Look ma, no SATA @[email protected]

I'm having a GRS and FFS on Tuesday, 23 July 2019.

I won't be posting explicit photos, but I will talk about my experiences. That will, perforce, include graphic descriptions of anatomy. I will CW all of this appropriately.

If this isn't something you want to read, or if you are underage and it would be illegal for me to send these descriptions to you either in US/VA or your jurisdiction, please either unfollow me or refrain from opening these CW'd messages.

One thing I really hate about my culture is its fetishization of competition. We create needless competition in business, sports, politics, etc. Why? It is destructive, it creates more losers than winners, and it wastes resources that could be better used to solve our collective problems. Proponents claim it spurs innovation and achievement. Bullshit: it spurs cheating and gaming the system. Competition of *ideas* is better served by *cooperation* to study them.

I should probably pin Britt's ref sheet.

If you're trans, remember: the point of changing your appearance and presentation is to feel better living in your own skin. Anyone who gives you grief for not meeting some arbitrary standard is welcome to go shag a cactus.

SARS-Cov-2 is really starting to take off in Virginia Beach, it seems. Which is not surprising: it's tourist season, a lot of people aren't wearing masks, etc.

In the log-scale view, you can see that the exponential growth rate is actually increasing. It's now on track to double every four days or so, which is frightening.

Buckle up, folks.

The WaPo was railing about the death of local newspapers. And while local news is useful and reporters deserve steady, good compensation for their work, I can't cry about that.

News as provided by advertisement-funded, hierarchically run organizations is just too problematic. It selects writers who conform to the editors' and advertisers' worldview; it emphasizes the salacious over the substantial; and it often fails to hold power to account.

I'd rather directly pay people I know do good work.

Good morning

Just got stopped on my walk by a driver who wanted the know if I ‘wanted a friend’ (nudge, wink). Since I’m out for exercise and getting sweaty, I’m wearing androgynous clothes and no wig, so there’s telling what he’s picking up as gender cues. Wheee.

The ACLU: We’re doing important work for trans people!

Also the ACLU: <Sends fundbegging snail mail addressed to my deadname.>

My neighbors are shooting off fireworks at midnight. WT-actual-F.

All of which makes me more interested in ever in explicitly intersectional leftist organizing. I need to look more closely into Black Socialists in America and Cooperation Jackson (BlackSocialists and CooperationJXN on birdsite, respectively). The former has been saying a lot of things that really resonate with me, including a pretty fantastic thread (https://twitter.com/BlackSocialists/status/1280495769318014978?s=20) that sums up my feelings about leaders.

Fin. For now, anyway.

But the authors fail entirely to address how decades of efforts at integration, assimilation, and curbing implicit bias have failed to reduce inequity. Which raises the question of why would the Economist's readers want to stay with a failed program (if indeed they admit it has failed, which is not clear)? To my thinking, they answer is obvious: they're capitalists, and they benefit from it. They just don't want to be criticized for that.

The article's nameless authors are happy to admit that things like implicit bias exist, but insist that measures toward facial equality like "making sure that ... hiring practices ... are non-discriminatory" and that "people of equal talant who make comparable efforts end up with similar life prospects" will "eventually eradicat[e] the legacy of past racial injustices."

It's a charade, and one that sees New Atheist darlings like Boghossian cozying up to explicitly Christian Nationalist groups to beat up on targets like transgender people. But that's probably not surprising: much of the New Atheist movement was always (sadly) less about addressing the real needs of non-believers who have been harmed in the name of religion than it was about pseudo-intellectual beat-downs as spectacle.

The Embrace the Void podcast's most recent episode, no. 150, deals with some of these folks and the theatrical way they bang on about 'evidence' and 'argument' while running away from any serious challenger to their ideas (https://voidpod.com/podcasts/2020/7/9/ev-150-sovereign-nations-and-the-grievance-hoaxers).

While the nameless author doesn't offer much of an argument, they do point readers to defenders of liberalism in the persons of James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.

Lindsay, Pluckrose, and their fellow 'grievance-studies' troll, Peter Boghossian, seem to be the darlings of a new right that wants to defend policies and power that it favors by cozying up to people who will do theatrical, pseudo-intellectual beat downs on social media for the cause.

The article doesn't present any well-reasoned critique of critical race theory's underpinnings and intellectual practice. Instead, it expects readers to be horrified by definitions of racism (and anti-racism) that are about power and policy and whether particular policies maintain, exacerbate, or reduce racial inequities. Readers are expected to be aghast at the lack of facial race neutrality and the prospect of race-based policies meant to reduce inequity.

What I'm noticing is what they take umbrage at, namely definition of racism that "defines everyone by their race, and every action as racist or anti-racist." What they're talking about is critical race theory, with the magazine's nameless writers turning their fire on Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Note what they're doing here: this is an attempt to use a word that sounds leftist to American audiences--liberal--to defend ostensibly race-neutral but racial-inequity-producing policies from criticism. One might also argue that they're mischaracterizing King, or at the very least divorcing positions from context, but I'll leave it to someone who knows the history better than I do to make that case, and focus on the definitions.

"... towards their vision of equality of opportunity and equality before the law. Most Americans still hew to that classical liberal ideal. But a dangerous rival approach has emerged from American universities. It defines everyone by their race, and every action as racist or anti-racist. If it supplants Enlightenment liberalism, then intimidation will chill open debate and sow division to the disadvantage of all, black and white."

The Economist has wading into race lately: "Our cover this week argues that a set of illiberal ideas about how to tackle American racism will only hinder progress." I haven't done more than skim the article (and one it links to) from unknown author(s). (I think the Economist normally omits author names.) Let's start with the blurb: "Leaders like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King .used vigorous protest to push society ...

Good morning

The Citations Needed podcast did a good episode about That Damned Harper’s Letter: https://twitter.com/citationspod/status/1280895778949607426?s=21