No solidarity for women:

So why, then, in a moment when statements of solidarity fly fast and furious, have feminists and their progressive allies not been more outspoken about the grotesque sexual violence visited upon Israeli women on Oct. 7?

Many feminist organizations rushed to express support for the Palestinian cause while eliding the plight of Israeli victims. The organization UN Women issued a four-page report last month exclusively addressing the impact of the war on women and girls in Gaza but made only a brief condemnation of the Oct. 7 attack that made no mention of the sexual violence that had been reported. A group of prominent scholars circulated a letter under the title “Feminists for a Free Palestine,” without explicitly condemning the sexual violence against Israeli women.

I guess the thinking is that some women deserve rape?

College campus groups have furnished other examples, such as the women’s students’ groups at Harvard that signed on to a letter holding Israel entirely responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks or the (now-former) director of the University of Alberta’s Sexual Assault Center’s signing on to a letter doubting the veracity of accounts of Israeli rape survivors. Even the office on my own campus that is devoted to helping students “lead social-justice centered lives” issued thousands of words in solidarity with the Palestinians and did not once acknowledge the sexual violence (or murder or abduction) perpetrated by Hamas. And then there are the familiar conversations like those that Miriam Schler, the executive director of a Tel Aviv crisis center, reports having with friends who style themselves “champions of human rights, feminism, and social justice” but who “have been bending over backwards to justify atrocities and rationalize rape.”

So, yes, the thinking is that some women deserve rape. It seems Israeli women are all Karens.

This tragic minimization — or justification, in some cases — of violence against Israeli women appears to be the result of an ideological turn among some feminists and progressives that elevates an “antiracist” agenda above the core feminist commitment to defend the universal right to bodily autonomy for all women. This argument contends that because Israel is a colonial power oppressing the Palestinians, any resistance is a justified dimension of decolonization.

Meanwhile, be sure not to ask any questions about how Hamas treats Palestinian women.

Grrrrr. Now we’re “non-trans women” – a subset of ourselves.

Sneak sneak sneak. Sneak in the “non-trans” bit as if it needs to be spelled out that women are not men who call themselves women. No thank you, that is surplus to requirements; we are women; men who pretend to be women are men.

Peter Tatchell tries to school women on who can be a woman and Rosie Duffield reminds him that we don’t need him to tell us who can be a woman. Go school yourself Peter.

Tim Harris’s mention of Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland has prompted me to summon the book from the library and to read the Guardian review by Fara Dabhoiwala.

In the endless catalogue of British imperial atrocities, the unprovoked invasion of Tibet in 1903 was a minor but fairly typical episode. Tibetans, explained the expedition’s cultural expert, were savages, “more like hideous gnomes than human beings”. Thousands of them were massacred defending their homeland, “knocked over like skittles” by the invaders’ state-of-the-art machine guns. “I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire,” wrote a British lieutenant, “though the General’s order was to make as big a bag as possible.” As big a bag as possible – killing inferior people was a kind of blood sport.

And blood sport is a Thing to [a certain class of] the British. I did a post once, not very long ago, about a fact I hadn’t known: the toffs like to shoot birds out of the sky and then just walk away. They don’t shoot them for food, they just shoot them. Same with “trophy” hunting – elephants, lions, whatever they think will look nice on the wall.

And now we learn that they saw a set of people the same way. A “bag,” a “trophy,” a blood sport.

And then the looting started. More than 400 mule-loads of precious manuscripts, jewels, religious treasures and artworks were plundered from Tibetan monasteries to enrich the British Museum and the Bodleian Library.

Ok stop right there.

Notice an incongruity?

On the one hand the people are so much garbage, as cheerfully slaughtered as mosquitoes. On the other hand, creators of precious manuscripts and artworks well worth looting and taking home to show off.

Well which is it?

Sitting at home watching the BBC antiques show Flog It one quiet afternoon in the early 21st century, Sathnam Sanghera saw the delighted descendant of one of those soldiers make another killing – £140,000 for selling off the artefacts his grandfather had “come across” in the Himalayas.

As one does.

