Friday: Hili dialogue

July 28, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the end of the work week: Friday, July 28, 2023. Today we meet with Facilities and see if they’ll meet their promise of having Botany Pond up and running by October.  It’s National Milk Chocolate Day, celebrating a relatively recent invention:

The first use of the term “milk chocolate” was for a beverage brought to London from Jamaica in 1687, but it was not until the Swiss inventor Daniel Peter successfully combined cocoa and condensed milk in 1875 that the milk chocolate bar was invented.

In the EU, anything labeled “milk chocolate” must have at least 35% dry cocoa solids.  In the U.S., it must have at least 10% by weight of chocolate liquor (not boozy!)

It’s also National Soccer Day, World Hepatitis Day, World Nature Conservation Day, National Hamburger Day, and Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval, commemorating the explulsion of the Acadians from Canada. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the July 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*What’s going on with the Ukrainian counteroffensive is not very clear, but it seems as if a big advance isn’t happening.

 Fierce fighting raged Thursday in southeastern Ukraine, where a Western official said Kyiv has launched a major push and Russian President Vladimir Putin said “hostilities have intensified significantly.”

Battles in recent weeks have taken place on multiple points along the over 1,000-kilometer (over 600-mile) front line as Ukraine wages a counteroffensive with Western-supplied weapons and Western-trained troops against Russian forces who invaded 17 months ago.

Putin praised the “heroism” with which Russian soldiers were repelling attacks in the Zaporizhzhia region of the southeast, claiming Moscow’s troops not only destroyed Ukraine’s military equipment but also inflicted heavy losses to Kyiv’s forces.

. . .Ukrainian troops have made only incremental gains since launching a counteroffensive in early June, and Putin has repeatedly claimed Ukraine has suffered heavy losses, without offering evidence.

Ukraine has committed thousands of troops in the region in recent days, according to a Western official who was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter.

It was unclear how the current effort differs from previous ones by the Ukrainian military to break through deeply entrenched Russian defenses. The Russian army has set up vast minefields to stymie Ukrainian advances and used combat aircraft and loitering munitions to strike Ukrainian armor and artillery.

Ukrainian authorities have kept operational details of the counteroffensive under wraps, and they have released scant information about its progress.

That is all ye know on earth, but less than we need to know. So many lives for so little land taken back by Ukraine: it reminds me of World War I.

*Trump’s lawyers met yesterday with the special counsel in charge of investigating the insurrection and Trump’s apparent attempts to overturn the election.

Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump met on Thursday with officials in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, as federal prosecutors edged closer toward bringing an indictment against Mr. Trump in connection with his wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It was not immediately clear what subjects were discussed at the meeting or if Mr. Smith took part. But similar gatherings are often used by defense lawyers as a last-ditch effort to argue against charges being filed or to convey their version of the facts and the law.

On Thursday, the prosecutors were said to have listened courteously — without signaling their intentions beyond what they had conveyed in an earlier letter to the former president — as Mr. Trump’s lawyers made their arguments.

In a post following the meeting on his social media site, Mr. Trump said that his lawyers had “a productive meeting” with the prosecutors. He said they had explained to Mr. Smith’s team that “I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an indictment of me would only further destroy our country.”

As if that’s going to convince the prosecutors! But wait! There’s more!

The former president’s legal team — including Todd Blanche and a newly hired lawyer, John Lauro — has been on high alert since last week, when prosecutors working for the special counsel sent Mr. Trump a so-called target letter in the election interference case. It was the clearest signal that charges could be coming.

The letter described three potential counts that Mr. Trump could face: conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding and a Reconstruction-era civil rights charge that makes it a crime to threaten or intimidate anyone in the “free exercise or enjoyment” of any right or privilege provided by the Constitution or by federal law.

And don’t forget that concurrent with this is an indictment already handed down by the Justice Department charging Trump with holding onto 31 classified documents after he left office. Still, most readers here seem to think that Trump will never see jail time. Has anyone changed their mind?

*In a press conference Wednesday, Mitch McConnell froze, speechless, for 19 seconds. (Video below.) The Guardian reports that he’s had other episodes that suggest he’s not in a good way.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, suffered an initially unreported fall earlier this month, before a very public health scare this week revived questions about his age and fitness.

On Wednesday, while speaking to reporters at the US Capitol, the 81-year-old appeared to freeze for nearly 20 seconds. Another Republican senator, John Barrasso of Wyoming, a doctor, then escorted his leader away from the cameras.

Only four months ago, McConnell, who suffered from polio as a child, affecting his gait, fell and sustained a concussion, leading to a prolonged absence from Capitol Hill.

Here’s the video: 19 seconds of silence. Clearly something’s going on and one Twitterite thinks McConnell’s having a seizure.

More:

On Wednesday, he returned to work and told reporters he was “fine” shortly after his incident. An aide told reporters McConnell “felt lightheaded and stepped away for a moment. He came back to handle Q and A.”

But NBC News then reported that McConnell also tripped and fell earlier this month, suffering a “face plant” while disembarking a plane at Reagan airport, according to an anonymous witness.

Another source told NBC McConnell now uses a wheelchair as a precaution in crowded airports. McConnell did not comment on the NBC report.

I don’t wish illness on anyone, including the tortoisian and conservative McConnell, but he really should retire.

*In an article that’s largely unreadable because of the surfeit of Māori words, the New Zealand Herald (the country’s main newspaper) announces a new initiative to legally protect Māori ‘treasures’ as well as well as mātauranga Māori (Māori “ways of knowing”)

Kaikohe’s Kohewhata Marae buzzed at the weekend as a decades-old challenge to the Crown marked an exciting step forward.

