Blog

When we don’t have Twitter, we’ll enjoy books again
Reading ‘Melancholic Parables’ as a parable of Twitter. Flash fiction by Dale Stromberg. One way to read it: who we are when we’re tweeting, who we think we are when we’re tweeting, and why we keep tweeting.

Gilbert Highet on censorship, 1954
A collage of his words. Cave man painting a running stag? Standards of good and evil? Transmuted into living flames? I’m in. Then I realize it’s an argument for censorship.

When you claim that experts don’t know their stuff
Jordan Peterson says climate scientists don’t define their terms. When a troll accuses someone else of bad-faith rhetoric, they’re usually only describing how they themselves operate. It’s spin. And it’s pure projection.

Pirate secrets you can’t have at sea
They worried their mates might steal a watch, not that their mates might be trans. Many people today act as if trans people were secret pirates. But even pirate captains didn’t care if other pirates were secretly trans men.

There were gay Nazis
‘Bad Gays’ by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Weimar-era Germany had LGBTQ society and culture and an early movement for LGBTQ legal rights. Of course, that was lost. And some of the Nazis were gay.

More shameful nonsense from ‘Gay Shame’
Regarding trans people, Gareth Roberts asks: ‘Who exactly invited the vampire in’? A continuation of my criticism of the ‘sex-realist’ aka ‘gender-critical’ aka transphobic book ‘Gay Shame’ by Gareth Roberts, published in April 2024.

Gareth Roberts says accepting trans people is ‘Gay Shame’
Yet another LGB-minus-T ‘sex realist’ book hits the shelves. Roberts won’t engage the academic work or mere existence of any trans people. He name-drops a couple, but we’re all either airheads or criminals to him.

121 things I want cis men to stop doing
Conveniently, all of them are sentences in the same article by the same cis man. Cis men’s name is Andrew Sullivan and I want them to stop doing what he did in his April 9, 2021 article on Substack. This is not Star Wars.

Yet another pro-discrimination argument
Always follow the typos. They reveal what editors aren’t researching. Why does a national newspaper pay a columnist for a 2,800-word anti-transgender opinion essay? More mysteriously: If there’s a typo, what does it imply?