Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on As the US hurtles toward autocracy.

The United States, under Mr. Trump, cannot be considered an idle bystander in the great twilight struggle between the democracies and the dictatorships, as it was in the 1930s. It is now on the side of the dictatorships.

It is not just that the democratic world can no longer count on America. It is that America, under Mr. Trump, is no longer necessarily part of the democratic world: neither fully democratic in its own affairs, nor committed to the welfare of other democracies, but hostile to both. If the international order is to be preserved, then, it will have to be preserved, in part, from the United States. Certainly it will have to be rebuilt without it.

The democratic world must therefore regard and treat [America] as it does the other non-democracies: not as an ally to be consulted but as an adversary to be contained.

Why do I get the strange feeling that Canada is about to be cast in the role of “Poland” in this reboot?

So here I am, vacillating between hopeless despair and wondering if I should start making Molotov cocktails.

It makes me think of the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who fought in the two World Wars, in hopes that their children and grandchildren would never have to. They fought overseas so that we would not have to fight in the streets. How many of them would have guessed that our country would be end up being next door to an emerging dictatorship, hungrily eyeing us and repeatedly threatening our annexation? We are oceans away from the peoples we helped to liberate; we can’t expect anything more from them than moral suppport, and I can’t blame them. The nation that threatens us is the most powerful on Earth.

As a matter of realpolitik, Canadian sovereignty, such as it is, has been at American sufferance since at least 1945. There is no way that we could meaningfully defend ourselves against a country with ten times the population, armed with nuclear weapons. Not that that was, as far as I know, ever a serious consideration. Apart from the Fenian Raids of the late 19th century, defence against a serious atteck from the US stopped being a real threat with the War of 1812.

Part of our role in the early years of the Cold War was to act as the buffer zone over which Soviet nuclear bombers flying sorties against the United States would shot down. With the advent of ICBMs, and the time during which any Soviet attack might be blunted being reduced from hours to minutes (not to mention American vulnerability to Soviet submarine-launched missiles that would bypass Canada altogether), our value as a buffer zone diminished. To the degree that mutually assured destruction worked, being under the American umbrella which, geographically, would have been impossible to avoid in any case, wasn’t something we had to “choose” or do much about. Whatever happened, Canada was along for the ride, with the US in the driver’s seat. We were the polite neighbour who didn’t usually make much of a fuss, whose recognition of Cuba and Communist China, while irksome, didn’t threaten the long term strategic balance between East and West.

As far as I know, we’ve never had to think of the consequences for Canada of the breakdown of American democracy because we probably never thought it was possible. But the ascendancy of Trump has shown just how fragile the American system is. Its rules and limits only work when they are respected and enforced, and right now there seems to be precious little respect or enforcement in evidence. These are no longer normal times in the US. They are no longer our friendly neighbour. Benign, indulgent neglect has been replaced with an unconcealed, rapacious covetousness, tempered only by noises that we are to be taken over economically rather than militarily, but I can’t help but think that the former will be followed by the latter.

Perhaps the sort-of false alarms of the Reagan and Bush II presidencies (which were each portrayed as incipiently fascistic) dulled the sensibilities of the Democratic Party, but the excess of caution that resulted in the failure to successfully prosecute Trump’s insurrection was a fatal mistake. Now we suffer the consequences along with those Americans who did not vote for Trump. What they can do at this point I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it has to be more and better than what they’re doing now.

Canada is no longer in a balcony seat; we are in the splash zone. We didn’t choose this seats, but we’re in it whether we like it or not. From our perspective, the best we can hope for is that Trump loses interest in us, or that the Trump administration comes apart through some combination of self-generated implosion (Trump vs. Musk?), actual enforcement of the Separation of Powers, and or popular resistance and non-compliance. With any luck, this will happen without violence or loss of life.Trump didn’t have the guts to actually go to the Capitol on January 6, 2021; maybe he will suffer a similar failure of nerve at some critical juncture of his current coup against the Constitution.

Good luck to us all.

Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail says the US is no longer one of the democracies.

Even now, as the United States hurtles toward autocracy – the petty grotesqueries perhaps tell the story better than anything else: a reporter barred from the White House for not using the name “Gulf of America,” President Donald Trump naming himself chair of the Kennedy Center by a “unanimous” vote of its board – the tendency is still to describe events in relatively conventional terms. For example, the “mistakes” that Mr. Trump is said to have made in his dealings with Vladimir Putin, of the United States as an “unreliable ally” under Mr. Trump, and so forth.

