Adding, via Rev David Brindley; do hit play.

Joan Walsh at The Nation on Tucker Carlson calling her a cunt.

…nine years ago, Carlson called me the C-word to a Salon intern, multiple times, and told the young man I needed to get “fucked.” I remember it because of the firestorm it caused in our small office.

The intern, Ethan Sherwood Strauss, remembers it too, telling Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple that he’d called to ask Carlson to do an opinion piece about President Obama (I don’t remember that detail, and, assuming it’s true, I apologize for our news judgment), when, out of nowhere, Carlson began calling me the C-word and sharing his views on my sex life. Strauss, understandably, was shocked, and told his supervisor what happened. 

Uproar. They wondered if they should write about it.

It was appalling, but was it newsworthy? Maybe; Carlson had moved to Fox News the year before. One problem was that Strauss didn’t tape the call, and when he called him back to confirm, Carlson denied it. His supervisor called too—she recently shared with me an e-mail she sent to a friend that afternoon. “I talked to Tucker Carlson on the phone for a half hour about how he called Joan a ‘c****’ during a conversation w/one of our interns and is now pretending like he didn’t.”

…

The other appalling fact is that, on another level, it wasn’t that newsworthy. The year before, disgraced Fox host Bill O’Reilly told me I had “blood on my hands” and spewed other personal invective, because I had defended the murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller (whom O’Reilly slandered as “Tiller the baby killer” for years). A few months before that, former GOP House majority leader Dick Armey told me he was “so damn glad you can never be my wife because I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day” during a routine MSNBC debate about the economy. Another day, another threatened right-wing man insulting a liberal woman in the coarsest personal terms.

Been there, seen a lot of that.

Also Don Lemon, I guess to even the numbers or something.

CNN anchor Don Lemon has hit out at the network over his firing months after being accused of misogyny over remarks about top Republican Nikki Hayley.

No he didn’t “hit out at” the network. Don’t be so silly. He objected to his firing – he complained, he fumed, he griped – but he didn’t hit anything.

“I am stunned,” Mr Lemon wrote on Twitter, saying he was told by his agent he had been let go.

He wasn’t “let go”; he was fired. One minute it’s a crude exaggeration and the next it’s a crude euphemism. I do wish journalists would use real words.

Was it because of the ridiculous and misogynist remark he made about Nikki Haley and his ridiculous and misogynist defense of same? Or was it because of a longstanding pattern of sexist crap? Or perhaps both?

The 57-year-old had appeared on CNN on Monday during the morning programme as normal, before reports of his dismissal were publicised later that day.

57. Nikki Haley is 51. Ah well – he says women become worthless earlier than men, so I bow to his superior wisdom.

Melbourne International Comedy Festival has a hell of a nerve.

Tucker Carlson fired fired fired fired.

Fox News said Monday that it was parting ways with Tucker Carlson, its most popular prime time host who was also the source of repeated controversies and headaches for the network because of his statements on everything from race relations to L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

The network made the announcement less than a week after it agreed to pay $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit in which Mr. Carlson’s show, one of the highest rated on Fox, figured prominently for its role in spreading misinformation after the 2020 election.

So we’re supposed to think Fox News wasn’t behind Carlson’s “misinformation” aka lies? Ha, yeah, sure, that’s hilarious. But anyway: GOOD.

Mr. Carlson is also facing a lawsuit from a former Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg, who claims that he presided over a misogynistic and discriminatory workplace culture. Ms. Grossberg said in the lawsuit, which was filed in March, that on her first day working for Mr. Carlson, she discovered the work space was decorated with large pictures of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing a swimsuit.

Ms. Grossberg, who was fired after filing the lawsuit, also claimed that after she was coerced by Fox’s lawyers into providing a misleading deposition in the Dominion trial and defending an offensive text from Mr. Carlson, his producers emailed the rest of the staff in recognition of “Abby Day” and suggested ordering a staff lunch to celebrate.

Fox says nuh-uh. I’m sure they’re far more credible than, say, anyone else on the planet other than Donald Trump.

Now where’s that bale of confetti I’ve been saving…

Special guest: Kyle Rittenhouse.

Republicans in Idaho have been criticized for “glorifying political violence” after the party hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, the American who shot and killed two people at an anti-racism protest and injured another, as a celebrity guest at a fundraiser.

The 20-year-old was the guest of honor at a Bonneville county Republican party event, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on 15 April, where an AR-15 style rifle signed by Rittenhouse was auctioned off as part of a fundraiser and people could buy tickets to “Trigger time”: a Rittenhouse-hosted shooting event at a gun range.

