Nice words from Elliot Page.
I’ve run into a few whiny TERFs who have complained about this — the most common spin is “Oh, no, the patriarchy has stolen a lesbian from us”, which is just weird — but mainly what I see is someone free to be himself, with a lot of support. IMDB has already updated all their entries!
I was out for a walk, and what did I see? Flocks of birds running away (OK, flying away, to be precise) from our little winter.
OK, I’m being a little unfair, #notallbirds. There are these little black-capped chickadees that hang around my house, and they’ll be here all winter. Those are #bravebirds. But geese? Big bullying cowards that hang around the parks pooping all over the place, and fleeing south at the first little cold snap.
The reason my photos suck is entirely because I don’t have access to exotic geography. Yeah, that’s it.
Our story chain marches forward, with part 2 on Death to Squirrels!
It’s a common trope — the anti-gay fanatic defending Christian values who is caught snorting coke off the backside of a gay hooker (I shouldn’t have to say this, but it’s not the last part that’s objectionable, it’s the hypocrisy in the name of hatred). Now we’ve got the crème de la crème of these kinds of incidents, at least until someone tops it, which they will.
A member of the European Parliament representing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has resigned from his position in Brussels after he was caught leaving what reports described as a 25-man orgy on Friday.
Jozsef Szajer resigned on Sunday after he admitted to breaching Belgium’s strict lockdown rules to attend a sex party, Politico reported on Tuesday. The police found 25 naked men at the gathering, including Szajer and some diplomats, the Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure reported. The newspaper quoted a local police source as saying, “We interrupted a gang bang.”
One last pitch-perfect note:
Szajer, a right-wing politician and ally of Orban, climbed out a first-floor window and was spotted “fleeing along the gutter,” the public prosecutor’s office said.
If that’s your thing, and everyone is consenting, go ahead and leap naked into a 25-man gay orgy. It just sounds exhausting to me, but hey, seize the day. However, you’re going to get called out for this:
Orban’s Hungarian government has curtailed LGBTQ rights since he was elected prime minister in 2010. Szajer, who fronted Fidesz in the European Parliament, helped rewrite Hungary’s constitution to “protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman,” The Times of London reported.
At least he didn’t marry the other 24 men. That would be bad.
Don’t worry, Jozsef Szajer has apologized.
“I deeply regret violating the Covid restrictions, it was irresponsible on my part. I am ready to stand for the fine that occurs.”
That’s a good point. With all the mucus and fluids flying around, that was probably a super-spreader event.
Those catastrophic hijinks atop the telescope, and the explosions, couldn’t have been good for the structure.
Seriously, and sadly, the Arecibo radio telescope has collapsed. It’s done.
A huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century collapsed on Tuesday, officials said.
The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet below.
The US National Science Foundation had earlier announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100ft gash on the 1,000ft-wide (305m) reflector dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.
Rather than blaming Sean Bean, though, I should note that this is another example of the decay of our scientific infrastructure on Donald Trump’s watch. You don’t he really cares about a radio telescope, or Puerto Rico, do you?
I used to watch Hercules with my kids all the time, but then he made God’s Not Dead and demonstrated that he’s a world-class twit. Now you can read this interview with Sorbo and see for yourself. It’s a well-done interview: Marlow Stern just asks him question, and lets Sorbo hang himself with the answers. Normally I detest journalistic stenography, but they are very good questions. He also keeps pointing out where Sorbo is wrong, until Sorbo himself realizes he sounds like an idiot (while not admitting error) and ends it all whining about how it’s going to be a hit piece. Sure thing. Because of what he said, willingly.
It’s all the right-wing’s greatest hits. Venezuela! Bernie is a Stalinist! Hitler was a socialist! That woman who accused him of harassment was just trying to get rich (because accusing someone famous harassment always leads to fame and fortune)! Trump didn’t lose the election! Doctors are faking coronavirus deaths, and masks are no good! Yuck.
As we’ve mentioned a few times, we’re having another casual fundraiser this month, and as part of that, we’re doing another fictional story chain. Last time, I got stuck with the chore of providing the concluding chapter of A Dark Web, which involved wrapping up a complicated storyline with gory violent murder and hybrid human-spiders. This time around, I get revenge by starting the thread with a complicated science fiction story about transhumans living on a partially terraformed Mars, and now I get to watch everyone else try to steer the story in unexpected directions (next up: Iris, followed by Abe) and William Brinkman gets to bat clean-up. We’ll have to try a different order in future story threads.
Jump below the fold and get started! Don’t worry, there are far fewer spiders in this one, so far.
