trans rights — Page 3

→ March 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/11/23.

Nothing new at the Athletic this week, although I should have 2-3 coming up this week as my travels continue. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the game Gartenbau, which combines very simple rules with tight decisions that make it a real challenge to play it well.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had my annual Oscars preview episode with Chris Crawford. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I was going to send another issue of my free email newsletter this week but got tied up with some other writing (board game stuff, actually), so it’s still on my to-do list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of the takedown of a former Iraqi translator who became a major fentanyl dealer in the U.S. and is now serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is trying to strip the press of its First Amendment rights.

The rash of anti-trans bills across the south and Midwest are the work of a network of religious-right groups that operated in secret while pushing their bigoted agenda, according to emails between those groups and South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) obtained by Mother Jones.

ProPublica has more information on billionaire Leonard Leo’s new plan to try to “crush liberal dominance” in American politics and culture. He’s considered the main architect of the strategy that gave conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority and control of much of the federal judiciary.

My wife and I watched the Oscar-nominated animated short My Year of Dicks, which is very funny and sweet, which led us down the rabbit hole of its writer Pamela Ribon, including this hilarious 2011 post from her now-defunct blog about how she might have become a new urban legend.

Walgreens won’t sell abortion pills in states that merely threatened legal action, even though the medication is still legal in those locations.

Failed actor turned conservative talking head Michael Knowles, called for transgender people to be “eradicated” in a speech at the far-right convention CPAC this week.

All of the rhetoric you’re seeing against trans people right now was previously used against gays/lesbians by the same sort of Christianist activists.

A girls basketball team in Hoover, Alabama, the host city for the SEC baseball tournament, was forced to play in a boys’ rec league if they wanted to continue to use city facilities. When they subsequently won the league’s tournament, they were denied the trophy, which was then given to the boys’ team that finished second, because they are a ‘competitive’ team playing in a recreational league.

An anti-vaxxer nurse in Spain is in court, accused of faking vaccinations of children.

After a woman went on a racist tirade in a pizzeria near Philly, TikTok vigilantes tried to identify her, and instead targeted three innocent women instead, leading to widespread harassment.

From January 2022: Ashli Babbitt, who some right-wingers want you to believe was a martyr, had a history of violent behavior prior to her participation in the January 6^th insurrection.

Witnesses at Guantanamo Bay recalled Ron DeSantis laughing while prisoners there were tortured.

Utah legislators have voted to change the law that made it nearly impossible for victims of sexual assault by doctors to sue their attackers.

The Tennessee House passed a bill gutting marriage equality, possibly allowing elected officials to decline to issue a license to a couple for any reason. The state’s Republicans also passed a law banning drag shows, which is nothing more than performative bigotry

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alabama, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ March 4, 2023
→ By keith

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25^th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, arkansas, board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, science, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, ukraine, washington

→ February 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.

The Hollywood Reporter has more details on the implosion of Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s animation empire in the wake of his arrest on domestic abuse charges and multiple former co-workers detailing harassment by Roiland.

Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).

The right-wing propaganda site Revolver states that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R )’s takeover of that state’s schools, including the previously progressive New College of Florida, is the blueprint Republicans need to use to take down public education across the country. (The article also says that African American studies is “a joke of a subject,” if you doubt my characterization of Revolver’s leanings.)

Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer because engagement on the billionaire’s tweets is low. Totally stable genius there.
Twitter glitched for me twice this week – once when we all got the “exceeded the daily limit” warning, and once when the app showed me misplaced white boxes where certain tweets should have appeared in my timeline. Former employees say this is due to a series of code freezes and Musk’s frequent, mercurial demands for changes.

The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.

Native American groups are protesting the Kansas City NFL team’s nickname, mascot, and their use of the embarrassing “tomahawk chop.” Atlanta baseball fans, pay attention.

A Montana bill would prevent schools from punishing students who intentionally misgender or deadname classmates. Just say bullying is allowed and be done with it.

Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.

Voice actors are being asked to sign away rights to their own voices so studios can create AI versions and save a few bucks.

Tony Dungy and James Brown (the NFL announcer) have withdrawn from their speaking slots at an event hosted by an anti-gay Pharisee preacher.

Republicans are not serious about governing, except when it comes to using the government as a weapon against their enemies, which is, you know, what fascist regimes do.

Also in Florida, the state is going to pass legislation to end Disney’s extra-governmental Reedy Creek Improvement District as retaliation for the company’s opposition to the state’s anti-LGBT “don’t say gay” law. See the previous bullet point.

Attempts to erase Black history from curricula, as Florida is doing, end up doing nothing except leaving students less literate in American history, rather than getting them to “love” the U.S. more, writes education Prof. Adam Laats in the Washington Post.

