Tabs for Friday
Because I really do need to close some of these tabs.
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, December 2, 2022
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9 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Saw the Kim Jong-eun story the other day myself. Interesting questions surrounding whether she is being presented as the heir or simply because she’s his daughter. The renewed rumors about the state of his health make an added bit of excitement.
She seems to look quite a bit like her mom.
That article on the ‘explosion’ is a pure example of anonymous fears colliding with reality and numbers. As the article says, there were 5,000 gender dysmorphia-related referrals last year in England. That’s not a lot. Calling it an explosion is just a manipulation of trans visibility. Farther on, you have an anonymous clinician saying that 10-20% of their referrals were for gender dysmorphia. Either England has only about 25-50k kids with psychiatric issues in England or this person is lying/distorting the truth. 10-20% of the kids who go to psychiatrists in England are not going there because of gender dysmorphia, trust me. And if you go on to read the actual cases they cite system seems to work okay, and there’s nothing to fear at all. So there has been no real explosion. The system works as much as anything in life works. And yet the audience for these fears needs to be fed. Amazing.
I’m not well informed on who exactly gets to vote on who will be RNC chair. I seem to recall it’s House and Senate members and state governors. Can anyone confirm this? If so why does Pillow Mike think he has a snowball chance in hell to to be the RNC chair (well apart from delusions of competency). Does he thing that rank and file MAGAt’s get to vote?
@Rick DeMent:
If I read Wikipedia correctly, if there is a Republican president, s/he appoints the chair. If not, there appear to be three voting members from each state: the state party chair, plus one male and one female committee member chosen by the state party.
@Modulo Myself: Your comment has reminded me that this is a “trend” story. They are always suspect.
Meanwhile, it is clear that trans people are a lot more visible than they were 20 years ago. A lot.
@Modulo Myself:
Not sure how the British healthcare system works, but if the clinician is working at a practice that does a good job with care for trans kids, it might be that they are getting a lot of patients through word of mouth.
A friend of mine inadvertently ran a transgender software company by hiring a transgender woman early on, treating her like a person, and hiring largely through referrals.
It was a perfect example of the “old boys’ network” that can lead to an all white-male office, except here it was the “trans girls’ network”. And even when they didn’t have any referrals for a position, the company was known and attracted a lot of trans candidates. And going through an interview process where candidates would meet four trans people of various levels of passing tended to lead to straight cis people self-filtering.
My friend had wanted to have a very diverse company. Instead he ended up with a ridiculous* monoculture (it broadened a little, but nearly everyone is some letter on LGBTMNLOP), but a monoculture of people who faced discrimination elsewhere at the more common monocultures, so as failures in diversity go… one of the better failures.
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*: well, I found it funny. Both my friend’s dashed intentions, plus how it was like any other software place, except instead of the conversation always getting to the usual white-male geekery like Fast And The Furious (why were my coworkers obsessed with that?) or something, it was bottom surgery.
Ok, I’ve read the piece on Pence. And I just re-read it. Pence is even more of a sanctimonious, hypocritical, chickenshit lying weasel in a suit than I’d previously believed.*
*With abject apologies to any chickenshit or weasel reading this article. I simply do not have adequate verbiage to express what a vile poltroon he is.
@Flat Earth Luddite: Perhaps vile is a wee bit harsh. IMO Pence is merely simple-minded and naive. He’s doing a terrible job trying to straddle a fence that can not be straddled, being naive enough to still think he has a political future.
“Vile” is not the right word for him as he has a moral core. Demonstrated by his standing up under enormous pressure in order to disobey Trump on 1/6. We are lucky for that.
@dazedandconfused: Even Pence was bright enough to realize he had no legal basis for rejecting certified election results, that attempting to do so would fail, and that Pence, not Trump, would then be left holding the bag. I’m not sure what the charge would be, but seditious conspiracy seems to fit nicely. There’s a limit to how much credit I’ll give him for electing to not be the fall guy.