Another kind of profiling

The story of Shadi Petosky makes no sense to me. She’s a transgender woman — a perfectly normal thing to be — who was trying to take a flight — another perfectly normal thing to do. TSA freaked out at an “anomaly”, the fact that someone presenting as a woman happened to have a penis. Apparently, like shoes, there’s a fear that one of those might be loaded with high explosives, although no one has ever stopped me from boarding an airplane because of my dangerous genitals.

She was screened and searched and probed multiple times, and taken aside to one of those featureless little rooms where they stash the suspicious people. She missed her flight, and they seemed downright truculent about helping her get another one. And then there’s the business of telling her to “get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem”, whatever the hell that means.

It all seems to have escalated absurdly. They needed two police officers, four TSA agents, and an explosives expert to wrestle with their own ignorance about what genitals are supposed to look like.

You can follow Shadi Petosky on Twitter if you want to see how it all turns out (it looks like she’s not home yet).

I guess TSA needs to learn that trans bodies are not anomalies.

Milo Yiannopoulos needs pizza and a wank

bot

Milo’s up to the same old sexist nonsense again — what a hack. His latest is a bit of contrived outrage about sexbots. He’s for ’em. He somehow thinks liberal SJW’s are going to suppress the technology, as if we care. I think he was so upset that he drank until he couldn’t see straight and then started typing.

Who, or what, men have sex with is the basis of our civilisation. It is the driving force behind our greatest accomplishments. Men don’t compete for abstract pleasure: they compete to bag the best mate. The internet, the pyramids and the moon landings would not exist were it not for man’s desire to have sex with woman.

Keep in mind that this was written by an openly gay man. He does not really believe that aspiring to sex with a woman is the basis of our civilisation or the driving force behind our greatest accomplishments (oh, and by the way — I read the hyperbole and the padded prose of first year students, and they aren’t this bad). He’s just pandering to his audience of juvenile MRAs and angry people who are pissed off that there are women in video games.

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“The Human Rights Movement of the 21st Century”

I just saw this video put out by A Voice For Men: it’s a bunch of drunk guys insulting Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti while doubling over in laughter at their own “jokes”. I am dumbfounded that they thought this was worth recording, and then at the amazing cluelessness that led them to think it would be a good idea to put it on youtube for all to see.

Hint: Obey the sign.

Hint: Obey the sign.

It was posted by Paul Elam, with this comment:

Look, it is just some men having non PC fun. If you find it offensive or a “bad thing” for the men’s movement, you can blow it out your ass.

He’s collecting comments on youtube.

SJWs Please keep those comments coming. I am doing a follow up on this based on your comments. Great lesson in PC and in your own hypocrisy. There is already enough here to work with, but if you want to add gravy…… all the better.

Yes. Because shouting “your pussy stinks” at women is “non PC” bravery. Read Marcotte’s post — she’s got these yahoos pegged, and no amount of bluster is going to get them out of the hole they have willingly dug for themselves.

Forget character — how large are this fictional person’s boobs?

sfarmor

So Scalzi has been ranting on Twitter about this proposal for a new F&SF award — it’s more fallout from the Hugo mess, and this person proposes more gatekeeping, requiring membership in a “web of trust” in order to vote for a new award. I’m not impressed with the idea — it seems to imply more a web of distrust, where someone in charge gets to decide who is the True Fan. But Scalzi is all over that part.

Reading the thread in question, though, I came across a comment that surprised me.

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Rewriting history and sucking up to misogynists

integrity

There’s a reason I’ve lost all respect for Hemant Mehta: wearing smug sanctimony while pandering to MRAs, slymepitters, and notorious harassers is not a good look. He’s now insisting that Phil Plait, Rebecca Watson, and I owe Tim Hunt an apology, on the basis of a poorly written bit of hackery, inspired by that blinkered obsessive, Louise Mensch, in a far right wing rag. It’s the latest bit of revisionist history, and it’s published in Commentary magazine, alongside articles whining about Obamacare, the Iran deal, and students opposing campus rape culture, overseen by editor John Podhoretz. I suppose it’s possible that he didn’t notice the stench of the company it’s keeping, but he might at least have thrown a red flag at the title: The Timothy Hunt Witch Hunt.

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It would give me pause if my causes required lies to be persuasive

standwithpp

It’s unfortunate that that doesn’t seem to be the case for abortion opponents. Even if I were sympathetic to their cause, I’d recoil from the dishonesty.

This has always been the case. There is no argument against abortion that doesn’t rely on misrepresentation and dodgy associations. Every one of those signs plastered all over my region that declares “My heart started beating at 28 days!” is fundamentally dishonest, relying on a false association between a heart beat and humanity. My zebrafish embryos’ hearts start beating at about 22 hours, does that make them human?

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I am not a number

continuum

I endorse this article: 5 Ways That Science Supports Feminism – Not Gender Essentialism. It’s making the point that when you actually study the relevant sciences, you discover that they fundamentally support a more complex view of sexuality than the usual boy/girl dichotomy. Here, in brief, are the five points it makes:

1. There Are More Than Two Sexes, Not to Mention a Vast Range of Gender Identities
2. The Environment Impacts Human Development from the Very Beginning at the Cellular Level
3. Socialization Is a Powerful Force
4. When Studies Do Find Gender Differences, They Are Often Too Weak to Serve as the Basis for Generalizations
5. Gender Means Different Things in Different Cultures

One other factor that leads people to adopt gender essentialism is a kind of innumeracy — I swear, I think the only statistical measure most people understand is the mean. But statistics was developed to describe variation, in addition to taking data sets and crunching them down to a single number.

There is also deficiency of logic. If you take any diverse set, divide it in two, and calculate the mean of any given parameter for both, you’ll get…two numbers. This does not validate your initial division as appropriate. It does not mean your artificial dichotomy reveals an absolute truth about the world. It does not mean you have encapsulated the essence of your two groups in a single simple metric. In particular, it’s possible to have a mean that does not describe a single individual in your group accurately.

The sad, lonely world of Ashley Madison

casper

Lately, I’ve been getting a fair amount of email from people who’ve been browsing the stolen Ashley Madison subscriber list, telling me what famous or semi-famous person had an account there. I haven’t been impressed. A lot of it seems to be men who were looking for dates, and the thing is…I really doubt that any of them found anything approximating love or sex there. It’s peculiar to accuse people of cheating on their spouses through Ashley Madison, when it’s highly unlikely that any man was making contact with any women there.

A detailed look at the Ashley Madison database reveals…

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