I was the fastest girl in Connecticut. But transgender athletes made it an unfair fight.

Transgender ideology is harmful to women and gay people.

As I’ve said before, transgender fundamentalists & the orgs & individuals which support them are essentially anti-gay (& misogynist). You wouldn’t know this if you listened to the mainstream media (and dumb celebrities) which lumps them together as LGBT+. You’ve been misinformed https://t.co/SCZW7NndtW

— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) May 22, 2021

I feel bad for the girl in the USA Today story, who was previously at the top of her sport but is now defeated by biologically-male runners.

But time after time, I have lost. I’ve lost four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to male runners. I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two male runners. With every loss, it gets harder and harder to try again.

Alas, there are such things as biological facts. Pretending they don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. Even now, after working out for several years, I’m not especially strong for a male. I’m maybe in the top 75-80% now. But if I were to decide I was a woman, I’d be in the top 99.8% of strength for women immediately. And that advantage would not go away even with years of being on estrogen, etc.

It’s completely deleterious to these women and women’s sports in general that biological males are allowed to compete in women’s sports. Anyone who can’t see that is being purely foolish.

The Texas Mask Mystery. When the governor lifted the state’s mandate, liberals predicted disaster. But it never came. Why?

Most liberals who were right were only accidentally correct about predicting pandemic disaster early. It wasn’t based on real systems examination or true cogitation, just shifting with the winds. Because, remember, very early, 90% of liberals were like, “Not shaking hands is racist, masks don’t work and are also racist, and anyway we should be worrying about the flu.”

Now, of course, they predict disaster as a matter of course and are always wrong as the pandemic is being brought under control in the US.

One of the things that made me a contrarian early on was observing that most people were wrong most of the time about most things. I am no longer a contrarian, really (as my thinking has grown more sophisticated than that), but I certainly still have those tendencies.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Went into several stores today without a mask and it was glorious. Made me truly realize how much I hate the masks and how very much my cognition suffered with those things on.

The woman at the counter helping me get some shrimp pad thai said, as I was for once in the mood to be very charming, “It’s so nice to see people’s faces again.” Right on, sister. About 2/3 of the people in the store we dropped by were without masks, though it wasn’t that crowded.

Mask culture needs now to be destroyed as the virus retreats since it has soured into yet another aspect of the abandonment of community and civilization and is emblematic of withdrawing into the loathsome pod.

Consumers are more likely to choose a plant-based meat substitute when the restaurant’s advertising highlights the social benefits of doing so rather than its taste.

I am not surprised, because most plant-based faux-meat “food” tastes like a slimy trash bin. The only reason you’d eat the poison food is to virtue signal. Otherwise, you’d go with something that doesn’t have the mouth feel of licking a moldy pea.

Amazon on my phone has decided that I speak Spanish, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.

I blame Critical Race Theory

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) May 21, 2021

Amazon (retail site) on my work laptop has also decided that I speak Spanish, and will not allow me to change it at all. At best, I can only translate the pages to English, not actually switch the site to English.

Note that I have a US IP address, the laptop is new, I don’t have any proxy software installed, I have cleared all caches and all cookies, used different browsers, and have tried in incognito mode, my region and language is set to the US and US English, and my time zone is Eastern. There is no reason that Amazon’s retail site should conclude, based on no evidence, that I am a Spanish speaker.

Luckily, I can read Spanish pretty well so I just roll with it — but when we attempt to live in a world where we think the algorithm knows best absurd things like this occur.

Good to know that I’m not the only person this has been happening to.

0.03% chance: Getting coronavirus after being vaccinated incredibly rare in L.A. County.

And even then, it’s less severe and has much less of chance of hospitalization and death. Get out there, people. Our days of pretending to be mole rats are done.

If we loosen restrictions too early, there is a real risk of a third wave in the UK. Not enough people are vaccinated against Covid as a new variant spreads, requiring us to remain vigilant for a little longer.

This is always going to be the case. I guarantee these types will be pushing for travel restrictions and lockdowns in two years, three years, four years, etc.

A surprising number of people in the comments (which I shouldn’t read) are supporting their own oppression and diminishment. But at least one person has some sense.

Notice the rapid jump between (a) a description of an increase in cases and (b) the fact that this (apparently inevitably) leads to ‘another period of lockdown’.

Leave aside the fact that there is basically zero chance into turning into Chile on the grounds that most of the most vulnerable are vaccinated and the absence of evidence that ‘variants of concern’ actually evade vaccines – what warrants making this jump?

Lockdowns are a political choice. So why is lockdown increasingly framed as an inevitable consequence of Covid?

Since nearly all of the most vulnerable have been vaccinated in the UK (and the US), and it’s clear that the vaccines work against the variants, are lockdowns and travel restrictions worth the huge psychological they take on all but complete sociopaths?

Covid will never be eliminated. It’s too late for that now. Thus, it’s time to quit the pantomime and stop harming people and get on with life.