Pretend-skepticism
Naomi Wolf has been reckless with other people’s lives before. Back in 2014 she was peddling conspiracy theories about the ISIS beheadings of journalists and others.
Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.
Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked.
Lots of people peddle conspiracy theories, but it’s worse and more dangerous when people with some claims to intellectual respectability do it.
despite Wolf’s turn into conspiracy theory, she is still more widely known for her earlier and much-respected work on feminism, as well as her political consulting for the 1996 Bill Clinton and 2000 Al Gore presidential campaigns on reaching female voters. I was taught parts of Wolf’s 1990 book “The Beauty Myth” in school and admit that, until researching her more recent views more fully for this post, still mostly associated her with this and other well-respected work. In other words, I was carrying the assumption that Wolf is a respected and authoritative figure to be taken seriously. I can only assume that I was not alone in this.
I would replace the word “authoritative” with “reliable,” but I agree with the basic point. You don’t expect people who can write respected books to spout dopey (but dangerous) conspiracy theories. You expect people like Trump to do that, not people who can write books.
Her initial posts on ISIS repeatedly stated that confirmation of the authenticity of their beheading videos “has not happened yet.” Wolf said that the media was ignoring “journalistic red flags” in that the sole source of the videos had been “SITE, which is run by an anti-Muslim activist with half a million dollars in US funding in 2004.” (In fact, the videos were widely distributed on open-source jihadist online outlets. Maryland-based nonprofit SITE monitors extremist social media.) She also detailed an alleged incident, which I was not able to confirm, of a website “based in Doha, address registered at a private intelligence firm in the UK” that she said had spread news of a Canadian journalist, who turned out not to exist, taken hostage in Syria.
This culminated in a now-deleted post, reproduced below, suggesting that the ISIS beheading videos had been staged, as had the initial abductions of the two American journalists and two British aid workers killed on camera. She hints that she believes this was done by the US military.
Now she’s sowing doubt about vaccination on Twitter and Fox News.
I don’t know what gets into people, I really don’t.
Oh, Naomi Wolf is the gift that keeps on giving:
Keeping transwomen out of women’s bathrooms gives permission to violence.
Yes, but transwoman generally means heterosexual adult man, so not sure how that’s a distinction.
Wait. Are you trying to say transwomen aren’t women? You TERF!
Huh. Does she even notice that she is arguing against any kind of single-sex or single-gender space? Because the state telling men – gay, straight, frilly-dress-wearing, whatever – that they can’t go in the same space as women who are taking their clothes off is “a gigantic breach of personal autonomy and freedom”, is it not?
Naomi Klein on Twitter:-
Your periodic reminder to keep your Naomis straight.
https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein/status/1364263148761489410
JFC. Do trans activists just not get it, or are they being willfully obtuse? Neither look is good. Let’s examine the best case scenario, which gives Wolf’s position more benefit of the doubt than it merits. Despite the fact that “Not all men” are rapists, it is prudent for women to assume that any man might be because it’s impossible to tell which ones are and which ones aren’t. Let’s pretend that, unlike other men, no trans identified males will ever pose any threat at all to any woman or girl in female only spaces. So we’re pretending that trans identified males do not offend at the same rate as the rest of the male population, and we are pretending that all trans identified males are as pure as the driven snow and completely harmless (which Wolf herself is pretending here with her “fake story” assertion). Even in this unbelievably optimistic and sparkly best-of-all-possible-trans-behaviour-worlds, self ID, and the erosion of women’s ability to say no to biological males entering their spaces still offers a golden opportunity for predatory, heterosexual, adult men just pretending to be trans to use this imposture to gain access to female victims. It’s happening already even before self ID becomes law; it will only get worse once it is. Wolf has been assaulted herself. She should be against that happening to other women, right? But she’s “weaponising” her own assault to use against women who are campaigning for their rights. How can she not have any empathy at all for those women who are legitimately concerned for their own safety? Why does she privilege the feelings of males who believe they are women over the health, safety and lives of actual women?
@YNNB # 6:
This excerpt was taken from a discussion on Wolf’s book on homophobia, and it seems to me that she’s assuming all transwomen are gay men. She therefore thinks she’s fighting back against people who think gay men are sexually dangerous to women.
As for your reasonable point regarding predatory men who aren’t trans having access, my guess is that Wolf would appeal to that definition of “transphobia” which talked about the unfairness of “accusing wider (sic) trans people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by … others.” That’s the response I’ve seen the most — that it’s discriminatory to blame transwomen who justwanttopee for what men do.
