Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 18, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Tuesday, the Cruelest Day of the Week. It’s June 18, 2024, and it’s International Sushi Day. For sure it’s cultural appropriation, but of the good kind (nearly all kinds are good).  Here’s the best sushi movie ever made: “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” it’s 80 minutes long, but mesmerizing.  This is, to many, the best sushi restaurant in the world. (If this movie, which is great, doesn’t play in your browser, just go to it on the YouTube site.)

It’s also Autistic Pride Day, Go Fishing Day, National Cheesemakers Day (blessed be them!), National Cherry Tart Day, International Picnic Day, and Waterloo Day in the United Kingdom (the date of the battle in 1815).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Jerusalem Post gave the results of a new poll taken by a Palestinian pollster in both the West Bank and Gaza (h/t Robert). and it puts the lie to those who claim that Palestinians who aren’t in Hamas don’t really support it much.

Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki released a survey of Palestinian attitudes on Wednesday – the third since October 7 – showing that fully 61% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would prefer to see Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and that support for the terrorist organization far outstrips that of Fatah.

Nevertheless, the headline of a New York Times front page article on Sunday read, “Gazans voice their distress under Hamas.” The online headline to the story was, “As war drags on, Gazans more willing to speak out against Hamas.”

Three days after a prominent Palestinian pollster referred to as such by a senior New York Times writer in November, released a poll indicating one trend among Palestinians, the Times published a front-page article that seemed to contradict those poll findings.

While the poll showed strong support for Hamas among Palestinians, the Times article, based on “interviews with nearly a dozen Gaza in recent months,” portrayed a different narrative of dissatisfaction with Hamas rule in Gaza.The article acknowledged that while gauging public opinion in Gaza is more difficult now even than it was in the past and, in some instances, renders contradictory results, “some recent surveys reflect the weak or mixed support in Gaza for Hamas and its leaders.”

That NYT article is here, and nobody would take this for even a quasi-scientific poll.  From the NYT:

In interviews with nearly a dozen Gaza residents in recent months, a number of them said they held Hamas responsible for starting the war and helping to bring death and destruction upon them, even as they blame Israel first and foremost.

. . . Some of the Gazans who spoke to The New York Times said that Hamas knew it would be starting a devastating war with Israel that would cause heavy civilian casualties, but that it did not provide any food, water or shelter to help people survive it. Hamas leaders have said they wanted to ignite a permanent state of war with Israel on all fronts as a way to revive the Palestinian cause and knew that the Israeli response would be big.

“Nearly a dozen” people? Of course, I can’t find how many people were interviewed by the Palestinian Pollster, either. Here’s another poll:

A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Gaza and published this past week showed that support in Gaza for Hamas leaders is slightly higher and that the share who are satisfied with Hamas leadership in the territory has risen since December.”

Shikaki’s poll, unlike the one from March cited by the Times, found that the percentage of satisfaction with Hamas and Sinwar remains very high. Some 65% of all Palestinians said they were satisfied with Sinwar’s performance during this war (76% in the West Bank and 50% in Gaza.)

How do we figure out if the Palestinians, speaking out of fear, are just telling the pollsters what they want to hear? Hamas, after all, doesn’t much like its Palestinian opponents, as we saw in 2006 and 2007, when they killed a lot of Fatah members in Gaza.  We’ll only find out for sure if Hamas is overthrown and then Gazans get to choose their own leadership.

*Every day when I look at the Washington Post it seems lamer and lamer, and that’s probably true, as the paper is bleeding money like a stuck pig. It’s hard to find anything covered there now that isn’t better covered elsewhere. However, here’s one article that caught my eye, “The most common job in America is an incredible three-way tie.” So guess what those jobs are before reading below. The tie is pretty amazing. The piece was written in response to someone who asked what was the most common job in the U.S.—and also the least common job.

If you guessed home health and personal care aide was American’s most common job in 2023, you were correct! And honestly, if you guessed retail clerk or fast-food counter worker, we ought to give it to you anyway. With about 3.7 million workers each,the three jobs cluster together so closely atop the list that the winner falls within the minuscule margin of error produced by the BLS’s critically acclaimed, clunkily named Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program.\

Here’s the Post’s graph; the top three jobs differ by only about 13,000 workers.

Twice a year, BLS contacts more than 180,000 businesses to find out what sort of workers they employ in 800-plus occupations and what they pay them. Each year’s final release is informed by the most recent three years of surveys, so when all is said and done, this survey tries to get data from more than half of American jobs.

The least common job?