It’s a characteristically instructive vignette in Empireland, Sanghera’s impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain’s imperial past and present. The empire, he argues, still shapes British society – its delusions of exceptionalism, its immense private and public wealth, the fabric of its cities, the dominance of the City of London, even the entitled and drunken behaviour of British expats and holidaymakers abroad. Yet the British choose not to see this: wilful amnesia about the darker sides of imperialism may be its most pernicious legacy.

I look forward to reading it. Thanks, Tim.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Signals.

To return to the question of ‘indigenous’ religious artefacts in museums, it should surely be pointed out that a great bone of contention is that a great many, if not most, of such artefacts were looted in the course of colonial wars, etc., and it is hardly surprising that the descendants of those peoples should not be happy about it, and the lack of respect shown to them then and now, a lack of respect that – forgive me for saying this – appears in at least one of the comments here.

There was the Younghusband invasion of Tibet in 1903, in which monasteries were sacked and plundered, and the man, Lawrence Waddell, mostly responsible for (as he said) ‘procuring from that closed land those manuscripts and books so greatly required by Western scholars’, even as he described Tibetan Buddhism as ‘a parasitic disease’ and Tibetans as ‘sunk in the lowest depths of savagery’, and as being ‘more like hideous gnomes than human beings’. There was the looting and burning of the Summer Palace in Peking in 1868. More than 10,000 Indigenous Australian & Torres Island artefacts have been identified in institutions around the world, a third of them in the British Museum. The ‘British Expedition to Abyssinia’ of 1868, in which… But I shan’t go on, except to say that you may find all this information, and more, in Sathnam Sanghera’s excellent and fair-minded book, Empireland.

I have confined the above to Britain, but I rather doubt that the objects in question in science museums in the USA were all happily handed over by happy ‘natives’ (‘Oh, great, you are going to put them in museums along with those skulls you need for your physiognomical research into IQ, etc.! Thank you so much’!). And I am not surprised at all that indigenous peoples are still unhappy about the situation.

I don’t think one should be worried about accusations of ‘virtue-signalling’, which come for the most part from people whose attitudes, even though they may proclaim themselves as atheists, seem uncomfortably close to those of nineteenth-century imperialists, colonisers, colonists, and Christian missionaries.

“Labour losing women” is trending.

Notice anything missing?

Women. She doesn’t include women. Apparently there’s no need to stand up for our rights.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Signals.

I think the term “virtue signalling” can be susceptible to overuse in something like the way “critical race theory” is. Signalling virtue in itself isn’t a bad thing, because virtue isn’t a bad thing; “virtue signalling” as a pejorative is meant to refer to a cynical or vacuous performance of a kind of artificial morality. Likewise, critical academic analysis of race in itself isn’t a bad thing, but “critical race theory” is a specific strand of academic theory which is a hot mess. The terms’ lack of clarity make them susceptible to being co-opted or misunderstood.

Nevertheless, I like the term “virtue signalling.” I like the juxtaposition of the two words. Virtue is supposed to evoke deep, rich and meaningful morality, but signalling suggests tinny pings of morse code. The idea of virtue as something to be merely signalled is, to me at least, always a little jarring, a little perverse. I like the sting it gives.

But yeah, not unlike the way Republicans have co-opted “critical race theory” to stop any academic discussion of race happening at all, rather than trying to ensure that it’s done well, “virtue signalling” has the potential to turn people against any displays of moral goodness, rather than simply trying to ensure there’s thought and meaning behind them. Which is going the wrong way.

The sting of “virtue signalling” is supposed to punish people for cheapening morality. But it could create disincentive for people to outwardly display any morality at all. Maybe it’s too cynical.

But we definitely need some kind of term for the phenomenon we’re seeing everywhere, which is that the relationship between incentive and moral behaviour has been warped. Everywhere I look, I see examples of people choosing to signal their allegiance to various groups or causes in ways that actually harm them. A thousand Trolley Problems, and everyone’s pulling the lever to drive the trolley over the victims because it gives the lever-pullers a short-term dose of social credibility.

People make a big show of embracing gender extremism because they want to appear aligned with gays and lesbians, even after we show them that it’s harmful to gays and lesbians. People make a big show of saying “trans women are women” because they want to appear as though they’re on the cutting edge of women’s rights and breaking gender stereotypes, even when it’s crystal clear that trans-identifying males are gutting women’s rights. People make a big show out of supporting ayurveda and other pseudoscience because they want to make a big show of how racially and culturally open-hearted they are, even though “alternative medicine” hurts many of the very people they’re signalling their allegiance with.

