Headline is clickbait. The executive order does not define men as “bigger, stronger, and faster,” and the headline contains zero information about how the executive order actually does define “sex”. This shit really gets under my skin. Misinformation like this makes it more difficult to educate people about what is wrong with the system, why it needs to be changed, and the actions necessary to change it. It greatly reduces a person’s ability to advocate for a cause effectively.
The bigger, stronger, faster part is in the section of the order called the preamble, not part of the definition. The preamble is all the WHEREAS shit you see at the beginning of bills and explains the rationale for the bill, or executive order as is the case here.
A preamble may be inserted between the title and the enacting clause of a bill for multiple reasons: to explain the state of affairs that caused the bill to be introduced; to make clear the purpose of the bill; as a sales pitch to improve the chances of enactment; or to serve some other purpose of the sponsor. A preamble is not a part of the enacted bill.[source - pdf warning]
In this instance, the preamble is grandstanding, and the article even refers to it as such:
Nebraska governor Jim Pillen, a Republican not noted as a women’s rights supporter, yesterday issued an executive order “defining” males and females and the attributes thereof. The anti-transgender political grandstanding offers fusty explanations of the sexes–men are “bigger, stronger and faster” on average–in pursuit of Rowling-esque calls for sexual segregation (and even echoing her ostensibly feminist rationales) and not a lot else.
Here’s the preamble, which doesn’t mean shit:
WHEREAS, males and females possess unique and immutable biological differences that manifest prior to birth and increase as they age and experience puberty;
WHEREAS, biological differences between the sexes mean that males are, on average, bigger, stronger, and faster than females;
WHEREAS, women have achieved inspirational and significant accomplishments in education, athletics, and employment;
WHEREAS, biological differences between the sexes are enduring and may, in some circumstances, warrant the creation of separate social, educational, athletic, or other spaces in order to ensure safety and/or to allow members of each sex to succeed and thrive; and
WHEREAS, inconsistencies in court rulings and policy initiatives with respect to the definitions of “sex,” “male,” “female,” “man,” and “woman” have led to endangerment of single-sex spaces and resources, thereby necessitating clarification of certain terms.
This is the part that contains information about defining someone’s “sex”, and is actually enacted:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, Jim Pillen, Governor of the State of Nebraska, under and pursuant to the authority vested in the Governor by the Constitution and the laws of the State of Nebraska, do hereby order and direct the following:
In the promulgation of administrative rules, enforcement of administrative decisions, and the adjudication of disputes by administrative agencies, boards, and commissions, all state agencies, boards, and commissions when using the following terms shall, to the fullest extent permitted by law, define them as follows: a. a person’s “sex” is defined as his or her biological sex (either male or female) at birth; b. a “female” is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova; a “male” is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female; a. [sic] “woman” and “girl” refer to human females, and the terms “man” and “boy” refer to human males; b. [sic] the word “mother” is defined as a parent of the female sex and “father” is defined as a parent of the male sex;
There are legitimate reasons to distinguish between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons or other detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms, and other areas where biology, safety, and/or privacy are implicated;
Any public school or school district and any state agency, department, or office that collects vital statistics for the purpose of complying with antidiscrimination laws or for the purpose. of gathering accurate public health, crime, economic, or other data shall identify each individual who is part of the collected data set as either male or female at birth.
This Executive Order shall become effective immediately and shall expire upon the effective date of state law governing participation of biological males in female athletics and prescribing environments where single-sex dedicated services and/or facilities should be provided.
IN WITNESS THEREOF, I hereunto set my hand and cause the Seal of the State of Nebraska to be affixed this 30^th^ day of August, 2023.
I honestly think that’s semantics. If the preamble doesn’t matter, then why is it there? Why have it if it doesn’t mean anything? Just because one is called a preamble and one a definition doesn’t mean that people won’t use either as the “real” definition. Maybe you could have argued that several years ago, but you certainly can’t now.
