Turns out it’s illegal to plot to kidnap people.

The ringleader of a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Adam Fox, 39, appeared in front of US District Court Judge Richard Jonker on Tuesday. Earlier this year he was found guilty of planning to abduct Ms Whitmer from her holiday home with other militiamen.

The group targeted the governor in 2020, after she imposed Covid rules early in the pandemic.

I wonder how many of us are alive today because of measures taken to deal with the flu pandemic in 1918.

As well as conspiring to abduct Ms Whitmer, Fox was sentenced for planning to use a weapon of mass destruction to blow up a bridge after the kidnapping, to make it easier to escape.

At the low low price of killing everyone who was on the bridge when it blew up.

I have a little stack of New Yorkers from a Little Free Library (to which they’ll return once I’ve perused them), and the other day I settled down to read what looked like an interesting article by Jill Lepore about a UK writer fella. But…the longer I read the more irritated I got.

You know how there’s a popular magazine style that involves adding a lot of “color” to reporting via details about decor, clothes, food, yadda yadda, so that it’s not just a parade of facts but more like a short story? And for that matter a popular fiction style that does the same thing? And you know how unskilled people can overdo it to the point where you want to throw whatever it is on the floor and stamp on it?

This was that. There were only tiny little bits of reporting on the writer and what he’s written, immediately interrupted by yet another description of his kitchen or going somewhere in his car or the weather or god knows what. It was 80 or 90 percent color with only a tiny fraction left for actually telling us anything.

It starts like this:

Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else.

It’s already too much, in my view. Too novel-y, too precious, too much information. That “pink as a peony” made me cringe, long before I’d read enough of the piece to get furious. The woolen slippers, too. Why not describe his underpants? Enough already! I don’t care about his slippers! Get on with it!

She does get on with it, briefly, just long enough to spark my interest, but then promptly goes back to piling on the gossipy backgroundy crap. She should have skipped the interesting part so that we could all just stop reading after a few paragraphs.

For the longest stretch of Herron’s professional life, he worked in London in the legal department of an employment-issues research firm, copy-editing journal articles, handbooks, and case reports about employment discrimination and wrongful termination. Nights, he wrote detective fiction, and even got some published, but no one bought it. Then he had a breakthrough. “People say write what you know,” Herron says. “So I wrote about people who are failures.” Bob Cratchitting away at job-discrimination case reports, Herron came up with the idea of Slough House, a place where M.I.5 puts bad spies out to pasture. “Sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people,” one character explains. “So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. They called them slow horses. The screw-ups. The losers.” James Bond they are not.

There it is, the one interesting paragraph in the whole long piece. Most of what we get after that is chatter like:

“Tonight at ten, chaos on all fronts for Liz Truss,” the BBC announced the night I boarded a red-eye to London….I took a bus from Heathrow to Oxford, a city of sandcastles. Herron and his partner, Jo Howard, picked me up by the side of the road in her black Volvo. I was two hours late. It was raining.

“I’m so sorry we’ve missed the morning,” I said, climbing into the back seat: black, white topstitching.

“Not to worry,” Howard said, pulling into traffic as zippy-fast as a taxi-driver.

She described the back seat of her subject’s partner’s car.

“We’ll pop over to the house for a bit and then head out?” Herron asked, looking back at me, wonderingly, black bushy eyebrows raised, a pair of commas. I’d barged in on what was meant to be a weekend getaway to the Malvern Hills with Howard’s two grown daughters. They had graciously agreed to let me tag along as far as a book event in Herefordshire, after which Herron and I would take a train back to Oxford, and then he’d turn around and train back out to meet Howard for what was left of the weekend. Howard downshifted for power, weaved left, weaved right, leaned into a turn on rain-soaked streets. She has corn-silk-yellow hair, pale, delicate features, and, faintly, freckles, and she drives, I decided, not like a taxi-driver but like a cop on a cop show circa 1972. Maybe Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Who cares?? What is the point of all this?

We get a description of their house.

We get told who went where in the house.

In a sitting room that opens out to a magical back garden, Herron and I sat down each to a sofa, one red, one off-white, like valentines. The cats have their own door, a tunnel through the wall and out to the garden, where they pounce on mice scurrying between potted geraniums and glower at squirrels scrabbling up the clematis that’s strangling a slatted wooden fence. Herron was wearing a black button-up shirt over a gray tee, and jeans, and had swapped out black sneakers for slippers at the door.

