Hmm. Staunch, or fanatical? Staunch, or one-eyed, clueless, venomous, poisonous?

Ruth Comerford on Clara Vulliamy:

Clara is a staunch Trans rights activist and is passionate about celebrating Trans and Non-Binary children in stories. She has been on the receiving end of horrific online abuse for her opinions. At the time of our interview, she had just locked her Twitter account again because the volume of threatening messages she was receiving was “getting ridiculous”.

Has she though? Horrific abuse? Any receipts for that? Any evidence for the claim of “threatening messages”?

I can’t see the reporter’s name without thinking of Aidan Comerford, but Google didn’t turn up any indication that they’re related, so I don’t know.

“I won’t say who, but some of them are from authors,” she says. “That is something the publishing industry has to face up to – it can’t keep turning a blind eye to the fact there are children’s authors who [spout] really vile transphobia from ‘within the room’ in publishing. And it’s so important publishers don’t accommodate that, and I’m prepared to speak out about that too – it’s so important”. 

Any receipts for that? Is it really “transphobia” or is it just not believing that boys can be girls and girls can be boys? It’s not a phobia to know what’s what.

We saw the other day that the LA news media reported a sexual assault on a girl of 10 as the crime of a woman when in fact of course the perp was a man who claimed to be a woman. I posted about it here and here.

Now we learn that the LA district attorney suspended a prosecutor for refusing to call the perp a woman. It’s only the right-wing media that are reporting on this.

Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon has suspended a prosecutor for allegedly referring to a convicted child molester and suspected murderer by his birth name and the pronouns that correspond to his sex, rather than the name and pronouns he adopted after coming out as transgender.

That is, after claiming to be transgender after molesting a child.

Assistant district attorney Shea Sanna served as the lead prosecutor on part of the Hannah Tubbs case, according to a Fox News report citing law enforcement sources. Sanna has argued in the past that jailhouse phone calls show Tubbs was attempting to use gender identity to game the justice system — an argument that sources say made others in Gascon’s office uncomfortable.

So take an aspirin! Who cares if it made them uncomfortable; what if it’s true? And how likely is it that it’s not true?

The child molestation case dates back to 2014, when Tubbs attacked a ten-year-old girl in a women’s bathroom. At the time, Tubbs was two weeks shy of 18 and and identified as a male named James. Eight years passed before police arrested Tubbs in connection with the attack. DNA evidence allowed police to make the link in the cold case.

After pleading guilty, Tubbs, now 26 and going by the name “Hannah,” received a sentence of two years at a juvenile facility because Gascon’s office declined to transfer the case to adult court. Gascon thus adhered to one of his day-one directives barring “children” from being tried as adults.

A boy two weeks short of 18 who sexually assaults a girl of 10 isn’t a “child.” An adolescent, yes, but a child, no.

Following the sentencing last year, jailhouse recordings of Tubbs were released in which the convict boasted about the light sentence he would receive after pleading guilty. Tubbs also made explicit remarks about the victim.

Let me guess – tight pussy type of thing?

Gascon pretended to care.

“After her sentencing in our case, I became aware of extremely troubling statements she made about her case, the resolution of it and the young girl that she harmed,” explained Gascon. “If we knew about her disregard for the harm she caused we would have handled this case differently.”

…

In an interview with the New York Post last year, Sanna disputed the idea that Gascon only found out about the tapes after the sentencing.

“George Gascon was in possession of all evidence and knew or should have known of every statement made by Tubbs when he said he still believes Tubbs should be tried as a juvenile,” said Sanna. “Gascon knew about all 250 plus jailhouse tapes and removed me from the case the night before the hearing where I was going to play the tapes.”

It’s disgusting.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Willoughby feels hunted.

One last thing: the information bar at the bottom gives the number of ‘hate crimes’ for the ‘year to March 2022’. That implies that it’s for the first quarter of 2022, when in fact it covers the year ending in March 2022; in other words, the twelve months from April 2021 to March 2022 inclusive.

There are figures here.

Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.’ This common definition was agreed in 2007 by the police, Crown Prosecution Service, Prison Service (now the National Offender Management Service) and other agencies that make up the criminal justice system. There are five centrally monitored strands of hate crime:

• race or ethnicity

• religion or beliefs

• sexual orientation

• disability, and

• transgender identity

Putting aside the Stonewalling of last category (the protected characteristic in law is ‘gender reassignment’), the figures for ‘hate crimes’ – which are actual crimes (such as assault) which have been deemed to have been aggravated by a motive based on hatred of the target’s perceived membership of one of the protected groups; hating someone because of who they are isn’t a crime in and of itself – the figures given are as follows:

Key results

• in year ending March 2022, there were 155,841 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, an increase of 26% from year ending March 2021 (124,104 offences)

• there were 109,843 race hate crimes, 8,730 religious hate crimes, 26,152 sexual orientation hate crimes, 14,242 disability hate crimes and 4,355 transgender hate crimes in year ending March 2022

• there were annual increases in all five strands of hate crime, ranging from 19% for race hate crimes to 56% for transgender hate crimes

• the upward trend in hate crime seen in recent years is likely to have been mainly driven by improvements in crime recording by the police; there have been spikes in hate crime following certain events such as the EU Referendum and the terrorist attacks in 2017

• it is uncertain the extent to which the increases seen this year continue the pattern of improvements in police recording or represent a real increase in hate crime; the rise seen in the latest year may also have been affected by the lower levels of crime recorded in year ending March 2021 due to the COVID 19 pandemic restrictions; trends may also differ by strand as some crime types have been more affected by improvements in recording practices than others

• as in previous years, the majority of hate crimes were racially motivated, accounting for over two-thirds of all such offences (70%; 109,843 offences); racially motivated hate crimes increased by 19 per cent between year ending March 2021 and year ending March 2022

• religious hate crimes increased by 37 per cent (to 8,730 offences), up from 6,383 in the previous year; this was the highest number of religious hate crimes recorded since the time series began in year ending March 2012

• sexual orientation hate crimes increased by 41% (to 26,152), disability hate crimes by 43% (to 14,242) and transgender identity hate crimes by 56% (to 4,355); these percentage increases were much higher than seen in recent years

• over half (51%) of the hate crimes recorded by the police were for public order offences and a 41% were for violence against the person offences; five per cent were recorded as criminal damage and arson offences

(Emphasis mine)

• race or ethnicity…………………..109,843 (70.48%)

• religion or beliefs…………………….8,730 (5.60%)

• sexual orientation…………………..26,152 (16.78%)

• disability…………………………….14,242 (9.14%)

• transgender identity…………………4,355 (2.79%)

Those add up to more than 100% of the total, presumably because some crimes ticked more than one box.

What is telling is the bit I’ve italicised. The police seem to be recording a lot more relatively minor incidents as ‘crime’ than they used to, and are quicker to label them ‘hate crime’ (and don’t get me started on ‘non-crime hate incidents’). Meanwhile, serious crime is not being dealt with. More from the link which explains:

Hate crimes are a subset of notifiable offences recorded by the police. In year ending March 2022, three per cent of such offences recorded by the police were identified as being hate crimes. This proportion has gradually increased from one per cent in year ending March 2013, as the police have improved their identification of what constitutes a hate crime, especially across public order and violence against the person offences which account for 92 per cent of hate crime offences collectively.

The annual crime rate in Great Britain is roughly 80 crimes per thousand people (population about 60.8 million). Acording to those figures above, hate crime incidents are about 2.56 per thousand people. Not nice, especially for the victims, but a very small proportion.

Those hate crimes perpetrated against people with a ‘gender identity’?

0.07 incidents per thousand people.

Three percent of crime is hate crime, and three percent of those are perpetrated against people who claim that it was motivated by a hatred of ‘gender identity’. Half of those are ‘public order offences’; i.e. someone saying something that someone didn’t like. Mr. Willoughby is taking a minuscule fraction of a small fraction of crime, and making it out to be a huge problem – for him. I’m having a hard time imagining a more narcissistic viewpoint; or a more dangerous approach to reporting crime than interviewing him for something which is exremely unlikely ever to affect him.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic on Fox News and its contempt for everyone:

Right-wing political and media figures regularly level the accusation of “elitism” at other Americans. But new revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the Fox Corporation over claims of election fraud are reminders that the most cynical elites in America are the Republicans and their media valets.

Is Tucker Carlson out there picking tomatoes or cutting up chickens or driving a truck or teaching first grade or staffing an emergency room or chopping cotton? Tucker Carlson reads a script on camera, and he’s very very rich.

The garbled “elite” hoax has been a goldmine for the likes of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump.

