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 There are going to be lots of publications with old, outdated ideas that have been superceded by more information and what we believe to be a better understanding. It is still important to keep the “outdated” books because it lets us see the context of the past, lets us see where we’ve come from, etc.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.

Please flag the problematic books, says…Cambridge University Library???

The University Library, one of just six legal deposit libraries in Britain with some 10 million books, is asking lecturers to flag “problematic” books that might be “offensive/harmful”.

But…dear “university library,” most books might be problematic or harmful. There’s always that potential in nearly everything. If that’s your criterion you should be a paper-recycling facility, not a library.

Examples of such books are being sought from across the university’s colleges, with officials planning to draw up guidance for librarians and readers on how to cope with them.

I think you’ll find that “how to cope with” books is called “education” and that it’s something Cambridge University has a bit of a reputation for. Fun fact: Christopher Marlowe is an alumnus. Now he was offensive if you like.

Prof David Abulafia, a leading historian at Gonville and Caius College, said: “Identifying books because they are seen as problematic itself has a very problematic history – witness bibliographies in the Nazi period where books by Jewish authors are marked with a star.

“It is absolutely not the task of librarians to sit in judgment, least of all in a university where they don’t do any of the teaching and where it is vital to promote free debate.”

It’s not even the task of librarians to try to console or soothe people who find books problematic.

Cambridge’s University Library, founded in 1209, established a “decolonisation working group” in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, but it is continuing to expand with 17 current members.

The group say they are “actively re-contextualising library holdings which are a legacy of colonialism and occupation” and developing “policies and guidance relating to decolonisation”.

What happens when someone finds the decolonisers problematic?

H/t NightCrow

Originally a comment by Sastra on Inextricably entwined with cultural fads.

The social contagions that get real social traction are those that can piggyback on something legitimate, and roughly similar. Both Multiple Personality Disorder and Recovered Memory Syndrome were presented as new examples of women/children who suffered abuse in the past which is being dismissed today because “it didn’t happen.” The coping strategies (splitting the mind into separate alters or repressing all knowledge) were legitimized because the person making the claim was clearly suffering. That left the sympathetic with the easy conclusion that This Is Totally Familiar. Kid with behavior problems is being beaten at home. Woman says she was raped and isn’t believed.

Been there; done that; not going back. Believe. Multiple Personality is real and recovered memories legitimate. Skeptically examining the unique properties of the particular way these Totally Familiar issues are manifesting just compounds the sin of not believing. Say it’s a social contagion and it’s just like saying kids don’t get beaten and women don’t get raped. We know what you’re like — and it isn’t nice.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen transgender identities jump on the back of homosexuality. If being trans is a social contagion, then so is being gay. Only bigots think the latter, therefore only bigots think the former.

The Detroit Free Press:

A politically connected Detroit synagogue president was found stabbed to death Saturday morning outside her home in the city’s Lafayette Park neighborhood, east of downtown.

Samantha Woll, 40, led the Isaac Agree Downtown Detroit Synagogue and previously worked for U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Holly, and on the reelection campaign of Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat.

Police said in an afternoon statement that they were investigating after finding a body stabbed multiple times in the 1300 block of Joliet Place. A trail of blood led to the victim’s home, where police said they believe the crime occurred.

Which sounds as if she tried to get help before she bled out, which is horrifying.

Woll had led the synagogue since 2022 and was involved in other local Jewish organizations. A statement sent by its rabbi said it was “shocked and saddened,” by Woll’s “unexpected death.”

Well, it’s not an unexpected death, it’s a murder. Let’s not euphemize it.

In a social media post, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, called Woll a friend and an organizing community member who had a sweet smile and warm eyes.

“Our community is devastated and we are shocked,” she said. “Please keep her family and our community in your prayers.”

In 2017, The Detroit Jewish News selected Woll as one of its “36 under 36,” describing her as co-chair of the American Jewish Committee’s ACCESS Detroit Young Leadership Program and founder of the Muslim-Jewish Forum of Detroit, a grassroots organization aimed at building relationships between young adults of those faiths.

“By extending her hand and creating space for connection between Muslims and Jews, she has exemplified the values of healing the world,” The Detroit Jewish News article said.

And this is the thanks she gets.

I suppose the most we can hope is that it was a burglary that escalated or similar, not ethno-religious at all.

From an article in the current Scientific American:

“Sex” typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms “female” and “male” are often used in relation to biological sex. “Gender” refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen.

So “woman” and “man” don’t label biological sex? They’re purely social? They label only how people “identify” and not what people are? And this is settled knowledge and everyone agrees with it? But nevertheless the scientific literature confuses the terminology?

