Pun Salad

Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked Judge Brown if she could offer a definition of the word “woman.” Brown demurred, saying she couldn’t because, “I’m not a biologist.”

Coverage of this has been scant in the mainstream media. When I searched Google News for “Ketanji Brown Jackson” and “biologist” I got one Daily Mail piece, some transcripts, and one or two “analysis” pieces that mention it in passing, as a data point in a larger “Republicans pounce” vein. The New York Times did have one 470-word blog post along these lines.

Jonathan Weissman begins: 

Republicans have spent hours this week trying to portray Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as an extremist on issues of race and an apologist for child sexual abusers. Late Tuesday, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, added another social issue to the list of cultural grievances the G.O.P. is foisting upon her in her confirmation hearings: gender — specifically, what makes a woman a woman.

Okay, so partisan Republican strategy is newsworthy. You know what else is newsworthy? That a woman who was nominated to be on the Supreme Court explicitly because she is a woman cannot offer a ballpark definition of what a “woman” is on the grounds that she’s not a “biologist.”

I’m no fancy pants lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that the concept—and biological reality—of what defines a female intersects with all sorts of legal questions. Someone can fact check me, but I do think it has some bearing on this thing called “abortion.” Title IX might also make a passing reference to this apparently ill-defined condition that applies to a majority of Americans.

The progressive answer that we’re just trapped by convention, mired in outmoded definitions of gender. As society catches up with the emerging consensus, people will shed their faulty intuitions and recognize that trans women obviously belong in the women’s division. This is essentially the logic of comparing Thomas to Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier.

Yet there is something wrong with that analogy. We aren’t going to be educated out of our feeling that there are major differences between biological men and women. The male/female performance gap appears at puberty in most sports, and quickly becomes so large that most cisgender women would never be able to compete at more elite levels if we weren’t segregated into our own leagues. Women’s sports exist to benefit us, not to keep us from hogging men’s glory.

Both arguments have obvious merit. Yet ponder them long enough and you eventually realize that only one of them supports the case its proponents are trying to make. Because taken to its logical conclusion, “biology is unfair, but that doesn’t give you the right to exclude better athletes from competition” isn’t a great argument for including Thomas in the women’s division. It sounds more like an argument for abolishing women’s sports in favor of one, open league.

Is the common act of tipping your waiter at a restaurant really a successor to slavery’s harmful legacy? Does tipping your bartender or Uber driver mean you are perpetuating the structural racism of the 19^th century? These are the implications of the latest claim by Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’s 1619 Project.

In a characteristic tweet-thread, Hannah-Jones declares that “[t]ipping is a legacy of slavery and if it’s not optional then it shouldn’t be a tip but simply included in the bill. Have you ever stopped to think why we tip, like why tipping is a practice in the US and almost nowhere else?”

It’s not the first time that the 1619 Project has made bizarre claims that try to connect mundane aspects of everyday life to slavery. When investigating Hannah-Jones’s theory of tipping however, I soon discovered that claims linking the practice to slavery have recently become a trendy talking point of the economic far-left.

Cases of COVID-19 are again rising in much of Europe due to the spread of the BA.2 version of the omicron variant that appears to be 30 percent more infectious than its already highly contagious progenitor. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is, as usual, way behind the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, the agency has decided to take its sweet time again and only begin to consider next month the emergency use authorizations for further booster doses of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines. By that time, a new wave of infections caused by the spread of the BA.2 version of the omicron variant will likely be cresting in the United States.

Let's take brief look at the history of FDA dawdling. Based on preliminary positive results, Israel approved COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for its older citizens in July 2020. Taking those data into account, the Biden administration urged the approval of COVID-19 booster shots in mid-August. This plan apparently sparked "anger" among FDA bureaucrats who, according to Politico, feared that "political pressures will once again override the agency's expertise." Even as the delta variant wave of infections began rising in August, the agency's experts finally got around to approving boosters for older Americans in late September. It took until late November for the FDA's experts to authorize boosters for all adult Americans just as the omicron variant tsunami was taking off.