The tendency in journalism, that is. The rest of us are free to call a fascist a fascist.

But that is not the situation we are now in. The policies on Ukraine announced, or rather confirmed this week by Mr. Trump and his Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth – peace talks without Ukraine; Ukraine locked out of NATO membership indefinitely; Russia keeps all territories gained since its illegal and unprovoked invasion, because, as Mr. Trump said, “they lost a lot of soldiers” taking them – are not, as described, irresponsible concessions to Russia.

They are not concessions at all. They are demands, aimed not at Russia but at Ukraine, and presented to it jointly by the United States of Russia and America. They are of a piece with the Trump administration’s very clear signalling that it will not be bound by Article 5 of the NATO treaty – that the United States will not, as promised, come to Europe’s defence should Russia broaden its attacks on it, but will, as Mr. Trump so memorably put it, let them do “whatever the hell they want.”

That is not merely an abrogation of its treaty commitments, or an abdication of America’s historic responsibilities, or even a declaration that the way is now open for other hostile powers to launch attacks on democratic states. The United States, under Mr. Trump, cannot be considered an idle bystander in the great twilight struggle between the democracies and the dictatorships, as it was in the 1930s. It is now on the side of the dictatorships.

I wish I could say that’s over the top, but I can’t.

It is not just that the democratic world can no longer count on America. It is that America, under Mr. Trump, is no longer necessarily part of the democratic world: neither fully democratic in its own affairs, nor committed to the welfare of other democracies, but hostile to both. If the international order is to be preserved, then, it will have to be preserved, in part, from the United States. Certainly it will have to be rebuilt without it.

…

That is not our choice. That is America’s, or at least the Trump administration’s. The democratic world must therefore regard and treat it as it does the other non-democracies: not as an ally to be consulted but as an adversary to be contained.

I wish I could disagree.

Even the Spectator does it.

So the Spectator bows down to censorship AND obscures information that is central to the story. Saying “transgender doctor” is MEANINGLESS. The core fact in this whole conflict, which has been keeping a tribunal busy for days, is that a male doctor bullied a female nurse who objected to his presence in the women’s changing room. The fact that the Spectator alters Joanna Cherry’s writing such that it draws a veil over that fact is an outrage.

It’s doubly insulting and infuriating, doing this. There’s the obvious infuriating insult of changing her wording to hide the crucial fact, but there’s the slightly less obvious infuriating insult of making her say something stupid that she did not in fact say.

Alarming.

In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.

Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.

Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?

When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.

How convenient for Musk that Trump fired the Defense Department IG.

The stakes around this question are extremely high. As the Times reported, concerns about Musk and national security have intensified so much that even some employees at SpaceX share them. With SpaceX receiving billions of dollars in contracts with the Pentagon and NASA, Musk has access to classified information, including about U.S. military technology, according to the Times.

As such, Musk—who has top-secret security clearance at SpaceX—is supposed to be subject to continuous vetting by the government. That requires him to report certain details of his private life and travel abroad, enabling the government to gauge whether he’s fit to have access to that classified info.

Yet Musk has failed to meet these reporting requirements since at least 2021, the Times reported, noting that Musk and his team haven’t provided the government with “some details of his travel” and “some of his meetings with foreign leaders.” The paper reported that SpaceX employees who are supposed to ensure adherence to these rules have complained to the IG about Musk’s and SpaceX’s lax compliance.

“Lax compliance” is one way to describe it. Another would be “criminal refusal.”

Meanwhile, back in October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk has had numerous conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This included ones in which Putin asked Musk to use his technology to do Russia geopolitical favors, such requesting that Musk “avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”

So Musk is doing “favors” for Putin and Xi at the expense of Taiwan and Ukraine to name only two.

Musk doesn’t believe he should deign to submit to such scrutiny. When the news broke in December that he was the subject of these reviews, he raged that “deep state traitors are coming after me.” In short, when Musk talks about destroying the “deep state,” what he really means (among other things) is that he hopes to destroy any and all mechanisms of transparency and accountability that might restrain him. This, even as he enjoys billions in federal contracts and has been empowered by Trump to reshape the U.S. state to an extraordinarily radical degree, despite not being elected or appointed to a real government position.

All of this is happening in plain sight but it seems nobody can stop it.

