What counts as controversial, and who decides?

Sometimes the BBC decides.

BBC staff have accused the corporation of double standards after they were told not to attend a march against anti-Semitism this weekend. Staff working in current affairs and factual journalism who have sought permission to go to the Campaign Against Antisemitism march in London have been referred to guidelines that tell employees not to take part in public gatherings about controversial issues.

They have told bosses that “racism is racism” and that if the BBC believes racism is not acceptable in any form, it should allow staff to show their opposition to it. They point out that BBC staff are allowed to take part in marches supporting other causes, such as Pride, which are not seen as controversial by the broadcaster.

But the broadcaster is telling staff they must adhere to the same guidelines that have prevented them from attending pro-Palestinian rallies in recent weeks. According to the impartiality rules, editorial staff “should not participate in public demonstrations or gatherings about controversial issues”.

That’s so interesting given the way the BBC reports on trans issues and especially on women who reject trans ideology.

Sandi Toksvig has definitely done some good things.

When Toksvig came out in 1994, she became one of the most visible lesbian women in British public life. She tells me coming out was about setting an example to her children with former partner, Peta Stewart. “I had three small children and my youngest had just been born. My then-partner and I were not prepared for them to grow up in the shadow of a secret,” she says.

At the time, Section 28 prohibited their own children from learning about LGBTQ+ people in school. “It was more important to me to be a good mum than it was for me to have a career. Everyone told me that my career would be over, but standing up for what you believe in in front of your children – that’s more important.”

Her career didn’t end there. Far from it. Toksvig has become a household name – and has built a loyal queer following – while also using her platform to campaign for equality. In 2015, she founded the Women’s Equality Party. At the last election the new party stood five candidates and, if funding allows, they hope to do so again.

For now, Toksvig’s focus is on the removal of unelected Church of England bishops from the House of Lords. There are only two countries in the world where representatives of the state religion automatically get seats in parliament: the UK and Iran. She wants to make that a party of one, because of the Church of England’s opposition to same-sex marriage and its institutionalised misogyny. (The church is exempt from UK equalities law, so this discrimination is entirely legal).

Another good reason is because theocracy is a really bad idea. Gods can’t be held accountable, not least because they don’t exist.

“It’s shocking. They don’t deal with gay people or women in an equitable manner. And they aren’t some sort of obscure organisation – this is our state church,” Toksvig says. “None of them have been elected. This is our parliament and it’s not OK. Be a bigot if you want to, in your own back yard – but don’t come and play in mine.”

There shouldn’t be any state church. She’s completely right on this one.

She is disturbed by the recent rise in reports of homophobic hate crime and the anti-trans moral panic that has been peddled by politicians and media figures. “I am so distressed by people who call themselves ‘radical feminists’ but are anti-trans. I could weep. I don’t get it. It’s beyond me,” she says. “When the feminist movement started in the 60s and 70s, lesbians were often excluded, because we were told that we would make the movement less palatable [acceptable]. I have been excluded myself, so how could I do that to someone else? It fills me with rage.”

So socialists should not exclude conservatives from their socialism? Unions should not exclude bosses? Football should not exclude tennis players? Marathons should not exclude cars?

Get a grip. Feminism is about and by and for women. Lesbians are women. Men are not women. Excluding men from feminism, even men who call themselves women, is not comparable to excluding lesbians from feminism.

That Malott guy praises himself for being all nuanced and shit.

To each of you who resist acknowledging nuance:

On Tuesday I shared a video with thoughts about childhood medical transition and passability, in particular the strong draw for transitioning young because biological males in particular know that they will be treated quite a bit more kindly and humanely if they ‘pass’.

I put forward that if we have concerns about childhood medical transition—which I do—then we should actually confront this draw towards passing and the benefit it offers, because that’s the strongest argument in support of childhood transitions.

Some of you have chosen to intentionally mischaracterize what I’ve said… I get it.. it’s more convenient to characterize me as having come down in support of medical transition for children, wouldn’t it?

