Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Glasgow is going to lose another historic building

    To paraphrase The Onion: I can’t believe this is happening in the only city where this regularly happens.

    Glasgow is set to lose another iconic building, the ABC in Sauchiehall Street. The music venue – one of my very favourite places – was badly damaged by the second Art School fire and has effectively been left to rot since despite promises of its rebirth; it is now in danger of collapsing. That means the previous block on demolition is almost certain to be lifted.

    That’s rather convenient for the developer, because the ABC was a major obstacle to plans to build yet more student flats.

    The entire block in which the ABC sits is owned by a single developer, and the developer’s plans for a seven-story block of flats on this prime bit of real estate were rejected in 2017; the developer appealed to the Scottish Government and was turned down again. The flats would be “detrimental to the historic environment”, which included the Art School’s Macintosh building and the ABC.

    That “historic environment” went on fire (for the second time) in June 2018. As the A Thousand Flowers blog reports, the developer promised to rebuild the ABC as “a world class music venue” but submitted no plans other than an application to completely demolish it.

    The all too frequently toothless Historic Environment Scotland chipped in to say that, “It is our view that the applicant has not made an adequate effort to retain and preserve this C-listed building (or any part of it), and has therefore not met the tests for demolition”. Garnethill Community Council have said it would “devastating and totally unacceptable” to lose the building. Omnipresent heritage fan and MP Paul Sweeney pointed out in his objection that the building hosted Glasgow’s first ever public film showing, in 1896.

    Glasgow School of Art have also objected to the demolition, pointing out that there are currently no plans for the site’s redevelopment and that the ABC building, with temporary props, is under no imminent danger of collapse. Conveniently, their letter also reiterates that student flat plans for the neighbouring building have been rejected several times and that the ABC’s facade is an effective and important part of the streetscape. We can, perhaps, read between the lines here.

    One pretty sure-fire way to destroy a damaged building is to leave it open to the elements. That appears to be what’s happened to the ABC.

    ATF:

    If the owners are granted permission to flatten the ABC, how long will it be before the student flat proposals for the neighbouring block emerge out of the ashes?

  • LGB Alliance fundraisers closed after campaign of abuse against gay MP

    PinkNews:

    The anti-trans lobby group LGB Alliance has had not one but two fundraising pages taken down, following an abusive campaign against gay MP John Nicolson and “violent and abusive” language from its supporters.

    Fundraising platforms JustGiving and GoFundMe have both permanently removed pages set up by the pressure group.

    This follows weeks of targeted harassment and abuse from its supporters against gay SNP politician John Nicolson, who attracted the attention of the fringe group when he began publicly voicing support for the trans community.

    …The funds from its supporters – which include neo-Nazis who the LGB Alliance has refused to denounce – have paid for newspaper adverts opposing trans rights and calling trans women “predators”, as well as a much-derided logo redesign, a pop song and a February conference in Scotland to which it invited a confirmed homophobe to speak about how LGBT+ clubs in schools are dangerous to girls.

  • A matter of Pride

    If you’re straight and cisgender, you probably don’t give Pride events much thought: they’re just parties, right? But if you’re LGBT+ you know that they’re much, much more than that. They’re places where, however briefly, you know you’re not alone; places where you aren’t hated or tolerated, but celebrated.

    Pride events are among the many casualties of coronavirus this year. Spiller of Tea explains why that’s sad for LGBT+ people.

    I’ve read a lot recently about how straight people are missing pubs and restaurants and cafes. This is entirely understandable, and I do sympathise, but imagine if your pubs were the only places in which you could safely relax your mannerisms, speak freely about your home life, or hold your partner’s hand. Then imagine that you lived in a city that only had one pub. Maybe go on to imagine that this single establishment only opened two nights a week, from 10 pm until 6 am, when the majority of old bastards like me are tucked up in bed. One place in the entire locality where, if you don’t like sticky floors, banging music and drinking until it’s light, you’re basically excluded anyway. That is the reality for huge numbers of LGBTQ people in the UK, and Pride is one of the few precious moments of relief we are allowed from this frustrating, constrained existence.

    The outside world may have stopped, but homophobia, biphobia and transphobia haven’t. The trolls have more time on their hands, so they’re more vicious than ever. The newspapers continue their assault on trans people (just yesterday The Scotsman ran a column claiming that it was “a biological fact” that trans women are men) and politicians continue to court the bigot demographic. As I was reminded yesterday, people still stare and glare at you in the street.

    You may well be bored and lonely, but you probably don’t have people wishing you dead on social media or calling you a deviant in the press.

    …in these most difficult of times, when LGBTQ people are facing all of the physical, emotional and financial issues cis-het people are facing, they present an added burden to people who, like the rest of you, are already fast-approaching breaking point.

    …This crisis has, distressingly, not even begun to put an end to the attacks our community is so often forced to endure, but what it has achieved is to rob us of one of our most vital coping mechanisms in the face of those attacks. And for that, I will unashamedly mourn its loss.

