All in fun! Just joking! Where’s your sensayuma?

Originally a comment by Sackbut on Not Selfridge’s.

It is important to me distinguish:

– the actions of the Israeli government;

– the state of Israel itself;

– Israelis;

– Jewish people;

– Palestinian people;

– the nation of Palestine (whatever that means currently);

– the actions of the Palestinian government;

– the actions of non-governmental groups.

I keep looking for nuance in the various protests, and in reports of these protests. I keep hoping to see protesters make clear that they are criticizing government actions and not damning the civilian populations. I keep hoping for news coverage to make this clear. But it is distressingly rare. Protests like this one are described as “pro-Palestine” rather than “pro Palestinian people” or “anti Israeli indiscriminate attacks” or similar. And the protests, regardless of what chants or slogans they invoke, seem to show up to harass Jewish people or groups, rather than Israeli government offices. Why M&S, instead of the Israeli consulate? Why banging on the windows of a library harboring Jewish students, instead of anything whatsoever associated with the Israeli government, or with the American government or military, or anything at all relevant to the actual war effort?

“Israel is a terrorist state” could be a slogan used by anti-Zionist Jews assembled at the Israeli embassy. But no, it’s just a slogan used by people who assume “Israel” and “Jews” are the same thing and bear the same responsibility.

Horrific.

The Marks in Marks & Spencer was Michael Marks, a Jewish immigrant from Belarus.

Trump again told to shut up, again fails to comply.

A federal judge has reinstated a limited gag order on former President Donald Trump in his 2020 presidential election subversion case. It prevents him from criticising court staff, prosecutors and possible witnesses between now and his trial.

Judge Tanya Chutkan had temporarily lifted the order earlier this month so his lawyers could appeal but reinstated it on Sunday. An hour after the news emerged, Mr Trump called the judge “Trump hating”.

Laura Norder innit.

The former president is also under a gag order in a separate ongoing civil fraud trial in New York.

The judge in that case has issued two separate fines against Mr Trump for violating that order, one for $5,000 (£4,100) and one for $10,000.

Keep doubling.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Protecting the public.

If they are that “acutely vulnerable” then maybe the outside world is not for them. If they really must go out of doors, they should make it brief. They should wear blinkers, lest they be upset by anything alarming coming into their peripheral vision. Looking down at the ground is also to be recommended. For longer, more dangerous journeys, they should be preceded by someone walking 10-20 yards ahead of them, ringing a bell, wearing a sign proclaiming “CAUTION: ACUTELY VULNERABLE PERSON APPROACHING!” This will give people in the vicinity time to hide from view anything that might upset or give offence.

There is no such thing as some particularly specially inordinately “acute vulnerability” that afflicts trans people and no one else.

This idea can be interpreted or rephrased a number of ways, some being more subtextual than this claim for particular sensitivity.

Only trans people’s needs and concerns are of importance.

Trans people are particularly demanding and vocal on encountering things they don’t like (like Islamists and cartoons of Muhammad), best not piss them off.

Please don’t hit us, we’ve done what you want us to.

These books are hidden away and we’ll give you a hard time and make you feel guilty about asking for them. And you should feel guilty. Bigot.

We love Big Brother trans women even more than you do. Why do you hate trans women so much?

Yet more solidarity from the boys.

The nightmare returns:

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the airport in the Russian city of Makhachkala in the predominantly Muslim region of Daghestan, with some shouting anti-Jewish comments at passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv on October 29.

Riot police arrived at the airport after the disturbances, while the Interior Ministry office in Makhachkala said reinforcements, including National Guard units, were being sent to “ensure the safety” of arriving passengers, according to the Baza Telegram channel.

Anti-Jewish protests have broken out in several cities in the region in the face of Israel’s war with Hamas, rulers of the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip.

…

Late on October 29, videos and photos from the scene published by Izvestia indicated that protesters had stormed onto the Makhachkala runway and attempted to gain entry to the incoming plane.

Authorities said the airport was closed for incoming and outgoing flights, while police reportedly began jamming communications in the airport area to prevent the crowd from coordinating further actions.

A local news Telegram channel reported that protesters were trying to check the identities of arriving passengers, attempting to prevent Jews from leaving the airport, including searching police vehicles.

Yay more theocracy for us:

In the moments before he was to face a vote on becoming speaker of the House this week, Representative Mike Johnson posted a photograph on social media of the inscription carved into marble atop the chamber’s rostrum: “In God We Trust.”

That inscription of course should not be there.

His colleagues celebrated his candidacy by circulating an image of him on bended knee praying for divine guidance with other lawmakers on the House floor.

