Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Mark Sturtevant is back with another batch of spider and arthropod photos (“harvestmen” aren’t spiders). His captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them. Our photo tank is nearly empty, by the way. Sunday may be our last day!
Last summer was a good one for getting some especially nice buggy pictures, although work and being dragged to vacation in urban areas did reduce the volume of pictures that I could gather. But I did my best. This set is all about some early-season spiders.
There was a big marbled orbweaver (Araneus marmoreus) in the garden late in the previous season (you saw pictures of her), and she left an egg sac. So early this summer my wife reported that they had hatched, and here are the bebbies. They would disperse when disturbed, but after a time they would gather together again into a tight little ball of tiny spiders. I love all those little baby bums!
Here are some focus stacked pictures of jumping spiders, taken with the manual Venus/Laowa 2.5-5X wonder-lens. Jumping spiders are of course very active, so high dozens to over a hundred of pictures were needed to get successful but short stacks. It also helped to use psychology on the subjects, as explained below.
The first one is a tiny ant-mimicking jumping spider, Myrmarachne formica. Readers may remember a male of this species that I had recently shown which had over-sized chelicerae. The one here is a female. To get her to stay in one area, she was marooned on a leaf that was pinned out in a cup of water. Since she was unwilling to cross the moat, I could zero in on her much more easily. No subjects were harmed in taking these pictures, btw.
And here is our charismatic bold jumping spider (that is its common name), Phidippus audax. It is useful to think of jumping spiders as being like cats, so here I fashioned a tiny cup out of a leaf and let her explore it. Being cat-like, she had to sit inside the cup, and she even sat still for almost a minute which is an eternity for such spiders!
Here she is again, but now she’s pausing atop a foam rubber stopper while sizing up the distance between her and the lens (she attempted the leap several times). You can see that one of the front legs had been regenerated.
Here is a close crop of the previous picture, and this show-cases the incredible quality of this super macro lens. Y’all should click again to embiggen this one! Many hours were needed to clean up most of the artifacts from the focus stack and from the Topaz Sharpen AI program that I’ve also started to use, but the result is a contender for my favorite critter picture. The eye reflections are the diffusers that were used on the twin flash. Those diffusers are now being re-built, as is required since that is one thing that must be regularly fussed over in this hobby.
Next up is an unknown species of wolf spider carrying her egg sac. I did not know that adult wolf spiders could be this small.
And finally, this is a focus stacked picture of a female harvestman (likely Phallangium opillio). OK, it’s not a true spider, but just look at that weird little face! Male faces are even stranger, but they are super restless. I will do my best to get the picture this summer.
Welcome to the tail end of the week: Friday, June 16, 2023; Cat shabbos begins at sundown, and it’s National Fudge Day. There are many kinds of this confections, but my favorites are chocolate or maple—with or without walnuts.
Here’s Mr. Happy Face, the winner of 2022’s Ugliest Dog Contest held in Petaluma, California. As the caption to the photo notes, “Janeda Banelly rescued Mr. Happy Face from a shelter in 2021. A survivor of a hoarder home, the poor pup experienced abuse and neglect at the hands of his previous owners, as well as myriad medical conditions, including cancer.” Photo from AFP via Getty Images
Oy!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 16 Wikipedia page.
The world’s largest kidney stone has been removed from a patient in Sri Lanka – and it’s about the size of a grapefuit, as long as a banana and as heavy as four hamsters.
At 13.372 centimeters (5.26 inches) long and weighing 801 grams (1.76 lbs) the kidney stone broke two world records when it was removed by Sri Lankan Army doctors on June 1.
Previously the records were 13 centimeters for length, set in India in 2004, and 620 grams for weight, set in Pakistan in 2008, according to Guinness World Records.
And of course you’ll want to see a photo:
*Another Supreme Court vote that surprised me: Justices voted by a big majority to allow Native Americans to keep adoptees within their tribes (and traditions).
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a 1978 law aimed at keeping Native American adoptees with their tribes and traditions, handing a victory to tribes that had argued that a blow to the law would upend the basic principles that have allowed them to govern themselves.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, acknowledged the thorny subjects raised in case, which pitted a white foster couple from Texas against five tribes and the Interior Department as they battled over the adoption of a Native American child.
“The issues are complicated,” she wrote. “But the bottom line is that we reject all of petitioners’ challenges to the statute, some on the merits and others for lack of standing.”
The vote was 7 to 2, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissenting.
Under the Indian Child Welfare Act, preference is given to Native families, a policy that the couple said violated equal protection principles and discriminated against Native children and non-Native families who wanted to adopt them because it hinges on placement based on race.
The tribes have said that they are political entities, not racial groups, and that doing away with that distinction, which underpins tribal rights, could imperil nearly every aspect of Indian law and policy, including measures that govern access to land, water and gambling.
“Congress’s power to legislate with respect to Indians is well established and broad,” Justice Barrett wrote, adding that authority could extend to family law. “The Constitution does not erect a firewall around family law.”
But if they’re not “races” but political entities, does that give them the right to keep any human artifacts, like ancient bonds, found on land they claim (they have this right)? For there were no “political entities” among ancient Native Americans.
The 40-year-old body man [JAC: this must be a politically correct synonym for “valet”] from Guam now faces 20 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charge against him. Sporting a wide scarlet tie a few shades deeper than his boss’s candy red one, Nauta, once a Navy sailor, made his first appearance in a Miami federal courthouse Tuesday to face charges that he obstructed justice, withheld and concealed a document from the government, and lied to FBI agents.
A key question hovering over the case now is whether Nauta will cooperate with prosecutors against Trump in hopes of a lesser sentence.
Nauta — who spent Tuesday bizarrely toggling between the roles of co-defendant, equal under the law to Trump, and dutiful “body man,” subservient to the former president — has showed no signs that his loyalty to Trump is waning.
Trump’s lawyers and advisers do not see Nauta as a threat to turn, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the criminal case.
According to the indictment, Nauta helped bring boxes to Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago for his review before Trump returned 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives in January 2022. When interviewed by the FBI in May 2022, however, prosecutors allege Nauta falsely said he had no knowledge of the boxes being taken to Trump’s suite.
