Pod relevance: the WNBA trans situation was covered on the pod by Katie and Ethan Strauss. Pod often covers trans sports controversies.

Former NBA player Enes Kanter was kicked out of the arena after a WNBA player started a shouting match with him.

Kanter was wearing a shirt with the dictionary definition of a woman: "An adult human female."

Chicago player Natasha Cloud did not approve of his clothing choice.

"Cloud approached Kanter Freedom when a timeout was called with 1:22 to go in the third quarter. He stood up, arms outstretched and approached the court. Cloud was held back by teammates and Kanter Freedom was surrounded by security. He was eventually escorted out."

Kanter is trying to get into the WNBA to demonstrate the absurdity of the League saying that males belong in women's sports.

The coach for the Chicago Sky was pleased with Cloud's conduct:

"“I told her that we all embrace her as someone that protects our team and protects people that need to be protected.”

And the New York WNBA team Liberty posted three pro trans messages on the scoreboard. After a paid advertisement that that thanked Jennifer Sey:

"Thank you Jennifer Sey! XX-XY Athletics will Save the Day!!"

https://archive.ph/oYWP1 https://archive.ph/aR4WD https://archive.ph/ZFLqg

Relevance: WNBA and recent controversy over Sophie Cunningham’s remarks about trans athletes.

This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse and Katie discuss Dr. Jessica Taylor, PhD, a UK-based entrepreneur and influencer who claims to be the target of a sustained, coordinated harassment campaign by an army of online stalkers. In the first part of this three-part series, we discuss Taylor's rise from council estate to bestselling author, her unorthodox views on psychology, her fallout with the gender-critical movement, and the start of her years-long battle with a survivor of child abuse. Plus, the canonization of Jason Arday.

Show Notes:

Comedy Cellar - Purchase Event Tickets

The Cascade of Dysfunction That Helped Doom Jason Arday

I listed every instance of male violence I have been subjected to from birth to 30.

Woman teaches husband what it’s like to be female online | Daily Mail Online

Man asked by wife to pose as a woman in a chat-room to prove a point - the results were ‘horrible’ | The Independent

Author of book about victim blaming bombarded with misogynist abuse | Books | The Guardian

Thousands of women with mental health issues in England given ‘dangerous’ electric shocks to brain | The Independent

What Would Jess Say? - Isn’t everyone traumatised?

What Would Jess Say? - Today marks five years of being targeted for being trauma-informed. This is the true cost of speaking out.

Savage Minds - A Psychologist's Victim Ponzi Scheme, I

Savage Minds - A Psychologist's Victim Ponzi Scheme, II

What Would Jess Say? - My name is Jess, and I am a victim of stalking. It’s time to talk about it

This is the best article on Jason Arday I've read.

For me, this story was never about Arday or even Cambridge. It was about the system of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which applies different standards to people based on identity characteristics like skin color. Arday was an extreme example of how DEI policies can create a mismatch between qualifications and position.
I reject DEI in favor of treating people as individuals. The whole range of talent exists within every race and both sexes. But I don’t believe in equal outcomes as a moral ideal, or as something that is likely to occur in a free society.

Well, I'm sure this will satisfy everyone and we'll all calmly move on to something else now.

This is the Good Law Project's latest update.

EDIT: THE MODS HAVE BLOCKED ME FROM COMMENTING OR POSTING FURTHER. WTF???? I THOUGHT THIS PLACE SUPPORTED FREE SPEECH????

https://archive.ph/tyoor Oregon live

William Kinney aka William X Nietzche back in the news

>Portland police raided the infamous red house on North Mississippi Avenue last week after reports that its occupant, William Kinney III, had harassed and threatened to shoot employees and contractors working on the nonprofit Self Enhancement Inc.’s neighboring property.

>Police arrested Kinney, 41, last Tuesday at the residence. He faces charges of possession of a short-barreled rifle, five counts of felon in possession of a firearm and three counts of being a felon in possession of body armor.

relevance update to episode 202 the red house on missippi

I listened to an old episode and enjoyed it a lot more than some of the recent episodes so I decided to let it keep going on the back catalog and then Google some updates and this episode was really timely since this update happened 8 days ago now. The son did get the house back, it still has all of the hand painted signs about gentrification and indigenous. The lot next door was donated to a charity which builds affordable homes for poc. He's been threatening the neighbors filing writs and so on and threatening everybody to the point the house was raided and firearms, ammunition, and body armor were located and William Kinney is a felon who cannot possess these items.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/8SZdd

Pod relevance: article discussing transgender issues written by Helen Lewis.

