The trouble is that individual abstinence won’t make any difference.

…for a small, yet growing, number of travelers, the problem with air travel goes way further. They are giving up flying because of its impact on the climate.

“I choose to stay grounded because it aligns with what is true,” said Dan Castrigano, 36, a former teacher who in 2020 signed a pledge not to travel by air. “The climate is breaking down.”

The last eight years on earth have been the hottest on record. Sea level rise is accelerating, and extreme weather events are happening more often than ever.

And a tiny fraction of the population deciding not to fly won’t make a dent in that. What might make a dent (if it’s not too late, which it probably is) would be to shut down flying altogether. That’s not going to happen. We can’t do what needs to be done, so everyone is screwed.

Air travel accounts for about 4 percent of human-induced global warming, and the United Nations warns that airplane emissions are set to triple by 2050. Planes are becoming more efficient, but our appetite for air travel is outpacing the industry’s environmental gains.

And appetite overrules information about airplane emissions and global warming. Appetite wins every time, until everyone explodes.

“A lot of people think that what you do as an individual doesn’t matter much. But the thing is, what we do as individuals affects everyone around us, and changes norms,” said Maja Rosén, 41, the president of We Stay on the Ground, who gave up flying in 2008. Ms. Rosén, who lives in Sweden, now travels primarily by train.

True, it does, but not enough.

Owen Jones trending.

Hoo-boy. I bet the Guardian is sorry it asked this question.

How much time do you have?

Reply after reply after reply cites Owen Jones.

Imagine, say, Rachel Dolezal saying “I’m more of an African-American than Michelle Obama will ever be.”

The NY Times on David Carrick:

The police officer told one woman he was the “safest person she could be with,” before threatening her with a gun and raping her repeatedly. He shut another woman in a small closet under his staircase, holding her there for hours on end. One of the women he sexually assaulted was a fellow police officer.

At a sentencing hearing in London on Monday, prosecutors laid out the shocking details of the sexual violence carried out by the officer, David Carrick, who raped, assaulted, and abused at least 12 women during his nearly two-decade police career.

That’s the thing about a police career, I suppose – it can enable predators.

Last month, after Mr. Carrick pleaded guilty, Shilpa Shah, the senior crown prosecutor in the case, said that the vast number of charges for rape and serious sexual assault over a 17-year period was “one of the most significant cases” with which prosecutors had dealt.

All the more so given that the perp is a cop.

The cases have fueled broader concerns about misogyny within policing and violence against women and girls.

Misogyny is everywhere. It’s pervasive, loud, seen as funny. It’s the water we swim in.

From the Male Dominance Displays on Social Media files:

It’s a bit weird, she keeps saying. It’s a bit weird for a man to sit in the aisle seat next to a woman on an empty bus, she says. No it’s not a bit weird; it’s blatantly intrusive and rude and bordering on assault. It borders on assault because she’s physically pinned to her seat: she can’t get out unless he lets her. It’s not a bit weird, it’s a deliberate hostile aggressive act.

I had a man get pointlessly aggressive with me on a bus a few years back, not in the “Hi honey” way of course but in the random belligerent toad way. I had a heavy backpack and a couple of auxiliary bags and the bus was mostly empty, so I was in one seat and my stuff was in the other, and Mister Toad came along and ordered me to let him sit in that seat. No, I said, there are plenty of empty seats – there were empty double seats – so sit in one of them. He ordered me to move my stuff, I told him if I did that I would have to stand, carrying all that stuff, so no, GO AWAY. He persisted, and I persisted in refusing, and he finally gave up, with some snide remark about my moving all my household goods. After about the third refusal I was simply shouting at him “LEAVE ME ALONE” and for a surprisingly long time he wouldn’t. It was insane.

If the bus had been full, of course, I would have had to stand, carrying all the stuff, because that’s only fair. I’ve had to do that occasionally. But the bus wasn’t full. There is no bus rule that says you can’t put your heavy backpack in one seat and sit in the other; that’s not a thing.

Dominance display.

Earthquakes.

A huge earthquake killed more than 2,200 people and injured thousands more on Monday in Turkey and northwest Syria, flattening apartment blocks and heaping more destruction on Syrian cities already devastated by years of war.