That’s just downright revolting. “I believe in a magic daddy in the sky so I’m better than you.”

And in his first speech from the chamber as speaker, Mr. Johnson cast his ascendance to the position second in line to the presidency in religious terms, saying, “I believe God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.”

Which being interpreted is: Daddy God put me here.

Very humble and meek.

Mr. Johnson, a mild-mannered conservative Republican from Louisiana whose elevation to the speakership on Wednesday followed weeks of chaos, is known for placing his evangelical Christianity at the center of his political life and policy positions. Now, as the most powerful Republican in Washington, he is in a position to inject it squarely into the national political discourse, where he has argued for years that it belongs.

That is, he wants to impose theocracy on us.

Mr. Johnson also played a leading role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and has expressed skepticism about some definitions of the separation of church and state, placing himself in a newer cohort of conservative Christianity that aligns more closely with former President Donald J. Trump and that some describe as Christian nationalism.

…

In remarks to a Louisiana congregation in 2016, Mr. Johnson linked school shootings to no-fault divorce laws (he is in a covenant marriage with his wife, which makes divorce more difficult), “radical feminism” and legal abortion.

School shootings are the fault of radical feminists. I’d like to see a map of that journey.

In lectures to student groups he addresses across the country, Mr. Johnson has lamented: “There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.”

It is a viewpoint fervently embraced by much of the hard-right Republican base, which reveres Mr. Trump and identifies with his frequent claims of being persecuted, aggrieved and looked down upon by liberal elites.

Ok again I’m going to need a map of the route from absolute standards of right and wrong to revering Donald Trump. A really large-scale detailed map with no blurry bits or Miracle Street.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on More bags.

The trouble with Western democracies is that the people who stand for political office are commonly not themselves democrats. They prefer their own wills to prevail rather than those of the population-at-large. Some prize examples of elected anti-democrats spring readily to mind.

I always wondered what the purpose of a divided government was, why didn’t the founders set up a parliamentary system where the majority party holds the executive? The way it is, the executive branch can be hamstrung as it is about to be when the next U.S. government shutdown battle comes along (and Johnson will not make a deal like McCarthy did). But, when someone like Trump or Sanders comes along as a populist who promises to “fix things” and have a “people’s revolution,” we are far better off with a strong Congress that can say “hold on there. Not so fast.”

People don’t vote for who would be the best administrator as President in the U.S. They vote for who would be a Strong Leader and make the country over by will and inspiration, and that’s bad for democracy. In Minnesota, the Democrats had a weak opposition in the most recent session and passed through a cornucopia of liberal wetdreams (some of which I think are pretty good.) But the opposition had no fangs and the Democrats were able to label any opposing voices on issues as being the plaints of RW bigots, they were basically toothless. So, the trans sanctuary bills, and “anti-conversion” bills were passed with no dissent among the Democrats and the Republican objections were dismissed.

That’s what happens when demagogues rule, the groupthink takes over. If our governor had faced a legislature with at least one house on the opposition party, he would have had to listen to them. Instead, we become yes-men, and I am thankful that the governor doesn’t have the power to do as much as a president would. I may secretly give money to Republicans in the next election here, not because I like them, but because I think we need opposition in the government. Slow down, fight for the hard compromises, and make sure all of the people have some voice and not just the members of the majority party.

Democracy depends on deliberation, but power is more attractive to the voters.

That sounds like a brilliant parody:

The trans “struggle for justice” hahahahahahahaha hilarious.

Let’s have a look.

Acknowledging the formidable hurdles trans and nonbinary athletes face in their struggles for inclusion, acceptance, and freedom, this book documents and analyses their resistance across a range of social-cultural and geopolitical contexts, from community sport to high-performance competition.

It looks like a parody but apparently isn’t.

So let’s talk about this “struggle” for “inclusion, acceptance, and freedom.”

Inclusion. We’ve been over this. We’ve been over this a billion times by now. Athletic competitions have categories and qualifications. End of story. There are age categories, sometimes weight categories, amateur/professional categories, and yes sex categories. There are categories for women. Women had to fight for them. They won the fight – the fight for inclusion, in fact. If men who identify as trans are allowed to compete against women then women are excluded from their own sports all over again.

Acceptance. That’s just another way of saying “inclusion”; see above.

Freedom. No one is taking away trans people’s “freedom.” Telling men they can’t invade women’s sports is not a violation of their freedom, it’s an enforcement of women’s rights. Women matter too.

The list includes Mein Kampf and gender critical books…and nothing else.

Works by authors including Helen Joyce and Prof Kathleen Stock were hidden from view by a library service of the Labour-run Calderdale council, and are now barred from being promoted in displays in order to protect the public from offence.

