Here’s a puzzler.

I’m not sure what to think about this. We don’t want people being fired just because bosses dislike something about them, but at the same time, we don’t want to work with (much less under) people with bizarre delusions that govern their behavior. What if employees identify as lions and come to work in costume and try to gnaw on colleagues’ arms?

The thing is…”gender identity” isn’t just a quirk, and isn’t just a personal thing in the head – it’s a performance, and a lie, and a sign of narcissism and entitlement. There must be some – many? – trans people who aren’t like that, but the reality is that the ideology itself depends on narcissism and entitlement. It wouldn’t be an ideology otherwise – it wouldn’t be a thing, a movement, an activism, a controversy, a campaign. It’s not about just inward thoughts about the self: it’s been totally and dramatically externalized.

In short a trans employee signals trouble ahead. Being trans is a kind of open invitation to be a quarrelsome greedy entitled shithead to everyone else.

I suppose there’s the same issue with disability as a protected characteristic if it includes mental disorders as pcs? Some mental disorders prevent people from being tolerable colleagues and employees. What to do?

I don’t know. It’s a puzzler. There are problems either way.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Actors who prioritized politics and ideology.

“…a then-new and experimental model of treating transgender and gender diverse children and adolescents…”

I wish they’d just used “dysphoric” as “transgender” is jumping to an unwarranted conclusion. It seems to concede that “gender identity” and “transness” actually exist, when I don’t think either does at all. Perhaps this was a step too far for the the lawyer writing this, and they don’t want to push too far, too fast, but this statement gives the “actors” in question too much benefit of the doubt and too much legitimacy, particularly since this woman is now detransitioning. It’s like suggesting a person really is possessed by demons, but the exorcism just didn’t take. This strongly suggests the “diagnosis” of trans was premature and uncalled for or, more likely, just plain wrong. If you can’t reliably tell if someone is trans or not with any degree of confidence, you’re setting yourself up for exactly this kind of result. It would be great if these “authorities” could prove the actual existence of a gender identity before making a diagnosis of “transness.”

Let’s take the exorcism analogy a bit farther, and stand it on its head to boot. While the exorcist is trying to drive the disturbed entity out of the sufferer, the practitioner offering “gender affirming care” is trying to make it comfortable. After all, it is primary and foundational, the body’s rightful tennant, not some unwanted intruder. The body itself is to be carved and drugged into submission and obedience, trained to accept the discomfort as a mismatch with its lawful owner, the gender identity, the “treatment” given for the benefit of this being, at the expense of the flesh, blood and bone that it supposedly inhabits.

Rather than the human body in front of them, the doctor’s real client is the gender identity. Everything is done for its benefit. Which must be rather embarrassing when the pesky material body turns around and decides to detransition. What happened to that gender identity that they were so keen to “affirm” when they began “treating” it? Did it suddenly leave? Did it change its mind? Was the gender identity itself “misgendered?” Was it never there to start with? None of these possible answers inspires confidence in “team affirmation’s” ability to correctly discern the presence and nature of the very thing it claims expertise in dealing with.

Yet another failure/tragedy/contadiction in “gender affirming care is how early “treatment” short circuits the possibility of desistance. Genderism’s self-serving medicalization of the distress, confusion and discomfort surrounding the perfectly natural process of puberty transforms a normal bodily process into a disorder or disease. There are real issues that arise as young adults learn what sort of society they’re becoming members of, their own place in it, as well as their newly discovered feelings and sexual desires. The varied and contradictory roles, demands, and expectations that bombard teens can include ones that are limiting, harmful and self destructive, particularly for young women. Genderism tells them they might have been born in the wrong body. It’s much easier (and more lucrative) to “fix” a body that’s wrong than it is to fix a culture that is wrong. Yet, ironically, trans activism spends an enormous amount of time and energy gaslighting, browbeating and bullying entire societies into accepting the idea that men can be or become women, and women can be or become men. If that same effort were put towards fixing the broken, toxic parts of our culture that drive some children to seek comfort in the false hope of the impossible dream of becoming the opposite sex that too many adults are far too eager to sell them, then more of them would grow up in healthier, intact bodies. The distress is real, but the putative cause that genderism posits is probably not. The supposed cure? A nightmare.

If simple human decency is beyond the modern Mengeles, let’s put the fear of lawyers into them. That should do it.

I’ve always thought that once this madness started to cost somebody real money, somone would stop and take a cold, hard look at what is really happening, stripped of blind, sugary, overconfident euphemisms and outright lies.