I may be incorrect, but I do not believe this is sematic.
If the preamble doesn’t matter, then why is it there? Why have it if it doesn’t mean anything?
I had a short explanation in my comment: A preamble may be inserted between the title and the enacting clause of a bill for multiple reasons: to explain the state of affairs that caused the bill to be introduced; to make clear the purpose of the bill; as a sales pitch to improve the chances of enactment; or to serve some other purpose of the sponsor.
Just because one is called a preamble and one a definition doesn’t mean that people won’t use either as the “real” definition.
The actions the government are to take to enact this order are described after this portion of the order:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, Jim Pillen, Governor of the State of Nebraska, under and pursuant to the authority vested in the Governor by the Constitution and the laws of the State of Nebraska, do hereby order and direct the following:
IANAL but isn’t there an issue with “if any data is collected it must define someone as a man or a woman” doesn’t allow there to be an “unknown.” Therefore you could potentially skew things like crime or Healthcare statistics by counting all unknowns as one gender or the other.
Secondly, the definition “shall identify each individual… as male or female at birth” also provides a problem as one presumably can now kick back a whole bunch of stuff with the message “yes but this data doesn’t contain their sex at birth, please provide birth certificates for all 128,323 members of this list”
I thought you were gonna talk about Grant Kirkhope’s magnum opus, the DK Rap. You know, because of the “He’s bigger, and faster, and stronger too, he’s the first member of the DK Crew! Huh!”
The dairy and meat lobbies are something else. It’s like smoking in the fifties.
It’s well established that there are serious health concerns when you consume animal produce (not to mention environmental and animal welfare ones), yet the industry keeps pushing back on plant-based alternatives.
I’ve heard of potential health issues from red meat consumption, but all animal products? That’s a first for me. Do you have any sources to share on this?
I don’t get much time to watch videos these days so I’m not going through the Netflix series. Though it looks like it’s based off this paper, and that I can look through.
They studied 22 pairs of twins, intervened by changing their diets so that one gets a vegan diet and the other an omnivore diet, then measured a bunch of stuff via blood and stool samples. I don’t see mention of how they correct for multiple hypotheses, but I’ll just give them the benefit of the doubt here.
They found statistical significance in two places
LDL-C: Participants all start out in a healthy range, and they stay in a healthy range. So while the vegans improved on this measure, it also tells us that omnivores are perfectly healthy as well.
Fasting insulin levels: Same as LDL-C. Start off healthy, ended up healthy. We see the vegans having lower fasting insulin, but we don’t know if that’s a good thing or not when they’re already starting at 12.7 μIU/mL.
So basically, the conclusion from the paper is that vegan and omnivore diets are both perfectly healthy, but you might gain slight benefits from going vegan.
Thanks for looking that up. I’m no dietician or medical expert myself, so I have to go by the more easily digestible media. That does run the risk of being more sensationalised.
One thing I did take away from the Netflix series was that both the omnivore diet and vegan one were designed to be well-balanced. Everything in moderation works well, I suppose.
Technically it can’t be all animal products, since honey is about 98% sugar, and despite the hate campaign currently hitting carbs, sugar is not quite as harmful (in and of itself) as it’s made out to be.
But if we’re referring to all animal products in the sense of meat, dairy, and eggs - those three foods have nutritional properties that are all very similar and they do have some overlap in terms of health issues.
The biggest thing they have in common is being a package deal with high amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol. Heart disease is generally the industrialized world’s number one killer, and all three animal foods initiate the onset and progress the state of heart disease.
Then there are issues that are less settled, like to what degree do these foods cause various cancers?
And then this one is even more in need of further study, but there might be a link between these foods and autoimmune disorders.
I’m aware that there’s evidence of saturated fats having undesirable effects on your health. But plenty of meats are low in saturated fats (e.g. skinless chicken breast, or fish).