Political leaders, kaitiaki (guardians) and revered kaumātua of te ao Māori (the Māori world) gathered for the launch of Tiaki Taonga, a movement to foster understanding and engagement with the kaupapa of taonga (treasures) and protection of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge).

“I think today represents the beginning of the beginning,” said Te Rarawa’s Haami Piripi on Saturday.

“What today is doing is reinvigorating people’s interest [in Wai 262], regenerating their involvement and reactivating their inspiration.”

The movement, which was launched by Wai 262 – known as the flora, fauna and intellectual property rights claim – will also become the legislative framework which was sought through the claim made to Waitangi Tribunal in 1991.

. . .Waitai said Tiaki Taonga was about “constitutional change to fully recognise kaitiakitanga of taonga and mātauranga by Māori, for Māori”.

“Tikanga will be recognised by ture [law] so, in the future, when the use of taonga and mātauranga Māori are being considered, te iwi Māori will have exclusive authority over their use as guaranteed by Te Tiriti o Waitangi and New Zealand law.”

The movement brings to life the Kanohi Ora engagements, which form an important stage in the Wai 262 constitutional development.

As the Kanohi Ora engagements take place throughout Aotearoa, input by iwi Māori will be sought through a serious of wānanga (seminars) for whānau, hapū and iwi to inform the protection framework.

“By listening to whānau, and understanding their shared experiences and opinions, we will help to build a framework informed by those who need this legislation to protect their taonga,” said Waitai, who’s also executive director of the Ngāti Kuri Iwi Trust Board.

Got that? (Remember, this is NZ’s most widely read newspaper. But what bothers me most is the claim that the Māori “way of knowing” was all-encompassing:

Alongside wānanga, technicians and practitioners are working simultaneously to build the world-first legislation on indigenous IP (intellectual property) protection.

Piripi, who is a Wai 262 Taumata Whakapūmau member, emphasised the presence of Māori knowledge, rights and interest prior to the arrival of Europeans.

“We had, at that time, an answer to everything, every problem. Every solution was in our paradigm, our Māori worldview.”

“I think Māori New Zealanders, and certainly non-Māori New Zealanders today, are failing to recognise that.”

“They’re failing to recognise the integrity of our rock of culture, and our expanse of knowledge.”

Piripi said the Government had a duty – for the country’s benefit – to protect the monumental knowledge held.

“The fact that we had our own explanation of the universe is a big deal,” he said.

I’m not sure what indigenous intellectual property involves, nor do they explain, but the claim that [the Māori] “had, at that time, an answer to everything, every problem. Every solution was in our paradigm, our Māori worldview” is a bogus claim. They didn’t know what matter was made of, the laws of physics, or anything about antibiotics or modern medicine. It may be a big deal that the Māori “had our own explanation of the universe”, but it wasn’t a thoroughly correct explanation of the Universe. (It had a lot of religion and superstition.) You are entitled to your own opinions, as someone said, but not your own facts.

I’m allowed to criticize this kind of pilpul because I’m both retired and not a Kiwi; otherwise I’d be in danger of losing my job.

*Conservative Christopher Rufo is much despised because of his work against DEI programs and the teaching of CRT in Florida, but he has a few sensible things to say in a NYT op-ed, “Diversity programs miss the point of a liberal college education.”

This appears to be a binary left-right conflict. The right sees the abolition of D.E.I. as a step toward meritocracy, while the left sees it as an attack on minority rights. But moving beyond reflexive partisanship, there is a strong argument for abolishing D.E.I. programs on liberal grounds.

. . .The most significant question looming over this debate is one that, unfortunately, has rarely been posed by either critics or supporters of D.E.I. programs: What is the purpose of a university? For most of the classical liberal tradition, the purpose of the university was to produce scholarship in pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful. The university was conceived as a home for a community of scholars who pursued a variety of disciplines, but were united in a shared commitment to inquiry, research and debate, all directed toward the pursuit of the highest good, rather than the immediate interests of partisan politics.

Today, many universities have consciously or unconsciously abandoned that mission and replaced it with the pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion. Many D.E.I. programs seem to be predicated on a view radically different from the liberal tradition: namely, that the university is not merely a home for the discovery of knowledge, but also a vehicle for activism, liberation and social change.

Note that DEI programs usually embody specific ideologies that are not to be questioned, and, in my view, violate the First Amendment if not academic freedom. Rufo goes through a lot of what he found in Florida, but I want to highlight his shoutout to the Kalven Report, the University of Chicago’s almost unique policy of institutional neutrality:

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases, there is more need than ever for clear policies. The application of the Kalven principles, in particular, will help depolarize academic institutions and relieve university administrators of the constant pressure to respond to every political controversy. Taken together, these policies will ultimately help public universities restore their reputation as stewards of scholarship, rather than political partisans.

These two proposals would honor the principles of liberal education, encourage a culture of open debate and cultivate a “community of scholars” with a wide diversity of opinions and a shared commitment to truth — something that both liberals and conservatives can and should support.

The U.S. team tied Netherlands 1-1 in the Women’s World Cup. Here are the hightlights, and the U.S. is still at the top of group E. If the U.S. loses against Portugal next week, they’re out of contention, though.  The tournament is in New Zealand

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are having a chinwag:

Szaron: What do you see there?
Hili: Deeper shade.
In Polish:
Szaron: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Głębszy cień.