He then could be seen on surveillance video removing 64 boxes from the club’s ground floor storage room after Trump received a grand jury subpoena seeking classified records in May 2022. According to the indictment, he was spotted returning only 30 boxes to the room, just before a lawyer for Trump searched the room for documents to turn over to the government in response to the subpoena.
Trump and Nauta spoke repeatedly by phone before Nauta moved the boxes, the indictment alleges. The indictment does not detail what the two discussed. If Nauta chose to cooperate, he could presumably explain what Trump told him on those calls — and offer evidence about whether Trump instructed him to lie to the FBI.
As the article notes, Nauta has already been accused of lying to the FBI, and that erodes his credibility as a witness should he decide to become a canary and turn against Trump. We’d all like to see that, but it seems unlikely:
Those who know him find it implausible that Nauta will turn on Trump or relinquish the perch as the former president’s right hand man — a job that those close to Nauta have described as a source of prestige and pride.
An absurd question keeps nagging at me: Could an inmate in a federal prison get a leave to attend his own presidential inauguration?
I wonder about that because Trump seems to be moving simultaneously in two opposing and irreconcilable directions. First, it seems increasingly plausible that he will become the first former president to be convicted of a felony. Second, he also seems increasingly likely to win the Republican nomination for president, with the betting markets also giving him about a 22 percent chance of going on and actually being elected president.
Any defendant must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. But some smart lawyers believe that for Trump, the “peril is extreme,” as one former federal prosecutor put it. Trump’s own attorney general William Barr said, “If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.”
. . .But Trump could eventually be indicted in four separate criminal cases, and with so many cases swirling about, the odds increase that he may find himself convicted of at least some felonies.
He would be a first offender, and it’s not certain that he would do prison time. Officials so far have been very deferential toward Trump: He hasn’t been handcuffed or subjected to a mug shot.
Still, deference may end upon conviction, and defendants in less serious cases have ended up with substantial prison sentences.
Even if Trump is convicted and imprisoned, he could continue to run for office and even presumably hold the office of president, if he isn’t too busy in the prison factory making license plates. Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate, famously ran for president from federal prison in 1920, receiving almost one million votes.
I don’t believe this could happen. A President in prison could surely be impeached on the grounds that he couldn’t perform his duties, even if the law allows him to hold office while in stir (Kristof seems to think it does).
All in all, I think Trump is going down. But my nightmare is that the United States slips into a recession that voters blame on President Biden, that there is a Middle East crisis that raises oil and gas prices and that there is a third-party candidate who draws more votes from Biden than from Trump. Or perhaps Biden has a health crisis and the Democratic nominee is Kamala Harris, who I fear would be a substantially weaker candidate. In short, Trump’s election as president seems unlikely, but not impossible — and the consequences could be catastrophic.
I wish I was as sure as Kristof, who seems to be just spinning his wheels in this column.
*In some place AI programs now have the authority to overrrule nurses, a protocol that might not be to the patient’s benefit. The story starts when an AI-run program tells an oncology nurse that her patient is in sepsis when she’s sure he’s not (he’s got leukemia).
Hospital rules require nurses to follow protocols when a patient is flagged for sepsis. While Beebe can override the AI model if she gets doctor approval, she said she faces disciplinary action if she’s wrong. So she followed orders and drew blood from the patient, even though that could expose him to infection and run up his bill. “When an algorithm says, ‘Your patient looks septic,’ I can’t know why. I just have to do it,” said Beebe, who is a representative of the California Nurses Association union at the hospital.
As she suspected, the algorithm was wrong. “I’m not demonizing technology,” she said. “But I feel moral distress when I know the right thing to do and I can’t do it.”
Artificial intelligence and other high-tech tools, though nascent in most hospitals, are raising difficult questions about who makes decisions in a crisis: the human or the machine?
The technologies, which can analyze massive amounts of data with a speed beyond human capacity, are making extraordinary advances in medicine, from improving the diagnosis of heart conditions to predicting protein structures that could speed drug discovery. When it is used alongside humans to help assess, diagnose and treat patients, AI has shown powerful results, academics and tech experts say.
In a survey of 1,042 registered nurses published this month by National Nurses United, a union, 24% of respondents said they had been prompted by a clinical algorithm to make choices they believed “were not in the best interest of patients based on their clinical judgment and scope of practice” about issues such as patient care and staffing.” Of those, 17% said they were permitted to override the decision, while 31% weren’t allowed and 34% said they needed doctor or supervisor’s permission.
This is a tough one, and the piece ends with a tale of a patient in excruciating pain with cancer in his bones. The nurse wanted to give him oxycodone, but the machine said no: the doctor didn’t allow pain medication until five hours later.
“The computer doesn’t know the patient is in out-of-control pain,” she said.
Still, she didn’t act. “I know if I give the medication, I’m technically giving medication without an order and I can be disciplined,” she said. She watched her patient grimace in pain while she held the pain pill in her hand.
Under pressure from the Biden administration, some of the biggest companies that handle ticketing for concerts and other live events announced on Thursday that they will make it easier for consumers to see the full price of tickets they want to buy, including the fees that can often add more than 30 percent to the total cost of an order.
Live Nation, the world’s largest concert company, said it would begin introducing “all-in pricing” — showing consumers the full price up front — at the venues it controls, which include more than 200 amphitheaters, clubs and other spaces in the United States. Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, said it would make this tool available to other venues and promoters as well. Those changes are expected beginning in September.
SeatGeek, a major vendor for reselling tickets that also works for major venues and sports teams like the Dallas Cowboys, said it too would begin introducing a feature that would reveal to consumers the full price of a ticket.
Those changes come as the Biden administration has stepped up its pressure on the entertainment and travel industries to rein in what it calls “junk fees.” Before beginning a round table at the White House with executives from Live Nation, SeatGeek, Airbnb and other companies on Thursday, President Biden framed the crackdown on surcharges as a way to appeal to the working class — a major theme of his re-election campaign.
“These hidden charges that companies sneak into your bill make you pay more without you really knowing it initially,” Mr. Biden said. “Junk fees are not a matter for the wealthy very much but they’re a matter for working folks like the homes I grew up in.”