And it goes on like that! For pages and pages! What on earth is the point? It reads like a parody, but Herron is a real person who really writes spy novels, so I guess it isn’t. At one point, three or four or five pages in, she mentions a character name and I don’t recognize it, so I scan the paragraph and then the page for the previous mention, can’t find it, scan again, and again and again and again, getting more and more irritated, and finally go back to page one to find a single brief reference. How were we, the readers, supposed to remember that one name through three or four pages of mind-bogglingly dull detail about the sitting room?

Anyway. It baffles me. Why do the New Yorker editors think this is good stuff? Why does Lepore herself think so? Is the ghost of Tom Wolfe messing with them or what?

Adjectives, how do they work?

Let’s try it with “dog.”

This is a brown dog.

This is a small dog.

This is a friendly dog.

This is a rescue dog.

This is a pretend dog.

This is a fake dog.

This is a fantasy dog.

Thus ends today’s lesson on how adjectives work.

The Hamline University student newspaper reports on the showing of images in an art history class a few weeks ago:

Hamline undergraduate students received an email from the Dean of Students on Nov. 7, condemning an unnamed classroom incident as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

That must have been weird. “Hi students. There was a bad bad bad incident. Love, the Dean.”

The Oracle has since learned that the event in question occurred on Oct. 6, when a professor shared two depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in class, while discussing Islamic art. One was a 14th century depiction of the Prophet and the other was a 16th century depiction of the Prophet with veil and halo. 

In other words a professor showed images in a discussion of art history. What else are instructors supposed to do? Nobody has claimed (as far as I’ve seen) that the instructor was discussing Islamic art for no apparent reason and that he was supposed to be teaching Marketing 101. Assuming he was teaching art history or history or comparative religion or similar, what law or rule says he’s not allowed to use images in teaching? Hamline University is not a madrassa so why wouldn’t he shouldn’t he couldn’t he refer to images in doing so?

Why is there an assumption that this is at least rude (at worst all but murderous) to Muslim students? Why should their rules (or Catholic rules or Hindu rules or Lutheran rules) govern teaching at a university?

I tell you what, I don’t think there is any genuine religious outrage here. I think any Muslim students fanatical enough to be horrified by images labeled “Mohammed” in an art history class wouldn’t be at a secular university in the first place. They wouldn’t be in Minnesota in the first place. People that narrow and confined in their thinking aren’t going to run off to a mongrel country like the US, full of people from a whole range of religions, and with a hefty fraction of the citizenry that’s not religious at all.

It’s not real outrage, it’s an excuse to make a big stink and get a lot of attention.

The Oracle goes on:

Within Islam, there are varying beliefs regarding whether the representation of the Prophet Muhammad is acceptable. The majority of those practicing Islam today believe it is forbidden to see and create representations of Prophet Muhammad.

That’s nice, but their beliefs about what is forbidden don’t govern anyone else. It’s like someone who works for Facebook moving over to Twitter and getting into a rage over some Facebook rule that isn’t a rule at Twitter. You’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy.

Aram Wedatalla, a Hamline senior and the president of Muslim Student Association (MSA), was in the class at the time the photos were shared.

“I’m like, ‘this can’t be real,’” Wedatalla told the Oracle. “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”

What respect is that though? What images are forbidden in that other community that Wedatalla respectfully keeps out of sight?

Crickets.

Anyway…how do they even know it is an image of Mohammed? Are they thinking all images of Mo are literally actually likenesses of him? Even though they don’t all look alike, to put it mildly?

What makes them think the image in the medieval Persian painting is of Mohammed as opposed to being the artist’s idea of Mohammed?

If I type

:)

and label it Mohammed, does that make it an image of Mohammed? What if I say it’s not that Mohammed but the lovely neighborhood UPS guy who recognizes me from a block away and waves hello?

In short what is the thinking here? If it can be called thinking?