Republicans have used it to convince millions of working people that super-educated gasbags such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Ron DeSantis are just ordinary folks who care deeply about kitchen-table issues that matter to their family and a secure future for their children, such as Hunter Biden’s sex life and whether public schools are letting kids pee in litter boxes.

It’s not about the money, see. Billionaires can be the salt of the earth, like Trump, and poor people can be elitist elitists, like union organizers and freelance journalists.

It’s one thing, however, to suspect that Fox personalities see their viewers as mere rubes who must be riled up in the name of corporate profit. It’s another entirely to have it all documented in black and white. Dominion might not win its lawsuit against Fox, but for the rest of America, the process has produced something more important than money: an admission, by Fox’s on-air personalities, of how much they disrespect and disdain their own viewers.

…

Fox’s cynical fleecing of its viewers is an expression of titanic elitism, the sort that destroys reality in the minds of ordinary people for the sake of fame and money. Not only does such behavior reveal contempt for Fox’s viewers; it encourages the destruction of our system of government purely for ratings and a limo to and from the Fox mothership in Times Square. (New York City might be full of coastal “elitists,” but that’s where the Fox crew lives and works; we’ll know the real populist millennium has arrived when Fox packs off Hannity and Greg Gutfeld and Jeanine Pirro to its new offices in Kansas or Oklahoma.)

Maybe they could compromise and move to Sacramento?

Also Tucker Carlson:

If you spend billions trying to make a place better, and it gets worse, you have an obligation to think about why. Maybe you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you’re not as powerful and clever as you thought you were. Maybe there’s a problem with your formula. 

But none of this ever occurs to people like Tom Nichols and Victoria Nuland and for that matter, Joe Biden. The more discredited they are, the more self-confident they become. They see every failure as evidence that their talents are more desperately needed than ever. What is this? Well, it’s called hubris.

Hmmmmmmmm. What does that remind me of. Something…it’s right there, I’ve almost got it. The more they get wrong the more brazen they get…who is that…oh yes I remember! It’s the woman man person camera tv guy, the one with the galactic brain and miraculous talents.

Hubris is the delusion that causes people to mistake themselves for God. They imagine they have power and wisdom and foresight they don’t actually possess, that no human does. Hubris is a species of mental illness. These people are unwell. They’re crazy and there’s nothing more dangerous than that. 

Yep. That sounds like Trump all right. Trump does a lot of imagining he has wisdom and foresight that he doesn’t actually have, right out in the open where we can watch him in the act.

Ok now I get it. Tucker Carlson on Fox tells us the Democrats hoaxed us about them there servers to cover up “The WikiLeaks scandal.”

The DNC’s servers, they claimed, had been hacked by the Russian military. The goal was to hurt Hillary Clinton, whom the Russians feared for her strength and wisdom, and to help Donald Trump, whom they controlled. Russia hacked the servers, in order to hack the election. That was their story. The Washington Post ran with it the first day, as if it were true.

Says the guy who runs with so many things, as if they were true.

But there was never any evidence that it was true. Almost seven years later, there is still no evidence. The DNC’s story about its servers is a lie. But, as a political strategy, that lie worked flawlessly. Russia made the perfect villain. It was a White, Christian country with a traditional social structure. It was everything the Democratic Party already opposed. The foreign policy apparatus in Washington was happy to hate Russia again.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh I see. Russia is white Christian, so it’s awesome, not just its people and its very very very big country, but its Dear Leader. Him especially.

Why did The Righteous People bully Christian Henson out? Because he “caused upset.” Oh dear. That’s very bad.

Christian Henson, the co-founder of British software brand Spitfire Audio, has taken to Twitter to share the news that he will no longer remain involved in Spitfire Audio, Pianobook and LABS operations. The announcement follows accusations of Henson espousing allegedly transphobic views.

…

Henson’s departure comes in light of a video essay posted by producer and content creator Jeremy Blake of Red Means Recording. In the video, titled ‘Spitfire Audio has a Transphobia Problem,’ Blake claims that Henson’s comments on transgender rights have caused upset among the music production community and Spitfire customer base. Spitfire collaborators Venus Theory and Skyscape Paradise reportedly terminated their partnership with the brand following the revelation.

The revelation? Or the claim, or the accusations? Which is it?

The initial dispute arose when Henson voiced support for author JK Rowling and former comedy writer Graham Linehan – specifically on their views on transgender rights, which have sparked controversy and backlash.

