Friday: Hili dialogue

May 24, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end of the week: Friday, May 24, 2024, and National Escargot Day, honoring those who love snails—or perhaps the snails themselves. I have had exactly one in my life, which tasted like butter and garlic with something chunky and fishlike within. I will never have another.  Here’s how the mollusks are farmed in Tasmania:

It’s also Asparagus Day, National Yucatán Shrimp Day (made with garlic and butter sauce with add-ons like sambal.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT reports that Israel is making deeper incursions into Rafah.  Of course the headline begins, “Defying international pressure, Israel. . . ” I never would have believed when I was a young and ardent follower of the magazine that it could be so arrant in slanting the news. Well, on to the story:

Israel’s military said on Thursday that it was fighting in neighborhoods near the heart of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, apparently expanding its campaign against Hamas in a week when Israel has faced mounting diplomatic and legal pressure over its war effort.

The fighting came as the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the top court of the United Nations, said it would respond on Friday to a South African petition for the court to order an immediate halt to the ground assault in Rafah. The court has no means of enforcing its orders, but a call for Israel to rein in its offensive would be the latest setback to the country on the international stage.

The Israeli military said Thursday that it was operating in the Brazil and Shaboura areas of Rafah, which are roughly halfway between Israel’s southwestern border and the Mediterranean coast. When Israel’s push into Rafah began on May 6, the military said it was carrying out a limited operation against Hamas battalions in the city, which lies along Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Israeli troops were “continuing operational activity in specific areas of Rafah,” the military said in a statement, adding that it was “making every effort to prevent harm to civilians” and moving in “after the civilian population in the area was evacuated.”

Around 815,000 people have already left Rafah as a result of the fighting and Israeli warnings to flee, the United Nations said this week, amounting to well over half the number of Palestinians who had crowded into the city in recent months to escape fighting elsewhere in Gaza.

Israeli forces had dismantled several tunnels and killed fighters in “close-quarters encounters,” the military said. It was not possible to independently verify Israel’s account of the fighting. Hamas did not immediately comment on the fighting on Thursday.

It looks as if there’s been substantial evacuation of civilians and I’m betting that the IDF is going after only putative militant targets. The ICJ, of course, is impotent here, as it should be. If the IDF is only going after military targets, what is South Africa’s beef? Is Israel not ALLOWED to mop up the remaining Hamas fighters? (The answer to that is “no, they’re not, because South Africa is a dweeb.”)

*This article and 3-minute audio from NPR was pointed out in a comment by reader Edward, who said “I despise Trump but this is why Biden is trying hard to lose my vote.” Fortunately, theres a transcript:

The Biden administration reportedly is considering opening up a pathway for some Palestinian to come from Gaza to the U.S. as refugees. But what would that look like in practice?

Bad idea of the year! No Arab country will take Palestinian refugees because they know that Palestinians come with terrorism. How do you weed out all the terrorists. The U.S. has a solution:

President Biden’s administration is considering its options for letting Palestinian refugees into the United States. That comes as Israel continues its war against Hamas in Gaza, and the United States has warned Israel to protect Palestinian civilians. An observer of the U.S. deliberations says any move by President Biden is likely to be narrowly drawn. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is with the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigrant rights.

AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK: It appears that the Biden administration is considering a policy that might apply only to those who are family members of U.S. citizens, or potentially family members of other lawful permanent residents in the United States, so this is a very narrow group of people.

INSKEEP: In other words, the U.S. would let in people who have some connection already to the U.S. To be let in as refugees, people normally have to show they are being politically persecuted, and that leads to an awkward question that I put to Reichlin-Melnick.

Would this be a little awkward for President Biden, to be a supporter of Israel and also accepting refugees from Gaza on the basis that they’re politically persecuted?

REICHLIN-MELNICK: There is an open question as to who the persecution could come from. It is not a requirement for refugee status that you be persecuted specifically by a nation state. A persecution by armed groups can at times qualify for protection, so theoretically, some individuals could be granted refugee status due to threats from Hamas. It’s a murky issue, let’s say.

I guess I’m not opposed to this in principle, so long as Israeli refugees—over 100,000 have moved away from the borders due to persecution from Hamas and Hezbollah, and have given up their homes for who knows how long—also get a shot at moving to the U.S. There are, however, both legal and political problems with getting Palestinians of even this type into the U.S.: see the article.

*Over at the Original Jurisidiction Substack site, legal writer David Lat has a sensible article called “Transgender Legal Issues: A Commonsense Approach“. (h/t Bob) He’s actually summarizing the conclusions of a new book mentioned in the first paragraph:

In 2024, defining sex is controversial. Doriane Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, tackles this topic in a thoughtful and fair-minded new book, On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach, released this week.

