Another campaign / protest / open letter / list of demands, this time aimed at the New York Times.

The New York Times has been accused by its own writers of fomenting “bigotry and pseudoscience” against trans people in the latest controversy to grip one of America’s biggest-selling newspapers.

Pseudoscience? Because what, trans ideology is based on such authentic genuine non-counterfeit not at all pseudo-type science?

More than 180 contributors, including Sex and The City actress Cynthia Dixon, writer Lena Dunham and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, have penned a letter raising “serious concerns” about the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.

Oh no, not Cynthia Dixon and Lena Dunham. How will the Times survive?

[The letter] said the newspaper had “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”.

Signatories said: “Some of us are trans, non⁠-⁠binary, or gender nonconforming, and we resent the fact that our work, but not our person, is good enough for the paper of record.

“Some of us are cis, and we have seen those we love discover and fight for their true selves, often swimming upstream against currents of bigotry and pseudoscience fomented by the kind of coverage we here protest.”

Is that supposed to be scientific? Their person is not good enough? Discovering and fighting for their true selves? That’s not science, it’s idenniny ideology.

It added that the New York Times had published more than 15,000 words of front-page coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children in the last eight months alone.

As they should. What if the trans fanatics are wrong? What if transing children is really bad for the children? What if trans activism is not like feminism or LGB rights but like lobotomies and symphysiotomies?

Because female people don’t matter.

Six first-class counties are demanding urgent answers from the England and Wales Cricket Board as to why a middle-aged player who transitioned from a man to a woman is being allowed to compete against girls as young as 12.

A two-fer. Not just a man, but middle-aged. Not just decades older, but male.

One letter from a coach claims the player “hits the ball harder than any other I have seen in the league”.

Gee I wonder what could possibly explain that.

It is understood that the player has previously caused injuries, although inadvertently, including one to an umpire and another to an opponent at county trials who was left unable to play for months. Some parents, disturbed at the significant inequalities of power between young girls and an adult who was born male, have threatened to remove their daughters from their league in response.

Or, and hear me out here – he could get out. Instead of forcing the girls out, the middle-aged man could get out instead. Call me crazy but I think that’s a fairer way to deal.

The worries raised by the case have become so acute that a group of six first-class counties met the ECB last week to insist on immediate clarification of the governing body’s transgender policy. All argue that they have been left without any clear guidance on the issue of girls’ physical safety.

As it stands, the ECB’s rules around transgender players in recreational cricket are among the most liberal in sport, decreeing that “trans women may compete in any female-only competition, league or match and should be accepted in the gender in which they present.” 

“Liberal” not as in progressive or liberty-respecting but as in generous to the point of lunacy. How “liberal” is it really to give one player massive advantages that both endanger all the other players and give him an unearned edge? It’s not so much liberal as just plain cheating.

[T[here is a view among the counties that the ECB is obfuscating and prevaricating on the subject. One county said that it had been pressing for concrete changes to the transgender policy for three years, only to be referred after last week’s meeting to literature from Stonewall, the LGBT charity advising organisations on pronouns and gender-neutral spaces.

Stonewall is happy to look on while girls are trampled to death. Stonewall is not the answer here.

NPR yesterday on the East Palestine disaster:

Some residents have reported headaches and rashes in the days since the derailment. And many have expressed frustration at what they say is a lack of answers from the railroad company and public officials.

I suspect the lack of answers is because the answers don’t make the railroad company or public officials look responsible or competent. “We could answer, but then you would come at us with pitchforks.”

On Wednesday night, hundreds of East Palestine residents crowded into a high school gym to press state and local officials for answers about air and water testing and the risks of long-term exposure.

“Why are people getting sick if there’s nothing in the air or in the water?” one resident shouted to thunderous applause.

It could be because there is something in the air or the water, or it could be the power of suggestion, or it could be a mix of both. We can be pretty confident that the controlled explosion and fire didn’t improve the public health.

The meeting was originally meant to include representatives from Norfolk Southern. But a few hours before the meeting was set to begin, the railroad pulled out, saying in a statement that it had become concerned about a “growing physical threat to employees and members of the community.”