The magnitude 7.8 quake, which hit before sunrise in bitter winter weather, was the worst to strike Turkey this century. It was followed in the early afternoon by another large quake of magnitude 7.7.

Two of them. Massive ones, hours apart.

In the Syrian rebel-held town of Jandaris in Aleppo province, a mound of concrete, steel rods and bundles of clothes lay where a multi-storey building once stood.

“There were 12 families under there. Not a single one came out. Not one,” said a thin young man, his eyes wide open in shock and his hand bandaged.

God is great.

Salman is back.

In a wide-ranging interview with David Remnick [in the New Yorker], the novelist said: “I’ve been better. But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad.

“The big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.”

But he said it was difficult to type and to write due to a lack of feeling in some of his fingertips.

“I’m able to get up and walk around. When I say I’m fine, I mean, there are bits of my body that need constant check ups. It was a colossal attack.” He said he also has mental scars from the attack and that he is having to rethink his approach to security, having lived without it for more than two decades.

“There is such a thing as PTSD, you know,” he said. “I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.”

If anything would give a person PTSD it’s being stabbed multiple times by a fanatic with a knife.

Remnick asked Sir Salman if he thinks he should have been more on guard after moving to New York in 2000, having previously lived underground for several years?

“Well, I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer to it,” he said. “I did have more than 20 years of life. So, is that a mistake? Also, I wrote a lot of books.”

I’m not the one who got stabbed, so I don’t know either, but from here I’d say hell no it wasn’t a mistake.

Originally a comment by latsot on Good afternoon Glasgow.

It was really good. I knew the women of Scotland would bring it and they absolutely did. The talks were great. I understand there was a problem with the live feed, but a better version should be up soon. There were a few impromptu talks as usual and some of those were especially good. A new star was born in Jean from Aberdeen!

But the atmosphere was also brilliant. In the days leading up to the event, a few women told me they were nervous about going there alone so I offered to meet them outside the hotel and go down mob handed. In the end, there were about 15 people who came to group up. But one of the most nervous felt so comfortable after a while that she got up and spoke, amazing herself. She’d been fiercely anonymous on Twitter until yesterday, too. She did that because she felt the atmosphere was so welcoming.

I knew it was gong to be a good one, but it exceeded all expectations other than furry attendance (there were only two I know of).

Unfortunately, my picture ended up in the Daily Mail, confirming to the TRAs my status as a genocidal, fascist, nazi bigot. But you can’t have everything.

One lie about us has surfaced already. I’m sure there will be more. At one point, a sign appeared at the back saying something about destroying the gaystapo. It wasn’t one of ours. The speaker at the time said she didn’t think it was welcome and the people in the crowd said the same to the person holding it, who went away. Needless to say, there are pictures of the flag superimposed over KJK and claims that this was our message. Weak.

A few hightlights.

Nobody is born in the wrong body; STOP TELLING OUR CHILDREN THAT.

Oh no oh no this new politically correct idea that girls are not public property for boys to fumble at whenever they like is HARMING BOYS.

Boys are being damaged by “an excessive cultural shift” against them triggered by the #MeToo and Everyone’s Invited movements that has left many lost, insecure and traumatised, according to top child experts.

Stupidest lede ever. Saying boys should not sexually assault girls is not “an excessive cultural shift” and it’s also not “against boys.” Some boys actually know they shouldn’t sexually assault girls!

Julie Lynn-Evans, a psychotherapist with 35 years’ experience, says the two movements involving girls and women speaking out about sexual harassment have led to a “dangerous” backlash against boys. Many have done nothing wrong.

Again: that’s just outright stupidity. There is no “backlash against boys.” A heightened awareness of sexual assault is not a backlash against boys, it’s a backlash against sexual assault. I know journalists have to take short cuts but this is more of a canyon.

While her clients during lockdown were mostly teenage girls with eating disorders, or who were self-harming, they are now “exclusively” boys who have been ostracised, punished or even expelled for behaviour that she describes as little more than clumsy “teenage fumbling”.