  • “How discriminatory do you have to be before you’re called out?”

    Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch explains why UK trans people are really scared right now.

    For some time trans people have understood the current media debate in the UK isn’t actually about the Gender Recognition Act. Instead, it is about our basic rights to live and move as full members of our society.

    …Most trans people I know in the UK are now absolutely terrified.

    They understand an arcane procedure for changing legal gender is probably going to be maintained in some form.

    But they realize their ability to function in any meaningful way as members of our society is about to be removed

  • Hormone treatment for Covid-19

    I’ve mentioned before that coronavirus appears to be deadlier to men than to women, and that because of that difference some anti-trans bigots have been deliberately hounding trans people with the virus and wishing them dead.

    The trans women may get the last laugh, because it’s possible that the hormones they take are helping them battle the virus. Here’s the New York Times.

    Men are more likely than women to die of the coronavirus, so scientists are treating them with something women have more of: female sex hormones.

    …Last week, doctors on Long Island in New York started treating Covid-19 patients with estrogen in an effort to increase their immune systems, and next week, physicians in Los Angeles will start treating male patients with another hormone that is predominantly found in women, progesterone, which has anti-inflammatory properties and can potentially prevent harmful overreactions of the immune system.

    Nobody’s suggesting that estrogen and progesterone are the only factors here. Men take more risks, are more likely to smoke, wash their hands less, and so on. And as the article points out, the difference is also evident among women who are decades past menopause. But it’s interesting nevertheless.

  • Using coronavirus for a culture war

    Rachel Shabi in The Guardian:

    the key issue in the right’s current culture war is the lockdown, which is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU. Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism, those challenging the overwhelming consensus of global expertise cast themselves as lockdown “sceptics”. And cleaving to a rightwing populist script, these sceptics say their legitimate concerns are being silenced.

  • What’s wrong with this picture.

    This is the Daily Express, apparently showing crowds of “selfish rule breakers” during lockdown.

    The photo is of Brighton and Hove seafront. Rob Shepherd lives there. See the cranes in the background? As Rob demonstrates, they aren’t there any more and haven’t been for some time.

  • It’s Not The End of the World (But You Can See It From Here)

    My band has released a new song, and a video to go with it.

    It’s Not The End of the World (But You Can See It From Here) is a lockdown song, and while there’s plenty of bile in there it’s also hopeful: after all, it’s not the end of the world.

    The song will go live on the usual streaming and download services over the next few days. It’s also available for free download at bandcamp – havr.bandcamp.com.

  • Never trust a Tory

    The UK government’s new equality minister, Liz Truss, has set out her priorities for the coming months. It isn’t good news for trans people.

    This isn’t a surprise. In 2019 Andrew Gilligan, the journalist who spearheaded The Sunday Times’ scaremongering about trans people, was appointed as a key advisor for No. 10. The conservatives have long discussed demonising trans people as a culture war strategy. It’s entirely on brand for the party of Section 28 to want to roll back trans people’s rights.

    Truss says the UK government will respond to the Gender Recognition Act “by the summer, and there are three very important principles that I will be putting in place.”

    First of all, the protection of single-sex spaces, which is extremely important.

    Secondly making sure that transgender adults are free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining the proper checks and balances in the system.

    Finally, which is not a direct issue concerning the Gender Recognition Act, but is relevant, making sure that the under 18s are protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future.

    The announcement is already being misreported by the right-wing press, so for example the Telegraph claims that “trans children [are] to be banned from surgery”. Surgery isn’t given to under-18s. The announcement clearly means puberty blockers, which it seems the government wants to withhold from teenagers until after puberty.

    “Single-sex spaces” is a dogwhistle. They are not affected by the Gender Recognition Act. The equalities minister of all people should know that.

    The second point suggests that letting trans people live free from persecution is conditional rather than universal.

    That third point is a direct threat to Gillick competence, which says that you do not have to be an adult to get essential healthcare without parental consent: it’s what enables teenage girls to get contraception. By saying that under-18s lack “decision-making capabilities” even though they are old enough to legally become parents, get married or join the army, it paves the ground for an assault on young women’s reproductive rights.

    I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve said previously that I think the government will do something with gender recognition that they can pitch as progressive but that actually removes trans people’s rights: I think it’s highly likely that they will make the existing gender recognition system very slightly more accessible but change the role of the Gender Recognition Certificate so that if you don’t have one, you are not protected from discrimination.

    As the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights put it:

    In her speech she says there must be “checks and balances” before trans people can live freely; an ominous admission that we will not be allowed to live without special restrictions, because of the “danger” of us being trans. This is not equality.

  • Overconfidence and incompetence

    Something we’re seeing a lot of during the coronavirus crisis is the rise of the armchair epidemiologist: the men (it’s mainly men) presenting themselves as authoritative voices about things they have no expertise in.