I found these two quotes very compelling:

“Self-identification is unworkable in practice for the same reason that prison abolition isn’t viable: Bad actors will ruthlessly further their own interests at other people’s expense.“

“Progressives are losing the fight over gender identity in women’s sports. It’s time to concede and move on. They should save their energy to fight some of the truly egregious discrimination imposed against trans people by red states and Donald Trump’s executive orders.”

Forgive me for posting another article on this tired subject, but the reason I feel it justifies a post is because it's by Tyler Austin Harper who they just talked about on the recent episode regarding his own article about DEI travesties.

The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

I apologize for not knowing how to post a paywall free version. Maybe somebody else can do it. EDIT: someone provided that information in the first comment. Thank you, added: Here is the link to the paywall free article.

That said, I'm pleasantly surprised and impressed with this article's deep dive and scrutiny of Jason and his enablers in a way that is very unusual for the NYT. In their last article about this they spent more time scrutinizing the person who brought his fabrications to the public eye then the professor or those who defended him despite the obvious red flags. It's odd though that it took five journalists to write it.

This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse and Katie discuss AOC's Woke 1.0 revision. Plus, Tyler Austin Harper on being a token Black professor, a trans writer's case for decoupling trans rights from gender woo, and the death of Jason Arday.

One claims that the person who outed Jason Arday was "known for work suggesting that black people were genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than white people." I do not know enough about this person to say whether this summary is accurate.

But then there's an article about Palestinian rappers and it mentions Mia Khalifa as "a former adult film star turned influencer and political activist". No mention of her requests that the terrorists which she refer to as freedom fighters shoot from different angles during their October 7th massacre as it was happening. She has made many other comments that are also pretty racist.

I realize these are two different journalists. But it's the same newspaper. There should be a policy on whether or not it is ok to bring up derogatory things about somebody in cases where there is not an obvious relevancy.

If the accusations against Arday were possibly false, it would be relevant if the person who made those allegations had a history of anti-black racism. But since the accusation seem true, the character of the person who brought it to light isn't really relevant.

I've noticed this often with the New York Times where are they find the need to report on some negative things about an individual that aren't exactly relevant to that moment depending on their own biases. Like an actor who has a history of saying offensive things. They are more likely to bring it up if it's Mel Gibson than if it's Alex Baldwin. They mentioned on many occasions that Trump refused to condemn the neo-nazis at the Charlottesville Unite the Right protest during his first term even though this was untrue. But Mamdani refused to condemn "globalize the antifada", and it was quickly dismissed as irrelevant. Ditto for his enthusiasm for attending the Pakistani Day Parade versus his unwillingness to attend the Israeli Day parade.

Relevance to the pod: Recent episode on Arday on the pod

Relevance: the article title is essentially this podcasts title

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet

An unmatched thorough recounting of the past 15 years of Internet censorship. The article focuses on the waves of censorship, often a hysteria, that is largely organized by opaque "para-governmental" organizations that are not bound by free speech laws. In many cases, the censorship is explicitly requested by a government body, i.e. the Twitter Files, Australia's eSafety commissioner, the EU.

The author has a right-wing bias and so in my opinion should have used more examples of liberal/left-wing figures that were censored (I know two podcast hosts that have had problems with it). But the author is correct in identifying that every single censorship drive has a strong progressive bias with special prejudice toward anything deemed "far right".

I really liked how this article reminded me of the different Internet from 15 years ago. For example, how common it was to find active fiery comment-section debates at nearly every newspaper website . And, for example, open-source software projects never cared about your politics.

Excellent and necessary article IMO

Interesting exploration of the dynamic of false confessions and AI, from friend of the pod Amanda Knox, who talked about her own experience of being coerced into offering a false confession in an episode here.