Relatively low if you compare it only to other meats or animal products. So while you can choose animal products that might progress these chronic metabolic diseases slower, you are still advancing them. But there are lots of factors that complicate things. For example the health impacts of animal products also depend on how you cook them, and what you eat them with. Cured meats are unanimously considered one of the worst things you can consume, right up there with smoking. Steamed fish would probably be about the least harmful (except that fish have some of the highest levels of bioaccumulated toxins and heavy metals). Actually, bugs are likely the least harmful, for those who are comfortable with that. Eating a source of fiber mitigates some of the harm from animal products as shown in this video:
Further complicating things is that single nutrients often behave differently depending on context. For example antioxidants other than some of the essential vitamins have never been shown to produce their purported effects outside of laboratory conditions, and some supplemented sources of antioxidants have even been shown to be a little harmful. But when we test the whole foods that contain those antioxidants, we get data like how increasing leafy green consumption has been correlated with a longer life expectancy.
And it’s similar for saturated fats and animal products. In the most established science on the matter you’ll see they don’t just talk about saturated fat alone - the science appears to show a relationship between the ratio of saturated and unsaturated fats consumed, particularly polyunsaturated fats. This book describes that science quite well-
But going back to that nutrients vs whole foods, there might be more than just the fats at play. This piece by Colin Campbell is a bit of a manifesto against nutritional reductionism, and suggests that the animal proteins themselves might play more of a role than we had thought:
When you put whole diets to the test, what starts to become most consistent is how the most whole-plant-dominant diets by far achieve the most remarkable results. It’s apparent in the Adventist Health Studies, the Esselstyn Heart Disease Reversal diet, as well as Dean Ornishes full lifestyle intervention program. The latter two claim they can reverse heart disease, which is a controversial claim. More study is needed to prove whether that’s true or false, but regardless it’s still apparent that these fully plant-based dietary interventions do more than any others to restore people to good health.
And it’s a thing where science and personal experience match. If you check out the online whole-food plant-based support communities, you see people routinely report almost miraculous changes to their health and wellbeing in a matter of weeks or even days. It’s the kind of thing that once you experience it fully enough, you don’t want to go back.
As someone who has had something large and expensive break with frequent enough regularity lately that it’s been keeping me from building up almost any savings for almost a year, I feel this. I feel very behind.
There’s no legal reason to define the genders, no ongoing court drama in Nebraska that hinges on this definition, nothing legally will ever be decided because of it. It’s just one idiot shouting out to a bunch of other idiots that he doesn’t like it when people who were born with one set of genitals want to have a different set of genitals.
What this will accomplish is added brain drain, an issue Nebraska sorely needs a remedy to, it will cost millions in court cases that will now be filed against the state and the governor, and it will cost women’s centers in Nebraska Federal money. All while doing absolutely nothing worthwhile for the state of Nebraska.
It’s Jim Pillen saying he wants a fight with a minority group. And it’s an idiotic call to arms at that.
N.B. : This excellent comment was unfortunately part of a thread which was deleted by the mod. I read the other comments in this post and, compared to the above, they’re mostly not worth one cent.
Confetti // Charlotte Cardin
Always been loud in a quiet way
I always feel alone in a crowded place
I always wanna stay, wanna go, wanna stay, lwanna go
I don’t know
I don’t know
I get sad on my birthday
I wanna talk back in the worst way
I always wanna stay, wanna go, wanna stay, wanna go
I don’t know what to say
I wanna throw it all away
I feel like a zombie, I’ll die at the party
Yeah, you’ll find my body fully covered in confetti
I tried calling somebody to tell them come get me
But you’ll find my body fully covered in confetti
Singing la da da da da
La da da da da
La da da da da
La da da da da
Find me in the club looking golden
I know everyone, I got no friends
I always wanna stay, wanna go, wanna stay, wanna go
I don’t know
I don’t know
And I never know what to say
'Til I’m already walking away
Wanna punch you in the face
But I won’t, but I might, but I won’t
And I don’t wanna play
I wanna throw it all away
I feel like a zombie, I’ll die at the party
Yeah, you’ll find my body fully covered in confetti
I tried calling somebody to tell them come get me
But you’ll find my body fully covered in confetti
Singing la da da da da
La da da da da
La da da da da
La da da da da
Look at the people, they’re crazy
Look at the people, they’re crazy
Look at the people, they’re crazy
Look at their pupils dilating
Look at the people, they’re crazy (crazy)
I feel like a zombie, I’ll die at the party
Yeah, you’ll find my body fully covered in confetti
I tried calling somebody to tell them come get me
But you’ll find my body fully covered in confetti
Singing la da da da da
Meanwhile, legislation like this also forces the Buck Angels of the world to use women’s restrooms. It’s all so fucking stupid. Kids are statistically in more danger from a priest or youth pastor.