Is this supposed to be an argument of some kind? It’s meaningless. Maybe she is selecting boys; how do we know? Just telling us she had Z clients before and now has Q clients tells us nothing further. Also, even “fumbling” without consent is wrong and bad.

It goes on and on in the same vein and concludes with

[Lynn-Evans] said: “I like #MeToo and would like to give the woman who started it an award but I think it has gone too far. Now any boy who puts a hand on a bosom because he is slightly drunk and has not asked is being in danger of being ostracised and shamed. Girls are viewing teenage boys as aggressive predators. So the normal sexual dance that has gone for ever now seems not OK. Boys are losing their feet.”

Their feet? The poor wee bairns, are the schools chopping them off? She probably meant footing and the reporter, Sian Griffiths, didn’t catch it. What a lazy destructive stupid article.

The Irish Times reports:

An attempt to stage Waiting for Godot in the Netherlands took on a Beckettian turn when the venue cancelled the performances because the Irish director had auditioned only men for the all-male cast of characters.

Can you imagine?? Auditioning only men to play men??? That director should be in jail, with bruises and contusions.

The play, in which Vladimir and Estragon are occasionally joined by other male characters as they await someone who never arrives, had been in rehearsals since November and was due to be staged at the University of Groningen’s Usva student cultural centre in March.

But the performances were cancelled after the venue discovered the casting call for the play’s five male roles had been open to men only, something they informed the production team went against a university inclusivity policy.

The university has a policy that forbids auditioning according to the sex of the characters?

“If it concerned a play with five white guys that they’d held open auditions for, everything would have been fine. But you can’t ban people right from the start,” Usva theatre programmer Bram Douwes told the Ukrant newspaper.

Yes you can. You can save everybody’s time and trouble by listing some criteria.

“[Beckett] explicitly stated that this play should be performed by five men. Moving forward, times have changed. And that the idea that only men are suitable for this role is outdated and even discriminatory,” university press officer Elies Kouwenhoven said.

That’s the play that Beckett wrote though. It’s too late to fix his thinking, and it’s not “discriminatory” to cast his play the way he wrote it.

“We as a university stand for an open inclusive community where it is not appropriate to exclude others, on any basis.”

Oh fuck off. So students can walk into their professors’ houses without knocking? Toilets have no walls? The public gets to sit in on all lectures and classes? The cafeteria feeds everyone in Groningen?

Of course it’s “appropriate” to exclude others in some circumstances. It’s also necessary. You don’t have to invite people you dislike to your parties. You don’t have to hire the first person who applies when you have a job that needs filling. You don’t have to read the first book you see at the library.

Mr Moyne told The Irish Times he had considered casting people of other genders for the roles, but could not do so because of rules set down by the playwright before his death and upheld by the Beckett estate.

Beckett sued a Dutch theatre company in 1988 for choosing to cast women in the play, the best known work from the Theatre of the Absurd movement. His estate holds the rights to the work until 2059, and has continued to oppose productions that deviate from Beckett’s instructions.

So the People of Incloosion will have to leave Beckett alone for 36 years. Fortunately there are other plays.

Originally a comment by Graham Douglas on Julie don’t want no stinkin’ fair competition.

I’ll admit up front that I am a huge rugby (union) fan. The team I support (Sale Sharks) started up a women’s team about three years ago and they now play in the top league for women’s rugby in England. I go down to watch them whenever I can because the standard of rugby played is very high. The games are most enjoyable and I always try to encourage anyone with even a vague interest in rugby to get down and watch the women.

All of which pre(r)amble is to say that the supporters’ club organised a meet&greet with some of the players and coaching staff of the women’s team last week.There was a Q&A session and, whilst there was no mention of TiMs in rugby, they were asked what they thought were the main differences between the men’s and women’s games.

Just about everything revolved around the physical differences between men and women. One of the first things mentioned was neck strength – I hadn’t known that the women have special training to improve neck strength and are regularly monitored on it. They were saying that they are all very aware of being more vulnerable in contact – even against other women – and prefer to play to avoid the crunching tackles that men revel in. (Not to that there aren’t any: there’s no quarter given when it comes down to stopping an opponent making ground.)