Sort of off topic/on topic, I’ve been reading a book about logical fallacies. It’s becoming a sort of game for me to spot the ones used by trans activists vs the ones used by GCF (the main bulk of both, not one or two random individuals chosen to make the group look bad). So far I have identified numerous logical fallacies used by the TAs, while only sporadic ones used by some GFCs, but not part of the main GFC argument. I am only about a third of the way through the book. I should make a list.
The entire TA argument is built on logical fallacies. It is also built on scientifically unsound ‘scientific’ premises. It’s like religion again; I see beaucoup religious arguments trying to claim some scientific principle or study to support their incredibly weak arguments for the existence of a god who is interfering for good in the world.
I wonder what her response would be to the fact of so many TIMs calling themselves “lesbians.” It would seem to me that their interest in women might move them out of the “safe for women to be around” category.
But it’s somehow women’s responsibility to provide safety and protection to TIMs from violence that comes from their fellow males, without acknowledging that this offers the perfect cover for predators. Ironically, the “un-womanly” lack of concern and consideration of this imposition on women’s space relies upon and demands women’s feminine-socialized role of concern and consideration to succeed. If that does not work, then they resort to force and intimidation, which is also, remarkably, “un-womanly.” It’s easier and less risky to bully women into submission, than it is to demand acceptance from other men. Women are not being bullied by “other women,” they are being bullied by MEN, a fact which is concealed when TIMs are called “transwomen.” The rejection of third spaces is particularly telling, in that it would be a workable solution, but one which would not “validate” and “affirm” the gender identity of TIMs. Which to choose, women’s safety or happy gender-feels?
I think the trans activists have a really difficult time understanding that this is not the case,that men-who-identify-as-women are predators at the same rate as the general population of men, and so there is no distinction, in terms of danger, between allowing TIMs into women’s spaces and allowing all men into women’s spaces. They are so invested in TWAW that they think the only comparison is between “transwomen” and any subset of women.
Tangent: I have discovered via the Twitter traffic that people are rhyming “Wolf” with “oof” words like “hoof”. I did a bit of searching and was surprised to learn that some people (mostly Americans? Not clear) don’t pronounce the L. I don’t know how NW herself pronounces her name. I pronounce the L, and it never occurred to me that some people might not. I pronounce the L in most vowel-L-consonant combinations, but not in “walk” or “talk” or “caulk”, although my wife does pronounce those Ls.
Huh. That’s like “vulnerable,” except that it’s UKnians who don’t pronounce that L. Vunnerable – it makes me flinch every time I hear it.
Everyone I know pronounces the “l”. I would say maybe it’s a regional thing, but I come from a region where leaving out letters in common words is…common. Almost a prerequisite. Unless you are adding letters, like “warsh”. (Maybe that’s why they can’t put the “r” in February; there are only so many “r”s available, and they used them up in “warsh”). But I won’t dispute the possibility of a contingent of people who say it differently; this is a vast, sprawling country with a vast, sprawling array of dialects, accents, and pronunciations.
Here’s one Brit who pronounces the ‘l’ in vulnerable, but I do admit to being an oddity. As for wolf, it tends to be around the London area where the ‘l’ is dropped, leaving a word that rhymes with with wolf but a phonetic spelling would be something like ‘wuwf’. Head for the North-East and it soon becomes ‘wullaf’.
iknklast, England alone is a tiny place yet we still have myriad distinct accents and dialects, with completely different and equally diverse sets as soon as one crosses a border into Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. Oddly, all Scottish accents are distinctly Scottish*, all Welsh accents distinctly Welsh and so on, none can be confused for another.
Language is weirdly wonderful….or wonderfully weird.
AoS, that reminds me of a friend from college who was Japanese. He was from Tokyo, and he was telling me that there are so many dialects that a lot of Japanese have trouble speaking to each other. He is unable to converse with his in-laws because their dialect is so dissimilar. (Some people would find that quite refreshing; I would have missed so much if I hadn’t been able to converse with my in-laws, who were better parents to me than my parents.) And Japan is also a tiny island, of course.
iknlast, Japan consists of 5 main islands and nearly 7000 smaller ones (not all inhabited, of course) which helps explain so many dialects.
I recall an anecdote in some newspaper column about a guy who was in the US Navy. Some of the crew were from the South, some were from (I think) the West Coast, and they couldn’t understand each other. They grabbed this one crew member from the Midwest who functioned as an interpreter.