And here is Baby Kulka:

And it’s a special day in Dobrzyn, for it’s the tenth anniversary of Listy z Naszego Sadu (Andrzej and Malgorzata’s website, “Letters from our orchard.” Malgorzata said this:

There is an article with a picture of you and Hili. It’s Andrzej’s article about 10 years of Listy. He decided that your picture with our Editor-in-Chief is the best illustration of the story.
The article is here, and here’s a partial English translation. I’m a proud boy! (Note that I’m wearing my Hili shirt.)

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

From Merilee:

From Nicole:

From The Absurd Sign Project:

From Masih, not a hijab in sight! In Tehran!

 

From Simon. Brian Cox retains a healthy skepticism towards the “UFOs” investigated by the government:

From Barry, who calls this “Marilyn Monrowl”:

From Malcolm. Hey, you guys get a room!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a three-year-old gassed upon arrival:

From Dr. Cobb, now out of cataract surgery and delighted with the results.  The first tweet is about the possibility that Gregor Mendel “cooked” his genetic data (“pea-hacking,” as one wag said). See the thread for further discussion:

Beautiful chicks. Sound up, please:

Sex 2: Dawkins vs. Rose on whether there’s a sex binary

July 27, 2023 • 11:30 am

Here’s the second sex post of the day.

Yesterday’s New Statesman, a liberal UK paper, has dueling essays by Richard Dawkins and Jacqueline Rose on whether there’s a sex binary (Dawkins says “yes,”, Rose “no”). I won’t go into into Dawkins’s background, as he’s a familiar figure here, but will note that Rose is a linguistics professor at Birkbeck College and “is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature.” One could argue that that’s not a background that allows one to pronounce on biological matters, but I’ve never been a big one for using bona fides as arguments.

The paper’s intro to the two essays is just this:

Note: We asked two thinkers to address one of the most vexed questions of our time: “What is a woman?”

Here, Richard Dawkins argues that biological sex represents a “true binary”. See here for Jacqueline Rose on why that binary should be challenged.

That’s not exactly two essays that answer the question, but who cares? Whether or not sex in animals is binary—and it is—is indeed a “vexing question,” but not because the biology is ambiguous. It isn’t. It’s vexing because people refuse to accept the binary nature of sex in animals (and nearly all plants) because it is wrongly seen to cast aspersions on people whose gender (note: not sex), does not conform to a
binary of gender, in which there is more variation than in sex.  This is something that Luana Maroja and I discuss in our Skeptical Inquirer paper (point 1), and I won’t go into it further, except that the biological definition of sex rests solely on gamete size, with males having small, mobile gametes and females large immobile gametes. Our paper also discusses why this distinction is made, and its biological implications. It also discusses why the sex binary has nothing to say about the societal aspects of gender.

If you think Richard has lost his elegance both prose and biological explanation with age, this article should dispel it. Click to read (it’s free):

It’s a succinct but engaging discussion of why the sex (gamete) binary evolved, the various mechanisms (environment, chromosomes, temperature) that lead to the binary, and the confusion around gender, a confusion between its linguistic and sociocultural uses, on top of which is extra confusion that I discussed in the last post—about what gender even means as a human behavioral/mental phenomenon. But he insists on a sex binary.

There’s only one small slip-up I found, and that’s where Richard says this (my bolding):

Obviously, Klinefelter (always male) and Turner (always female) individuals must be eliminated from counts of intersexes, in which case Fausto-Sterling’s estimate shrinks from 1.7 per cent to less than 0.02 per cent. Genuine intersexes are way too rare to challenge the statement that sex is binary. There are two sexes in mammals, and that’s that.

But genuine intersexes don’t challenge the statement that sex is binary. They aren’t classifiable as “male” or “female” (the author whose figures we relied on uses morphology or chromosome constitution as the criteria for “intersex”) but nor do they constitute a third sex. They are developmental anomalies that are not exceptions to the male/female binary. As Luana and I wrote:

Further, developmental issues can sometimes produce people who are intersex, including hermaphrodites. Developmental variants are very rare, constituting onlyabout one in 5,600 people (0.018 percent), and also don’t represent “other sexes.”

The binary abides.

But except for that quibble, the essay is on the money. Read it for yourself, learn some biology, and I’ll reproduce the ending:

. . . gender dysphoria is a real thing. Those who sincerely feel themselves born in the wrong body deserve sympathy and respect. I was convinced of this when I read Jan Morris’s moving memoir, Conundrum (1974). As what she called a “true transsexual”, she distanced herself from “the poor cast-aways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves”. Under “misguided” she might have added today’s unfortunate children who, latching on to a playground craze, find themselves eagerly affirmed by “supportive” teachers, and au courant doctors with knives and hormones. See Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020); Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021); and Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021). Many of us know people who choose to identify with the sex opposite to their biological reality. It is polite and friendly to call them by the name and pronouns that they prefer. They have a right to that respect and sympathy. Their militantly vocal supporters do not have a right to commandeer our words and impose idiosyncratic redefinitions on the rest of us. You have a right to your private lexicon, but you are not entitled to insist that we change our language to suit your whim. And you absolutely have no right to bully and intimidate those who follow common usage and biological reality in their usage of “woman” as honoured descriptor for half the population. A woman is an adult human female, free of Y chromosomes.