Dear students: You can get extra credit by doing one of these two political things; be sure to provide a screenshot/photo of you doing one of these two political things; you’re welcome.

At first this is annoying, but then if you enlarge the image it becomes hysterically funny.

(Do I believe that made-up statistic for a second? Of course not.)

Oh yay, it’s like old times – I’m the lucky recipient, along with the president and the secretary of Atheist Alliance and 184 others, of an email telling me “the Good News of Salvation in Yeshua (Jesus), our Saviour.” The generous donor is one Céline L – funny that she’s coy about her last name when she has this good news to offer.

And how does she know? The bible, duh.

The texts of the prophets in the Bible bear witness to this. In particular, the prophecy of Isaiah 53.
As seen below:

Isaiah 53:
1 Who believed the announcement made to us? 

Etc etc etc; you know the drill.

And there are a whole bunch more – bible extract after bible extract, on and on and on. What more do you need to know?? Look right here: it’s in this book.

That’s me convinced.

A couple of days ago:

All of what Layton wrote:

Before I started my gender transition (ftmtf) I was working with a psychiatrist and social worker who was “helping” me work through cult abuse, and who diagnosed me with Dissociative Identity Disorder. While “treating” me for DID, which included experimental hypnosis sessions and her encouraging me to “let the alters take over and live their own lives,” she also pushed me to proceed with gender transition…despite the fact that I was highly unstable, suicidal, self-harming, etc. Because I was working with her three days a week, and was in such a vulnerable place, I trusted her judgment. She brought my case to a place called Thundermist in Rhode Island. Despite seeing my diagnosis and medicating me for several other mental health issues, they co-signed the idea that gender transition would help my mental health, and they immediately put me on birth control and testosterone. For a long time, I have taken responsibility for the part that I played in this. After all, I was an adult. Then, I think of how many medical professionals saw the extremely vulnerable and dissociated state that I was in, and decided that I was somehow mentally stable enough to process the consequences of these actions….especially when I couldn’t even process my own identity. I feel anger, and it is a rightful anger. I was in need of support and stability…and instead, I have had to come to terms with feeling permanently mutilated. The more I process what happened to me, the more anger I feel towards the current medicalization of children. If I couldn’t consent, how could they? What we are doing is running unethical medical experiments on children. There are no longterm studies on the effects of blockers or hormones in young children.

As an adult, I am high-risk for osteoporosis after 3 years on testosterone. I have symptoms of early menopause, as well as other health complaints. These things matter! Detrans stories matter.

Oh willya look at that now.

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1716917419867029519

But but but how can it be malpractice when it’s affirmative??

Let’s read the excerpt:

“…a collection of actors who prioritized politics and ideology over children’s safety, health, and well-being.”

Nailed it. I love lawyers; they’re so good at nailing.

“…their collective failure to treat her properly in the name of a so-called ‘gender-affirmative’ model of care, a then-new and experimental model of treating transgender and gender diverse children and adolescents…”

In the name of a fad, in other words.

Dare we hope that the fad is on its way out?

Trump ungagged.

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan agreed to temporarily lift the gag order that had restricted Trump’s public statements about special counsel Jack Smith, his team and witnesses while she considered a motion from Trump’s lawyers to suspend it entirely while they appeal.

So the giant toddler did what a giant toddler would do.

Within 48 hours, Trump issued a new broadsideattacking the prosecutor, Trump’s first since the gag had been imposed. On Sunday, he took to his social network Truth Social to attack Smith in the exact terms that the order had prohibited, calling him “Deranged Jack Smith.”

When he was born the announcement should have been not “It’s a boy” but “It’s a bully.” He’s the bulliest bully most of us have ever witnessed. The need to insult and belittle and cover in filth is the core of his being. He’s a pinhead with a gigantic store of spite and venom.

Trump’s campaign has been aggressively fundraising off the gag order. Though it declined to specify how much it raised, Trump’s campaign sentout more than three dozen pitches that mentioned the phrase in the last month.

Heads they win tails we lose.

And another one:

Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, pleaded guilty Tuesday to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia, making her the third attorney associated with the former president to accept a plea deal in the sweeping criminal racketeering case.

Ellis, who had been facing two charges including violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering act, pleaded guilty in court Tuesday morningto a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.The deal allows her to avoid jail time in exchange for providing evidence that could implicate other defendants and agreeing to testify in any future trials. Ellis worked closely with personal Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, another defendant in the case who faces 13 charges.