What I also found intriguing was that there is mounting evidence that menstruation increases susceptibility to some forms of injury. I can’t remember what they quoted, but it was things like fractures and other stuff that you might not immediately associate with periods – or, at least, do a double take if it’s mentioned.

What was abundantly clear, even though no-one was explicit about it, is that allowing men – of any calibre – to play against women would kill the sport by making it impossible for women to play without greatly heightened levels of risk.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is annoyed because They Don’t Pay Her Enough.

Earlier this week, the Republican representative from Georgia appeared on journalist Glenn Greenwald’s podcast and expressed concern about her congressional salary, which according to public records is $174,000 annually.

Greene told Greenwald: “Becoming a member of Congress has made my life miserable. I made a lot more money before I got here. I’ve lost money since I’ve gotten here.”

She’s welcome to quit. She wasn’t drafted.

Additionally, Greene complained about the amount of time her congressional work consumes, saying: “The nature of this job, it keeps members of Congress and senators in Washington so much of the time, too much of the time … that we don’t get to go home and spend more time with our families, our friends … or maybe just be regular people because this job is so demanding. It’s turned into practically year-round.”

Gee, what a surprise that being part of the legislature of a huge complicated country turns out to be demanding and time-consuming. Who could possibly have foreseen that?

Also, people are mean to her.

The congresswoman said: “I have people come up to me and say crazy things to me out of the blue in public places that they believe because they read it on the internet or saw it on some news show about me.”

Golly. The crowd at today’s Let Women Speak is MASSIVE.

The whole thing:

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on He’d like that.

The English Rugby Football Union (RFU) is facing a legal challenge to its ban on male players competing in contact rugby with women.

Julie Curtiss, 52, told @ESPNUK that opponents to men participating in women’s sports “need to be dragged, kicking and screaming.”

When reported honestly, like this, in plain language which doesn’t hide the issue, it’s perfectly clear what’s at stake. It’s also perfectly clear that the men are in the wrong. “Identification” may have no power to change material reality, but it sure plays havoc with journalistic integrity.

“Transness” has nothing to do with it. It’s men in women’s sport. Let them keep their socially consructed gendered soul. Let them keep it to themselves. They can be whoever or whatever they want to be between their ears and behind their eyes. Nobody give a fuck. And that’s the problem. They demand an audience, they require enthusiastic validation and participation in their little fantasy. It doesn’t count if nobody knows, if nobody applauds, if nobody bows down to the specialness inside of them, paraded ostentatiously on the outside for all to see. This makes it real, it confirms the impact of their personal belief upon the world.

But they want to be more than just a static, brute fact, a roadblock or obstacle that everyone is forced to notice and make allowances for; they want to do shit. They want use this power they’ve taken (and been given) to force their will on the world, to go places they normally wouldn’t be allowed to go, and do things they normally wouldn’t be allowed to do. Schoolboys might fantasize about having a ring or cloak of invisibility that would let them do naughty things, unseen, and get away with it. Well these men want a cloak or ring of obviousness. They don’t want to “just go pee.” They want to mark their newly conquered territory, to run their flag up the pole and make everyone salute. They want to revel in the public enactment and enforcement of their fetish. This is boner material. They don’t want to blend in and go unnoticed; they want to broadcast the fact that they have been given social licence to violate women’s boundaries, that they have permission to do what they’re doing, and that women can’t do a goddamn thing about it. They need to be seen getting away with their transgression. They want licence to gloat, to cause women to be dragged away, kicking and screaming when, in a sane world, it would be these men who would be subject to forcible ejection from female only spaces and facilities.

ESPN tells us more about the tragic exclusion of huge “Julie” Curtiss from women’s contact rugby, and the entitlement still looms as large as Julie himself does.

In July of 2022, the Rugby Football Union (RFU), the game’s governing body in England, voted to ban transgender women from playing women’s contact rugby, and trans player Julie Curtiss is leading the opposition to fight the decision.

Trans player Julie Curtiss, who is HUGE, is leading the opposition to fight the decision.