Ok so skip the representatives, send in the big bosses for a change. Send in the people who actually make these decisions, not the ones who try to sugarcoat them after the fact.

Because most of the rail cars were carrying non-hazardous materials, Norfolk Southern was not subject to laws that would have compelled them to notify Ohio officials of the train’s contents. On Tuesday, DeWine urged Congress to consider changes to hazardous cargo notification requirements.

That’s a thing? There’s a “minority of cars” escape clause? How stupid is that? Or rather, how corrupt is that? Please advise.

Guy loiters in female changing room to watch young girls getting naked. Staff says nothing can be done.

Janayh Wright, a photographer and mother of three, spoke to Reduxx about her own encounter with the man — one she says she had heard about before interacting with [him] herself. Wright explains that she was aware of rumors that a male had been using the women’s facilities at the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre from other parents, some of whom said they had lodged complaints with both staff and local police.

On February 3, Wright was visiting the pool with her daughter and niece. She told Reduxx that she would typically wait for her daughter outside of the changing room, but decided to accompany her that day.

While in the changing room, Wright witnessed a man wearing a wig and a face mask enter the women’s facility and proceeded to walk over to the shower area. Wright says he did not have a towel or pool bag, and gave no indication that he was getting changed or going swimming. He then returned and entered the stall next to the one Wright’s daughter was changing in.

Let me guess – the stall doesn’t have walls floor to ceiling.

Wright watched as the man tried to peer under the stall and into the one her daughter was using.

How on earth did I guess?

You know, if these buffoons are going to insist on letting men do this, they could at least make the stalls pervert-proof. Floor to ceiling, god damn it, not those stupid things with gaps that invite people to peer and poke cameras under or over.

She immediately confronted him as he exited, but the man simply responded that he identified as female and that it was his “human right to be in the women’s changing room.”

Oddly enough girls and women don’t want women peering at them under the stall either. If he really were a woman, he would still be invading people’s privacy. But also there’s no such thing as a “human right” for men to force women to get naked while strangers watch them.

She escorted the man out of the changing room and reported the incident to the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre staff, who told her that she was not allowed to kick him out. They warned her that she could be arrested and charged for her actions.

His human right to leer under partitions was violated! Call the cops!

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on But whose dignity?

Using preferred names and pronouns, referring to TIMs as a kind of “women” (more specifically the “trans” kind as opposed to the “cis” [1] kind), reframing special privileges as “rights”, reframing forced obedience as “respect” or “dignity” etc. are the Trojan horse, the foot in the door, the thin end of the wedge, the seemingly (at the time) benign concession that gets the justification spiral going:

Only a weak-minded dolt would have made these concessions because of simple peer-pressure, tribalism, fear of ostracism etc. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, so if I did make those concessions, it had to be the only reasonable, or even decent, thing to do. By the same logic, the people who didn’t make the same concessions have to be unreasonable, indecent bigots and haters who only deserve to be fired from their jobs, being flooded with hate on social media 24/7, having their names pulled trough the dirt all over the internet etc. They have to be the villains so that I can be the good guy!

If “Linda” (she/her) here, with her “lady-cock”, is indeed (as I have already conceded!) just another kind of “woman”, comparable to black women, disabled women, working class women etc., who but a bigot could possibly advocate excluding “her” from women’s toilets/changing rooms/showers/jails/rape shelters/sporting events/awards etc.? Furthermore, since “Linda” (she/her) has to be a “woman”, being a “woman” (of any kind!) cannot be about biological sex. In fact, biological sex cannot enter into it at all [2], since that would allow us to talk specifically about biological females to the exclusion of “women” like “Linda” (she/her), hence sex has to be arbitrarily “assigned at birth”, a Western cultural construct (inextricably linked to Western hegemony, cultural imperialism and white supremacy), a “spectrum”, or, at the very least, too complicated and messy [3] to allow us to say anything about the sex of individuals. On the other hand the word “woman” has to refer to something real. After all how can “Linda” (she/her) be “a real woman” if there are no real “women”? Therefor something other than physical traits has to make “Linda” (she/her) a woman. And not only that: To make it true that “Linda” (she/her) does indeed belong (as I have already conceded!) in all the same spaces as the apocryphal biological females, the thing that makes the latter group “women” has to be the same as the thing that makes “Linda” (she/her) a “woman”. Hence biological females are whatever they have to be to make “Linda” (she/her) one of them, and they don’t get a say in the matter [4]. Well, if someone is indeed a “woman” in every relevant sense of the word, they don’t stop being so the moment they commit a crime, so “Linda’s” (she/her) long history of violently forcing her “lady-cock” on “cis” women is irrelevant to whether or not she belongs in a women’s prison. And if that means putting the cis women at increased risk of rape and violence, that’s their problem. Fuck’em! I mean literally!