Another academic pushed roughly out the door, this time for purported Islamophobia, because he included an image of Mo in a lecture on Islamic art. Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Michigan Christiane Gruber has the details:

The “Islamophobic incident” catalyzed plenty of administrative commentary and media coverage at the university. Among others, it formed the subject of a second Oracle article, which noted that a faculty member had included in their global survey of art history a session on Islamic art, which offered an optional visual analysis and discussion of a famous medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad. A student complained about the image’s inclusion in the course and led efforts to press administrators for a response. After that, the university’s associate vice president of inclusive excellence (AVPIE) declared the classroom exercise “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

But it was optional. And part of a discussion of a famous medieval Islamic painting. In an art course. So it wasn’t “undeniably” any of those things.

Neither before nor after these declarations was the faculty member given a public platform or forum to explain the classroom lecture and activity. To fill in the gap, on Dec. 6, an essay written by a Hamline professor of religion who teaches Islam explaining the incident along with the historical context and aesthetic value of Islamic images of Muhammad was published on The Oracle’s website. The essay was taken down two days later. One day after that, Hamline’s president and AVPIE sent a message to all employees stating that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”

Yeah good plan. Also respect for observant Muslim students in the classroom should supersede women’s right to an education – they should all be kicked out of universities and schools just as they are in Afghanistan. Let’s hand everything over to the most fanatical monotheists on the premises and leave it at that.

And then this VP for inclusive excellence – what’s so inclusive about censoring art classes on behalf of the most fanatical monotheists in the room at the expense of everyone else? What’s excellent about it? Unless Hamline University students are 100% fundamentalist Muslims, the VP for inclusive excellence isn’t being all that inclusive.

Gruber continues:

The instructor was released from their spring term teaching at Hamline, and its AVPIE went on the record as stating: “It was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.” In other words, an instructor who showed an Islamic painting during a visual analysis — a basic exercise for art history training — was publicly impugned for hate speech and dismissed thereafter, without access to due process.

Much excellence.

Jerry Coyne comments:

This is absolutely unbelievable, and I’m going to write to Hamline’s Dean objecting to the firing. It’s not though the pictures, innocuous though they were, were sprung on unprepared students. Gruber goes on to discuss the history of depiction of images of Muhammad, and it’s a good and edifying read.  She concludes that the students, given the history of Islamic art, had absolutely no reason to consider showing the paintings in class as an “Islamophobic” incident. That is, she says, an “ultraconservative Muslim view on the subject.”

Why should the ultraconservative view get the last word?

This is the Mo in question:

He looks so very human, and quite lovable.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest…

She will work day and night and does not need rest, boasts Noura, a housewife in Riyadh. Gesturing to the cowering Ugandan maid next to her, who is 23 according to Noura, she adds: “If she does something wrong, you just send her to her room and do not let her out.”

Noura, who clutches gold Gucci sunglasses as she bargains for a price of £3,500 for the maid, is eager for a quick deal when she talks to an undercover Times reporter. “I can take her to your home tonight,” she says. “If you are still unsure, no problem, you can rent her instead . . . But tell me now, because by tomorrow someone else will buy her.”

Noura advertised the domestic worker on Haraj.sa, Saudi Arabia’s largest online marketplace, through which a Times investigation shows that hundreds of domestic workers are being illegally trafficked and sold to the highest bidders.

So Noura isn’t just running an employment agency with a staggeringly high fee?

In Saudi Arabia, which has the third largest migrant population in the world, foreign labourers are able to live and work through the Kafala system, where a Saudi citizen known as the “Kafeel” is legally responsible for the worker and will write up their contracts and the terms of their visa.

In the past year the government said that it had “reformed” the system as part of the 2030 Saudi Vision, a plan heralded as part of its attempt to open the country up to the world. It offered what were supposedly greater freedoms, including allowing workers to open bank accounts, move jobs and leave the country without permission.

Can they also breathe, eat, and use the toilet without permission?

The “new freedoms” don’t apply to domestic workers, farmers and drivers, all four million of them.

Every seller who spoke to The Times admitted they had been withholding their worker’s passports. Two admitted to physically disciplining their workers if they “spoke back”, and dozens said they expected their maids to work day and night without breaks for as little as £5 a day.

This is Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca, cradle of Islam. Doesn’t Islam have anything to say about slavery, cruelty, exploitation, mercy, decency, fairness, rights?