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

And so onto Rose’s essay (click to read):

It’s immediately obvious that Rose and Dawkins are talking at cross-purposes, with Rose willing to accept transgender women as equivalent to biological women, and asserting that the denial of this is harmful. She takes the ability to change genders as somehow casting aspersions on the sex binary. Rose also layers all kinds of historical arguments on the word “woman,” none of which do anything wotjh refuting Dawkins’s arguments. It’s as if we have two different essays addressing two different questions.  I’ll give some of Rose’s statements to show this (the bold headings are mine):

The argument from feminism:

Being a woman is at risk of becoming a protected category, as the binary man/woman hardens into place. This is happening even though it has always been a central goal of feminism to repudiate the very idea of womanhood, as a form of coercive control that means the end of freedom.

“Womanhood” here is clearly not the same thing as “biological woman”, but a gender stereotype. And there are plenty of feminists who accept the sex binary, even today! Finally, at least in the U.S. “sex” is a protected category.

The argument from societal pressure and aging:

It was Simone de Beauvoir who famously wrote, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one.” Whatever biology may dictate, becoming a woman is something that society, not nature, enjoins on all humans biologically classified as female, as it casts its oppressive diktats over them, mind, body and soul, layer upon layer. But the still-radical edge of de Beauvoir’s statement conceals its more conservative premise – “they become one” – which implies that “becoming a woman” is something that biological females, one way or another, manage to do, however restrictive their lives then become (de Beauvoir’s crushing account of those lives remains unsurpassed). Meanwhile, the idea that “female” is some kind of primordial condition remains, as if it were the bedrock of all the limitations to follow.

If a woman is an “adult human female,” then “becoming one” simply means becoming an adult.  But what Rose is talking about here appears to be women conforming as they grow up to stifling social expectations. Again, this has nothing to do with the sex binary. In fact, note that Rose alludes to a sex binary here when saying “all humans biologically classified as female.” She reinforces this shortly thereafter:

To assume that “female” is a neutral biological category is, therefore, historically naive and racially blind. It not only drastically limits the options, but trails ugly histories behind it. The point is not to deny biological difference, but to refuse to wrench the term from the historical forces through which it takes on its myriad lived shapes.

What, then, is the biological difference she’s talking about? Isn’t it the sex binary?

The argument from transitioning.  To Rose, changing genders, or “transitioning”, is more evidence against the sex binary. But in fact it isn’t, as transitioning usually means members of one biological sex adopting the traits of another.  The question isn’t whether you can do that, but whether humans fall into two discrete classes at birth:

Far from being inevitable or always welcome, rigid sexual differentiation is one of the most insidious features of our social/sexual arrangements, grafting itself on to the biological body like a parasite. Challenging the binary by transitioning becomes one of the most imaginative leaps in modern society. Research published this June found that roughly 7 per cent of people changed sexual identity and/or orientation in the course of a six-year period in the UK. And that proportion is rising. According to the same study, the impulse to change sex does not show any sign of declining with age. People over 65, especially women, are almost as gender-fluid as the young. This suggests that the neat division of humans into women and men for most of a life is deferred by youth for as long as possible. Change then becomes permissible in old age when the individual has fulfilled the task of sexual conformity, which can then be left behind.

Transitioning may be challenging the binary, but it in no ways effaces it.

It’s very clear that Rose seems to accept that you’re born as male or female, but then society puts all kinds of complications on that fact, like sexism, the desire to transition, and patriarchal expectations. Yet none of this does anything to refute what Dawkins says. These are not dueling essays, but essays that have their swords pointed in different directions. One more quote from Rose:

But to claim that sexual differentiation is “reality” surely ignores that “reality” for feminism is something to be negotiated, struggled over, fought against. To claim the right to dictate on this matter is oppressive and omnipotent, and uncomfortably like the patriarchal order that feminism seeks to dismantle.

Here we have the postmodern conception of different realities: the reality of the sex binary that somehow is in contrast with the reality of womanhood as feminists conceive it.  But Dawkins isn’t dictating the latter; he’s simply pointing out that people are born into one of two biological classes.  If that truth is oppressive to Dr. Rose, well, it’s too bad. At least it gives her a lot of grist for her obscurantist mill.

Sex 1: The Labour party declares the obvious

July 27, 2023 • 9:20 am

There will be two posts on human biological sex today—at least if my exhaustion permits. Here’s the first.

I suppose this declaration by Keir Starmer will anger gender activists, especially those who insist that “a trans woman is a woman,” but it comports with common usage and avoids the fracas that the Scottish government got into last year when it declared (with court affirmation) that self-identification of a biological male as a woman, declared on a certificate, establishes the sex of a person. Here’s the declaration of Lady Haldane, a judge of Scotland’s Supreme Court, affirming the government’s decision.

“I conclude that in this context, which is the meaning of sex for the purposes of the 2010 Act, sex is not limited to biological or birth sex, but includes those in possession of a GRC [gender recognition certificate] obtained in accordance with the 2004 Act stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex,” she wrote.

Sex is not gender, for one thing, and you can’t change your gamete type by getting a gender recognition certificate, which is not about sex but about gender (see below).

Last year, the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, refused to define what a “woman” was, and although she was motivated by an admirable desire to protect the rights of trans women, she got into trouble for saying “I’m not going to. I’m just not going to get into this debate at a level that’s about simplified and lurid headlines.” Shortly thereafter she resigned, but of course she’d been assailed on many issues. The refusal to define “woman” is a hallmark of extreme gender activism, a fracas that Sturgeon and the Scottish government got itself into. Your either have to say that it’s an inborn biological trait or is the result of self-identification. Waffling means that you know there’s a conflict between the two.

The Scottish declaration, however, was overturned by UK’s Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who exercised a “nuclear option” to block Scotland’s system of gender self-identification.

