“I think what I said in the tweet is the regulation permits students to rape and sexually harass with impunity. I think that the regulation has weakened the intent of the Title IX that Congress wrote.”

That was Biden  nominee Catherine Lhamon in her confirmation hearing this week, answering a question about whether she would enforce the DeVos  Education Department regulation requiring due process and the presumption of innocence in campus evaluations of sexual misconduct complains by female students. Remember this quote the next time you read one of those claims that Republicans or conservatives are existential threats to democracy and civil rights. What Lhamon is literally saying is that due process is a bad thing, because it allows those accused of crimes or misconduct to escape punishment when allegations against them can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s what she means. And what she said means that she, those who think like her on the progressive side of the spectrum, and anyone who would give her power are existential threats to democracy and civil rights.

Lhamon was doubling down on this May 2020 tweet— Continue reading →

And, as in this case, stupid.

Marine experts and and animal rights advocate in Australia want the public and media to refrain from using the word “attack” when sharks, meaning no harm, bump into a human swimmer and inadvertently take his or her arm, leg or head off. They suggest that violent, even fatal human meetings with the predatory fish be described with more neutral words such as “interactions.” “negative encounters,” or “incidents” the Sydney Morning Herald recently reported.

All of these, as is usually the case with euphemisms and “cover words,” convey less than accurate information. When an animal intentionally inflicts harm, it’s an attack. It might be an attack based on misidentification—“Hey! That doesn’t taste like a seal!”—but it’s still an attack.

Oh, no, says University of Sydney language researcher Christopher Pepin-Neff: “Shark attack’ is a lie.” He argues that a majority of what people call “attacks” are merely nips and minor injuries from smaller sharks. Apparently prior to the 1930s such episodes were once called “shark accidents.”

“Shark accident” is intentionally vague. Would poor Chrissie, above, call what the shark did to her an “accident”? And I know they use the language a little differently in Down Under, but since when does whether an animal bite qualifies as an attack depend on the size of the creature? If a rapid squirrel “nips” me, I have to call it a “squirrel accident”?

This is like the “Wuhan virus” censorship. Because some idiots react to the truth by being irrational, we have to obscure reality according to the woke, misguided, and addled enemies of free expression.

What happened to poor Chrissy was an attack, and the attacker was a shark.

1. Today’s bit of Trump Derangement comes from a new book by The Post’s Carol Leonnig, which claims that Gen. Mark A. Milley feared that President Trump would attempt a coup to say in power after his defeat in the 2020 election. Writes the Post, in a typical peive of inexcuably misleading journalism, “It recounts that Milley was deeply alarmed by Trump’s recruitment of supporters to descend on the Capitol on Jan. 6, which culminated in the violent insurrection attempt.” All this tells us is that Milley was (or is) more than a little hysterical, and that the various Big Lies about Trump pushed by the Post and others, along with the military brass’s understandable dislike of their Commander in Chief, caused more than just social media wackos to go off the deep end. How exactly was a bunch of Trump fans armed with little but their own indignation going to pull off a coup? The idea was and is ridiculous, but it shows just how deep contempt for Trump and the willingness to suspend logic and common sense where his conduct is involved goes. The story is, essentially, “X lost his mind and feared that Trump would do something that it would have been certifiably insane, so this means that Trump was planning to do it.”

Like a game of “telephone,” the story becomes sillier the more it circulates. Matthew Chapman at leftist fringe site Raw Story has a version of the story that is headlined,  “This is a Reichstag moment’: General Milley legitimately feared Trump would launch a ‘coup.'” Legitimately!

Wow.

2. What do you do about Wikipedia? It is the world’s fifth largest website, pulling in an estimated 6.1 billion followers per month and serves as the primary reference source for quick information on almost any topic in the world. [Aside: I don’t have a Wikipedia entry, though there are links to various essay I have written. The con artist who swindled ProEthics out of $30,000 when we were getting started has an entry. I am clearly doing something wrong…] The online encyclopaedia put all other published encyclopedias out of business, and it may be the “most read reference work in history.” Once the site was supposedly committed to neutrality, but according to Larry Sanger, one of Wiki’s founders, that ideal was abandoned after 2009. Since then he says (and I’ve noticed) it has become increasingly partisan. He now describes his baby as “broken beyond repair”:

“You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned. So what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream center-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia..There are companies like Wiki PR, where paid writers and editors will go in and change articles. Maybe there’s some way to make such a system work, but not if the players who are involved and who are being paid are not identified by name — they actually are supposed to be identified by name and say ‘we represent this firm’ if they are officially registered with some sort of Wikipedia editing firm. But they don’t have to do that…”

Continue reading →