Friday Ephemera

Such a modest claim. I’m a girl, I just want to be one of the girls. Less modestly put: I get to decide unilaterally that I’m one of the girls, and the girls who think otherwise are bigots.
Which touches on what is for many, myself included, an obvious cause of friction. As noted recently,

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

And so, the dynamic often feels like that of a dating shit test.

That sounds like a procedure for checking if your colonic bacteria are compatible.
“Shit test.” Basically, a test of how much bullshit someone (usually a potential mate) is willing to put up with.

Which is why I have no sympathy at all for the poor dears…women’s sports has been wielding the Herculean club of Title IX lawsuits for decades against colleges.
And feminists are still doing so. And then there is their loud demand that female professional athletes (basketball, soccer, whatever) should be paid as much as the men–even though the women’s teams attract far fewer fans and far less TV viewers.
When I point out the vast difference in audience size the feminists just whine that it isn’t fair, men should be watching, and the women should be paid the same regardless. It’s like I’m talking to a bunch of junior high commies.

even though the women’s teams attract far fewer fans and far less TV viewers.
And some of which are terribly painful to watch. Looking at you women’s soccer and basketball. The irony being, for me anyway, that back in the day when women’s basketball was a different sport, a kind of half-court thing as I recall, it was at least interesting to watch as there was a lot of passing and other strategies that were not so prevalent in the men’s games. Watching women struggling to get to the (soccer) ball or their lame (basketball) skying attempts gives me angst. It’s like watching young boys except they are “boys” who will never grow into the proper higher ambitions of the sport. It’s kinda hopeless.

“men should be watching” ha. consider women’s basketball. Virtually no dunking because they can’t dunk. It looks more lame than a high school game. And slow. Sports is closely related to the male urge to hunt which gets the guys more riled up. It is no coincidence that most sports involve putting a ball into a net, a sexual symbol if ever there was one. Boxing and wrestling and american football are pure combat.
As to women on a men’s team: several girls have gotten onto boy’s high school wrestling teams. Many of the boys won’t wrestle them–not just because it is unfair, but because it is way too sexual. The standard on-the-mat position is one person on hands and knees and the other kneeling next to them with their hand around their chest basicly in the spot where a breast is. Sure, grab her breast, you won’t get in trouble. Oh, and you can get in a position on the mat where you are face-to-crotch (theirs, not your own if you don’t have a good imagination). It is not a co-ed sport but feminists want to elide all that and say “what?” like it is just boys being unreasonable or squeemish.

And some of which are terribly painful to watch.
As a person of very limited athletic ability, I can admire those mediocre female athletes. But that doesn’t mean I should be required to subsidize them.

[ Arrives late, somewhat wan with a hint of emotion after epic struggle with PayPal account access issues ]
Bless you, sir. May an allegedly fun night in never include a question about which of the 1970s Planet of the Apes sequels you’d most like to watch.

So similar but totally different, wife and I watched Night Moves last night. 1975 pic starring Gene Hackman and featuring a barely 17 year old Melanie Griffith. In the movie there’s a scene where Griffith removes all her clothes and dives into the sea. There are several quick glimpses of …well nearly everything. Watching it was quite uncomfortable because the whole time I’m thinking how many male film crew members were there, how many takes were done, a scene where Hackman has to…simply has to dive into the water to grab and “save” the naked girl. I don’t remember this movie coming out though I would definitely have been too young to see it. I don’t recall any serious concerns or such. The movie IMNSHO is rather lame but I see where Roger Ebert and most other “critics” of the day gave it 4-star reviews. I’m sure it was quite “liberating” for young Ms. Griffith however.
I see this in wiki:

Tatum O’Neal alleged that Griffith dragged her into an orgy with Maria Schneider and a male hairdresser during the time of her father’s relationship with Griffith.