The prices vary by ethnic background. Filipino maids sell fastest and for the highest prices, and Ugandan maids are labelled by some Haraj users as “the most stubborn” and “unclean” and selling for the least amount.

Translation: lighter brown maids versus darker brown maids.

Doesn’t Islam have anything to say about that?

Valery Shebna, 30, a Kenyan maid, used the helpline for assistance to leave Saudi Arabia without her sponsors’ permission and returned to Nairobi this year. She said the family she lived with for two years in Riyadh beat her every day, refused to let her return home and withheld food as a form of discipline. “I came back emotionally scarred, and without my money, my passport documents, my education certificates. All of that was kept by the couple — my bosses. They didn’t want me to leave.”

Allah is the most merciful.

More from the Reuters report: Kaiser Permanente did a study that reported a very low transition rate, but the study missed some people.

Reuters found two other patients in the region covered by the study who don’t match those characteristics and whom the Kaiser researchers apparently missed. Both have been outspoken about their detransitions.

…

The other patient was Chloe Cole. According to a letter of intent to sue that her lawyers sent to Kaiser in November, Cole was 13 when a Kaiser doctor in 2018 put her on a puberty blocker, followed a few weeks later by testosterone, for her gender-affirming treatment.

At 15, Cole told Reuters, she also wanted top surgery. In an interview, she and her father said the doctors at Kaiser readily agreed, though he wanted to wait until she was older.

“They were so adamant,” he said. He recalled the doctors telling him: “‘At this age, they definitely know what their gender is.’”

Sigh. At that age they “definitely know” a lot of things that they don’t actually know. Do none of these lunatics even remember being 15 ffs???

In June 2020, a Kaiser surgeon performed a mastectomy on Cole, according to the letter of intent to sue. That was a month before her 16th birthday. Less than a year later, Cole said, she began to realize she regretted her surgery and medically transitioning in general after a discussion in school about breastfeeding and pregnancy.

Cole said that when she discussed her decision to detransition with her gender-care specialist at Kaiser, “I could tell that I made her upset that I was so regretful,” Cole said in an interview. Eventually, the doctor offered to recommend a surgeon for breast reconstruction, Cole said, “but that’s something I’ve decided to not go through with.”

Cole has begun speaking out publicly in support of measures to end gender-affirming care for minors, appearing often on conservative media and with politicians who back such bans.

Because the liberal media and politicians are completely on board with the gender ideology, in a way they never were and still aren’t with feminism.

Steve Shivinsky, a spokesman for Kaiser Permanente, declined to comment on the care provided to Cole and Robinson or whether they were included in the study, citing patient privacy.

In a statement, he said Kaiser’s “clinicians are deeply interested in the outcomes of the care we provide and the individual’s state of health and wellbeing before, during and beyond their gender transition.” For adolescents seeking gender-affirming care, he said, “the decision always rests with the patient and their parents and, in every case, we respect the patients’ and their families’ informed decision to choose one form of care over another.”

But it isn’t care. Cutting a girl’s breasts off because she says she feels like a boy isn’t care, it’s crazed reckless brutal mutilation. The decisions to mutilate aren’t “informed,” they’re warped by an ideological fad that has eaten way too many people’s brains.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Their stories have upended his assumptions.

…and any attention they got reinforced to the public the false impression that transgender people were incapable of making sound decisions about their treatment.

Guess what? The impression is not a false one. Deciding to pursue a course of medical treatment that promises something it’s not possible to do is the definition of a decision that is unsound. The falseness is in the claims of those offering such “treatments,” not in the correct perception that a course leading to sterilization and lifelong medical experimentation on your own flesh is not a good or healthy one.

It’s like getting on board a burning plane that is supposed to take you to Oz. You’ll never reach the stated destination, and the trip itself is dangerous and terrifying. Sure you post brave, smiling selfies while you’re in the air, but you’re still going to fall out of the sky before you get to where you’d hoped to because Oz isn’t real; and nobody can take you there. Anyone who says they can is lying, and cannot truly have your best interests at heart.

You left reality when you climbed aboard and took your seat, but nobody on the flight is going to tell you otherwise. There is no safety demonstration from the cabin crew because this plane (though on fire) is never going to crash. Should you have second thoughts, and try to make your way to the emergency exit (or look for a parachute), you will be subjected to threats and abuse, and told that your doubts and fear are going to kill everyone on the flight, and that you should shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.

