In which a Washington Post writer states her conclusion and immediately demolishes it

Washington Post local reporter Julie Zauzmer presents her analysis of data on D.C. traffic accidents, including the following insight:

5. The numbers are in: Men are worse drivers than women.

This goes way beyond refusing to stop for directions. Men were the drivers in about 65 percent of all crashes in the study. There’s no way to tell, for the sake of comparison, exactly how many men and women are on the roads in Washington.

That is, she states her conclusion and then immediately explains why the data do not support it. Her conclusion would make sense if men and women drove the same amount — something that no one admits to believing. She is entitled to her own opinions about the relative driving skills of the sexes, but not to her own rules of statistics.

Someone actually wrote this: Julie Bindel on the Proud Whopper

Julie Bindel, ever eager to enlighten the rest of us on the one correct way to live, rails against business marketing to the LGBT market:

As lesbians and gay men all over the world fight to end oppression, corporations have been piggy backing on our struggles to sell us whatever they can dress up as "gay-friendly". The latest to offer us commercialism masquerading as campaigning is Burger King. It recently introduced the Proud Whopper, just in time for the San Francisco Pride march and festival, with rainbow-coloured wrapper and the inscription: "We are all the same inside".

Companies want to do business with us, and that's terrible.

The gay community used to be defined by politics,

I thought it used to be defined by something else — exactly what something else, I'm not quite sure, but there must be something.

but lesbians and gay men no longer share a political base – only, in some quarters, a social one.

In other words, the big problem with the LGBT community is that it has too little political groupthink.

This deradicalised version of gay life revolves around marriage, babies and mortgages. Many gays have kidded themselves that bigger and richer sponsors for our Pride events and charities means acceptance rather than acquiescence; that it is a sign we are reaching full equality.

You're only kidding yourself if you think that you get to have an opinion on what equality means to you. Only the anointed, like Julie Bindel, have that privilege, and they get to tell you what you should want.

But how can we be liberated when there are still daily attacks on gay people, and when the school playground remains, in many ways, hostile to gay pupils?

If we can't have everything we want, right this second, then nothing is worth pursuing at all.

When I came out in 1977, the GLF had fizzled out, but the gay men and lesbians I met celebrated the counter-culture over the status quo. Many of us lived collectively, raising children as a community or friendship group, rather than in traditional couples. We critiqued monogamy and the privileging of the nuclear family. We have now swapped laughing at marriage for lauding it.

Now? Did the last three decades of political correctness not happen in Ms. Bindel's world?

What would real gay liberation look like? Marriage would be abolished for all in favour of something based on equality and next of kin rights rather than ownership and tax avoidance.

If Ms. Bindel believes in privatizing marriage, I'm all for that, but the general tone of her article suggests that she doesn't.

We have been sold a dream of marriage, babies, and conventionality at a huge cost to our radical potential, and the profits will not go to our freedom and liberation.

Ms. Bindel loves us for our potential.

While lesbians and gay men fork out on marriage, an institution previously eschewed by feminists and anti-capitalists, our brothers and sisters in Russia, India, Uganda and elsewhere are suffering the most grotesque oppression by the state....

That's just it. Not all of us follow what anti-capitalists tell us because some of us know how the story ends.