By the way, sometimes pressure works, even on zealots: Florida’s interscholastic sports committee has dropped plans to make questions about athletes’ menstrual cycles mandatory. It was a blatant attempt to out trans kids, of course, although they claimed otherwise.

Missouri’s Republican-led legislature rejected a measure to ban children from carrying guns in public.

Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.

A professor at the University of Wyoming tweeted about a former student of hers who was trans and killed themselves. Legislatures passing laws attacking trans people, especially trans kids, are destroying lives just to score political points.

We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.

Over 200 people have been quarantined and at least 8 have died in Equatorial Guinea from an as-yet unidentified hemorrhagic fever (a category that includes dengue and the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses).

Board game news: Allplay (formerly known as Board Game Tables) has a Kickstarter up for four new small box games, with pledges starting at $19 for any one of the titles.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter, already over 400% funded, for the new expansion to the game Set a Watch.

This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, disney, florida, football, french literature, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, montana, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ February 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/4/23.

My top 100 prospects ranking ran on Monday for subscribers to The Athletic, followed by the players who just missed the list, and then my ranking of all 30 farm systems. I held a Q&A on Monday, which the site excerpted for a separate article. I also held an old-fashioned Klawchat here on Friday. The team-by-team top 20s will start to run on Monday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke with Steve Ives, writer and director of the upcoming documentary Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, which will run on PBS’s American Experience and stream online on February 20^th. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been keeping up better with my free email newsletter recently, and I’ll get back to it again this upcoming week once I get through the last nine team reports.

And now, the links…

The Atavist has the story of a family caught up in the world of YouTube influencers, including one star’s mother accused of inappropriate behavior against a number of her daughter’s co-stars.

Mother Jones looks at the troll site Kiwi Farms, and how driving it offline hasn’t worked to stop its users’ campaigns of doxing and harassment.

The new emerging microbe threat around the world? Infectious fungi taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting people with damaged immune systems.

Cory Doctorow examines what he calls the “enshittification” of TikTok and other sites that built up massive user bases on one premise and then switched to another model to make some money – a digital bait and switch of sorts.

The New Yorker looks at NY Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, whose columns seem designed to push buttons and have often engaged in TERF-like arguments.

Chuck D spoke to Rolling Stone about the new documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, available now via PBS.

Even a mild case of COVID-19 leads to a massive increase in heart disease risk.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced a plan to block all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at state colleges.

Dan Rather wrote about DeSantis’ platform of white grievance.

Florida teachers are removing all books from their classroom for fear of prosecution by the white police state. Here’s more on the policy behind this.

Meanwhile, the craven College Board, whose entire business model is built around making it more expensive for students to go to college, bowed to pressure from DeSantis and eviscerated its A.P. African American Studies curriculum.

Republicans continue to push anti-abortion laws, proposing 105 bills and counting just this year alone, even subverting democratic norms to do so. They’re also forum-shopping to try to ban the abortion pill.

Abortion bans often include exceptions for rape or incest. They’re mostly meaningless, there to make people feel better about discriminatory laws against providing medical care.

Utah passed a law banning transition health care for trans kids.

Arizona’s legislature passed a law allowing lawmakers to delete all emails after 90 days, which isn’t suspicious at all.

Some businesses are warning Missouri lawmakers their culture war is going to harm the state’s economy.

An off-duty cop in Providence, RI, shot an unarmed kid, and a jury acquitted him of all charges.

Georgia cops killed a protestor fighting the construction of a massive training facility in the woods around Atlanta. They’re claiming he shot first. I do not take the word of police as truth.

Texas election deniers raised funds to build a mobile hospital in Ukraine. They failed, and it’s not clear where the donated money went.

Harvard Prof. John Comaroff has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, leading to a mass walkout of his first class back from suspension last week.

Tom Verlaine, founder of the essential American art-punk band Television, died last week at age 73.

Many consumers say that tipping is getting out of control. This isn’t a yes/no question, really; I think you can say tipping for some services is obligatory, and for others is unnecessary.

Noted free speech absolutist Elon Musk took down a video critical of India’s hypernationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the government’s request.

The FBI infiltrated a major ransomware group called Hive, gaining the group’s decryption keys to allow victims to recover their locked files.

Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson asks, “Can we please just let the M&M’s fuck?”

The Guardian looks at Daybreak, the upcoming cooperative board game about climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island).

The role-playing game based on the Hugo-winning novel The Fifth Season is now on Backerkit.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, coronavirus, georgia, harvard, links, longreads, missouri, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, utah

→ December 17, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/17/22.

