Blasphemy hunts continue:

Four pupils have been suspended from a West Yorkshire secondary school after a copy of the Quran was damaged by students.

Wednesday’s incident at Wakefield’s Kettlethorpe High School happened when a copy of the Islamic text was brought in by a Year 10 pupil.

Head teacher Tudor Griffiths said the book remained intact and there was “no malicious intent” from those involved.

There is no shortage of copies of Islam’s holy book. It shouldn’t be a news story that one copy out of billions was “damaged.” You might as well fret that a newspaper got torn.

Maybe if people do it out of malice they should be told to stop bullying, but other than that, nothing to see here.

The school held a meeting “with concerned community leaders” – which I suppose means with men from the “community” of Muslims. The BBC does love to sort religious people into their respective “communities.”

Independent councillor for Wakefield East, Akef Akbar, called the meeting after being contacted by people calling for more information. He said reports the Quran had been burnt or destroyed were untrue, and he had inspected the book himself during the meeting.

Mr Akbar said he had been told the book had been taken to school as a dare by a pupil who lost while playing a Call of Duty videogame with other students.

It’s a book. Schools sometimes have books.

Head teacher Mr Griffiths said in a statement: “We would like to reassure all our community that the holy book remains fully intact and that our initial enquiries indicate there was no malicious intent by those involved.

It doesn’t matter. It’s one copy of a very widely available book. Its state of health is of no real significance.

“However, we have made it very clear that their actions did not treat the Quran with the respect it should have, so those involved have been suspended and we will be working with them to ensure they understand why their actions were unacceptable.”

Oh stop. Mass-produced inanimate objects don’t require “respect.” Tell the kids not to bully other kids, and make sure they don’t, but don’t bother to protect ubiquitous physical objects.

“This morning, we met with our local Muslim community leaders, local councillors and police to share all the information we currently know, the action taken and the immediate steps we have taken to reinforce the values and behaviour we expect from every member of this school community to ensure that all religions are respected.”

We don’t have to respect any religions.

Elon launches another “Hooray for racism!!” into the world.

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

He’s a busy man, he doesn’t have time to comment on what Adams said, he has time only to defend him for saying it.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Questions of bodily autonomy.

Medicalisation of children, and the surgical removal of healthy body parts which are necessary for a full and healthy adult life, aren’t an issue of ‘bodily autonomy’; they’re an issue of bodily integrity. Adults should be protecting children from harmful physical interventions which are wholly unnecessary, and equally should be protecting them from an ideology which is telling them that they need those interventions in order to ever be happy again.

We allow children a say in medical and surgical interventions according to age and competence. My son had no say in the procedure to give him some hearing at the age of four months, so I had to weigh up the probability of being deaf having a massive negative effect on his acquisition of language and his safety, versus the slight risk of the procedure itself, and make the decision for him. Using medicines and surgery on a child when to do nothing is harmful, but the outcome of the interventions is beneficial, is quite different to removing their ability to mature alongside their peer group, or to grow into adulthood with necessary body parts intact; it is quite different to turning them into lifelong medical patients because of iatrogenic health issues.

When it comes to girls and abortion, it has been proved time and again that a timely termination of pregnancy is far, far safer than allowing it to go to term. That truly is an issue of bodily autonomy, and girls are capable of having a say in the decision, provided that they have had proper, fact-based, counselling. Proper, fact-based, counselling is exactly what children are not being given when pushed onto the ‘trans’ track.

She sums the mess up nicely.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Questions of bodily autonomy.

It’s interesting how they mention the anti-abortion laws, but those immediately fall away. It looks like abortion rights are like anti-racism; they have become a tool for trans to use for their own interests, to tie trans to unrelated activism in order to tie their issues to other issues that really are issues of rights.

Indeed. We saw TiM speakers at rallies, which were ostensibly protests against the overturning of Roe v Wade, turn the fight for abortion rights into a subsection of trans demands for “bodily autonomy.” Women’s rights pushed aside for boutique demands. To complete the hijacking of women’s platforms, captured orgs like the ACLU, NOW and Planned Parenthood tweeted about abortion rights without using the word “woman.” Once women have served their purpose of getting the T centred, women and their needs are cast aside. Mission accomplished.

Similarly NBs, and even TiFs, are afterthoughts within trans activism itself for the core of TiMs who seem to be driving the agenda. If there was some means of dismantling the forced teaming and dismantling the “umbrella,” TiMs would find it harder to advance and defend their demands. A good wedge issue might do the trick. Pushing on things like getting men men out of women’s prisons might help do this. It’s harder to hide the impact of the trans agenda on the prison issue than it is to conceal in “health care for trans kids.” There are far more candy-coated euphemisms to unpack and translate in the medical arena than in the prison one, making the incarceration of men with women a harder position to hold, and an easier one to attack. It looks bad to start with, and I don’t think TiFs or NBs have much of a draw to this issue. I don’t see TiFs clamoring to get into men’s prisons in the name of TMAM, and as for NBs, who really gives a fuck what they think or want?