Some examples of her reasonable approach to contentious issues:

One of her central tenets in On Sex and Gender is that society, instead of being “sex-blind,” needs to be “sex-smart.” She draws many of her examples from the field of medicine. As Coleman told me, “We all know that sex matters when it comes to the way our bodies are, how they function and sometimes don’t function, and how they age.”

Failing to recognize sex-based medical differences—which for decades meant treating female patients using research derived from males—leads to worse outcomes, in terms of both medical outcomes for individual patients and public-health outcomes for society. What’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander.3

What does it mean to be sex-smart when it comes to transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports? The issue resonates strongly for Coleman, a champion runner who competed at the collegiate and national levels before going to law school.

And in the athletic context, according to Coleman, being sex-smart requires recognizing the undeniable advantages that post-puberty male physiology and hormones provide. So elite sports, where the focus is on competition and selectivity, should be classified by sex, full stop. If you have been through male puberty, you should not be allowed to participate as a woman in Division I college sports, national competitions, and the Olympics, in Coleman’s view.4

Outside the elite context, however, Coleman doesn’t have a bright-line rule. Developing a sensible policy requires looking at the specific sports program in question, figuring out its institutional goals, and evaluating how much sex matters to fulfilling those goals. For an after-school sports program focused mainly on advancing physical fitness and teaching teamwork, trans kids should be allowed to play with the groups that match their gender identity.

But the answer might be different when it comes to the statewide championship in a high-school varsity sport, where the focus is more on competition rather than health and well-being (and athletic scholarships, like the track scholarship that sent Coleman to college, might be on the line). As Coleman writes in her book, “a male-bodied kid shouldn’t be the girls’ state champion.”

Her conciliatory view treatment for gender dysphoria, however, is a bit problematic:

What about gender-affirming care for minors? Coleman, who describes her own politics as liberal, again stakes out a moderate position, rejecting the extremes of left and right. She doesn’t support total bans on all gender-affirming care for minors, but she also doesn’t support automatically and immediately prescribing hormones or surgery for all potentially transgender kids.

Since she wants care to be “evidence based,” I think we need to have a good base of medical evidence before we even think of prescribing hormones.  If there are known side effects, we need to know both their range and their frequency so that consent can be informed.  Also, shouldn’t there be a lower age limit for surgery or hormones?

*If you’ve ever paid way too much for tickets because of that pirate outfit Ticketmaster, you’ll be happy to hear that the Justice Department is suing Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster. (I actually remember actually buying tickets without fees!)

The Justice Department’s suit against Live Nation  tees up a legal battle more than a decade in the making, one that could redistribute power in the live-events business and change how consumers buy tickets to concerts and sporting events.

The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, alleges Live Nation used its power to squelch competition and retaliate against promoters and venues that threatened its dominance. The company chokes off competition in key pillars of the concert system, driving prices and fees higher for fans, the department said. “It is time to break up Live Nation,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

Live Nation said Thursday that it doesn’t have a monopoly in ticketing or promotion and will fight the government’s case. Ticketmaster doesn’t set prices, according to the company, artists and teams do, and they are subject to high demand and low supply, while the majority of fees go to venues. Live Nation’s shares declined 7.8% to $93.48 on Thursday.

With Thursday’s suit, a Justice Department committed to bolder antitrust enforcement gave up on its earlier approach to the live-events marketplace. The Justice Department had concerns about Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2010 but declined to challenge it, saying it didn’t think it would win in court.

Fourteen years later, the department says it’s armed with more information about how Live Nation operates—and that supports calling it an illegal monopoly. Department officials didn’t spell out Thursday how they want the company to be broken up, but analysts expect it would seek to separate Live Nation’s concert-promotion business from Ticketmaster.

. . . If the government prevails, officials said, U.S. consumers could in the future pay lower prices because a broader range of companies could offer tickets to shows. That added competition could drive down the fees that Ticketmaster adds to the price of seeing a show, the Justice Department said.

Oh please, government, PREVAIL! Ticketmaster says that most of the fees go to venues, but a lot of the fees go to Ticketmaster, and they’re hidden fees. I despise that sort of piracy and am rooting for the government this time.

*A somewhat serendipitous accident happened to a fan at a game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Toronto Blue Jays. She was hurt, but now she’s famous and even has her own baseball cards!

Liz McGuire was at a Blue Jays game in Toronto on Friday night, sitting on the third base line and talking with a friend, when a foul ball suddenly hurtled toward her at 110 miles per hour, striking her in the head and leaving a large lump above her right eye.