Five new posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic:

I’ll try to do a Klawchat this upcoming week as my schedule permits; I’m trying to fill my days with calls for the prospect rankings package that will run in late January or early February.

My top ten games of 2022 article is already in my editor’s hands at Paste, so that should be up any day now. I’ll update here when it runs.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Boston Globe writer Alex Speier, talking about the Red Sox’ confusing offseason so far and apparent desire to act like a small- or medium-payroll team. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve got a new email newsletter about half-written, so I’m really hoping I can finish that off tonight or tomorrow. You can sign up here, for free. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

Finally, I caved and set up an account on Mastodon, @keithlaw@mastodon.au. Perhaps that’ll prove a better place for actual discussions with readers as the bird site becomes overrun by trolls – even my post saying I was on Mastodon attracted three randos who seemed only there to mock anyone who said they were leaving Twitter (which I’m not).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times ran a “Lives They Lived” piece on twelve children murdered with guns in 2022, as gun violence has surpassed auto accidents as the leading cause of death for children in the United States. I think I was most affected by the one on a 17-year-old boy whose brother was also shot and killed several years previously. No way to prevent this, says only nation where this happens regularly.
ProPublica opens the window on CIA-led night raids on Afghan civilians, for which the U.S. has never taken responsibility. Mission Accomplished, though, right?
Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, writes about conservatives’ invention of the “right to post,” although it doesn’t seem to apply to everyone, just them, as Twitter suspended a bunch of journalists who report on Elon Musk’s doings. NBC promptly beshit themselves by failing to back up Ben Collins, even taking him off the air for a few days for ~~defending evolution~~ failing to insufficiently worship Musk.
Also in the Atlantic, the solution to our growing problem of homelessness is to create more housing. That’s it.
Leading Republican figures had no problem gathering with ardent white nationalists talking about “total war” at the New York Young Republican Club’s recent gala.
This Twitter thread on the extreme right-wing concept euphemistically called “Common Good Constitutionalism,” which believes hardcore Christianity should be the guiding principle for our country, should terrify the rational among us regardless of our political leanings.
A professor at Chico State had an affair with a student and threatened to kill two co-workers, but the university only suspended him for a third of a semester while leaving any mention of the incident out of his personnel file. He’s since been suspended again through the end of this academic year after a new outcry over the school’s mishandling of the matter in 2020.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment for seven years for alleged securities law violations, sought information on Texas residents who changed the genders on their driver’s licenses amidst the state’s push to punish trans people for existing. If he can do this, I’m not sure what prevents any state official from demanding a list of residents who are Black, Jewish, etc.
Also in Texas, Carroll ISD no longer protects students against discrimination based on their gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Texas’s lurch towards theocracy continues virtually unimpeded.
Florida passed a law in June that was supposed to address the state’s shortage of about 5000 teachers by putting military veterans, even those with zero educational experience, in the classroom. The state has hired seven.
One member of Twitter’s now-disused Trust & Safety Council explained to Slate why she quit the board after Elon Musk bought the company.
Harassment and threats of violence, encouraged by Musk himself, forced former Twitter head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth to flee his home last weekend.
The Kickstarter for a new printing of the 2017 game Sol: Last Days of a Star is already funded at over $140K pledged with two weeks to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, board game news, california, florida, guns, links, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ November 25, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/25/22.

Just a quick note from me this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the Angels’ trade for Hunter Renfroe in exchange for three fringy reliever types, with notes from Sam Blum as well. I did do my annual livestream where I take your questions while I spatchcock a turkey, although the video quality appears to be terrible. I blame Twitter.

For Paste, I reviewed Splendor Duel and Botanik, two new small-box two-player games from the publisher Space Cowboys. Splendor Duel is a strictly two-player spinoff of the wonderful game Splendor, adding direct player interaction and special powers on the cards that make it more than two-player solitaire, which can be true of the original.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter last week. I’m on a bunch of wannabe Twitter replacement sites, including Post.news, Hive (keithlaw), and Counter Social, plus the usual Facebook and Instagram links. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica leads the way again, with a story on how a woman’s 911 call when her baby died was used to convict her of killing him, thanks to the police’s use of an evidence-free technique called “911 call analysis.”

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has issued a lengthy rebuttal to a recent New York Times article that claimed harm from puberty blockers that isn’t supported by available research. The report also questions whether the authors of the Times article misquoted some sources.

A sheriff in a rural county in northern Minnesota has been accused of misusing corporate funds given to his office, arresting protesters against a water pipeline on tar sands in the county, and now retaliating against lawyers seeking to subpoena him

The head of the Autism Science Foundation writes about the need to recognize profound autism as a distinct diagnosis from or within that of autism spectrum disorder, arguing that the people advocating for autistic rights represent just one type of autism diagnosis.
The most likely GOP nominee for President in 2024 hosted white nationalist antisemite Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago this week.

