Heather Mac Donald on the obvious-but-seemingly-unthinkable:

Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit bias in the hiring process.

But there are no cultural expectations that discourage females from memorising dictionaries—a typical strategy of competitive Scrabble players, often in a foreign language that the player doesn’t speak. Girls are as free as boys to lap up vocabulary. Nor are there misogynist gatekeepers to keep females out of Scrabble play; the game, usually first learned at home, is open to all. According to Hasbro, 83% of recreational Scrabble players 25 to 54 are female.

Championship Scrabble, however, rewards typically male obsessions: strategy, math, a passion for competition, and a drive to memorise facts. [World Scrabble Champion, Nigel] Richards’s mother told the Guardian in 2015 that he “related everything to numbers” when he was growing up. Feminists will need to employ circular logic to conjure forth a discriminatory barrier in Scrabble: Males’ excellence at a certain activity itself keeps females out. But that leaves unanswered the question of how males came to excel at Scrabble—or any other abstract, competitive activity—in the first place.

Also this:

“Blink, motherfucker.” (h/t, Damian) || Brew of note. || Today’s word is suboptimal. || Toothbrush of tomorrow. || Dicycle. || Dude. || Turn your desk into a touchscreen. || “Makes drinking water fun.” || Stormy weather, somewhat distant. || White women bad. || Whale heart. || New legs. || Photographing lichen. || Small claims. || Scenes. (h/t, Obo) || “This teacher had to tell her deaf students that people can hear farts.” || Flat-Earth gravity and other fun facts. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Jigsaw of note. || “Jigsaw companies tend to use the same cuts for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable.” || Parallel universe detected. || Florida man sighted. || And finally, behold ye, a party trick of note.

With space exploration, we have to consider how we are using language, and what it carries from the history of exploration on Earth. Even if words like “colonisation” have a different context off-world, on somewhere like Mars, it’s still not OK to use those narratives.

In the pages of National Geographic, Nadia Drake and Lucianne Walkowicz competitively fret about how terribly problematic the language of space exploration is:

I think the other [word not to be used] is “settlement.”

I’ll give you a moment to process that one.

That comes up a lot and obviously has a lot of connotations for folks about conflict in the Middle East. I think that’s one that people often turn to when they mean “inhabitation” or “humans living off-world.”

Apparently, notions of our species expanding into space are “born from racist, sexist ideologies that historically led to the subjugation and erasure of women and indigenous cultures,” and must therefore be corrected by the lofty and woke. And so, “government agencies, journalists, and the space community at large” are “revising the problematic ways in which space exploration is framed.”

Numerous conversations are taking place about the importance of using inclusive language, with scholars focusing on decolonising humanity’s next journeys into space, as well as science in general.

You see, any attempts to colonise other worlds, or to explore and exploit astronomical objects, will have to be pre-emptively “decolonised” and purged of gender by the neurotically pretentious. Lest our astronauts and astronomers instantly start oppressing their black or female colleagues, rendering them tearful with the words unmanned probe, while spitting on the floor and shouting about the merits of Arcturian poontang.

Needless to say, the word frontier is also deemed “problematic,” due to “narratives… based around European settlement.”

Yes, an open thread, in which to share links and then bicker about them.

Our previous free-for-all included the abolition of clapping at the University of Manchester Student Union; the hazards of genital steaming; and the joys of waiting 30 seconds for 26 adverts to load on a 200-word story on a local newspaper website. There was also the question, as yet unresolved, of what to tell relatives who politely ask what this blog is actually about.

If all else fails, you can always poke through the reheated series and greatest hits.

No messy hand. (h/t, Julia) || He lives on as a pair of shoes. || Unnatural passions. (h/t, O&G) || It could happen, people. || The humans have some kind of force field. || False economy. || Conflicting definitions. || Disgusting Food Museum, Malmö, Sweden. || On Cerenkov radiation and travelling faster than light. || A bit of a kick to it. || Ice crystals in the sky. || Hatchlings of note. || He does this better than you do. || Skillz. || Scenes. (h/t, Dicentra) || Think good thoughts. || A project for the weekend. || Mascot of note. || More scenes. (h/t, Damian) || 10 robots. || Aerial refuelling. || And finally, “When it became clear that Trump was going to be president, silence descended over the mostly naked crowd.”