On a related note, I used to work in Social Security disability with a man who was educated in a British school in Nigeria. He came to me one day for help because he couldn’t understand what his clients were saying. He didn’t know what language they were speaking. (I’m not sure why he came to me, since I am not noted for my command of many languages; maybe it’s because I’m about the only one he trusted). So I agreed to help and called his clients. I got the information he needed, he thanked me, and asked me what language it was. I told him they were speaking Oklahoman. He’d been living in Oklahoma for several years by then, and was quite surprised to find out they had their own language. I said not really, it’s just you have a rural Oklahoman with a third grade education, and things that come out of their mouth don’t match what someone who can speak the Queen’s English would recognize.
I once wrote this, on the logic of letting TiM’s into women’s spaces:
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that everything that liberal feminists and trans activists say is true. That gender really is in the brain. Trans people are born in the wrong bodies. That all trans people will surely die by murder or suicide if not fully affirmed in their chosen gender at all times. That the logic flows that trans women are women, therefore women’s rights are trans women’s rights, therefore anything a woman may legally access in society may be legally accessed by an equivalent trans woman. That no trans woman presents any danger at all to women, because none of them are either lying about their identities or their intentions in women’s spaces; and no cis male predators are hiding amongst them, or, in the alternative, there *are* cis male predators hiding among them, but that fact doesn’t make it reasonable to then expect trans women to police their own, or to punish the innocent for the crimes and proclivities of the guilty. Further, that it is also unreasonable to require trans people to obtain expensive surgeries and treatments that they may not want in order to be affirmed in their chosen gender and access women’s spaces.
Let’s say that all crimes against women and trans women are committed by cis men. Cis men are the harassers, rapists, murderers, flashers, voyeurs. Trans women are safe and never do any of those things.
Women and girls have good and justifiable reasons to fear cis men, even the ones who don’t commit crimes, as do trans women and trans girls. We therefore have good reason to exclude all cis men from women’s spaces, even those who don’t commit crimes.
Because what does a rapist look like anyway?
It therefore follows that women and girls have no justifiable reason to fear trans women or trans girls in their spaces. Those who do are bigots who are lying about their motivations, or brainwashed by an anti trans society.
So women, girls, trans women and trans girls have good and justifiable reasons to be triggered by the presence of a cis man’s penis in their swimming pool change room. Everyone knows that cis men are potentially dangerous. Keeping cis males out is just sensible safeguarding.
But they don’t have good or justifiable reasons to be triggered by the presence of trans women’s penises, because these penises are no threat.
So, what does a rapist’s penis look like anyway?
Is it therefore the position of liberal feminists and trans activists that cis women and girls (and trans women and trans girls) can distinguish between the “dangerous” cis penis, and the “safe” trans penis? And that this distinction is so obvious, it doesn’t even trigger a violence survivor’s fight, flight or freeze response?
It’s been deleted now (though I’m sure you can find screenshots), but Wolf tweeted in the last day or two that she overheard some Apple employee telling a friend that he was shown a top secret project in which Apple has invented nanoparticles that travel backwards in time.
(Some people have speculated that she was badly misunderstanding a discussion about an Apple app called Time Machine, which I gather is a backup/recovery tool of some sort.)
This is just bizarre behavior. Which means now we’re into the territory where some people will say that we shouldn’t mock her because she is clearly mentally ill, and other people will jump in and express outrage that the first group is diagnosing mental health on the internet, and I just want to sit back and let those two groups fight it out.
Heh I’ve been seeing screenshots all morning.
Lordy she’s a spectacle.
I’ve only seen the screenshots, devoid of any context. I can’t work out whether she was joking, taking the piss out of the Apple people she says said it, or believes Apple has time-travel nanobots.
Wolf has also been talking about the “calm, still, peaceful, restful, natural” aura of….. 1970s Belfast.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EU1i4QsWkAAoTGT?format=jpg&name=large
There’s a thread that keeps on giving here: https://twitter.com/shockproofbeats/status/1247520505789210625
“because when the state gets to say what your body can do, what you can do based on your body, that is a gigantic breach of personal autonomy and individual freedom.”
By that same logic, it would be unjustifiable for the state to put anyone in prison, no matter how abominable their behavior was. Adherence to this sort of bullying (because that is what it really is) is creating an unresolvable contradiction on the left, which endangers everything it has tried to accomplish for a century and more.