Deep rifts.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican congressman-elect who rose to prominence under former President Donald Trump’s wing, went rogue after the former president endorsed GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy of California for House speaker.

Gaetz told Fox News Digital that Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy for speaker has not changed the congressman’s view on the former president or GOP leader, nor has swayed his vote.

“Sad!” Gaetz said in a Wednesday statement. “This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.”

What happened to loyalty? What happened to payback? Where would Matt Gaetz be without Trump??

Gaetz wants the shirtsleeves molester guy.

Gaetz has led the House Freedom Caucus charge against the GOP leader’s speakership bid, where he and 19 other Republican members have frozen the House in opposition to McCarthy while solidifying their support behind Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.

They’re quarreling over who is the absolute worst so that they can elect the winner.

All the despised groups should have euphemisms, all of them. Murderers should be re-branded as population controllers and rapists should be called admirers of women. Jo Bartosch at spiked:

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Police Scotland were blasted for referring to those who abuse children as ‘minor-attracted people’, or ‘MAP’, in a report for a European Commission project.

As euphemisms go, that’s a pretty terrible one, because of course the issue isn’t attraction, it’s abuse. The issue with rapists isn’t attraction, it’s rape, and it works the same way with the rape or molestation of children.

After an online backlash, Police Scotland were quick to point out that the phrase ‘minor-attracted people’ was a quote from the EU’s proposals for the project, which was set up to tackle child abuse. In a statement, Police Scotland said that it had lobbied against the use of the term MAP at a meeting of European partners in September 2022.

Notably, MAP is the word preferred by groups who campaign to remove the ‘stigma’ associated with adults who want to sexually abuse children. It is a term often used by dangerous people who believe they have been victimised by a hostile society

See, some kinds of stigma exist for good reasons and should not be removed.

Who exactly advised the European Commission to adopt this kind of language remains a mystery, but there are several organisations that push it.

The US-based group B4U-ACT, which was founded by convicted child molester Michael Melsheimer, describes itself as helping professionals to ‘learn more about attraction to minors and to consider the effects of stereotyping, stigma and fear’.

Notice that it doesn’t describe itself as “helping professionals to ‘learn more about wanting to fuck minors’.” When in a tight spot always deploy the euphemisms.

B4U-ACT is not the only such group to have links to academics. California-based Prostasia, which advertises itself as a ‘child-protection organisation’, runs a ‘support club’ for ‘MAPs’. In its 2021 annual review, Prostasia says it acts ‘as a watchdog on extremism in the cause of child protection’ to address ‘the human-rights impacts of child-protection laws and policies’. Prostasia works with several universities, including Nottingham Trent in the UK.

Libertarianism run mad again – “extremism in the cause of child protection” is a real gem. Tucker Carlson crossed with Jimmy Savile.

Scandal in Wisconsin:

Early in 2020, an Indigenous artist urged the owners of a new music venue in [Madison] to change its name. 

It was called The Winnebago, after the street on which it stands. Many Indigenous people and allies let the owners know that wasn’t the best name for a white-owned music venue. One of them was nibiiwakamigkwe, also known as Kay LeClaire, a founding member and co-owner of the queer Indigenous artists’ collective giige, and budding leader of Madison’s Indigenous arts community.

I don’t think it’s all that clear that using indigenous names is bad if you’re not indigenous. You could be promoting awareness of indigenous culture, which could be not bad, it seems to me.

Anyway the owners eventually changed the name.

“I’m glad the owners have decided to no longer profit from the identities of Indigenous peoples,” LeClaire wrote in an editorial for Our Lives Wisconsin. “I’m glad the name is going, but I’m not happy the institutions that allowed it to be stolen in the first place remain. For over 500 years, Indigenous Peoples have not controlled our narratives and representations. Our exclusion has been built into inclusion for others.”

But there’s a catch: she’s not indigenous. It’s one of those stories.

Since at least 2017, Kay LeClaire has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. Additionally, they identify as “two-spirit,” a term many Indigenous people use to describe a non-binary gender identity. In addition to becoming a member and co-owner of giige, LeClaire earned several artists’ stipends, a paid residency at the University of Wisconsin, a place on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force and many speaking gigs and art exhibitions, not to mention a platform and trust of a community – all based on an ethnic identity that appears to have been fully fabricated.