Mischaracterizing what I said and calling me a groomer doesn’t change that I’m right. The reason we have childhood medical transition at all—for those who actually care about history—is because practitioners recognized that the world is hostile to gender dysphoric individuals who don’t ‘pass’ and that passability is more likely when transition is undertaken young.

For gender criticals, this is a matter of medical safety, female spaces, risks of regret, and in some cases just a visceral distaste for the idea of someone transitioning.

For progressives, this is about a society that is incredibly gendered, where some people find distress in their biological reality, and an understanding that ‘disappearing’ as one’s preferred sex is most likely when transitioned young.

Now—I didn’t take a position there. I stated the positions of two opposing sides. Two sides that are arguing for different outcomes on different basis. I’m empathetic to both of these positions to a certain extent: the only thing I can be accused of, if I must be accused of something, is not taking a hardline position unilaterally in support of one or the other.

I believe nuance is important. I’ve had thousands of hours of conversation with individuals devastated by policies holistically in favour of both extremes in this debate.

I don’t think I have all the answers.

But I do have an observation: individuals on both sides are so entrenched in righteous indignation that there doesn’t seem to be space to talk about this with nuance. To reflect on the complexity. And to cry together from the devastation of real lives being affected in real ways. Let’s humanize this conversation a little bit by listening to others and allowing for complex takes.

Yesterday I recorded a fantastic podcast with @JLeslieElliott and @jlmannisto that goes very in-depth on my perspectives around all of this, so if you want a more nuanced take you should definitely check that out.

— — —

Anyway, I wasn’t going to make a video tonight because I’ve had a family crisis that will be taking my attention for—well possibly for a very long time. Wishing you each the very best.

I love that closing “Wishing you each the very best” as if he’s King Choss or the pope or the UN. He’s just some long-winded self-important guy on Twitter.

Why the gag order on Trump just might be a good idea:

The Department of Justice submitted a court filing on Thanksgiving arguing that a gag order against the former president must remain while pointing to documents filed as part of the $250 million civil fraud trial in New York.

On Thursday, November 23, Cecil Vandevender, an assistant special counsel for the Department of Justice, notified the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals of a document which said that a gag order needs to be reinstated against Trump during the civil proceedings in New York, where state Attorney General Letitia James has accused the former president of fraudulently inflating the value of his properties in financial statements.

The government’s court filings pointed the appeals court to one section in particular, in which an employee at the New York State Unified Court System details the “hundreds of threatening and harassing voicemail messages” which had been sent to Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the civil trial, as well as the judge’s law clerk Allison Greenfield.

Well how bad can it be, really?

According to an affidavit cited by the DOJ from Charles Hollon, who works in the Public Safety Department’s Judicial Threats Assessment Unit, there are 275 single space pages worth of transcribed threatening messages and voicemails which have been left for Engoron and his court staff since early October.

Several of the “threatening, harassing, disparaging and antisemitic” which were left on Engoron’s chamber’s voicemail were cited in the New York affidavit. One of the messages to Engoron states: “Trust me. Trust me when I say this. I will come for you. I don’t care. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me either.”

A second transcript of the message calls Engoron a “dirty, treasonous piece of trash snake,” and warns “we are coming to remove you permanently.”

I guess that answers that question.

Charles Clymer attention-seeking as usual.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on This period of maximal disruption.

It’s off topic, but you make an interesting point about immigration and benevolence. In Canada, immigrants are not usually poor, and they’re admitted strictly on terms related directly to their suitability to the labour force.

Unlike Western European nations who are saddled with waves of migrants and asylum seekers of all kinds of education, language, and work skills, making their way from the Middle East, Northern Africa and elsewhere, and the US with its porous border with Mexico, Canada has the luxury of naturally strong border protection, flanked on both sides and above by vast oceans, with the US below. This means the topic of immigration is, to us, almost entirely separate from topics like asylum and refugee hosting, and largely uncoupled from cultural debates around xenophobia and racism.

Immigration today in Canada is strictly business, and it’s all about the labour force. Our refugee program aside (which is surprisingly small, given our goody-two-shoes image on the global stage), you can come to Canada from anywhere in the world, so long as you’re already middle-class or have enough qualifications to show you’ll be a productive, skilled labourer when you’re here.

