Month: March 2024

Climbing Mount Insufferable

As someone who’s not entirely science-illiterate but still not a lot better than that, I value scientists who do know what they’re doing in their field (especially if they’re good at making me understand it at least slightly). And then sometimes you wish they’d have stuck to their field instead of branching out into areas they probably shouldn’t have gone near…

Two tweets by Richard Dawkins: Those who say sex is a spectrum don’t realise how rare intersex humans are. Frequency histogram runs out of graph paper, so represent frequency of unambiguous males & females by NY’s twin towers respectively. Then frequency of intersexes is a medium sized molehill. Sex is binary. Fausto-Sterling falsely said intersex frequency 1.7%. Hence eager myth, “common as red hair”. She included Klinefelter (XXY unambiguous male) Turner (X0 unambiguous female) syndromes. True figure 0.018%. Anyway irrelevant to trans “existence”: they don’t claim to be intersex.

…like Richard Dawkins branching out into political issues. I would consider his atheist activism as part of that political activity, including his advocacy for the Smugs… sorry, the Brights, and the results of that haven’t always been pretty, but his further problems with trans people have been even less so. And…

Look, I’m no scientician so I don’t know how fair or accurate this claim is, and I’m not always the best at logic either… but even I can tell this is bullshit. Rarity and non-existence are NOT the same thing, Richard. 99 out of a hundred people may well be “unambiguous males and females”, but the other one still exists. Maybe 0.018% is statistically insignificant if you want to call it that, but that 0.018% is still real. (Indeed, going by the current US population, that amounts to a bit over six million people who actually exist as intersex.) They’re the blip that stops the binary from being 100% absolute. The genetic mutations that eventually produced Homo sapiens, and which separated us out from, say, the Denisovans or the Neanderthals, would’ve been similar blips, therefore by Dawkins’ logic above they don’t count and so evolution didn’t happen and he himself doesn’t exist…?

But such coverage as I’ve seen of this stuff on social media hasn’t mentioned the second tweet, which I think is key to what he’s actually trying to say… I mean, the quotation marks around “existence” are kind of telling in themselves, but even though he says all this is “irrelevant” to trans people, I feel on some level it’s actually all about them, really, cos the worldwide population of trans folk is about the same as that of intersex folk, probably a bit more so but generally considered somewhere between 0.1 and 0.6% of people. Which, even at the low end of that scale, still means about 34m trans people fucking with the gender binary just in the US… and in basically trying to say intersex people don’t matter and the binary is still real, I think Dawkins was trying to covertly say that trans people don’t either.

And even if I’m reading him wrong and being uncharitable, which I quite possibly am, there’s still something weirdly mean-spirited about the entire thing. I don’t understand why this was a point he felt so strongly about making. Maybe it’s one of those “secular Christian” or “cultural Anglican” thing. I used to think Lalla Ward was kind of callous divorcing him in the same year he had that stroke, but now I feel she had a point…

A historical flashback from Tumblr

Seeing this while going over Tumblr this evening was one of those “fucking hell” moments. I’d actually almost forgotten the whole “freedom fries” bullshit, which… I don’t know what that says about my memory and/or the world as it’s changed (?) in the years since Iraq II: Weapons of Mass Boogaloo… But it did also remind me that, somewhat less long ago, I watched this film:

That’s one of John Ford’s few surviving silent films, Four Sons from 1928. Not a film I was especially impressed by when I saw it, but I was struck by one scene… it’s set mostly during WW1, with one of the eponymous sons making his way to America before that breaks out, and when America finally enters the fray he’s fighting on the US’ side… you know, against his brothers. Anyway, there’s a bit where, once America’s joined in the war, the “German-American Delicatessen” in the small town gets rebranded as the “Liberty Delicatessen”, which has obvious resonances with the freedom fries silliness. I’ve never actually researched whether or not anything like this actually happened in reality, but I presume it must have done somewhere in the US cos that’d be a really weird detail to have invented for a film, especially when something similar did happen in reality 75 years later…