And it turns out that only 260 of America’s jobs go to wood patternmakers — making it the least common job tracked by the federal government. Brad Moore, director of engineering at Badger Alloys, employs two of them.

On the western edge of Milwaukee, where Badger has sprawled across several city blocks since its founding in 1966, the pattern perfectionists take the engineer’s plan for a valve or pump and craft a master. Often it’s wood, but sometimes they use other materials, such as urethane or aluminum. A colleague puts each side of the master into a mold box, a fancy industrial sandbox full of easy-to-shape industrial sand, to create a mold. They fill the mold with molten steel or alloys. Once it hardens, Team Badger busts the metal out of the sand to reveal single-piece parts that can weigh as little as a few pounds or as much as a late-model Chevy Suburban.

“It is unquestionable that those who can build, maintain and understand traditional wooden pattern equipment are artists,” Moore told us. “We aren’t making more, and they are slowly retiring and leaving the industry” now that so much American manufacturing has moved overseas.

But Moore doubts the art will die off entirely. American factories, ships and power plants, especially those critical to the nation’s security, will always need locally made steel bits that can’t easily be fabricated with other techniques. A few of the 10,000-odd wooden masters in Badger’s dry and secure storage facility have been around for a century, and Moore sees no reason we won’t need them for a century longer.

But of course there are unique jobs and jobs less common than wood patternmakers. For example, I’d guess lion tamers. This applies only to jobs tracked by the federal government. We are a white-collar country, but there are quite a few manual laborers: twice as many as software developers, which I found surprising.

*The IDF claims that it has destroyed two of the four brigades of Hamas fighters in Rafah,

The Israel Defense Forces said Monday it has dismantled about half of Hamas’s fighting force in Rafah, killing at least 550 gunmen in the area, as the operation against the terror group in the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city continued.

The IDF’s 162nd Division has been fighting in Rafah for more than 40 days, first taking control of the city’s eastern outskirts and the border crossing with Egypt in early May. In the second stage of the operation, about a week and a half later, the division captured the Brazil neighborhood.

The third stage of the Rafah offensive saw the IDF take control of the entire Egypt-Gaza border, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, and push into the city’s northwestern Tel Sultan neighborhood.

The IDF said it has killed at least 550 gunmen in the Rafah operation — that is, those it was able to physically identify following battles. Many more terror operatives were killed in strikes against buildings and tunnels, it has assessed. Additionally, an unknown number of terror operatives fled the Rafah area as the military began its offensive there.

Of the four battalions in Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, two — Yabna (South) and East Rafah — are considered to be almost completely dismantled, while the capabilities of the other two — Shaboura (North) and Tel Sultan (West) — are somewhat degraded due to IDF operations.

Along the Philadelphi Corridor, the IDF said it located hundreds of rockets, including dozens of long-range projectiles aimed at central Israel. Also in the border area, more than 200 tunnel shafts have been located, leading to many underground routes.

But of course many questions remain. How many Hamas fighters are in tunnels and can pop up in places other than Rafah, as they’ve been doing? When the IDF claims to have destroyed both remaining brigades form Hamas in Rafah, will that somehow end the war? Where is Sinwar? Where are the rest of the hostages? (My guess is that they’ve been farmed out to civilians.)  And, most of all, after Israel “destroys” Hamas, what will happen to Gaza?

*President Biden, while tightening immigration rules on one hand, is loosening them with the other. But the loosening seems fair, so long as the immigrants married to Americans aren’t doing so just to get their green cards:

President Biden is expected to announce a new immigration program Tuesday that would provide a path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the country illegally who are married to U.S. citizens, according to lawmakers and others familiar with the matter.

Biden plans to make the announcement at the White House alongside members of Congress, immigration advocates and U.S. citizens who, because of arcane immigration rules, haven’t been able to sponsor their spouses for green cards.

The program has the potential to benefit immigrants who have been living in the country at least a decade, offering them work permits, deportation protections—and a route for them to apply for green cards, which is the pathway to citizenship. The program’s size would make it one of the largest immigration initiatives started in recent decades, rivaled only by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that former President Barack Obama created to benefit Dreamers in 2012. The White House is also planning to mark the 12-year anniversary of that program, known as DACA, at the event Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Biden was weighing the spouses program.

. . . With the new policy, his team homed in on the idea of providing immigration relief to spouses because a much smaller version of the program already haw existed for a decade for military families, according to people familiar with the discussions. His advisers also pointed to internal Democratic polling that found that most Americans support legalizing spouses of U.S. citizens, even if they entered the country illegally.

