going to start doing something I previously felt ws too vain to do more than once a year or so. I’m going to be resurrecting some of those comments that I consider worth time and attention even outside of their original contexts and recreate them as posts here on Pervert Justice. Note that I won’t be merely linking them, since we know that it’s easier to lose blog comments in a technology transition than blog posts. When I do this, I’ll be copying them whole, sometimes with bits of additional context surrounding them so that there are no gaps in understanding.

Bonus points to those who understand why I chose today to embark on this new policy (no peeking at this post’s URL), and on the off chance someone who reads me elsewhere has a suggestion for a topic on which I’ve expressed myself (or even a specific comment), you can put it below.

How do you solve a problem like kathleenzielinski?

So, over on that Pharyngula thread that has sparked a week’s worth of posts here on Pervert Justice, the main instigator of the back and forth was a commenter named kathleenzielinski who tends to pop up in threads that are not about trans people and pose a very, very serious question about “Why do we take all these trans people seriously, with their rights and stuff, when they deserve rights of course but not the almighty excessive rights that these trans people are always demanding, like the right to grow their wheatgrass for juicing right in my shower under my bathroom skylight? Why are over 90% of trans people telling me that I can’t move wheatgrass out of my own way when I take a shower in my own bathroom just because the shower is where the daylight from the skylight hits?”

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Privilege, Deference, and Moral Certainty

GG has been discussing in other threads the concept of epistemic deference, focused on epistemic deference of members of empowered majorities with respect to members of disempowered minorities. As it happens, I’ve lectured on just this topic at Portland State University, the University of Vermont, and a couple other places. (University of Minnesota I think… but I’m not entirely sure, and it would have been my visit to the Minneapolis campus, if you’re wondering PZ: I’ve never been to Morris). I even spoke to it when speaking to a North American conference of human rights officials and boards. So I’ve been thinking about this problem for a LONG time. More than 20 years, certainly. As a result, I have at hand things I’ve written right here on FtB available to quote.

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kathleenzielinski’s “gay rights movement”

So, over on Pharyngula kathleenzielinski has been having a bit of a say. I will likely go into other things said by kathleenzielinski (and issues that they raise or raised) later. But for now, I want to talk about the Great kathleenzielinski Gay Rights Movement, which, she would like you to know, is much, much better than that icky trans rights movement to which she would like to compare her GRM:

I will say this: The gay rights movement moved as quickly as it did because we took the time to win over our opposition using their own language. Conservative arguments were made in favor of gay marriage and legal equality. Some of us even quoted the Bible. We didn’t demonize people whose real fault was that they didn’t understand us. We won them over.

The trans rights movement is, if we are to believe kathleenzielinski, both moving much more slowly than her cherished GRM and is also much less friendly and compassionate to the bigots who oppose trans rights than the gays were to the bigots who opposed gay rights.

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Ignoring abuse to focus on lexicography

Okay, this is turning into a thing.

So in the thread created to talk about the phenomenon where people announce on the internet that they’re too afraid to discuss issues central to (or sometimes merely implicating) trans persons’ human rights before immediately launching a conversation about their concerns about granting trans persons equal human rights, one new commenter, GG, decided to change the subject. Although I feel vexed that what I wrote seemed to be ignored in favor of the commenter’s preferred conversation, the comment and request for response were both respectful and, as it turns out, the issues that GG unknowingly raised are actually significant. So I decided to respond, but I’m not going to allow that thread to be derailed so I have created this new post to discuss what GG brought up. Let’s start with GG’s comment, which itself begins with a quote from a BBC news article:  

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Being a Transphobe, the Great Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time

So first, I hate the words “transphobia” and “transphobe” but let’s save that for a footnote, or better yet another post (we’ll see if I can stop myself from rambling into that territory at the bottom of this). So setting that aside, I have noted that many, many people seem paralyzed with fear at the idea that they might do something which they consider reasonable, or good, or perhaps not good but a minor error which deserves no bad consequence, and despite the not at all truly bad nature of their conduct, end up labeled a “transphobe” or “transphobic”. They often cry out about their “fear” of being called “transphobic”. They positively scream about the injustice of it all:

Someone thought that I’m a transphobe, when really I just hate the idea of being inconvenienced in any way, except for all those ways that I am inconvenienced which I just accept as an unavoidable fact of life, like having to lie to my boss about how that watch is so cool and I wish I had one.

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Joyce Carol Oates and the great pronoun debates

So, I was hanging out on Wonkette early this morning, curating some artisanal tabs, when I came across an article I thought might be interesting to talk about. (You can find it here.)

Because it did actually generate some discussion, and because some people found it valuable and one person specifically asked to have it posted to my blog so that it could be found more easily than would be the case if it were left buried in Disqus comments, I’m going to cross post here the long ass thing I wrote over there.

Yes, it’s long ass, but you’re going to read it anyway, since you don’t want my diligent efforts to go to waste, do you?

I said, “DO YOU?”

Fine, don’t read it. I’ll just sit over here NOT being passive aggressive at you. So there.

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