Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

White People Are Acknowledging Their Privilege on Twitter. But for What Purpose?

Prompt Twitter is back at it again. On Saturday, Twitter user @freeyourmindkid asked white people to share “the most outrageous thing that you’ve gotten away with as a white person that you know damn well a black or brown person would have never gotten away with?” and asked respondents to tag their stories with #MyWhitePrivilege. The tweet went viral, trending over the weekend and garnering almost 10,000 replies as of the time of writing.

You know why, Slate. Starts with a “V” and ends with an “irtue signaling.” Being dumb and playing dumb actually works at cross-purposes.


#notallbrains

Study Linking Autism to ‘Male Brain’ Retracted, Replaced

The authors of a study that claimed to find a link between typical male brain anatomy and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have retracted it and replaced it with a dramatically changed version after finding an error in their methodology.

The article, published in April 2017 in JAMA Psychiatry and reported by Medscape Medical News at that time, contained “serious errors,” writes lead author Christine Ecker, PhD, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in a letter published in the journal today.

The study authors “found that the vast majority (79.6%) of women with ASD were allocated to the category of phenotypic male individuals.”

The original paper concluded that the findings “highlight the need for considering normative sex-related phenotypic diversity when determining an individual’s risk for ASD and provide important novel insights into the neurobiological mechanisms mediating sex differences in ASD prevalence.”

Men are still diagnosed with autism 4 times as often as women. [I retract nothing! Nothing!]


Speaking of soft brains…

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Liz Cheney disagree on Twitter over knowledge of 22nd Amendment, Constitution

House Reps. Liz Cheney and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez clashed on Twitter over each other’s understanding of the Constitution.

Cheney, R-Wyo., took issue with a comment Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made during a recent MSNBC town hall event in which the freshman congresswoman talked about Democrats being in control of Congress in the 1930s and 1940s.“When our party was boldest, the time of the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act and so on, we had, and carried, supermajorities in the House, in the Senate. We carried the presidency,” she told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

“They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure (President Franklin D.) Roosevelt did not get reelected,” Ocasio-Cortez continued.

(Reminder, FDR died in office in 1945; the 22nd Amendment came in 1947)

In response to Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, Cheney tweeted: “We knew the Democrats let dead people vote. According to AOC, they can run for president too.”


Is it after lunch for everyone yet?

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