Chalk up another good thing to Biden. We all hated those fees!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is protecting Baby Kulka, whom Hili despises. (Look at Hili’s ears!) The funny thing is that sometimes Kukla attacks Szaron. It’s a cat-eat-cat world out there.
Szaron: You will not attack Kulka!
Hili: Look at this feline knight in shining armour.
In Polish:
Szaron: Nie będziesz atakować Kulki!
Hili: Znalazł się, koci rycerz.
********************
From Stash Krod. It appears to be a letter to a vet from a kid, and I really hope it’s real:
From Masih, a British woman re-enacts the story of 10 Bahai women; their story appears at the end of the heartbreaking video:
True story. To commemorate 40th anniversary of the horrific injustice done to the 10 Bahá’í women of Shiraz 18th of June 1983 @TinySpeck_ & I made this. Pippa Walton mirrors the last days of the life of Mona Mahmoudnizhad who was hanged aged 17. #OurStoryIsOne#GenderEqualitypic.twitter.com/aQnFaxz5PI
From gravelinspector: the atavistic “claws” of an ostrich and (second tweet) a baby hoatzin. He adds:
Everyone not a signed-up Creation Research Institute subscriber knows that Hoatzin avalian dinosaurs have big manual claws as chicks. It’s not a unique trait. This thread includes ostriches and red partridges in the “clawed-hand” group. Which is a very paraphylectic group.
Actually, for ostriches, it shouldn’t even be a surprise. The occasional atavism (technical term? “Throw-back”, to headline-writers.) is likely to be a survival advantage in a chick of a flightless species. Which would make re-acquisition of the character an interesting case.
One ostrich I’ve helped dissect had some pretty impressive hand claws on display! Alongside those absolutely bizarrely distributed thick-quilled feathers of course. https://t.co/tA2vVfVF1ypic.twitter.com/TfZUMcpBew
— Michael Chiappone (@MichaelChiappo3) June 13, 2023
My own tweet, with the figure taken from D.J.G.’s FB page. The content is not sensitive—it’s an optical illusion.
Everyone loves puffins, and there’s a live PuffinCam on YouTube that operates 24 hours a day off the coast of Maine. Here are the facts:
This live puffin cam overlooks the “loafing ledge” on Seal Island, 21 miles off the coast of Maine. The loafing ledge is a prime spot for puffins to congregate, with plenty of “exit routes” in every direction in case a hawk or gull attacks.
Click the video and loaf with the Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica). Right now (12:30 pm) I think most of them are feeding, but later on they’ll be schmoozing on the ledge. Be sure to notice how they fly: it’s amazing these things can even take to the air! You’ll see other species loafing with the puffins, too.
Machias Seal Island is in fact territory (20 acres) disputed between the U.S. and Canada!
Machias Seal Island is a barren island and devoid of trees. Because of its location at the boundary between the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy, Machias Seal Island is fog-bound for many days of the year. It is also a sanctuary for seabirds such as Atlantic puffins, razorbills, common murres, common and Arctic terns, Leach’s storm-petrels, and common eiders.
Colin Wright, who’s turned out a number of clear and well written pieces on gender issues, has by so doing inserted himself into a maelstrom, for there are no activists so authoritarian and unforgiving as gender activists. In fact, their actions in getting a paper retracted is the subject of Wright’s latest piece in City Journal (click on first screenshot below)m which recounts a fracas that I think we should know about.
Why? Because it shows very clearly how ideology can distort science, and how activists can get a paper retracted for no good reasons, just to discredit the contents of that paper. Much of the science around gender issues is currently unsettled, including the notion of a syndrome called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), its possible influence by social pressure, and, of course, whether puberty blockers can cause permanent damage or are completely reversible.
Instead of allowing open discourse on these issues, activists try to shut down all discourse, including scientific publication, in favor of their own views: that ROGD doesn’t exist, that children “know” instinctively if they’re in the wrong body, and that any child or adolescent who’s confused about their gender must immediately receive “affirmative therapy”, which appears to involve enthusiastic rather than objective support by therapists coupled with a nearly instantaneous prescription for puberty blockers.
Any deviation from this scenario produces a storm of opprobrium. You already know about the demonization of Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters, which proposed that ROGD might be real and might be promoted by social-media pressures. Shrier’s book was briefly canceled and taken out of bookstores, and an ACLU lawyer called for its banning. But the concept of ROGD itself came from Lisa Littman earlier (passages from Wright’s article are indented):
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), a newly proposed pathway to gender dysphoria, was first described by the researcher Lisa Littman in 2018; the theory may help explain the documented surge in cases of gender dysphoria among adolescents and young adults who had previously exhibited no gender-related issues. Littman proposed and provided supporting evidence that social factors have at least partly caused the surge, especially among girls.
. . . Littman’s 2018 paper generated intense backlash from activists, who successfully pressured the journal that published her findings (PLoS One) to take the unusual step of initiating a second round of post-publication peer review. The paper was republished with a “correction” that offered a more detailed explanation of its methodology, specifically focusing on its dependency on parental reports, and a clarification that ROGD is not a clinical diagnosis. Importantly, however, the paper’s central conclusions concerning the probable role of social influences remained unchanged. Activists repeatedly disrupted further attempts by Littman to explore ROGD using online surveys.
Littman’s paper is here, and the journal’s “correction” is here.
Now there’s a new paper by two authors on ROGD, and that one (click on second screenshot below) has generated all the scandal:
I’ll try to be brief and give a numbered sequence of events.
1.) First, the paper below was submitted to Springer Nature’s journal Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB). It was accepted and published. (Diaz is a pseudonym for a parent who helped collect data, Bailey is on the faculty at Northwestern:
2.) As Wright notes, the paper, as you can see by its title, didn’t conform to the preferred gender ideology, describing as it did a whole pile of possible cases of ROGD. Wright describes its contents:
The paper in question, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was authored by researchers Suzanna Diaz (a pseudonym) and Michael Bailey and published in ASB on March 29. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), a newly proposed pathway to gender dysphoria, was first described by the researcher Lisa Littman in 2018.