And why is that? Because any dissent from the new and stupid ideology that says people can change sex with their brains is BLASPHEMY and must be driven from the village with fire and sharpened axes.

Updating to add a screenshot of the oh-so-horrifying tweet [h/t NightCrow]:

Jeremy Blake has issued a response to MusicTech regarding Henson’s announcement, saying: “I am saddened and disappointed [that] the efforts of the community to redeem a beloved company have ended in Christian’s departure. I tried very hard in my video to offer a path to open communication and clearing of the air, and we have gotten none of that.”

Blake tried very hard in his video to spell out exactly what Henson had to do to appease the people Blake had just summoned to bully him. The gall of these people. “Hey, man, I did a video explicitly telling you what you had to do to get us to stop throwing huge rocks at you, what’s the holdup? Do what you’re told! Jump!”

“The fact of the matter is, Christian hasn’t apologized or explained his stance on the matter addressed. Nobody has. It’s still there, looming like it always was.

“What worries me here is that the beliefs shared in the original tweet are so deeply entrenched that instead of coming around to seeing why they are harmful, Christian has decided to martyr himself and step down from his operations at Spitfire.”

How dare he think what he thinks instead of what I tell him to think?!

Another triumph for The Activists.

Henson is a media composer and the “episode” of course is something to do with accusations of “transphobia.” Now he’s being told NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

you quit instead of apologizing? bro. come on. there is nothing weak about owning up to mistakes. in fact that’s the strongest thing you can do. i urge you to challenge these prejudices with proper education on trans issues. we don’t want you to quit, we want you to see yourself.

We don’t want you to quit, we want you to stick around so that we can kick you some more.

Please, Christian, no… this isn’t what anyone, even your most ardent critics wanted. Please *talk* to people who are effected by the kind of dangerous and hurtful rhetoric Peterson and Lineham and their ilk are pushing. Discuss your concerns. *Listen* to theirs.

Don’t go! Stand still while we punch you!

You have provided sound advice in many of your videos, coincidentally at the particular time I needed to hear it. I am begging you to give some thought to the track you are on, and begging you to look for a chance to get off it.

I am begging you to think what I think instead of what you thing. Begging, I tell you!

I’m sorry you’re too obstinate to try to understand what other people were trying to tell you and learn from it, be open and sincere about it instead of hiding from the issue until it’s unsustainable. If you ever change, you’ll be welcomed by many, I think.

Why can’t you just do what you’re told?? Why do you insist on having your own thoughts???

India Willoughby, dressed up in a little-girl round-collared blouse with puffy sleeves, says how persecuted he is.

…and it’s just become so toxic, it’s horrible, I feel like this government have put a target on my back, I belong to nought point two percent of the population, which is like literally nothing at all – I feel hunted now, every story that appears in the British media is about trans people being a threat to women n chil which is ridiculous

Stop right there. That’s a distortion, along with the absurd exaggeration. The main issue is men who identify as trans being a threat to women’s rights, and about men who pretend to be trans to gain access being a physical threat to women. It’s not about trans people in general being a general threat to women; that’s absurd. As for children, the perceived threat is mostly persuading children to believe this stupid reckless harmful ideology. None of those are in the least “ridiculous.”

And – erm – they’re treating me as if I’m a criminal or a disease. When you have that rettrick, I just want to say that Ben, if you have that rettrick, a thousand stories a month on trans people, exclusively hostile, you’re going to get a reaction because it’s all very well having a civilized debate, in a philosophical sense about you know women and trans people in a studio, but that feeds down onto the street where you have thuggish ignorant people who don’t pick up on the subtleties.

Mmm. Powerful argument. Women mustn’t say that men like Willoughby are undermining women’s rights, because that will feed down onto the street where thuggish ignorant people will hear it and go berserk.

Ok then. Never mind.

Why did Trump go to East Palestine? To pretend to be the guy who cares about East Palestine and the people who live there and the people who live in all the places like East Palestine.

Donald Trump is visiting the small Ohio town reeling from the toxic fallout of a Norfolk Southern Corp. train derailment in the hope of capitalizing politically on residents’ anger about the initial response by the Biden administration. But the trip also highlights the ex-president’s rolling back of rules that former regulators say could have improved rail safety.