The plea marks the first time a senior Trump aide has been held criminally accountable for and has admitted to making false statements that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by widespread fraud. In a hearing Tuesday morning, Ellis tearfully admitted that she was wrong and misled and that she no longer believes those false claims.

…

She is the fourth Trump co-defendant to plead guilty in the case, which was brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis. Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall, accused of playing a wide-ranging role in the conspiracy to reverse Trump’s loss in Georgia, pleaded guilty Sept. 29 in a cooperation deal with prosecutors. Former pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro each pleaded guilty last week on the eve of their scheduled joint trial in the case.

So what did she do?

Ellis is the second co-defendant with known direct links to Trump to plead guilty in the case. A onetime Fox News regular who was hired in late 2019 as a legal adviser to the Trump campaign, Ellis was part of the post-2020 election legal team, appearing alongside Giuliani and pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell at news conferences where she echoed false claims of election fraud.

She worked closely with Giuliani, traveling to battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania where prosecutors say she spoke to lawmakers urging them to reject the popular vote results in their states. The Georgia indictment also pointed to memos she wrote for Trump outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the election results.

Aka steal the election. No small crime. I kind of hope she gets pulled over for tailgating and receives a long stretch in prison for it.

Ellis was later admonished by a Colorado judge for the false statements she made about the 2020 election. As part of that proceeding, Ellis admitted that several statements she said back then were false — stating that she acted “with “a reckless state of mind” and telling the court she had acted with “selfish” motives and that her actions had “undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.”

So she admitted she lied in order to steal an election to keep that raging fascist in office. Quite an admission.

How dare you write an article that the Daily Mail illustrates with a photo of MEMEMEMEME?!

Proper narc continues to make it all about her.

Let’s think about this. “Feminism is about ALL women. INCLUSIVITY. Or it doesn’t work.”

Well, about, yes, and perhaps for, yes, but we have to be clear about what we mean by it. All women benefit from women’s rights, so in that sense feminism is for and about all women, but in other senses it isn’t. Some women despise feminism and would happily destroy many rights that women currently have. See, for the glaringly obvious example, abortion rights. So yes and no.

More narrowly: yes (and no) all women, but not all women plus men wearing lipstick. Stevenson means the second. That’s stupid. It’s like saying rights for migrants are for ALL migrants, including citizens who Identify As migrants while never stirring from home. It’s like saying workers’ rights are for ALL workers, including bosses and stockholders. It’s like saying BLM is for ALL black people including white people.

Glinner shares a Message from Zoe Hatch to Green Party Members:

Dear  …..,

I received notification today that Joe Hudson-Small, Melanie Earp and John Macefield have voted to suspend me from the party for the email I sent to you on 13th October titled Green Party Women under attack. These named individuals are the ‘on call’ members of GPRC who are supposed to protect the party from the most egregious threats to its reputation. My alleged offence was to send an email talking about how Green Party Women are under attack. The attack on Green Party Women has now been made more clear than ever before, for that at least we perhaps owe them a debt of gratitude. The fervent behaviour of the zealots within the party who are intent on silencing women are the ones bringing the party into disrepute – and it has got to stop. NOW.

As members are aware I am leading the GPW project to compile a dossier of evidence for the EHRC detailing discrimination and detriment towards women on the basis of their Gender Critical (GC) views. Being put on [No Fault Suspension] has the intention of denying me access to any of the benefits of party membership and consequently silencing my voice.

What’s “Green” about trying to remove all women who understand that men are not women from a putative progressive party? What is even “Green” about insisting that men can be women?

Members of GPRC have clearly gone rogue and are acting unlawfully here. Instead of looking after the wellbeing of the party, as they are tasked to do, they are instead directly flouting the legal advice given to them by their own solicitors. This advice clearly defines the offence of victimisation as sanctioning or treating someone badly who has whistleblown regarding discrimination. According to the Equality Act 2010 this is against the law.

…

It has been clear for some time that GPRC are keen to close down Green Party Women. In April and June this year GPRC held two emergency meetings to try to have the GC members of GPRC expelled from the party. You can read more about that sorry saga here. It was only the heroic efforts of Martha James and others that prevented this from happening. Now Martha has stepped down as GPRC Co-Chair citing her reason that “GPRC is not working as it should”. Personally I think Martha massively understates the corrupt practices she and others have witnessed. Now she has stepped aside it is becoming clearer for all to see.

It seems there is no home for women on the left.

Watch the clip.

