Poor Trump, no one tells him anything, he has to get his information from the news media like any other shlub.

Donald Trump says he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and has urged his supporters to launch mass protests.

However his lawyer said there had been no communication from law enforcement and the former president’s post was based on media reports.

And gossip, don’t forget gossip.

The district attorney’s office has not yet commented. Mr Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, said her team had not heard anything from law enforcement officials.

“Since this is a political prosecution, the district attorney’s office has engaged in a practice of leaking everything to the press, rather than communicating with President Trump’s attorneys as would be done in a normal case,” she said.

That’s so sad when he’s such a norm-following respectful punctilious guy himself.

The Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, has hit out at the investigation, calling it “an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA [district attorney]”.

There it is again, that stupid UK media trick of translating discourse into physical violence. Kevin McCarthy didn’t “hit out at” anything; he said words. Metaphor is all very well but this brand of metaphor is highly manipulative, and journalists should not be using it.

Very enlightening piece by Jonathan Haidt about the rise in depression among girls and how catastrophizing is involved.

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, he learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from.

Ahhhhhh. That’s very interesting, and would explain a lot.

Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. 

Do catastrophize. Do use your emotions as a guide to reality.

They wrote an essay about it.

After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career. 

2015 eh? The summer of 2015 is when all those loonies at Freethought Blogs got to work catastrophizing about me. I was supposed to walk on eggshells, but I told them to fuck off instead.

Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

All those people screaming at “terfs” – that’s where their heads are. No wonder it’s all such a clusterfuck.

There’s more. I’ll get to it later, because there’s a lot to think about. I like to take small bites.

Well it’s none of my business but the Guardian saw fit to publish an article about it so I guess that makes it everyone’s business.

Jon Snow ‘at complete ease’ with becoming a father again in his 70s

The broadcaster, 75, and his wife, the academic Precious Lunga, 48, welcomed a baby boy via a surrogate in March 2021 after struggling with “medical setbacks and miscarriages”.

“Via a surrogate”=a different woman did the work of gestation and pushing out.

Snow elaborated:

“I haven’t found age relevant to my relationship with my son or grandsons. Is being a grandad different to being a dad? Not really. In the end, it’s all love, isn’t it?”

Yes but that’s not the issue. The issue is that the kid will have less time with his father than most children do. The issue is that there’s a bigger than usual risk that the kid will lose his father in childhood. Maybe not an altogether kind thing to do?

Pink News sees a fistfight where there isn’t one:

Oxfam hits back at critics of trans-inclusive guidance who claim its ‘erasing mums and dads’

No it doesn’t “hit back,” because nobody “hit” in the first place. Saying words is not hitting. Oxfam responded or reacted or issued a statement; it didn’t “hit.” Nobody “hit” Oxfam.

Also, why “mums and dads” instead of mothers and fathers? Why not treat the readers like adults?

The 92-page toolkit offers advice on how to engage with different groups of people which Oxfam staff and volunteers might come into contact with, including people with a disability, sex workers and the LGBTQ+ community.  

But not women, of course. Women don’t matter. Women aren’t worth mentioning. Women are Karens.

An updated version of the guide, which went live on Monday (13 March), immediately courted controversy for allegedly ‘erasing mothers and fathers’ by encouraging the use of gender neutral terms in certain situations.  

There it is – mothers and fathers. So why the cloying “mums and dads” in the headline? To manipulate, of course.

Under the ‘LGBTQIA+ Rights and Inclusion’ section of the document, the charity stated people use the phrases “parent” or “parenthood” when unsure of the gender of a particular caregiver but equally respect people who want to be called ‘mother’ or ‘father’.

The guidance stated: “In patriarchal culture, social norms around gender result in designated roles for parents that reflect expectations of that gender.”

Well it’s not a social norm that it’s the mother who gestates and pushes out the baby, or that it’s the mother who breastfeeds the baby. It’s not a social norm that the father doesn’t do any of those things.