I think something like the above is not too untypical of how people get from a (misguided, but still) sincere desire to be “kind”, treat others with “dignity” and “respect” etc. to putting dangerous rapists in women’s jails and going out of their way to destroy anyone who objects.

1. Once again, either “trans women” relate to “cis women” the way baseball bats relate to fruit bats (i.e. not at all, it’s just a bad pun), or there is no justification for equating biological females with “cis women”.

2. Unless the point is to argue for the necessity of puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, “gender affirming” surgery etc. Then Oceania has always been at war with East-Asia changing one’s physical features into a bad simulation of the ones associated with the other (supposedly non-existent, or at least totally irrelevant) biological sex is so vitally important that anything other than automatic affirmation in advance is “hate”, “violence”, or even “murder”.

3. Needless to say, no comparable demand for clearcutness or simplicity applies to “gender identity”: Circular definitions (or no definitions at all), equivocations (a.k.a. bad puns), word-magic, proof by assertion/loudness/endless repetition etc. Anything goes.

4. Since the thing that makes both “Linda” (she/her) and the apocryphal biological females “women”, cannot be physical traits, it has to be something “internal”, a way of thinking or feeling etc. best left unspecified. Hence calling someone a “woman” (whether “cis” or “trans”) is to make an implicit claim about what’s going on inside their heads. An exception can be made for a minority of “trans men” and “non binary” people as long as no one challenges the larger framework of “male” vs. “female”, “masculine” vs. “feminine” ways of thinking and feeling.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on But whose dignity?

The TRAs have shown that there’s no way to give them what they want in the way of dignity and respect in order to get the same back; they want to trample over boundaries, and as soon as one falls, they’re going for the next. (The order of the following may vary from place to place):

If we give in on fetishistic cross-dressing, they demand bespoke pronouns;

If we give in on pronouns, they demand that we cede to them all the other words which apply to our sex;

If we let them have our words, they demand access to our toilets;

If we give them access to our toilets, they demand inclusion in women’s shortlists;

If we give them inclusion on our shortlists, they demand that they win;

If we let them win, they demand inclusion in our sports teams;

If we let them have those, they demand inclusion in our sex-specific changing rooms, showers, rape crisis centres, prisons, health services, hospital wards, dating sites, and as sexual partners.

All of those have happened and continue to happen, often simultaneously.

They will never, ever stop, because they want to take us over completely, jealous because it is a fact that they can’t become the opposite sex, and they know it. They won’t stop even when every single woman has lost every shred of dignity and respect; they won’t stop until there are no women left.

We can’t let them continue their rampage; not if we want any semblance of polite society left. We should have stopped them right at the beginning, but too many people thought that it was more important to treat psychopathic delusional narcissistic men with dignity and respect than to protect half the human race from predators.

“I didn’t think that the leopards would eat my face”…

Kathleen Stock reviews Sturgeon’s farewell press conference:

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

…

Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

…

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

Just read the whole thing. It’s epic.

This talk of treating trans people with dignity and respect just as we treat everyone else with dignity and respect could be put another way. It could be described as walking on eggshells.

The only reason there’s an issue about dignity and respect, I think, is the fact that trans people are a challenge to dignity and respect. If you see it as just a fantasy, or social contagion, or a mistake about the self, and the like, then…the dignity part is missing. Being trans is like a pratfall. A pratfall is the opposite of dignity.