Now, according to the Times of London (click on screenshot, though it’s mostly paywalled; perhaps judicious inquiry will yield the piece), Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has gone along with the Tories by not only refusing to accept self-declaration of sex (or gender, if you will), but also giving its own definition of “woman”, one that, in my view, is pretty correct in a biological sense:

Here’s the central bit:

Sir Keir Starmer has said that “a woman is an adult female” as he hardened his stance on gender.

The Labour leader insisted that biological women needed single-sex spaces and ruled out introducing self-identification for changing gender.

At Labour’s national policy forum at the weekend, the party formally ditched a policy of self-ID, which would have allowed people to change their legal gender without the need for a medical diagnosis of dysphoria.

Starmer cited controversy over the Scottish government’s law introducing self-identification, which was blocked by Rishi Sunak, and said he disagreed with Scottish Labour’s decision to support the reform.

“We don’t agree, we don’t think that self-identification is the right way forward,” Starmer said. He added that he had “reflected on what happened in Scotland”.

The Labour leader has been shifting position since struggling to say in 2021 whether a woman could have a penis, before declaring this year that 99.9 per cent of women “haven’t got a penis”.

Challenged on a BBC Radio 5 Live phone-in, Starmer went further. “Firstly, a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up,” he said.

The party would “keep it a medical process” to change gender, Starmer said, while adding that he wanted to “modernise” the Gender Recognition Act and “get rid of some of the indignities in the process”.

The weekend’s policy discussion has “allowed us to be clear that there should be safe places, safe spaces for women, particularly in relation to violence against women”, he added.

Citing his own experience prosecuting violence against women as director of public prosecutions, Starmer said he felt “very strongly” about the need for safe spaces and that “biological women who have been subjected to violence against women and girls want a safe space where they can feel . . . that they are properly supported and protected”.

Asked what women needed to be protected from, Starmer raised the case of Isla Bryson, a rapist who was moved from a female to a male prison after a public outcry.

Starmer’s definition comports with that of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first definition is this one:

The statement is not perfect (Starmer could have said “a woman is an adult human female”, as we don’t speak of “women flies”; and he could have recognized the obvious earlier instead of waffling). But at least there’s a recognition that one can change gender, though Starmer says that that would require a medical process (some would disagree), and a recognition that in some cases, like prisons and safe houses, biological women need safe spaces that don’t include trans women (I would add sports).

And the concept of “gender” is currently subject to lot of debate: is it a social sex role or a self-identification that isn’t clearly connected with how you behave in society? Or all of the above?  And what does Starmer mean by “medical process”? Does a psychological analysis count as a medical process (remember, psychiatrists are doctors), or do you need hormones and/or surgery? I would, for example, avoid all this debate by calling what most call a “trans woman” as someone who has medically transitioned to living in a female sex role”. That avoids self-identification as the sole criterion for your “role”.

But despite this quibbling, Starmer’s statement is a good one, particularly the emphasis on using the definition to provide safe spaces for women.

And I would add that I don’t consider this discussion transphobic, though some will. I agree with J. K. Rowling’s statement—except of course for the last two sentences:

I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth,” she tweeted. “The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women—i.e., to male violence—‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences—is a nonsense.”

She continued, “I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.”

 

h/t: Pyers

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 27, 2023 • 8:15 am

I have many promises from readers to send photos in, but I haven’t called in the promissory notes. Do send me any good wildlife photos you have.

Today we have part 4 of Tony Eales’s recent safari to Botswana (part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here). To me this is the culmination: Victoria Falls!

Tony’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Safari Part IV: Chobe and Victoria Falls

Chobe is an amazing national park famous for its large population of elephants and having lions that specialise in hunting elephants:

Our best viewings of wildlife were along the Chobe River, the south side of which is in Botswana and the opposite shore, Namibia. Young giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis ssp. giraffa) sparring on the banks of the Chobe River.

And young impala (Aepyceros melampus) also sparring:

From the high banks we could watch giant herds of buffalo:

The riverbank also had a large troop of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus ssp. griseipes) allowing close up views of family like and squabbles.

And by the riverside the sunsets were amazing as the large mammals started to get active again:

On the Zimbabwe border we bid farewell to our guides and safari truck and after processing we got into a minibus and went to the tourist township of Victoria Falls. Several of the group decided to hire a taxi together and visit the falls that afternoon. The entrance had long lines and where the taxi dropped us hawkers came and asked us if we wanted to hire a raincoat for 3USD. Most were thinking “How wet can it really be?” but I thought that it was probably a good idea and in the end we all hired raincoats. The entrance looked cheesy with faux rocks and vines rendered in concrete giving it a bit of a discount Flintstones look, and entry for foreigners was an eyewatering 50USD each. We got in and went through the kiosk and gift store, following the rising sound of the falls and the ever-present sound of helicopters.

All I can say is that $50 seems cheap now, the first glimpses of the falls were jaw-dropping. we looked out on massive thundering falls with unmeasurable amounts of water plummeting into invisible depths, obscured as the bottom was by the clouds of spray. Above it all a great rainbow.

Picking up our jaws from the floor we soon realised that this represented perhaps a tenth of the falls and only the first of some 20 odd viewing spots along about a kilometre and a half of cliff-face that looked across directly at the face of the falls.

We were all giggling and babbling, almost running from one viewing spot to the next, through a rainforest created entirely by the spray of the falls:

Each viewing spot got progressively more of the spray until the last spot was basically like a tropical downpour:

And that was the trip.  We saw so much wildlife, experienced a world very different from the one I grew up with or that I see represented anywhere on tv or in the media and marvelled at landscapes at once familiar but also alien.