He bragged constantly about getting rid of all the pesky regulations, as if they were swarms of gnats as opposed to measures to protect human health and the environment, protect worker and consumer safety, and protect people from industrial accidents and disasters like DERAILMENTS OF TRAINS CARRYING DANGEROUS FREIGHT.

The way he talked, along with the rest of the Capitalism Unleashed crowd, you’d think regulations existed just to annoy everyone. Bring on the toxic explosions, yeah?!

The Post on the Times:

The New York Times is racked with internal dissent over internal dissent — a development stemming from multiple open letters sent last week to newspaper management taking issue with the paper’s recent coverage of transgender youth. The uproar reflects the pressures of managing coverage of a sensitive topic at a time when media criticism is flourishing everywhere.

The thing is…the topic isn’t just “sensitive”; it’s also…bizarre. An outlier. More bluntly, childish.

I was thinking the same thing while reading that dopy piece in The New Republic. I was thinking about how weird it is seeing adult publications and outlets like TNR and the Post and the Times, and the Guardian and the BBC and NPR and on and on, take this childish game of let’s pretend so very seriously. It’s bizarre watching them report on it as if it were entirely real and normal and like the rest of their subject matter, instead of being about adults treating their fantasies about themselves as both truth and of public interest and importance. On the one hand Ukraine, climate change, authoritarian governments, extinctions, famines, pandemics, poverty, corruption – on the other hand Mai Jenndur Idenniny. How did we get here? How did we get nudged into taking this personal make-believe so very seriously?

H/t Mike Haubrich

The New Republic has a polemic by a trans activist named Brynn Tannehill.

So far this year, Republicans have filed over 300 anti-transgender bills at the state and federal levels, and we haven’t even reached the end of February…The American Principles Project, a religious conservative think tank and super PAC whose goal is to ban all transition-related health care (even for adults), is making a full-court press on Republican candidates to use transgender people as the number one talking point during the 2024 election cycle.

It always relies on the language tricks. “Transition-related health care” isn’t health care as normally understood at all, it’s something quite different. It’s medical intervention to make people’s bodies fit their fantasies about their “genders.” Bills that attempt to protect people from such medical interventions are labeled “anti-transgender” bills, as are bills that aim to keep men out of women’s sports and women’s locker rooms and toilets.

What doesn’t change at all are the half-truths, lies, and deliberate omissions used as talking points at every one of these hearings.

The trans ideology relies on half-truths and lies and omissions.

Like this one:

They bring up the closure of the Tavistock clinic for transgender youth in the U.K., but leave out the part that it was closed so new clinics acting as regional hubs could open up scattered about the country in the interest of making care more readily accessible.

The NHS is setting up new clinics, but the Tavistock was closed because it was a disaster.

Perhaps the worst irony in all of this is that while Republicans are rejecting the accepted standards of medical care because they deem the evidence insufficient, they are embracing and endorsing a model of treatment that has no peer-reviewed supporting evidence in practice called “Gender Exploratory Therapy” (GET) . This is essentially a rebranding of the type of conversion therapy that presupposes that some undetermined trauma causes a person to be LGBT, and if you find and treat that trauma the individual will stop being LGBT. 

There’s no such thing as being LGBT. Being same-sex attracted is not the same thing as thinking you’re in the wrong body. Being lesbian or gay doesn’t involve surgeries or puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. Being lesbian or gay doesn’t involve a massive delusion about the self. Being lesbian or gay doesn’t require bullying of women. LG is different from T.

The New Republic doesn’t say the author of this propaganda piece is trans.

Brynn Tannehill is a Naval Academy graduate, former naval aviator, author, and senior defense analyst. She currently lives in Northern Virginia with her wife and three children.  

That’s it, that’s the blurb.

There are always so many theological puzzles with these things.

Why should fundy Christians be ruling the country and passing the laws and re-enslaving women?

Why, because they’re right, of course.

How do they know they’re right?

God said so! It’s all in the bible!

But other bible-readers and god-obeyers have different views.

They’re wrong!

How do you know they’re wrong?

God said so! It’s all in the bible!

Then why doesn’t god do something about them? Why doesn’t god put a stop to the wrong believers – or convince them that they’re wrong? God can do anything, so why doesn’t he (you do consider him a he, right?) just impose his will? Why allow all this error to flourish? Why stand idly by while so many humans are led astray?

Because free will!

Oh is that it? Then why try to impose a fundy Christian government on all of us?

