Not like parents are known to be especially supportive of their trans kids.

surgeries have been marketed on social media like cigarette companies used to market tobacco to children

I had assumed they were just trying to profit off it. I guess it’s a win-win for them. Either keep out the unruly assholes or make a ton of money from them.

They don’t have a problem with the open pedophiles.

I thin what The Root is doing here is pointing out the hypocrisy of other outlets that didn’t seem to care about selective access when Trump was the one doing it. I also think there’s a stronger positive case here, since there are probably lots of other forces preventing people of color from getting into positions to…

But it obviously does matter, because even if you think this is a bad idea, it’s clearly a much less bad idea than only allowing access to non-White journalists for the rest of her term. It’s also clearly very different from saying “non-White journalists can’t report on the mayor”, which is what censorship actually…

But this isn’t censorship. That’s a key point you seem to be dodging. What publication or individual is being blocked by Lightfoot? Giving some people preferential access on a specific topic is just not censorship. Now, we can disagree on whether this is a good idea, or whether it’s fair. I’m not personally convinced…

That’s not remotely relevant to the example I gave, and it’s not particularly relevant to this case. The mayor is expanding access to herself on a particular fluffy topic, but she’s doing so selectively (which, by the way, was always going to be the case; there’s no way she could guarantee an interview to every single…

I am constantly amazed by how many people seem to think that being respectful of trans people is one step away from Nazism.

Oh my god, so many. I used to bike to work every day (about 6 miles, each way, from Malden, MA into Cambridge), and over maybe 4 years of biking, I was hit by cars four different times. The first time, someone pulled out of a parking lot but then did a U-turn back into another parking lot, right in front of me. I…

It’s a little less direct. They knew what people’s incomes were, and their self-reported levels of satisfaction. Then they calculated their BMIs. They used a regression model to predict satisfaction from BMI, income, and a bunch of other variables, then they figured out how much money would be needed to raise the…

The chart is showing percentage of all residents, not just adults. From what I’ve read, that’s a more common approach. If the chart were percentages of all adults it should inflate all of the state percentages, but I wouldn’t expect the rank ordering to change much, it seems like we would still expect Texas to be in…

I think that’s right. You could absolutely explain the results in the paper as society punishing women for being heavier and men for being lighter, and that within heterosexual married couples, both husband and wife are more obsessed with the woman’s weight. It’s not a surprising result, but I think that the language…

I believe it, but rates are still really low. I think it’s the “persuading people to get vaccinated” front that Texas and a lot of other states are failing on. I know that’s only partially under the governor’s control, but they need to do more.

I don’t think that’s right. Texas is doing really badly compared to the rest of the country both in terms of first doses (see the chart in the article I linked) and in complete vaccinations: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/states-ranked-by-percentage-of-population-vaccinated-march-15.html. If you…

As Jordan Weissmann pointed out on Slate (https://slate.com/business/2021/05/republicans-states-unemployment-insurance-labor-vaccines-schools.html), the states that have been quickest to cut unemployment benefits have also generally been the worst at getting people vaccinated, ensuring that working remains dangerous.…

Jackson’s attorney, Bob Hinton, says his client maintains that he submitted the evidence, and that had Jackson chosen to fight the accusation in court, he would’ve won.

I could totally beat up a grizzly bear, by which I mean that there is at least one grizzly bear on earth that I could totally beat up, as long as no other bears intervened.

I think it would be a much bigger problem for them if the jury heard it in context, because the context is ... not good.

Reliable birth control is so important and should be available for free for anyone who wants it. It seems like something conservatives should agree with, since effective birth control also prevents abortions, but they don’t often find that convincing.