    Sarah Weinman, for InsideHook.com:

    They are lawyers, former reporters and thriller writers, Silicon Valley technologists, newspaper columnists, economists and doctors who specialize in different parts of medicine. Their utter belief in their own cognitive abilities gives them the false sense that their speculation, and predictive powers, are more informed than the rest of ours.

    They’ve been with us for a long time, of course – the blogging world is full of them – but coronavirus has given some of them a much bigger audience, and that has made some of them dangerous. The UK press and social media is full of grifters speaking with great certainty about things they know nothing about, and those things currently include how to deal with a lethal global pandemic.

    There is a name for this, and it is the Dunning-Kreuger effect. The effect is often explained as “stupid people are too stupid to know they are stupid”, but it’s more nuanced than that. It’s not that people are stupid. Many of the people who clearly have DK are very clever. It’s that they are blinkered: they lack the knowledge to understand what knowledge they are lacking.

    For example, let’s say you’re an economist. If you turn your attention to the likely outcome of the coronavirus, you may come up with different answers than the virologists and epidemiologists do. That doesn’t necessarily mean the virologists and epidemiologists are wrong; it’s much more likely that you’re making ignorant assumptions and rookie mistakes that people in the field don’t make. You don’t know that you’re making them, because this isn’t your area of expertise.

    Where the Dunning-Kreuger effect comes into play is when you decide that if the experts disagree with you, it means it is the experts who are wrong.

    Who better to speak to about the Dunning-Krueger effect than David Dunning, one of the two professors who coined the term? That’s who Sarah Weinman interviewed.

    The problem is that some people can take things they know and misapply it to this new situation. A lot of people think, “Oh, this is a flu,” so they use what is common knowledge of the flu to guide them. But this virus is not the flu. Knowledge is a good thing, but they don’t realize it’s a misapplication.

    I used the example of an economist because that’s a field Dunning specifically mentioned.

    Confidence comes from knowing something, but not realizing you don’t know everything you need to know. If you’ve been rewarded as a successful economist, you deal with formal models in math, and you have confidence in what you do. This can be true of all of us in our area of expertise.

    That confidence may be perfectly justified in economics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have anything valuable to say in other fields.

    Elon Musk is a great example of this. The Tesla boss has an electric car company and launches rockets into space. And when a bunch of kids got stuck in a cave in Thailand, Musk rode to the rescue with a special high-tech submarine to save them.

    The submarine was useless, because it wasn’t able to navigate the caves. When criticised, Musk called an expert diver – the diver who actually helped rescue the trapped kids – a “pedo”.

    Musk has since moved into providing ventilators for coronavirus patients. The machines he supplied are not ventilators. It’s surely just a matter of time before he calls the doctors “pedos” too.

    Here’s one example of why these overconfident men are dangerous: Richard Epstein. Epstein has arguably contributed to the US death toll: his prediction that the coronavirus would only kill 500 Americans was widely shared in US conservative circles and helped inform US government policy on how to respond to the potential loss of life.

    As NY Mag reports:

    A week later, Epstein conceded that he had committed a math error, and the real number would be 5,000 deaths, though “it, too, could prove somewhat optimistic.”

    At the time of writing, the US toll is about to pass 50,000 deaths.

    …Somehow this experience has not shaken Epstein’s confidence in his own ability to outthink the entire field of epidemiology.

    There’s an astonishing interview with Epstein in The New Yorker where he throws a tantrum.

    O.K. I’m going to tell you. I think the fact that I am not a great scholar on this and I’m able to find these flaws or these holes in what you wrote is a sign that maybe you should’ve thought harder before writing it.

    What it shows is that you are a complete intellectual amateur. Period.

    O.K. Can I ask you one more question?

    You just don’t know anything about anything. You’re a journalist. Would you like to compare your résumé to mine?

    Part of the reason grifters have achieved such prominence is because the people in authority often have the Dunning-Krueger effect too.

    The UK government is a stellar example, but you can also see it in things such as authorities urging us not to wear masks because they don’t really prevent you from getting the virus (even though proper ones do, which is why health workers use them, and though they do have a proven effect of reducing the danger of you spreading the virus to others if you don’t realise you have it). When official sources are often wrong, it creates a vacuum that grifters are all too ready to fill with bullshit.

    In the MetaFilter discussion of the article, one commenter posted:

    Science and these various “experts in stuff” both operate in uncertain environments, but treat uncertainty in totally opposite ways.

    …Experts in stuff… use uncertainty as a means to an end, so they generally try to increase it. Since science shows its cards with regards to uncertainty, they can always argue a reasonable level of skepticism of science. Then they can turn around and present some alternative facts and arguments about their own position on the matter. The idea isn’t about the next researcher, or a process to eliminate uncertainty, it’s simply to be convincing. They don’t care if they are right – only if they are perceived as right.

    This is why these “experts” can be so troubling to deal with. They’ll stake a claim against anything, as long as it gets them to their goal. Sometimes it’s just to be respected, but sometimes it can be much darker.