Anti-vax accounts are pretending to be legitimate by buying the blue check mark, allowing them to spread misinformation more widely, as Twitter appears to have given up on moderating content on its site.

They’re also pushing a bullshit documentary called Died Suddenly that claims many people died suddenly after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine – some of who are, in fact, not dead – and are harassing those people’s loved ones online, claiming they’re part of some sort of cover-up.

This spike in militant anti-vaccine activity is leading to rises in measles cases, as measles is extremely contagious but depends on a pool of unvaccinated hosts, since the MMR vaccine is one of the most effective we have.

Meanwhile, some former Twitter employees expressed their dismay at Twitter’s decision to reinstate twice-impeached former President Trump’s account. Of course, there are a lot of former Twitter employees these days.

The New Republic examines Elon Musk’s implied anti-trans agenda, given his moves so far.

The Washington Post interviewed dril about the state of Twitter. I admit it wasn’t quite as funny as I’d hoped it would be.

The Atlantic wins for the best headline of the week, with Trump’s Terrifically Stupid Return to Twitter.

Georgetown history professor Thomas Zimmer posted an interesting if disturbing thread on Musk’s lurch to the right and his embrace of an anti-democratic worldview, arguing as well that Twitter’s demise will be bad for democracy across the globe.

A Christian (Baptist) preacher in Washington state said the massacre of five LGBTQ+ people at a club in Colorado Springs was “a good thing.”

And it’s a vicious cycle, as the flood of anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech coming from the right leads to more violence, which spurs on more hate speech, and so on.

The same far-right is now attacking the hero who stopped the Club Q shooter, calling him a “groomer” and a slur for gay men, led by the same troll who started the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy.

Republicans are now trying to pass laws restricting investment firms from pursuing climate change-friendly policies, like divesting in fossil fuel producers, calling them “anti-boycott” laws.

Government officials and candidates have visited Trump’s properties over 500 times, even continuing to do so in the wake of the January 6^th insurrection.

The Post’s Philip Bump argues that the Supreme Court has lost any justification for its claims of being above the partisan fray, with the news that Samuel Alito leaked a decision back in 2014 just the latest in a series of moves showing how polluted the institution has become.

Meanwhile, Amy Coney Barrett, who isn’t even one of the two most conservative justices on the court, has yet to recuse herself from a case involving LGBTQ+ rights given her own membership in a religious group that practices the same sort of discrimination.

The BBC reports on the kenari nut, a crop that may be about to boom as a possible dairy substitute, while also potentially driving economic growth in Indonesia.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette co-owner Allan Block and his wife Susan responded to a question about why he won’t settle with striking workers with a “fuck you” and a slap (video included). You can support the strikers in several ways, including reading their strike paper at Union Progress.

Board game news: Z-Man Games announced Mists over Carcassonne, a new cooperative spinoff of Carcassonne, due out in January.

Holy Grail Games has a Kickstarter going for Copan: Dying City, a worker-placement game where resources get scarcer as the game progresses and the city of the title collapses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: autism, board game news, food science, lgbt rights, links, longreads, minnesota, misinformation, police, religion, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights, unions, vaccines