Not to mention being “non-binary”/”two-spirit” while also being on a missing and murdered women task force.

LeClaire made an evasive “statement”:

“I am sorry,” they wrote. “A lot of information has come to my attention since late December. I am still processing it all and do not yet know how to respond adequately. What I can do now is offer change. Moving forward, my efforts will be towards reducing harm by following the directions provided by Native community members and community-specified proxies. Currently, this means that I am not using the Ojibwe name given to me and am removing myself from all community spaces, positions, projects, and grants and will not seek new ones. Any culturally related items I hold are being redistributed back in community, either to the original makers and gift-givers when possible or elsewhere as determined by community members. Thank you.”

Given to her by whom, one wonders. She was asked, but answer came there none, nor did she specify what “information” came to her attention.

LeClaire graduated from Hamilton High School in Sussex, Wisconsin, where they were known as Katie Le Claire, in 2012 (despite later telling a Capital Times reporting intern that they were raised in Northern Wisconsin). They apparently attended the University of Wisconsin and in the summer of 2018 married fellow Hamilton alum Adam Pagenkopf, a research specialist at UW. 

What pronouns does Adam Pagenkopf use??? We’re not told.

It’s not yet known exactly how much money LeClaire made by claiming Indigenous heritage, but it’s clear they worked their way into many institutions and exhibitions. 

Which is very bad if the institutions are indigenous and you’re not, but stunning and brave if the institutions are female and you’re not.

Why is that?

Originally a comment by Holms on Marjorie.

For the last twenty years or so, there has been a strong push for movies, tv shows, theatrical productions (etc.) to have more widely representative characters and casts. Fewer male characters, more female; fewer white, more of every other ethnicity; fewer straight, more of other sexualities. It was emphasised that these characters were not to be reductive cliches. Further, this popular push emphasised that this was especially applicable to the lead role.

The reasoning was simple, and well understood by the left. People of demographic combinations other than ‘white male’ deserve to see themselves represented in movies, and not as insulting caricatures. Kids especially deserve to see their sex and/or skin colour as the hero, as the genius, as the object of desire, as the virtuoso, and so on. Broader representation was positive, perhaps even inspiring those kids to push themselves to become that themselves.

But bring up female representation in sport and all of that goes away. I’ve seen it argued for example that a person that needed to see champions demographically similar to themselves in order to be inspired to push themselves was never particularly interested in the first place. But worse is when that reasoning goes away for women but remains in force for trans women. Actual women are weak if they need someone else to feel validated and inspired, but trans women need to have visibility in sports so as to have heroes to admire and aspire to become.

Up with representation of demographics that aren’t straight white men! Then sotto voce: but feel free to forget about the female sex. Supplant them in sports, it’s a net positive because it helps males that wish they were women.

Originally a comment by latsot on Where are the skeptics?

Harald Hanche-Olsen@22ish

Your point reminds me of the characterisation of social media as Skinner Boxes, which I’ve written about here before. The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear and obviously designed to encourage people to take increasingly outspoken positions in the everlasting hunt for likes as returns diminish.

And of course once you’ve gone down one trouser leg of validation, it’s rather hard to come back. I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy is quite up to describing this effect because the increasing apparent conviction is based on diminishing returns for increasingly wild claims.

This is the only explanation I can come up with for the constant over-reaching of gender identity ideology and politics. If activists were to say, for instance, that TWAW is a linguistic argument; that we should change what “woman” means because of some greater good, then we’d have something to talk about. I wouldn’t agree, but we’d have the basis of a good argument about how to determine public policy, at least.

But that doesn’t happen. If arguments like that are ever made, they are motte-and-bailey’s or switched bait.

To make an actual, coherent, evidenced, logical argument, the proponent would have to inch back up toward the… er.. crotch of the trousers of validation (I now regret making that analogy). Every step in that direction loses more in terms of validation than even the decreasing returns gain in heading to the turn-ups (these are 80s trousers, in my analogy).

This is an obvious weakness of human brains. Arty talked about it in the latest Mess as brains being hacked by arseholes. The way it’s done could well be as simple as diminishing returns in likes, I reckon.

I think you were being a bit too glib about this, NiV; it’s easy to see what PZ does as a performance now that we have reason to condemn it. Of course there was always an element of performance, but the questions have always been about the crowd to which he was performing and whether and how that changed. And to what extent he was complicit in it.