On and on. They pull the lever anyway.

We need a pithy, venomous term for that kind of incentive-reversal moral-cowardice-disguised-as-virtue that’s going on everywhere, something more precise than just “virtue signalling.”

Hmm. I’ll try to think of some ideas.

Apparently there is no number of daughters sufficient to convince men of the need to take women seriously.

Donald Trump has daughters. Ditto Vladimir Putin. David Cameron, with two, maintained a primitive preference for male colleagues/banter. George Osborne’s daughter couldn’t inoculate him against airing psychopathic fantasies about Theresa May. That Boris Johnson was the parent as prime minister of two, then three girls, similarly confirms that hiring only men who have daughters cannot, sadly, be the solution to misogyny in Westminster, the City or the Metropolitan police.

Admittedly, since spawning another girl, Johnson has apologised to the female colleague known to his old WhatsApp pals as “that cunt”.

Baby steps. Plus lots of daughters. This is going to take some time, isn’t it.

I’m reading a piece by Elizabeth Weiss about science museums and how they should respond to controversies. I’ve paused to follow up a sidetrack.

In the past two decades, science institutions have faced challenges from another source: indigenous religions. Unlike Christian fundamentalist beliefs, these indigenous beliefs often receive enthusiastic support from academics, scholars, and mainstream media journalists. This support might stem from a desire to oppose Western civilization and align with the “victims” of modernity as part of an effort to “decolonize” museums. Alternatively, it may also be linked to a trend of virtue signaling, which has allowed the misconception that “indigenous knowledge is science” to take root in academic circles.

It’s the virtue signaling bit that caused me to stop and think. It’s a label I find amusing, and probably deserved at least some of the time, but I also feel slightly uncomfortable or guilty about liking it. I second-guess myself when I smirk at it. Know what I mean? “Yes there is a lot of that around, but at the same time, what are people supposed to do, say nothing lest they be accused of virtue signaling?”

I think it’s not always that simple. I think it’s hard to tell the difference between virtue signaling and signaling solidarity or concern or sympathy and the like. I think it’s very possible, indeed likely, that sometimes what looks like virtue signaling to opponents of virtue signaling is actually solidarity and the like. No doubt it can also be a mixture of both.

I think what caused me to stop and question the label this time is the fact that it’s about things indigenous. My reading slowed when I got to that part, even before the virtue bit. Why? Because I’m ambivalent, I think. I’m not a fan of deference to religions, but on the other hand, indigenous people by definition were here first (that is, their ancestors were), and it seems a bit rude to blow off their concerns entirely. I think science museums should be science museums, but I also think indigenous people should get a little respect. I don’t think it’s necessarily virtue-signaling to say that.

Am I wrong? Do any of yiz have this kind of ambivalence?

Daily Mail:

USA Boxing to allow transgender women to compete against female boxers under certain conditions from 2024 after introducing new policy

That is, USA Boxing to allow men to punch women.

USA Boxing has adopted a ‘Transgender Policy’, which will allow male boxers who transition to fight in the female category from 2024.

One, it’s unfair, and two, it’s dangerous.

But it’s only unfair to women and dangerous to women, so it doesn’t matter.

USA Boxing announced the policy on Friday, saying in a statement: ‘The purpose of this policy is to provide fairness and safety for all boxers.’

Bullshit. That policy can’t possibly provide either fairness or safety for women boxers.

Stop cheating or lose your funding.

Parkrun must protect women runners from transgender rivals – or risk losing their funding, says a report backed by Olympians.

The research paper by Policy Exchange, a think tank, found that at least three Parkrun female records were held by biological men as a result of its policy of allowing entrants to self-identify their gender.

The report – backed by Olympic medallists Sharron Davies and Daley Thompson and tennis player Martina Navratilova – warned that female athletes risk being alienated unless grassroots sports from cricket and rowing to football and tennis could provide fair and safe play.

That is, the report warned that there’s a risk that female athletes will be alienated. The female athletes themselves aren’t doing anything risky; it’s the allowing male athletes to cheat that’s the risk.