“Some transgender and non-binary people may identify with these roles. However, some may prefer to use other names to designate parenthood. 

“The important principle here is to be inclusive in the broader sense by describing people as ‘parents’, but if individual parents have a preference for a role name, to respect their choice.” 

Is it really? Does that come up a lot in Oxfam’s work?

I doubt it, myself.

Trump’s lawyer says he’ll surrender if he’s indicted. Very big of him I’m sure. The lawyer didn’t mention that he would also incite his worshipers to riot.

Former President Donald Trump will surrender to face criminal charges if indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, his lawyer said Friday evening.

…

Trump is under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for his company recording as legal expenses a reimbursement to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen for $130,000 he gave porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual tryst with Trump.

Trump is living at his Florida club these days.

Under Florida law, the state’s governor is responsible for making sure a person in the state is arrested and delivered to another state if that person is indicted on a felony charge.

The governor in question is Ron DeSantis, a rival and an object of trumpy insults. Fun stuff.

Speaking of Trump about to be arrested, he also failed to report a quarter of a million dollars worth of prezzies from foreign governments.

Donald Trump’s White House failed to report more than 100 gifts from foreign nations worth more than a quarter-million dollars, according to a US government report, and several of those gifts – including a lifesize painting of Trump given by the president of El Salvador and golf clubs from the prime minister of Japan – are still unaccounted for.

The revelations came as part of a report on Friday from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. The report details numerous unreported items, among them 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia worth more than $45,000 in all, including a dagger valued at up to $24,000, and 17 presents from India that include expensive cufflinks, a vase and a $4,600 model of the Taj Mahal.

Funnily enough, there are rules about this.

The Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act requires that gifts above $480 given to the president, vice-president and their families by foreign officials must be reported to the state department.

For very fucking obvious reasons. If they’re not reported, they become bribes.

The top Democrat on the committee, congressman Jamie Raskin, said the findings indicate “a brazen disregard for the rule of law and its systematic mishandling of large gifts”.

Which amounts to taking bribes.

The report is the result of a year-long investigation into Trump’s failure to disclose foreign gifts while in office, according to the Washington Post, and runs 15 pages long.

“Today’s preliminary findings suggest again the Trump administration’s brazen disregard for the rule of law and its systematic mishandling of large gifts from foreign governments, including many lavish personalized gifts that vastly exceed the statutory limit in value but were never reported – some that are still missing today,” said Raskin in a statement.

He’s a greedy corrupt criminal. Maybe it was a mistake to make him president.

Trump is expecting to be arrested next Tuesday and is inciting violence in response.

“TAKE OUR NATION BACK” is pure January 6.

Not how to teach science:

They deleted it.

Too bad she has faith that men can be women.

BBC insults women some more.

The BBC has rejected viewer complaints about the trans rapist Isla Bryson being referred to as a woman on a Scottish news programme. The corporation’s executive complaints unit (ECU) launched an investigation after concerns were raised about how Bryson was described in coverage of his conviction for raping two women.

…

A presenter said: “A woman has been found guilty of raping two women prior to changing her gender. 31-year-old Isla Bryson carried out the attacks in Clydebank and Glasgow in 2016 and 2019 while known as a man called Adam Graham. Bryson now identifies as a woman and is in the process of starting gender reassignment.”

Rubbing our noses in it. They didn’t have to say “A woman has” at the very start of the piece. They chose to. Rubbing our noses in it.

The viewers took issue with the fact the rapist was referred to as a woman, and female pronouns used, when Bryson did not have a gender recognition certificate. The BBC refused to uphold the complaints but said the wording used in the programme was “not ideal”.

I don’t give a flying fuck whether he has a “certificate” or not; he’s a rapist; he’s not a woman. I wouldn’t be fine with that insulting lede if he had had a “certificate” at the time.