Occupy Democrats wrote on Facebook:

BREAKING: Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center implodes in humiliating fashion as droves of talented celebrities abandon the legendary performing arts center in protest.

Trump is radioactive with the people he wants to impress most…

Actress Issa Rae announced on Instagram in a brief statement that she is cancelling her “An Evening With Issa Rae” event slated for next month. Tickets will be refunded.

“Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I’ve decided to cancel my appearance at this venue,” she wrote.

Trump made himself chairman of the center on Wednesday. Earlier this week he removed Biden appointees from the board and rammed in unqualified cronies including Second Lady Usha Vance and White House Chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Mega-successful television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes — the woman behind hit shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Bridgerton, and Scandal among others — resigned as treasurer of the center’s board yesterday.

She posted a quote from JFK on her Instagram: “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

Legendary soprano Renée Fleming resigned as artistic advisor to the center and while she avoided naming Trump, she praised David M. Rubenstein — the center’s former chairman who was ousted.

Singer and songwriter Ben Folds stepped down from his role as advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra, which the Kennedy Center oversees.

“Given developments at the Kennedy Center, effective today I am resigning as artistic adviser to the N.S.O. Mostly, and above all, I will miss the musicians of our nation’s symphony orchestra — just the best!” Folds wrote on Instagram.

Adam Weiner of the band Low Cut Connie has also canceled an appearance at the center next month.

“Upon learning that this institution that has run nonpartisan for 54 years is now chaired by President Trump himself and his regime, I decided I will not perform there,” he wrote on social media, adding that friends and fans were going to be “directly negatively affected by this administration’s policies and messaging.”

This is the kind of rejection that infuriates Donald Trump more than anything. He has long wanted to be accepted by America’s cultural elites. Instead, they see him for the cruel, fascist, incompetent failure he truly is.

So progressive.

Vance drops in on Europe to yell “You all suck!!!”

In a chastising speech on Friday that openly questioned whether current European values warranted defence by the US, he painted a picture of European politics infected by media censorship, cancelled elections and political correctness.

Arguing that the true threat to Europe stemmed not from external actors such as Russia or China, but Europe’s own internal retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”, he repeatedly questioned whether the US and Europe any longer had a shared agenda.

Well no, and that’s because the US now = Trump.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the vice-president had been expected to address the critical question of the Ukraine war and security differences between Washington and Europe. Instead, he widely skated over these to give a lecture on what he claimed was the continent’s failure to listen to the populist concerns of voters.

Vance said of Donald Trump’s re-election: “There is a new sheriff in town.” He said: “Democracy will not survive if their people’s concerns are deemed invalid or even worse not worth being considered.”

So if the people want a genocide of immigrants that’s worth being considered?

The blistering and confrontational remarks were met with shock at the conference and were later condemned by the EU and Germany, while drawing praise from Russian state television. They signalled a deepening of the transatlantic chasm beyond different perceptions of Russia to an even deeper societal rupture about values and the nature of democracy.

Vance said: “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people … If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”

He doesn’t really mean “the American people” though, does he. He means the pro-Trump ones.

In Germany, a firewall has long existed preventing mainstream parties from engaging with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland owing to its Nazi origins. But Vance said there was no room for such barriers.

No room for barriers against Nazism. Thanks for the clarity.

“People dismissing voters’ concerns, shutting down their media, protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”

Is it? More surefire than embracing Nazism?

After the speech it was confirmed that JD Vance privately met the AfD leader, Alice Weidel, for 30 minutes. In a breach of previous protocol, he had declined the offer to meet the SPD leader and current chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

Fabulous. He spurned Scholz and cuddled up to Weidel. He’ll be sieg heiling any day now.

So “diversity staff” have more valuable skills than…doctors?

There have been a slew of recent job postings offering roles in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at salaries that exceed specialist junior doctors.

They include an NHS England EDI secondment position covering the southwest of England offering a pro rata salary of £122,000 per year, and a head of EDI role at a London trust with a salary of £91,336.

Junior doctors earn a basic salary of between £36,616 and £70,425, while consultants receive between £105,504 to £139,882 per year.

You do have to wonder what skills EDI people have that merit that kind of pay. I don’t think the NHS is wrong to want “diversity” in the sense of having staff that are not all rich white men, on account of how patients are not all rich white men. But can’t they recruit female and brown people without shelling out hundreds of thousands of £s a year?

