Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Treating a socially-created disorder with drugs

From a nutty 2013 essay:
Like every feminist I interviewed, Tauni echos that gender needs to be dismantled and that transgender individuals are perpetuating stereotypes that hurt women. More worrying to Tauni, however, is how lesbians are being pressured to transition, often by their partners: ‘There is this particular aesthetic you have to be—it is the coolest thing to be trans. The hottest lesbian now is the trans man and so a lot of lesbians are going this way. The other lesbians can pressure their partners to become trans. They fetishise other trans men and then they pressure their partners through their sexuality.’ Noting some of the changes in Australian society Tauni adds: ‘What I am really concerned about is that young girls are being channeled into sex reassignment rather than encouraged into thinking about lesbianism. Children in Australia are exposed to transsexuality before being exposed to ideas of being lesbian and gay. Children in Australia at the age of ten are put on hormone blockers and they don’t know at that age what their beliefs will be like as an adult. It is a human rights violation that these drugs are being pushed onto children and vulnerable adults. Essentially they are treating a socially-created disorder—treating a social illness with drugs.’
These essays just seem like jokes to me.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Alabama white man complains about blackface

Here is a tiresome opinion:
When (if) the tykes finally rumble into the two new Gardendale elementary schools in the fall, will someone please immediately begin teaching them their history?

Yes, their history -- the history of their families and their neighbors' families, of their city (Birmingham, not just Gardendale), their state and their nation, with all its wonders and heroes, its villains and ugliest warts.

Especially its warts.

Like why it is never, ever, ever a good idea to wear blackface.

Never.
No, trying to silence expression is not teaching history with its warts.

99% of blackface was completely innocuous. It is mainly white ppl and Jews who complain about it, and they complain for the purpose of stirring racial hatreds. No one is actually offended by blackface.

I guess he wants to teach little kids that black skin color is shameful and grotesque, and giving an appearance of black skin is something so disgusting as to be avoided at all costs. When he says that blackface must not be tolerated, he has just found a politically correct way of saying that the appearance of black skin is disgusting to him.

Update: If the man really wants the truth out, then he should be happy about this:
Yes, Trump Is Making Xenophobia More Acceptable

A scientific experiment shows that the election liberated people to express feelings they’d otherwise keep to themselves.

By Cass R Sunstein ...

The upshot is that if Trump had not come on the scene, a lot of Americans would refuse to authorize a donation to an anti-immigrant organization unless they were promised anonymity. But with Trump as president, people feel liberated. Anonymity no longer matters, apparently because Trump’s election weakened the social norm against supporting anti-immigrant groups. It’s now OK to be known to agree “that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

Movie celebrates adultery

I watched the movie Never Forever (2007), as described by this review:
Watching this movie was a breathtaking experience to me. From the very first scene, it grabbed my attention, and I became more and more involved with the story of this beautiful and desperate woman, Sophie Lee.

The movie touches so many important issues such as interracial marriage, faith and religion, class determined by economic factors, and illegal immigrant. Yet those issues are so well blended without distracting the audience' attention from the main story.

The main story is purely simple. It's a woman's struggle to keep a man she loves happy. But in the end, she realizes that she has to pursue her own happiness.

It's the story of my own life. It's the story of so many women that I know. It's also the story of so many sons and daughters, wives and husbands, and fathers and mothers. That's why this movie touches the very core of my heart - anybody's heart.
She aborts her husband's baby, without telling him, and has a secret affair with an illegal alien. She gets pregnant and rejects her husband while her lover gets deported.

Pursue her own happiness?! Does this reviewer really know many women like that?

Is this supposed to glorify a wife becoming a degenerate slut, like Eat-Pray-Love?

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Transracial transsexual trendiness

The NY Times announces:
‘The Physics of Forbidden Love’
Malcolm Conner, Trinity University

The winning essay from our Modern Love College Essay Contest explores an unlikely romance between a transgender man and an immigrant Indian woman.
From the essay:
I was told by my doctor that I had gender dysphoria, the product of a mismatch between body and brain. ...