The ruling said: “The ECU considered whether the programme met BBC standards of accuracy. The ECU agreed the opening line was not ideal (subsequent bulletins referred to ‘a trans woman’). However, it did not agree audiences had been misled on a material point. Anyone watching the programme would have been in no doubt as to the gender identity of Bryson at the point at which the crimes were committed.

But people don’t always “watch the programme” in the sense of staring fixedly at the screen while doing nothing else. People also listen to it while doing other things, with or without glances at the screen. It’s not a test. It shouldn’t be a matter of “Viewers knew if they were paying proper attention” as if the BBC were teaching first grade arithmetic.

“Notwithstanding the tension between the requirement to report accurately while using appropriately inclusive language, it was a matter of fact that Bryson was convicted as a woman.”

Azza. The court unfortunately went along with his insulting dodge, but it shouldn’t have, and neither should the BBC. The language was not “appropriately” “inclusive” – it’s not in any way “appropriately inclusive” to call a violent rapist a woman. Try being appropriately inclusive of women for a change.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room.

The point of laws like this TN one is to intimidate people and chill expression, and this very thread demonstrates how.

Oh, the law doesn’t specifically say that all drag performances are illegal, only ones that appeal to a prurient interest! And who could be against performances of a prurient interest where CHILDREN might see it? (Won’t somebody think of the children?)

Except what makes something an “appeal to a prurient interest”? Yes, it’s a phrase used in obscenity law, so it has some legal meaning, but obscenity has other requirements that limit its applicability, and even with those it’s still a bit of a dangerously fuzzy concept.

And here in this very thread we have J.A. expressing the view that drag performances are de facto appeals to prurient interest.

Imagine trying to advise a client on what they can and can’t do in TN. Can you perform a stage version of Mrs. Doubtfire? Well, the Robin Williams version didn’t seem terribly sexy, so probably? But maybe not. Maybe it depends on the size of the fake breasts. But hey, you probably wouldn’t be convicted. I mean, you might be arrested and lose your job and not be able to pay rent or mortgage while you await your trial, and end up owing huge amounts of attorneys fees, but you’ll probably be acquitted, right? Sound like a risk you’d like to run?

It’s the same with some of the laws being passed in Florida. Oh, gosh, the law doesn’t say you can’t have books about Rosa Parks in schools! I mean, a teacher wouldn’t be convicted for having such a book in their classroom library. Well, almost certainly not. They probably wouldn’t even be charged. I mean, what are the chances of some conservative parent making a stink, and some crusading and/or politically ambitious D.A. deciding to press charges? That would never happen in the great state of Florida! Well, ok, it might. But probably not! That sounds like something worth risking your career, financial security, and freedom for!

The Federalist Society is grappling with the always-grappled-with conundrum of democracy versus rights (or democracy versus law, democracy versus principles, democracy versus charters). Democracy is more fair and just than dictatorship or monarchy, but then what about democracies that persecute minorities? What do you do when the majority is all for violating human rights?

This year’s gathering was even more important than most. As the first student symposium since the Supreme Court handed conservatives a historic package of victories on gun rights, religious freedom, environmental deregulation, and, of course, abortion, the weekend offered a window into the shifting priorities and preoccupations of the youngest and most elite members of the conservative legal movement, at a time when the future of the movement as a whole is quietly unsettled. 

The first major clue about those preoccupations came from the symposium’s theme, which the organizers had designated as “Law and Democracy.” As the programming unfolded over the next day and a half, it became alarmingly clear that, even among the buttoned-up young members of the Federalist Society — an organization not known for its political transgressiveness — the relationship between those two principles is far from settled. 

Is it ever settled? Can it ever be settled? It seems to me the tension is built in. Majorities don’t always respect human rights. Democracies can neglect or persecute their own minorities. They can and do and have.