McGuire, 40, didn’t get to keep the ball that hit her, but now, 110 personalized Topps baseball cards bearing a picture of her swollen forehead have been mailed to her.

Bo Bichette, the Blue Jays shortstop, was up to bat during the late innings of Toronto’s game on Friday against the Tampa Bay Rays when he fouled off a pitch. The ball was fired over the protective netting in the lower bowl of Rogers Centre and behind the third base line, where McGuire was sitting with her friend.

McGuire said she briefly turned her head away from the field to talk to her friend and didn’t see the ball barreling toward her.

“I heard someone scream, and then it just hit me,” she said.

Here’s her tweet of how her face got mashed in. Look at that lump on the left-hand picture. She was lucky she wasn’t killed; I don’t think her skull was even cracked!

And she was gutsy:

The Blue Jays said in an email on Tuesday that McGuire was immediately attended to by medical workers at the ballpark, and that she decided to return to her seat to watch the rest of the game.

. . .After McGuire posted pictures of her swollen face and the ensuing black eye on social media, she said Topps, the trading card company, contacted her and asked her permission to use one of the images on a custom card.

Topps produced exactly 110 copies, a nod to the speed of the ball that hit McGuire. The cards have a picture of McGuire in Blue Jays gear with the large lump on her forehead.

“Fan wears 110MPH foul ball like a champ,” the cards say.

A spokeswoman for the Blue Jays said that the team had reached out to McGuire and invited her to an upcoming game. The team also offered her a ball signed by Bichette.

Click to see the whole card. I bet they’ll be worth a pile in the future. After all, they’re by Topps.

Oh, the damage:

Since Friday, McGuire said she has suffered headaches and nausea. She went back to the emergency room on Monday, but her CT scans were clear.

“I probably just have a concussion, and a good story,” she said, adding that she bought two lottery tickets over the weekend.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is having a Senior Moment with Hili

Szaron: I was thinking for a long time whether I should tell you about it.
Hili: About what?
Szaron: I’ve already forgotten what I wanted to tell.
In Polish:
Szaron: Długo się zastanawiałem, czy ci o tym powiedzieć.
Hili: O czym?
Szaron: Zdążyłem zapomnieć, co ci chciałem powiedzieć.

*******************

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From The Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Masih, an older lady dancing to celebrate the death of the “Butcher of Tehran,” killed in a helicopter crash:

Here’s the newly released footage of six IDF women soldiers attacked on October 7 and abducted as hostages to Gaza. I think at least one of them is dead. This is horrifying, so be aware of some blood and some very brutal treatment.

From Shadi Bartsch, professor of classics and Bob Zimmer’s widow, annotated by me:

I’m not a fan of Ted Cruz, but I have to admit that I get some naches seeing him bore into Anthony “Invertebrate” Blinken.  Cruz is, however, a bit harsh and tendentious. But I wonder if Blinken is always telling the truth here, especially about Israel.  “We did not cut off weapons to Israel,” says Blinken. But they did: bombs!

From Jez, two examples of physics:

From Malcolm, who says, “The cats are thinking, ‘You’re a wimp.'”:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 36 year old man who didn’t survive. His eyes are haunting.

Two tweets from Matthew. First, a fishing wolf–way cool!


And a BIG duck on the loose!

24 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Coleman/Lat: “For an after-school sports program focused mainly on advancing physical fitness and teaching teamwork, trans kids should be allowed to play with the groups that match their gender identity.”

    Do the girls get any say in this, or just the trans kids?

    I’m not convinced. If being male/female doesn’t matter to the activity then just have it mixed girls/boys. If, though, you are segregating the kids, then I’ve never heard a good reason for segregating by “gender identity” rather than biological sex.

    Further, a rule of: “if segregating, then segregate by sex” is clear and easy; any segregation by ill-defined “gender identity” is a recipe for endless wrangling and edge cases.

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  3. Apparently media and academia are going to hold onto obsolete ideas as long as they can. Quote from CSR “Minds and gods” – “Reacting against the Standard Social Science Model, which views the neonate mind as essentially a blank slate and ***places a fundamental division between biology and culture***, the models of mind put forth by cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary psychologists rightly include innate knowledge bases that facilitate computation in specialized domains.”

    We just live in a world where some people are going to build moon rockets, and others are going to gather a following blessing it with moonlight charged crystals. The important thing I guess is to know the difference and have a keen social empath level sensitivity when filling staff position and handling the unqualified.