Applicants to come to Canada are scored on a point system, between 0 and 1200 points, almost entirely based around their job qualifications, and what kinds of skills our economy is looking for at any given time. If we need computer coders, we’ll recalibrate the point allocation to give more points to people with computer science degrees; if we need mining specialists, you’ll get a huge points bonus if you’re skilled in that area. Then we set our threshold at however many points we need to get exactly the right number of immagrants into exactly the right areas into our economy. (Today the dial is set at 431. Very low. We’re letting lots of people in. This is causing problems for the housing market, and it’s starting to become a political issue.)

It’s a ruthlessly impersonal system. And it is based 100% purely around the idea, deeply ingrained in Canadians’ psyches, that this country depends on a growing population of skilled labourers to sustain itself. We must always have more productive labourers than retirees, and we must always draw upon immigrants with professional skills to keep the country growing and healthy.

In a country as resource-rich as Canada, that could in theory be sustained for a long time. But realistically, globally, it’s not working. And with AI very suddenly poised to render many of those new Canadian residents’ labour skills irrelevant, tensions at our nation’s borders are sure to get a little dicey.

Andy Lewis on the Brighton “skeptics”:

So, Brighton Skeptics were to hold a talk in January between Hannah Barnes and Helen Lewis. Barnes was the journalist who wrote a book exposing the debacle of the Tavistock gender clinic and how it was desperately failing vulnerable children.

What a perfect topic for a public critical thinking meeting! It involves the failure of evidence-based medicine, the ideological capture of institutions, and popular ideological beliefs that turn out not to be true. That is bread and butter for the ‘skeptic movement’.

Or so you would think. But as @helenlewis tweets, the event has been cancelled despite selling out immediately. It looks like Brighton Skeptics failed to “compromise”. With whom though, and why?

Because third rail, that’s why. Touch it and instant electrocution.

A group was formed to get this event cancelled – and if that failed to try to disrupt it on the day. This new group was to be called “Reece’s Pieces”.

The founders though did not want this to be seen as pressure from external trans groups, so were keen to recruit ‘sceptics’ who were sympathetic to trans ideology. The “main thrust” must come from “sceptics”. They would front the “anger”.

They called it “Reece’s Pieces as this is a reference to the advertising slogan about a sweet with a peanut butter inner and a crunchy shell. They believed that “trans liberation and scientific skepticism are two great tastes that taste great together”.

They may taste great together but they sure as hell don’t work well together. The foundational belief and dogma and imperative is that people are the opposite sex if they say they are. It’s a magical claim, so skepticism has to be kept at a distance – a very large distance.

Sceptics should not intend to be cruel, but ought to believe that truth is necessary. Without truth we do not know how to be kind or just.

Unfortunately, too many sceptics groups now think we need to be kind first and foremost, and kindness needs to guide how we see truth. That is the road to hell. That leads to rejection of truths based on social acceptance rather than material reality.

Conformity rather than inquiry. The hell with that.

What we have here is a lobby group with pseudoscientific ideas trying to shut down public discussion that has material impact on the well being of many people, not least children. That they appear to have recruited “sceptics” to do their dirty work is deeply alarming.

But not at all surprising how sceptics appear to be easy prey for these fashionable “progressive” beliefs about how sex is not real and lesbians can have penises. The desire to appear to be ‘kind” easily suppresses critical thinking.

For some people, it seems. It doesn’t work that way for me. That’s not because I love to be unkind, it’s because I don’t believe in the “kind” they’re talking about, and I find it both soppy and manipulative. I don’t think it is “kind” to pretend that ludicrous fact-claims are true.

There’s been a surge in anti-Semitism in France.

Thousands of marchers joined French lawmakers in Paris on Sunday to condemn a surge in anti-Semitism in France during the conflict in the Gaza Strip, but arguments over political participation clouded an intended show of unity. 

The protest, called by the leaders of France‘s two houses of parliament, was prompted by a three-fold increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents compared with the whole of 2022, according to French authorities, since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Hamas attacks Israel so anti-Semitism increases. Seems fair.