To those who have followed the Federalist Society closely since its triumphs at the Supreme Court last year, the symposium’s focus on law and democracy may hardly seem incidental. Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has championed “judicial restraint,” the notion that judges should limit their roles to interpreting the law as written, leaving the actual business of lawmaking to democratically elected legislatures. 

Which is a sensible principle on its face, but at the same time, democratically elected legislatures can be very eager to make law that violates some people’s rights. It’s always a tug of war.

That approach made sense for conservatives when they still saw the federal judiciary as a liberal force dragging the country to the left. But now that conservatives have secured a solid majority on the Supreme Court — and voters in several red states have soundly rejected hard-line positions on abortion — a spirited debate is underway within the Federalist Society about the wisdom of deferring to democratic majorities as a matter of principle.

Or to put it another way, deference to democratic majorities is good when it goes our way but not quite so good when it doesn’t. Who knew?

“From our very beginning, there has been an aspect of judicial restraint, and there has been an aspect that it’s judges’ jobs to interpret the Constitution, that whatever it says, that’s what they should do — and those two can sometimes be in tension,” said Eugene Meyer, the president and CEO of the Federalist Society, as we spoke in a back hallway of the conference center. 

What I’m saying.

Headline:

Woman jailed for four-and-a-half years for threats to murder her mother

Except, not a woman.

A woman who threatened to torture, rape and murder her mother, was today jailed for five and a half years with the final 12 months suspended.

Except NOT A WOMAN. Not a woman, not even close. A man. A violent abusive violent man.

Judge O’Donnell noted the defendant, who was born male but identifies as a woman “is unrepentant” about wanting to kill her mother.

His mother.

Unfortunately the women in that prison will now have to deal with him.

Famous they/them artiste Sam Smith wore a thing at an awards do last month.

I’m chagrined that I missed it.

Sam Smith’s inflatable latex suit was the talk of the red carpet at this year’s Brit Awards. Its designer is also a latex farmer in India, who reveals it was inspired by his dog.

An inflatable latex suit! Of course it was the talk of the carpet! (Wait what? What is the talk of the carpet? That don’t make no sense.) Plus it was inspired by a dog!

Aesthetically it’s just [chef’s kiss] –

And the back view!

No no you’ve got it all wrong, it’s about inclusion. It’s so much more inclusiony this way.

Good Morning Britain viewers have been left furious as the CEO of Oxfam spoke out on why the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are to be banned in the charity’s new foundation scheme.

Oxfam has instructed its staff to use the word ‘parent’ instead of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ as it updates its language guide…

CEO Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah explains why Oxfam’s inclusivity guide has been updated, claiming the changes “create an inclusive environment within the work place.”

But it doesn’t. It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. Is Dr Sriskandarajah aware that lots of people in the work place are themselves mothers or fathers? Does it not occur to him that forbidding mention of them is not inclusive? That it’s especially not inclusive when it’s not a mere oversight but an explicit written instruction?

Oxfam CEO Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, said on Friday (March 17) morning’s episode of GMB: “All foundations need to create an inclusive environment within the work place and that’s what this guide is about. Its not about telling staff what to do or what not to do its a guide.

“We want to make sure we treat people, staff and communities that we work with around the world with kindness and dignity. We have tens of thousands of volunteers and we want to make sure that the language we use is inclusive of all of us, of people with all backgrounds.”

By telling those people of all backgrounds not to mention mothers and fathers. I’m not seeing the kindness and dignity. Not seeing the inclusive of all of us.

You know, he probably doesn’t either. He’s not a purple-haired teenager. He probably doesn’t see kindness or dignity in this either, but The Iron Law of Trans Entitlement has dictated that he has to pretend to. We really need to get this law repealed.

Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah couldn’t answer how much it costs to update the guide. He added: “What we’re learning is if we’re going to end poverty, we need to take people with us. And using inclusive language is an important way of showing dignity and respect to the people.”

