Lot going on in the world so it's mportant to stay updated about BlueSky:

Someone replies to the CEO demanding for the 500000th time I be banned (HIPPO), CEO makes the grave error of responding jokingly instead of with the seriousness the situation warrants, it doesn't go well
2/ These people have created a world in which they relentlessly harass and dox and death-threat anyone they dislike enough while simultaneously convincing themselves that all the stuff they do to other people is being done to them. It's truly an asylum

1/ After Jordan Neely randomly punched a 67-year-old woman in the face, which led to one of his three dozen or so arrests, several for assault, he spent 15 months in jail, max. Then The Helpers arrived(!), leading to "a carefully planned strategy between the city and his lawyers to allow him to get treatment and stay out of prison." 2/ The traumatized, violent, deeply mentally ill guy got to do basically an honor-code type of deal where he sorta pinky-swore to stay in treatment. But 13 days later he just walked out (because of course he did!).

1. Trumps' damage to and politicization of science is already orders of magnitude worse than anything Biden did

2. Biden admin did, of course, politicize science

3. Dems need a better response than tut-tutting and denying (2), because (1) is not easy to communicate

https://twitter.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1961416036516847878

[con't] There's a consistent error American liberals make, which is that it will be ~obvious~ to persuadable American voters that Trump is beyond the pale, that he is steamrolling important norms. Voters don't see it that way! They see both sides endlessly screaming.

New from me: The Disaster At McMaster, Part 1

Scholars are being “traumatized,” a long-running collaboration is being torched. . . what is going on?

Gordon Guyatt, SEGM, the SPLC, and more...

jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-disaster… 2/ A few hours from now I'll be publishing Part 2 (also free), which is an in-depth interview with Gordon Guyatt.

jessesingal.substack.com/subscribe

"No one can invest significantly in the U.S. if they have no idea what the policy is going to be from day to day" is a concept that understandable by a bright 6-year-old. There's really *no one* left in Trump's orbit with *any* power to deter him from this garbage?

https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/1910022283080446177

2/ None of this is even internally consistent. He will reward other countries just for *calling* us, regardless of what was said or how productive the conversation was? The man has no idea how to negotiate.

1/ Emma is well beyond reasoning with, but for anyone who is close to her and actually cares: According to pretty basic tenets of suicide research, it's likely dangerous to constantly spread the idea that trans kids are on the verge of killing themselves over policy disputes

https://twitter.com/EmmaVigeland/status/1887281344167768279

2/ This simply isn't how suicide works, usually, thankfully. In a vaccuum, it's uncommon for someone to receive bad political news and kill themselves. What's more common is for already-at-risk kids to internalize the meme that suicide is a common/rational response to adversity

There's a culture of just total impunity over there when it comes to violence. On Twitter, as far as I can tell, it's rare for people to post violent threats or musings under names identified with their IRL identities. Over there, they know they can do so without any risk. 2/ All the death threats are couched in the idea that *I* pose an imminent threat to the community. That's the line: I'm putting users there at risk. No one can explain how. NBC is at work on an article with that angle, based on the request for comment they sent me.

This is going to be so freaking incredible 2/ They're going after Hannah Gais, who works at the SPLC and who I knew foreeeeeever ago (People's Republik RIP). She stands accused of not giving a straight answer as to whether she'll sign (she'll sign, I'm sure), and liking a problematic skeet.

FASCINATING community.

1/ New from me in @TheEconomist Johanna Olson-Kennedy is the most famous youth gender doctor in the U.S. She has long been skeptical of comprehensive assessments, viewing them as unnecessary gatekeeping. Now, she’s being sued by a former patient who argues she didn't get *enough* gatekeeping. 2/ Clementine Breen is a 20-year-old UCLA student. She got puberty blockers at 12, testosterone at 13, and a double mastectomy at 14. She regrets it all and her lawsuit argues that Olson-Kennedy, her therapist, and her surgeon all provided her with lackluster care. Olson-Kennedy’s own notes, ...

MASSIVE scoop here. Many of us have wondered why Johanna Olson-Kennedy's team, which has received ~$10 million in NIH funding, hasn't published its study on puberty blockers. JOK says the results weren't positive and she doesn't want them weaponized.

nytimes.com/2024/10/23/sci… 2/ A situation in which a researcher can ask for money from the federal government to run a study, run the study, and then not release the results because they weren't what she wanted is a situation in which federal funding for science is fundamentally broken.