. . . . . Such a hypothesis might appear plausible, or at least a straightforward empirical matter to be decided through evidence-based examination. But it violates the dominant narrative favored by medicalization activists that the rise in trans identities stems from an increase in societal acceptance of “gender diversity.” Evidence supporting ROGD would call into question the “gender-affirming” model of care, an approach premised on the notion that kids can know their “gender identity” from very early on and will rarely, if ever, change their minds about it. This philosophical belief system, which flies in the face of centuries of accumulated wisdom on human development, has been pithily summarized with the phrase: “trans kids know who they are.” The affirmative model guides health-care providers to “affirm” (i.e., agree with) a child’s self-declared identity and facilitate access to hormones and surgeries, all in order to align the child’s body with his or her felt gender identity. Consequently, activists have exerted intense efforts to undermine ROGD research at every opportunity.
Littman’s 2018 paper generated intense backlash from activists, who successfully pressured the journal that published her findings (PLoS One) to take the unusual step of initiating a second round of post-publication peer review. The paper was republished with a “correction” that offered a more detailed explanation of its methodology, specifically focusing on its dependency on parental reports, and a clarification that ROGD is not a clinical diagnosis. Importantly, however, the paper’s central conclusions concerning the probable role of social influences remained unchanged. Activists repeatedly disrupted further attempts by Littman to explore ROGD using online surveys.
But Diaz and Bailey’s new paper lent further credence to the ROGD hypothesis. They examined parental reports of 1,655 potential ROGD cases through an online survey. The sample size dwarfed that of Littman’s original study, which was based on 256 parental reports. This data bolstered Littman’s findings about the onset of gender dysphoria after puberty, predominantly in girls, in conjunction with preexisting mental-health conditions, heavy social-media usage, and peer influence. They also corroborated Littman’s 2018 finding that an overwhelming majority (90 percent) of concerned parents are politically progressive, undermining the common narrative that criticisms and concerns about gender affirmation originate in conservatism.
What else did the paper find? In the sample, gender dysphoria manifests approximately two years earlier in females compared with males. Females are more than twice as likely to pursue social transition. However, among those who experienced gender dysphoria for at least one year, males were more likely to undergo hormonal interventions. Moreover, a majority of parents reported feeling coerced by gender specialists to affirm their child’s new identity and endorse his or her transition. Parents who facilitated their child’s social transition reported that the child’s mental health “deteriorated considerably after social transition,” and that their relationship with their child suffered.
These findings are crucial. They provide further corroboration to a growing body of evidence supporting the ROGD theory, indicating the need for a new, specialized treatment approach for youth with gender-related distress.
3.) Gender activists started besieging the journal because the results violated the dominant gender-activist narrative. Not attacking the paper’s thesis, they went after a technical matter: the data supposedly did not pass approval of Northwestern’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), a university body that must approve all human research before it’s done. However, the authors had written approval from the subjects to publish the results of the study. (The journal replied, in effect, “but not in this scholarly journal.” However, as we’ll see, the authors effectively did have IRB approval, and the journal had also published at least six papers by other people without such approval. In other words, the journal was inconsistent in its standards.
4.) With pressure from individuals and the International Academy of Sex Research, as well as a petition, the journal began querying the authors. The authors replied that they had written approval for publication, though the first author didn’t answer to an IRB since he/she is a private individual not affiliated with a university.
5.) The authors pointed out the approval for publication was given though the study wasn’t vetted by the IRB, for it couldn’t have been. HOWEVER, as Wright reports, there’s a very important exception:
Northwestern’s IRB representative informed Bailey that, though the IRB could not retrospectively approve the pre-collected data, it would permit him to coauthor a paper on those data provided they were expunged of all personal identifiable information. Significantly, Springer’s own policy explicitly states that in situations where “a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing. . . . The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor’s discretion.” Thus, all efforts to undermine the study or discredit Zucker’s decision to review and publish it on the grounds of IRB considerations appeared futile.
6.) On top of that, author Bailey responded that he found at least six papers in the journal using human data without IRB approval. Given this and the material in #5, there seemed to be no good reason to retract the paper.
7.) Nevertheless, the paper (as you can see above) was retracted, on the grounds that Bailey didn’t get IRB approval and the subjects didn’t agree to have their data published in a scholarly journal.. The editor of the journal, however, did have the discretion to publish the paper anyway, and Northwestern’s IRB had no overt objections to Bailey and “Diaz” publishing the paper. This is a matter of censorship on the grounds of the paper’s content.
The paper appears to have been retracted not because of the IRB issues, but because its survey didn’t give the results that activists wanted. As you see, it is still online, which is normal for retracted papers, but has a big RETRACTED ARTICLE warning at the top. As Wright explains, this makes a difference to activists:
Such retractions, regardless of their reasoning, are routinely exploited by activists to tarnish the reputation of the involved researchers. Lisa Littman’s original paper on ROGD was merely “corrected,” and no results or conclusions changed; nonetheless, she has been smeared relentlessly online and in the press. Brown University, Littman’s employer at the time, felt compelled to affirm its “long-standing support for members of the trans community” in response to the paper’s publication. One science writer critiqued Littman’s study as “scientifically specious” and claimed that “ROGD provides political cover for those who wish to rollback trans rights and healthcare.” The controversy even led to Littman losing her consulting job following demands for her dismissal by local clinicians.
The authors, though, haven’t given up:
In the wake of the retraction, Bailey and Diaz are re-submitting the manuscript to the Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science (JOIBS), a fledgling publication founded by scholars devoted to the principles of “free inquiry and truth seeking” and the belief that ideas ought to be scrutinized rather than suppressed. Regrettably, among medical journals this commitment appears to be increasingly the exception, not the rule.
The retraction, though it has nothing to do with the scientific results of the paper, is being used to discredit those results. Such are the sleazy tactics of activists. At least allow the issues to be argued out in the scientific literature!
We need to know if ROGD is a real syndrome.
We need to know if social pressure promotes the frequency of gender transition.
We need to know the long-term effects of puberty blockers, and whether they are reversible.
We need to know if “non affirming” therapies, involving empathic listening but no agenda by the therapist beyond listening to the patient, will lead to resolution of gender dysphoria without having to change genders (e.g., getting children to accept that they’re gay).
We need to know the frequency of transgender people who desist, or decide to change their minds. This is part of getting informed consent for medical procedures.