The NHS was ordered to stop recruiting for EDI jobs in 2023 by Steve Barclay, the Conservative former health secretary, after he uncovered a £96,000 job advert for a diversity role.

Barclay also told trusts to stop paying consultancies and external organisations to provide diversity training for staff, but he said that his edict was ignored by NHS bureaucrats, who are now recruiting “even more on eye-watering salaries”.

Couldn’t they just give staff a book or two?

[Wes] Streeting highlighted “some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion”, and pointed to a member of NHS staff “who was merrily tweeting a job ad online and saying part of her practice was anti-whiteness”.

He was responding to a post by Dr Florencia Gysbertha, an NHS psychologist, who wrote in a social media advert for a job placement: “The trainee will be supervised by myself, a counselling psychologist, who integrates anti-whiteness/anti-racist praxis into supervision and approaches to clinical work.”

Streeting added: “And I just thought ‘what the hell does that say to the bloke up in Wigan who’s more likely to die earlier than his more affluent white counterpart down in London?’. We’ve got real issues of inequality that affect working-class people.”

But so few working class people are trans. They’re just not fun, if you know what I mean.

However, he is not preparing to sweep the roles away even though he said it would win him “quite a lot of plaudits”.

“Ask black nurses about their experiences of being bullied in the workplace,” he said. “You look at outcomes: prostate cancer, black men twice as likely to die of prostate cancer than white men; black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. We’ve got some real racial inequalities here.”

On the other hand they don’t have some real trans inequalities there.

An NHS spokeswoman said the health service “needs to take action to reduce health inequalities” and that a “diverse and inclusive workforce that better reflects the patient population leads to improved patient care”.

She added: “But equally we cannot make tokenistic gestures that don’t ultimately improve patient or staff experience.”

The grifters remind me of Robin DiAngelo, who gets huge fees for lecturing people about their white fragility. Cha-ching.

It’s also a class thing.

Dr Upton, for those who have not been following the case, was born male and is at least 6ft tall. Make-up and discreet silver jewellery cannot mask the good doctor’s male physiology. As Sandie Peggie told the tribunal, she was not discomfited by Dr Upton being transgender, but by having to share female changing facilities with a male-bodied person, as indeed most women would be, especially when bleeding heavily.

She made her feelings clear, much to Upton’s distaste. As the solidly middle class doctor, still in his 20s, told the tribunal, “I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life.”

Oh really? That explains a lot.

The employment tribunal, which will continue into the summer because of NHS Fife’s inability to produce essential documents in time, has not only exposed the nebulous nature of gender identity theory – that a human being can change their sex through sheer will – but the ingrained class divide at the heart of the NHS that also characterises the debate around gender.

Gender identity theory is largely a middle-class pursuit, a fake radicalism which doesn’t bother its pretty little head with tackling the material causes of poverty and inequality. Instead, as feminist writer Sheila Jeffries argued in 2014, it is a social construct designed to maintain male dominance. And since its inception, the National Health Service has put the demands of the doctor class first before the needs of the largely working-class nursing and support staff.

Maybe if we all started pointing out how posh and twee and snobbish the whole thing is it would get through. It turns out men don’t mind being told how sexist their hot new opinion is, so maybe we should ding them in their street cred.

Former Labour MSP Jenny Marra, who attended the tribunal over several days, said the evidence reeked of class and entitlement. She observed: “Middle-class arrogant male doctor breaches nurse’s boundaries is not a new story. But this time the doctor is facing down the nurse with the backing of politicians and illegal guidelines drawn up by public sector officials who have been hoodwinked into betraying reality and the many working-class women at the frontline of our public services.”

…

In an ironic twist of fate, the UK’s largest union Unison held its national women’s conference in Edinburgh this week, and the first motion to be debated called for the Labour government to introduce self-ID, the process where someone can change their legal sex by filling in a form. “Trans women are women,” read the motion which also criticised women who campaign for female-only spaces as “reactionary”.

Unison’s robustly male president Steve North (pronouns he/him) crowed on social media that not one delegate had spoken against the motion but, as is often the case with carefully stage-managed political conferences, the reality was rather different to that described by President North. Women who were prepared to debate the issue were so intimidated by the hostile atmosphere that they left the meeting, unable to face being called bigots by the very noisy supporters of the motion.