It’s like being tangled in a net that just pulls tighter the more you struggle.

Reuters has a special report on detransitioners.

For years, Dr Kinnon MacKinnon, like many people in the transgender community, considered the word “regret” to be taboo.

MacKinnon, a 37-year-old transgender man and assistant professor of social work at York University here, thought it was offensive to talk about people who transitioned, later regretted their decision, and detransitioned. They were too few in number, he figured, and any attention they got reinforced to the public the false impression that transgender people were incapable of making sound decisions about their treatment.

But what if it’s not a false impression? What if it’s not high quality thinking to assume in advance that it is a false impression? What of the (surely very real) possibility that in a climate of feverish noisy nonstop affirmation of the claim that people can be “in the wrong body,” many or most transgender people really are unable to make sound decisions about their treatment? What if they’re unable to make sound decisions because of the intensity and fervor of all the affirmation and the bullying of dissenters? And caught in a spiral they can’t get out of because of this very belief that it’s a “false impression” and “offensive to talk about”? Why didn’t any of that occur to MacKinnon for years?

Anyway, he decided to do some research on the subject.

In the past year, MacKinnon and his team of researchers have talked to 40 detransitioners in the United States, Canada and Europe, many of them having first received gender-affirming medical treatment in their 20s or younger. Their stories have upended his assumptions.

Many have said their gender identity remained fluid well after the start of treatment, and a third of them expressed regret about their decision to transition from the gender they were assigned at birth. Some said they avoided telling their doctors about detransitioning out of embarrassment or shame. Others said their doctors were ill-equipped to help them with the process. Most often, they talked about how transitioning did not address their mental health problems.

It’s so sad.

In his continuing search for detransitioners, MacKinnon spent hours scrolling through TikTok and sifting through online forums where people shared their experiences and found comfort from each other. These forays opened his eyes to the online abuse detransitioners receive – not just the usual anti-transgender attacks, but members of the transgender community telling them to “shut up” and even sending death threats.

It’s interesting that even here, in a special report on detransitioners, there’s room for a snipe at “the usual anti-transgender attacks” – as if critics were just shouting at people for fun as opposed to pointing out what a catastrophic mess this new ideology really is.

The stories [MacKinnon] heard convinced him that doctors need to provide detransitioners the same supportive care they give to young people to transition, and that they need to inform their patients, especially minors, that detransitioning can occur because gender identity may change. A few months ago, he decided to organize a symposium to share his findings and new perspective with other researchers, clinicians, and patients and their families.

You know how that went.

A Canadian health provider said it couldn’t participate, citing recent threats to hospitals offering youth gender care. An LGBTQ advocacy group refused to promote the event. MacKinnon declined to identify either, telling Reuters he didn’t want to single them out. Later, after he shared his findings on Twitter, a transgender person denounced his work as “transphobia.”

Around and around we go, caught in the circle. Claims of “transphobia” keep people from getting good advice, and then when they want to reverse the process, the claims of “transphobia” catch up to them anyway.

In the world of gender-affirming care, as well as in the broader transgender community, few words cause more discomfort and outright anger than “detransition” and “regret.” That’s particularly true among medical practitioners in the United States and other countries who provide treatment to rising numbers of minors seeking to transition.

Except it’s not “treatment,” is it – not as commonly understood. It’s a very new very drastic intervention, that mutilates healthy bodies in an effort to make them match reported (but entirely untestable) “gender identities.” I don’t think “treatment” is the right word for that.

 When someone does detransition, they say, it’s almost never because of regret, but rather, a response to the hardship of living in a society where transphobia still runs rampant.

Is it? Or is it a response to the hardship of coming to understand that they trashed their bodies for a mistake?

Doctors and many transgender people say that focusing on isolated cases of detransitioning and regret endangers hard-won gains for broader recognition of transgender identity and a rapid increase in the availability of gender care that has helped thousands of minors.

Yes but that’s just it. This “rapid increase in the availability of gender care” is a fad for a new and bizarre ideology, and it could well be that everyone will end up regretting it. The rapid increase is horrifying and scary.

To be continued.

H/t CB.