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  4. We lost internet for two days in our whole subdivision (thanks, AT&T). It just came back on ten minutes ago (thanks, AT&T?). (WEIT is first thing on my morning routine after I check email.) I have to say, it was very annoying. Living in Florida, we have lost power for several days at different times, and I thought that that was the worst, but, apparently, not having internet by itself is just as bad. If I had a choice between power and internet, I’d choose internet. I can always use re-chargers on devices. This was a bit of a revelation.

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    1. Reminds me of Mr. Jefferson: something like, “were it left to me to decide whether to have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should prefer the latter”.

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    2. That would really suck. You probably know but hurricane season is expected to be really bad this year.

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      1. Yeah. It’s the trade off for not having to shovel or wear sweaters. I always tell people I didn’t move down here for the summers.

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  5. Yes. A toast to the memory of the late President Zimmer, especially in these recent trying times: scholar, independent leader, and, very importantly to me, a mensch.

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  6. Wolf appears to have a presumably tracking collar. I guess that’s how they figured out where to set the camera up.

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  7. I am almost starting to feel sorry for Ted Cruz. He is one of those poor fellows that one can find deeply disagreeable even when in agreement with what he is saying.

    There is another clip of him floating around in which he castigates a judicial nominee for having sentenced a 6’2” serial rapist to a women’s prison. Note how the judge says that the man is now “female.” Not a “she.” Not a “woman.” A female. With original factory equipment.

    https://x.com/Riley_Gaines_/status/1793470910378430553

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    1. And of course there’s a nice five-minute video of former Senator Al Franken’s take on Ted Cruz at

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  8. After coaching young boys and girls in sports for 12 years, I can say pretty confidently that boys have an advantage even before puberty kicks in. That advantage won’t go away with puberty blockers. We can’t keep them at 8 years old forever- – they will grow differently, and boys will have the advantage. You might end up with a 6 foot tall teenage boy with low muscle mass and tiny genitals, but he’ll still be 6 feet tall with male-proportioned bones and basic musculature. Giving kids unproven drugs is a recipe for disaster. We worry about micro levels of inert plastic in water, but are OK giving kids drugs that forever change their bodies? I’ve heard proposals to open up a 3rd class so there would be men’s / women’s / other, but that just means that bio men would have 2 classes as females who identify as men will never be competitive against males in sports.

    Re: Gaza refugees – if this occurs, there will terrorists in America. We are allowing illegal immigrants coming across the Southern border as refugees without stopping them, so why would it be any different with Gazans?

    Bombs were withheld from Israel but other military aid was sent. Media won’t hold Blinken/Biden accountable. There seems to be a double standard at play – what would be front page “HE LIED” news with a Trump administration is ignored or explained away as “misspoke” or “inartful” with Biden, when the truth is somewhere in the middle.

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    1. Canada “rescued” a tranche of people from Gaza who have flag-of-convenience Canadian passports. I should imagine many of them are already in the United States now, waiting for opportunity.

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    2. Somewhere I read a compilation of data for old (1960s? 1970s?) Presidential Fitness Challenge for kids. Well before puberty the boys scored higher for strength and speed than the girls, while girls had better flexibility. (I suppose some of that could be cultural, girls are not encouraged to become strong.)
      So, yeah… Testosterone.

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    3. After coaching young boys and girls in sports for 12 years, I can say pretty confidently that boys have an advantage even before puberty kicks in.

      There is some evidence of on-average sports advantage for boys over girls prior to puberty:

      Marta CC, Marinho DA, Barbosa TM, Izquierdo M, Marques MC. Physical fitness differences between prepubescent boys and girls. J Strength Cond Res. 2012 Jul;26(7):1756-66. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0b013e31825bb4aa

      Brown, G.A., Shaw, B.S. and Shaw, I. (2024), Sex-based differences in track running distances of 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1500m in the 8 and under and 9–10-year-old age groups. Eur J Sport Sci, 24: 217-225. doi: 10.1002/ejsc.1207

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  9. ‪Whenever the topic of human males interconverting to human females arises, the following bears some thought:

    Queer Theory is the doctrine of a gnostic theosophical religious cult, expressed through erotic and sexual experience, with explicit interest in young children. Let me write that again : explicit interest in young children. The objective of Queer Theory is the establishment of perpetual thought revolution as a biological necessity for rebirth in and creation of a new world.

    See Marcuse’s The End of Utopia (1967) for the “biological necessity” — yes, literally — and an idea of the gnostic prison (here, “alienated labor”) :

    “What is at stake is the idea of a new theory of man, not only as theory but also as a way of existence: the genesis and development of a vital need for freedom and of the vital needs of freedom — of a freedom no longer based on and limited by scarcity and the necessity of alienated labor. The development of qualitatively new human needs appears as a biological necessity; they are needs in a very biological sense.”
    “All human needs, including sexuality, lie beyond the animal world.”