She was truly unfazed by my transness. I exulted in this; it seemed as though I had finally cleared the last hurdle between me and the mundane heterosexual existence I had yearned for. Joking about reincarnation once, she said I must have had great karma to be a human in this life.

“It couldn’t have been that good,” I said, “or I wouldn’t have wound up in a girl’s body.” ...

She and I are still together, and we will almost certainly break up. Our relationship is based on mutual respect and trust — like any healthy pairing — but also on denial. She cannot marry me. We both know this, though I think she knows it better than I do.

The foolhardy logic I use to rationalize my commitment to her will no doubt worsen my inevitable heartbreak. But for now, it sustains me. As animosity toward brown-skinned immigrants seems to worsen daily in this political climate, and anti-transgender bills that strip me of my dignity draw closer to becoming law in the Texas Legislature, there are days when we wake up scared, go to bed scared and navigate our isolation in between.

Why not find refuge, however finite and daring, with each other? In a time of such upheaval and uncertainty, our reckless, quiet love feels like deliverance.
This sounds like a sick joke, making fun of leftist Jewish efforts to debase American culture.

Friday, May 26, 2017

Feminist professor denies male risk-taking

Australia history professor and feminist Cordelia Fine writes:
What on first inspection seemed like a sex difference was actually a difference between white males and everyone else.
She denies that men are bigger risk-takers. They might be more likely to go skydiving or tightrope walking, but then they usually take safety precautions so that it is not really so risky!

Women take risks in other ways, such as buying lottery tickets. White male risk-taking just seems riskier, because they are better able to control their risks.

She is confused. Men are willing to take more risks, but that does not mean that they are stupid about it.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Marxist view of identity politics

Here is a Marxist view of identity politics:
Marx's surprising claim in OtJQ is that, while calls for equal treatment of disenfranchised ethnic and religious minorities may seem to subvert the prevailing social and economic order, they are actually often welcomed by it for reasons having to do with the logic of capitalism. ...

However, these calls for emancipation are, in another respect, regressive. The extension of formal legal equality to disenfranchised groups is perfectly in keeping with the logic of capitalism, which seeks to erode all ethnic, national religious and ideological barriers among people so as to integrate them more effectively into a world market - one in which the only division left is the class division between laborer and capitalist (a division the market itself masks). Concretely, the ability to own property and participate in markets should be as widespread as possible for this to function, and that ability is unthinkable without legally protected rights of various kinds. So the call for emancipation, though partially emancipatory, is, in this instance, something of a capitalist ruse.

"Political emancipation", the granting of formal legal equality, and other less tangible forms of equal status to disenfranchised religious and ethnic minorities, would never be sufficient for true, human emancipation - a fact evidenced for Marx by the fact that the most formally egalitarian nation on earth (the USA) remained among the most religious, and therefore, most alienated (here, Marx is relying on Feuerbach's insight that the persistence of religion is evidence of frustrated human aspirations). True human emancipation would come about not through the inclusion of disenfranchised minorities into the prevailing social and economic order but, rather, through its revolutionary overthrow and the replacement of a mode of production driven by the interest of a particular class by one governed by the general will.
So the Marxist revolutionaries are foolishly falling for a capitalist ruse to assimilate more workers into the world labor market.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Leftist cries "hypocrisy" as usual

From the blog of leftist-Jewish-atheist professor Jerry Coyne:
Looking at the new first thing this morning, I saw photos of Donald, Melania, and Ivanka with the Pope [JAC: see below], and was immediately struck by the fact that both women were wearing head coverings. I was pleased that the Trump delegation did not kowtow to Saudi dress codes for women, but to turn around and abide by Vatican ones strikes me as being incredibly disrespectful to the Saudis, and to Muslims in general. ...