My silly abstract model might be right as far as it goes. It might help us gain some insight into how people of conviction can so quickly and easily forget what they were actually convinced about in the first place and embrace the opposite. Or it might not.

But it’s not enough.

Robert Reich points out that the Republican party veered into incoherence when it tried to combine libertarianism with cultural conservatism.

That kind of incoherence is inevitable though, when you have on the one hand two political parties and on the other hand more than two political philosophies or orientations or whatever you want to call them. It applies just as much to the Dems – they’re way too conservative on most issues for my liking, but they’re all there is.

The party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby created an opening for a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.

Or centering on whatever exactly it was that they saw in Trump. Greed? Conceit? Cruelty? Rage? Pussy-grabbing?

Enter Donald Trump, the con artist with a monstrous talent for exploiting resentment in service of his ego.

Trump turned the Republican party into a white working-class cauldron of bitterness, xenophobia, racism, anti-intellectualism and anti-science paranoia, while turning himself into the leader of a near religious cult bent on destroying anything in his way – including American democracy.

I think that’s pretty accurate. Trump doesn’t really have any politics, he just has that urge to be the worst loudest guy in the room.

What we are seeing played out today in the contest for the speakership of the House involves all of these phases – what remains of the small-government establishment, the cultural warriors and the hate-filled authoritarians – engaged in hopeless, hapless combat with each other.

Cheery stuff.

Julie Bindel at Unherd:

In 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then rape their victims before pimping them to multiple men in exchange for alcohol, cigarettes and food.

…

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national average of children in care in Blackpool.

That’s bad enough, but then there’s a plot twist.

But there is one thing I didn’t know about Blackpool, which I learned from listening to Inside the Gender Clinic, a podcast  about the much maligned Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. The  majority of referrals to the clinic are not, as one might assume, from the South, or from Brighton, but from Blackpool. This is surely the last place you’d expect to see so many trans-identified children. After all, the voices we so often hear on this issue in the media tend to belong to upper middle-class kids raised in liberal families.

But transing would be a refuge from abuse, wouldn’t it…at a horrendous price.

Claire*, who grew up in Blackpool, is working for a charity that supports female victims of male violence. She tells me that the links between the rise in young females being referred to gender identity clinics and the realities of growing up in places like Blackpool are obvious. She cites high levels of poverty and the normalisation of the exploitation of women and girls in the sex trade.

As a child, Claire, who was raised in Blackpool, was subject to men’s violence and consequently wanted to “opt out of girlhood”. She says: “The option to be removed from the harms of men would be appealing to most survivors. I am furious that we are allowing girls who need care and support to go down irreversible paths.”

Cheaper, easier, quicker – just cut their tits off.

Blackpool seems to offer a clear example of how vulnerable, damaged children are being drawn to gender ideology because it offers a “one stop shop” solution to the pain of living as a female in a hellish world of abuse. “These girls have been horrifically betrayed,” says Norma. “Why are we sending them for irreversible, damaging treatment, when what they need is protection from sexual violation and abuse?”

Because cheaper, easier, quicker, plus they’re just girls?

The Guardian heralds another first:

Missouri set to become first state to execute an openly transgender person

Progress! No, wait, that’s not what we mean. What do we mean? Uhh………..

Amber McLaughlin is facing the fate on Tuesday of becoming the first openly transgender person to be executed in the US – unless Missouri’s governor, Mike Parson, grants clemency and puts a stop to the planned lethal injection.

First transgender person but not first man.

Punishment by execution is a bad thing, but it doesn’t become worse because the executed person is a man who claims to be a woman.

There are no further court appeals pending. The clemency request focuses on several issues, including McLaughlin’s severely traumatic childhood and serious mental health issues, which the jury never heard during her trial. She was convicted in 2006 for killing a former girlfriend in 2003.

It’s the old “these aren’t our crimes” thing. Statistically men are vastly more likely to murder an ex than women are. McLaughlin was bumbling his effort to pass by killing his former girlfriend. It’s not a girly thing to do.

Two Missouri members of Congress, Democrats Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver, have been campaigning for McLaughlin’s sentence to be commuted and last week wrote to Parson urging him to scrap the execution.