    See Curriculum Inquiry, 50:5, 440-461, (2020) for the explicit interest of “The Queer Family” “particularly for young children” for “preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship” and “world making”.

    The cult manipulates its way around the above by entering from exoteric things like athletics or medicine (easily defended motte, unrelated to Queer Theory) by which its esoteric interests are advanced (in the bailey ) because everyone was made to get busy working in the motte, retooling the world to accommodate the “new human needs”.

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    1. “Explicit interest in young children”…
      Hence the lingerie-wearing, twerking, erotic “drag queen story hours” for elementary school children. There’s never been a movement for bringing pole dancing women to read to kids, so I wondered why having males dressed in a similar manner and performing in a similar manner was being pushed. Now I know.

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      1. The idea of humiliation ritual comes to mind. IMHO that makes the most sense in only one of those scenarios.

        [… hmmm… goes to library …]

        I just found this in Margaret Thaler Singer’s Cults in our Midst (1995):
        p.189-190 for a rough idea of the connection :

        “Large Group Awareness Training programs … contain processes to humiliate people (they resemble fraternity hazing events) … nor can I see a correlation to work or anything that might be remotely helpful to employees in exercises that […] have people cross-dress and act out caricatured opposite-sex roles, as others have reported.”

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  10. >She doesn’t support total bans on all gender-affirming care for minors, but she also doesn’t support automatically and immediately prescribing hormones or surgery for all potentially transgender kids.

    This is disingenuous straw-manning either by David Lat or by Prof. Coleman. The current practice in the United States and Canada is not automatic and immediate prescription for all kids who think they are trans. Only a minority of all gender-confused children get medicalized. Rather the so-called “informed-consent*” approach is to provide hormones and at least some surgery for all kids who want them, with the dishonest manipulation given to skeptical parents that their children will kill themselves if they are not affirmed in the way the children want. What some American states have done in banning this care is to have stepped in where medical self-regulation has failed to protect immature children from predatory medical self-interest happy to give them what they have been manipulated into thinking they want.

    The release of Dr. Hilary Cass’s final report in the UK, which has resulted in a regulatory ban on puberty blockade of children there and stimulated retrenching caution in Europe, has fallen on deaf ears in North America, outside of states that were already moving in this direction. (In Canada, only Alberta has announced plans to curtail this treatment for adolescents.)

    Jerry’s sensible idea that there should be minimum age restrictions for this treatment is undermined by the claim that going through the “wrong” puberty is devastating to a child’s mental health. Therefore if you’re going to save lives from suicide you have to start at the first sign of puberty, which can be as young as eight or nine in some girls, either by keeping them in a suspended state of barely perceptible puberty with gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues or by getting right to it and giving them the “correct” puberty with cross-sex hormones.
    ——————-
    * The informed consent does include a description of known side effects. In many clinics the parents even sign forms acknowledging that they have been informed of these risks, a CYA effort unusual for standard non-experimental clinical care. The problem is that an 11-year-old can’t comprehend what it means to be infertile — “Babies? Yuck! Gross! I’ll just adopt.” — or to have fragile bones like their elderly grandmothers. And if the treatment is life-saving, like chemotherapy for acute leukemia, well, life is choices, isn’t it.

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    1. Yes! “Dishonest manipulation given to skeptical parents that their children will kill themselves if they are not affirmed,” and the legal ban on so-called conversion therapy that might lead to acceptance of one’s sex.

      It’s all predicated on the gnostic gnotion (thanks TP) of a gendered soul that can be discovered at an early age by introspection.

      That craziness has to stop, and one aspect of stopping it is avoiding any encouragement to socialize as the other sex, including boys joining girls’ sports teams, clubs, and sororities. Coleman missed an opportunity to draw on the known biology of humans and other mammals in deciding on this compromise between compassion for mentally ill people and the protection of sex-based rights of women and girls.

      I’m so glad my daughter who loved Girl Guides got out before it became necessary to share a tent with the boys:
      https://www.girlguides.ca/WEB/Documents/GGC/Guidelines-for-the-Inclusion-of-Transgender-and-Non-binary-Members.pdf

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  11. The silly CBC has run as its top story on the hourly news all morning that the ICJ has ordered Israel to cease its offensive in Rafah. It reports Israel’s statement that it has no intention of complying, with an air that you have to listen to CBC announcers to really catch, as Israel’s further isolation from the international community, as if that was a relevant consideration to Israel or anyone else.

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