I’ve travelled a lot of the world and you could say that about anywhere, the world is a wonderful and awe-inspiring place but even so, there’s something extra special about sub-Saharan Africa that’s not like anything I’ve seen before. What a place!

Thursday: Hili dialogue

July 27, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday,  July 27, 2023, and National Scotch Day. Make mine a:

It’s also National Chicken Fingers Day (??), National Chili Dog Day, National Refreshment Day, National Crème Brûlée Day, and José Celso Barbosa Day in Puerto Rico.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the July 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In an ironic act of recursion, the Israeli Supreme Court will hear arguments about the new law that curbs their own authority.

Israel’s Supreme Court said Wednesday that it would begin in September to review a contentious new law that diminishes the court’s own role, setting the stage for a constitutional crisis and renewed social turmoil if the judges then overturn the legislation.

The decision sets up a looming clash between the executive branch of government and the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court must now decide whether to reassert its dominance over Prime Minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s government — or it must accept the move to reduce its own power.

Either conclusion is likely to provoke widespread anger, since the issue has become a proxy for a much broader battle over Israel’s character.

The court’s announcement came in response to the decision on Monday, by Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, to pass a deeply divisive bill that stops the court from overruling government decisions with the legal standard of “reasonableness.” The government said the term, never defined in a statute, was too subjective and gave unelected judges too much leeway to overrule elected lawmakers.

. . .on Wednesday afternoon, the court announced on its website that it would hear two of the petitions in September. An exact date has yet to be set, and the court did not announce which of its 15 judges would hear the petitions or how long the process would last. The court often takes weeks if not months to reach a decision.

The court has not issued an injunction barring the law from coming into effect, as some opponents had hoped. The hearing’s date will be set in the coming days, a Supreme Court spokesman said.

If the court strikes down the law, Mr. Netanyahu’s government will be forced to decide whether to respect the decision of an institution that it is trying to restrain. And should the government reject the court’s ruling, Israel’s other key institutions — its military, police, civil service and lower courts — will in turn need to decide whether to obey the country’s executive or judicial branch.

I’m wondering why more people don’t object to the Court using the term “reasonableness”, which needn’t be explained, to overturn laws and ministerial appointments. It’s as if the Supreme Court of the U.S., without a suit being brought, could strike down any law it wanted because it was “unreasonable”—without giving a written explanation. I’m wondering if this fracas (and the discussion has been going on for three decades) wouldn’t be taking place if the Prime Minister wasn’t perceived as right wing.

But get a load of this: as Adam Shinar says in a NYT op-ed:

As the bill cleared Parliament 64-0 — all 56 opposition members walked out to boycott the vote — petitions challenging the legislation were quickly submitted to the Supreme Court in the hope that it would strike down the new law. That hope, however, may be dashed.

All the proposed components of the overhaul — a concerted effort to entrench the government’s hold on power — are amendments to the Basic Laws, the body of legislation that serves as Israel’s de facto constitution. The Supreme Court striking down an amendment to a Basic Law is tantamount to accepting the idea of an “unconstitutional constitutional amendment”: theoretically possible, but incredibly unlikely. It’s true the court has declared it has the power to invalidate amendments to the Basic Laws, but only on very narrow grounds, such as denial of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Well, what do I know? I’m not even sure, after making inquiries, whether that last contention about the unlikelihood of the court overruling the new laws is even accurate.

*Hunter Biden’s plea deal with the government, in which he’d plea guilty to tax charges and the government would drop gun charges, is now in jeopardy.

A federal judge on Wednesday delayed accepting a plea deal for President Biden’s son Hunter, saying the terms as written by prosecutors and defense lawyers may not be constitutional, but also signaling the agreement could be approved in the future.

The deal that had been struck in June began to unravel near the start of the three-hour hearing. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika asked a series of questions that revealed a disagreement between federal prosecutors and Biden’s lawyers over whether the agreement — in which he would plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and likely avoid jail time — would protect him from the possibility of additional criminal charges.

While the judge pressed the prosecutors and defense attorneys to resolve the immunity issues, she also expressed concern that they had crafted a two-step plea deal in which some key features may not be reviewable by the court.

The sides had proposed that Biden would plead guilty to the tax charges in a fairly standard agreement that requires the judge’s approval. Separately, they crafted a “diversion agreement” with Biden’s attorneys in which the president’s son would admit to wrongdoing in the gun case and agree to certain conditions, including not purchasing a firearm and not using drugs, to avoid actually being charged with unlawful possession of a firearm.

The rub is that this second agreement is highly aberrant and may be unconstitutional:

A provision of the gun diversion agreement said that if Biden failed to remain drug free and meet other conditions for the next two years, the judge would determine whether he had broken the terms of the deal and tell prosecutors they could revive the gun charge against him.

But Noreika questioned whether she could lawfully do that, given that she is not a party to the diversion agreement and judges generally are not responsible for pursuing criminal charges.

It’s still possible, however, that this could still be fixed without the President’s son going to jail.

*A whistleblower has testified before Congress that the government has acquired several specimens of unidentified flying objects and has been “reverse engineering them.” These aren’t necessarily alien spacecraft; they could be enemy vehicles from Earth.

The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims.

Retired Maj. David Grusch’s highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress’ latest foray into the world of UAPs — or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.

Some lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for not providing more details in a classified briefing or releasing images that could be shown to the public. In previous hearings, Pentagon officials showed a video taken from an F-18 military plane that showed an image of one balloon-like shape.