Yeeeah, pesky women. Don’t they know that the working class is male? That workers are male? That women who work don’t count as workers? That women are reactionary by nature and have to be told what to say by the enlightened men?

It is not surprising that middle-class professionals, whether doctors, HR managers or even politicians, have found comfort in the simplistic politics of identity. How much easier it is to pin a trans ally badge on a set of scrubs or business suit than begin to tackle the centuries’ old structural issues that trap millions of women in low-paid jobs, poor housing and ill-health, often at risk of sexual violence and abuse.

There is much about the gender debate that has left women aghast in recent years, from placing male rapists in female prisons to the scandal of the NHS mutilating young women’s bodies in the name of progress.

But surely one of the greatest betrayals is a trade union whose membership is three-quarters female, ignoring the material reality of women’s lives in favour of a fanciful theory that sex can be cast off as easily as last season’s fashions.

Yes but it’s so much easier than going on strike.

Yes but how long had they been there in the first place?

The Trump administration has erased references to transgender people from New York’s Stonewall National Monument website.

Well guess what, the Stonewall monument started life as a monument to lesbians and gay men. The T was added later. Trump is the wrong person to meddle in all this, but it’s still true that the T colonizes everything it can reach.

On the National Park Service website, the acronym LGBTQ+ has been shortened to LGB, standing for lesbian, gay and bisexual.

No, other way around. LGB was lengthened to LGBTQ+ even though the T is not the same as the LGB and the Q is just empty. “The acronym” hasn’t been LGBTQ+ forever, handed down by Moses’s second cousin. The T and the Q and the + are late additions, and it’s not written in stone (literally) that they must be kept.

Activists denounced the move on Friday and held a protest at the site, which is the country’s first national monument dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history.

But it was originally dedicated to lesbian and gay history. Transgender elbowed its way in much later. Transgender is not the same thing, and it’s not an eternal truth that it belongs with lesbian and gay. How’s about it gets its own national monument instead?

H/t Sackbut

Too easy.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Explain belief.

The late Ray Hyman, a leading expert on cold reading and arch-nemesis of parapsychologists, was once asked if he thought alleged psychic Rosemary Altea was a fraud. Hyman’s answer (from memory) went something like:

I don’t know if she’s a fraud, but if I were a fraud I would do exactly what she does.

Many of the things that seem crazy to us begin to make sense (in a ”reverse engineering” sort of way) once we ask ourselves:

If I were determined to defend the indefensible, what would I do?

To me the main virtue of Simon Edge’s The End of the World Is Flat is not that it’s a particularly close analogy to gender ideology*, but the way it deals with precisely this question.

As the word ”indefensible” implies, persuasion by evidence and argument is obviously not the way to go in this case. Instead you need to work on people’s motivations. Some useful ”carrots” include being ”kind” (according to self), being on the ”right side of history”, getting to take your righteous indignation out on others and feel good about it etc. The ”sticks” include the fear of causing offense, of making yourself unpopular, of social isolation, of losing your job, of having your name pulled through the dirt all over the internet etc.

Ideally you want to avoid addressing the actual substance of your opponent’s arguments for as long as possible. Instead make it about your opponent as a person. The ”Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” of the woke Left and the ”Efficient Rhetorical Fortress” of the Trumpist Right (cf. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott) offer endless excuses for never getting to the issue. Postmodernism (or, if you’re on the Right, Trumpist post-truth politics) is your friend: If any appeal to ”evidence” and ”logic” is just a naked exercise of power in a zero-sum conflict between oppressors and oppressed, why waste your time with such such things?

If you have to talk about research, avoid specifics at all costs. All people have to know is that there is generic ”research” that proves you right, and that your opponents are too ignorant and uneducated to know about. No need to cite any sources. Instead place all the burden of proof squarely on your opponents. Woke standpoint epistemology comes to the rescue: It’s not the job of marginalized people to educate you, remember! If you can’t claim an officially approved ”marginalized” identity for yourself, you can always claim to simply be ”passing on” what the truly marginalized told you, as a good ”ally”. If you are on the far Right, don’t worry. Religious apologists can show you how it’s done:

There are irrefutable arguments in favor of my position that are out there on the internet (or in the theological literature) somewhere. I’m not saying what they are, but I’m still going to attack you for not dealing with them. If you had made a serious effort to educate yourself, you would know why I’m right, so the fact that you still don’t agree with me proves you haven’t made the effort. Now go out there and study forever or until you agree with me.