The RFU’s reasoning behind the ban, they said in their July statement, was to ensure ‘fair competition and safety of all competitors.’ They added that their decision was based on the latest available scientific research.

For Curtiss, that decision has impacted more than her ability to play a sport, as she says it has impacted her mental health. It has also put her at the forefront of a global debate about trans athletes competing in elite sports, after she launched legal action against the RFU in September.

See that? Again, he just sails right past the part about the safety of all competitors, to whine about how this decision has affected him, him him him precious him. No one else matters. He might as well whine because he’s not allowed to cut women’s heads off.

I don’t know if the ideology fosters selfishness on this scale, or if people who are selfish on this scale are drawn to the ideology, or both, but I do know that we’ve seen this jaw-dropping obliviousness to the needs and rights of women a billion times over the last ten years or so. It should scupper it, but so far it hasn’t.

“Although I’m still involved with Hove rugby, not being able to play and feeling stuck off on the side… And everybody always wants to talk about it, and I love to talk about it. And I’m glad they want to talk about it and want to find out how things are going.

“But at the same time, it’s just this constant thing of feeling like you have been kicked into the long grass and just discarded with no forethought.”

Then compete against men. It’s perfectly simple. Just play on the men’s team; problem solved. All this whining and roaring and self-pity and emotional blackmail when all he has to do is play on the men’s team and accept being not very good at the sport.

Wow. The placid, determined, immovable entitlement of this massive guy is breathtaking. (Being tackled by him would be breathtaking too, and bonebreaking and possibly life-ending, if he snaps your neck.)

“They” offered him coaching or reffing and he said no because if he does those things it means that he is “accepting that trans women can’t play this sport.” No it doesn’t. It means accepting that men can’t play women’s rugby, including men who call themselves trans.

“You just can’t play contact,” he says they told him. “They just seem to have been blissfully ignorant of the impact they’ve had.” Impact? It’s “Julie” Curtiss who seems to be blissfully ignorant of the impact he would have if he played contact rugby against women.

He did say the thing about needing to be dragged kicking and screaming. Not into doing something, as is usual with that metaphor, but just dragged kicking and screaming. He’d like that.

There was a conference in London today: Education for Women’s Liberation.

Of course there were “protests.”

Maryam was there!

Julian Baggini has a very nice “wisdom list from big thinkers” piece in the Guardian, in which he mixes philosophical training and literary appreciation. I’m a sucker for that combination.

Philosophers are, of course, the archetypal expert thinkers. Their discipline is often portrayed as a kind of formal method that lists fallacies to be avoided and distinguishes between deductive and inductive reasoning, invalid and sound arguments. These things have their place. But philosophy cannot be reduced to mere technique. Thinking well also requires adopting the right attitudes and being prepared to nurture effective habits. Without these “intellectual virtues” even the cleverest end up merely playing theoretical games.

Mind you, some people are happy just playing theoretical games, and fair play to them, but more is available.

Written some time between the sixth and second centuries BCE, supposedly by Akapāda Gautama, the Indian classic the Nyāya Sūtras is the first great treatise on the principles of reasoning. Gautama distinguishes between three kinds of debate. In jalpa (wrangling) the aim is victory, while vitanda (cavilling) is concerned wholly with criticising the other side. But in good or honest discussion, vada, the aim is truth.

On the one hand, a kind of sport, where the goal is to win; on the other hand, a kind of conversation, where the goal is to learn or discover something.

Philippa Foot was one of the best British philosophers of the 20th century. Yet she told me, “I couldn’t give a five-minute lecture on dozens of philosophers. I couldn’t tell you about Spinoza. I’m very uneducated really.”

Mary Warnock was another philosopher with a keen sense of humility, saying: “I haven’t done very much work and I haven’t done it very well.”

Both women’s remarks sound ludicrously self-deprecating to anyone who knows their work. In fact, they reveal a self-awareness and honesty that helped them to excel. Foot was probably right to say that she wasn’t as good a scholar as many of her peers and wasn’t especially clever in the sense of having an ability to process complex logical calculations quickly. Rather than trying to compete with those who were, she played to her strengths: great insight, a penetrating mind, and a good nose for what’s right.

Read on.