Month: November 2024

Here's an odd thing. I got curious today about just how many trans girls (i.e., biological males transitioning to become girls) actually compete in girls' sports. The answer is that nobody knows, but a very rough extrapolation from a few state-level numbers suggests perhaps 200 in high school and 50-100 in college. These numbers are so tiny that it makes me think both sides probably ought to lower the volume on this.

But that's not what I'm writing about. As I was browsing around I ran into this:

Shazam! That's a lot, and certainly doesn't gibe with with my estimates above. And what's the UN's interest in this, anyway?

So I dug up the source, which turns out to be a recently published report called "Violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences," written by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. The report is 24 pages long and it's mostly just what you think it is. But it also includes this:

The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.

Hmmm. What exactly does this mean? It doesn't say that 890 women have lost medals to trans competitors. It says that because of the "replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category" women have been "losing opportunities"—which is deliberately almost impossible to parse. I have no idea what it means. So let's look at the source:

The Women's Liberation Front is a group dedicated to keeping trans girls out of sports. Ditto for the ICFS and Dianne Post. And Lavender Patch turns out to be Lavendar Patch, which is yet another anti-trans group.

But where do the numbers come from? It turns out there's an invisible link in the footnote that takes you to SheWon.org, which maintains a running total of medals ("or records, scholarships or other opportunities") supposedly lost since 2001. The list is apparently self-submitted and includes competitions of every conceivable variety at every level around the world. In addition to the usual cycling and track meets, it includes things like poker, disc golf (lots and lots of disc golf), Irish dancing, darts, and so forth. Even developmental events. It's up to 1,055 as I write this, but counting only US high school events it comes to 13 during all of 2023. Some of the entries have a citation—usually a confusing one—and some don't. It's a dog's breakfast.

As it happens, the UN rapporteur, Reem Alsalem, is herself opposed to trans girls and women competing in girls' and women's sports. So what we have is a trans athlete opponent writing a murky sentence based on a submission from anti-trans activists that's not really from them at all but is just the latest number from a website of unknown provenance that's been around for years.

I'm not myself in favor of trans girls participating in girls' sports, but this is nonetheless ridiculous. The cite of 890 "medals" is a number pulled out of someone's ass and then deliberately distorted by both the UN rapporteur and every right-wing group that then reported it as a "UN estimate." It means nothing.

Pandemic inflation in the US and Europe was nearly—but not quite!—identical:

Why was it nearly the same? Because in both places the underlying causes were the same: supply chain shortages combined with rescue packages that kept demand steady.

Why was it a little different? Because the US passed a gigantic stimulus all at one time in March 2020. This produced a nearly vertical surge in inflation a year later.

Europe, by contrast, relied more on its existing safety net, which expanded more slowly. It also passed a stimulus bill, but it was smaller than ours and came four months later. This produced a surge that started later and grew a bit more slowly.

Nothing after that mattered more than slightly. Inflation peaked four months apart and then declined at exactly the same rate. The ECB raised interest rates later than the Fed; held them lower; and cut them sooner. It didn't make any difference.

The entire non-poor world had almost identical experiences. Low-income countries, which were largely on the opposite end of supply chains, were a bit different: they suffered even worse inflation and it persisted through 2023.

Let me get this straight. While he was married (to his second wife) Pete Hegseth started an affair with a Fox producer. They had a child out of wedlock in August 2017. Two months later Hegseth had a drunken hookup with a third woman¹ who showed signs of rough handling and filed a complaint with the police. Last year he paid the woman to keep quiet because he was afraid if the hookup went public it could result in "immediate termination" from his job.²

But he's a Christian, and that's why he sports tattoos from the Crusades that also happen to be favored by white nationalists.³ Uh huh.

¹While on a road trip speaking to the California Federation of Republican Women!

²At Fox News!

³Just a coincidence!

This tweet from Don Jr. has gone viral:

The New York Post reported that RFK Jr. was "spotted" on Trump's plane "sheepishly posing with a McDonald’s Big Mac and a Coca-Cola."

No. This was obviously a planned and very deliberately shared photo. And it was typical Trump: a ritual humiliation forced on RFK Jr. to test his loyalty. I guess everyone has to go through it.

Atrios weighs in on the election dispute between progressives and moderates:

A lot was going on in 2020, and an amazing thing about the Biden campaign (yes, I am praising it!) was that it did not go out there and start screaming about "thugs" and "freaks." To use the shorthand of the times, they pretty much embraced "wokeness" during a period of major social turmoil and then they won.

Hmmm. This is not how I remember things. During the primary Biden was practically the only candidate who pushed back against open borders. He loudly opposed defunding the police. He rejected Medicare for All and instead supported increased subsidies and a limited public option. He avoided woke language in favor of Bidenisms. Trans issues weren't on the radar. Biden was, by a good margin, the most moderate candidate in a field led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

As president, Biden moved to the left. But that's not how he got there. He got there with endless appeals to his working-class upbringing in Scranton and by being almost militantly moderate. He might not have engaged in much hippie punching, but he kept his distance from them.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a strange corner of the current market frenzy:

Dogecoin, a speculative coin backed by nothing, shot up after Trump revealed plans to create a government-efficiency department called DOGE, to be co-led by Elon Musk, a dogecoin evangelist. Its $55 billion market cap now tops that of Ford Motor.