Unless your opponents are able to meet any arbitrary standard you impose on them, you get to claim victory by default, without having to meet any standards at all. Once again it’s more or less analogous to saying that ”I get to claim for free what you have to pay for”.

Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different kinds of ”belief”: You can believe in the actual propositional content of a statement (e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East, as seen from my frame of reference, tomorrow morning), or you can believe in ”whatever statement x happens to mean” (e.g. I believe, on the authority of physicists, that E = mc².). The former kind requires you to actually understand the statement in question (you can’t believe in the content without knowing what the content is) while the latter does not. The relevance to our purpose should be obvious: You want to encourage the latter kind of belief! Indeed the less people understand what they are required to believe the better. Once again, all we need to know is that there’s sound ”research” (or ”scholarship”) supporting all this stuff, and if it all sounds like gibberish to us, it’s because the ideas are too intellectually sophisticated and profound for our primitive brains to fathom.

Ophelia once wrote an insightful blog post (I believe it was called ”#peopleagainstbadthings”) about people who claimed to be against misogyny (more or less by definition ”bad things”) while (from memory) ”defining misogyny so narrowly that it’s defined out of existence”. There is also a danger of defining things too broadly. Of course everyone thinks they’re against ”bad things”, whether it’s ”misogyny”, ”phobias”, ”injustice”, ”bigotry”, ”Fascism”, ”hate” etc. And everyone is in favor of ”good things” (e.g. ”social justice”, minority ”rights”, ”diversity”, ”equity”, ”inclusion” etc.). On the other hand most people most of the time don’t necessarily have a well thought out idea of what all this entails in practice. This can be used to manipulate us by first getting us to declare ourselves ”against [bad thing]” or ”pro [good thing]” and then using that as a Trojan horse for smuggling in tons of other crap that’s supposedly implied for reasons best left unspecified. Soviet-style Communism is an obvious example. Your ”good thing” (i.e. the Trojan horse) may be ”justice for the working class” etc., and what it is taken to imply is unconditional endorsement of tyranny, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, censorship, thought police, the surveillance state, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, labor camps, forced collectivisation, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc. In the end even questioning the inalienable right of the leader to live like an emperor while the workers are starving is reframed as denying ”justice for the working class”.

* Too conspiracist, too traceable back to a single source, too easily defeated in the end etc.

Imagine having JD Vance lecturing you from a great height.

Vice President JD Vance publicly berated European leaders on a host of issues from free speech to security and mass migration, as simmering tensions between the United States and its close allies boiled over at an international conference in Munich on Friday.

The vice president used the podium at the high-level security gathering that had been focusing on the invasion of Ukraine and the threat Russia poses to Europe and the rest of the world to raise social issues animating many on the American right.

Well great, because European leaders have nothing better to do than fret about US social issues from the pov of Trump Toady # 3.

The vice president’s comments were met with an icy reception and only scattered applause — and groans when he joked about how if American democracy could “survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”

Who says it’s a few months? Who says it’s not for the duration?

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius denounced Vance’s remarks during a session at the conference later in the day, saying in German that it was “not acceptable” that the U.S. vice president compared “the condition of Europe with the condition that prevails in some auto-authoritarian regimes.”

“This is not acceptable,” Pistorius said. “This is not the Europe, not the democracy where I live and where I conduct my election campaign right now. And this is not the democracy that I witness every day in our parliament. In our democracy, every opinion has a voice.”

“I was in the room in Munich for VP Vance’s speech,” Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., wrote in a post on X. “No talk about Russia, Ukraine, China. Just criticisms of our allies and focus on “the threat from within.” His speech is going to embolden our adversaries who will see this as a green light to act while America is distracted/divided.”

Just picking a fight with allies, in other words.

“The new American administration has a very different world view to ours, one that has no regard for established rules, partnership and grown trust,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at the conference Friday, prior to Vance’s comments.

“We have to accept that and we can deal with it. But I am convinced that it is not in the interests of the international community for this worldview to become the dominant paradigm,” said Steinmeier.

Well no, it’s not. It wasn’t in the Nazi period and it isn’t now.

It all goes back to the fallibility of the first person point of view.

It’s a lifelong struggle for everyone. Our wants are much clearer to us than everyone else’s wants, because we are the ones who have our wants, while it’s everyone else who has those other, much less vivid and urgent wants.