→ November 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/19/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote two pieces this week, one on the Angels’ signing of Tyler Anderson and the Yankees’ re-signing of Anthony Rizzo, and one on four trades from earlier this week before teams had to set their 40-man rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke to Jessica Grose, New York Times opinion writer and author of the new book Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, about the book and what we might do to make being a working mother easier in the U.S. You can pre-order her book, which is due out December 6^th, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With Twitter imploding, you can find me in a bunch of other places, including Facebook, Instagram, counter.social, and cohost, as well as here and on my free email newsletter, which went out again yesterday. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Population projections have the stretch of West African coastline that runs from Lagos, Nigeria, to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, becoming the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth by 2100, with about 500 million people in it. The Guardian looks at what this means for the region, its people, and the planet as a whole.
Clint Smith’s story in the Atlantic on his visits to Holocaust memorial sites and what they might tell us about how to grapple with our own shameful past is one of the best things you’ll read this year.
And this New York Times Magazine article on the theft of an Afghan baby by a network of American evangelical Christians should win a Pulitzer. The lawsuit is still ongoing, but we should not be in the practice of stealing babies from countries we invade.
The United States lags badly behind other developed nations in researching and preventing stillbirths. We still have 20,000 stillbirths every year in the U.S., and at least a quarter of them are (likely) preventable.
A woman visiting Ohio had a miscarriage and began to hemorrhage. Because of Ohio’s anti-abortion law, the emergency room sent her home to wait because they couldn’t “prove there was no fetal development.” This is how these religiously-motivated laws will kill women.
I was obsessed with the computer game Age of Empires when it first came out in the late 1990s. WIRED has an interview with the current CEO of Microsoft Gaming and the head of the studio that makes the Age games as the game celebrates its 25^th anniversary and two new civilizations were added to the most recent version, Age of Empires IV.
ProPublica has the inside story of how anti-abortion groups helped write Tennessee’s extremely strict ban on the medical procedure and are working to defend it.
Colombia faces a difficult challenge as its new President wants to stop extracting fossil fuels and move to climate-friendly energy sources, including the lack of a transition plan for affected workers.
This 12-minute BBC podcast looks at online harassment and threats against scientists investigating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The CARES Act led to the release of 11,000 inmates from federal prisons during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 17 reoffended. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and we spend nearly $200 billion just to keep people in prison. Maybe we should rethink this?
A new research paper in Nature found evidence that climate change is increasing the risk of bat pathogens spilling over into humans.
Yoel Roth was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, and wrote an op ed explaining why he quit a few weeks after Elon Musk took over the site. It’s not good, but it also explains how the company’s dependence on advertisers may prevent Musk from turning it into 8chan. Roth himself has some bigoted tweets from 10+ years ago.
Eighteen unvaccinated Ohio children, all but one under the age of 5, have contracted measles in an ongoing outbreak across two day care facilities. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses we know, and it can cause death up to ten years after the infection from a progressive and incurable neurological condition called SSPE.
More anti-vax loons are demanding “vaccine-free” blood and are trying to set up so-called “safe” blood banks.
Meanwhile, America’s Frontline Doctors, a quack group that took in millions from prescribing useless COVID-19 treatments and offering online “consultations,” is imploding now because founder and January 6^th insurrectionist Simone Gold may have been embezzling the group’s funds for personal gain.
Also, it appears that someone contracted dengue fever from a mosquito bite in Arizona. Climate change makes this almost inevitable.
Tucker Carlson’s attempt to play kingmaker this election season ended mostly with embarrassing defeats.
It’s a weak substitute for the real thing, but Democrats should codify Roe v. Wade right now, and force SCOTUS – with five justices who are religious zealots or otherwise openly anti-abortion – to grapple with it, according to The Nation’s Elie Mystal.
Mystal also wrote elsewhere about how Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the House to his fellow Republicans by gutting voting rights laws.
Tom Scocca writes that Trump’s hold on the GOP is stronger than ever despite the drubbing many of his preferred candidates took in the midterms.
The Virginia state education department has proposed major changes to social studies standards, written by five new appointees of the state’s Republican governor. Educators oppose the changes, calling them jingoistic and derogatory towards non-whites.
Moms for Liberty, the astroturfing, pro-white/anti-LGBT activist group that’s been targeting school board elections, threw out a Black superintendent in South Carolina and banned critical race theory
A Connecticut school district is so wedded to its racist mascot (the Redmen) that they’re forgoing $94,000 in state funding just to keep it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is shipping more migrants to Philadelphia in another instance of human trafficking, but the government of the City of Brotherly Love has posted a list of resources for folks who want to help welcome these new residents. Love > hate.
And Texas Republicans have filed a bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors – yes, putting parents in prison for getting medical care for their kids. Why is MLB putting the All-Star Game there?
The Biden Administration is giving Saudi Arabian “Prime Minister” Mohammed bin Salman immunity from a lawsuit filed by the fiancée of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, because oil.
All the news about Republicans investimigrating Hunter Biden’s laptop or something is overshadowing the real damage they’re going to do by going after science agencies.
Board game news: Pandasaurus Games owners Molly Wardlaw and Nathan McNair face accusations from former employees of creating a toxic workplace environment through “negligence, mismanagement, and manipulation.” I have met Molly and Nathan, although I can’t say I know either of them well, and I’ve reviewed many Pandasaurus Games over the years. The company denied the allegations and their response is at the bottom of the linked article.
Tabriz, the new game from the co-designer of the amazing Cascadia, is crowdfunding on Gamefound for two more days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, anti-science, board game news, carceral state, colombia, links, longreads, measles, philadelphia, scotus, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, video games, virginia

→ October 1, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/1/22.

Since my last weekend post, I’ve had three few posts up for subscribers to the Athletic, including my annual column on players I was wrong about, my annual Prospect of the Year column, and a quick scouting take on last weekend’s Future Stars Main Event showcase for the 2023 draft.

