The anti-trans rhetoric masquerading as philosophical inquiry and political philosophy in our field is both intellectually vacant and manifestly harmful.

From an academic perspective it is an embarrassment to the profession that trans lives are "up-for-debate."

It should a matter of professional legitimacy taken up by our learned societies that people engage in and are rewarded for the kind of vapid pseudo-scholarship that I see crop up in the field around trans lives.

I have a chapter in my thesis about the problem of anti-trans propaganda which focuses on the *central* argument in that propaganda: that trans women, by virtue of their socialization as men, pose a credible threat to cis women if allowed in to gender-regulated space.

I'm going to tweet out some of the points below.

Canada has a data problem when it comes to sexual violence perpetrated against anyone other than cis people.

"I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears, except coronavirus. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed, though they shall be covered.” Psalm 34:4–5. COVID trans.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, except coronavirus, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me, and thy mask protects me.” Psalm 23:4, COVID trans.

“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The maskless. The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? Those without masks.” Psalm 27:1, COVID trans.

"For I, the LORD your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the one who helps you, but only if you wear a mask.” Isaiah 41:13, COVID trans.

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid, except about the coronavirus, which can kill you.” Luke 14:27, COVID trans.

For years, I distrusted sidewalks. I grew up in Athens, where sidewalks are cramped, cracked, or just missing. I learned to walk on the street, something I had to “un-learn” after moving overseas. But I spent time in Athens recently, and it all came back. A thread—on sidewalks.

First rule: sidewalks are *not* for pedestrians. They function chiefly as overflow parking. If there is enough space on the sidewalk, a car or motorcycle will appear. Vehicles win—every time. (Photos taken around Alimos and Palaio Faliro.)

The next barrier is the trash can. The urban planner has often firmed its place on the sidewalk with this little insert. Good luck squeezing past these guys.

And, of course, these obstacles exist alongside others (e.g. trees, poles, etc.). Combined, they are a formidable barrier—like a poorly played game of Tetris. The committed pedestrian might pull off the slalom required, but most will simply walk on the street. Easier that way.

The indifference towards the pedestrian extends to every non-car user. I often saw bikers on the tram path—the only way to move seamlessly along the coast. Or they risked their lives to ride alongside cars. The bottom line is this: unless you’re in a car, get out of the way.

(THREAD) Quarantine Act - we should all know what we are dealing with

1/ The devil is in the details. The first couple of sentences raise a red flag.

A communicable disease need to pose "a risk of significant harm to public health"

How is significant defined? Do the covid deaths meet that bar?

2/ While looking for a definition of significant harm to public health I found this gem!

2007 Jun 19:

"When I trained in public health, some 25 years ago, quarantine had fallen into disrepute because of the widespread perception that it did not work"

3/ "Mass quarantine gained further currency when it was adopted as a control strategy against severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. Now, quarantine is re-entrenched in the mainstream of public health theory such that it is being proposed as a measure to fight pandemic

4/ "The Control of Communicable Disease Manual4 provides an authoritative summary of control measures for more than 150 infectious diseases of public health concern."

Eye Candy: Some of @MBuhari's Administration’s Laudable Projects.

We at #IPAN thought we should remind you, refresh your memories, educate, and most importantly, brighten your day with these photos.

If this thread spoils your day, we’re very sorry. It’s never our intention.

Modern Medical Diagnostic Centre at the Federal Medical Centre, Umuahia (FMCU), Abia State.

The 17-storey headquarters building of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), located at Swali, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State.

Nnamdi Azikiwe Mausoleum (contract originally awarded in 1996, abandoned at various times, Buhari Administration revived the project in 2016, and completed it in 2018)

Rehabilitation, repair, and expansion of the runway of Akanu Ibiam International Airport, Enugu, Enugu State.