This is not helped by the unreasonable nature of the demand, let alone the constant escalation of it, and the abuse dealt out for failing to obey it. All of a sudden we have to pretend Joe next door is Nancy, and we have to treat him with dignity while we’re at it. This isn’t comparable to having to treat other humans in general with respect, it’s a veering off from that into a thorny swamp full of alligators.

We don’t have to pretend anything to treat people in general with respect. We do have to pretend anything to pretend to believe other people’s fantasies. The two are different. The result is infinite eggshell walking.

Screechy Monkey alerted us to a piece by Matt Yglesias on trans issues. It’s far from the usual disdain and hatred for all who don’t obey all The Imperatives, but it is more cheery about the whole subject than I think is quite justified. He starts from a column by Jamelle Bouie that emphasizes dignity.

Bouie skillfully elevates these controversies out of the weeds and into the level of principle — “in the democratic ideal, we meet one another in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges” — and argues persuasively for a politics of dignity. He notes that while we best know Frederick Douglass as an anti-slavery activist and advocate for racial equality, he was a broad-minded and forward-thinking visionary who fought for a range of causes that he saw as linked by the quest for human dignity. This loops back to a call for solidarity:

The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.

Equal respect is one thing, and equal dignity is another. It sounds like a good and progressive idea, but it gives me pause. I certainly don’t want to run around depriving people of dignity that they have, but on the other hand I’m not sure I’m required to ignore the fact that people have abandoned dignity. This is part of the problem – it’s why the trans issue is different from its predecessors. The trans ideology rejects dignity. In other words it’s hard to nod along to passionate defenses of the dignity of trans people when so many trans people make such silly absurd claims. You know? This is one of the stumbling blocks after all – the whole game of let’s pretend, the dressing up, the endless photos, the bizarro-world truth claims. None of that is really anyone else’s business on its own, but when it’s shoved at us…it’s made our business.

There’s also the fact that trans women can be a massive threat to the dignity of women, and way too many have no qualms about that whatever. Way too many of them rejoice at it. So, given the current circumstances, I’m not convinced that the rest of us are the problem when it comes to the dignity of trans people.

I would add, with a gesture at Judith Shklar, that decent people are on guard against the politics of cruelty. Cruelty can be tempting and it can be fun, but even the worst of us know that cruelty is wrong. So there are always people seeking a higher justification for their cruelty, a reason that being an asshole is actually a high-minded undertaking serving some crucial purpose. And today’s backlash to trans rights clearly involves people doing this — bullies and wannabe bullies being jerks for sport.

But some trans activists are cruel, especially to women. The backlash no doubt involves some people being cruel, but at the core it’s about the damage to women’s rights, and the harms and risks to children and adolescents. It’s very much not clear that all the cruelty comes from people who resist trans ideology, and none of it comes from the ideologues themselves.

Yglesias acknowledges some of that (with nervous caution), but he also skips briskly over the thornier issues.

The vast majority of trans adults are, after all, not competitive athletes or otherwise implicated in these edge-case questions. They want what they are entitled to, which is to be treated with dignity and respect and to be allowed to live their lives as they see fit.

But wait. What does “living their lives” mean? If it means being forcibly “included” in everything women do or have, whether women consent or not, then I disagree that they’re “entitled” to do so. Living their lives as they see fit in private, of course, but when they’re in public and shoving women aside with threats and disregard of our dignity, then no. Yglesias waves at that point from very far away, but he doesn’t really engage with it.

Heather Cox Richardson on regulations and railroads:

Biden appears to be trying to turn the nation to a modern version of the era before Reagan, when the government provided a basic social safety net, protected civil rights, promoted infrastructure, and regulated business. Since the 1980s, the Republicans have advocated deregulation with the argument that government interference in the way a company does business interrupts the market economy. 

But the derailment of fifty Norfolk Southern train cars, eleven of which carried hazardous chemicals, near East Palestine, Ohio, near the northeastern border of the state on February 3 has powerfully illustrated the downsides of deregulation. The accident released highly toxic chemicals into the air, water, and ground, causing a massive fire and forcing about 5,000 nearby residents in Ohio and Pennsylvania to evacuate. On February 6, when it appeared some of the rail cars would explode, officials allowed the company to release and burn the toxic vinyl chloride stored in it. The controlled burn sent highly toxic phosgene, used as a weapon in World War I, into the air.

Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine has refused federal assistance from President Biden, who, he said, called to offer “anything you need.” DeWine said he had not called back to take him up on the offer. “We will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem or anything, but I’m not seeing it,” he said. 

Of course, he has his eyes closed, and a bandage wrapped around his head for good measure.

Just over the border, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said that Norfolk Southern had botched its response to the accident. “Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars—in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’—yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders. Norfolk Southern’s well known opposition to modern regulations [requires] further scrutiny and investigation to limit the devastating effects of future accidents on people’s lives, property, businesses, and the environment.” 

Shapiro was likely referring to the fact that in 2017, after donors from the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns, the Trump administration got rid of a rule imposed by the Obama administration that required better braking systems on rail cars that carried hazardous flammable materials. 

According to David Sirota, Julia Rock, Rebecca Burns, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writing in the investigative journal The Lever, Norfolk Southern supported the repeal, telling regulators new electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT) would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.” Railroads also lobbied to limit the definition of HFFT to cover primarily trains that carry oil, not industrial chemicals. The train that derailed in Ohio was not classified as an HHFT.

Let’s have more and bigger releases of hazardous chemicals into the air and ground!

I’m reading a piece from 2018 by Massimo Pigliucci on Jordan Peterson and Stoicism, so you get to read some of it too.

The question at hand is not whether there are some similarities between what Peterson writes and what the Stoics teach. Such similarities are indubitably there. Then again, “pick yourself up and do the right thing,” or “endure what life throws at you” are not exclusively Stoic concepts. They are found pretty much everywhere, in one form or another, from Christianity to Judaism, from Buddhism to Confucianism. And yet I’m not aware of anyone making the argument that Peterson is a Stoic-Christian-Judeo-Buddhist-Confucian. The issue, rather, is whether there are sufficient deep similarities between Peterson and Stoicism. I will argue that not only the answer is no, but that the sort of worldview Peterson advances is, in fact, anti-Stoic.

The first bit of Petersonian advice we encounter in Vacula’s post is “clean your room and get your life in order.” Which is good advice, the sort that my mom used to give me. But that didn’t make her a Stoic. The crucial part of the Stoic advice is that it tells us how to get our life in order: by practicing the four cardinal virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance; and it explains to us why we ought to do it: because virtue is the only thing that is always good (it can’t be used for bad, by definition), as argued by Socrates in the Euthydemus.

Peterson, by contrast, gets this imperative from his adoption of Carl Jung’s views about the perennial opposition between logos and eros, where logos represents order, and it is masculine, while eros represents chaos, and it is feminine. From which Peterson further derives that it is both good and natural for men to control women (order has to overcome chaos).

It’s pretty hilarious when you think about it. All those wars humanity has been afflicted with over the millennia? Those are women’s doing are they? (Of course they are! What was the Trojan War but a war over a woman? Totally her doing, obviously!)

But more than hilarious it’s profoundly irritating. Ho yus, we’re order and you’re chaos and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that we can break your jaw with a punch, it’s entirely because YOU ARE CHAOS, BITCHES.

Updating to clarify: Massimo of course goes on to say Jung is talking “a lot of pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical nonsense.” I’m laughing/shouting at Jung & Peterson, not Massimo.

It seems to be true.

AP News February 2018:

In October, DOT published a notice inviting the public to recommend which regulations should be repealed, replaced, suspended, or modified. Accompanying the notice was a list of 20 potential candidates, including 13 of the most significant transportation safety rules of the past decade.

Airlines, automakers, railroads, pipeline operators, trucking companies, chemical manufacturers and others responded to the notice with their wish lists. After the comment period closed, DOT said it would repeal a 2015 rule opposed by freight railroads requiring trains that haul highly flammable crude oil be fitted with advanced braking systems that stop all rail cars simultaneously instead of conventional brakes that stop cars one after the other.