For Paste I reviewed the board game Cellulose, from Genius Games, which produces science-themed games that try to be both accurate and educational. It’s definitely the former, but I’m not sure about the latter, as it’s a good worker-placement game that you can play well without getting into a lot of the technical stuff.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was author and sportswriter Will Leitch, who wrote the wonderful 2021 novel How Lucky and who has a new novel coming out in May that you can pre-order here. We discussed his writing, his beloved Cardinals, and the upcoming slate of movies for this fall and winter. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter should return next week. COVID and some travel and other stuff just knocked me for a loop.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This story has gone beyond this one subtopic, but it’s worth reading about how Brett Favre took $6 million in welfare funds and gave it to Southern Miss to build a volleyball stadium.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won a Nobel Peace Prize by ending the decades-long conflict with Eritrea, a former Ethiopian province that took Ethiopia’s only coastline when it became independent. Now Ahmed stands accused of starting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority Tigrayans and fomenting a civil war less than a year after earning the honor.
Vigilante “predator catchers,” using techniques similar to those from To Catch a Predator, are infiltrating and often interfering with the criminal justice system.
Yet another author thinks he’s identified the Zodiac killer – although this time, the suspect’s daughter thinks it might be true.
Fifth Circuit judge Andy Oldham ruled that internet companies no longer have any right to moderate content on their sites, which doesn’t jibe well with the First Amendment. The Atlantic’s Charlie Wurzel asks if this is the end of the internet. The subreddit r/PoliticalHumor is protesting the ruling and the Texas law in question in a rather clever way.
Virginia is trying to enact a set of policies to deny trans kids’ rights in schools, such as prohibiting the use of their preferred pronouns or their use of bathrooms that match their gender identities. It’s cruel, and it solves no problem other than catering to transphobic voters. If you live in Virginia, the public comment period is open and you can comment here.
An editorial in Nature argues that we need to let science and data determine transgender policy, not anti-trans politicians. “The current spate of anti-trans positions has little to do with evidence-based research, science or data,” such as bogus claims of sexual assaults by trans people (or people pretending to be trans) in bathrooms.
Meanwhile, right-wing trolls are targeting children’s hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, going after facilities in Akron and at Vanderbilt just weeks after a similar misinformation campaign led to bomb threats against Boston Children’s Hospital. And, as usual, Twitter does nothing.
Libraries under attack: A dozen public libraries across the country received bomb or active shooter threats in the last two weeks, which might be part of a coordinated effort targeted at LGBTQ+ communities. Last week was Banned Books Week, and yet schools across the country continue to target LGBTQ+-themed books. A librarian in a St. Louis-area school received two visits from a police officer because parents complained about “pornographic” books on the shelves. In Greenville, South Carolina, Republicans have stolen several LGBTQ+ books from the library and are trying to get the system to remove any such books from the kids’ sections (where, say, a child questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity might find them). Cory Doctorow points out that vast majorities of Americans oppose book-banning efforts, but the other side is louder.
A French scientist who pushed the thoroughly discredited notion that hydroxychloroquinone could treat COVID-19 now faces a criminal investigation and possible retraction of six of his published papers.
A measles outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed 700 children.
ProPublica explains how “pig-butchering” scams work. If you’ve been getting texts from random numbers or similar messages on Whatsapp/Instagram, sometimes saying “hi” or “your number is in my phone” or something, that’s often the first step in the scam.
In a new documentary about Mario Batali, a former employee alleges that he sexually assaulted her.
Fentanyl is the new bugaboo for Republican politicians and a lot of MAGA accounts on Twitter. The problem is it’s arrant nonsense: You can’t overdose from touching it, and it’s not in random Halloween candy.
I loved this MLB.com story and video about a lovely new ballpark in Bavaria, built to house a Bundesliga (the German professional league) team in Füssen.
The Danish island of Bornholm is trying to go trash-free, reusing or recycling all waste, as their waste-incineration plant is nearing the end of its life and officials there chose not to replace it.
A number of Trump’s phony electors from 2020 still hold powerful positions in their states, are on the ballot this November for the same, or are working for major campaigns like those of Blake Masters (Arizona) or Sen. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin).
Speaking of Sen. Johnson, he flip-flopped on the bill to protect marriage equality, pandering to a small but vocal minority of voters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hired a company tied to one of his closest advisers to fly migrants from Texas to Massachusetts, and his office has refused to explain how the company won this contract.
John Fetterman responds to the strange attacks against his tattoos, including a rant from Tucker Carlson. Are we really still worried about people with tattoos in the year 2022?
Can “brown noise” help your brain relax? There isn’t much research on this, and the research on “pink noise,” which allegedly helps with deep sleep, is limited to one real study.
Board game news: Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is already 10x funded on Kickstarter with 12 days to go.
Daybreak, the new cooperative game about fighting climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic), is over $300,000 already with 20 days to go on Kickstarter.
LX News has a story on Dungeons & Dragons players who tout mental health benefits from playing, which isn’t exactly backed by research but does talk up some of the benefits of gaming in general. The article does note the actual research on how reading fiction increases your empathy, though.
NPR’s Code Switch looks at race in Dungeons & Dragons – how the game’s fictional races bring in real-world stereotypes, and how some players are trying to rewrite some of the rules to eliminate or confront those issues.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board game news, book banning, books, ethiopia, first amendment, frauds, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, science, stick to baseball, trans rights, true crime