Political figures, including Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and former presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, headed the march, holding a banner with the slogan “For the Republic, against anti-Semitism“. They led several renditions of the French national anthem.

Interesting. We don’t see that much (or at all?) in the US – former presidents heading protest marches.

“We had grandparents who escaped being transported to the concentration camps, luckily they aren’t here to see that (anti-Semitism) is back,” said Laura Cohen, a marcher in her 30s.

“We shouldn’t have to hide in 2023,” she added, saying her family planned to remove their name from the intercom in their building and the mezuzah, a Jewish religious object, from their door.

A friend of mine who recently moved to Paris from New York saw two guys with semiautomatic rifles guarding a Jewish school in the Marais yesterday. Makes my blood run cold.

Thomas Schlachter at CNN tells us:

The International Cricket Council (ICC) announced Tuesday that “any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty,” will not be allowed to partake in international women’s cricket.

In the announcement, the ICC did not define its criteria for “male puberty.” CNN has reached out to the ICC seeking more detail.

CNN doesn’t know what male puberty is?

“The new policy is based on the following principles (in order of priority): protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion, and this means any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty will not be eligible to participate in the international women’s game regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken,” the ICC said in its statement.

CNN doesn’t see this as a restoration of fairness to women, it sees it as cruelty to men who say they are women.

In recent years, some forms of gender affirming care for trans youth, like puberty blockers, have become more common. But many adult trans women today did not have access to care that would delay or prevent the hormonal changes associated with puberty in their youth, and these women would thus be excluded from competition under the new guidelines.

But “these women” are not women, they’re trans women, i.e. men. It’s only fair to exclude them from competition against women. Why is indulgence of men who call themselves women so much more important than basic fairness to women?

Mainstream science does not support the claim of athletic advantage in trans women over cisgender women.

Wo. That’s a big leap – from whining and manipulation to just plain lying.

Saying the quiet part out loud:

Just imagine: gender dysphoric males are not the priority of these wicked selfish women. How dare women campaign for female rights instead of male privileges?

When skeptics go all credulous.

“Humanist” chaplain approves.

What were they thinking even considering it??? Gosh I don’t know, maybe they were wondering if it’s really true that men can be women on the inside despite having male bodies? Maybe they were skeptical of claims that people are what they say they are and that it’s evil to question them?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Crank them out, ladies.

A healthy populace needs steady economic growth.

Steady economic growth comes from constantly increasing productivity.

Productivity growth requires the ongoing creation of new jobs.

New jobs require an ever-growing working-age population.

That’s been the formula for the past half-century or more. But it rests on a number of assumptions that can’t stay true forever. And just because this formula has worked up until now doesn’t mean it’s the only one that can ever work.

Firstly, and most obviously, civilization can’t just keep growing and consuming forever. The planet’s size is fixed, and so are the resources within it.

Secondly, there’s no actual law that states that a healthy populace needs steady economic growth. It’s just that in a capitalist system, that’s how things have turned out. An ever increasing amount of total resources can serve as a modest counterbalance to capitalism’s tendency to concentrate resources in the hands of the few. New resources just entering the system will be distributed somewhat evenly at first before the Gordon Gekkos of the world inevitably find ways to capture them.

So how about instead we build an economic model that stops the Gordon Gekkos stealing what we already have so we don’t have to keep mining new resources to make up the losses?

And lastly, there’s the sudden emergence of AI, which may at long last uncouple the link between productivity and human-powered jobs. At the very least it will certainly disrupt such a link. Our species is running out of skills to justify our existence in pure economic terms. A human life costs a lot ot maintain — a lifetime of food, water, shelter, and energy — and under the current economic model, we’re losing opportunities to earn our keep, as we get outbidded by the automatons of Artificial Intelligence.

Things are rapidly coming to a head all around the world, with climate change, overpopulation, and now the technological disruption of labour. If civilization manages to emerge from this period of maximal disruption at all, it will have to do so with a new economic model to sustain humanity at a much lower population, with a fixed or even declining rate of consumption of the planet’s finite resources.

It would be nice of some kind of Artificial General Intelligence could find a way to orchestrate a safe passage for humans through the upcoming mess.