But this does seem fair, and of course there are ways to ensure that people really are married beyond having that marriage license. Suspected violators are separated and asked questions like “what side of the bed do you sleep on?”, and of course much more probing questions.  But if a couple has been married for a decade, and is living together, it seems cruel not to allow the immigrant spouses to embark on getting citizenship.

*The Biden Administration has a new Title IX law, one that protects LGBTQ+ students (fine with me, but not with Republicans), but also dismantles the salubrious changes made by Betsy DeVos in adjudicating sexual discrimination cases in colleges (DeVos’s changes were for the better, Biden’s changes for the worse), and, apparently, says nothing about what’s going to happen to transgender athletes.  However, the law is being challenged by several states, and apparently for the LGBTQ+ stuff. Ergo, it’s on hold. If it’s still on hold and Trump is elected, all bets are off:

The Biden administration’s effort to expand protections for LGBTQ+ students hit another roadblock Monday, when a federal judge in Kentucky temporarily blocked the new Title IX rule in six additional states.

U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves referred to the regulation as “arbitrary in the truest sense of the word” in granting a preliminary injunction blocking it in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. His ruling comes days after a different federal judge temporarily blocked the new rule from taking effect in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi and Montana.

Attorneys general in more than 20 Republican-led states have filed at least seven legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s new policy. Republicans argue the policy is a ruse to allow transgender girls to play on girls athletic teams. The Biden administration said the rule does not apply to athletics.

Still under consideration is a request for a preliminary injunction filed by the Republican attorneys general of Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. The Education Department has asked a judge to deny the request.

Set to take hold in August, the rule expands Title IX civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students, expands the definition of sexual harassment at schools and colleges, and adds safeguards for victims. Title IX, passed in 1972, is a law that bars sex discrimination in education.

Here’s the part that’s worrisome:

The ruling Monday in Kentucky was applauded by the state’s Republican attorney general, Russell Coleman, who said the regulation would undermine equal opportunities for women.

“The judge’s order makes clear that the U.S. Department of Education’s attempt to redefine ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ is unlawful and beyond the agency’s regulatory authority,” Coleman said in a statement.

If “sex” is redefined to include “gender identity,” then yes, student athletics will have to allow transgender women to compete against biological women in school athletics.  I’d have to look up the law, and I’m too lazy to do that now (plus it’s 93°F outside).  But the dismantling of DeVos’s protections for sexual harassment/assault cases in college, which simply gave the accused the same rights he’d get in court, is dire, and for that they should hold the law up. But I don’t have any beef about laws that expand civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ people. Is there any downside to this?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili remains bellicose:

Hili: I’m afraid that the aphids have returned.
A: So we have to declare war against them.
In Polish:
Hili: Obawiam się, że mszyce wróciły.
Ja: To musimy wypowiedzieć im wojnę.
And a photo of Baby Kulka with Baby Julia:

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

From Cat Memes:

From The Absurd Sign Project, Uncensored 2.  The caption, “Suddenly, McDonald’s looks less appetizing since they put rodents on their menu.”

From reader Barry:

From Masih; the Taliban are sending their own kids to the West for education, while permitting only boys to get education in Afghanistan.

Colin Wright is disappointed, as he should be, but it’s not his fault! Either ideology or ignorance of biology (or both) can explain this sad result:

From Malgorzata; People need to know that this kind of Jew hatred is taught as a regular thing in Palestine. This is from MEMRI, so it’s absolutely reliable. Notice that in Palestine they don’t use euphemisms like “Zionist”; they simply say, as they do in this cartoon, “Jew”.

From Malcolm, a man helps a cat play:

Freddy Mercury warming up, with the audience helping, before his famous performance at Live Aid.  I’d never seen this!  He’s singing the opening of the famous Harry Belafonte song.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, the self-correcting nature of science (found while Matthew was researching his biography of Crick):

I love this video. Look how politely the raccoon takes its donut.  I’ve watched this maybe twenty times, and I don’t get tired of it.

27 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. It just so happens I’m making sticky rice : the rice has to be steamed.

    Here’s my hasty notes:

    • short grain rice in sturdy small bowl (e.g. Pyrex)
    • Soak rice a good long time. Maybe fridge.
    • 1-1/2 tbsp rice vinegar/cup dry rice
    • put bowl on rack in instant pot
    • steam function

    … I’ll try to report back.

    1. Lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans*/queer/+ whatever else you got that ain’t cis/het.
      It’s a “community”.