And by the same token we think much more highly of ourselves than of everyone else, because we know ourselves from the inside, while everyone else is…well, everyone else.

We learn about this struggle as we get older, and we try to correct for the personal point of view, when we feel like it, and when we know we’ll be arrested if we don’t.

It’s a survival mechanism though, so we hesitate to over-correct. We can perhaps justify selfishness as being good for the species if not necessarily for the less assertive members of the species.

At any rate, one of the things we spend a lifetime learning and re-learning and reminding ourselves of is the fallibility of the personal pov.

Except when we don’t. Except when we come up with a weird new ideology that claims the personal pov nullifies everyone else’s pov because it’s personal. Epistemology turned inside out and wearing a bright orange wig.

The fact that all human beings apart from one can see that Person1 is male is entirely beside the point when Person 1 insists he is not male.

Result: more and more people think like infants, and nobody knows how to do anything, and humans go extinct.

Trump the KGB agent:

Some leaders make history. Others have it thrust upon them when they fail to understand the moment. Donald Trump’s announcement that he has opened bilateral negotiations with Vladimir Putin over the future of Ukraine, which Putin invaded and where his armies have been accused of committing war crimes, is one such “moment”.

Keir Starmer must now decide whether he has what it takes to lead the country – or go down in history as an appeasement prime minister like Neville Chamberlain.

…

Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement traded a large chunk of Czechoslovakia for a commitment from Hitler that Germany’s imperial ambitions would end with the absorption of 3 million Czech citizens from the Sudetenland into the Reich. In 1938, the British prime minister was hoodwinked into believing that was a solemn written commitment from the fuhrer.

But Trump hasn’t been suckered by Putin. Trump is an enthusiastic collaborator with the Kremlin. Moments before he announced, on social media, that he had opened talks with Putin over the future of Ukraine, he acceded to most of Putin’s much-telegraphed demands.

In Brussels, Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defence, said that Ukraine should give up on ever getting all of its territory back. He said that the US would never send troops there – not even as part of a peacekeeping mission – and that Ukraine can forget about joining Nato.

It’s worth repeating: those are all Putin’s demands. Ukraine will merely be kept informed, while Putin – the former head of the KGB – works out what to do with Ukraine in talks with a US president who is behaving as though he is an actual KGB agent.

After a Russian invasion of a European country, no KGB officer could have dreamt of sitting opposite a US president who had already threatened to colonise Nato-member Canada, or invade Greenland, which is part of Nato-member Denmark.

But here we are.

JKR nails it. Again.

It makes no difference how politely the person who wishes to compel my speech makes the request. The very making of the request tells me the man in question thinks he has the right to control my language, and thereby, to control me. He is asking me to acquiesce in a lie, to pretend, implicitly, that he and I are the same. It is an act of dominance, which is why the women discussing this with you keep using the word ‘demand’, as opposed to your preferred ‘request’.

In the current political climate, any request to use opposite sex pronouns when talking about a trans-identified man carries a threat. It is highly disingenuous to pretend you don’t know that many women and girls have been put through absolute hell over the past few years, either for refusing to pretend men can be women, or for hurting an individual trans-identified man’s vanity, even unintentionally.

I’m assuming that if someone put a gun to your head and told you to hand over all your money you wouldn’t much care how sweetly they’d asked. That’s where increasing numbers of women are on this issue. They’re sick of having a metaphorical gun held to their head, of the ever-present threat of being investigated, reported, harassed, sacked, defamed and dragged into court – simply because they won’t pretend men are women.

All you’ve been doing for the past two days is prove exactly how shallow your understanding is, not only of this issue, but of what women have already lost and endured. This makes your patronising ‘just be nice, ladies,’ lectures even more offensive.

Originally a comment by Steven on As they wish to be addressed.

There is a massive equivocation fallacy here.

We generally allow people to choose their own proper names. In our society, most people go by whatever name their parents gave them, but they can pick a different one if they like. As a practical matter, if someone introduces himself as “Fred”, I’m going to address him as “Fred”, and I’m not going to demand that he produce some document to prove that “Fred” is his “real” name.

Even when we happen to know that someone is going by a name other than their given or official or legal name, it is considered courteous–we generally extend the courtesy–of addressing them by the name that they announce. Perhaps the most commonplace example of this is someone who chooses to go by their middle name rather than their first.

