Linkage

This is so, so important to read in full. For me to be told that a critically important part of my identity is reducible to my sexuality — an embarrassingly marginal part of my life — is not merely insulting but ridiculous. To tell children that not merely what they have, but what they are, is a fetish and that therefore they are for all practical purposes not allowed to even discuss it until they turn eighteen is murderous cruelty. Post-egg-crack, I don't know what I would have done if I'd not been able to establish friendships online with other trans women my age who had similar life trajectories.

Queer identity is one of being born into a secret society that you as a member have to discover as rite of induction. If you fail, misery tends to visit you again and again, without having a good explanation for it, dissatisfaction, and shame from an unknown source.

In this light, the push to #AgeVerification for social media and internet access is especially awful. With "queer" being equated to sex stuff exclusively, queerness is effectively banned in the era of life where teens are supposed to discover love, and have first, clumsy experiences. But while the cishets generally experience queerness from porn and get their fingers sticky to what they view as fetish, it is so much more. Especially for trans kids, research on who and what they are is postponed to a time when devastating damage is already taking place, and a lot of it in fact irreversible, or a huge effort and cost to correct.

Most interviews with Emily and Alex have assumed quite a bit of prior knowledge. This one not so much, so it's a good explainer for laypersons:

Dr. Allison Lester sits down with Dr. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna authors of the AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want for a conversation about what ChatGPT is, what it is pretending to be, and what we lose when we treat it like an all-knowing answer engine.

Together they ask: What is a large language model, actually? Why does “search engine” framing mislead people so quickly? What gets erased when we focus on convenience, from labor and surveillance to environmental cost?

They talk resistance, agency, and the classroom, including why banning is a dead end, how to protect learning without turning teaching into policing, and what it means to be human together in an era of synthetic text.

As Oxfam said in a previous report, every billionaire is a policy failure.

Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the average annual rate in the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024.1 Whilst US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. Actions of the of the Trump presidency, including the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation, have benefited the richest around the world.

[…]

This phenomenon of the richest influencing and controlling politics is not new; it is familiar in countries in every part of the world. But events in the US in 2025 perhaps made this viscerally clear: in country after country, the super-rich have not only accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent, but have also used this wealth to secure the political power to shape the rules that define our economies and govern nations. At the same time, all over the world we are seeing an erosion and rolling back of the civil and political rights of the many; the suppression of protests; and the silencing of dissent. A century ago, the US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, ‘We must make our choice. Either we can have extreme wealth in the hands of the few, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.’

This report is about that choice. How governments worldwide are making the wrong choice; choosing to defend wealth not freedom. Choosing the rule of the rich. Choosing to repress their people’s anger at how life is becoming unaffordable and unbearable, rather than redistributing wealth from the richest to the rest. It shows how the economically rich are becoming politically rich the world over, able to shape and influence politics, societies and economies. In sharp contrast, those economically with the least wealth are becoming politically poor, their voices silenced in the face of growing authoritarianism and the suppression of hard-won rights and freedoms.

The State Library of Victoria (SLV) conceded it had “created unintended concerns” with its proposal to cut 39 jobs and reduce services to focus on more “digital experiences”.

Musician Nick Cave was among 220 distinguished names to sign an open letter calling for the board to explain the restructure, which would have halved the number of reference librarians, from 25 to 10.

In a statement, board president Christine Christian said the library had “decided to withdraw” the proposal after “careful consideration of feedback”.

“Our focus will remain on strengthening services, modernising operations and ensuring the library continues to thrive as a leading home for history, arts, culture and knowledge for the next generation,” she said.

(Paywalled, regrettably.)

I feel seen.

People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior. Putting off work sure looks lazy, to an untrained eye. Even the people who are actively doing the procrastinating can mistake their behavior for laziness. You’re supposed to be doing something, and you’re not doing it — that’s a moral failure right? That means you’re weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn’t it?

For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.

When you’re paralyzed with fear of failure, or you don’t even know how to begin a massive, complicated undertaking, it’s damn hard to get shit done. It has nothing to do with desire, motivation, or moral upstandingness. Procastinators can will themselves to work for hours; they can sit in front of a blank word document, doing nothing else, and torture themselves; they can pile on the guilt again and again — none of it makes initiating the task any easier. In fact, their desire to get the damn thing done may worsen their stress and make starting the task harder.

The solution, instead, is to look for what is holding the procrastinator back. If anxiety is the major barrier, the procrastinator actually needs to walk away from the computer/book/word document and engage in a relaxing activity. Being branded “lazy” by other people is likely to lead to the exact opposite behavior.

In my defence, everybody needs a hobby.

On December 18th, during a Health and Human Services press conference that saw RFK Jr. announce new federal rules that, if implemented, will almost entirely ban gender-affirming care for minors nationwide, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill said the following:

“Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. [pauses for applause from other Trump officials] Children are innocent and they need our protection. [pauses for more applause] It takes organized efforts to deny these fundamental truths. Sadly, we’ve seen such efforts succeed from time to time.

The denial of fundamental truths can destroy nations from within. At the root of the evils we face, such as the blurring of the lines between sexes and radical social agendas, is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived. This ideology does not just deny biology; it declares war against it.”