    2. Anyone? Anyone?

      Let us open our hymnals and read, first from David M. Halperin, in Saint Foucault — Towards a Gay Hagiography (all bolding added unless noted – capitalization preserved):

      “UNLIKE GAY identity, […] queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality.”

      “Homosexuality is [..] a modern form of ascesis.”

      And brother José Esteban Muñoz said, in Cruising Utopia — The Then and There of Queer Futurity:

      “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. […] Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house.”

      Let us read also, the prophet Marcuse :

      ‪”All human needs, including sexuality, lie beyond the animal world.”‬
      ‪-Herbert Marcuse‬
      The End of Utopia

      And two last quotes from Mothers Dyer and Hot Mess :

      “The child has become both a limit and a hope for queer theory”
      – Hannah Dyer
      Global Studies of Childhood

      ““drag pedagogy” provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly.”
      -Lil Miss Hot Mess
      Curriculum Inquiry

      We can conclude, then, :

      ‪Queer Theory is the doctrine of a gnostic theosophical religious cult, expressed through erotic and sexual experience as ascesis, with explicit interest in young children. The “hope” of Queer Theory is perpetual thought revolution as a biological necessity for breaking free from the prison of birth, and subsequent rebirth in and creation of a new world – in rejection of any stable reality. This religious cult has detailed strategies to navigate parental resistance to its salvific efforts. It has nothing to do with the positive object choice of homosexuality.

      1. “Queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality.” My working metaphor (really an extended allegory) for queer culture is the chaotic gang attacking the normies (who are running one of the last working oil refineries) in the second Mad Max movie. And in that allegory JK Rowling plays the Mel Gibson character who rescues the normies, but with a keyboard instead of a shotgun.

        1. And the resource — or, property — as MacGuffin is the power source defining “the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Halperin, p. 62).

  3. The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren’t you halfway there? -Roger Ebert, film critic (18 Jun 1942-2013)

  4. Freddy Mercury warming up, with the audience helping, before his famous performance at Live Aid.

    Actually, that was a bit of audience participation after the first two songs (Bohemian Rhapsody and Radio Ga-Ga) in Queen’s set, not a warm up.

    I can’t comment on whether or not it is based on The Banana Boat Song, I always assumed he improvised it. I think he did it at every Queen concert.

    The full set can be found on Youtube, of course.

  5. The MEMRI TV item is in my opinion absolute evidence that Palestinian society is beyond saving. There will never be any peace in the Middle East with these people. Words fail me. Israel must prevail regardless.
    Regarding Racoons we have them on our property since build and were obviously there long before us so we have done everything possible to accommodate them, now over twenty years and they are without doubt the best neighbours, even to every year bringing their cubs to visit. Fortunately there is lots of room for all of us and they are a pleasure, cannot imagine life without them. Bonus yesterday, a very young white tail fawn with mother and raccoon cubs, a solitary hare and a red cardinal. Pity I am so useless with a camera.
    We are lucky for such experiences.

    1. I am always surprised that there is not more awareness and anger at what is taught to children. The cartoon is interesting, you almost think they are going to say Europeans were wrong for hating Jews, but instead they use that as just more evidence that Jews are bad.

  7. As I see it, including ‘gender identity’ in Title IX does two things:
    1. It allows for self-id, meaning every man who identifies as a woman is automatically allowed into girls’ sports teams, locker rooms, dormitories, sorority houses etc.
    2. Makes it illegal for said girls to complain, as can be treated as sexual harassment. Also, ‘consistently misgendering’ someone will be considered sexual harassment.

    I find it horrifying, to be honest. This isn’t ‘LGBTQ+ protections’, it’s the erosion of women’s rights.

    1. How is the legal definition of “gender identity “ arrived at? Why is this predominantly a problem of men, males insisting they are not men, male? and claiming to be women which they can never be?
      This is most certainly potentially a continuation of the erosion of womens rights.

      1. [ excerpt source below ]:

        Definitions

        Gender Identity: The sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individualty as male, female, or ambivalent, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behavior; gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.

        Gender Role: Everything that a person says and does, to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male, or female, or ambivalent; it includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response; gender role is the public expression of gender identity, and gender identity is the private experience of gender role.

        -JOHN MONEY, ANKE A. EHRHARDT
        MAN & WOMAN, BOY & GIRL
        Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity
        1973
        JASON ARONSON INC.