But you’re not going to take people with you by carefully erasing the words “mother” and “father” from your language. You’re not going to take people with you by making it an explicit rule that it’s naughty and exclooosionary to mention mothers and fathers. The people you’re trying to take with you are going to get off that train so fast they’ll be a blur.

Oxfam has issued a new inclooooosive guide to how to erase everyone except Trans Folks.

Oxfam has instructed staff to drop the words “mother” and “father” from their vocabulary and replace them with “parent” when describing family roles.

Which is to say Oxfam has instructed staff to describe family roles without describing family roles.

The charity said that allowances should be made for trans families that might not identify with the conventional roles of a man and woman in parenthood and that in such cases “parent” would be more appropriate.

Except it’s not actually “conventional”; it’s physical. There are of course many conventions that go with the physical roles in parenthood, but the conception and gestation and expulsion and lactation are physical. Not having a word for the one who does the gestating and lactating or a word for the one who does the inseminating is just fatuous.

The word parent describes “the role in raising children without directly ascribing gendered roles”, Oxfam said.

No, it doesn’t. That’s exactly what it doesn’t do. It throws a modesty veil over the role in raising children; it removes the precision that names the parent who nurses the infant and the parent who is unable to nurse the infant by lumping them together. In the real world, sometimes “parents” is the right word, but other times the specific parent has to be specified. We have a quick and easy way to do that: say “mother” or “father.” It’s not an obscenity, it’s not blasphemy, it’s not libel, it’s just the ordinary word.

Oxfam said: “This guide is not prescriptive but helps authors communicate in a way that is respectful to the diverse range of people with which we work. We are proud of using inclusive language; we won’t succeed in tackling poverty by excluding marginalised groups.”

They won’t succeed in tackling poverty by refusing to mention mothers, that’s for damn sure.

Sigh. The burning stupid, it’s like mildew, or ants, or a bad smell.

When we “include everyone” in the sense of calling men “women” if they tell us to will overcome poverty? Really? How? What’s the mechanism? And does this eccentric claim apply to all people who call themselves something they’re not? How about rich people, and bosses, and CEOs, and stockbrokers, and market manipulators, and advertisers, and politicians who spurn immigrants and labor unions? When we “include” them will poverty be overcome? Please explain how it works so that we can get busy.

Meet “cute authoritarianism.”

The results of a study of the effects of Disney films and “cute webpages,” such as Lolcats and Cute Overload, suggest that humans have a hardwired biological response to cuteness. Communications expert Julia Möller argues that “the sensitivity to cuteness is directly connected to the reproductive phase of the recipient.” Some other research suggests that “gazing at cute babies releases dopamine”—the neurotransmitter that also plays a crucial role in drug addiction.

Many corporations have learned to capitalize on this in advertisements that feature images of puppies, kittens and children. Möller describes this strategy as “fluffy dollars.” This strategic use of cuteness is also used to sell non-cute items, such as AI. According to a Chinese study, customers are more willing to adopt AI applications with “high perceived cuteness.”

I think there’s also a counter-cuteness response, when the cuteness goes too far or misses the mark in some way. Some cuteness is just too damn cute. Think Shirley Temple for instance – she was extremely cute as a child, but she was also just too damn cute. Too many dimples, too much curly, too giggly. For the long haul you want a little gawkiness or pathos or similar. That probably applies only to humans though – not puppies.

Most citizens of modern democracies are resistant to being forced to do things against their will. To combat this, social engineers have developed the psychological tool of nudging. Pioneered by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, nudge theory draws on the reductive science of behaviourism and advocates the practice of operant conditioning through indirect suggestions and positive reinforcement through “rewards.” 

“Thank you for not smoking.” I know. It’s a good thing there are so many literal-minded people like me who snarl “You don’t know what I’m doing.”

When Boston Dynamics got three of its robots to do a coordinated dance to the Motown classic “Do You Love Me?” the social media world thought it was very cute indeed. The resulting YouTube videos and GIFs garnered hundreds of millions of views.