Dude with pink backpack has shades and a thick scarf obscuring his face. He’s about twice as tall as the women he’s bullying. He stalks around towering over the women and grabbing their signs; he crushes the signs right in their faces, performing the “I’m so furious I’m just on the edge of smashing your face with my fist” ritual. Dude is this “community” in a nutshell: full of hatred and contempt for women who refuse, and big and strong enough to terrorize such women without breaking a sweat.

Updating to add what I forgot to say: he knows which people are women. They’re the one he bullies, because he’s bigger than they are.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Might be.

…with officials planning to draw up guidance for librarians and readers on how to cope with them.e

They’re just books, not unexploded bombs. The way to “cope” with them is to read more books. There are going to be lots of publications with old, outdated ideas that have been superceded by more information and what we believe to be a better understanding. It is still important to keep the “outdated” books because it lets us see the context of the past, lets us see where we’ve come from, etc. Discovering the widespread, casual racism of the past can be alarming, but it’s better to have that awareness (and the evidence for it) than to pretend it didn’t exist, or to believe it will disappear with the removal of some statues and books. There going to be lots of ideas in the world that one might find upsetting or angering. Those ideas aren’t going to go away; neither are the people who espouse them. In the end, what’s important is determining whether or not an idea is good or not, true or not, and useful or not. Good, true, and useful do not always line up the way we’d like them to.

But…dear “university library,” most books might be problematic or harmful.* There’s always that potential in nearly everything.

If you’re going to be emotionally crippled and scarred from ideas you find in books, then university might not be the place for you. Maybe reading altogether. If you’re going to use your claimed, personal discomfort (or that of some poor, helpless, marginalized, possibly hypothetical “other”), then working in a library might not be for you. Unless you pack any commitee you form to evaluate books for their “offensiveness” with like-minded people, few or none will escape censure and condemnation. Few books outside of phone directories will fail to piss off somebody. Your publicly accessible shelves are going to end up being rather bare, your padlocked stacks of “problematic” books nearly infinite.

Newton is remembered for some good ideas about the nature of the physical universe; his biblical and spiritual ideas have not stood the test of time. He likely also held ideas that we would consider bigoted and offensive. But would we have been given the useful physics without the wacky and the wicked, or are they all part of the package, with posterity left to separate the wheat from the chaff? Even geniuses can be wrong, misguided or offensive; sometimes the village idiot, bigot or misanthrope can speak the truth. There’s no knowing in advance who will say what. This winnowing is an ongoing process in which we all take part. What ideas do we assent to, pass along, and amplify? What’s our level of quality control? What do we do if we find out we’re wrong? It’s a truism, but it’s useful to remember that ideas can change the world. The best and the worst that humans do and have done all started with ideas that were picked up and put into action by a sufficient number of people. Without followers and doers, ideas go nowhere and do nothing. Timing and quality control are vital. There are bad times for good ideas, and good times for bad ones. Hitler without supporters would have been a crank. Alone, he could have done nothing. Acceptance, proliferation, and realization of his ideas led to the deaths of tens of millions of people. We are in a crisis period even more dire in its possible outcomes than the last World War. The ideas we put into reality will determine our future as a society and a species, with much of the rest of the biosphere along for the ride as powerless, innocent bystanders and collateral damage. What we think and do matters. What we don’t think and don’t do also matters.

With the volume of information, ideas and knowledge out there, it’s impoosible to avoid relying on authority, but you can still try to vet the authorities upon whom you rely. I know many of us here have been disappointed by the ideological capture of authorities we’d like to be able to depend upon; it’s disconcerting to find them parading around their obliviousness and inconsistency, displaying the blind spots in their own quality control. It makes it harder to trust anything they say on any subject. As uncomfortable as it might be, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to learn that they’re human and fallible too, that they can be as wrong about things as anyone else, including ourselves. The answer is not to shut them up, shout them down or ban them, but to discuss and debate. Easier said than done. But we have the tools, we just need to know how best, and when, to use them.

An unwillingness to engage in open, honest, goodfaith debate is not a good advertisement for the quality of one’s arguments. Claiming to have the moral high ground is not the same as earning it and keeping it. You can’t do it by fiat, because you might not have convinced anyone that your position is correct and defencible. Saying it is doesn’t prevent you from having to do the hard work required, it just delays it. If you can’t argue your position, you have no reason to hold it, and even less to proclaim its justice or superiority. If your ideas are so good, explain them to us and justify them. We can use some good ideas, the more the better. If you have the courage of your conviction, then you should be willing to put them to the test. If they pass, great. If they don’t, that’s also great because we can stop going down a blind alley we can ill afford to waste time and effort on.

