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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   34444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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(Am I the only person who finds it maddening that in the year 2025 newspapers still don't bother to link to the easily-findable publications that they base their reporting on?)

On a more meta-level, this feels like legislation from the bench. From my understanding, the 2004 GRA updated the legal definition of "man" and "woman". The Equality Act was passed in 2010. Presumably, parliament was aware of changed definition when they passed the Equality Act. If they meant "biological woman", not "legal woman", they should have specified that.

I think that's a fair criticism, but I think there are at least three strong points arguing against your interpretation, which are also mentioned in the judgment:

  1. The Equality Act 2010 was meant to replace the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Sex Discrimination Regulations 1999, which predate the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and obviously intended to use the biological definition. There is no evidence to suggest the lawmakers intended to change the definition of man and women.

  2. The Gender Recognition Act creates a distinction between legal sex and biological sex; it does not abolish biological sex (how could it?). Interpreting the EA as referencing biological sex is not inconsistent with the GRA, especially since this is the most common interpretation. You could argue that if the EA wanted sex to be interpreted as legal sex, it should have defined this explicitly, and since it doesn't, it could be reasonably assumed to default to biological sex.

  3. The EA only refers to “pregnant women” and never “pregnant men”. This implies the word "woman" refers to biological sex, because it would be unthinkable for a law to exclude biologically female legal men (trans men) from protection of discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.

I admit I'm biased because I oppose genderism in most of its forms, but I think the judgment is defensible.

Am I the only person who finds it maddening that in the year 2025 newspapers still don't bother to link to the easily-findable publications that they base their reporting on?

I straight up think it should be intensely shameful bordering on illegal for journalists to publish news articles about scientific studies or judgements without a link to the original.

We have hypertext, I don't have to be locked into reading only your loose poor quality recollection of events goddammit.

More infuriating is that sometimes the only thing that survives is the shitty article.

I suspect that half the time the journalist a) hasn't read the study, and b) is only rewording a press release from either the university or activist group associated with the study. You can tell by the way all articles on a study will use identical framing and share particular phrases that aren't quotes from the study itself. Frequently they all make the same odd mistake, like a typo, mislabeled figure, or metric conversion.

The big universities have entire offices dedicated to research publicity, and of course it's the entire goal of most non-profit "institutes."
From reading a lot about insulation and heat pumps I've developed a spider sense for "this entire news article was written by a Rocky Mountain Institute publicist"

Yep this is it exactly on the journos behalf. Except change half to 90% - and that's being charitable. The publishers could change this but don't however, because they don't want people leaving their site for any reason ever. What if they don't come back!? They are often right to be afraid - after all why continue reading some moron's interpretation of a study when you can just read the study itself? Or why listen to a journo's memory of a politician's policies when you can check out their website and discover them for yourself?

And scientists don't really mind (as much as they complain about science journalism among themselves), because nothing gets citation numbers up like journo spam.

How would it being difficult to find their paper lead to more citations?

What?

And scientists don't really mind (as much as they complain about science journalism among themselves), because nothing gets citation numbers up like journo spam.

How would it being difficult to find their paper lead to more citations?

What?

Journalists excluding information that makes it easy to find your paper does little to help you get citations.

No, because anyone in a field close enough to cite you will easily find and have access to your paper through their university. But they're a lot more likely to a) hear about it and b) want to associate their own work with it if they hear about the paper on NPR rather than skimming through issue #1708 of the Journal of Queering Anthropology (which nobody ever actually does)

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