Not quite. The part about dogecoin being explicitly based on nothing is true. But the part about it shooting up in price after Trump announced DOGE isn't:

Dogecoin more than doubled after the election, shooting up from 16¢ to 38¢ by November 12. That evening Trump announced DOGE. The next day dogecoin rose by 2¢ and then immediately gave it back the day after.

So what's the real deal with dogecoin? As usual with this idiocy, I suppose we'll never know.

As we continue to argue about why Kamala Harris lost, I want to remind everyone that only about 3% of the electorate switched from D to R this year—less in swing states. So regardless of whether you think the culprit was cultural issues or the economy or misogyny or Latino defections or a bad campaign—no matter which it is, it only had to influence 2-3% of the voting public. You can make a plausible argument for practically anything doing that.

UPDATE: But wait! What about lower turnout? If you account for that you get to about 4%. Still a very small number.

I was browsing around on an unrelated subject and happened to notice something about the nicknames of famous women who have led big countries:

• Golda Meir: Iron Lady
• Indira Gandhi: Iron Lady
• Margaret Thatcher: Iron Lady
• Benazir Bhutto: Iron Lady
• Angela Merkel: Iron Chancellor

Is the United States ready for a woman president? Maybe we first need an Iron ______.

Have liberals moved too far to the left culturally? Is that why we lost in 2024?

This is hardly a new dispute. Thomas Frank wrote his seminal exploration of the question, What's the Matter With Kansas? in 2004, back when Democrats were considerably more moderate than they are now. But it seems newly relevant in the wake of an election where the American public seemingly decided that even a lunatic right was better than leaving liberals in power.

These things tend to be thermostatic. After a few years people get tired of whichever ideology is ascendant and switch to the other one for a while. Still, why switch to Trumpism, which most liberals view as wildly beyond the pale?

A lot of it has to do with the nature of extremism. Which extreme are you more afraid of? As an example, consider the question of puberty blockers in trans children. A moderate view might be something like Sometimes they make sense, but the evidence suggests we should be a lot more careful about prescribing them. What are the two extreme views on either side of this?

• Conservatives: Ban hormonal treatments for minors.
• Liberals: Twelve-year-olds know what they're doing. Transition away.

Which is scarier? As in many things, the conservative view is essentially Stop. Let's go back to the way things were a few years ago. And this is not very scary. The liberal view, conversely, is inherently a little disturbing if you're not already a confirmed lefty.

This isn't always the case. The moderate view on abortion, for example, would be I support Roe v. Wade. The two extremes are:

• Conservatives: Ban abortion completely.
• Liberals: Just let women and their doctors decide.

In this case, partly because abortion is a well-worn issue, it's the conservative position that seems scarier to most people. Republicans have discovered this to their dismay ever since Dobbs forced them to put their money where their mouths are.

But for most cultural hot buttons, especially fairly new ones, the conservative extreme is the less scary. After all, Stop doing it has a natural limit of zero. And since zero was often the normal position only a few years in the past, how scary can it be? By contrast, the sky's the limit for lefties. We can compete for ever more extreme positions almost without limit.

This is meant as an explanation, not an endorsement. I have my own views, of course, but they don't matter. I'm nowhere near the median voter, and the question is how they feel. The answer, I believe, is that they often find liberal extremes scarier than conservative extremes, so when the extreme left gains influence they'll gravitate naturally toward conservatism even if it's also (or more) extreme.

Not always, but often. And it's mostly related to the mere existence of influential liberal extremes, not whether Democratic politicians actively endorse them. If they don't actively condemn them—yes, the dreaded Sister Souljah moment—then they're implicated and conservatives win. This is what happened in 2024.

Lefty discourse has suddenly been filled with talk about The Groups—nonprofit organizations that apparently wield enormous veto power over Democratic politicians. Ezra Klein discussed this a couple of days ago with Michael Lind, starting off with an observation about routine opposition to big solar power projects from highly focused groups on the left:

KLEIN: When I would talk to the people working on it, I was just stunned by the power of small groups, environmental justice groups, and so on, that didn’t really represent anybody, or at least not any large numbers of people.

They would just explain to me that if you couldn’t get them on board, they couldn’t move forward with this at all. And I would say, “Well, what is the power of these groups — like, what is their leverage on you?” And there was never an answer. It was just a coalitional decision that had been made in the culture of the way the Democratic Party now made policy.

....A culture of how you make policy had emerged, a culture of who you listen to had emerged. And it couldn’t be broken, even if that meant a genuinely smaller chance of achieving a goal that you believed and had told everybody else was existentially important: the speed of decarbonization in the coming 10 years.

LIND: Well, it’s not new. Back in the 1990s, I was having a conversation with a Democratic staffer about some sensible educational reform — I don’t remember what it was — and he worked for Senator Ted Kennedy at the time. And he said, “Well, we’ll have to run it past the Groups.”

That was the first time I had heard of “the Groups” — clearly with a capital G.

So who are these Groups? In general they seem to fall into a few categories:

• Black
• Trans
• Green
• Environmental justice
• Immigration
• Gay
• Indigenous

But which ones? Can we name names? My sense is that although this list includes some big, well-known groups—the ACLU, NAACP, NRDC, etc.—the bulk of The Groups are mostly smallish organizations that are, in practice, run by young staffers with an incentive to move steadily left and steadily more hardline.

But who are they? I don't think it's a secret; it's just that no one has ever bothered to make a list. But maybe it's time for someone to do this?