The entire medical establishment of the U.S., and nearly all gender advocates, are trying to prevent the resolution of these issues, for they pretend to already know the truth. And that’s not the way we progress in understanding the world.
He we have a dramatic example of literary suicide by writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who, after being demonized on social media, withdrew from future publication her latest novel, The Snow Forest. Why? Solely because it was set in Russia—1930s Siberia, to be exact. Apparently writing about Russia when Putin’s Russia is attacking Ukraine—a century after the novel was set—simply cannot be done. Besides the pushback, which may have come from an organized campaign, Gilbert claims that she withdrew the book because its topic elicited an outpouring of anger and pain from Ukrainian readers, and she didn’t want to add “any harm to a group of readers who experienced and continue to experience extreme harm.” Note that none of those who objected had read the book, for it wasn’t due out until next February. All they knew was its topic. But of course that hasn’t stopped literary Pecksniffs before.
And that’s apparently the only reason for the self-cancellation, as recounted in the following Free Press piece by novelist Kat Rosenfield (click screenshot to read):
I don’t know much about Gilbert except what everyone else does: she wrote the wildly successful autobiographical novel Eat Pray Love, aimed at giving hope to all women whose love life wasn’t successful. I neither read the book nor saw the movie, but I did pick up the book in a bookstore and paged through it. What I saw was the worst writing of any novel I’ve seen since The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, which was a good movie but an absolutely dreadful book—perhaps the most abysmal modern novel I’ve read. (Note: I haven’t read any other of Gilbert’s half dozen books.)
Gilbert’s withdrawal was accompanied by the usual act of public contrition, so look at that first: click on the confession below to hear it on Instagram, and be sure to turn the sound on:
Now everyone knows I’m firmly on the side of Ukraine in this conflict, but this novel had nothing to do with the current conflict; the only “problematic” thing about it was that it was set in Russia. Not only that, but it depicted the lives of a group of anti-Soviet people, people who, says Gilbert, “removed themselves from society. . . resisted the Soviet government and defended nature against industrialization.” What on earth does that have to do with the current conflict?
Yes, I’m with the Ukrainians in the war, but I’m not with them on this one, for they’re exhibiting the kind of cancellation-without-reading madness that we’ve become familiar with. Here’s what Rosenfield says about the episode:
Until this week, Elizabeth Gilbert was best known as the author of Eat, Pray, Love, a memoir about finding her bliss (and her appetite) in a post-divorce odyssey through Italy, India, and Bali. Now, she’s the unwitting harbinger of what appears to be a seismic change within the literary community, and perhaps in the culture at large.
Gilbert’s upcoming novel, The Snow Forest, was set in 1930s Siberia—which, as we all know, is part of Russia, which, as we all know, is the headquarters of Vladimir Putin’s ongoing and execrable war against Ukraine. As is so often the case when it comes to publishing controversies, this fourth-degree connection between American author and Russian imperialist wasn’t a big deal until, suddenly, it was: over the weekend, The Snow Forest was trashed on the book review site Goodreads in an organized campaign by people who took exception to Gilbert’s choice of setting.
As of this writing, the book has 174 reviews and 533 ratings, every single one of them one star, and most employing eerily similar language that suggests the existence of a form letter lurking behind the scenes. (Chief among the claims on the page, which has now been removed, is that Gilbert’s book, which was not slated for release until February 2024 and absolutely none of its critics have read, is guilty of “romanticizing” Russia.)
[Gilbert] continued: “It is not the time for this book to be published. And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”
The publication of the book, “The Snow Forest,” was announced last week and had been scheduled for Feb. 13, 2024, shortly before the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The novel follows a Russian family that has removed themselves from society in the 1930s to try to resist the Soviet government.
. . .Since the start of the war in Ukraine, arts institutions have sought to distance themselves from Russian artists and writers — in some cases, even from dissidents. In May, during PEN America’s World Voices Festival, participating Ukrainian writers objected to a panel featuring Russian writers, leading to a disagreement about how to proceed and the cancellation of the panel. (Both of the Russian writers on the canceled panel, the journalist Ilia Veniavkin and the novelist Anna Nemzer, had left Russia shortly after the invasion of Ukraine.)
Last year, the Metropolitan Opera in New York cut ties with the superstar Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, who had previously expressed support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, who denounced the invasion, had his concert tour in Canada canceled last year. The Bolshoi Ballet lost touring engagements in Madrid and London.
It’s one thing to impose sanctions on the Russian government that, incidentally, may cause harm to regular Russians. But it’s a different thing entirely to cancel all things Russian because Russia invaded Ukraine. Many Russian people don’t agree with their government, but are afraid to oppose it publicly. Just as I don’t favor academic boycotts of “demonized” countries like Israel, I don’t favor cultural boycotts of countries like Russia, which seem to me to have no positive impact at all. It’s a form of enraged virtue signaling.
Rosenfield makes two more points. First, this cancelation is nothing new, as you’ll know if you read this site. Sometimes the publisher does it (not in this case, though), and sometimes the author does it. But the cancelations are invariably accompanied by cringeworthy statements of contrition by the author, like Gilbert’s above. As Rosenfield notes:
Within the past five years, authors withdrawing their books over allegations of nebulous harm have become a familiar spectacle.
In 2019, fantasy author Amélie Wen Zhao cancelled her novel Blood Heir over allegations the book was racist. That same year, Kosoko Jackson withdrew his debut novel from publication after critics complained that its Kosovo-set gay love story “centered” Americans and trivialized genocide. In 2020, Ember Days author Alexandra Duncan withdrew her book from publication after another author, who had not read it, took exception to its cover tagline (yes, really).