Parkrun is among sports highlighted by Policy Exchange where grassroots policies allow for participants to self-identify their gender. This contrasted with elite or competitive levels in the same sports where there were protected female categories or there were restrictions placed on their participation.

You mean there were restrictions placed on the participation of male athletes, right? Not the participation of protected female categories.

Its analysis suggested it placed women at a competitive disadvantage, citing how the winning woman from the London Marathon in 2023 would be beaten by the 231st ranking male, or that every British long-course swimming record set by an elite female swimmer has been beaten by a teenage boy.

The report highlighted Porthcawl’s Parkrun record time of 18 minutes 53 seconds in the female 45-49 category which was set by transgender runner Siân Longthorpe. It beat the previous record by one minute 13 seconds, prompting an Olympic long distance runner to say the record was “probably now out of female hands forever”.

The unfairness seems so blindingly obvious, doesn’t it?

Blah blah blah Peter.

Rabbits aren’t same as other women but equally valid.

Shovels aren’t same as other women but equally valid.

Sailboats aren’t same as other women but equally valid.

In short, that doesn’t mean anything. It’s hurbleburble meant to cover up the absurdity of claiming that men are women. Men aren’t the same as women how? In the sense of being the opposite of women – of being the other sex in a two-sex species. Men aren’t the same as women in the same way that up isn’t the same as down or night isn’t the same as day. “Valid” is beside the point.

Women are women based on their sex. Men are men based on their sex. The end. “Gender identity” is just a thing in the head, which can be meaningful to the owner of the head but isn’t meaningful to anyone else. We can all have fantasies about our identities, but what we can’t do is order everyone else to endorse the fantasies, let alone live by them.

Still racing toward the cliff.

The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.

As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.

“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said. “Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”

…

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels.

Limp and vague and wholly empty. They can’t do more even if they want to. If they try they won’t be world leaders any more.

Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.

He said these new developments indicated the Earth was in uncharted territory ​​and under siege. “What we mean by this is that we may be seeing a shift in Earth’s response to 250 years of escalated human pressures … to a situation of ‘payback’ where Earth starts sending invoices back to the thin layer on Earth where humans live, in the form of off the charts extremes.”

Rockstrom was among the authors of the 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper, which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and dying forests could tilt the planet into a state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile.

Check, check, check.

This is as good as it’s going to be.

Who ya gonna believe, Trump or pretty much anyone else?

Donald Trump has angrily denied claims by the director of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York that he bullied his way into a now famous cameo. The former president made a brief appearance in the 1992 film in a scene filmed at the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time.

Director Chris Columbus said Mr Trump insisted on appearing in the film if they used the hotel as a location. But Mr Trump said the filmmakers were “begging” him to appear.

“I was very busy, and didn’t want to do it. They were very nice, but above all, persistent,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.

Tsss. Of course he wanted to do it. He’s always loved attention. A spot in a movie? A movie that was a sequel to a huge success? Of course he wasn’t too busy to do it.

The initial comments from Mr Columbus were made in a 2020 interview with Business Insider, although they received renewed attention on social media over Christmas. The director said Mr Trump sought a cameo appearance in addition to the customary fee to film in the hotel.

“We paid the fee, but he also said ‘the only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie’,” Mr Columbus said. “So we agreed to put him in the movie.”

Trump has been a publicity hound his whole adult life.

Let the mutilations continue.

Ohio’s Republican governor has vetoed legislation that would have barred transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming care, he said Friday. Signing the bill would “be saying that the state, the government” knows what’s better for youth than their parents, Gov. Mike DeWine said.

So there should be no laws against beating children, or torturing them, or locking them up in a dark cold basement room, or putting them to work in factories at age 5. Parents always know better, so there should be no child protection laws or institutions at all.

Also, it makes a difference what you call it. “Gender-affirming” makes it sound wholesome and nice. Non-medical genital mutilation and mastectomy don’t sound quite so nice.

The legislation would have prohibited gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary youth, including hormone blockers, hormone replacement therapy, medical or surgical procedures and some mental health services.

That’s because hormone blockers, hormone replacement therapy, medical and surgical procedures are very drastic things to do to children and teenagers, and they’re done in service to a comparatively new and fanciful ideology that claims physical sex is changeable.