[…]

And it wasn’t just O’Neill either. The next day, conservative political commentator Benny Johnson, in a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, escalated even further while speaking about Charlie Kirk’s death:

“The person who pulled the trigger is part of the demonic transgender ideology that warps the minds of our young children, that poisons them, that is antithetical to creation itself. God called on us: I maketh you, man and woman. God doesn’t make mistakes. Transgenderism is a lie from the pit of hell and I’m sick of seeing transgender violence and murderers in my country!”

For the neurotypical people in your life:

If you’ve ever wondered what AuDHD feels like, this video walks you through the lived, everyday experience of having both autism and ADHD—at the same time.
Especially for adults who were diagnosed late, the experience isn’t always what people expect. It’s not just a mix of traits. It’s a whole different way of thinking, feeling, and processing the world.

In this video, I explore the emotional, cognitive, sensory, and social patterns that show up again and again in AuDHD adults—and how they’re different from ADHD or autism alone.

Whether you’re figuring this out for yourself or finally putting words to what you’ve always felt, this is what AuDHD feels like from the inside.

A good account of events around Robin Ince's resignation, and an answer to the obvious question that had been bugging me:

This won't convince everyone, but it is very good:

To the transphobes, “what is a woman?” is never treated as a serious question. It is only a rhetorical device meant to “own the libs” or whatever. This is a shame, because it’s an excellent question. As a trans woman myself, I love this question because if treated seriously, it yields some surprising and uplifting insights into the nature of identity itself.

So that’s what we’re going to do today: take it seriously. And for the sake of clarity, the rest of this article will refer to “what is a woman?” as The Question.

If you took any philosophy classes in college, you may recognize The Question as fundamentally an ontological one. It is a question about categories, which are sufficiently interesting that an entire branch of philosophy dedicates itself to examining them and how they work.

[…]

The broad strokes of ontology are about how categories are defined and how you determine which things in the world do or don’t belong to a given category. In that sense, The Question is clearly ontological because it implicitly posits that a category called “women” exists, and then asks for a definition of that category.

Why? Because we would presumably like to have a rigorous way of knowing which people belong to that category and which do not. That is, we would like to be able to use that definition in a social context to do useful things like decide who gets to marry whom, who gets to use which bathroom, and who might get sent off to fight in foreign wars.

Keen readers will observe that there is a circularity problem here: to define a category, we must examine members of that category to see what traits they have. But without an a-priori definition of the category, how do we know that the things we’re examining actually belong to the category? Ontologists take a variety of approaches to this circularity problem. The ones that are most relevant for our purposes are prototype theory and iterative refinement.

Prototype theory takes the existence of the category itself for granted and builds a definition of the category around uncontroversial examples. If examining the category of “birds”, the prototype theorist more or less says, “look, we’re not sure about penguins, but we all agree that crows and robins and sparrows are birds, so let’s just start there, ok?”

Iterative refinement takes a prospective category definition and refines it by examining additional candidate members of the category, to see whether they should be rejected from the category or whether the category definition itself should be refined to properly recognize them. The iterative refiner says “Ok, so penguins don’t fly, but they do lay eggs. Should we refine the category definition to exclude flying as a necessary attribute, or should we reject penguins from the category of birds?” And they probably decide to exclude flying from the definition, because a broken-winged sparrow is still a bird.

Joyless monomaniacs, the lot of them. This one is quite a specimen:

As Utah lawmakers return to Capitol Hill for their 2026 session next week, LGBTQ+ advocates are on guard for what will be the fifth year in a row with multiple bills targeting transgender people.

But one bill in particular — HB183 — stands out as especially bad, said Marina Lowe, policy director for Utah’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group, Equality Utah.

“That is by far the most harmful and outrageous piece of legislation I have seen in a long time,” Lowe told Utah News Dispatch in an interview this week.

The bill — sponsored by one of Utah’s most hard-right Republicans, Rep. Trevor Lee, of Layton — is far reaching and would have broad impacts in a variety of areas of state code.

[…]

The bill would effectively “erase transgender people from existence under state law,” she said — except in one provision, which “allows you to disparage transgender people on license plates.”

Lee told Utah News Dispatch in an interview this week that his bill is aimed at “getting away from this idea that there are like 100 different genders out there.”

“There is no such thing as gender, it’s a made up word and term. It’s actually just two sexes. There’s male and female,” he said. “We need to get back to that basic biology.”

He said he also wants “no more changing birth certificates” because “that’s stupid and it makes it very confusing for people, as we get older, especially our children.”

Lowe said it’s one of the most egregious legislative attacks on transgender people she’s ever seen crop up on Utah’s Capitol Hill because it would basically undo years of progress to create equal protections for a class of people that do exist — whether Lee likes it or not.

[…]

Lee refused to acknowledge that his bill would allow discrimination against transgender people in housing and employment, instead insisting that they don’t exist.

“You’ve got to pick one. You’re not both. See, this is part of getting away from this complete, alternate universe that people have been living in for a long time,” he said. “There’s male and female. There’s nothing in between. It doesn’t happen.”