Return to start.

Christian Nationalism is flexing its theocratic muscles.

Long a shadowy force in American politics, Christian Nationalism is having a coming out party. The movement seeks a fusion of fundamentalist theology with American civic life. “They believe that this country was founded for Christians like them, generally natural-born citizens and white,” says Andrew Whitehead, author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Whitehead emphasizes that the danger of Christian Nationalism to democracy is that the movement “sees no room for compromise — their vision must be the one that comes to pass.”

Because their vision is god’s vision and obviously there’s no compromising with god’s vision – god is absolute so god’s vision is also absolute, end of story.

Ah, you ask, even if that’s true, how do they know what god’s vision is?

Tss. Stupid question. God told them.

[T]he Christian Nationalist movement now commands a burgeoning political powerhouse, the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. A first-of-its-kind organization in U.S. history, NACL advances “biblical” legislation in America’s statehouses. These bills are not mere stunts or messaging. They’re dark, freedom-limiting bills that, in some cases, have become law. 

Not surprising; there’s a lot of freedom-limiting stuff in the bible. A lot.

NACL’s impact has already been felt nationally. The group played a significant role in the legal fight that culminated in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. NACL member Bryan Hughes, who serves in the Texas legislature, led passage of S.B. 8, the bounty-hunter bill that all-but outlawed abortion in Texas by allowing private citizens to sue women who terminate pregnancies after six weeks, and their doctors, in civil court. 

The bible doesn’t allow women to have much freedom at all.

Dang that Marjorie Taylor Greene really has her eye on the ball.

Yessir!! That’s what matters!!

Zelensky dresses the way he does in solidarity with the soldiers resisting Putin’s invasion. MTG of course knows that. What’s her point? That Zelensky is the bad guy and Putin is the exquisitely dressed hero? She’s going with that?

Can Laurie Penny really be this stupid? Surely not?

As you can see, the origin is a conversation from last April, which got woken up today. I found LP’s reply as silly as most of her replies to most things, so I felt compelled to contradict her.

Her response? Oyyyyyy

Ok so the solution to my problem a few hours ago is excerpts.

It shall be so.

tigger_the_wing:

The hospital had a section for people who suffered severe traumatic brain injury. These people were particularly interesting. As their brains healed and grew new connections, and they learned to do literally everything all over again they became totally different people. They had no memories of their previous lives; those stories and photos which their families and friends showed them might as well have happened to someone else. I’ve had parents crying in my taxi because the son or daughter they thought would die a few years earlier…had returned to them a complete stranger.

Mike Haubrich:

Being transgender is not an experience, it is an explanation for what some people experience. It’s a diagnosis, but it’s not based on anything more than a simple idea that can’t be formulated into a testable hypothesis.

I do not deny their experiences, but what I doubt and am skeptical of is their diagnosis, or their explanation for why they have those experiences.

Sastra:

I’ve often wondered why the extreme intensity of the anguish felt by those who are convinced their mental-sex doesn’t fit their body is routinely assumed to support that assumption. A high level of obsessive rumination and fractured sense of self is generally associated with psychological pathologies, not with birth defects.

…

An intense, agonizing, inescapable feeling of an unfilled need for something you rationally reject doesn’t give me a lot of confidence on the self-diagnosis. That supporters don’t seem to notice this doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that they’re analyzing it properly, either.

iknklast:

I have done a lot of literature search on these things, partially because students are always coming up with things I need to address as a science teacher. Some of it sounds astonishing to me, that you know there are demons because you woke to one sitting on your chest. Even after I learned about sleep paralysis, it seemed odd that would lead to such an experience.

Then one morning I couldn’t move when I woke up. I had sleep paralysis. I felt fortunate that I knew about it before I experienced it; that allowed me to interpret my experience accurately. I’m sure I would never have jumped to the conclusion that a demon was sitting on me, but I might have thought I had some serious condition. We filter such experiences through our expectations.

Nullius in verba:

It’s vaguely reminiscent of the cosmological argument. Assuming the argument is entirely valid and sound, it still doesn’t establish the existence of any particular deity. Likewise, assuming the absolute sincerity and torture of cross-sex belief doesn’t establish its veridicality. When I’ve pointed this out before, believers have responded that I’m missing the point, immediately pivoting from “therefore it’s true and TWAW” to “therefore we ought to believe that TWAW”. That is, our moral convictions should logically precede and determine our beliefs about the world.