So likely “liberating” for a young Tatum O’Neal as well. Wonder if/what her father knew.

it isn’t fair, men should be watching
Advocates of the moral superiority of women tend to roll their eyes at male sports status hierarchies (I don’t know why those silly men are so obsessed with shirts with numbers on them and names in record books). But it’s something that men have for themselves and that they don’t seem to need women for, and women’s advocates can’t let that continue, so eventually women get shirts with numbers on them and their names in record books too.
Then they’re shocked, or pretend to be shocked, to find out that paper status is no guarantee of peer status. For men’s sports, the record books were invented to settle spontaneous arguments about which sportsball player sportsed the ball better. Women’s names have been in the record books for decades, and yet the arguments about which woman sportsed the ball better just don’t happen, or don’t happen organically enough, or don’t seem to matter as much.
Which leads to the second stage of the campaign, which is aimed not at women but at men. We understand that you men attribute status to wearing numbered shirts. Well here’s a woman wearing a numbered shirt, who isn’t asking for special treatment, just the same attention and status you give to her male “counterpart” with a numbered shirt. But you don’t even give her that, which is why we need condescending schoolmarmish micromanagement of male sports spaces, and socially engineered enthusiasm for women’s sports.

And then there is their loud demand that female professional athletes (basketball, soccer, whatever) should be paid as much as the men…
My usual reply: The men’s league is down the hall, second door on the right.

My union “friends” here in America were all gung-ho for strictly seniority-based pay scales.
My first professional work on the Space Shuttle program, following the Challenger accident, they did layoffs according to seniority. We had tons of dead weight and there was no work. It was not like those with seniority were contributing anything based on that as many were useless even in the simplest tasks. Some even drunks. But they unloaded the younger ones they had recently hired. I was there just long enough to be “safe” but as it dragged on it created significant unnecessary stress in those “on the bubble”. How professional people, people of any substance at all could approve of such a thing shocked me. Hell, if a company doesn’t want you and you are a good employee, they are kind of doing you a favor by letting you go. But letting people go strictly based on seniority eliminates even that information from the system. But hey, smart people. Smaaaaart.

pay vs performance: the whole left is offended by this idea. Unions are why the most recent subway tunnel in NYC just opened (??not sure) after 75 years of construction. The tenure system acts the same. Initially you are supposed to prove you can deliver the goods but it is also a popularity contest. Once in, you stay in. Some profs overtly declare that since they got tenure they quit trying to publish. other profs just put their name on as a co-author with all of their students.

Theological hot take.

Theological hot take
Have you noticed how all the wokeristos and wokeristas flick their eyes, usually but not always, to their left as if to get assurance from the director that they are performing OK and on-script?

The idea that people’s pay should bear some relation to their output seems to deeply offend some people.

To be perfectly honest, while not at all offended by such a proposal, I am deeply suspicious of performance related pay in general for the simple reason that employees do not have a say in how that performance is measured.
And my feeling is that it’s the metrics used that almost always lead to a corrupting influence in an organisation, even a whole industry, whatever differences accounted for, and all other things being equal.
As I hope everyone recognises, there is always a trade-off between Quality, Time, and Budget.
And since most managers across a very wide range of industries have their performance measured by the latter two (Time, Budget), but many employees by the former two (Quality, Time).
Not only does this set up a natural antagonism for people ostensibly on the same team and working towards the same goal, but it corrupts in the incentives it produces.
Employees who deliver more and more quickly tend to find themselves rewarded in the short term despite the fact that the inevitable skimping on quality very often results in a long, slow decline in standards, reputation, and success of whatever organisation they are working for.
The more conscientious, careful, and often more skilled employees – the ones you would think an organisation would want to keep around – end up devoting more and more of their own time (coming in early, working late, taking work home at weekends)to ensure the quality of their work.
The first of these kinds of employee tend to be promoted upwards into management posts where they continue more of the same. The second kind become demoralised, burn out, and leave the profession altogether wondering what on Earth went wrong.