Ah that’s so attractive, so public-spirited, so benevolent.

The event, amid a prolonged spate of mass shootings – many conducted with AR-15s – suggests a further embrace by Republicans of the most extreme elements of the gun lobby in the US, despite polls showing a majority of Americans, across party affiliation, supporting some gun control laws.

It’s not an embrace of the gun lobby or its “extreme elements”; it’s an embrace of guns and violence and murder. It’s treating murder as a goal and a virtue. It’s a fucking death cult, a murder cult.

Rebecca Casper, the mayor of Idaho Falls, said Rittenhouse “does not represent the majority of the people in Idaho Falls”.

“Make no mistake, this unfortunate, distasteful and insensitive event was in no way supported by the City of Idaho Falls,” Casper said. “We are an inclusive and welcoming community and we join with so many others in voicing our dismay over such an insensitive and patently offensive event.”

But it’s not merely insensitive and offensive; it’s glorification of murder, which amounts to incitement of murder. Calling it “offensive” misses the point.

Rittenhouse’s appearance comes amid a series of high-profile shootings in the US. According to the Gun Violence Archive there have been 167 mass shootings – defined as incidents where four people were shot or killed – in the US through 21 April.

Through April 21 starting when? January 1?

After that the article for some reason lurches into talk of “violence against trans people and gender non-conforming people” and the point gets completely lost.

Human progress is a sight to behold. Never mind about AI; we now have batteries for girls.

50p? Pikers! Here they’re a whole entire dollar more.

Some Victorian Greens are not entirely ecstatic about the new and more sweeping definitions of “transphobia.”

A newly expanded definition of transphobia is threatening to reopen divisions within the Victorian Greens after a senior member accused the party’s leadership of stifling free speech with its revamped code of conduct.

Others have welcomed the updated policy, which was passed by the party’s state council late last week, arguing the Greens now have the strongest anti-discrimination safeguards of any political party in Victoria for transgender members.

But not the strongest anti-discrimination safeguards for women or feminists or people who understand what words mean.

The Victorian Greens now define transphobia as the vilification of trans people; intentionally misgendering people individually or as a group; denying that non-binary genders exist; or “promoting the unnecessary prioritisation of sex characteristics above gender”.

Aka questioning the fanatical doctrine that “sex characteristics” don’t determine who is a woman and who is a man.

The party’s new rules also state that “advocating for unnecessary restrictions on transition care” and “asking leading questions that cover for doing one of the above” can constitute transphobia.

And who will decide when those conditions have been met? Why, the fanatics, of course. The people who are guaranteed to find sin where sin is expected, and never to err on the side of thinking people are allowed to know who is a woman and who isn’t.

A member of the Victorian Greens, who holds a senior position and was speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss internal party matters, said the new code of conduct went too far.

“The old code already prohibited vilification, harassment and misgendering,” the party member said. “Now you won’t even be able to ask questions about or propose changes to our policy without threat of expulsion. One way or another, this will split us.”

The member went on to accuse MPs – including Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam – of trying to “cleanse the party of dissent”.

“They’re not interested in freedom of expression, facts or science. They’ve declared war on half the membership.”

And on women. That’s how this crusade works – the punishment always lands mostly on women.

However, another Greens member – also speaking on the condition of anonymity – stressed the expanded definition of transphobia was about giving the party the appropriate tools to grapple with important issues, rather than predetermine an outcome.

The member added that in the past, trans-exclusionary feminists – who often prefer to be called gender-critical feminists – have used official Greens meetings to question, among other things, whether men can give birth. Some party members find these sorts of questions offensive because, in their view, it presupposes that trans men are not men.

Which, of course, they’re not; that’s what “trans men” means. They may be butch; they may even be more butch than most men (though that’s hard to pull off without the requisite body type); but they’re not men.

Greens LGBTQ spokesperson Gabrielle de Vietri said the new code of conduct would protect serious debate while ensuring unsubstantiated questions aren’t weaponised against gender-diverse people.

“Respectful debate which is grounded in evidence is crucial to policy development and will always be welcome in the Greens,” she said.

“Leading questions, on the other hand, are a highly effective tactic that bigots can use to fearmonger and mislead people about complicated issues.”

And of course it’s the zealots who will decide which questions are “leading” and which are permitted. Fewer but better Greens.

I approve this elegant and polite mating ritual.