→ September 17, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/17/22.

My one new post this week for The Athletic is a scouting notebook looking at some Yankees and Red Sox prospects, including Jasson Dominguez, Yoendrys Gomez, and Cedanne Rafaela. I’ve had to push some things off, as I got sick on Tuesday and it turns out that my COVID number is finally up.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Justin E.H. Smith, author of the book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, which you can buy here on Bookshop.org. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter returned today after a long hiatus, describing my COVID experience so far and linking to a lot of the stuff I’ve written over the last few weeks.

And now, the links…

Hasidic private schools in New York City fail to provide even the most basic secular education to students, but have taken in $1 billion in taxpayer money, according to an extensive New York Times investigation. It would appear that various Mayors and Governors have declined to fully examine the issue for fear of alienating the Hasidic voting bloc.

“Satanic panic” is back, thanks to QAnon, right-wing influencers, and major media members like Fox News hosts.

The chairman of the Alabama GOP refused to show his photo ID to vote, and then had the poll worker who asked him to show it fired. It appears this is part of a larger pattern of behavior for John Wahl and his family, who hold substantial power through their Anabaptist sect.

Marcus Mumford spoke to the L.A. Times about his new album and its discussion of the abuse he suffered as a child.

The Denver Post argues that Rep. Lauren Boebert is a Christian nationalist, and part of a dangerous movement that threatens American democracy..

Years of investigations by the Kansas City Star and other outlets appear to have resulted in the arrest this week of a former Kansas City, Kansas, detective who stands accused of raping two women, taking money from drug dealers, and framing innocent people. It’s unbelievable how long people were aware of what Roger Golubski was allegedly doing, yet he was able to continue to do it, and even retired from one department and got a job with another.

Portland, Oregon, police had evidence two years ago in the case of the 2019 killing of a prominent anti-fascist activist, but sat on it for two years before making an arrest in August.

Why on earth are some Gen-Z folks starting to talk up the Unabomber’s manifesto?

People pushing the lab-leak conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs (an economist with no background in science), are doing great harm by advocating a belief that is contrary to all available evidence.

A Black protester in South Carolina is likely to give birth in jail, where she’s serving a four-year sentence for being mean to cops. She was convicted of “breaching the peace in a high and aggravated manner.”

The man accused of killing Eliza Fletcher was investigated for a 2021 rape, but the Memphis DA’s rape kit backlog is so long that the results didn’t come back until September 5^th. You would think this would lead to calls for increased funding to process rape kits.

A Detroit-area man who killed his wife and shot his adult daughter had fallen into a QAnon rabbit hole, according to other members of his family.

…as international experts warn that right-wing extremism is becoming more mainstream.

A lawsuit against the state of Texas includes evidence from a mother whose 13-year-old trans son was pulled out of class and questioned for over an hour by state “investigators.”

The co-chair of the Michigan state GOP referred to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “a weak little girl.”

The Uihlein family, owners of the U-Line shipping materials company, have helped pay for fake-newspaper mailers blasting Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker while trafficking in transphobic and homophobic rhetoric. Don’t buy from U-Line.

Fred Franzia, the winemaker behind the popular $2 wines known as Two Buck Chucks, died this week at 79.

Candace Owens claimed that British colonization of Africa was actually a good thing for the colonized people.

An Iowa law on restitution for victims of violence means that a woman who, at age 15, killed the man who raped and trafficked her, owes his family $150,000. It is, literally, a law of unintended consequences. A GoFundMe for the woman has raised nearly three times that amount already.

Students and staff at Seattle Pacific University are suing the school over its anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policies.

Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that the Christian right is ignoring the biggest threat to their existence: Declining religiosity in younger generations. The younger you are, the less likely you are to identify as Christian, or as religious at all.

There’s a campaign afoot on the right to penalize businesses that work towards environmental or social goals, much like Florida is trying to penalize businesses that don’t support Gov. DeSantis’s agenda. The party that claims to support free enterprise isn’t adhering to the “free” part of it.