This is all very cute—but the cuteness conceals the fact that Boston Dynamics worked with DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) for over a decade and still works with the US military and is involved in the manufacture of robots like the LSR pack mule—a large dog-like AI-powered legged squad support system. Robotic dogs that resemble Spot the dancing robot have been developed by tech companies like Ghost Robotics for explicitly military use and their role within the military has been expanding. One such robotic dog was used to enforce lockdown curfews in Shanghai. It issued commands like Your behaviour has violated anti-pandemic rules. Please go home immediately, or you will be punished in accordance with the law. What a cute doggie!

Imagine the psychic trauma: a darling robotic puppy threatening you with punishment. Ouch.

Japan’s cute army is a strange example of this fusion between military weapons and cuteness. Fighter jets have been painted with anime figures and soldiers often pose with fluffy toys in social media posts. On one fighter ship, a decoy rocket launcher has even been “anthropomorphized into a bunny rabbit, complete with mortar tubes for ears.”

See this is why I think there must be some resistance built in too: because I hate anime [chibi]. I think it’s revolting. It doesn’t make me want to cuddle anything, it makes me want to knock heads together. It’s like the word “winsome” – I hate anything labeled winsome, and always have. Cute can be a love-hate thing.

Kawaii (the “cult of cute”) has been an integral part of Japanese culture since the post WW1 years and includes curly handwriting, shy and childlike manga and anime characters and cute monsters and animals like Hello Kitty and Pikachu. Matt Alt has argued that its strange adaptation to military use “could reflect a deep-seated discomfort with the nation’s military history,” a form of denial.

Samurai Hello Kitty.

Cuteness is where the Red Guard came from.

In his 1963 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Robert Jay Lifton has shown how China made public expressions of joy and happiness mandatory, enforced by rewards and punishments. The populace had to repeat song lyrics and phrases such as Long live Chairman Mao for ten thousand years and Anyone who sees Chairman Mao is the happiest person in the world. This mandatory performative cuteness heightened the sense of inescapable oppression. Fengyuan Ji reports that, by the mid 1970s, there were 141 million radio loudspeakers around the nation, blaring out joy-filled anthems and propaganda to 95% of workers and 65% percent of rural households…

In an attempt to make the populace childlike and compliant, Mao unleashed an army of school-aged children, teenagers and students: the Red Guards, staffed by children as young as twelve. During their two-year reign of terror, the Red Guard children and youths became the policers of Mao’s enforced-positivity state, rooting out all negative elements and forcing older people to perform humiliating struggle sessions—public confessions that sometimes led to prison, torture and even death.

Now the Red Guards are punishing us for gender ideology non-compliance.

There are a few striking parallels between Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Rainbow Rebellion of identity activism in the 2020s. Both ideologies deploy kitsch for political purposes. In the case of rainbow identity politics, this has evolved from the gay camp that Susan Sontag explored back in the swinging 60s, but also from kawaii, cosplay and drag, which stress-test the limits of the acceptable. The cute is here an ironic rebellion against social norms, argues Simon May in his book The Power of Cute. “Cuteness is queer,” writes May. Through hybrid mythical figures like the hermaphrodite and the sphinx, the cute “beguiles us” by “distorting the values of gender, age, morality, and even species into something playfully indeterminate.”

Playfully except when it comes to non-compliant women. Game over!

Both rainbow activism and Maoism share a strong belief in behaviourist linguistic engineering: in the designation of some words as good and others as bad, in the censorship of words, the cancellation of people and the imposition of compelled speech. The very Maoist idea has re-emerged that we can build a new egalitarian, queer, tolerant society, if we simply police all language, images and behaviours and force the populace to use the new rainbow-coloured lingo.

This involves using correct and affirmative words, chants and slogans like mantras, to repel political enemies. This new revolutionary language is based on tearing down the old language of history and discrimination, on the basis that all prescribed forms of identity are oppressive social constructs, bearing the dead weight of history. New pronouns are needed for a new rainbow youth that is free from the past, new forms for a reborn Red Guard.