To be clear, I don’t object to campaigns to scrap the execution.

They further stated in the letter: “Ms McLaughlin’s cruel execution would mark the state’s first use of the death penalty on a woman since the US supreme court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, and even worse it would not solve any of the systemic problems facing Missourians and people all across America, including anti-LGBTQ+ hate and violence, and cycles of violence that target and harm women. 

No it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t mark the state’s first use of the death penalty on a woman since the US supreme court reinstated capital punishment, because he’s not a woman. These are not our crimes.

Gee, I wonder why women get so angry about this kind of thing; I just can’t understand it.

So there you go. Shut up and take it, women.

Paul Fidalgo has an interesting piece in Free Inquiry (where he is now the editor-in-chief).

Tim Minchin Reaches across the Algorithmic Chasm

Nice title, too.

In a “lecture” portion of his show recently posted online, which is introduced as being a “TED Talk” on confirmation bias, Minchin (winner of CFI’s 2021 Richard Dawkins Award) teases apart what he sees as the worsening phenomenon of tribalism, wherein the political right has come to hold bewilderingly absolutist, contradictory, nonsensical, and bigoted beliefs, while progressives have turned on themselves, creating an endless fractal of mini-tribes that are constantly ejecting their members over increasingly minor ideological infractions.

Also over what I would consider not infractions at all. Progressives have lost their grip on the difference between reality and fiction lately. Progressives now queue up to denounce people for not believing other people’s fantasies – which is a weird thing to denounce. It’s weird when it’s religion and it’s weird when it’s ideology.

This is something I think about all the time, particularly from the position of someone who runs a secular humanist publication that is literally called “Free Inquiry.” It has to be okay to ask hard questions and to have a healthy skepticism of the beliefs held by those even within our own “tribes.” Just as it’s important to speak out against what is false, harmful, and wrong, it must also be okay to be wrong in the first place so that one can feel free to learn and grow.

Which doesn’t mean you have to be wrong about everything all the time, like Trump.

Now we get to read the texts and phone logs and such from Trump’s Big Day.

The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.

The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win.

This will keep us busy for weeks.

Hope Hicks, to the surprise of no one, was agitated about her personal future.

Trump aide Hope Hicks texted with Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff Julie Radford on the afternoon of Jan. 6 decrying Trump’s actions and lamenting that their careers were likely doomed.

“All of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed. I’m so mad and upset,” Hicks wrote. “We all look like domestic terrorists now.”

Ya that’s the important thing: Hope Hicks’s career.

There is a certain amount of humor though.

The select committee also posted a journal entry produced by Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump White House press Secretary, from Jan. 6, describing some of the chaos and interactions she observed that day.

“POTUS wanted to walk to capital [sic]. Physically walk,” she wrote. “He said fine ride beast. Meadows said not safe enough.”

You can imagine what came between that “Physically walk” and “fine ride beast.” It’s not a short walk – it’s very doable, but it’s not five or ten minutes. Trump doesn’t like to walk.

In case anyone’s feeling like shedding a tear for Pope Benny (unlikely, I know), here’s a reminder from 2009:

The Catholic Church (and Pope Benedict XVI) were presented with a public-relations powder keg in March when news broke that a 9-year-old Brazilian girl underwent an abortion after she’d been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Catholics from São Paulo to Paris were outraged by the swift public declaration of the local Archbishop, José Cardoso Sobrinho, that the girl’s family as well as the doctors who performed the abortion were automatically excommunicated.

What, just because the local archbishop valued the “life” of the process inside the 9-year-old girl more than the very actual life of the girl herself? Because the archbishop swiftly declared that the unaware unconscious unsentient pregnancy forced on the child mattered more than the child herself? Because the archbishop declared that the child should have submitted to likely death rather than halt the life-threatening process forced on her by her rapist stepfather? Yes, just because all that.

Monsignor Rino Fisichella, a solidly traditionalist Rome prelate considered to be close to Benedict, tried to soften the church’s approach to the case by writing in the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the girl “should have been defended, hugged and held tenderly to help her feel that we were all on her side.” 

Fuck that noise. You’re a million miles from “her side” when you’re forcing her to go through agony and likely death after being raped by her stepfather. Imagine being a 9-year-old girl gestating twins!! There isn’t room in a child’s body for that.