*The books I find most “problematic” are the stupid ones that are wastes of paper. Books by “psychics” and “astrologers?” A waste. I’d be happy if our library system decided not to buy them for its collection. But that’s just me. If there wasn’t a market, they might stll be written, but they wouldn’t be published. And of course, as Ophelia points out, the right answer is education.

Sidney Who???

Former President Donald Trump claimed Sidney Powell was “never” his attorney in a social media post Sunday, three days after she pleaded guilty in the Georgia election subversion case.

People are always never his ________ once they stop licking his bum.

Despite Trump’s claims, Powell was briefly an official member of Trump’s legal team in 2020, and Trump stayed in contact with her on election-related matters even after she was ousted from his campaign.

“Sidney Powell was one of millions and millions of people who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, AND OUR COUNTRY IS BEING ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED BECAUSE OF IT!!! MS. POWELL WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS. In fact, she would have been conflicted,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Lying in public again; ho hum.

Meanwhile, lemme say how I detest that childish habit of his of stuffing way too many subordinate clauses into his sentences. If you have that much you need to add, stop, take a deep breath, and divide it into more than one sentence. Don’t end up with a sentence with 143 commas. Maeks you look stupid and childish.

Musk is doing what now?

…the sight of Elon Musk charging towards Wikipedia with his trademark guile and delicacy was so predictable that it was almost relaxing. He saw a collective resource that people prized and he wanted to hurt it. Why does Wales even need any money to run Wikipedia in the first place, he wondered on Sunday. You could fit the entire thing on your phone, he claimed. Eleven minutes later, he offered $1bn if it would change its name to Dickipedia.

He really is that adult.

What’s Elon Musk’s money for?

Tune in tomorrow to see Elon ask what the hell the British Museum and Library are good for, with not one but THREE snoring emojis.

The idenniny trap.

This is the reason why the pedagogical practices that many elite private schools have adopted of late, like racially segregated affinity groups or encouraging students to “own” their “whiteness,” infuriate me. If you know anything about the world, you know how dangerous it is to teach kids to define themselves by the group into which they’re born—and how easily such a culture can lead to the worst forms of zero-sum conflict.

“No place for hate” indeed.

Gee I hope the man’s fist is ok.

Here is how not to resist the social contagion of trans ideology.

What a string of terrible ideas. Don’t bin the glitter! Let him glitter as much as he wants. Join him in glitter play if he welcomes you. Don’t force him into sports or camping – offer them if you like, but don’t force. Not everyone likes sports, not everyone likes camping, and no one should have to. Offer him a lot of things, especially things you liked as a child, but also let him find them himself.

There are some exceptions to that rule I suppose. If he develops a taste for violence, then it’s time to step in. If he starts being a bully, tell him not to, and why. But do not bin the glitter.

“No place for hate,” says the huge burly man’s placard, as he punches an older woman in the head hard enough to knock her down.

This was the “No Place For Hate” counter protestor at Nanaimo City Hall today who crossed the street to the side where the parental rights group was gathered, put his sign directly in an older woman’s face and then punched her hard in the side of the head when she tried to move it away. She dropped to the pavement immediately from the blow. She was taken to hospital and is planning to press charges, we are being told. I didn’t take this photo and I wasn’t at the City Hall portion of the event (just the rally at the park later). But feel free to share this photo since people need to be warned of him for their own self-protection.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on A pause for extra sass.

I think that bit about the brutishness of human existence is critical—not Critical. This metaphysics of history and humanity in Critical Theory-flavored views, which they inherit from Marx, is that if not for [insert favored villain], life would be utopian. At the core of existence is pure gold, and it will be revealed by removing all the base substances through the hermetic alchemy of Critique and Dialectic. Humanity is already perfected, and all we have to do is deal with the colonialists, racists, sexists, cisheteronormativists, capitalists. Once we do, the Perfect will be revealed, and Social Man will be finally recognize himself as his own creator and realize the End of History.

In really real reality, however, we see no reason to presume this sort of antediluvian perfection. There’s no Fall, no expulsion from Eden as punishment for crimes committed by Europeans. Humans are but mammals, products of evolution and therefore intrinsically imperfect. Our core isn’t a flawless gem to be found be casting off the impurities that sully us. Our core is stupid and selfish, to be accounted for and mitigated by the systems and technologies that we’ve developed over painful, bloody millennia.