New pronouns are needed and people who refuse to use them must be sent away for…further training.

Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett wrote a piece about misogynist men a few weeks ago.

The continued detention of the professional misogynist Andrew Tate deprives fans of a treasured role model. Even if Tate is soon free to resume his life’s work – essentially, telling women to “shut up, bitch” – it could be a while before Romanian police return the luxury cars that validate his alpha male status.

…

In what is increasingly acknowledged to be a golden era for misogyny, it’s still unusual to find anything approaching Tate’s strutting self-regard, his bragging, his contempt for women, especially mouthy or older ones. “I don’t even talk to old hoes,” he offers, in one video. As for working women who aspire, to Tate’s disgust, to “thoughts and opinions and a job”: “Sit at home,” he tells them, “be quiet, make coffee.” Rule one for “chicks” (which must be tricky to enforce from prison) goes: “No. You stay in the house, you don’t go nowhere. No restaurants, no clubs, nothing.”

Or as the Labour party’s director of communications, Matthew Doyle, was heard saying last week, after a woman MP started playing up, spend more time in your constituency rather than “hanging out with JK Rowling”. He was referring to the MP for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield, once a darling of the party, now feeling, as she written, “ostracised”, but in refusing to shut up, becoming the sort of problem Tate never faced.

She’s making a point here. Matthew Doyle’s insult is a slightly more refined version of Andrew Tate.

If Labour’s responses to its woman problem (as Duffield rightly calls it) can never compete with Tate’s videos, its progressive approach to misogyny is arguably more instructive for men who would like to shut women up but cannot afford a Romania-based chick compound. Men who study, for instance, the conduct of Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle may even conclude that the manosphere could have done more to nurture, as he does, male belief that bullying and insulting women is indicative of moral superiority. For Russell-Moyle, when he brought himself to apologise for insulting and intimidating Miriam Cates MP (having previously barracked Duffield in the debate about the government’s section 35 order blocking Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill), the aggression only confirmed the purity of his sentiments. His “tone”, he conceded, was a mistake, but he stood by his words: “Our job as MPs is to channel passion and anger into considered debate to win our arguments.”

When, that is, we’re talking down to women.

Russell-Moyle is channeling his passion and anger again:

This headline comparing me & Ben Bradshaw with an alleged sex trafficker/serial abuser is sickening from the @ObserverUK. It claims things which are untrue, and places my photo as a form of doxing continuing the abuse, death threats & homophobia which has been ongoing for 2 weeks https://t.co/ZRCperS8Tb

— Lloyd Russell-Moyle 🌹🏕️🏳️‍🌈 (@lloyd_rm) January 29, 2023

He expects to be able to abuse his female colleagues with impunity.

Two University of Bath senior lecturers have a piece in Jacobin about…you’ll never guess…”transphobia” and moral panic and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sorry sorry I’m awake now – yes transphobia and moral panic and transphobia. The subhead presents their claim.

Britain’s moral panic over the trans “threat” is often promoted by people who see themselves as liberals. But their transphobia echoes the same reactionary themes long used to demonize minorities.

Or to put it another way, their evil echoes the same evil long used to be evil to saints. Compelling argument; can we talk about something else now?

No. Pay attention. These are senior lecturers telling us.

The horrific murder of Brianna Ghey has put transphobia in Britain’s news headlines yet again, with police currently investigating it as a potential hate crime.

That is of course horrific but is it necessarily more horrific than the vastly more “yet again” murders of women that don’t generally get this level of sanctimonious attention-calling?

Violence targeting trans people is unfortunately not rare. In 2022, Vice reported that “the number of homophobic hate crime reports in the UK has doubled and the number of transphobic hate crime reports has tripled over the last five years”.