AI gonna eat our lunch yeah?

[Google boss] Sundar Pichai told the CBS programme 60 Minutes this month that AI could be “very harmful” if deployed wrongly, and was developing fast. “So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely,” he said.

…

So how much of a danger is posed by unrestrained AI development? Musk is one of thousands of signatories to a letter published by the Future of Life Institute, a thinktank, that called for a six-month moratorium on the creation of “giant” AIs more powerful than GPT-4, the system that underpins ChatGPT and the chatbot integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The risks cited by the letter include “loss of control of our civilization”.

…

An immediate concern is that the AI systems producing plausible text, images and voice – which exist already – create harmful disinformation or help commit fraud. The Future of Life letter refers to letting machines “flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth”.

So, like right now but even more and worse.

Glinner on Barry Humphries:

My acquaintance with him was about as fleeting as it was possible to get and yet I feel all those qualities manifested in the single email I received from him. A couple of years ago, Stella O’Malley and I wrote a letter defending JK Rowling from the death and rape threats sent to her by trans rights activists. I thought it would be an easy and safe way for comedians to stand up against the rising authoritarianism of the hysterical, misogynist Left. But hardly a single comedian of my acquaintance signed it.

Barry signed it, though. And he sent me this.

Originally a comment by latsot on Trans activism as progressive credential.

Well there’s not even a passion about trans rights, is there? If there were passion, there’d be a constant emotional outpouring describing those rights and the injurious effects of their supposed lack. If there were passion, there’d be powerfully reasoned argument, studded with heart warming and heart breaking examples.

The passion is not for ‘trans rights’, it’s for shouting the slogan, signalling the virtue, siding with the side, as you say, Arty.

One of the most interesting parts of any #LetWomenSpeak event is watching the behaviour of the ‘protesters’ (when they’re not being violent). They’re passionless, for the most part. They stand, slackly and without expression, blandly repeating the mantras. Every so often, someone with a megaphone will whip up 30 seconds of enthusiasm, but it quickly dies out. They put on music, for goodness’ sake, to stop everyone getting bored and wandering off!

The comparison to the passion expressed by our side, in the form of detailed explanations of injustice and calls for specific action rather than vague appeals to phobia, tells you everything you need to know about trans activism.

Then, in my experience (I’ve only been to three), when the trans activists sense that the event is about to finish, they attempt to surge forward. At Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast, this thrust was decidedly half-hearted and the antagonists seemed relieved, more than anything, that the police did such a good job of holding them back.

What they’d have done had the police not been there is anyone’s guess, of course, but my point is that this is the part they get behind. This is why they’re there. The part that requires no words, reason or even responsibility. That’s the only thing they can really muster passion for: the part about stopping women speaking. Because they know what they’re saying and they know who they’re saying it about.

This is borne out by those events that have been less well-policed, where the protesters have been allowed so close to the speakers that their noise really did drown out women’s voices. There’s no passionless shuffling and half-hearted chanting there! It’s almost as though the entire point of these ‘protests’ is to stop women telling the truth about trans activism and its ‘activists’!

I’ve often said how interesting I find it that the TAs never copy our format. They never have similar open mic events where trans people and their allies can speak passionately about the many injustices they feel plagued by. Instead of protesting about *checks notes* women being allowed to speak, they could let trans people speak, right! The optics would be great! The news channels would be falling over themselves to compare and contrast in a light most favourable to their side!

There’s only one reason I can think of why they don’t do this. They know how stupid it all sounds. They know how pathetic it will seem if they whine about getting funny looks when they barge into women’s spaces. They know how monstrous it will look when they demand that disabled women accept intimate care from men against their wishes. They know they have no logical, legal or moral arguments. They know there is no human right they don’t already have. They know their demands are neither feasible nor sustainable and they know they have nowhere near the support among the general public that they have within their social media and, as you put it, media-media bubbles.

You’re right, Arty. The ‘passion’ is all in the side-picking and purity-signalling, not in any deeply-held belief in ‘trans rights’. I have no doubt that many believe in or even feel a deep sense of injustice. We all did, at that age, and sometimes it turned out that the perceived injustice wasn’t really there. This is about the rebellion, not the cause, and it’s the dullest, most tedious, most regressive, least passionate rebellion in history.