Occasionally someone will claim some impractically long and grandiose name for themselves, and insist that everyone use it, but this is usually performative, and understood as such. (See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screaming_Lord_Sutch, also https://xkcd.com/327/)

Personal names in English are gendered, and trans people sometimes change their name to one that matches their announced gender rather than their biological sex. This can cause some confusion or awkwardness on initial introduction, but after a while most people find that they can roll with it, because–in the end–it’s just a name.

Pronouns are completely different. Pronouns are not like proper names. Pronouns are not arbitrary labels that people can choose. Pronouns are part of the language. No one owns or dictates or controls language (Académie Française notwithstanding). Language exists as a shared convention, embedded in the minds of all the people who use it.

Words mean what people think they mean. Really, they do. There is no other way to define or ascertain the meaning of words. When a man announces that he uses she/her pronouns, that neither makes him a woman nor changes the meaning of those pronouns to somehow encompass him. What it is is an implicit lie, coupled with a demand that everyone else participate in that lie with him.

Immediately, this breaks the language. It causes confusion and ambiguity as people contort their speech and their understanding to accommodate the lie.

But what these demands that people use the wrong pronouns really are are demands for submission. They are demands that everyone else do an absurd thing–and the absurdity is the point. If it were a reasonable demand, people might do it because it is reasonable. But it is absurd, and the only reason to do it is to demonstrate submission to the person making the demand. It is a kind of kowtowing.

We shouldn’t do it.

Very bad news.

Senate confirms RFK Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary

The Senate voted on Thursday to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Health and Human Services secretary, a victory for President Donald Trump after Kennedy faced intense scrutiny over his controversial views on vaccines and public health policy.

“Controversial” is a weasel word. They’re way more than controversial; they’re wack, they’re wrong, they’re harmful. First do no harm, unless it’s a Kennedy doing it.

He’s anti-vax and he lies about it.

During confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill, Kennedy denied being anti-vaccine, telling senators instead that he is “pro-safety.” He went on to say, “I believe that vaccines play a critical role in health care.”

At one point, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, asked Kennedy if he agrees that the evidence shows vaccines do not cause autism, citing dozens of studies. Kennedy began to say, “If you show me those studies, I will absolutely –,” at which point Sanders jumped in to say, “That is a very troubling response because the studies are there. Your job is to have looked at those studies as an applicant for this job.”

It’s not the first time Kennedy has said he’s not “anti-vaccine,” but as a CNN fact check from 2023 noted, despite those claims, Kennedy has been one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists and has for years used false and misleading claims to undermine public confidence in vaccines that are indeed safe.

Which is a strikingly wicked thing to do.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on As they wish to be addressed.

A matter of politeness, then, even if that requires one to indulge a certain fiction. Yet I also accept that it is easier for me — a man —to take this view, or grant this indulgence, since doing so comes at no cost to me whatsoever.

I would argue that there is a cost to anyone and everyone indulging in this fiction. It is a surrender to someone else’s rude, unreasonable, reality-denying demand. The power relationship isn’t what you think it is. You’re not deigning to play along, you’re following orders. That’s certainly how those making the demand see it. You might think it’s condescension, but it’s actually submission. Your compliance and submission with pronouns emboldens these men to demand more and more.* Your initial cooperation makes it harder for you to say “No” when the demands become even more unreasonable and obtrusive, particularly when those paying the price are people other than you. Just ask Sandie Peggie how that escalation plays out. I’ll bet it all started with Upton getting a rainbow lanyard with Her/She beside his name. Was that too much to ask? Turns out it was. But you don’t think so. You think it’s “reasonable.” Think again.

Your being a “good ally” to the man whose “certain fiction” you are indulging ends in real harm to women. Ask yourself why “[n]o one is seeking access to spaces previously reserved for men and reserved such for good reason.” If you can see the danger to women as being “at no cost to me whatsoever” I feel sorry for all of the women in your life, because they deserve -and need- better than you.

*There’s an on line, two-panel editorial cartoon I can never re-find when I need it. Panel one shows a woman agreeing to use a TiM’s preferred pronouns because it seems to be such a small thing to ask. Panel two shows the woman being bowled over by the torrent of additional demands the TiM imposes on her.

That’s the whole thing right there.

No no no no no no no. It is a fact that men are men. It’s so much a fact that it’s a tautology. It’s not a belief, it’s a fact. We’re not confused, you’re confused.