Are we quite sure about that?

For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses “female” and “male,” so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms “woman” and “man” are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but when citing the work of others, it is difficult to add that nuance.

Oh, neither sex nor gender is binary? Both are a spectrum? I did not know that.

The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.

Therefore it’s totally fair for men to infiltrate women’s sports. That’s science, baby!

Gareth Roberts takes a blowtorch to the “thinking” of Owen Jones:

‘Oh, and by the way’, said Owen Jones in his ‘sassy’ mode the other day on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, ‘it wasn’t actually Hamas who introduced the law banning homosexuality in Gaza. Guess who it was?’ He then gave an extra pause for extra sass. ‘The British Empire.’ (Dramatic chord!)

There’s an ordinance! A British Mandate Ordinance! Can’t argue with that, now can you.

Jones, who has been a vocal supporter of Palestine during the current conflict in Gaza, clearly thought he had got one over on those critics who have tried to remind him of Hamas’s less than savoury attitudes to gay people. Never mind that the British Mandate for Palestine ended in 1948, when Dorothy Squires was Britain’s top hitmaker and Mrs Dale’s Diary was the hot new soap. The obvious thought that the Gazans have had 74 years to repeal this anti-gay ordinance doesn’t seem to have occurred to Jones. In fact, they have made the ‘offence’ and its punishment more severe in recent years. Meanwhile, the other jurisdictions that also were formerly under the mandate had no such issue – Jordan scrapped the law in 1951, Israel in 1988 (though it stopped bothering to prosecute homosexuality much earlier).

…

This bizarre romanticism of non-Western cultures as prelapsarian paradises is, ironically, a very Western thing. In fact, there is a bulging smorgasbord of ironies here.

The first and most obvious is that this view is deeply racist. It treats the non-Western peoples of the world as children, with no agency or identity of their own. They can only copy us, and once something Western goes into their laws, bish bosh, it’s in for good. Even after decolonisation, it never occurs to them to change it…

We are also often asked to swallow an absurdity of presentism – that before the coming of the dread British Empire, it had never occurred to these populations to do anything that is disapproved of by Westerners on the internet in the year 2023.

In other words he implies that before the British Mandate Palestine was a utopia of idenniny recognition and celebration.

But in truth, Western Enlightenment ideas didn’t enable slavery, colonialism or the punishment of sexual difference. They stopped them. Jones and his ilk are posing against the very institutions and economic system that support and enable their charmed lives. The default of civilisation isn’t egalitarian Eden, it’s earth-grubbing poverty, backbreaking toil and perpetual war conducted by any means, with a ‘99.99 per cent for me, and a tiddler for you’ distribution of the spoils.

And no time or energy to have luxury idenninies.

This is a useful mini-essay.

Karen Carpenter’s tragic battle triggered a social contagion of anorexia; Princess Diana’s public struggle with bulimia had the same effect.

The book Sybil kicked off the multiple personality disorder epidemic in the 80s. Running parallel to that was the Satanic Panic, set off by the book Michelle Remembers. As a result, thousands of lives were destroyed.

As cutting started to appear in movies and TV shows, the number of teens self-harming increased, and when TikTok influencers with Tourette’s launched to fame, adolescent girls began experiencing TikTok tics.

Mental illnesses are inextricably entwined with the cultural fads and whims of the era in which they arise. Our celebration of the likes of Jazz Jennings and Ellen Page captures the minds of young people, plants the dangerous idea that the discomfort and anguish of puberty can be miraculously solved with drugs and surgeries, sending many down the same devastating path to destruction.

Children and adolescents no more need trans role models than they do anorexic or bulimic role models. Every time we celebrate a celebrity coming out as trans, we sacrifice countless young people to the horror of this medical atrocity.

Seriously. How many wannabe Ellen Pages are out there? I bet it’s quite a few. Horrible.

Steerpike at the Spectator has more:

In the past fortnight, pro-Palestine marches in London have attracted some unseemly elements to their cause. One such example was offered today at an event for Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in central London. After one speaker asked the crowd ‘What is the solution to liberate people in the concentration camp of Palestine?’ a chant of ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad’ echoed out around the speaker. An incitement for holy war? Surely grounds for a police intervention…

Unfortunately not, it seems. For the Metropolitan Police have now used their overactive Twitter/X account to confirm they will not be taking any action:

“The word jihad has a number of meanings but we know the public will…”

blah blah blah see previous post for the full blah. The Met Police who look fixedly the other way when trans “activists” abuse women also pretend they don’t know what Hizb ut-Tahrir means when it shouts “Jihad jihad jihad.” When in doubt side with male people; when in doubt side with Islamist male people.