I don't know what to say anymore, man. There are just no adults left at most of these supposed gatekeeping and quality-control institutions within journalism.

healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/09/h… 2/ This is the textbook definition of "manipulation." I don't understand this.

I thought the contemporary concept of 'gender' was muddled beyond repair. Then the American Medical Association's Draft Guidance on Reporting Gender, Sex, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, and Age in Medical and Scientific Publication TOTALLY cleared it up.

Thank you AMA! 2/ Let's affirm everyone's individuality by dictating to them that they have these four characteristics, two of which aren't coherently defined anywhere

I'm all for not auto-trusting an organization like the IBA (or the IOC for that matter!). But I'm trying to construct a scenario in which the IBA publicly lies that it conducted two separate chromosome tests on both athletes, publishes that lie, and alerts the IOC in June 2023. 2/ What would be the purpose of such an audacious, sprawling double-lie? I think you can simulatneously think the IBA is corrupt and that that doesn't automatically render invalid every position the org has ever taken.

Pretty remarkable stuff by the AP 2/ There is always an adjunct medical anthropologist available to provide expert insight into these questions

Biden, delivering a teleprompter address at the NAACP convention, is repeatedly having trouble completing sentences. This is a fucking disagrace and it has to stop. He is incapable of campaigning. I have been watching for perhaps 10 minutes and three different times he trailed off and said "anyway" because he couldn't remember the point he was making

1/ New from me in @TheEconomist: Emails released during discovery in a youth gender medicine case demonstrate that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health interfered w/the systematic reviews it commissioned from Johns Hopkins University.

economist.com/united-states/… 2/ The emails are damning, showing that for many months WPATH sought to control the output of the JHU team it paid $200k to examine questions pertaining to transgender healthcare as the Standards of Care 8 was developed.

Not a direct comparison, but on the general principle: A good example of this was when some journalists and academics questioned the recovered-memory/Satanic sex abuse movement, causing them to be reviled by survivors' groups. As we all know, these "just asking questions" skeptics were wrong -- kids *were* routinely being stapled to trees, ritually raped by their pre-school teachers, etc., because recovered memories are always accurate. I'm glad Evan is helping promote solid journalism. 2/ More generally, "If you didn't do the thing you were accused of, why are people circulating memes saying you did?" is an excellent standard and a sign of a really sharp mind at work. I'd like to actually see if we can get this codified into the justice system.

It's 2024 and CNN cannot define 'sex' in a remotely coherent way: "A person’s sex is what they were assigned at birth based on biological characteristics of maleness or femaleness as indicated by chromosomes, gonads, hormones and genitals."

cnn.com/2024/05/06/hea… 2/Gender = "social construct and social identity marked by certain attitudes, feelings and behaviors a culture associates with someone’s biological sex, according to the [APA]." It's a construct AND and identity, and it's marked by 'certain' attitudes, feelings, and behaviors. k

Amazing chain of events. The kid reiterates his murderous views *during* a disciplinary meeting and posts it online. He brags to his audience about having not walked it back. Columbia (apparently) doesn't take any further action. Then, when it goes public, he's sorry, Columbia's sorry (and bans him from campus), everyone's so sorry

nytimes.com/2024/04/26/nyr… 2/ The meeting was held by the "Center for Student Success and Intervention," one of God knows how many administrative bodies. Surely it creates a lot of work for folks. Those employees decided it's no big deal if this kid is threatening to kill his classmates.

1/ The Cass Review explains, in detail, why we need to trust systematic reviews over both doctors' anecdotal evidence and low-quality standards published by professional associations. The CBC responds by publishing an article that cites professional associations and is dominated by doctors' anecdotal accounts.

Science journalism seems screwed at the moment.

cbc.ca/news/health/pu… 2/ This might be the worst bit:

"Surveys and interviews are considered low-quality evidence in medicine, said [Pediatrician Dr. Tehseen Ladha], but that might be misleading to the general public. 'Many people would see low-quality evidence and think well, that means this could harm our children. But that's not what it means.' "

That's... exactly what low-quality evidence for a major intervention means. It means we don't know if the intervention offers a net benefit, because the true effects might differ significantly from what the studies in question present.

1/ Sam Seder just found out about the Cass Report yesterday and he is VERY concerned 2/ Should address one substantive point here. The caller says the Cass Review threatens access to hormones/surgery for any trans person under 25. This is NOT true. It's a viral rumor that popped up right after the report came out. I think the source is Erin Reed.