#Assange extradition verdict is due shortly. I will be reporting on the case through a remote video link to the Old Bailey. #Assange #Assangetrial

We can now see the dock in court 2 of the Old Bailey as we wait for #Assange to arrive. The verdict is scheduled for an hour, but may be over more quickly. #Assange #Assangetrial

Assange has been charged in the US of 17 counts under the US Espionage Act and 1 count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. #Assange #Assangetrail

There is no public interest defence to charges under the US Espionage Act. Prosecutors have also indicated that Assange will not benefit from first amendment rights as he is not a US citizen. #Assange #Assangetrial

The case has potentially huge implications for journalists and press freedom. It could criminalise many standard journalist practices, such as gathering information from sources and protecting their identities. #Assange #Assangetrial

@ThyConsigliori

This is not in response to your work, Pat  but...

this is well, ummm

MY FIRST THREAD😳

I am posting  what I sent to my Reps in D.C., in hopes that others will follow. The time is now or never to say HEAR ME!

(1)To: (my reps),

It is your duty to stand and represent, as our reps, to not only vote to elect Trump, but also with your objections to electors that are falsely claimed for Biden. 

You are bound by the constitution to uphold what the maj. of YOUR constituents

2. believe to be true.

(A)That Donald J. Trump won this election in a grand way and should be inaugurated on Jan. 20. 2021. 

(B)That Biden electors in certain states are falsely claimed by the use of lawlessness and deception.

(3) As a public servant it is your duty, first and foremost, to represent your constituents. You are our voice in Washington and our voice needs to be heard. We know much about what happened in this election, and on what we don't know, there are very strong

(4) suggestions and unexplained anomalies. If you don't stand up to fight for America herself today, to fight for the truth to be uncovered, then you will never have this chance again. Even if you have been "promised" a "bright future". To surrender today only means one thing.

This isn't what I normally post, but it's a summary of some morning reflections since Monday is the anniversary of @aaronsw's death.

He had a big impact on the world (and me). He's someone you should know.

Here's a tribute.

Aaron was "one of those kids" - he was part of the working group on early RSS at 14, dropped out of Stanford, was in @ycombinator's first summer class, and was part of the early @reddit team.

His life's work was focused on the accessibility and dissemination of knowledge.

Aaron believed public information, scientific research, and the Internet as a whole should be open and accessible to all.

Here's the preamble to his "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto".

He was the definition of mission, even if it meant flying in the grey areas of hactivism.

In 2008 he went after PACER, a database of public court documents that charged per page of access even though the documents were public (they made $100M+ per year).

Through a library loophole he downloaded 2.7 million documents and released them to the world.

The FBI investigated, but since they were public documents and he used the free library trial, nothing illegal took place.

PACER still charges to my knowledge, but @binarybits continued the mission with a browser extension that gives free access through the @FreeLawProject

Beginning to learn and understand that my "inner critic" - the voice that harshly criticizes and shames me - is only and has always only been attempting to protect me, to act to curtail or stop behavior that in the past has gotten us harmed - has made dealing w/it much easier.

Not "easy" or "pleasant," because the inner critic still shows up only when it wants to yell that we need to stop doing something immediately b/c of how we have previously been hurt. As a protector it still attempts to mostly communicate with goads of fear and shaming.

But understanding the roots of that fear and shaming, that self-policing behavior, has allowed me to respond to it with compassion, and that has been transformative. Being able to hear and endure the shaming as what it is - a protective reflex born from a child's fear & pain;

has enabled me to view it in that proper context, the same way I would view a child screaming in fear, and receive it gently and warmly, thank it for trying to protect me, and attempt to de-escalate the fearful predictions of catastrophe.

Not having to receive these still-aversive messages from a place of anger and hurt - from a place of "why is this voice saying such terrible things, I am so angry at this piece of myself that wants to protect me," has reduced the stress of inner critic interruptions considerably.

You know how occasionally you get glimpses of just how casually racist the world we grew up in really was & you get like a vertiginous lurch in your stomach? Heads up, this thread does need a content warning.

Background, I worship The Kinks & rate Ray Davies as one of THE great songwriters, but they're ruined for me by one song - 'Apeman' - a cod calypso in a comedy Caribbean accent with the chorus "wanna live like an apeman" & I thought it was about the most racist pop hit ever >

Well last night I happened upon a 1971 song by Harry Nilsson, a white man from New York, called 'Coconut,' which is another cod calypso etc in an even more offensive comedy accent ("put me lime in de coconut" etc.) I was appalled enough by it, but then >

I looked it up on Youtube & there's an old promo performance video of him doing the song. And it's just him and a guitarist and they are wearing actual monkey suits. I'm not going to paste the vid here because it is genuinely horrible.