The only other book similarly censored by the library service by being hidden was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

So, it seems, the Calderdale library system considers gender-skeptical feminism to be on a level with genocidal Nazism.

That’s puzzling for a number of reasons. Like, for instance, the fact that gender-skeptical feminism is not genocidal or genocidal-adjacent or remotely in any way similar to or connected to genocide. Like, also, the fact that there are many cruel or destructive or murderous ideologies promoted in many books other than Mein Kampf yet they are not on Calderdale Libraries’ list of books to hide.

The Telegraph previously revealed that six books discussing the dangers of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery were hidden from public view by Calderdale librarians.

Now council documents shown to The Telegraph indicate that staff had not previously taken such direct measures to conceal books, except on one occasion when “a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was moved to our stores following complaints from some customers some years ago”.

In other words Calderdale librarians are saying gender-critical books are as evil and dangerous as Hitler’s book and that no other books in their system are that evil and dangerous.

Ms Joyce, the author of one of the six gender-critical books, told The Telegraph: “I was disgusted, but not surprised, to discover that the only previous example Calderdale Libraries could give of hiding away a ‘toxic’ book concerned Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf.

“Its senior staff have apparently surrendered to the demands of trans ideologues to such an extent that when a crybully threw a strop about a top ten bestseller on the subject of women’s, children’s and gay people’s human rights, they agreed to treat that book as if it was Nazi propaganda.”

What’s the thinking?

Calderdale council officers cited best-practice advice that the books should not be promoted, advice which comes from the group Book 28, an LGBT organisation which has pushed councils to take steps to prevent LGBT people seeing “offensive” and “transphobic” gender-critical books in their libraries .

So why do Calderdale council officers and library bosses take advice from Book 28 and no one else? Why does it not take advice from, say, LGBAlliance? And feminist organizations? And free speech organizations? Why do they give the Trans Police the final and only word?

The controversy began with an internal HR grievance lodged in January 2023 about gender-critical books on display in council libraries .

Calderdale’s library agreed to remove six gender-critical books from public view.

After The Telegraph revealed that these books had been hidden, Calderdale library staff lodged a complaint against their own employer and demanded the books be reinstated on library shelves.

Calderdale council undertook a review of its policies following the outcry against censorship, while stating it had to balance these concerns against what it termed some people’s “acute vulnerability”.

Ok stop right there. That’s where you go so wrong. There is no such thing as some particularly specially inordinately “acute vulnerability” that afflicts trans people and no one else.

It’s more the other way around, really. Trans people – especially the male ones – are pulling a very elaborate and very destructive long con, and women are the people who are rendered “acutely vulnerable” as a result.

This week Ian Day, the council’s director for public service, said that while the books are likely “to cause offence to some people”, the titles do not reach “the threshold required to interfere with legal rights such as the right of freedom of expression”.

He recommended that the council decide to reinstate books, with the proviso that they are not promoted.

So just mild censorship. Thanks a lot.

Sorry but this is too hilarious to pass up.

Like the fact that there were five men and one woman discussing an issue about women? No, of course not that, that’s fine. Fred’s choices on the other hand…

Oh no, Inja and Fred are quarreling!

Take your time, boys. Be thorough.

They killed the patient trying to save her.

An Iranian girl, 16, has died after she was allegedly beaten by morality police for not wearing a hijab.

Why is it so important for women to wear bags on their heads that it’s necessary to beat them to death for not doing it?

It’s not to protect them from anything, especially not from the sexual violence of godbothering men. It’s to make a big fuss about the “honor” of men, which is besmirched by the existence of those horrible oozing sluts known as “women.” If they’re not tightly wrapped like a supermarket cheese, they flop down in the street and spread their legs, so that explains why the “morality” police have to kill them for taking off the wrapping.

Activists have alleged Geravand was attacked because she was not wearing a hijab. 

They also demanded an independent investigation by the United Nations’ fact-finding mission on Iran, citing the theocracy’s use of pressure on victims’ families and state TV’s history of airing hundreds of coerced confessions.

Maybe the CIA should have left Iran alone…

Aw yeah, solidarity forever. Islamists and sex workers, unite and fight!

The Guardian reports there is conflict over the revamped NHS gender idenniny development service.

The opening of the hubs has been delayed by more than a year amid difficulties in recruiting staff, and tensions over how to train employees in caring for young people with gender dysphoria. Meanwhile, the waiting list of young people seeking help has grown to 5,766.

As delays to the openings continue, NHS England (NHSE) has started to divert thousands of 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds who turn 17 before next March, towards the adult waiting list, where they are likely to receive a different, less exploratory form of treatment.