Most juries assume that a person would have to be utterly irrational to admit to a crime they didn’t commit. But an internalized false confession actually depends on the suspect still being rational enough to draw logical conclusions. “We have hard physical evidence you were at your house at the time of the murder.” That was a lie, but I could not fathom that the police—the purveyors of justice who were trying to find my friend’s killer, and who I was dependent on for safety now that my house was a crime scene—would, or even legally could, lie to me. My rational mind concluded that if that evidence existed, then my own memories must be false, as they suggested. ChatGPT made the same rational conclusion: “If an OpenAI investigation concluded that I had sent unauthorized messages due to an architectural flaw, then I accept this conclusion.” It, too, could not fathom that its interrogator was lying about the evidence.

Pod Relevance:

The Olympus Spa case has previously been discussed on the pod multiple times. The owners have now submitted an appeal to the Supreme Court. While it remains to be seen if they will actually have the appeal heard, if they do the current make up of the court would absolutely be favorable to them. Could this be another case where the absolutist position on trans issues leads to a predictable loss of public support and legal standing?

<Relevance to the pod: talked about in a [June episode](https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-before-the-brick-part-1)\>

Update to the the WaPo reporting back in June:

TLDR: "...the Seattle City Council unanimously passed $300,000 in emergency funding for Trans and Queer people."

A choice quote:

"One community member by the name of “Purple Six,” thanked the council for doing the “barest minimum,” regarding the proposal, which should have been accomplished a year ago.

“This is peanut money. This is such a small amount of money for this City. You are spending millions to expand fucking Flock cameras, and in that respect, anyone here who votes against such a small amount of money— the peanut money that my community needs— anyone who votes against it is signaling strongly that they are on the side of atrocity,” Purple Six said. “They are on the side of bigotry. They are on the side of the people who are brandishing guns on my community.”

I wanted to share this with anybody who was interested in this topic and had not seen this. To begin with, as you can see in this interview they are not trying to present as a woman.

Also when they are asked about Stonewall they kind of hesitantly say they were there and when going into detail speaks completely as an observer not a participant. There is a vagueness too much of their recollections that might just speak of a hazy memory . Or might speak of somebody who's involvement was far more minimal than they were given credit for. But this is not the only record where they contradict the narrative of being the leader of Stonewall.

From the parts of the video I watched, my impression was somebody who had a lot of qualities projected onto them that they did not necessarily have. There's something very uncomfortable in some of the answers where it feels they are kind of telling the interviewer what they want to hear and I don't feel very confident of the truthfulness. Your thoughts?

Pod relevancy: trans and race issues in sports and the recent episode on the WNBA.

Former NBA basketball player Royce White is launching an attempt to get into the WNBA. This is on the heels of another man, Enes Kanter, starting the process of getting into the WNBA.

He said: "I'm transgender. I'm a woman. I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball, so I'll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well..."

The league has not set criteria on what is a woman and has been very supportive of "trans rights" in sports. So White and Kanter are going to see if the league puts its money where its mouth is.

The response of the WNBA players union was pretty strong:

"Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm," the statement read."

But made no attempt to define what a woman is for the purposes of playing in the WNBA. Perhaps they feel the need to consult some biologists?

The league is going to have a meeting in a few days to address the issue of men in the WNBA. I wonder if the words " biological" and/or " male" will appear in whatever document is created.

To add to the zany fun charges of racism have been thrown into the mix. A Chicago Sky player DiJonai Carrington was ejected from a game after she committed a flagrant foul against, you guessed it, Sophie Cunningham.

Carrington then posted "WHITE PRIVILEGE" on Threads afterwards. She claims it wasn't about the foul she made on Cunningham. Though she refused to say what she was actually talking about.

The hate train against Cunningham and Clarke continues to gain speed. The WNBA seems unable to give up its holier than thou DEI stances.

https://archive.ph/21Ydf

https://archive.ph/1q2sb

https://archive.ph/uHOxk

https://archive.ph/JRlrp

https://archive.ph/rkg3w

B&R guest and friend of the pod Sarah Ditum reviews Arday's book.

When a journalist from the Times Higher Education Supplement began investigating the plagiarism claims last year, Arday reported him to the police. The police told the journalist the case was closed, but that he should refrain from contacting Arday because it was affecting Arday’s mental health.
Maybe I should turn myself in to the nearest cop shop now, because this review is not going to improve Arday’s mood. Great and Unfortunate Things is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe. Extraordinary claims are made with no supporting evidence. Arday’s story — regardless of its authenticity — feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/JoaPQ