I bring saucy celebrity news, which we don’t often cover. The catch is, it’s from the Guardian: 

The US magazine People has crowned Idris Elba the sexiest man alive,

A handsome chap, and popular, so not entirely surprising. Indeed, the author of the piece, Mr Caspar Salmon, refers to Mr Elba as “incontrovertibly loin-tugging.”

It’s heartening that Elba, long held to be a favourite to become the next James Bond, has cracked another predominantly white institution.

So far, so Guardian. But it could, I think, be a little more Guardian.

Elba fits squarely into an amusing pattern that People has been building up over the years, which sees them plump for decidedly masculine, established, patriarchal figures. The award, in other words, is relentlessly straight.

There we go.

The prize tells us a good deal about the cult of masculinity still prevalent in the world, which equates male looks with “sexiness” rather than beauty. This emphasis on sexual attraction brings power and dominance into consideration alongside mere aesthetic qualities.

“The cult of masculinity.” Now we’re cooking. And a trashy magazine that once a year ranks famous men by sex appeal tends to favour men who strike its readers as sexy, statusful, and manly. Shocking stuff. They even – brace yourselves – put “emphasis on sexual attraction.” Despite the aforementioned loin-tugging, I suspect this may prove problematic: 

[The magazine’s] museum-like display of strong, mostly white, straight-acting men does tell us something about the dominant culture, and is, let’s face it, funny.

What’s funny, apparently, is that the largely straight and female readers of People magazine – readers whose average age is 38 – often rate as sexy men of roughly similar age:

Elba is the fourth man in his 40s in a row to win the award… The average age of winners is 38.7 years old.

And which, it turns out, is also problematic: 

Decency demands it: 

16 Vancouver women are facing human rights complaints for refusing to wax a transgender woman’s male genitalia. The anonymous individual “JY” has filed 16 separate complaints with the Human Rights Tribunal after being refused a Brazilian wax from businesses that only service women.

The faintly surreal news item is worth reading in full, though one passage seems to, as it were, brush against the nub of things:

In spite of the fact that JY is able to obtain a Manzilian in Vancouver, JY has filed 16 complaints against these women at the BC Human Rights Tribunal, claiming discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.” […] One of them, Shelah Poyer, is a single mom who works out of her home. JY was willing to withdraw his complaint in exchange for $2,500. 

The term naked shakedown comes to mind. Via Claire Lehmann. 

Meanwhile, in crime news. 

Be careful out there, people.

Andy Ngo on media dishonesty and racial shakedowns: 

The genre of “white people doing something to black people” is, by now, a well-established media genre that generates easy clicks. But there is also an unsettling subplot that few seem willing to discuss. Rashsaan Muhammad and Mattie Khan, the two people of colour who star in last week’s viral video, both act abominably toward a young woman they’ve just met… And it was Ms Khan, not the pedestrian, who instantly racialised the incident, while her male partner called the woman an “idiot” and told her that she doesn’t belong in the neighbourhood. Who’s the racist—not to mention segregationist—here?

The couple’s abominable behaviour didn’t end after that encounter and the publication of the video, however. Within hours, Ms. Khan named the bicyclist publicly and posted her photo on social media. Friends and followers of Ms Khan then continued the doxing, publishing more photos and personal details of the woman… Sha Ongelungel, who was recently profiled glowingly as a racial justice activist in the Guardian, published the woman’s employer information on Twitter and encouraged others to call or email them. They obliged and demanded that she be fired. Ms Ongelungel stopped responding after I inquired if she took any steps to verify the couple’s (false) allegation.

Previously and somewhat related: When “dismantling the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy” trumps little things like opening hours. 

Heather Mac Donald on pathological academia and the barking left: 

The epithets used by the left are simply reflex actions. They have nothing to do with reality. “White supremacy” is now the favoured term of art and it’s trotted out in situations that are ludicrous… We saw this during the feminist hysteria over the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Those who defended the idea of due process… were accused of supporting “white supremacy” and “white privilege.” What was left out of the equation was that his accuser was also white. So how does race come into this?

And in unambiguous hate-crime news: 

When they’re not looking, set the parental controls on the TVs of your family members to block Fox News. 

Quick quiz. Pretentious teenager or sociology professor?