Your Name’s not Bruce?

“Gender affirming” “care” is competing with watchful waiting for the minds and bodies of children. Practitioners promoting the “trans” pathway have something to push, whether it’s pharmaceuticals, surgeries, or both. Patients have an excellent chance of becoming lifelong customers, as they are ushered along their “gender journey,” a never-ending chase for a fantasy goal that’s always, and ever will be, out of reach. As I’ve said before, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” In contrast, those going the talk therapy route have little to sell but puberty. The end goal is independence and acceptance, however uneasy, of how things really are.

Bjarte Foshaug:

I keep returning to the the old “what if I see blue the way you see red” problem. If there is no way to describe “ways xyz”, if there is no way to specify what I mean when I claim to feel like a “woman” (apart from “I think or feel like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like etc… etc.. ad Infinitum“), I can’t possibly know that anyone else who claims to feel like a “woman” is talking about the same thing. If Chase Strangio is a “man” then I’m not. If Chase Strangio claims to be what I am, it’s fucking disingenuous to go on talking as if this were all about trans people’s right to be “who they are”.

Don’t eat a jar of hot sauce just before bedtime.

Kevin McCarthy gave a whole lot of Capitol Hill riot footage to Tucker Carlson.

US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy is under fire for giving thousands of hours of footage from the Capitol riot to a Fox News host.

…

Access to the video has until now been restricted mainly to a congressional committee and lawyers for the rioters.

During his show on Monday, Carlson said: “Some of our smartest producers have been looking at this stuff and trying to figure out what it means and how it contradicts or not the story we’ve been told for more than two years. We think already in some ways that it does contradict that story.”

Great. Fantastic. We’re being governed by Fox News. What could go wrong?

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries blasted the release of up to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage to Fox as an “egregious security breach”.

In a letter to his fellow party members, Mr Jeffries said that “extreme Maga [Make America Great Again] Republicans in the House have provided tens of thousands of hours of sensitive Capitol security footage to a Fox News personality who regularly peddles in conspiracy theories and pro-Putin rhetoric”.

Who regularly lies to the camera, is what he regularly does.

The release comes as a number of Fox News journalists, including Mr Carlson, were named in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that says the network broadcast false and malicious rumours about voter fraud that harmed its business.

A court filing last week revealed a number of Mr Carlson’s profanity-laced text messages to colleagues in which he disparaged Trump lawyers’ claims of a rigged election, but continued to allow voter fraud conspiracists a platform on his top-rated show.

Top-rated.

I hate it when we (the non-Fox part of the world) give Fox ammunition.

A children’s “chapter book series about women who spoke up and rose up against the odds” and is targeted at kids ages 6 to 9 years old is set to release a book about Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2021 who is now the new assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

Children’s book series about women who spoke up to do a book about a man. Progress!!!

Here’s me speaking up: this is bullshit.

The book, which includes an introduction from Chelsea Clinton, states it is the “perfect choice for kids who love learning and teachers who want to bring inspiring women into their curriculum” and provides a “list of ways that readers can follow in Rachel Levine’s footsteps and make a difference!” 

How is it the perfect choice when he is a man?! How is it a perfect choice when he benefited from being a man for 54 years before he “transitioned”? How is it a perfect choice when he had the manly right to speak up and rise up for the first 54 years of his life? How does that make sense?

The book, “She Persisted: Rachel Levine” by Lisa Bunker will be released on June 6, 2023, and was inspired by Clinton’s picture book series by the same title that tells the stories of women like Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sotomayor and Greta Thunberg.

The stories of women. Not the stories of men who call themselves women.

“As the first openly transgender government official to hold an office that requires Senate confirmation, the first openly transgender four-star officer in uniform service, and the first female four-star admiral in the commissioned corps, Rachel Levine faced many obstacles throughout her life,” the book’s online description reads. “But she persisted through them all and showed kids of all genders that they can succeed in their dreams too.”

But he didn’t face the obstacles women face as women throughout his life, because for the first 54 years of it he didn’t even pretend to be a woman.

Remember Sam Brinton, the “non-binary” nuclear waste official who got busted for stealing luggage at airports?

One of his victims spotted him wearing her stuff.

That’s Sam in the photo on the right, carrying the TastyFreeze and wearing the beautiful top she designed and wore.