Pentagon officials in December said they had received “several hundreds” of new reports since launching a renewed effort to investigate reports of UFOs.

At that point, “we have not seen anything, and we’re still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin,” said Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. “Any unauthorized system in our airspace we deem as a threat to safety.”

I do wonder (haven’t you?) whether there is an excessive amount of secrecy attending these sightings. Perhaps, if they’re analyzing our enemies’ secret airplanes, they want to keep it to themselves.

*CNN summarizes recent doings in the Ukraine-Russia war; apparently Ukraine has made some gains, but we keep hearing that, and the gains are always small. Here are a few items:

  • Heavy fighting continues in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, especially around the village of Robotyne, where Ukrainian forces have been trying to break through heavily mined Russian defensive lines, according to Ukrainian and Russian accounts.

    “We came close to Robotyne. Have not yet entered the settlement itself. Fighting continues in trench positions in front of Robotyne,” Ukraine’s 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which is involved in the offensive, told CNN.

    Ukrainian forces are also “gradually advancing” in the Melitopol and Berdiansk directions, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said. Farther east, Ukraine is “making progress” and consolidating its positions in the area of Staromaiorske, she added.

    Ukrainian forces have made only modest territorial advances in the south since the counteroffensive began at the end of May.

  • The Ukrainian Air Force has issued a warning that powerful Russian Kinzhal missiles have been fired toward the Khmelnytskyi and Kirovohrad regions in western Ukraine, as well as at the capital of Kyiv.

    Yurii Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, said the latest volley involved a variety of types of missiles launched from different areas and changing direction.

    Explosions have been reported in the western Khmelnytskyi region in Ukraine, hours after the Ukrainian Air Force had warned that Russian strategic bombers were airborne.

  • More than 40 Ukrainian companies have contracts to develop drones for use in the war against Russia, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.

    Shmyhal appeared at a forum marking the first anniversary of the “Army of Drones” project that brought together Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle manufacturers. The prime minister said the production of UAVs has since increased tenfold.

    Both surveillance and attack drones have played a critical role for both sides in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, assisting with targeting enemy weapons, tracking the movement of units and taking out armor.

    Shmyhal said the Ukrainian government has allocated about $1 billion this year for investing in Ukrainian UAV manufacturers.

And more:

  • SBU says it carried out October attack on Crimea bridge: The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has acknowledged its involvement in the attack on the Crimean bridge in October last year. “SBU officers have been destroying the enemy in the hottest spots and doing everything to liberate our land as soon as possible. The destruction of the Crimean bridge is one of our achievements,” said SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk.\

 

  • Kyiv denies losses in northeast: The Ukrainian military has denied the loss of three settlements in the northeastern part of the country, near Kupyansk. The denial came after Russian officials and Ukrainian sources reported Moscow’s troops had forced Kyiv’s forces to retreat several kilometers, abandoning three small settlements in the process.

*Singapore has just hanged a man for drug trafficking, and is about to hang a woman for the same offense. You probably know that the country has draconian rules for trafficking, with as little as a pound of marijuana bringing you a mandatory death sentence. Look at this!

More adventurous Singaporeans might think that the laws under the MDA only apply within Singapore, and that they can get away scot-free by consuming drugs overseas. This cannot be further from the truth.

Under section 8A of the MDA, a Singapore citizen or permanent resident who consumes drugs abroad will be dealt with as if that offence had been committed within Singapore and punished accordingly.

From the CNN report:

Singapore executed a man Wednesday for drug trafficking and is set to hang a woman Friday — the first in 19 years — prompting renewed calls for a halt to capital punishment.

Mohammed Aziz Hussain, 56, was hanged at Singapore’s Changi Prison and has been buried, said activist Kirsten Han of Transformative Justice Collective, which advocates for abolishing the death penalty in Singapore. A citizen of the city-state, he was sentenced to death in 2018 for trafficking around 50 grams (1.75 ounces) of heroin, Han said.

Saridewi Djamani, a 45-year-old Singaporean woman, is due to be hanged Friday after she was convicted and sentenced in 2018 for trafficking around 30 grams (1.05 ounces) of heroin, the group and other human rights organizations said. Han said the last woman known to have been hanged in Singapore was 36-year-old hairdresser Yen May Woen, also for drug trafficking, in 2004.

. . .If Djamani’s is executed as planned, Singapore will have executed 15 people for drug offences since it resumed hangings in March 2022, an average of one execution every month, Transformative Justice Collective, Amnesty International and seven other groups said in a joint statement.

Anyone — citizens and foreigners alike — convicted of trafficking more than 500 grams (17.64 ounces) of cannabis and 15 grams (0.53 ounces) of heroin faces the mandatory death penalty.

Singapore justifies this capital punishment because it’s near the “Golden Triangle,” an area of drug trafficking.  But they haven’t shown that the death penalty is a deterrent. In fact,  they’ve had about one execution per month for drug crimes since March of last year.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is jesting:

A: Where are you running to?
Hili: To the computer.
A: What for?
Hili: I have to ask AI where the source of the truth is.
In Polish:
Ja: Dokąd biegniesz?
Hili: Do komputera.
Ja: Po co?
Hili: Muszę zapytać A.I. gdzie jest źródło prawdy.

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

From Divy:

A B. Kliban cartoon from Stash Krod:

From Thomas:

From Masih; another Iranian protestor loses an eye:

I found this one, and the peacock looks as if it’s breathing fire:

From Malcolm, three examples of superb veiled sculpture:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 7-year-old girl gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, getting new eye lenses (cataract operation). His comment on this one: “One of the most bizarre pretexts for a study I have ever seen. The real question of course is HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK YOUR EARS WEIGH?”  I don’t think he meant “ears.”

