According to some research, conspiracy theorizing really is a BSDI thing.
This is one of the best liberal pieces on gun control I have ever read.
Well, when you put it that way, Trump is kind of ridiculous. (Or any other way, while we’re at it.
Ryan Cooper argues that the EU screwed up and that contributed to what increasingly looks to be a bad vote on the Brexit. Maybe. Or maybe the EU as it was imagined was not a great idea because you can’t turn peoples into a people by government fiat without speartips?
As we rush to (rightly) condemn rapist Brock Turner, it’s worth pointing out that sex offender registries are still questionable in terms of efficacy and justice.
Japan Times looks at the Japanese custom of having kids clean up the classroom. Note, however, that contrary to rumor they do actually employ custodians.
It turns out, giving away condoms may not be the best way to reduce teen births. At least, not without counseling.
Third grade? I didn’t learn cursive until the fifth, and that was back when it was a relevant skill.
Josh Blackman argues that the government cannot actually mandate that employers, landlords, and so on use of preferred pronouns.
The description of the plot of Neon Genesis Evangelion here is off, but I do kind of think that Asuka might actually be a Trump fan if they existed in the same universe.
Noah Smith is worried about Canada becoming a petrostate. Well, diversification is good, but oil per se isn’t precisely Russia’s or Nigeria’s problem, and the fact that the only other liberal democracy that is a petrostate is just fine, I suspect that’s where you would look for the good and the bad.
The Southern Baptists are going after the Confederate Flag. This… is a very good thing.
Dixie, land of the gender pioneers.
Eli Lake reports that somewhere along the way, Natan Sharansky became a realistic.
I did not know this was a thing, but apparently Hasidic Jews in New York have their own private police force.
About the Author
13 Responses to Linkluster Charlotte
Leave a Reply
please enter your email address on this page.
racist Brock Turner, or rapist?
that piece about gun control was very good indeed.
Concur, one of the more even handed ones I’ve read in a while.
I like how it defined the extremes and tried to break them out of the left/right mold.
Really? My school covered cursive in second grade.
Yeah. Cursive remained a foreign language through most of my elementary school years.
How do you guys remember back that far?? Granted that I’m older than you, but I doubt I would’ve remembered the exact grade we started working on cursive even by the time I was in college.
I remember which teacher taught me, and I remember which grade she taught.
IIRC, we started with it in third grade. That was also the first year we were allowed to use ball point pens (as opposed to pencils). Later on, like fifth grade, we were allowed to use “college ruled” instead of wide ruled paper.
Each of those things was an eagerly anticipated milestone but turned out to be a huge disappointment in actuality. Good preparation for adult life….
In fifth grade, I was kept out of a gifted-and-talented program despite testing “high enough” because one of my teachers thought my cursive handwriting was too bad and I needed to use the time to work on that instead. My handwriting is still terrible 30+ years later (I mostly print). Also, you know what gets you harassed even more in school than being in a gifted-and-talented program? Having been tested for it and having not quite made it. (The kids didn’t know why).
Yeah, I pretty much hated grade school. I loved learning but hated the social environment.
What I really like, but have had a hard time finding, is the narrow-ruled notebook paper. It’s narrower than college-ruled. They must have stopped making it (and I don’t miss it enough to hunt down whoever might be selling it on the internet).
I use mostly print, too, and that’s unreadable enough for others. Now at my middle-life-ish age, even I can’t always read my writing (print or cursive). My cursive is and always has been god-awful: it’s the only “subject” I ever got a D in (in grade school).
I was in and out of gifted programs in grade school and middle school. I think the deal was that I was intelligent, but not so exceptionally intelligent to qualify as truly “gifted.” But I was very precocious and read a lot. Sometimes I’d just sit at home with a volume from the encyclopedia set my parents had gotten and read through it. The knowledge I acquired thereby made me *seem* a lot more intelligent than I was.
(I know that whether one can speak of “quantity” of intelligence and whether it can be reliably measured or not are contentious questions. Still, I believe that if there were such a test, I might score above average (like everyone else with my advantages), but not particularly impressive.)
Regarding the gender pronoun law, what would be the legal implications if someone insisted on referring to a cis man with female pronouns (or vice versa)?
A fine, I think.
So is the argument that referring to a trans man with female pronouns should not result in the same?
It’s weird… if I insisted on calling you Billy Boy instead of your preferred Will, I doubt I’d run afoul of the law. I may get fired because I’d be acting in a disrespectful manner towards a customer — and that firing might be by “the government” — but that’d seem in line with the expectations of the job.
If I insisted on giving people weird nicknames against their objections, I’d similarly likely not be long for the job.
It strikes me as a bit weird to specifically craft laws/rules around this stuff but maybe weirder still to extend those rules to some people but not all?
Fining someone for intentionally misidentifying a cis person seems to imply that the rule is, “Use the proper pronoun.” This argument seems to add, “…unless the person is trans.” Though I suppose that is partly based on differing ideas of what is “proper”. So if we swap out proper for preferred, are we really demanding thought? Or just requiring a certain base level of respect: You can’t call Will Billy if he doesn’t want to be; you can’t call the clients Broseph; and you can’t call women he/him. Regardless of if they are cis or trans.
I misunderstood the question. I thought you were talking about with regard to the recent changes.
Prior to the recent changes, I do not believe someone calling me Mrs, lady, or whatever, would result in a fine.