      2. There is an asymmetry, isn’t there. Men don’t feel physically threatened by the incursion of bearded women into our spaces, few as they are now, because as Helen Joyce says, 95% of us can kill 95% of women with our bare hands and they can’t rape us. The men might have resented the entry of women into Hart House at the University of Toronto in the 1970s because it meant we could no longer swim in the pool naked and the locker rooms for us had to be shrunk to make space for the women. (The women already had their own segregated athletic building.). But if a “transman” had dropped “his” trousers and dove in, we would certainly have stared but not cowered or tried to beat “him” up because we would know we were hitting a girl even if she had a beard, and scars where her breasts used to be. More pathetic than dangerous I should think.

        The undoing of the DeVos due-process rules on investigation of sexual misconduct complaints makes actual, real women, bearded or not, dangerous for all men on campus, a very powerful asymmetry in the other direction.

  8. “Protection for LGBTQ+ students” sounds great, and completely logical and moral, just as the words “gender-affirming care for minors” do. It’s when you divulge the details that it gets far messier and difficult to reconcile. In the case of LGBTQ+ “protections,” unfortunately that almost always means at the expense of girls, whether it’s privacy, security or the ability to play sports on a fair basis with other women. Women’s spaces exist for a reason, and forcing girls to share those spaces with biological men is outrageous. (Notice it’s never about trans men in men’s rooms.) Women’s sports will cease to exist if biological men are allowed to participate. (It’s also dangerous. Nicola Sturgeon lost her leadership role in Scotland after she agreed that a male rapist, who’d never identified as a woman, suddenly declared upon conviction that he was a woman and needed to be in a women’s prison. And she was surprised that Scottish people had a problem with that.) I like to think most normal people have a benevolent “live and let live” attitude towards others, whether they understand them or not, but expect the same in return. I’m always reminded of the old phrase “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose,” which I first heard in law school. It’s no different here. (Edit – Lettuce, you made the same point much more succinctly!)

    1. At least Lia Thomas won’t be at the Olympics this summer. But perhaps “she” will be back competing with women in the US.

    2. Yes, yes, yes! I’ve been using the “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose” forever! Unfortunately, fewer have any idea what I’m talking about. My question lately has been, what rights are NOT being afforded LGBT… and this is where I turn to TP’s/Bryan’s dialectic stuff. So many of these things that make no sense fit so perfectly into the pieces of that puzzle he keeps giving us glimpses of (and offering up citations for us to research). This is kind of, sort of where I bristle against those who think I’m drinking some ‘other’ kind of koolaid. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but there are many (MANY many) “things” lining up that point to something (someone?/ some group?) too numerous for my personal comfort.

  9. The downside Jerry asks about in civil protections on campus for “LGBTQ” people is this. (First note the lumping together of TQ with L and G, aka forced teaming.)

    Leave sport aside. An all-women non-athletic sorority rejects an application from a male student to join. It is not impressed with his claim to be a transwoman. He sues under Title IX claiming the sorority discriminated against “her” because “she” is a woman with a trans identity, erroneously assigned male at birth but has now discovered in her gender journey that “she” is every bit as much a woman as those the sorority accepts. “She” demands that others — the sorority — accept “her” story as truth and admit her.

    This is inescapably what “trans rights are human rights” means. If you want to endorse “full civil protections” for trans-identified people qua trans, this is what you are endorsing. It is also the power you are granting to the administrative state to obligate others to obey it.

    Now, most of us, I think, would not want sororities to be able to exclude lesbians, or the dance club to exclude gay men. (Who would necessarily even know, unless someone made an unwelcome pass at someone?). So protections for L and G seem reasonable (though probably unnecessary today as we’ve come to accept homosexuals as not relevantly different from ourselves in the public space.). But Leftist politicians don’t dare, given the politics today, write in protections for homosexuals without also including trans and queer (whatever that is), because of the coat-tailing the trans activists have been so successful at.

    If you want to see Title IX interpreted this way you are positing that society now sees men (or at least men who claim to be women) as not relevantly different from women in all public spaces (except sport, for the moment.).

    1. I agree with this analysis. I’m someone who never gave much thought to the expanding LGBTQIA+ coalition until just a few years ago when gender activists forced the issue. With so many institutions being captured by the pseudoscience of gender ideology, a critical look at the LGBTQIA+ alliance is long overdue. Essentially, the alliance has lumped those with same sex romantic attraction (orientation–the LGB) with gender preference/identity (T), with lifestyle (Q), with anomalous sexual development (I), with attitudes and behaviors regarding sexual activity and attraction (A). What an incoherent mess! With the “+” we might as well just say everyone is included in the coalition. Or we can simply accept the facts of nature that biological sex is real and that it does matter across the animal kingdom as well as in human affairs.