But the moral of the story is, people my age (54) & older, we grew up SWIMMING in this stuff. Surrounded by it. People talk about the horrors of the Black & White Minstrel show as if it was in isolation. The truth is our culture, from films & TV, drama to sitcom >

@LordBryant454 @TheJimMajors @smutterbutter41 @FaithlessPheas1 @GoblinQChesh @MorganHanne @retep57 @amca1975 @EboiLeon1 @ardenking55 This grew out of control but here it is...

I grew up with a fundamental Christian mother and a "Catholic" father who didn't practice. We rarely went to church except for a couple of years when I was 10-14. During that time I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior (11) at a
/1

@TheJimMajors @smutterbutter41 @FaithlessPheas1 @GoblinQChesh @MorganHanne @retep57 @amca1975 @EboiLeon1 @ardenking55 Baptist Church. For a couple years I was a "good" christian and read my Bible and went to Sunday school. Then when I was 15ish we didn't go much anymore and I was what is known as a "luke warm" Christian until I got to College experimented with alcohol, drugs and girls a lot.
/2

@TheJimMajors @smutterbutter41 @FaithlessPheas1 @GoblinQChesh @MorganHanne @retep57 @amca1975 @EboiLeon1 @ardenking55 I college I learned a lot of science including evolution. After a couple of years of that I found a nice girl and started to practice my own fundamental Christian beliefs separate from any organization. This was when I was the most emersed in my faith. I didn't listen to
/3

@TheJimMajors @smutterbutter41 @FaithlessPheas1 @GoblinQChesh @MorganHanne @retep57 @amca1975 @EboiLeon1 @ardenking55 secular music. I read my Bible with some help of fundamental websites to get through the tough parts but never gave up my scientific knowledge. After a divorce and a career change to pharmacy school, a new wife and job my faith faded again.
/4

@TheJimMajors @smutterbutter41 @FaithlessPheas1 @GoblinQChesh @MorganHanne @retep57 @amca1975 @EboiLeon1 @ardenking55 One day at work (emergency department). We had a 3 month old come in, cardiac arrest. We did everything we could for an hour but there was no getting them back. It wasn't the first or last time I've had a child die at work but this was different for me.
/5

It is at jarring times like this where society is reeling most from the lack of journalistic integrity within the mainstream media. It is for good reason that just 9% of Americans have "a great deal" of trust in media institutions, with 60% having little or no faith at all.

I would like to know how anti-Semites, climate change activists, and BLM protest attendees took front-and-center in a supposedly Trump-inspired riot (given his stance as the most philo-Semitic president in US history, a climate realist, and an outspoken critic of mob violence.)

Unfortunately, the current state of most of the news media is to engage in the exercise of simply identifying whichever take is most politically damaging to Trump, look no further, and become steadfast in the resilience against the dangers of being confused by the facts.

Commentators are po-facedly presenting the outrages on Capitol Hill yesterday as a sincere (and allegedly Trump-inspired) attempted "insurrection" (by a rag-tag group of unarmed hooligans in MAGA attire), led by these Neanderthals, who stopped to pose for a mid-coup photo shoot:

The hypocrisy is scandalous but typical. If nothing else, at least Trump has reunified the country in regarding riots as bad and law enforcement as good. That is, until the next left-wing protest turns violent.

Bear with me here for a moment.

There are acceptable "censorships" and censorships which you should stand up against - because sooner or later the latter will bite you in the ass too.

So, on the top of the acceptable so called "censorship" - it's basically platforms and media moderating content published there. It is better when they have their own criteria, more conservative than the legal framework, in order to keep content in line with their goals/agendas.

Under this fall, e. g., news portals moderating comments under their articles and hand-picking their staff and guest authors who are being published on it.

It also applies to fringe portals; Breitbart has a full authority to censor me if I go nuts and decide to comment there.