But I’m not particularly hopeful. When we look up at the skies, there’s a reason we aren’t seeing a universe teeming with civilized planets. More and more I’m coming to believe it’s because civilization is intrinsically doomed to wipe itself out.

Ah yes, women don’t have any rights, women are simply machines for supplying the state with people.

Russian authorities are limiting access to abortions in an attempt to confront the country’s longstanding demographic crisis.

That is, Russian authorities are treating women as brood mares.

The Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Kremlin, is playing a key role in the anti-abortion campaign.

Because it’s up to men, in government or religious institutions or both, to decide what women get to do with their bodies and lives.

A stagnant population

Russia’s population is virtually the same size as it was over 20 years ago. According to official figures, there are now 144 million people in Russia – 2 million fewer than in 2001, when President Vladimir Putin first came to power.

Why is the BBC labeling that “stagnant”?

We can’t just go on having more and more people forever; the planet turns out not to be an infinite resource.

It comes down to scribbles in the margins.

Donald Trump had his worst day yet in his ongoing civil fraud trial in New York on Tuesday at the hands of his own key witness, a former Trump Organization executive who linked the former president directly to the fuzzy math at the center of the case.

The witness was Jeffrey McConney, who was the comptroller and spreadsheet czar at the Trump Org. McConney had been called to the witness stand by the defense, but on cross-examination by lawyers for the state attorney general’s office Tuesday, he linked Trump firmly to the conspiracy and fraud counts that have yet to be decided in the non-jury trial.

McConney was handed People’s Exhibit 3054, a draft of Trump’s net-worth statement for 2014. He was asked to look at a note scribbled in thin blue ink on the draft’s first page, “DJT TO GET FINAL REVIEW,” which he said he’d written.

…

The AG has alleged the net-worth statement that McConney was handed the draft for, from 2014, contained $3.5 billion in exaggerations.

Oh is that all.

“Donald Trump would get final review?” Andrew Amer, the state’s lawyer, asked McConney.

“That was my understanding, yes,” McConney answered from the witness stand, his voice gruff.

Amer asked next whether Trump would get the final review of every net-worth statement until leaving for the White House in 2017, after which Eric Trump would approve the drafts. “That was my understanding, yes,” McConney answered again. Asked whether that was his handwriting on the drafts — the thin blue pen marks — McConney also said yes, it was.

Trump has been claiming that he never knew anything about these petty details, it was the cleaners and elevator maintenance crew who took care of that.

But McConney’s blue-ink handwriting is all over the net-worth statement drafts, showing he revised language and even added cautionary notes that were then passed along for Trump’s “final review,” as McConney said in his own description of the drafting process.

In one key cautionary note from the 2015 draft, McConney made a notation in ink that “this computation also includes forecasted deals that have not signed yet.” In the note, McConney asked whether Trump wanted to exclude some $151 million in as-yet-fictional assets from the net-worth statement.

The final version of that year’s net-worth statement shows McConney’s suggestion was ignored, possibly by Trump himself. The AG alleges that Trump routinely padded out his net-worth statements with the same sorts of nonexistent assets.

Trump pads out absolutely everything with nonexistent something. That “IQ test” is the classic model – “woman man person camera tv” is his approach to life in a nutshell.

The NY Times:

Susan Sarandon, a five-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner (for best actress, in 1995’s “Dead Man Walking”), was dropped by United Talent Agency after making comments at a pro-Palestinian rally last week. An agency spokesman, Richard Siklos, confirmed Tuesday that the agency no longer represented Sarandon but declined to elaborate.

…

United Talent dropped Sarandon after she made remarks at a rally in New York City last week. “There are a lot of people that are afraid, afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence,” she said at the rally, where she called for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, according to a video published by The New York Post.

Ahh that’s lovely – that “getting a taste of.” That’s what vindictive sadists say when torturing someone they dislike. It’s also grotesque when you stop to think about what Jews have had “a taste of” over the centuries.