This of course is a form of hypocrisy: kowtowing to Christianity—seen by many as the Official United States Religion—while slapping Islam in the face. If I had my way, no leader of a secular state would wear religious garb on any official state visit—UNLESS they’re visiting a religious site, in which case I have no big objection. But if you’re going to osculate the rump of one faith, you’ll have to osculate the rumps of all of them.
(For nitpickers, I know he does not call his blog a blog.)

I guess that since Coyne is Jewish, he excuses Trump wearing Jewish garb in Israel.

No, this is not hypocrisy. Coyne is usually outspoken about the evils of Islam, and about allowing free speech to let ppl make whatever statements they want. And yet his Jewish atheist leftism requires him to say that all non-Jewish religion must be treated alike, even in the use of minor symbols.

Religions are not all the same. Even for an atheist religion-hater like Coyne, there is much more reason to disrespect Islam than Christianity.

Saying: there is no evidence

Here is a
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli history professor. ...

First published in 2011 (in Hebrew) and then in 2014 (in English), it’s a Jared Diamond-esque trip laced with Harari’s Big Thoughts on evolution, religion, life, people, all of human history, etc. Harari is a 40-something gay vegan who lives with his husband on an Israeli kibbutz, according to Wikipedia.

Sapiens begins tantalizingly enough, with a discussion of imagined orders and how they serve as touchpoints for mass human cooperation. Division of humans into “superiors and “commoners” might be a figment of the imagination, he says, but so is “equality.” “All men are created equal”, he observes, is a purely aspirational declaration.

“According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal.’

In addressing the Interbreeding v. Replacement theories of out-of-Africa evolution, he notes that if the Interbreeding theory is right, “there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years. This is political dynamite, which could provide material for explosive racial theories.”

And, he concedes, the appearance of small amounts of Neanderthal DNA in humans, discovered in 2010, pushed the Interbreeding theory to the front.

But then, on page 152, he preserves his tenured position, book sales and popularity with this: “Between blacks and whites there are some objective biological differences, such as skin color and hair type, but there is no evidence that the differences extend to intelligence or morality.”
I didn't think that same-sex marriage was legal in Israel.

There are many educated scholars who insist on using the phrase "there is no evidence" when there is obvious evidence as well has 100s of published papers. What do they even mean, as they obviously do not mean that there is literally no evidence?

One possibility is that they want to be as transparently wrong as they can be. If you lived in a Communist country and you were not allowed to criticize Communism, you might say "Communism is the most perfect system ever invented". It is so silly, it is just a clever way of signalling that you believe the opposite.

Another possibility is that they have some technical or political reason for saying that the published evidence is not really evidence. Maybe they categorically reject anything influenced by the white Christian patriarchy, for example.

Maybe they believe that the evidence has been refuted somehow. If so, it is more accurate to say that the evidence has been refuted, not that there is no evidence. Scholarship then requires a reference to where a refutation can be found.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Human evolution started in Europe

The London Telegraph reports:
The history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa.

Currently, most experts believe that our human lineage split from apes around seven million years ago in central Africa, where hominids remained for the next five million years before venturing further afield.

But two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago.

The discovery of the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi, and nicknameded ‘El Graeco' by scientists, proves our ancestors were already starting to evolve in Europe 200,000 years before the earliest African hominid.

An international team of researchers say the findings entirely change the beginning of human history and place the last common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans - the so-called Missing Link - in the Mediterranean region.
I am doubtful about this, because it is a lot to conclude from one jaw fossil.

Also, those creatures were still apes. It is much more reasonable to say that Neanderthals were the first humans, or perhaps the Neanderthal-African hybrids.

Monday, May 22, 2017

For and against school choice

Kevin Carson writes:
Right-libertarian shills for school charterization like to use the euphemism “school choice,” which is about as misleading as referring to proprietary walled garden platforms like Uber as the “sharing economy.” The charter school movement’s inroads occur, almost without exception, in places where choice has been suppressed by the state. The Charter Mafia hates choice. Charterization, where it occurs, is imposed by a process about as free and democratic as the National Party coup that established Apartheid in South Africa. ...