Government job rules, right? [ … ] It still bothers me, but it no longer surprises me.

None of what I’ve just said is to deny the inefficiencies and often counterproductive systems of incentives that exist in government jobs as pst314 suggests here.
But rather that the more a corporation increases in size or importance, the more it comes to resemble the government departments they inevitably begin to develop a close relationship with and, hence, come to adopt the same kind of inefficiencies and often counterproductive systems of incentives the private sector is alleged to be free of.

And since most managers across a very wide range of industries have their performance measured by the latter two (Time, Budget), but many employees by the former two (Quality, Time)…
Sensible managers recognize that there are advantages in having some employees who excel most in speed and others who excel most in quality, and properly reward them all. In my career I tended to produce fewer lines of code per week than some of my coworkers, but also fewer bugs. But those other coworkers could throw together a basic subsystem more quickly than me, which had its advantages too (get something running, that can be used to further work on other subsystems, or just to have version one working sooner so the client project can be started sooner, even if those using it have to accept some inconvenient bugs for awhile.)
… the more a corporation increases in size or importance, the more it comes to resemble the government departments…
I was fortunate (chose to) to work for a small company where even the owner knew every employee and thus policy stayed realistic.

…these claimed qualities of God, just happen to flatter the people making the claim…
One has to wonder what scripture version these clowns are reading. Most of us members of The Universal Church Triumphant of the Apathetic Agnostic (“We don’t know, and we don’t care”) reached our enlightened plane by reading various versions, and they all say God created man in his image, first Adam, then Eve, who proceeded to go at it like rabbits and bring forth Cain, Able, and all the others which would indicate that the big guy is neither queer, gay, non-binary, or any of that other silliness.
As he “breathed life” into the lungs of Adam, I suppose we could give him credit for CPR, though.
Silly twats are a bunch of lemmings.
The best are the ones who also have “My thoughts are my own”.

Outrageous behavior from MPs in The House of Commons.
Savages.

Adam and Eve: the story in English has eve made from adam’s rib, but if anyone is missing a rib, it is women, who sometimes lack the lowest set. What bone is it then? As I understand it, in the hebrew the word for that bone refers to the penis bone. Humans lack a bone in their penis which most other mammals have and the ancient hebrews knew this (of course) and worked it into the story.
If that guy is an actual rabbi, they need to tighten up their standards.
If you are not a believer in god, no problem, but I think trying to make him lbgqrts+ is simply bonkers. HE has a book (or several depending) and HE certainly gives no indication of any of that crap. In the old testament HE actually seems to have some rather toxic masculinity (turning people to salt and such).

the old testament HE
is actually an unpleasantly bloodthirsty and retributive SoB. Pillars of salt are benign compared to a lot of the OT content.

savages
“Norman Atkinson, Labour MP for Tottenham”
I have the impression that Tottenham is still a Labour stronghold. Correct?

FTFY
No one would mourn for him. Likewise for this model citizen. Unfortunately the people who work so hard to free these thugs are almost never their next victims.

Isn’t that a tell for lying?
I seem to recall that types of eye movement like this are also mnemonics for memory. I can’t remember where I saw it (oh the irony) but they were doing experiments with babies where they would show them an object and then get the babies to move their eyes up and left or up and right to remember. It’s like programming memory which also defines what might be happening with young ideologues.
I couldn’t find the baby stuff but there is this.

Sipes is 28 years old. He has two sources of income: theft via the state a/k/a social security and robbery.
Assault and battery, aggravated battery, armed robbery, home invasion: Yes, that’s him!
But, but, he’s a victim who deserves our sympathy! “Assistant Public Defender Suzin Farber said Sipes suffers from mental health conditions.”
If true, then he should be, one way or another, permanently removed from civil society.

There might however be one mitigating circumstance in his favor: his name is Tomatae Sipes.
“Urban” equivalent of “A Boy Named Sue”?