Apparently, there’s a bit of a row going on over in the UK because Cambridge University is planning to impose a policy that would require Cambridge’s academics, students and visiting speakers to treat others and their opinions with “respect”. This is bugging a few people, who don’t want to respect others, and they want to change the word “respect” to “tolerate”, which is in itself a revealing bit of jiggery-pokery. I mean, really, asking people to treat others with respect is not an onerous demand: I’ve listened to creationists and Republicans speaking on campus, and managed treat them with respect even while regarding their ideas as horseshit, and being able to tear into them with questions. It’s not hard. It’s also a demand with a strange context.
Supported by the actor Stephen Fry, who read English at Cambridge, and Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering, Ahmed fears the new code could be used to stifle views deemed to be “disrespectful” on subjects such as transgender rights, anti-vaccination, religion, race or climate change. They fear it could lead to academics who satirise certain views being sacked.
Mock away! The only restriction I see that might be in place is that you don’t get to dehumanize people over their gender, their politics, their religion, or their race. What I see here is typical right-wing paranoia — a fear that they might be abused in the same way they abuse minorities.
As usual in these academic matters in the UK, we just have to get the opinion of Richard Dawkins. So he appeared on this radio program (skip ahead to the 1:44 mark to hear Dawkins), and just totally embarrasses himself.
The radio host brings up a message from a listener, Zoe. Zoe says “as a post-op transsexual woman married to a man and being a respectful member of society, I would hope to be respected as a person rather than being merely tolerated, otherwise incorrect assumptions and bigotry will thrive,” and akss what Dawkins would say to Zoe. This is his reply.
I would say if she wants to be called she, I am very happy to call her she. That’s a matter of courtesy. But if she wants me to say she’s a woman, when she has an XY karyotype, then as a biologist, then I would say that I would define a woman, as a biologist, as a member of the species Homo sapiens with XX karyotype. That’s a matter of definition. People can say what they want to be called, and I’m happy as a matter of courtesy, I do this myself, a person who was a man who becomes a woman, I’m happy to use pronouns like she, but I’m not happy to be dictated to and told that you must use this pronoun as a matter of law or coercion.
First problem: that doesn’t address the point at all! He’s rambling off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the issue brought up. Does he understand how someone might see “tolerance” as a minimal expectation? Zoe wants to be respected as an equal member of society, not as some aberration to be tolerated.
She’s not asking about what pronoun she’d prefer. He’s not being particularly magnaminous by conceding to address her as she wants, as if we should all appreciate his graciousness. This is minimal courtesy he is offering.
WHat does he do next? He offers some unasked-for pedantry, telling us how he, as a biologist, defines “woman”, as a way of saying that he does not regard Zoe as a woman. Very respectful!
He’s also wrong. “Woman” is a complex multifactorial entity, and it is not identical with “reproductive female”, as he is using it. As a biologist, I would not analogize womanhood with the function of one half of a breeding pair of fruit flies or spiders or zebrafish or mice. Furthermore, I would not make the mistake of correlating even that with a simplistic version of chromosome organization. A biologist should know better.
He’s not particularly consistent. He calls Zoe “a man who becomes a woman”, right after tellins us that she isn’t really a woman. He needs to get his story straight.
Finally, this petty declaration that he doesn’t like being dictated to…is he also being dictated to when polite convention tells him address a woman (even the ones he recognizes as a True Woman!) by masculine pronouns? No one is talking about legal impositions, and the only coercion is the same kind that compels us to behave in mutually respectful ways as members of a civil society.
So let’s get it straight: what the Richard Dawkinses and Stephen Frys want is to be able to exclude transgender men and women from their civil society.
None of this makes any sense. Our university administration keeps flapping their lips about caution and respect for faculty, staff, and students, while enforcing rules about social distancing and masking in the classroom, and then…oh, we have to keep the football games going! So now disease is sweeping through the football program.
The Minnesota football Gophers have canceled a second consecutive game due to an ongoing COVID-19 outbreak in the program.
U of M Director of Athletics Mark Coyle, University President Joan Gabel and Gophers Medical Director Dr. Brad Nelson made the decision to scrap the Dec. 5 game with Northwestern after consulting with the Big Ten Conference.
The game will not be rescheduled, and is considered a “no contest” as per Big Ten policy.
Since Nov. 19, the football program has experienced 47 positive cases of coronavirus in players and staffers [!!!], the most recent group of 15 diagnosed just Saturday.
Remarkable. We are an educational institution, we’ve compromised on everything to keep the academic mission limping along, and yet we’re risking it all by giving the goddamned athletics department free rein, on top of paying the coaches and AD staff far more money than they do the instructors. We should have just put the whole athletics program on hiatus at the start of the year, and saved money by putting the coaches on half pay for the year (they’d still make more money than I do.)
“The health and safety of our student-athletes, coaches and staff continues to be our main priority,” said Coyle.
Oh, BULLSHIT.