That’s how the “school choice” sausage gets made. The main forces behind it are corporate lobbyists and their pet “nonprofit” foundations working to impose their agendas through government with the help of their special insider access, and to line their pockets from the public treasury. They achieve success mainly in areas where elected governments have been suspended and replaced with appointed dictatorships that share their agenda. And for all their rhetoric of “empowerment” and “choice,” they do everything in their power to keep the public out of the policy process and minimize public scrutiny.
He has various complaints about charter school oversight, but does not really explain his problem with "choice".

In many areas, charter schools offer parents and students a public school choice that would not be available otherwise.

Here is a good audio debate over the question Are charter schools overrated? While there were disagreements about the management and effectiveness of charter schools, little was devoted to what seems to me to be the crucial issue: they offer a public school choice.

The libertarians don't really like any govt activity, whether it be charter schools or regular public schools. The leftists like centralized brainwashing of the next generation of students. If the charter schools are superior, they don't like the inequality, and otherwise they don't like the loss of govt control.

Choice is really the key issue. Do you believe all kids belong in the same cookie-cutter schools, or should they have the freedom to choose alternatives?

Some parents and students may well have reasons for preferring a school that do not necessarily apply to other students. Our whole economy is based on different ppl having different needs and preferences. Why should schools be any different?

Choice also underlies debates about Common Core. Leftists believe that the state should decide what is best for all kids, and then everyone should do that. Others wants some choice in the matter, and do not believe that they should have to prove superiority according to externally-defined criteria.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Secure Blessings for our Posterity

Jim Goad writes:
Even in the Preamble to the US Constitution, it was understood that a nation that was something to be preserved for one’s “posterity.”

When I searched the word “posterity” on Google, the first definition to pop up was telling: “all future generations of people.” The idea that “posterity” meant “the descendants of a person” was described as “archaic.” Still, Merriam-Webster refuses to get with the program and still defines “posterity” as primarily meaning “the offspring of one progenitor to the furthest generation.” I highly suspect that this is the sort of “posterity” that the Founding Fathers intended.
The Constitution says "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". It is reasonable to assume that this means for the descendants of the free citizens at the time.
The cobwebbed wombs and the blank-shooting scrotums that currently rule Europe obviously have no personal genetic stake in what happens to Europe after they die. To them, the Europeans of the future will be “all future generations” that inhabit Europe, not the biological descendants of those who’ve inhabited Europe for dozens of millennia.

A continent ruled by the sterile and inhabited by those who’ve been brainwashed or demoralized into choosing sterility themselves will have no posterity in the classical sense. Instead, they will be overrun by people from alien cultures who may not have developed much in the way of technology or philosophy but who at least possess the genetic wisdom to be fertile.
It does appear that the future of Europe is being sold out by its childless leaders.

Saturday, May 20, 2017

What are Traditional Gender Roles?

This is from a site that trolls a lot, so I don't know how serious it is, but here is a weev rant:
Because of the critical importance of this discussion for the survival of the white race and its European civilizations, I wanted to take a minute to explain to all the men and women claiming to be so-called traditionalists all the concepts and social boundaries that defined traditional relationships. ...

Coverture was the reality for all of European history up until the mid and late 19th century, when feminist agitators, the media, and academic establishment triumphed with their agitations through its abolition. The basic principle of coverture is that the rights of the woman are completely subsumed into that of her husband’s. A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband’s wishes, or keep a salary for herself.

William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume I:

The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law - French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. ...

Rape is a property crime and nothing more. First a crime against the property of the father, and then a crime against the property of the husband. This change only finished in the US and UK in the nineties, when I was 8 years old. Women existing in a state of slavery to the sexual whims of their husbands is not some barbarism of prehistory. This was universal common sense for whites up until a couple decades ago. ...

Be honest about what you are. Don’t sit here and pretend you’re a nice traditional girl when you fight against any implementation of traditional values.
This gives the impression that women had no rights at all, and I do not think that is correct. Even women in the Roman Empire had various rights.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Women like men with beard stubble

I thought that conventional wisdom was that men shave their faces in order to be more attractive to women. However it appears that such wisdom is wrong, as is a lot of other advice about what attracts women.