Ironically, corpos like this who want good reputations is one of our few line of defense against these sites going full blown masks off with bigotry. If advertisers didn’t care, we’d be in a significantly worse place.
I work at a retirement place doing tech. Have had 3 hp printers shit the bed exclusively because of software in the 6 months I’ve been there. Hp smart is so bad.
Such a shitty company. As most of these people are former professionals they get an hp because they used it at work then get talked into the subscription ink because they aren’t 21st century tech savvy.
One printer stopped printing because they did not have the subscription ink. They placed a normal ink cartridge in with a subscription one and the software would not allow printing because it recognized non subscription ink. Disgusting.
So many companies want to enter this subscription hellscape.
After being in IT and software development for over 25 years, the only printer brand I bother with any more is Brother. It’s unbelievable how much better they are than everyone else. No nonsense drivers and they’re not constantly trying to force you to buy expensive ink.
People complain about them supposedly having DRM now or whatever but, to be frank, the fact that I can just click “print” and it actually prints makes it miles ahead by default. My printer actually functions now so I can’t say I have any regrets.
From a repair standpoint, Brother are definitely the best option (that I know of). I do authorised repair work for them, and their support guides, technical support team and range of spare parts is absolutely amazing. The biggest problem I see is aftermarket toner wrinkling up the fuser of laser models, but that’s not like it’s something Brother’s introduced to be anti-competitive slime bags.
I’ve got a second-hand HL-5370DW (from 2009~) that’s been through the wringer of a medical practice - I still use it to print without any issue, despite the Web UI insisting that all the non-toner consumables need to be replaced immediately.
Great to hear. Preferably from a more neutral source next time. Hard to take it at their word when it’s so editorialized and filled w/ name-calling. And I say this as someone who probably would end up on a watch list if I gave my personal opinion of Elon
I agree , the source is doubtfull. And about Musk… we should cut his head without ceremony and ditch it in a sewer… I think there is a lot of us on that watchlist
Impossible nowadays to get unbiased news. For instance, despite Reuters excellence in journalism awards, people still love sharing their Daily Mail and Mother Jones.
I verified Montana with another website. If you want to know the full list of per capita. Just google it. But all that hate isn’t trapped in the south. Though, I admit that there is more than enough to go around down here.
Right. What I was saying is. Calling the civil war the “war of northern aggression” may make some of the racists that currently live in the northern states upset.
I meant northern as a literal geographic area. Like how Oregon is in the north. As opposed to some arbitrary line like the 31st parallel, or the mason Dixon line.
No, much like I said in my comment. Now, just like then. The racists are everywhere. They are in the north and the south. Trump welcomes racists from all over the US irregardless of geographical location.
I mean, this is still all true, but damn. Why is boingboing reporting on a nearly 20-year-old site in response to news about the diamond industry? One could argue the existence of that site and people’s knowledge of all that being true is part of why diamond sales were in the crapper anyway…
boingboing has really gone downhill since most of the original team left and it became an ad-infested mess.
Apparently, from what I’m reading, this will also potentially cause women’s shelters to lose federal funding. They aren’t legally allowed to discriminate against trans-women, which means they’ll be disqualified for getting funding.
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