This development so concerned the mothers of two 17-year-olds that they launched a judicial review challenging the stark disparities between the child and adult services.

You can see why they’d worry. “Less exploratory” probably means more eager to offer drastic interventions because hey, once you’re 17 you’re totally immune to being deluded about being the sex your body isn’t.

To complicate matters further, an NHS consultation designed to gather views on how best to support children with gender dysphoria has identified two irreconcilable outlooks on the best approach: one group is cautious about the prescription of puberty blockers, while the second is suspicious of exploratory therapy, arguing that it could enter the realm of conversion practices.

And clearly it’s far more risky to avoid blockers and surgery than it is to embrace them, right?

Tensions have also emerged in the small team charged with developing teaching materials for staff at the new clinics. There are polarised views on how quickly patients with gender dysphoria should be assisted towards social and medical transition, and how much focus should be given to other issues present in their lives, such as trauma and homophobic bullying.

In other words same old same old same old. Some people think being trans is the best thing since pumpkin lattes and other people think it’s a warped fad that is going to ruin a lot of lives.

Meetings are said to be polite, but privately clinicians have dismissed those holding opposing views variously as “activists”, for promoting trans rights, or “conversion therapists” or “transphobes”, for questioning a child’s self-diagnosis.

So it’s like Twitter but with physical consequences.

One current member of Tavistock staff said: “What they are proposing to do is gender exploratory therapy. My view, as a clinician working in gender services, is that this is tantamount to conversion therapy for trans youth. It’s very problematic and very unethical.”

But it’s not problematic and unethical to charge ahead with diverting teenagers’ puberties. How can they be so confident of that?

Originally a comment by Holms on We know that something is being waved in our faces.

The claim that using someone’s pronouns of demand is a mere ‘kindness’ is belied by the fact that they are also claimed to be non-optional. Kindness is not mandatory, and mandates are by their nature not kind as there is the implication of enforcement, punishment, for failure to comply. It is further undermined by the revisionism we see at play with trans identities. When someone declares they have a gender identity, name, and/or pronouns at odds with their sex, it is immediately forbidden to mention even obliquely that the person ever had anything other than those even in the past. This is especially visible with famous people, as their pages on wikipedia, imdb, and others are immediately edited to match the new demand even for past events under their previous name.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this inflexibility can be seen in the very public tragedy of Elliot Page, formerly Ellen. The wiki page for Hard Candy states the protagonist’s actor as Elliot Page, despite being Ellen at the time, and despite her character being a 14 year old girl. The plot of that movie begins with that character tempting another man into meeting her via online flirting, as she suspects he is a paedophile who killed an earlier victim of his predation. In particular, she suspects he is a heterosexual paedophile – the entire interaction thus depends on her being female. Yet that of course does not stop all references to Elliot referring to her as grammatically masculine.

A footnote on that page gives us another absurdity: “Elliot Page, in his memoir Pageboy, revealed that a member of the production gave him a ride home after the wrap party, and then sexually assaulted him.” Him him him, despite the glaring incongruity: Ellen page was sexually assaulted 16 years prior to ‘coming out’ as a man. The assault was due to lust for her as a woman. Elliot’s own page contains a stream of further absurd lies.

The ‘kindness’ claim is a flimsy defence, part of a coercive effort to promote mass lying.

The CBC is shocked, shocked to have discovered that Buffy Sainte-Marie invented an indigenous identity for herself.

When Buffy Sainte-Marie strolled onto Sesame Street in 1975, she was making history.

The Dec. 9 episode was the launch of the program’s efforts to present Indigenous culture to millions of viewers.

…

From the early days of her career, Sainte-Marie has claimed to be a Cree woman, born in Canada. She has also allowed herself to be celebrated as an Indigenous icon and success story.

In 2022, CBC broadcast a concert that was held in her honour at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where Anishinabe musician ShoShona Kish told the audience: “Buffy Sainte-Marie has led the way for Indigenous music on this beautiful land since her first album.”

However, almost 50 years after stepping onto Sesame Street, the iconic singer-songwriter’s claims to Indigenous ancestry are being contradicted by members of her own family and an extensive CBC investigation.

Late last year, CBC received a tip that Sainte-Marie is not of Cree ancestry but, in fact, has European roots. She is the latest high-profile public figure whose ancestry story has been contradicted by genealogical documentation, including her own birth certificate, historical research and personal accounts — the latest chapter in the complex and growing debate around Indigenous identity in Canada.