Thanks to Rev David Brindley for alerting us to this gem:

And how will we be defining “vilifying”? “discriminating against”? “the rights of trans people”? How will we be knowing when it’s “unnecessary” to prioritize “sex characteristics” over “gender”? How will we be knowing why sex has “characteristics” (which there’s no need to prioritize) while gender doesn’t? How will we be defining “transition care”? How will we be defining “leading questions”? How will we be defining “harms”?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Serious people.

I still can’t quite figure out where all of this passion about “trans rights” has suddenly come from. It’s got little to do with the ‘Western’ concept of transsexualism as it was understood a few decades ago, and it’s got nothing to do with celebrating or encouraging gender diversity in general. Nor does it have anything to do with the ways other societies are structured around sex, sexuality, and gender roles, like in indigenous, collectivist cultures around the world. “Transphobia” as the term is presently used is an elusive spectre that seems to have been conjured entirely out of people’s minds. None of the terms it relies on can be consistently defined, or even roughed out: what is and is not “transgender”? What does and does not constitute a “trans right”?

If we can’t get anywhere with the words themselves, can we find some clues in the people who use them? What do the people who carp about “trans rights” have in common? Based on the insults they throw at their supposed enemies, they seem to share an anxiety about the “far right”, about Donald Trump or Brexit, about a general sense of loss of social cohesion, some kind of cultural splintering, and a fear of being left tribeless after a period of political disruption…

All that anxiety has led to the formation of an in-group/out-group mentality among some progressives, and “trans rights” appears to serve no function except as a shibboleth to signal that one is loyal to the tribe and willing to fight the good fight against its enemies in order to earn favour and maintain status among the in-group. It’s certainly got nothing to do with actual progressive values. Women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech… they’re being ripped to shreds. The degree of enthusiasm with which a person takes up the transgender cause corresponds closely to the degree to which that person is invested in publicly displaying his or her “progressive” credentials: direct financial incentive, career obligations or opportunities, insecure social standing or job position, etc. Jolyon Maugham has found a lucrative market in selling virtuous, crusading lawsuits to credulous backing donors within the group. Billy Bragg built his entire image for decades around being the most progressive folk troubadour in England — it’s his bread and butter. Owen Jones, progeny of prominent old-school hippie leftists, rests his entire social media and media-media brand on lefty militancy. On and on.

No wonder JK Rowling, possibly the woman with the most secure credentials, career opportunities, and finances in the whole United Kingdom, is so far the most prominent person to step up and speak out.

Yuh huh.

He’s a guy. He may be a guy of distinction, I don’t know, but he’s a guy.

That’s a woman who won’t get a 2023 women of distinction award, because this fella got it instead.

Well, feminist organizations shouldn’t be promoting men at the expense of women. That’s not feminist.

And another thing.

“…but trans rights are human rights. They shouldn’t be up for debate amongst serious people…”

Jolyon Maugham is a lawyer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it an important part of a lawyer’s job to be very careful about precision in language, and to make sure everybody is talking about the same thing?

I ask because what exactly are “trans rights”? How can we tell whether they’re human rights or not if people aren’t clear about what they mean by the category?

Is it a human right to force everyone to pretend you are what you visibly are not?

No, it isn’t. It can’t be. Such a right would be unworkable, and often disastrous.

Is it a human right to force everyone to say you are a woman when you obviously are not?

No, of course it isn’t. Why would that be a right? It doesn’t even look like other rights.

Is it a human right for people to be treated as if they were the sex they’re not for all purposes?

No. Such a right would carve great gaping holes in women’s existing rights, and they would be pretty bad for children too.

Those seem to be the pseudo-rights that trans activists want, but they shouldn’t and can’t have them. If they attain them everyone else will lose some genuine rights.

Jolyon Maugham is a lawyer. On some level he must know this, right? That the claimed rights aren’t rights as normally understood?

Jolyon continues to out-Jolyon himself.

What possesses him to keep calling her “Jo” in that infuriating way? He’s not her friend, so he doesn’t get to “Jo” her – especially since in his case it’s not just inappropriate familiarity, it’s also male condescension plus intrusion. It’s a deeply hostile act, so it makes his whiny “Y won’t you make a truce with me??” all the more passive-aggressive and obnoxious.

And then there’s telling her what she knows again. There’s telling her no good will come of fighting when he picks fights with everyone. There’s saying he tweeted at her “warmly” as if he were just the nicest kindest sweetest most cuddly man on the planet, when in fact he’s an aggressive Twitter bully.

And then there’s whining about the fact that she blocked him, when he’s blocked countless feminist women because we dare to dispute him.

They used to be so close, he whines.