The NY Times reports:
The answers, which were published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, varied depending on what the woman was looking for. Overall, the women said the sexiest men were those sporting heavy stubble, followed by short stubble. Men with full beards and clean-shaven men were rated the lowest on the overall sexiness scale.

What kind of man is most attractive to a woman looking for a short-term fling or one-night stand? Men with light stubble won that contest, closely followed by men with heavier stubble, suggesting that the scruffy look appeals to women looking for fun, but not commitment.

But when it came to choosing a long-term partner, a guy with whom a woman could have babies or settle in for the duration, the more facial hair the better. Men with heavy stubble and full beards were the clear winners on this question, suggesting that men who are ready to commit might do better if they shave less often.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Buying insurance for bad genes

The NY Times reports:
Under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Privacy Act, companies cannot ask employees to take gene tests and cannot use any such results in employment decisions; insurers are not permitted to require gene tests or to use the results in coverage decisions. ...

The 23andMe test results will not appear in people’s medical records, and the company promises not to disclose identifiable findings to third parties. It is up to the customers to reveal them — and the fear for insurers is that many will not. ...

Yet even if just a minority of 23andMe customers decided to game the current insurance system, “it’s enough to perturb the market,” ...

But he also found that those who learned they had the gene variant — Ms. Reilly was one of them — were nearly six times more likely to buy long-term care insurance than those who did not. The ApoE4 gene variant is present in about a quarter of the population.
Insurance depends on companies being able to assess the risk. If insurance companies have to ignore genetic risks and pre-existing conditions, then healthy ppl will have to pay more for policies, because the insurance companies have to deal with those as if they are gaming the system.

Insurance would be more efficient if the companies could use genetic and other risk info.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Arguing with a psychic psychiatrist

The Dilbert cartoonist explains:
How to Know You Won a Political Debate on the Internet ...

Absurd Absolute

An absurd absolute is a restatement of the other person’s reasonable position as an absurd absolute. For example, if your point is there is high crime in Detroit, the absurd absolute would be your debate opponent saying something such as “So, you’re saying every person in Detroit is a criminal.” ...

Analogy

Analogies are good for explaining concepts for the first time. But they have no value in debate. ... No one needs an analogy when facts and reason can do the job.

Attack the Messenger

When people realize their arguments are not irrational, they attack the messenger on the other side. If you have been well-behaved in a debate, and you trigger an oversized personal attack, it means you won. ...

The Psychic Psychiatrist Illusion

The Psychic Psychiatrist Illusion involves imagining you can discern the inner thoughts and motives of strangers. I’m talking about the unspoken thoughts and feelings of strangers, not the things they have actually said. If your debate opponents retreat to magical thinking about their abilities to detect secret motives and mental problems in strangers from a distance, you won.
He nails it. In certain types of discussions, I am invariably confronted with absurd absolutes, analogies, and ad hominem attacks. But most of all, someone will make some crazy mindreading assertion about what someone else is thinking or intending.

Someone might say, "Yes, Trump said ABC. But a woman would know that Trump intended XYZ."

Many times I have heard someone say that he is continually surprised by what Trump says, and cannot make sense of his words, and yet he somehow knows what Trump is thinking.

Not just Trump. I have had ppl argue with me and tell me what I am thinking!

So yes, an internet arguing who starts ad hominem attacks and playing psychic psychiatrist is grasping at straws.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Geneticist afraid of genetic knowledge

NPR radio rebroadcast this:
Today's guest, Siddhartha Mukherjee, has written a best-selling book called "Gene," which is now out in paperback. It tells the history of genetics and reports on new breakthroughs and ethical questions resulting from gene manipulation. ...

GROSS:... I want to ask about your own genes. Have you decided whether to or not to get genetically tested yourself? And I should mention here that there is a history of schizophrenia in your family. You had two uncles and a cousin with schizophrenia. You know, what scientists are learning about schizophrenia is that there is a genetic component to it, a genetic predisposition. So do you want to get tested for that or other illnesses?