A FORTY POUND CAT!

Wigged-out animals:

 

 

Sinéad O’Connor dies at 56

July 26, 2023 • 1:57 pm

According to the BBC, Sinéad O’Connor has left this vale of tears at 56. This is incredibly young (her 17 year old son died, an apparent suicide, last year), and the cause of death was not given.

Irish singer and activist Sinéad O’Connor has died at the age of 56.

In a statement, the singer’s family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad.

“Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”

She was best known for her single Nothing Compares 2 U, released in 1990, which went on to hit number one around the world.

Taoiseach (Irish PM) Leo Varadkar paid tribute to her, saying her music “was loved around the world and her talent was unmatched and beyond compare”.

I wasn’t a big fan, but I do remember seeing this live:

In 1992, one of the most notable events of her career took place when she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on the US TV show Saturday Night Live, where she was the invited performer.

Following an acapella performance of Bob Marley’s War, she looked at the camera and said “fight the real enemy”, a protest against the Catholic Church.

The incident resulted in her being banned for life by broadcaster NBC and protests against her in the US.

“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” she said in an interview with the New York Times in 2021.

deBoer disses “equal opportunity”

July 26, 2023 • 12:00 pm

Freddie deBoer has written a commentary on equal opportunity, a situation that I’d much like to obtain in America.  Sure, it’s got problems, but isn’t it better than what we have now? What if every kid had access to a good school, and the chance to take music, algebra, and a culture that didn’t discourage education?

For reasons I can’t understand, deBoer doesn’t like it. Why? Because if there is equal opportunity, there would be losers as well as winners! Read for yourself by clicking:

The problem:

I’m also particularly not a fan of the concept of equality of opportunity. This has always been the standard liberal saw against socialism and other kinds of radically egalitarian politics – we don’t want everyone to end up summatively equal in all respects, but we want everyone to have an equal chance to be all that they might be thanks to their abilities and work ethic. I think that the equality of opportunity/equality of outcomes distinction actually falls apart with a moment’s inspection, as I’ll get to. But even if we accept the concept on its own terms, it has a remarkably dark side that nobody ever wants to engage with.

And what’s the dark side?

The part that never gets discussed is the obverse: what happens if someone reaches their potential by becoming a D+ student who just barely graduates from high school and ends up a ditch digger making $24,000 a year? What if a life spent in material deprivation and constant financial insecurity is the outcome of a genuinely equal opportunity? What if someone’s potential is correctly fulfilled when they end up in a life that’s barren of wealth, stability, and success? If equality of opportunity means anything, then it must include such outcomes. I constantly have to make this point when discussing education, a field where failure is seen as inherently a matter of injustice and yet one where there will always be a distribution of performance – a distribution with a bottom as well as a top. What if someone faces a completely equal playing field and, through the full expression of their talent and hard work, ends up totally ill-equipped for the job market?

There’s more, but one more bit:

But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.

As I said, even beyond that, there’s basic problems. Core to that whole conception of justice is the notion that talent and hard work are something inherent to the individual or under the control of the individual. But if we accept that there’s any sort of genetic component to talent at all, and we certainly should, it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control. Talent, however defined, has always looked like just another fickle gift of nature, to me, and thus using it to hand out scarce goods is no more just than hereditary nobility. If someone suffers from complications during their birth such that they have a severe cognitive disability that prevents them from flourishing, few people would see their impoverishment as a just example of equal opportunity. But if someone is born with a genetic makeup that predisposes them to do very poorly in school and meritocracy, how is that any different?

deBoer doesn’t discuss “equity” (representation of all groups by their proportion in the population), but I have a few things to say about deBoer’s piece.

First, what would he replace “equality of opportunity” with?  Sure, some people would fail, and others succeed, and in the end that all depends on the laws of physics. But rewarding success and talent, even if it be through no “will” of the person alone, manages to rewire the brains of other people who also want rewards, so rewarding merit is a rising tide that lifts all boats. The person born with a bad genetic makeup or cognitive disability may not do that well, but there’s a solution for that (see below). And, of course, our desire to “do better” is a product of natural selection, assuming that status and “stuff” are proxies for reproductive success.

Second, no society that functions well will ensure that everyone gets exactly equal amounts of goods and services. Those are limited, and if you can’t strive to do better than you’re doing, you now only lose incentive, but also lose incentive to invent something that you think might be popular.  But in the main, what about a society in which you afford people not only equal opportunity, but guarantee them a minimal amount of income, housing, and healthcare so that they don’t suffer. This, I think, is the Scandinavian model. It combines equality of opportunity with just enough “equity” to ensure that nobody starves to death or has a useless life.  Except for the severely disabled, there’s a job for nearly everyone, though yes, not all those jobs are satisfying.

Here are the world’s ten happiest countries for 2023.  I don’t know about social welfare in all of these places, but six of them are in Scandinavia.  All of them, as far as I know, have a free and open economy with lots of opportunity, but also good social welfare systems. And all of them, also as far as I know, have free government healthcare (correct me if I’m wrong).

1. Finland

2. Denmark

3. Iceland

4. Israel

5. Netherlands

6. Sweden

7. Norway

8. Switzerland

9. Luxembourg

10. New Zealand

The big problem with this article, unusual for a piece by the thoughtful deBoer, is that he makes the perfect the enemy of the good. What is his alternative to equal opportunity? Strict communism? Hasn’t worked!

h/t: Mike