    2. A sorority in Wyoming recently decided to admit a man who claimed that he was really a woman. He was a fully-intact adult male, IOW, he still had his penis. According to the sorority women, this man proceeded to sexually harass and abuse them, photograph them in the shower without their consent, and walked around the residence naked with a full erection. Some sorority sisters decided to sue the sorority. They lost. See https://womensliberationfront.org/court-filings .

      Recently, the national chain Planet Fitness decided to allow men in women’s locker rooms if the men “self-ID” as women. A naked man with a full erection was in the women’s locker room in front of minor girls. Yes, he was a convicted sex offender. The girls’ parents are suing PF. When news of PF’s policy went national, their stock prices dropped by 7% (IIRC) and women (including me) cancelled our memberships by the thousands. I complained to both my local PF and national and have never received any response.

      In WA, a Korean spa was told that it could not remain women-only, IOW, it must now admit men. This happened after a male convicted sex offender entered the spa, undressed, and proceeded to masturbate in front of (older) Korean women in the spa. WA has a “self-ID” law. And WA incarcerates men in women’s prisons thanks to ACLU.

      This is what “safeguarding TQ+ rights” means. Women always lose. We are expected to allow and defer to men in our own places. We are expected to be good little girls and shut up. Any woman who complains is labeled a “phobe” and a “bigot.”

      And how are we supposed to distinguish convicted/registered male sex offenders from “real” trans-identified males? We can’t. Nobody can.

      But women have never mattered.

      This is a virulently misogynist men’s rights movement.
      And yes, LGB are losing our rights as well.

  11. I think some of the ways Title IX has been expanded are reasonable and fair. Same-sex attraction, sex-related characteristics such as pregnancy, differences of sex development, and sex-stereotype nonconformity are all elements which fall into the category “sex.” None of them are “consistent” or “inconsistent” with sex for the purpose of permissible sex-based differentiation, which is what Title IX involves.

    “Gender identity” is different because it comes in conflict with sex — it’s a direct challenge to the category of sex. Whether someone’s considered a boy/man or girl/woman can differ depending on whether that individual is categorized by sex, or by gender identity (which the bill leaves undefined.)*

    If people who identify as transgender were simply classified as “gender nonconforming” or “sex-stereotype nonconforming” the new provisions for Title IX would be perfectly adequate for their protection against discrimination. That’s exactly how they should be classified. But giving “gender identity” a separate status as a sex characteristic even though it runs counter to and undermines the legal class of sex obviously goes right against the values and goals of Title IX. It just doesn’t belong. The new version spreads itself far outside the scope of its original purpose.

    *One of the few legal attempts to define “Gender Identity” is the Equal Opportunity Act: “the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.” (SEC. 1101. DEFINITIONS AND RULES, a,2)
    Why wouldn’t that just be considered “gender (sex stereotype) nonconforming”(such as a man who wears a dress)? How does that negate biology?

  12. Where is Sinwar?
    Easy… I think.

    He’s in Egypt. He’s near the border kept safe by corrupt Egyptian border guards who are incredibly well rewarded. Keep track of the money available to Sinwar.
    And nobody else in Egypt knows this. I have no idea if Israel knows it but they will one day. A happy day I look forward to as that rat looks into the sky at a buzzing above him.. for the very last time.

    I no expert but in my defense I was right about Bin Laden. I laughed at “Afghan caves”. I said and wrote “He’s in the large house of a rich supporter in a large Pak city, probably Karachi” in 2002.
    Abattobad is almost a suburb of Islamabad (not Karachi, but still) and he was in the house of a supporter which he paid. The cave story was too cute to be true.
    Like this Tunnel-Sinwar story is too cute to be true.

    Sinwar isn’t in Gaza, I’m personally convinced. Egypt is deeply corrupt and poor, Sinwar is rich and that border with Gaza is extremely porous.
    ——————————————-
    I have an article out soon in my column about the Coming War in Lebanon I’ll post here — even though I’m unsure of whether the war will happen.
    ————————
    Onwards Israeli heroes. This fight – what people think is a real estate squabble is much larger. It is *civilizational*.
    D.A.
    NYC

    2. David so accurate. It is “civilisational” and yet many seem to not know this or are at root antisemitic to the core.
      Israel must and I am sure will prevail in this war and if this is at the expense of Arabs designated “ palestinian” then they only have themselves to blame. I have no sympathy whatsoever for their predicament.

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