MUKHERJEE: I've chosen not to be tested. And I will probably choose not to be tested for a long time, until I start getting information back from genetic testing that's very deterministic. Again, remember that idea of penetrance that we talked about. Some genetic variations are very strongly predictive of certain forms of illness or certain forms of anatomical traits and so forth.

I think that right now, for diseases like schizophrenia, we're nowhere close to that place. The most that we know is that there are multiple genes in familial schizophrenia, the kind that our family has. Essentially, we don't know how to map, as it were. There's no one-to-one correspondence between a genome and the chances of developing schizophrenia.

And until we can create that map - and whether we can create that map ever is a question - but until I - we can create that map, I will certainly not be tested because it - that idea - I mean, that's, again, the center of the book. That confines you. It becomes predictive. You become - it's a chilling word that I use in the book - you become a previvor (ph). A previvor is someone who's survived an illness that they haven't even had yet. You live in the shadow of an illness that you haven't had yet. It's a very Orwellian idea. And I think we should resist it as much as possible.

GROSS: Would you feel that way if you were a woman and there was a history of breast cancer in your family?

MUKHERJEE: Very tough question. If I was a woman and I had a history of breast cancer in my family and if the history was striking enough - and, you know, here's a - it's a place where a genetic counselor helps. If the history was striking enough, I would probably sequence at least the genes that have been implicated in breast cancer, no doubt about it.

GROSS: OK.

MUKHERJEE: I recommend this for my patients.

GROSS: OK. Thank you for that.
This opinion is weird.

Genes are the most important thing in the world but he does not want to know his own genes because of a mixture between thinking that genes are predictive and that genes are not predictive. Which is it? Are they too predictive, or not predictive enuf?

But if a feminist interviewer asks him to recommend gene testing for women, to show that he supports women, he complies.

If the genetic info is bad for him, why wouldn't it be bad for the woman?

Obviously he has some sort of phobia about learning about himself. If he cannot face his genetic data, then probably millions of others cannot either. I understand Jim Watson of DNA discovery fame was also afraid to learn his genes.

Friday, May 12, 2017

Do not call my daughter Caitlyn

AP reports:
A year after Caitlyn Jenner announced her new name and gender, the popularity of the name Caitlyn plummeted more than any other baby name, according to Social Security's annual list of the most popular baby names.

In fact, the four names that dropped the most were all variations of the same name: Caitlin, Caitlyn, Katelynn and Kaitlynn. ...

All four versions of Caitlyn fell out of the top 1,000. ...

Wattenberg said it would be wrong to blame Caitlyn's drop in popularity solely to the fact that Jenner is transgender.
Yeah, that would be wrong, but no one wants his daughter identified with Jenner anyway.

Monday, May 08, 2017

Watergate burglar was CIA agent

I missed this story last year:
CIA report reveals mole among Watergate burglars – Cuban exile Eugenio Martinez

President Richard Nixon, left, and Watergate burglar and CIA agent, Eugenio Martinez. (Photos: Associated Press)

President Richard Nixon, left, and Watergate burglar and CIA agent, Eugenio Martinez. (Photos: Associated Press)

Forty-four years ago, a handful of men broke into an office in Washington, D.C., and two years later the president of the United States resigned.

There have always been questions about the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement in the most famous burglary in the history of the U.S., at the Watergate Hotel offices of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972. Likewise, the connection to the Cuban exile community in South Florida has long been noted.

Now, a report released thanks to a Freedom of Information request has revealed that one of the five men arrested at the Watergate complex, Eugenio Martinez, was both: a Cuban exile and a CIA agent.
I thought that the most incriminating accusation against President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal was that he obstructed justice by telling an aide to tell the DoJ that the Watergate burglary was a CIA operation.

Now it turns out that Nixon was telling the truth!