In London today:

They have assessed this video, filmed at the Hizb ut-Tahrir protest in central London today, and have not identified any offences arising from the specific clip. However, recognising the way language like this will be interpreted by the public and the divisive impact it will have, officers have identified the man involved and will be speaking to him shorty to discourage any repeat of similar chanting.

“Divisive.”

Not quite, Sunshine. It’s not quite that bland. Jihad means, for instance, what Hamas did two weeks ago today. It means, ultimately, everyone on the planet must submit to Islam, and Islamism must be in charge everywhere on the planet. It means submit or die.

Dang that really has it all.

He closed comments. There is a good deal of rage in the quote tweets. Like…

He did what?

The Irish Independent last March:

Equality Minister Roderic O’Gorman has been accused of playing “parish pump politics” after his department transferred €1.1m to LGBTQ+ projects. The money was originally allocated to schemes for the Traveller and Roma communities, migrant integration and Magdalene laundry redress.

So, obviously, just the right man to close a summit on menopause.

Trump is having a bad day.

A former lawyer to Donald Trump has pleaded guilty in an election subversion case in the US state of Georgia. Kenneth Chesebro is the third of 19 co-defendants to plead guilty in a deal with Fulton County prosecutors. He is accused of putting forward a slate of fake pro-Trump electors in Georgia and other states to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.

That is, to steal the election. “Overturn” makes it sound vaguely legitimate. It’s important to be very clear and uneuphemistic about this.

Under the plea deals, the former defendants will have to testify under oath in forthcoming trials.

…

His guilty plea can be seen as a victory for Fulton County prosecutors as they continue to build their case against Mr Trump, said Atlanta lawyer Rachel Kaufman.

“The chips are falling and falling on Trump,” Ms Kaufman told the BBC.

“Chesebro pleading guilty and agreeing to testify truthfully against his co-defendants is the biggest blow yet to any defence they’ve been building. Chesebro was like the captain of Trump’s legal team – and was often the only link between Trump and the other co-conspirators,” she said.

Good to know.

Judge holds Trump to account.

A New York judge has fined Donald Trump for violating a gag order in his civil fraud trial.

Mr Trump was fined $5,000 (£4,100) by Judge Arthur Engoron on Friday. The judge said in court that the former president had failed to remove an online post mocking a clerk at the court. He also threatened Mr Trump with jail time, and demanded he take down the “untrue and disparaging” post made about the clerk earlier this month.

Trump’s flunkies took it off social media but left it on his website. He can fling insults around but apparently he’s too important to erase them himself: that kind of menial work is for the underlings.

Later in the day, Judge Engoron ruled that Mr Trump pay a fine given that “the violation was inadvertent, and given that it is a first time violation”.

“Make no mistake: future violations, whether intentional or unintentional, will subject the violator to far more severe sanctions, which may include, but are not limited to, steeper financial penalties, holding Donald Trump in contempt of court, and possibly imprisoning him,” Judge Engoron said in his ruling.

Go on, Don. Test him.

Reduxx reports:

A trans-identified male musician in California is currently touring and performing songs calling for the murder of women critical of gender identity ideology. Precious Child, who previously involved himself in the Wi Spa controversy, utilizes graphic sexual and violent threats against “TERFs” in his music.

During his most recent performance at the Knockout Bar in San Francisco, Precious Child performed his song “TERF Killer,” riling the audience into chanting “kill a TERF today.”

That is, today kill a feminist woman who knows that men are not women.

In a video of the performance shared to his YouTube account, Precious Child can be seen chanting “kill a TERF today” while the accompanying music video is shown on a screen behind him. The video features images of bullets and of a knife stabbing into the air as the words “kill a TERF today” flash repeatedly across the screen.

Precious Child has a history of repeatedly threatening critics of gender ideology, with a particular focus reserved for females who oppose gender self-identification law.

Earlier this year, he released a music video for Pride month titled “VILENCE” [sic] which depicts masked trans activists posing threateningly with a variety of weapons – a sword, baseball bats, an axe, and Molotov cocktails – as he sings the refrain, “Give ’em the violence, or they will silence.”

“They’re hunting, beating, strangling, stabbing, killing… with the lies they scream. My knife, my fist, my gun, my violence. I am the future because I am violence,” Precious screams before a baseball bat studded with nails spins on the screen.

Hugely progressive, isn’t it.