I’m reading a piece about Jazz Jennings’s “affirmation” surgery. Had to take a break for a minute to cope with the revulsion. They didn’t know what they were doing but they did it anyway – how progressive.

Jazz Jennings has had a tougher transition than her doctors expected. In the last two years, the teen reality star and LGBTQ+ activist has undergone multiple gender confirmation surgeries, and her doctors are now revealing more details about what went wrong in the new season of TLC’s I Am Jazz, People reported.

Why did the doctors expect a not so tough transition? Why would that be easy? It turns out there was no reason for them to think that other than the fact that they wanted to.

In the episode clip, Jazz’s doctors, Marci Bowers, MD, and Jess Ting, MD, speak to Jazz and her family about the previous surgeries. Bowers admits Jazz “has had a very difficult surgical course,” in the show. “She had a very incredible first surgery—it went seemingly very well, but there were problems. And that prompted a second surgery, which I was not a part of, unfortunately.”

“Taking Jazz on as a patient for surgery, we knew it was going to be a one-of-a-kind surgery,” Ting explained in the clip. “We don’t have the experience of having said we’ve done 50 of these. I was just not expecting her to have a complication as severe as what she did have.”

That’s one place I had to pause to take deep breaths. They had no experience, they knew it would be “a one-of-a-kind surgery” i.e. AN EXPERIMENT on a living child and they did it anyway. “Oh Jess isn’t this exciting, it’s brand new, we’re going to cut his genitals off!” “Oh Marci, it’s so exciting, we get to try to create a vagina from nowhere!”

“This has been a real journey, hasn’t it? We knew it would be tough—it turned out tougher than any of us imagined,” Bowers tells Jazz’s family. “I think in hindsight we would have never sent you home from the hospital. You know, easy to say now. When I wasn’t here when you had problems and had to go back, I can’t tell you how stressful that was.”

Aww was it stressful for Bowers? That’s heart-rending.

Jazz went through her initial gender confirmation surgery in June 2018. Doctors had to use a new technique because she started using hormones at such a young age. Since she hadn’t developed enough tissue to construct a vagina, Jazz’s doctors used tissue from her stomach lining.

That’s where I stopped reading. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

Let’s see if I can get through a little more…

Jazz experienced complications and had to return for a follow-up procedure. “There was just an unfortunate event and setback where things did come apart, and there was a complication,” she told the outlet. “I had to come back in for another procedure, but it was just all part of the journey. The good thing though is that it was only cosmetic and external so it wasn’t too dramatic.”

There is no “good thing” though. The kid was mutilated for a fantasy.

Final paragraph:

Jazz came out as transgender at age 5 and has been sharing her transition in the TLC series I Am Jazz and on her Youtube channel. FYI: Gender confirmation surgery gives “transgender individuals the physical appearance and functional abilities of the gender they know themselves to be,” according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

No it doesn’t. Gender confirmation surgery does not give trans people the functional abilities of the gender they aren’t. Trans women can’t get pregnant, to name the most obvious missing functional ability.

The whole thing is an atrocity.

Oh honestly. Easy for some. King Choss says words about The Poor:

King Charles has highlighted the cost of living crisis and the “great anxiety and hardship” of many struggling to “pay their bills and keep their families fed and warm” in his first Christmas broadcast.

Isn’t that just so kind and loving of him?

Until you remember how much money he gets for his important job of being a tourist attraction. He’s ordered a slap-up coronation, no expense spared:

King Charles III is reportedly in favour of a “glorious” coronation with pomp and pageantry to promote the best image of the UK amid the cost-of-living crisis.

It was speculated that Buckingham Palace might opt for a cut-price event as Charles has long advocated for a slimmed-down monarchy [amid] the financial conditions of the country.

But no. Make it as flashy and expensive as possible! He’s waited all this time, he deserves it.

The Graun continues:

In the message, with the nation in the grip of economic woes and against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the king dedicated a major part of his broadcast to those helping to ease the plight of others.

Footage of food banks and meals being distributed to the needy featured prominently as he praised “the wonderfully kind people” who had donated food or their time.

I wonder if any of the donated food was expensive Duchy of Cornwall lemon curd and biscuits.

It’s the human imperative to fight over something. We can’t get out of bed in the morning unless there’s a fight to inspire us. India chooses communalism.

