The silver lining to the shit show of the last 9 months is that the Republican drama has finally gotten entertaining.

It is in one sense and isn’t in another. Someone saying “basic biology” is generally ignorant of the wide world of biology out there, either through lack of exposure or purposefully so.

The truth is that biology’s definitions are all humans’ ways of dividing up phenomena into neat little categories, but nature just exists as it is and doesn’t need to follow our linguistic rules.

For every definition we come up with, there are invariably multiple exceptions that don’t cleanly fit, because that’s just not how nature works. Even basic definitions like “sex,” “species,” and “life” itself start to get shaky the moment we try to eliminate all the exceptions.

The truth is that for humans there is no single, universally accepted definition of sex or gender. And even attempts to reduce them to something tangentially related like genotype quickly fall apart when you start looking at the exceptions. The person who says that there being two human sexes (usually to the exclusion of gender identity) is “basic biology” is not only categorically wrong, but they’re either ignorant of or ignoring the granularity of our own species. The whole of human sex and gender identity cannot be neatly summed up as “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina” from Kindergarten Cop.

So are the slugs relevant? I would say yes, because if you’re not aware of the variation in nature on the obvious macro scale you have no prayer of appreciating it on the more subtle micro scale.

But it’s not, though. It’s the watered down children’s version of biology people half remember from elementary school. It’s not actual human biology.

I should be more clear: “Huge mistake” means it’s an opinion piece from a person who has a clear bias, not factual journalism. And the fact that the title gives no indication of what it’s actually about means the only thing I have to go on is the author disagrees with something, but won’t say what until I pay them for an opinion I didn’t ask for.

I would personally rather be given the information and form my own opinion.

Clickbait title that is clearly partisan, looks like not worth reading regardless of content.

Up until recently, I always scoffed at presidents running on “the economy” due to the classical wisdom that presidential policies are a small drop in the bucket in the overall economic picture and that the influence they do have typically isn’t felt until after they’ve left office.

Trump proved me wrong on this one. He’s speedrunning a recession.

Normally I’d accuse you of doomsday speculation, but he already proposed this:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-simply-floated-idea-of-deporting-u-s-citizens-white-houses-leavitt-says

I just don’t understand why Trump supporters believe Trump. It was clear that his campaign was influenced by Project 2025, and he had several of its authors at his inner circle. But he claimed he didn’t know anything about it and for some reason his supporters believed him.

And now he’s doing exactly what was promised. None of this should be a surprised. The document was openly published by a think tank, his campaign embraced it, and yet his supporters thought it wasn’t going to happen.

While that’s possible, I kind of suspect that if Trump clearly loses this election, the Republicans will just start distancing themselves from him.

He’s 78 and on trial for multiple felonies. In 4 years he’ll be 82 with 2 election losses in a row and possibly be still embroiled in legal battles. I just don’t see the Republicans trying as hard as they did in 2020 to keep him afloat when they can just ditch him and focus on their rebrand for 2028.