That’s a hell of a non sequitur. Doubled from what? One to two? Telling us the unknown number has doubled does not tell us that violence targeting trans people is not rare.

It is essential to see such extreme actions as part of a broader discursive environment — one that links together mainstream, far-right, and extreme-right actors.

That is, it’s essential to see one murder as somehow connected to feminist women doing feminism. It’s essential to bullshit about this one murder in such a way that it becomes the fault of feminist women who dispute the ideology that claims men are women if they say they are.

The disproportionate and generally negative focus against trans people across the media spectrum has been well documented. In a 2020 report, the Independent Press Standards Organisation in the UK noted that there had been a 400 percent increase in coverage of “trans issues” between 2014 and 2019. Many mainstream public actors have also used their huge platforms to push anti-trans narratives into the mainstream, emboldening extreme-right activists.

What these two senior lecturers call a “generally negative focus against trans people” is in fact mostly an ongoing argument about the ideology that claims gender trumps sex and people are whatever gender they say they are. It’s not “a focus against trans people”; it’s an encyclopedia of arguments about women and sex as opposed to gender and women’s rights.

Many mainstream public actors have also used their huge platforms to push anti-trans narratives into the mainstream, emboldening extreme-right activists.

“Narratives,” they say. We stupid feminist women are just telling stories. Women are too dumb to make arguments.

Then they admit that many of “these actors” are not in fact right wing, but that just makes us all the more sneaky, doncha know.

But individual intentions aren’t all that matter. The anti-trans discourse they’re joining in supports a more global reactionary movement by reinforcing key far-right tropes and giving mainstream legitimacy to forms of exclusion.

Back atcha, chums. The anti-feminist discourse you’re joining in supports a more venomous reactionary movement by reinforcing the breath-taking misogyny of men who claim to be better at womaning than women are.

Jumping ahead a little (yes, they’re boring – of course they are) –

This also relates to the memetic nature of how the threat of “trans ideology” and “social contagion” is discussed in political and media circles. For example, it is common to see stories about dramatic 3,000 percent or even 4,000 percent increases in referrals to the youth gender identity service, which turn out to represent an increase from mere dozens of referrals per year to stabilization at the number of referrals we should broadly expect, if existing estimates of the size of the trans population are correct.

Wait, what was that you said at the beginning? Oh yes –

Violence targeting trans people is unfortunately not rare. In 2022, Vice reported that “the number of homophobic hate crime reports in the UK has doubled and the number of transphobic hate crime reports has tripled over the last five years”.

Ahem.

After that we get paragraph after paragraph of academicky posturing and name-checking that never grapples with the actual issues. Tedious, pretentious, and wrong.

H/t Mostly Cloudy

Now that we’ve met Maisie Hill let’s get to know her even better. She certainly wants to tell people on the internet all about herself.

Chapter one: she had horrible period pain for 15 years, which is not something I would wish on anyone. Except Donald Trump.

Chapter two: she became fabulous.

At the time I was managing a rock bar in Soho and trying to find my path in life (having previously experimented with tattooing, music merchandise, and working in a parrot store in New York), so when I found the perfect combination of therapies that finally dealt with my period pain once and for all, I was inspired to train as a health practitioner.

What’s a health practitioner? How is it different from a doctor or nurse?

She says she’s been “working in reproductive and hormonal health” for 15 years. Again I don’t know what that means. I suspect the vagueness is deliberate.

My qualifications include:

• BSc Chinese Medicine Acupuncture which included a semester in the neurology department of a Chinese hospital.
• Diplomas in Life Coaching, Reflexology, Aromatherapy, Massage, and the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy (ATMAT).
• Post-graduate diploma in Paediatric Acupuncture.

Ah, so no qualifications at all then. A new agey quack.

Conclusion:

I’m an all round fantastic person.

And a person who wants to hire a part-time assistant to do the full time jobs of 3 or 4 people. Much fantastic.