Once upon a time, JK Rowling and I had a good relationship. We followed one another on twitter. She funded Gingerbread, the Charity for single mothers I was on the Board of. And from time to time she asked me for help. https://t.co/jsOtzs2xQR

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) April 22, 2023

Ah she asked him for help did she. So she was the supplicant and he was the benefactor. He’d like us to think that, wouldn’t he.

Knowing that, alongside her position on trans rights which I do not agree with, she has funded much good work, I wrote to her on Twitter DM, as I have written to many other GC feminists, with warmth and in sadness.

It was that message I referred to in my tweets earlier today. pic.twitter.com/pJlR1solEW

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) April 22, 2023

He wrote to her with warmth and in sadness, to try to persuade her that his superior wisdom could rescue her from this willful insistence on having her own opinions about whether men should be able to take over Being Women from us stupid weak useless female people. How warm and sad of him, and how patronizing and conceited and generally repulsive.

What an insufferable man.

Now for the scathing review of Jolyon’s book by Yuan Yi Zhu in the Times.

How to explain the rather indefinite but very real fame of Maugham to those who do not tweet? Well, you see, he was a successful but obscure tax barrister. Then he started a mildly successful blog, which led to him advising the Labour Party on tax policy and even to fleeting fantasies of becoming attorney-general in the House of Lords in an Ed Miliband government.

But what really made him famous was his energetic abuse of anyone who disagreed with him on Twitter…

That yes but I think his colossal ego also played a large part. It really is a sight to behold.

For instance there’s the attention to his martyrdom over The Fox and the Kimono.

His account of the inner-London fox hunt is spread across eight pages and ends with him quoting, in full, the long statement he issued on Twitter (where else?) after the RSPCA declined to prosecute him. He compares his calvary to that of Caroline Flack, the television presenter bullied into suicide by social media. The reader will be glad to know that for him “the pain of it all has faded somewhat”. For the fox as well, one hopes.

I take it there’s nothing about our pain.

One more thing the reader should know about our brave hero Maugham is that he is a King’s Counsel. If the big blue letters “KC” on the cover escaped your notice, he refers to his exalted rank at least 13 times in the body of the book alone; on four of those, he reassures the reader that he wasn’t interested in taking silk for the money it would bring (how much money he could be making in private practice instead of pursuing his noble activism is another of the book’s leitmotifs).

…

Several chapters are dedicated to cases he brought through the Good Law Project, the Goliath-slaying private company he founded to sue the government with money donated by gullible laymen, with a dismal success rate. One chapter concerns a judicial review against the awarding of some contracts during Covid. The judge found part of the process unlawful, but that it made no difference to the eventual outcome, and refused to grant declaratory relief — in substance, a pathetic defeat for Maugham.

But “at least from my perspective, it didn’t really matter . . . The might of the crowd — we had received over 16,000 separate donations — helped us expose a series of transactions that stank of sleaze.” In other words, throw enough mud and some will stick. This is a refreshingly frank admission, but one which does him no credit.

The real crime of this book is not that its author is insufferable. It is not that he displays an ugly streak of meanness against anyone who disagrees with him. It is that it is unbearably boring. Lawyers are supposed to be in love with the sound of their own voices; Maugham is also in love with his own prose.

He quotes his own blog posts, interviews, tweets. The man is a fountain of vanity.

Page after page, we are treated to ponderous declarations and clumsy narrations, some of which literally make no sense. It is all downhill from the book’s very first, unforgivable sentence: “The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not.” Is this a song lyric? What does it even mean? Does Penguin no longer employ editors? Give your money to the RSPCA but please do not buy this book. Maugham is a first-time author who should not be encouraged to reoffend ever again.

I promise not to buy this book!

Heh Rowling finds Jolyon’s “we both know” as absurd as I do.

He does! Of course he does. The conceit of that man could power a rocket to Mars.

Hilarious. Jolyon Maugham has published a book. The Times has a disdainful review. JK Rowling remarked on the review.

So what does the notoriously pompous self-admiring barrister do? He tells her – chummily calling her “Jo” as if they were friends which they are NOT – she should read it.

“We both know” ffs – as if she automatically thinks exactly what he thinks about the matter – i.e. about how impossible it is that he Jolyon Maugham could have written a bad book. Why would she admire his book as much as he does? Why would she take the same view of his critics that he does? That’s some badly broken theory of mind right there. “We both know, Jo, that you admire me as much as I admire me.”

Then he tells a huge lie.

They both know no such thing, because it’s not true.