Emphasis added.

The advanced brakes can reduce the distance and time needed for a train to stop and keep more tank cars on the track in the event of a derailment, DOT said two years ago when it issued the rule.

Freight railroads, which say the rule’s safety benefits are marginal and don’t justify the cost, persuaded Congress to require DOT to revisit the rule. The department now says its revised analysis shows costs would outstrip benefits.

Yeah yeah but the real point is that owners and bosses profit from weaker safety regulations while it’s mere workers, and people who live near the tracks, and the environment who benefit from stronger safety regulations. Who ya gonna pick? Owners and bosses, duh.

This is making me rather angry.

Oh jeez. If this is true…

The CNN story is that there was a better braking system, the Obama administration said great, let’s make it mandatory for trains carrying hazardous materials, and the Trump administration said no let’s not and canceled what the Obama administration had done.

Please, tell us more about what a hero Trump is to The White Working Class.

We’re too busy mopping up after climate disasters to try to prevent climate disasters.

The damage caused by global heating across the globe is increasingly clear, and recovering from climate disasters is already costing billions of dollars. Furthermore, these disasters can cause cascading problems including water, food and energy crises, as well as increased migration and conflict, all draining countries’ resources.

Sounds kind of tipping pointish, doesn’t it.

The report said: “This is a doom loop: the consequences of the [climate] crisis draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to higher temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.”

And this is while it’s all too obvious that nobody is really doing anything in the first place. Nobody can. Tell people to stop flying? Tell the airlines to shut down? Tell people to stop driving? Let the price of oil skyrocket? Tell corporations to stop making cars? Close the freeways? Shut down the cruise industry? Tell people to get out of Florida and Arizona and much of California?

Not going to happen.

Yet another casual insult.

You’ll be amazed to learn that’s not a woman.

Originally a comment by Beth Clarkson on Greasing the wheels.

I agree with you both that it’s blatant corruption and that it shouldn’t be shrugged aside as unimportant and also agree that it isn’t a big deal. My Trump supporting relatives point to Hunter Biden regarding his well-paid Ukrainian corporation position. I can’t say that doesn’t look like corruption. It does. Turning a blind eye to this sort of thing is why so many working-class Americans are MAGA people. I just point out that the Trump children were even more blatant about cashing in on their fathers position, both foreign and domestically. Doesn’t matter of course. They love Trump. He hasn’t done anything wrong in their opinion. Then we talk about other things.

IMO, the most serious corruption affecting us is the issues of industry capture of regulatory agencies. It is pernicious throughout the federal U.S. regulatory system. I don’t have any solid feeling about what it would take to turn those agencies back into defenders of citizens rather than corporations. Terrible tragedy maybe? That seems inevitable if we don’t figure out a better solution to improving that situation. Sadly, this one doesn’t even make anybody’s radar as a thing to focus on.

Actually, on second thought, the solution isn’t that hard. We have a lot of research about what we need to do regarding this problem. But it’s devilishly hard to implement because it would require a power shift within each of the agencies.

Robin Moira White gets confused from one paragraph to the next.

The stabbing of teenager Brianna Ghey in Warrington is a terrible tragedy for her family and my heart goes out to them. It is not clear whether the fact that she was trans was a factor in the events in Linear Park, Warrington, but shock at her death has rippled through the trans community.

I cannot help but feel this kind of tragedy was waiting to happen. Anyone who followed the Conservative leadership contest will have seen the candidates vying with each other to stoke “debate” over trans people’s lives; and such sentiment is something I, as Britain’s only trans discrimination barrister, have to cope with every day.

So………….”it’s not clear whether being trans was a factor, but being trans was definitely a factor and I have to cope with it every day.” That’s some high-class reasoning right there.

But wait, it gets better! He cites Montgomerie of all people.

Katy Montgomerie, a trans social media commentator, was recently assaulted on a night out with friends, just for being trans. She wrote about it on Twitter.

Monty says a guy threw a drink over him. We don’t know that he’s telling the truth. We don’t even know that he knows the difference between truth and fiction, which is one reason this ideology is so toxic. If he believes he’s a woman he could believe a lot of other bizarre things.