In which Ritchie Blackmore gives no fucks

I’m going through some old recordings of Rage to pick out music videos for the video collection, and the one I’m editing just now featured this here TV performance of “Fireball” by Deep Purple. Or should I say “performance”, cos whatever show this was done for clearly adhered to the common practice of bands miming (I think Gillan’s voice is the only actual live element). And there’s always been a sort of kayfabe thing about this, the audience knows what they’re listening to is playback but we never talk about that fact, but there have been some notable instances of miming musicians making it obvious…

…but I was particularly struck by this Deep Purple TV clip, cos near the end the camera captures R. Blackmore “playing” the back of his guitar. As being blatant about miming goes, this is kind of magnificent in its contempt. Paice doesn’t look like he’s putting in much effort on the drums either, but to be honest I can’t tell for sure and I may well be wrong; he’s certainly not as obvious as Blackmore if he is pretending…

A right royal Tuck-up

I normally hate Youtube prank channels, but I’ll make an exception for once.

Tucker Carlson has been pranked over Kate Middleton‘s infamous edited photo.
The former Fox News anchor was duped by British YouTubers Josh & Archie into interviewing a fake Kensington Palace whistleblower, who was prepared to dish the dirt on the doctored image.
Archie Manners posed as the Prince and Princess of Wales’ former digital content creator, who claimed he had been fired for altering the Mother’s Day image so poorly it was rumbled by the public.
The former Fox News anchor was duped by British YouTubers Josh & Archie into interviewing a fake Kensington Palace whistleblower, who was prepared to dish the dirt on the doctored image.

The whole Kate Middleton business has been a bizarre story unto itself, and I’ll let Slate summarise it:

In case you need a refresher on the biggest tabloid story of the year, Middleton, the wife of heir apparent Prince William, has been out of the public eye since Christmas. The supposed reason for this absence was a scheduled abdominal surgery, which the Crown said would sideline her until Easter. The royal gossip apparatus tends to grow ravenous in silence, and the internet surged with all sorts of wild conspiracy theories speculating on the real reason Middleton had vanished. Some floated that she was going under the knife to receive a BBL; others asserted that the surgery was cover for alleged infidelity; and so on. But the story went truly nuclear this week when Middleton submitted, then quickly retracted, a cheery photo of herself and her three kids, which the Associated Press determined to be counterfeit due to some irregularities in the composition. In response, Middleton rushed out a baffling damage-control campaign, claiming that she had simply been experimenting with photo editing.

Apparently in the video Fucker begins by saying they’ve worked hard to prove the guys’ identity to make sure they weren’t pulling a prank, which was clearly a lie:

Archie Manners posed as the Prince and Princess of Wales’ former digital content creator, who claimed he had been fired for altering the Mother’s Day image so poorly it was rumbled by the public.
The Tucker Carlson Network, which streams on Twitter (now X), accepted his story after Manners and co-conspirator Josh Pieters forged Kensington Palace employment documents.
The YouTubers’ faked letter of engagement for the whistleblower included a clause stating that the palace had a right to amputate one of his limbs should he fail his probation period.
Carlson’s people did not spot the preposterous faked document and Manners was sent to a London studio with a hotline to Carlson for the interview.

Like I said, I have no time for prank channels but given who these guys were going after here I’ll overlook it. Alas, they appear to have had a change of heart when they realised just how many Twitter followers Fucker has and didn’t want to be responsible for spreading misinformation in case his viewers took them at face value. So it’s probably not actually going to air now. Can’t wait to see if Carlson owns up to being had or not, though…

Important images 37

Because I wouldn’t be me without some sort of confusion about what I’m doing, I had a sudden befuddlement about whether or not I normally capitalise both words in the “Important images” post headings when I went to post this. After a quick squiz, it appears that I do not and never have done so and I’m buggered if I can work out why I was so confused about this.

Not that you care, of course.

There’s nudity in this one.

Continue reading “Important images 37”

That makes so much more sense now…

So Alex Jones posted… this earlier:

…Which caused obvious mirth but equally obvious confusion. His later explanation only muddied the waters:

I don’t think anyone misunderstood it, though, more that we didn’t understand it at all. I’m not sure there was anything TO understand, never mind misunderstand, beyond it being an undeniably amusing shitpost. The explanation clarifies nothing, and by doing it as text it kind of misses the comedic grandeur that would’ve come from him shouting it as a camera. And this is Alex Jones we’re dealing with and he has a history of saying nonsensical bullshit, but this was baffling even for him…