Interesting. Genealogical documentation, historical research, and personal accounts are enough to justify the CBC questioning Sainte-Marie’s indigenous idenniny but nothing is enough to justify anyone questioning someone’s gender idenniny. That’s super interesting because what sex people are – aka their “gender identity” – is a lot more self-evident and concrete and unmistakable than their indigenous ancestry is, yet it’s treated as downright evil to question (let alone disbelieve or deny) that a guy who calls himself Josephine Sexgoddess is a man.

If it’s evil to question anyone’s gender identity why isn’t it evil to question anyone’s ethnic identity? Why is one taboo while the other is The Right Thing To Do? Why is it wrong to try to usurp indigenous identity but brave and stunning to usurp female identity? Please explain.

Indigenous scholars like Kim TallBear, a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and a member of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, say it’s unacceptable for non-Indigenous people to speak for Indigenous people and take honours set aside for them.

“It’s theft of opportunities, resources. It’s theft of our stories,” she said.

Hey! I know what she means! Women feel exactly the same way! But we’re not allowed to say so.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce

Brilliant and enraging: Helen Joyce dissects the intense deliberate sustained suppression of women’s views on Magic Gender.

There’s the double bind, for one thing – you get mostly silenced but if you manage to utter a peep that means you haven’t been silenced.

This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead.

Most of the stifling is secret and carefully hidden, but occasionally a bit of the curtain gets caught in someone’s zipper. Helen gives enraging examples – Intelligence Squared, the Irish Times, the BBC, ABC [the Australian one], Sky News.

All that Sky told me when I asked was this: “After reviewing [the show], we felt that we weren’t really happy with it — basically our production standards were not good enough … This is absolutely no reflection on you (or for that matter Joanna [Harper, trans woman]): you were engaging and interesting, and we’d love to invite you back on Sky News.” 

Reader, they haven’t.

I’ve no such striking story for BBC Woman’s Hour, because it’s never got as far as recording anything with me that it could then drop. The nearest I have to proof that this is deliberate rather than an oversight is something that happened in early 2022. 

Grace Lavery, a trans-identified man whose book Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis was about to come out, had claimed that none of the feminist critics of trans ideology were willing to debate him. I sighed heavily and decided to take one for the team. UnHerd agreed to host a debate between him and me, booked a venue and started selling tickets — at which point Lavery pulled out, insinuating that I, UnHerd and anyone on my side were fascists.

And who did Woman’s Hour invite on after this performance: the best-selling campaigner for women’s rights or the bloke who had written a book about his penis, and who insults and demeans women’s-rights campaigners? It’s not like the show’s producers and presenters can possibly think this is what its audience wants. Every August they tweet requests for topics and interviewees for “listeners’ week”; let’s just say I’m mentioned a lot in the replies and Lavery isn’t.

How grotesque and disgusting is that? They chat warmly with the hideous woman-hating Lavery and they freeze out the brilliant Helen Joyce. Woman’s Hour does. Every day, every hour, we get reminded of how expendable women are, of how ready and eager the people in charge are to silence women while listening to every word from men who wear short skirts and fishnets.

Why all this matters isn’t because it’s unfair to me, although it is. It’s because what I’m trying to shout from the rooftops is that women’s rights are being destroyed in the name of a parody of social justice; that politics and policymaking are turning towards ideology and away from evidence; and above all that a socio-medical scandal is being played out on the bodies of children. 

All that and because we get jumped on and beaten up and silenced for saying so.

Joan Smith is. not. having. it.

Referring to Izzard or any other trans-identified man as “she” is profoundly insulting to women. In this instance, it happens to be the Guardian talking to Izzard “ahead of the release of her new film”. The word “her” has no place in that sentence, creating an immediate sense of cognitive dissonance. We know that something is being waved in our faces, challenging us to object to our own erasure. 

What’s being waved in our faces is the [implicit] dick along with the explicit dick move of ordering us to ignore the dick as we are forced to submit to it.

For years we were told that using someone’s preferred pronouns was a matter of “being kind”, when it’s nothing of the sort. “Look at this obvious man and dare to challenge a suffocating orthodoxy that insists he’s a woman,” is what it says. Suffocating and silencing, because once you accept that, everything else flows from it — men demanding to be in women’s refuges, changing rooms and prisons.

All those people adding “he/him” or “she/her” to their email signatures are telling us they accept the argument that someone’s sex is a matter of personal choice.

And they’re telling us we’re evil shits for not doing likewise. It’s very much an attempt at social control, at forcing us to submit to the new boss.

It’s a form of gaslighting, promoting an ideology that’s hugely controversial, not to say scientifically illiterate. When a newspaper or website does it, it’s making a conscious decision, lining up behind the idea that men can become women at will. It could only happen in a culture where women’s legitimate concerns are laughed at and disregarded.

And stamped “KAREN”.