In a tucked-away “clarification” published on page 7 of a recent edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican produced a document that unequivocally confirmed automatic excommunication for anyone involved in an abortion — even in such a situation as dire as the Brazilian case.

Because priestly power matters far more than the lives of mere little sluts who probably tempted their stepfathers in the first place. Bros before hos.

Updating to add, reminded by tigger_the_wing’s comment:

Jordan Peterson is notoriously a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.

Example:

Ah yes, we live in that utopia where nobody decides were anybody can drive, so there are no freeways or highways or roads.

Oh ffs.

And Sir Keir whines and gesticulates and flails like an idiot. He finally manages to utter the complete sentence “I don’t think discussing the issue in this way helps anyone.”

It helps women you fucking fool. This exciting new fad for pretending men can become women by saying so is bad for women, and men in power brushing that off is also bad for women. It does help us to keep reminding men in power like you that letting men pretend to be women and invade our spaces and take over our sports and win our prizes is bad for us.

Yet another one of these.

“Tiffany” of course is not a woman.

Sucks for Paula James, doesn’t it.

I could find only one headline that doesn’t lie about the murder of Carlo Secondino. Even the New York Post says “woman” in the headline. Newsweek is the one truth-teller.

Who Is Nikki Secondino? Trans Woman Accused of Murdering Father

A New York transgender woman has been arrested by police and is accused of killing her father and critically injuring her sister, according to reports.

Why don’t they all report it that way? Why do they say “woman” and “daughter” in the headlines?

Actual literal journalists lying about the news. That’s useful. Reporter for CBS News:

That’s all lies. His SON told police that. His SON is under arrest on suspicion of murdering his father and stabbing his sister.

The hashtag is NotOurCrimes. It gets used a lot.

Ah, I didn’t realize there was a Welsh publisher of women writers. Gwasg Honno Press: “Vibrant fiction, auto/biography, short stories, anthologies & Classics (@Honno_Clas) from Welsh women writers. Longest running UK independent women’s press.” (I still miss Virago.)

But, it turns out…

Never mind then, it’s not a women’s press after all.

Mind you, they’ll get in trouble for that “or.” It’s not “if you’re a woman or you identify as a woman” because that implies that if you identify as a woman you’re not a woman. ERROR ERROR ERROR.

Bolsonaro has urgent business up north.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been sworn in as the new president of Brazil – the third time he has held the country’s highest office.

…

Lula and incoming Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin paraded through the city on an open-top convertible before proceeding to the Senate – at the start of the formal inauguration ceremony. The men have spent the past days selecting their cabinet and appointing supporters to key state owned businesses.

In a noted change of policy from the Bolsonaro administration, Marina Silva – one of Brazil’s best known climate activists – was re-appointed to head the environment and climate ministry. She will be expected to achieve Lula’s pledge to reach “zero deforestation” in the Amazon by 2030.

Noted and vitally important to the entire planet.

Mr Bolsonaro himself reportedly flew to the US state of Florida after delivering a teary farewell to supporters.

Ah, Florida. Hoping he has friends there, no doubt. Of course Trump hates “losers” so…

The populist incumbent has repeatedly said he does not wish to attend the inauguration of his successor, where he would be expected to hand over the presidential sash in a sign of a stable transfer of power.

Aw, iddn that sweet; so trumpy. Maybe Trump will let him kiss the ring if he promises to leave immediately afterwards.

Now that’s more like it.

Scarborough’s New Year fireworks cancelled to protect walrus

Priorities. Which is more important, a walrus or fireworks? The walrus, obviously. Good job Scarborough.

A New Year’s Eve fireworks display had to be cancelled at the last minute to protect an Arctic walrus discovered in Scarborough.

The event was called off over fears it “could cause distress to the mammal”. Council leader Steve Siddons said he was disappointed but “the welfare of the walrus has to take precedence”.

The walrus, which has drawn huge crowds since arriving on Saturday, is believed to be the same one spotted on the Hampshire coast three weeks ago.

If it’s drawn huge crowds that would seem to indicate it’s given some joy to a lot of people, so there’s some consolation for the canceled fireworks. There may not be a huge amount of overlap between the fans of marine mammals and fans of fireworks, but even so.

More on the walrus, who seems to feel very comfortable catching up on sleep while the people of Yorkshire admire.