Tensions are rising in India over prime minister Narendra Modi’s push to make Hindi the country’s dominant language.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janaya party (BJP) government has been accused of an agenda of “Hindi imposition” and “Hindi imperialism” and non-Hindi speaking states in south and east India have been fighting back.

Of course with Modi and the BJP it’s not just Hindi, it’s also Hindu – it’s not just the language, it’s also the religion and all the baggage that goes with it.

Modi’s speeches are given exclusively in Hindi and over 70% of cabinet papers are now prepared in Hindi. “If there is one language that has the ability to string the nation together in unity, it is the Hindi language,” said Amit Shah, the powerful home minister and Modi’s closest ally, in 2019.

That’s a big “if” though. It’s entirely possible that there is no one language that can do that. Furthermore, if there were, it could be that only the foreign one would work. English might work the way Latin did in Europe for many centuries: it was no one’s natal language, so it was neutral.

The debate over Hindi’s prominence has raged since before India’s independence. Though there are more Hindi speakers than those of any other native language in India, they are largely concentrated in the populous, politically powerful states in the north known as the Hindi belt. Hindi traditionally has very little presence in southern states such as Tamil-speaking Tamil Nadu and Kannada-speaking Kerala, and eastern states such as West Bengal, home to 78 million Bengali speakers.

…

“Under Modi, language has become a heavily politicised issue,” said Papia Sen Gupta, a professor in the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. “The narrative being projected is that India must be reimagined as Hindu state and that in order to be a true Hindu and a true Indian, you must speak Hindi. They are becoming more and more successful in implementing it.”

Hey I have an idea: why not partition the true Hindu section of India off from the rest of it? That went so well the last time…

Some have warned of the bloody history that language imposition has triggered in the region. Sri Lanka descended into 26-year civil war after Sinhalese nationalists tried to foist their language on the island’s minority Tamils, and it was the oppression of the Bengali language in east Pakistan that led to the 1971 war and the establishment of Bangladesh.

Let’s go to war over language! No let’s go to war over religion! Let’s do both! No let’s do first one and then the other!

In response to the policies seen to promote Hindi, multiple nationalist language movements have now emerged across India, from Rajasthan to West Bengal. In West Bengal, where the Bengali language is seen as a very fundamental part of people’s cultural identity, there has been a growing Bengali nationalist movement over the past two years.

Nationalism begets more nationalism. Anything for a fight, eh?

We are Inclusive, so we are excluding you. Have a nice day!

You couldn’t make it up. “We have recently written and adopted an Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) Policy for our charity…This policy clearly states that we must be inclusive as an organisation.” Therefore we are excluding you.

Also the bit about yeah yeah we support feminism and women’s rights BUT we support the trans comyoonidee way way way more than we support excloozhyunary bitches like you.

Golly gee who knew Louisa May Alcott was butch? Besides everyone?

Louisa May Alcott balked when her editor asked her to write a book for girls. “Never liked girls or knew many,” she journaled, “except my sisters.”

…

To family and friends, she was Lou, Lu, or Louy. She wrote of herself as the “papa” or “father” of her young nephews. Her father, Bronson, once called Alcott his “only son.” In letters to close friend Alfie Whitman, Alcott called herself “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.”

Gasp – could this mean………………………..?

All this leads me to wonder: Is Alcott best understood as a trans man?

No. Why? Well, for one thing, because she’s not particularly hard to understand in the first place. She didn’t feel comfortable with the exaggeratedly genderized rules of the world she lived in, in much the same way that I don’t feel comfortable with the exaggeratedly genderized rules of the world I live in. I don’t identify with the huge skirts and prissy manners of the Victorians and I don’t identify with the torture shoes and waxed crotches of the 2020s. Big whoop. That doesn’t make me a trans man, it just makes me a woman who thinks the conventions about how women are supposed to look and talk and act are deeply stupid and limiting.

Alcott scholars agree that she felt a profound affinity with manhood. “I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model,” said Gregory Eiselein, a professor at Kansas State University and the current president of the Louisa May Alcott Society. In “Eden’s Outcasts,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alcott, John Matteson wrote that Alcott believed “she should have been born a boy.” Jan Susina, a professor of children’s literature, concurred: “Alcott may have experienced what we today would consider gender dysphoria.”