[A] former speechwriter for Israel’s delegation to the United Nations said on the X platform, formerly Twitter, that she had interpreted Sarandon’s remark as implying that Jews “have it coming — that we don’t deserve to live free from harassment and assault.”

Assuming what she said wasn’t scripted, I think it’s possible Sarandon meant “a taste of” as “a small fraction of” but that’s not a whole lot less disgusting.

Sarandon said at the rally that being critical of Israel should not be considered antisemitic. “There’s a terrible thing that’s happened where antisemitism has been confused with speaking up against Israel,” Sarandon said. “I am against antisemitism. I am against Islamophobia.”

Yeah well that’s another dumb thing to say. “Semitism” names an ethnic group; “Islam” names a religion.

Another brave heroic stunning man vows to keep working hard to take away everything women have.

The international career of Australian-born transgender cricketer Danielle McGahey would appear to be over after the International Cricket Council (ICC) ruled players who have been through male puberty will not be able to compete in international women’s cricket.

There it is again, the neutral “transgender” where “male” should be.

The change in regulations appears to have been prompted by the case of McGahey, who became the first transgender cricketer to take part in an official international match when she featured in a Women’s T20 fixture for Canada against Brazil.

But the problem isn’t “transgender cricketer”; the problem is a man playing against women and stealing a woman’s place.

The Brisbane-born 29-year-old, who played grade cricket as a man in Melbourne, moved to Canada in 2020. Having transitioned socially, then medically, to a woman she began playing women’s cricket in Canada and was called into the national team in October 2022.

Which just illustrates how ludicrous and destructive the new convention of calling men “she” is. He began playing women’s cricket, which was unfair to the other teams and to the woman who would have had his place on that team.

Transgender athletes have been banned from taking part in elite women’s competitions in other sports such as swimming, cycling, athletics, rugby league and rugby union.

Male transgender athletes.

It’s so interesting the way some misogynist men just can’t exercise their hatred of women without making it sexual. Why make it sexual when the issue isn’t sex? Why drag it in just for the sake of underlining how intense the hatred is? Why isn’t sex just plain irrelevant?

I suppose it’s because men of that type (there are lots of them, I’m afraid) just can’t think of women apart from their score on the Would I Fuck Her Index.

The lies people tell. This is a journalist.

“Eliminationist” implies genocidal. It’s an outrageous lie, and she must know it is.

“Genocidal.”

It’s a journalist saying this.

The BBC on the other hand finally manages to get it right.

Transgender women banned from playing international women’s cricket by ICC

Transgender women i.e. men, but I don’t expect the conventional media to start saying that any time soon.

Following a nine-month consultation process, the governing body said its new policy, which takes effect immediately, was based on “protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion”.

It shouldn’t take nine minutes to figure out that letting men play on women’s teams is not fair, but there it is.

“The changes to the gender eligibility regulations resulted from an extensive consultation process and is founded in science and aligned with the core principles developed during the review,” said ICC chief executive Geoff Allardice.

“Inclusivity is incredibly important to us as a sport, but our priority was to protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players.”

Now, wait a minute. What does he mean by that? How can “inclusivity” be important to competitive sport when the whole point of the competitive bit is to exclude everyone who doesn’t win? Exclusion is the whole point. It’s not unjust exclusion, it’s just what competitive sport is. I’ve never liked it much, as a participant or part of the audience, because I can’t seem to care very much who is more skilled at [whatever the sport is] than someone else, but that’s just me. Lots of people love it, and let’s be real: it’s the winning and losing that makes it exciting. So inclooosivviteee just can’t be “incredibly important” to people in charge of running a competitive sport. You can’t have everything.

Always this shameless sneaky obfuscating lie – it’s always “trans” instead of “male.” Why is that? Because, of course, “male” makes it all too obvious why they’re banned, while “trans” makes it look disskrimminittoree to people who aren’t paying much attention.

“Transgender players who have gone through male puberty,” the Graun says – in other words male players. The problem is not that they’re “trans”; it’s that they’re male. Nobody cares how people idennify; the issue is unfair artificial physical advantage. Sean Ingle must know this, of course, which means he must be deliberately hiding the reason for not letting men compete against women, even if they say they are trans.