I have found that, in casual conversation, everyone agrees that Nixon was guilty, but no one can tell me what he did wrong. Now I learn that I was also mistaken about what he did wrong.

Friday, May 05, 2017

Kimmel wants free surgery

CBS News reports:
On Monday night Jimmy Kimmel held back tears as he told the story of his new son William's birth. ...

"Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you would never be able to get health insurance because you had a preexisting condition," Kimmel said.
That is not true. Under the old law, he could add a newborn child to his policy at birth, regardless of the health of the baby.

Apparently Kimmel's is that he wants to buy health for heart surgery after the baby's heart defect is diagnosed. He makes millions of dollars, and can easily afford to buy insurance for a new baby. But he wants to wait until he finds out that surgery is needed, and then get someone else to pay for the surgery.
"If your baby is going to die and it doesn't have to, it shouldn't matter how much money you make," he said with tears in his eyes. "We need to make sure that the people who are supposed to represent us, the people who are meeting about this right now in Washington, understand that very clearly," he added.
They need to understand that millionaires should get free heart surgery for their uninsured babies?

I did not know that Kimmel was such a creep.

Thursday, May 04, 2017

Not desirous of importing a problem

A NY Times op-ed argues:
Selecting refugees based on their spiritual beliefs is a form of state-supported prejudice that secular societies like Australia have a moral obligation to reject.

As one of Australia’s foremost experts on refugees points out, specific religions don’t have a monopoly on peaceful behavior. “Some Buddhists, for example, are extremely spiritual and peaceable,” William Maley, a professor at the Australian National University and author of “What is a Refugee?,” said in an email. “But there are Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar who might better be classed as fascists.”
Okay, I am convinced. Keep out the Buddhists.
Muslims, especially those from the Middle East, have an image problem in the Western world. Concerns are fed by a legitimate fear of terrorism and the alienness of Muslim and Arabic social norms, clothing and language. ...

“As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration,” a government official said in 1938.
The Australians do not just have a legitimate fear of "alienness". The Muslims are against much of what Australians are for, and importing Muslims will cause a lot of problems.

Tuesday, May 02, 2017

The crime of deadnaming

A scholarly journal apologized for this:
Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes.
What's the problem? Here it is:
The sources of those harms are multiple, and include: descriptions of trans lives that perpetuate harmful assumptions and (not coincidentally) ignore important scholarship by trans philosophers; the practice of deadnaming, in which a trans person’s name is accompanied by a reference to the name they were assigned at birth; the use of methodologies which take up important social and political phenomena in dehistoricized and decontextualized ways, thus neglecting to address and take seriously the ways in which those phenomena marginalize and commit acts of violence upon actual persons; and an insufficient engagement with the field of critical race theory. Perhaps most fundamentally, to compare ethically the lived experience of trans people (from a distinctly external perspective) primarily to a single example of a white person claiming to have adopted a black identity creates an equivalency that fails to recognize the history of racial appropriation, while also associating trans people with racial appropriation.
Wow, I did not even know that "deadnaming" is a thing that generates leftist disapproval. I guess they disapprove of saying "formerly Bruce".

No, none of those things are harms. They are delusions by crazy ppl.

Monday, May 01, 2017

Web to support encrypted content

Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C writes:
The question which has been debated around the net is whether W3C should endorse the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) standard which allows a web page to include encrypted content, by connecting an existing underlying Digital Rights Management (DRM) system in the underlying platform. Some people have protested “no”, but in fact I decided the actual logical answer is “yes”.
Much as leftist web activists hate DRM, the logical answer is indeed yes.

I am all in favor of wanting control over my own machines. That is why I don't like advertisers running javascript in my browser, and why I don't like Apple and Facebook. I appreciate tools for blocking javascript, ads, and itunes. But I also want to watch movies that cost millions to make, so I want DRM-capable hardware and software.

For related reasons, the Apple and Linux folks are ideologically opposed to using technologies like TPM to help secure your computer. They make it impractical to securely store info on those computers. So enterprise customers buy Microsoft.