Stone the crows! That would be so exciting if it weren’t for the fact that everyone has always known it because it’s spelled out in the novel.

Still, these scholars hesitate to use the word “transgender” to describe Alcott. “I’d like to be cautious about imposing our words and terms and understandings on a previous era,” says Dr. Eiselein. “The way folks from the 19th century thought about gender, sex, sexual identity, sexuality is different from some of the terms we might use.” 

Some of us might use. Others of us, not so much.

H/t Mike Haubrich

Stella Creasy now:

Stella Creasy last May:

Stella Creasy is clarifying her position on the word ‘woman’. “Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes”, she declares. “But they are now women and I respect that.”

…

Surely, as a fellow feminist, she and JK Rowling aren’t too far apart on the issue? “No, I don’t agree with her and I’m told I am a bad feminist because I take a different view,” she reveals.

Her “different view” being that men are women if they say they are.

“JK Rowling doesn’t support self-identification whereas I do. Of course biological sex is real – it’s just not the end of the conversation. I am somebody who would say that a trans woman is an adult human female. I would say that you and I were adult human females.”

But a trans woman is not an adult human female, he’s an adult human male. That’s what the words mean. Self-identification doesn’t change reality.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Despite warnings.

It really is (morbidly, frustratingly, infuriatingly) fascinating how this movement reveals just how insignificant the concerns and welfare of women and girls are to those in power. And not just political power. It’s as though power itself, even if only that of an artist or book club chairman, makes it difficult to remember that female people exist and are as valuable as males.

The movement’s success also shows how fragile actual progress is and that liberty really does have an eternal price. After all, Genderism quite obviously depends on the exploitation of existing sexism, whether conscious and overt or nascent and hidden. The very idea of gender identity requires that there be nonphysical traits that are not merely predominantly associated with but actually unique to one sex. To be taken in by the ideology requires some degree of what used to be called sexism. (It’s a sort of ethical special pleading via persuasive definition. You get to engage in the very thing you decry, because the new definition doesn’t apply to you.) Genderism doesn’t create sexism; it liberates it. Genderism absolves people of moral failing, transmuting sin and shame into virtue and pride.

What an exultant rush that must be.

Thanks, Keir.

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to change the law to allow trans people to self-declare their gender, The Telegraph can reveal in the wake of anger over similar moves in Scotland.

The Labour leader has said he will “update” the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) if elected, despite warnings that doing so would impact women’s rights and could enable predatory men to access single-sex spaces.

It’s so heart-warming to know that Labour doesn’t give a shit about women.

In a message to Pink News for Pride last year, he said his priority was “forming the next government so we can introduce legislation and change society so that, whoever you are, you can lead a happy and fulfilled life. We are committed to updating the GRA to introduce self-declaration for trans people”.

So that, whoever you are, you can lead a happy and fulfilled life unless you have the bad taste to be a woman. If you’re a woman, then fuck you. Solidarity.

Asked by The Telegraph about the leader’s comments to Pink News, Labour confirmed that he stood by plans to reform the GRA.

And to destroy women’s rights. Thanks a lot.

The return of The Soul:

“Who people are” is no longer who they literally are, but who they mystically are.

Who people are isn’t the dull material facts of date of birth, parentage, history, sex, education, skills – that’s all so yesterday. Now who people are is who they think they are inside their heads. The fun about that is that it can be literally anything. We can imagine ourselves mountains, planets, dragons, erupting volcanoes, melted candles.

The Seattle Times on what it’s like here now:

A quarter-inch of frozen water ground the region to a halt.

…

Transportation — moving by any means — was all but impossible.

It was – you couldn’t walk, let alone drive.

King County Metro shut down all its buses. So did Pierce and Snohomish counties. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport briefly closed all three runways, an “unprecedented” situation. Paine Field closed. So did Highway 2 over Stevens Pass. Garbage pickup was canceled. Museums, theaters, libraries, the zoo, the aquarium: all closed. Doctor appointments moved online.

“Stay home if you can,” King County Executive Dow Constantine tweeted. “Please don’t go viral on TikTok trying to drive on the ice.”

But…

That’s my nabe. The hill is very steep.

I look forward to being able to walk around outside again!