@dnkboston Islamophobia is "respectable" (snort) cover for racism against darker-skinned people. Racism and transphobia tend to go hand-in-glove (with a side-order of misogyny because racism then tends to veer into natalism and attempts to roll back the demographic transition by chaining women to the kitchen sink).

@cstross I assumed that someone who was Islamophobic was in general an asshole, but I hadn't realized those people would devote so much time to transphobia.

Generic misogyny, yes; I seem to remember reading one of these people refer to a strawwoman as "Muslima", and I wanted to throw up.

@George_Kimberly @cstross

None of these people were acting like they thought they were doing anything wrong.

Which we should remember when any of them claims they didn't know. None of it was being hidden from them, certainly not by Epstein himself. The time for them to distance themselves from the paedophile rape club was before they got caught, and that time is now up.

@dnkboston If someone is a bigot on one social issue, the way to bet is that they're a bigot on *all* of them (just, more quiet about it).

@cstross @StephanieMoore The man has quite a reputation in linguist circles.

Another circle I am curious to see discussed in the context of billionaire-adjacent agenda setting and their entanglement beyond Pinker and Gates is the whole "New Optimism" lot and OWID. Just how deep into liberal or purportedly progressive territory does the network spread?

@cstross I have been following the #Epstein case since 2019. Julie K. Brown, Miami Herald, wrote about how Alex Acosta's 2008 plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein hid 10 others.
https://crooksandliars.com/2019/07/its-not-about-cover-its-about-child-rape

Today I read
"Buried in a footnote of Ghislaine Maxwell’s court filing, she makes the bombshell claim that there twenty-five accomplices of Jeffrey Epstein entered into secret settlements and that there are four unnamed employee co-conspirators of Epstein."
FINE THESE PEOPLE!
https://open.substack.com/pub/michaelpopok/p/ghislaine-maxwells-bombshell-filing

@webhat @cstross They virtually _ALL_ had something to hide .. and they hid it ..... perpetrator or not .. they _KNEW_ about it.

And everybody stood quiet .. saying _nothing_.

@cstross @George_Kimberly Himself i suppose....

I don't think he actually was a russian or chinese puppet....

But, he surely offered his "services" to _all_ of them.....

@cstross Agree! But there's a difference between an off-handed, "yeah, fuck 'em" and devoting hours of your life to it. I guess these people just have a lot of time on their hands.

@cstross we need to rip these people new assholes

@cstross I was going to post about this the other day

it'll be harder for that dingbat David Pakman to have Richard Dawkins on his show and launder his reputation now

he was like "turns out he doesn't HATE trans people"

as if any transphobe is gonna take that position, especially on liberal media

the problem is he's a biological essentialist, like a lot of fascists

wants to deem certain genetics as natural and others as mutations we must never acknowledge the legitimacy of

he doesn't believe trans & nonbinary people exist, we are mentally ill cisgenders, and thinks intersex people are freaks

ergo we can't have rights like bodily autonomy or gender affirming healthcare

ergo 'keeping the numbers down' is a healthy practice

Dawkins will say he believed Epstein innocent

probably can't imagine Trump raping a teen either

but that doesn't mean it didn't happen, it just speaks to the limited imagination of these "thinkers"

@cstross

Not THE Richard Dawkins, right? The evolutionist? Please say no.

@cstross Richard Dawkins. There's a surprise.

@cstross
The Epstein Class

@Olson The brain eater got him a couple of decades ago.

@cstross

Fuck.

@cstross How are you, my friend? You have many followers. Could you please share my latest post? Sharing is my source of income in Gaza.

@cstross Fucking Dawkins and Pinker. Before Epstein happened/was revealed I realized that who I had thought were modern intellectuals were, in fact, massive and amoral shit-bags. It made the Epstein thing burn less (ouch) but finding out that people you'd once admired were even bigger shit-bags than the shit-bags you found out they were doesn't lessen the original self-questioning: it my judgement *that* flawed?!

@cstross Richard Dwakin ist ein Evolutionsbiologe und Atheist. Er wurde in den US Südstaaten von religiösen Fanatikern die die Darwin ablehnen gehasst . Hetze gegen Opfer religiösen Wahn ist nicht angebracht.

@sstrader No, we were ALL taken in.