A law lecturer says White should know better. White spits venom.

It escalated.

Stop that.

That’s not a woman. Stop pinning men’s crimes on women. Stop falsifying the statistics. Stop lying. Stop confusing the public. Stop lying and faking the stats and pinning men’s crimes on us to pander to men who pretend to be women. Stop it.

What a mess we are.

As more and more details emerge about the recent unfortunate exercise in Second Amendment freedoms at Michigan State University, there are a couple that not only stick in the throat, but also make you wonder even more deeply what kind of madhouse in which we’ve all been living for the past few decades. From Fox2 in Detroit:

When Jackie Matthews was 11 years old, she was inside a classroom in Newtown, Connecticut, when children were shot and killed. Now at 21, she’s a Michigan State student and was just a few feet away from where a gunman killed at least 3 other students. Jackie shared her story on TikTok, recounting the moment she sat crouched in a classroom in Newtown when a gunman shot and killed kindergartners at Sandy Hook Elementary. She said that she suffered PTSD fracture in her lower back and every time she is in a stressful situation, the pain flares up. “The fact that this is the second mass shooting I have lived through is incomprehensible,” she said.

That’s not even the only one, Charles Pierce tells us.

And from another recent exercise in Second Amendment freedoms just a few miles up the road from MSU. From The New York Times:

Ms. Riddle, the Oxford High graduate who is now at Michigan State, remembered hiding in the band room in high school the day of that 2021 shooting. On Monday night, she and her roommate barricaded their dorm room door with a dresser and their bathroom door with a hamper, and hid under their desks. “I was trying to make myself as small as possible,” she said.

Sssssssshhhhhhhhh. Guns are more important than people.

Dennis Kavanagh has a stemwinder of a thread on Sturgeon. Since so many of you are allergic to T_____r I’ll quote it instead of showing.

2/ Sturgeon embraced an unreal, elite fad because she mistook it for gay rights 2.0. It should have been obvious from the start this was not the case had she listened to women and gay groups making the point that without sex, there is no same sex attraction as a great woman said.

3/ The FM not only embraced the madness of dangerous legislation, she took on the clothes of those who push this extremism in the form of their disinclination to debate and contempt for any dissent and she did so claiming to be a champion of Scots democracy.

I like that metaphor – disinclination to debate and contempt for any dissent as clothing.

4/ The result was pure absurdity. A FM inventing the three sexes of M, F and rapist. A FM saying TWAW but not that one, that’s an individual. A FM calling more than half the country homophobes, racists, transphobes, you name it. This is governing against your people, not for them.

5/ The corruption of gender runs deep and this amateur hour experiment with the safety of women and the right of homosexuals to have single sex spaces extended to process. Groups were shut out of the GRA process or told concerns were “not valid”.

6/ Such well founded, obvious, and inevitable concerns turned out to be well founded within a matter of days of the legislation. Locked in the gender prison, Sturgeon was unable to adjust course or construe any comment as anything other than hate.

He’s a dab hand with the metaphors, Dennis is.

7/ This is what happens when democracy becomes gendocracy. When you prefer the ideological male voice from the UN over the two female ones concerned with VAWG and, disgracefully so far as her record goes, torture. To achieve a comment from the latter in a Western State is galling.

That last sentence is confusing. Maybe “a comment” is a stray; the sentence makes sense without it.

8/ The core of the ideology the FM embraced cannot hold; with characteristic foresight Joyce subtitled her book “when ideology meets reality”, precisely what happened here. The cosy merry go round of gendocrats met the real world – the legacy is chaos and a diminished figure.

9/ Sturgeon leaves office having set back the cause of independence. Of achieving remarkable polls in which Scots support a Tory SoS deploying s35. She leaves office with the plausible criticism her policies exposed the most vulnerable women there are to danger.

10/ This is the epitaph of gender. “No debate” means no feedback mechanism. Bad policies just get worse. Bad governance becomes more insular and self repeating. Even good politicians begin to look like amateurs. This is what happens when you govern from outside the real world.

This, or Afghanistan.