More interesting to me is that, for the first time, the literary world is showing a backlash to the backlash: authors, literary organizations, and free speech groups are upset and worried about the ability of the public to control literature in this way, and are not that supportive of Gilbert’s decision:
[Because previous acts of contrition had been applauded], there was no reason to think that Gilbert’s announcement would not be similarly celebrated. Yet, right away, this one just hit differently. Commentators immediately compared it to the histrionic moment in 2003 when the Congressional cafeteria renamed French fries “freedom fries” after France declined to support the American invasion of Iraq. PEN America’s Suzanne Nossel released a statement calling Gilbert’s decision “regrettable,” saying, “literature and creativity must not become a casualty of war.” And fellow writers were no less dismayed: as acts of moral grandstanding go, this one had disturbing repercussions. Elizabeth Gilbert, whose net worth is estimated upward of $20 million, might not have thought much about the financial hit she would take by cancelling her book, but for most writers, this sets a precedent that is not just economically ruinous but completely untenable in the glacially paced world of publishing. As author Rebecca Makkai tweeted, “So apparently: Wherever you set your novel, you’d better hope to hell that by publication date (usually about a year after you turned it in) that place isn’t up to bad things, or you are personally complicit in them.”
Perhaps most tellingly, this was a bridge too far even for some of the most diligent defenders of similar, previous incidents. “The Russian people are human beings,” wrote Osita Nwanevu on Twitter. “Stories can and should be told about them. They are not reducible to the actions of their present government. This stuff over the last year has been pretty unsettling, honestly.”
. . . That someone, someday, would take the anti-Russian cultural crusade too far was probably inevitable; the only question was where the line would be drawn. As it turns out, declaring Russia off-limits even as a fictional setting—a place you dare not go even in your own imagination—was too much, even for the scolds among us.
Even the staid but woke New York Times couldn’t help point out the difference from previous cancelation campaigns:
By the early afternoon on Monday, a backlash to the backlash had escalated on social media, with many slamming Gilbert’s critics, and others chiding Gilbert herself for succumbing to pressure.
The episode also sparked renewed criticism of Goodreads, which allows users to leave reviews of books long before their publication date, without having read the book, and has sometimes served as a springboard for online campaigns against authors.
Some literary and free speech organizations saw the controversy over the novel — the latest example of how a social media pile-on can derail a book’s publication — as a cautionary tale.
Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild, said the organization supports Gilbert’s right to make decisions about her book’s publication date, but also expressed alarm about how authors increasingly feel vulnerable to online pressure campaigns.
“We don’t think authors should ever be pressured not to publish their books,” said Rasenberger. “The more complicated issue of the era is that authors are being told they can’t write about certain subjects.”
Other organizations warned that the criticism of the novel, and Gilbert’s response, set an unnerving precedent, and urged her to release her novel as originally planned.
“The publication of a novel set in Russia should not be cast as an act exacerbating oppression,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s chief executive, said in a statement. “The choice of whether to read Gilbert’s book lies with readers themselves, and those who are troubled by it must be free to voice their views.”
When PEN America, which hasn’t had a particularly strong backbone about these issues (besides its canceling its Russian literary panel in May, in 2015 many of its members criticized an award given to Charlie Hebdo for literary courage), then you know that the literary establishment isn’t with you. The Ukrainians who complained about this novel being set in Russia are understandably peeved at that country, but that’s overwhelmed their judgment to the extent that an author who simply writes about Russia is piled on (I suspect many of those one-star ratings came from Ukrainians or their sympathizers). Are we to have no more literature about Russia until the war is over? Will they start pulling Tolstoy and Dostoevsky off the shelves? Not this time: the literary world is fed up with cancelations, at least for a while. Gilbert is not a hero, and her actions aren’t admirable: she is a sniveling, whining, coward who refuses to recognize the obvious: her book has nothing to do with the current war, and thus causes no harm to Ukrainians.
A few contributions have been coming in, so we’re good through the weekend, I think. Today we have a new contributor, Małgosia Borkowska-Tarr—from Poland. I’ve also added two photos sent by reader Diana MacPherson from Canada. If you can ID any of the photos, please do so in the comments.
Everyone’s ID and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
My name is Małgosia and I live in Łuków (eastern Poland) with my husband Brian. He is from California and thanks to him I found out about your website “Why evolution is true.” I took some pictures of wild bees in our garden. There is Anthophora plumipes, Osmia biconis and some others.
From Diana, who found a spider mimicking an ant:
We still have cute spider ants. I took this picture with my 100mm macro lens just now. He’s so small and so convincing as an ant but here he is with his cute spider face.
He’s very tiny – about 2 mm. I took this with a 100mm macro lens so he looks a lot bigger. There are so many species I have no idea what the Latin binomial would be for this guy but he was near my window where I saw the small ant mimicking spiders. I think that window is host to a lot of smaller insects & such that these small arachnids can eat.
It’s also Magna Carta Day, celebrating the document signed at Runnymede by King John and the barons on this day in 1215. This is one of four extant copies, two of which are in the British Library:
(From Wikipedia) The Magna Carta (originally known as the Charter of Liberties) of 1215, written in iron gall ink on parchment in medieval Latin, using standard abbreviations of the period, authenticated with the Great Seal of King John. The original wax seal was lost over the centuries. This document is held at the British Library and is identified as “British Library Cotton MS Augustus II.106”.
In addition, it’s Global Wind Day, Native American Citizen Day, National Lobster Day, Nature Photography Day, National Electricity Day, and the best holiday of all National Beer Day, but only in the United Kingdom. In honor of that day, reader Jez sent me a photo of him about to down a pint of my favorite of all ales: Timothy Taylor Landlord. Twice named Champion Beer of Britain by CAMRA, it is my favorite session pint, perfectly balanced. And you can’t get it in the U.S. I can taste it now just looking at it! Unlike many American ales, this one has not been hopped to death.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 15 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT beefs about the scant criminal-trial experience of Aileen Cannon, who will preside over Trump’s trial. I had already thought that she, as a Trump appointee, should recuse herself from the trial, but there’s too much fame to be gained there. And she’s never struck me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, either. From the NYT:
Aileen M. Cannon, the Federal District Court judge assigned to preside over former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, has scant experience running criminal trials, calling into question her readiness to handle what is likely to be an extraordinarily complex and high-profile courtroom clash.
Judge Cannon, 42, has been on the bench since November 2020, when Mr. Trump gave her a lifetime appointment shortly after he lost re-election. She had not previously served as any kind of judge, and because about 98 percent of federal criminal cases are resolved with plea deals, she has had only a limited opportunity to learn how to preside over a trial.