The bill also sought to prohibit transgender [male] athletes from taking part in female sports.

Because it’s not fair to females. Apparently the governor of Ohio doesn’t care about that.

How not to do an exhibition on women in revolt:

I wouldn’t say the circled bit makes clear that trans women are centered, but that it makes clear they’re included, which of course they shouldn’t be. Men shouldn’t be included in exhibitions about women, because men are not women. You can’t include men in an exhibition that purports to be about women even slightly without diluting it. It’s just really stupid, frankly, to claim you’re doing a thing about women rebelling and at the same time shove in a sentence about men pretending to be women as if they belonged there. It’s insulting. It can’t not be insulting. It can’t ever be anything but reminding women that we never get to have anything about women and women only, ever again.

Men wanting to be women, claiming to be women, dressing up as women, insisting they are women, are a separate issue from women demanding equal rights. Even if you think such men are an important issue, it’s still a separate issue, and frankly it’s a pretty trivial issue compared to the rights and freedoms of half of humanity.

Today I learned that it’s “insidious” to be not attracted to someone.

When the Mail gets it and “progressives” don’t:

The BBC has been heavily criticised for describing playwright Noel Coward as ‘queer’ amid concerns that the term, ‘reclaimed’ by some in the gay community, is still offensive to many.

A social media post by the BBC Arts account promoting the BBC2 Boxing Day documentary about the actor, singer and composer’s life described him as being ‘queer’ in a ‘very straight world’. The same wording is used on the show’s description on the BBC’s iPlayer.

Critics accused the corporation of using ‘homophobic slurs’ saying Coward was a ‘gay man’, while another said the term ‘queer’ was an ‘insult for most gay men and women’. 

And it’s not for the BBC to err on the side of insulting most gay women and men. The BBC, pillar of the establishment including the royals, is not the institution you want babbling about queer this and queer that one minute and kissing an archbishop’s bum the next.

BBC News’ own style guide says the term should not be applied to an individual or group ‘unless they have already adopted it’. 

It adds: ‘Originally a pejorative term… “queer” has been reclaimed by some in the LGBTQ+ community. However, it is not universally accepted and has the potential to cause offence.’

Yeah kind of like the way the word “nigga” does when used by white people. Duh.

In response to the BBC post, Dennis Noel Kavanagh, director at the Gay Men’s Network, said: ‘You know damned well a good portion of gay men find this term offensive, but it’s plainly more important to you to offend us and show how much you love Stonewall rather than behave like an independent broadcaster.’

The BBC has been accused of being too close to campaigning gay charity Stonewall, an organisation that has sparked controversy for its views on issues such as trans rights.

Gay rights activist Fred Sargeant said Coward ‘would never have embraced a slur used against his generation of gay men’.

Two of my favorite gay rights activists.

Pathetic that the Mail gets this and the Beeb doesn’t.

What is The Birth of a Nation?

D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic 1915 film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern carpetbaggers and freed Black people.

Similar to Gone With the Wind but without spoken dialogue.

History is usually written by the winners. But that wasn’t the case when The Birth of a Nation was released on February 8, 1915. In just over three hours, D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic film about the Civil War and Reconstruction depicted the Ku Klux Klan as valiant saviors of a post-war South ravaged by Northern carpetbaggers and immoral freed Black people. The film was an instant blockbuster. And with innovative cinematography and a Confederate-skewed point of view, The Birth of a Nation also helped rekindle the KKK.

Until the movie’s debut, the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1865 by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, was a regional organization in the South that was all but obliterated due to government suppression. But The Birth of a Nation’s racially charged Jim Crow narrative, coupled with America’s heightened anti-immigrant climate, led the Klan to align itself with the movie’s success and use it as a recruiting tool.

A heightened anti-immigrant climate eh? That sounds oddly familiar.

Adapted from the book The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr., who was a classmate and friend of President Woodrow Wilson, The Birth of a Nation portrayed Reconstruction as catastrophic. It showed Radical Republicans encouraging equality for Black people, who in the film are represented as uncouth, intellectually inferior and predators of white women. And this racist narrative was widely accepted as historical fact.

That is, Black men are represented as predators of white women.

Anyway. That one movie has a lot to answer for.