URLs du Jour

2018-11-29

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  • Meghan Murphy, another victim of Twitter's elastic code of conduct, writes at Quillette: Twitter’s Trans-Activist Decree.

    On November 15, I woke up to find my Twitter account locked, on account of what the company described as “hateful conduct.” In order to regain access, I was made to delete two tweets from October. Fair enough, you might think. Concern about the tone of discourse on social media has been widespread for years. Certainly, many have argued that Twitter officials should be doing more to discourage the vitriol and violent threats that have become commonplace on their platform.

    In this case, however, the notion that my commentary could be construed as “hateful” baffled me. One tweet read, simply, “Men aren’t women,” and the other asked “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?” That last question is one I’ve asked countless times, including in public speeches, and I have yet to get a persuasive answer. I ask these questions not to spread hate—because I do not hate trans-identified individuals—but rather to make sense of arguments made by activists within that community. Instead of answering such questions, however, these same activists insist that the act of simply asking them is evidence of hatred.

    It's a religion, and heretics must be denounced.


  • But (continuing that theme, sorry) Ben Shapiro writes at NR about The Real-World Consequences of Submitting to the Transgender Zeitgeist.

    Last week, a member of my Orthodox Jewish congregation approached me at synagogue to tell me a story. Many of the women in the congregation exercise at a females-only gym for modesty purposes. The gym is successful; its main constituency is religious women who don’t wish to be stared at by men, or to see men in various states of undress.

    According to the congregation member, this month, a transgender woman — a biological male who suffers from gender dysphoria — came to the gym. This man, who retains his male biological characteristics, then entered the locker room and proceeded to disrobe. When told by management that he could use a private dressing room, he refused, announcing that he was a woman and could disrobe in front of all the other women.

    The predictable result: Many of the actual biological women began cancelling their memberships. When the management asked people higher in the chain, they were simply told that to require the man to use a private dressing room or to reject his membership would subject the company to litigation and possible boycott. So the gym will simply have to lose its chief clientele because a man with a mental disorder believes he has the right to disrobe in front of women.

    This will do wonders for the "civil society" everyone's writing eulogies for.


  • The Supreme Court seems poised to rein in states' abuse of asset forfeiture, which is good news. But we had some fun along the way, too. At Reason, Eric Boehm notes: Indiana Solicitor General: It's Constitutional to Seize a Car for Driving 5 MPH Over the Speed Limit.

    Civil asset forfeiture is such a farce that it took Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer only about 100 words to twist Indiana's solicitor general into admitting that his state could have the power to seize cars over something as insubstantial as driving 5 miles-per-hour over the speed limit.

    Click through for the transcript, which is pretty funny. The transcript helpfully notes the "[Laughter.]" in the chamber.

    It's a shame this case made it to the Supremes, but…


  • A Canadian writer, Mark Richardson, tsk-tsks the notion that drivers of cars and motercycles be allowed to decide for themselves the risks they want to which they want to subject themselves: Cruising for a Bruising. He looks disparagingly across the border at … us:

    In fact, there’s only complete freedom from helmet laws in three of the states: Iowa, Illinois, and New Hampshire, where you don’t even need to wear a seatbelt in a car and you’re welcome to Live Free Or Die. In all the others that permit bare-headed riding, there’s a requirement for a minimum age – anywhere from 18 to 21 – and in a few states, only if you have medical insurance.

    I'm somewhat tired of the pretense that there's any principle involved in such finger-wagging, other than "let's ban behavior of which I don't approve."

    A relevant easy-to-understand fact from the NHTSA:

    Motorcyclist deaths occurred 28 times more frequently than fatalities in other vehicles, based on 2016 fatal crash data.

    Shouldn't that be, for the nannies, a knockdown argument for banning motorcycles altogether? I won't hold my breath waiting for them to make a logically consistent argument, however.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 3:16 PM EDT