A Bloomberg Law database lists 224 criminal cases that have been assigned to her, and a New York Times review of those cases identified four that went to trial. Each was a relatively routine matter, like a felon who was charged with illegally possessing a gun. In all, the four cases added up to 14 trial days.
Fourteen trial days! Oy! But wait–there’s more!
Judge Cannon’s suitability to handle such a high-stakes and high-profile case has already attracted scrutiny amid widespread perceptions that she demonstrated bias in the former president’s favor last year, when she oversaw a long-shot lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump challenging the F.B.I.’s court-approved search of his Florida home and club, Mar-a-Lago.
In that case, she shocked legal experts across the ideological divide by disrupting the investigation — including suggesting that Mr. Trump gets special protections as a former president that any other target of a search warrant would not receive — before a conservative appeals court shut her down, ruling that she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.
. . .“She’s both an inexperienced judge and a judge who has previously indicated that she thinks the former president is subject to special rules so who knows what she will do with those issues?” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University criminal law professor and former federal prosecutor.
In theory, Judge Cannon could step aside on her own for any reason, or the special counsel, Jack Smith, could ask her to do so under a federal law that says judges are supposed to recuse themselves if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” — and, if she declines, ask an appeals court to order her to recuse.
There is no sign that either of them are considering taking that step, however — or what its legal basis would be.
Well, we’re all stuck with her, and Trump is probably happy that he is. Fortunately, there will be a jury, so Cannon can’t make the finding of guilty/not guilty.
The case against Mr. Trump, accusing him of illegally retaining national defense documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, is the first time that federal charges have been filed against a former president. But the case’s passage through the legal system should, with any luck, proceed like other criminal matters, if against the backdrop of the political calendar.
I suppose they could have stopped the article there, but they go on:
The parties will begin a slow but steady rhythm of status conferences, meeting every couple of months in court as the government starts to provide evidence to the defense through what is known as the discovery process. That evidence will help Mr. Trump’s lawyers decide what motions they plan to file in attacking the charges against him.
Mr. Trump will also have to finalize the members of his legal team. To that end, he met privately with a handful of Florida-based lawyers at his club in Miami, Doral, on Monday night, according to a person close to him who was not authorized to speak publicly about the efforts to remake his legal team. Mr. Trump found himself needing additional lawyers after the two who had taken lead on the documents case, James Trusty and John Rowley, resigned the day after the charges were filed.
. . .For now, Mr. Trump will lean heavily on the New York lawyer who appeared with him at the arraignment, Todd Blanche. Mr. Blanche is also defending Mr. Trump against criminal charges in state court in Manhattan stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star.
It is unclear what role another lawyer who stood beside him, Christopher M. Kise, will have as the case goes forward. Mr. Kise was initially hired to handle a legal fight over imposing an outside arbiter to review reams of government records seized last summer during an F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
In a brief interview after the court appearance, Mr. Kise, a former Florida solicitor general, rejected reports that Mr. Trump had struggled to find lawyers interested in working on the case.
. . .The one unusual aspect of Mr. Trump’s case will be its pacing.
Prosecutors working for the special counsel Jack Smith will most likely seek to drive the case forward quickly, all too aware that the prosecution is playing out as Mr. Trump pursues his presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will surely try to slow the case down, perhaps with an eye toward dragging it out until after the 2024 election. That has been Mr. Trump’s M.O. in nearly every legal case he has faced over the years, and this one is not likely to be an exception.
What bothers me is not that this case will probably proceed slowly, but rather the possibility that even if convicted, the Trumpster won’t go to jail. For how could the Secret Service protect him there? This is really annoying!
The Biden administration has quietly restarted talks with Iran in a bid to win the release of American prisoners held by Tehran and curb the country’s growing nuclear program, people close to the discussions said.
As contacts between the two sides resumed, Washington also approved €2.5 billion, equivalent to $2.7 billion, in payments by the Iraqi government for Iranian electricity and gas imports, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. The money had been frozen by U.S. economic sanctions.
After discussions started between senior U.S. and Iranian officials in New York in December, White House officials have traveled to Oman at least three times for further indirect contacts, the people said. Omani officials passed messages between the two sides.
President Biden took office pledging to revive an international nuclear pact that imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear programs in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions, before declaring in November that such a deal was dead. The U.S. withdrew from the pact under former President Donald Trump.
The latest attempt at diplomacy represents a delicate political balancing act for Biden and is focused on cooling tensions, which have soared this year as Iran has provided drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine, pushed ahead with uranium enrichment and seized oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
In exchange for a prisoner release and limits on nuclear work, Tehran is seeking billions of dollars in Iranian energy revenue trapped abroad by U.S. sanctions. Iranian officials have repeatedly tied the possible release of prisoners to winning access to $7 billion in Iranian funds held in South Korea and demanded access to billions of dollars held in Iraq for deliveries of gas and oil.
Look, this isn’t rocket science (well, it is, sort of) but it’s really just having enough neurons that there is no way in hell that Iran is giving up its nukes. Their goal is to destroy Israel (there are billboards in Iran showing missiles with the slogan “44 seconds to Tel Aviv”). If Biden thinks he can stop Iran from having nuclear weapons, he’s delusional. Even if he thinks he can slow them down for a few years, he’s delusional.
As Ukraine launches its long-awaited counteroffensive against entrenched Russian occupiers, both Kyiv and its backers are hoping for a rapid retaking of strategically significant territory. Anything less will present the United States and its allies with uncomfortable questions they are not yet prepared to answer.
With this year’s flow of billions of dollars’ worth ofadvanced Western weaponry to Ukraine, “everybody’s hopeful that, you know, you’d see overwhelming success,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters lastweek. But, he said, adding a note of caution, “I think most people have a realistic outlook on this.”
Western officials claim not to know Ukraine’s exact plans. Ideally, Pentagon officials have indicated, the Ukrainians will use their newly supplied tanks and training to cut through Russia’s land bridge between occupied eastern and southern Ukraine, or take control of the land and sea gateways to the Crimean Peninsula. Such gains would break the current narrative of a stalemate and quell any calls for reconsidering current policy.
The administration is reluctant to say what would constitute a Ukrainian success against formidable Russian defenses, but the stakes for President Biden are high.