I will mention here free market for the first time. Free market provides and private media (unlike one owned by the state) are not expected to be unbiased. There are obviously issues with that too, but it's less of a problem than not having them like that.

So, you get it. You run a platform where you publish your content and you want to try and benefit from your consumers' engagement. Please, by all means, do moderate it. I don't care where you are on the political or social spectrum - moderate the hell out of it.

1/10 When examining Statins, it should be noted that they have been shown to damage Mitochondria. Article – https://t.co/NIJbj3mULI. Mitochondrial damage can account for all of the relevant adverse effects of Statins – muscle weakness and damage, loss of memory/cognitive function

2/10 Diabetes, depletion of glutathione, etc. An interesting feature of mitochondrial injury is that a threshold of damage must be reached before a disease state results (as described in this article –

3/10 So, if your study period isn’t long enough, Statins truly will have the same number of adverse effects as sugar pills because in a short period of time, the subjects have not crossed their tolerance threshold for mitochondrial damage and no disease state (or adverse events)

4/10 have manifested. It is only with prolonged exposure to mitochondrial damaging chemicals, like Statins, that adverse effects manifest.
If you don’t design your study of mitochondrial damaging drugs to take into account how mitochondria react to assaults –

5/10 with an initial adaptive response followed by a toxic response (as the Peroxynitrite cycle is induced), your results don’t actually say anything notable. If you design your study to take into account the tolerance threshold feature of mitochondria,

THREAD: Ok, just sent the adrenochrome files by a contact. This has been ongoing for some time and many of us have been investigating it for a while. Below shows the lists they keep of children and their details, in their ‘detention centres’. This is a REALLY tough topic.

5th and Park Ave, apparently a group has gathered and some of them have lasers. Starting to march.

23:23

People are spray painting buildings at 5th and Park, possibly the Justice Center.
23:26

Police have observed several instances of graffiti and damage to property with this group.

Fireworks at 5th and Park, and more spray painting. 23:30

Medical Examiner's office was just tagged (graffiti). 23:33

On late Tunde Thomas #DNAtest & the MD, FCMB Adam Nuru, paternity fraud, let me share a story from one of my private investigations.

Mr Balogun (not real name) was married to Mrs Kemi (not real name) for 33 years. none of the 4 children from that marriage belongs to Balogun. 💔

According to Mr Balogun, he met Kemi, while she was serving (NYSC) they dated briefly, & got married. He was already successful at a very young age, why Kemi was trying to find her feet. He gave her everything any woman could dream of having. A good life, & a good home.

Unknown to Balogun, while Kemi was serving, she dated him, alongside one poor dude. She had Balogun, as the money bag or MUGU, why the Poor Boy as her true love. When she became pregnant, Balogun proposed, & married her. But Kemi kept on with that relationship, outside matrimony.

Just to have unhindered access to her true Love, Kemi lied to Balogun that the poor dude (Uncle Shola) was a family member, from her late mum's family. That being the only child of her late mum, since after her death, it is only Uncle Shola, that has been in touch & helps to her.

That lie from Kemi, made Balogun to love Uncle Shola even more. For being there for his wife, when she had no one to help. He gave uncle Shola unhindered access to his house 24/7. Calling him in-law. The two love birds comport themselves properly, whenever someone is around.

Today Gardaí pepper sprayed, tasered and shot dead a young Black man with mental health issues. There will be an ombudsman inquiry, as there always is in the case of a death at the hands of Gardai. Some thoughts...

There have been many such deaths at the hands of police in the UK over the years. So many of them involve mental health issues. The @IRR_News has recorded many of those.

Police are rarely disciplined for the use of lethal force in the case of mental health issues, because the decision is based on the balance of threat versus force.

Butp police are not mental health specialists, and they make a judgement on the perceived safety of officers. Those judgements on threat are often based in biases that perceive ethnic minorities, particularly people of African descent, as more aggressive.

Policing of Black communities worldwide suffers from this bias problem, as do investigations into lethal force by police.
Police services rarely acknowledge these biases, nor do those bodies that investigate them.