Noted liberal rag (checks notes) Bloomberg has an op ed arguing that the Texas judicial ruling that companies could decline to cover PrEP treatment for employees takes religious freedom too far.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he’d be open to banning contraception in the next legislative session.

The American Library Association reported a huge increase in book-banning efforts across the country so far in 2022.

Khruangbin’s new album is a collaboration with Vieux Farka Touré, reimagining the songs of his father, the legendary Malian musician Ali Farka Touré.

Board game news: You can pre-order the latest game in the Unmatched series, Houdini vs. The Genie.

Sagrada: Artisans, the legacy version of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada, is now on Kickstarter and already funded.

Age of Inventors, an economic/resource management game from a small Greek publisher, is also on Kickstarter and also funded this week.

Dune: War for Arrakis, an asymmetrical area-control game pitting the houses Atreides and Harkonnen against each other, is also on Kickstarter, and fully funded even with a higher goal. It seems like it’s designed primarily for two players, but with 3 or 4 the extra players control “sub-factions” loyal to one house or the other.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, conspiracy theories, cults, free speech, georgia, iowa, kansas, links, longreads, oregon, police, south carolina, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines, wine

→ August 20, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/21/22.

I’m returning from a long vacation to England and Wales, one in which I was barely online and enjoyed this tremendously. A couple of folks reached out to see if my absence from the internet was due to something unfortunate, and I appreciate that you checked in.

Before I started this break, I had a slew of articles for subscribers to The Athletic, including a ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors that included recent draftees; some thoughts on which teams did best and worst at the trade deadline; and breakdowns of the Juan Soto trade, the Frankie Montas trade; the Josh Hader trade; and some smaller deals from that final day. I held a Q&A at the Athletic on August 1st.

Before this vacation, I took a few days to head to Indianapolis to go to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in North or South America, and wrote about it in two posts for Paste – one ranking the ten best games I played there, and another discussing everything else I tried or saw. I also reviewed the very disappointing new Stranger Things game, Attack of the Mind Flayer.

My podcast will return this upcoming week, as will my newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times details the numerous allegations against former Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who had become a media darling for his decision to raise his company’s minimum salary to $70K a year (which, to be clear, is still good!) and his tweets about excessive CEO pay and living wages.
Bob Nutting, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, bought the Aspen Times newspaper, and in what appears to be a concerted effort with a Russian oligarch, suppressed negative coverage in the 140-year-old paper, according to a former editor.
Climate change is causing a mass movement of people from the worst-hit areas, and we need to prepare for it.
NBC News has the story of a Texas mom campaigning to ban LGBTQ+ themed books from school libraries – even though her own son is gay.
Texas’ abortion law made one woman’s wanted pregnancy a medical nightmare. Republicans trying to ban abortion are worse at failing to anticipate consequences than Bud Selig was.
The BBC looks back at the failure of Disney and Miramax to sell Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke to American audiences.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, one of the authors of the recent studies that showed that COVID-19 almost certainly had a natural origin, discussed the toxic “lab-leak” discource on social media, one pushed by bad actors, including people with books to sell.
Dan Szymborski wrote about how the Fernando Tatis suspension is a loss for baseball, not just for Padres fans.
Two billionaires, Jeff Yass and Dick Uihlein, are funding a far-right election denier in Nevada’s Senate race. Uihlein’s money comes from U-Line, his closely held packaging company. If I get a package in an U-Line box, I ask the shipper or vendor to use someone else for their packaging needs.
A Nigerian doctor tried to warn the world about monkeypox back in 2016, but nobody listened.
President Biden has almost completely stopped drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, compared not just to his immediate predecessor but to President Obama as well.
This was inevitable: some sore-loser parents used Utah’s anti-trans law to question the gender of the girl who beat their daughters in a track event.
Meanwhile, far-right transphobes are harassing Boston Children’s Hospital employees over false claims that the hospital is conducting gender-affirming surgeries on trans kids.
Reader Dr. Paul Sax wrote a personal piece about why abortions are medical care.
The Washington Post wrote about how Indy Star reporters showed that the story of a pregnant 10-year-old who had to travel out of Ohio to Indiana for an abortion was, in fact, not a hoax. (And then Indiana banned all abortions, because that state is also a theocracy.)
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Trailblazers, a short, portable family game about hiking and kayaking, funded in less than two hours.
Level Up Dice made custom polyhedral dice from metal melted down from a German WWII tank, and then had to apologize for it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, baseball, board game news, censorship, coronavirus, links, longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, trans rights, utah

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