As he heads into next year’s reelection campaign, Biden needs a major battlefield victory to show that his unqualified support for Ukraine has burnishedU.S. global leadership, reinvigorated a strong foreign policy with bipartisan support and demonstrated the prudent use of American military strength abroad.
Allies in NATO and beyond have bought heavily into Biden’s case. “Let no one doubt U.S. leadership — and resources — are the decisive contribution,” visiting British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Thursday at a news conference in Washington with Biden.
Biden, Sunak and leaders of the more than 50 other countries backing Ukraine have couched their support as part of an apocalyptic battle for the future of democracy and the international rule of law against autocracy and aggression that the West cannot afford to lose.
. . .Despite a 2020 revamping of Pentagon acquisition policies “in an effort to deliver more timely and effective solutions to the warfighter,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessed last week in a report to Congress that the Defense Department “continues to face challenges quickly developing innovative new weapons” and meeting military demands.
A muddled outcome of limited gains in Ukraine would provide grist for all of those critiques and further cloud the already murky waters of NATO and European Union debate over future posture toward both Ukraine and Russia. A less than “overwhelming” success would probably also increase pressure in the West to push Kyiv to negotiate a territorial settlement that may not be to its liking.
In general, the article says that we’ll lose a lot of credibility if Ukraine doesn’t win, but is also pessimistic about it. This is the best defense secretary Lloyd Austin could do:
“Does that mean, you know, we’re going to expel every Russian out of every corner of Ukraine? Probably doesn’t,” he said. “But I think … it may have the opportunity to begin to change the dynamics on the battlefield, and that’s really what you’re looking for.”
The politicization of science—the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise—threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.
. . . By “politicization of science,” we mean the invasion of ideology into the scientific enterprise. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ) (Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020, Pluckrose 2021). But the term is a disarming euphemism; there is nothing “critical” about the movement in any positive sense, and the movement has about as much to do with social justice as Orwell’s Ministry of Love had to do with love. The ideology, with philosophical roots in Marxism, postmodernism, and their offshoots (Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020), fundamentally conflicts with the liberal Enlightenment—the foundation of humanism, democracy, and modern science—the ideas that have made the world healthier, wealthier, better educated, and in many ways more tolerant and less violent that it has ever been (Pinker 2011, 2018).
The ideological intrusion into science is affecting all areas of the scientific enterprise: education, hiring, funding, and publishing (Abbot et al. 2023, Krylov 2021: 5371, Krylov and Tanzman 2021). In what follows we will focus on one area: scientific publishing (Krylov et al. 2022: 32, Krylov et al. 2022: 12, Krylov 2022: 223, Rauch 2022, Bikfalvi 2023). We will provide concrete examples of how CSJ is affecting publishing, focusing on chemistry (Krylov’s field), and show that it is doing so by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.
Here’s just one example of the madness:
The case of James Webb illustrates that facts do not matter to the cancellation mob (Powell 2022). Webb was the head of NASA during the heroic period of the agency that culminated in sending a man to the moon. As an effective administrator and leader, Webb—according to many—deserved a fair share of the credit for the agency’s success, and, accordingly, it was decided to name the Webb space telescope after him. Unfortunately, Webb led NASA during a period when the US government discriminated against gay people. Predictably, this has led to accusations that Webb, himself, was a homophobe who discriminated against gay employees of NASA. A cancellation campaign against Webb by a Twitter outrage mob and a petition demanding that NASA rename the telescope ensued. In response, NASA conducted a formal investigation. Their conclusions, contained in an 80-page document, were that there is no evidence that Webb participated in any anti-gay discrimination nor held any homophobic views. But these findings have not shut down the cancellation mob, which continues the campaign.
A disturbing aspect of this story is how scientific publishers have reacted to the cancellation campaign. Rather than following the example of NASA leadership, which evaluated the validity of the claims of the activists before making a decision, the Royal Astronomical Society responded with the following instructions to authors: The Royal Astronomical Society “expects authors submitting scientific papers to its journals to use the JWST acronym rather than the full name of the observatory. In this case, the previous requirement for the acronym to be spelled out at first mention will not be observed” (Kahlon 2022).
That’s only one example, but it’s positively Orwellian. You can’t spell out the name, but have to use the acronym, even the first time you write it!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili remains on the beat:
Hili: There may be something over there.
A: Indeed, there is such a possibility.
In Polish:
Hili: Tam może coś być.
Ja: Faktycznie, jest taka możliwość.
And a photo of Szaron:
********************
Speaking of Trump, here’s a meme that’s going around (sent by Randy):
Not from Masih but about something she said. Google translation:
Masih Alinejad, a human rights activist, said at the Oslo meeting that the reaction of the international community to the deprivation of Afghan women from education was not appropriate. He said: “Imagine you are not allowed to study, what will be your reaction?” “If western women are deprived of education, the world will go crazy.” https://afintl.com/202306135715
The West’s general ignoring of this kind of oppression, particularly by feminists, baffles me. Is it that Iran is too far away, or that Iranians, considered as “people of color,” are allowed to adhere to different cultural standards than other countries. If Israel banned women from higher education, there would be holy hell raised.
مسیح علینژاد، فعال حقوق بشر، در نشست اسلو گفت که واکنش جامعه جهانی به محرومیت زنان افغان از آموزش مناسب نبوده است.
From Luana. I guess this is legal in Canada, but “racialized women/gender minorities”? Oy!
Exciting news! @USaskChem is seeking to diversify its faculty with a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Chemical Synthesis. This search is open to racialized women/gender minorities within 10 years of completing their PhD. Full details here: https://t.co/N9ZDGgKXpP#Chemjobspic.twitter.com/upUJtpuv87
From the Auschwitz Memorial, photos of Polish Jews being rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. One shows them being packed into railroad cars. (Enlarge photos.) Few of these would survive being gassed upon arrival. There’s more information at this site.
An exceptional collection of photographs depicting the deportation of the first Poles to the newly established German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz 83 years ago has been discovered and published.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) June 14, 2023
Tweets from Matthew. First, the morning egress of fowl:. Matthew adds, “They are netted because of the bird flu pandemic – all domesticated fowl need to be kept away from wild birds.”