For TiMs, it’s TWAW in all situations and circumstances; or, as Stonewall used to put it, “Acceptance without exception.” No ground can be given: TWAW is a total(itarian) position. In the UK, TiMs in women’s prisons was promoted as the perfect test case for getting men into any and all female single-sex spaces. They can’t afford to let this one go. All the better for our side. Bring it on. Let this be their Stalingrad.

Andrew Sullivan on the war on dissenters:

Five years ago when I wrote “We All Live On Campus Now,” I noted how illiberal practices that originated in elite colleges — bullying, ostracism, public condemnation, speech shutdowns, purges of dissenters — were becoming common in every sphere of life, super-charged by social media. From 2020 on, that dynamic has intensified, especially in journalism, with the media purges of 2020 lifted straight from the campus woke playbook.

And this week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

But the New York Times isn’t a university. Newspapers have different goals, different rules, different standards, different criteria and reasons for the criteria, different consumers/markets – so many differences. Universities cater to people who don’t have fully developed brains yet; newspapers do not. Student activism isn’t always bad or repressive or wrongheaded…but sometimes it is.

Students like having A Cause that the adults have neglected, and they have been known to do great work. The Civil Rights struggle featured a lot of students, and they helped it wake up a callous nation. But Trans Activism is Not Like That. The activists want it to be, but it isn’t. The cause isn’t the same and it isn’t even similar, not even similarish. It’s grotesquely dissimilar – it’s luxury protest as opposed to the life and death kind.

But is it health care, or is it dangerous invasive tampering?

After a midterm election and record flow of anti-transgender legislation last year, Republican state lawmakers this year are zeroing in on questions of bodily autonomy with new proposals to limit gender-affirming health care and abortion access.

Calling it “gender-affirming health care” is tendentious at best. “Attempted sex-changing surgery and hormones” would be more accurate, though of course believers in the ideology would see it as an outrage.

You can’t change sex. You can change gender only if gender is being understood as entirely external and social, which is not how most people understand it. Either way it has nothing to do with health or health care. Assisting it is not medical.

More than two dozen bills seeking to restrict transgender health care access have been introduced across 11 states — Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — for the legislative sessions beginning in early 2023.

See that’s even more misleading. It sounds as if the bills say trans people can’t have health care, which would indeed be outrageous. The bills are about restricting measures to make people trans, which is not the same as restricting health care. Measures to make people trans can be the opposite of health care.

Gender-affirming health care providers and parents of trans youths are the primary targets of these bills, many of which seek to criminalize helping a trans child obtain what doctors and psychologists widely consider “medically necessary care.”

Really? How widely? In what way medically necessary? What is the evidence that “gender-affirming health care” is medically (as opposed to socially or psychologically or emotionally) necessary care? What is the evidence that the purported medical need for such treatment is permanent? What is the evidence that no harm is done, that no one regrets such health care?

Oh, here it is.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said last year that teens experiencing gender dysphoria can start taking hormones at age 14 and can have certain surgeries at ages 15 or 17. The group acknowledged potential risks but said it was unethical to withhold early treatments, which can improve psychological well-being and reduce suicide risk.

Ah yes WPATH, which notoriously has no vested interest at all whatsoever. Yes it’s risky but it’s unethical not to do it because maybe it will make the victims happy. Maybe. Ignore all the people already saying they wish they hadn’t done it.

What does this remind me of? Oh yes…

The Blood Libel.

The term blood libel refers to the false allegation that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian children, for ritual purposes. The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews, with Julius Steicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer making frequent use of ritual murder imagery in its antisemitic propaganda.

So, in a similar vein, terfs use the blood of trans women to thicken their energy drinks.

Blood libels, together with allegations of well poisoning, were a major theme in Jewish persecution in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period. They were a central component in the development of modern antisemitism in the 19th century.

That’s ok though. Don’t worry about it. These people whipping up murderous hatred against feminist women defending our rights…they’re fine. They’re just more enlightened than the rest of us.

1. (Rubie [↩]

Finally.

Transgender women convicted of violence will be barred from female prisons under new rules to be introduced on Monday.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is toughening its stance, meaning that not only transgender women convicted of sexual assaults but also those jailed for violence will no longer be able to be held in mainstream women’s prisons.

Violent offences will include murder, attempted murder, harming a child, assault with intent to cause serious harm or with injury, endangering life, and harassment. The new rules will also cover all transgender women with male genitalia and will apply regardless of whether transgender prisoners have a gender recognition certificate.

Because as women have said all along, the male genitalia and all that goes with them are reality while a gender recognition certificate is a certificate of…airy nothing.

The tougher rules south of the border follow a scandal when a transgender inmate sexually assaulted fellow prisoners after transferring to a women’s prison in 2018. Karen White, a transgender woman, was on remand for multiple rapes and other sexual offences against women when transferred to New Hall prison, near Wakefield.

It then emerged that, after transferring to the female prison, she was accused of four sexual assaults against other inmates between September and November last year, before being moved to a men’s prison.

So, concentrating very hard and thinking very deeply, officialdom slowly came to the conclusion that men who fantasize that they’re women and have a history of sexual assault might just possibly not be the best prison cellmates for women.

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