Sigh. Rule number one, plus two through six or seven hundred: don’t be an asshole.

A controversial New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the billionaire owner of New York’s Empire State Building’s property outside Queenstown is understood to have caused a large scrub fire.

Why was the fireworks display controversial? Well, because of the risk of fire. Cool that the guy did it anyway.

Empire State Realty Trust chairman, president and chief executive Tony Malkin of New York had upset neighbours of his Dalefield property with plans for an extravagant 14-minute fireworks display to bring in 2023.

Because fireworks are a necessity of life?

Now, several neighbours who were watching the display closely with fears for their animals, believe that a sizeable blaze was started by the fireworks.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) said there were three separate fires on steep terrain which spanned an estimated 1.2ha of land in Dalefield near Arrowtown.

The guy could have just canceled the fireworks. They’re not in fact a necessity of life, and when they’re actively dangerous, how about just not setting them off and causing major harm?

The New York property tycoon’s fireworks plans had enraged neighbours, the majority of whom owned horses and other livestock animals.

So why couldn’t he just be a mensch, a decent neighbor, a decent human, and not do the hazardous thing?

In a statement to the ODT before the event, the [fireworks-having] property owners said they had “deep and long-lived social and charitable connections” in the area.

“As a courtesy, beyond any requirement, mindful of house pets and livestock, we have reached out to neighbours to ensure they are appraised of our plans,” the statement said.

What a complete dickhead. Just don’t do it. Don’t set your barn on fire, don’t shoot at the neighbors’ children, don’t bomb the local school, don’t pour toxic chemicals into the nearest river, and don’t set off fireworks in an area likely to burst into flames. Just don’t.

He rubbed salt into the wound by saying “We are sorry for any inconvenience.” Don’t pretend to be sorry; don’t do it.

Everything that’s yours is belong to us.

An Australian transgender woman who says she was barred from using the female-only platform Giggle for Girls has sued the social media site for alleged discrimination.

Female people must not be allowed to have anything that’s only for them. Not one thing.

In a federal court lawsuit filed on 22 December, Roxanne Tickle claims she was unlawfully barred from using Giggle in September 2021 after the firm and its CEO, Sally “Sall” Grover, said she was a man.

The activist is seeking damages, a written apology and complete access to the platform.

Oh is that all.

After initially suing Giggle and Grover in the federal circuit and family court in July this year, Tickle dropped the case, afraid of the legal costs after hearing the firm’s CEO would take the matter all the way to the high court if she had to.

Maybe he can find some other way to silence women.

What do you know, sometimes Scientific American does remember that men are not women and vice versa.

Women have long surpassed men in the arena of environmental action; across age groups and countries, females tend to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Compared to men, women litter less, recycle more, and leave a smaller carbon footprint. Some researchers have suggested that personality differences, such as women’s prioritization of altruism, may help to explain this gender gap in green behavior.

Or to put it more crudely, lots of men are of the “you can’t tell me what to do” mindset even in contexts where yes of course someone can tell you what to do, while women are better at accepting that living in society entails some rules. Lots of men dread being called a pussy more than anything else, while women know selfish behavior when they see it.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity. It’s not that men don’t care about the environment. But they also tend to want to feel macho, and they worry that eco-friendly behaviors might brand them as feminine.

Those are closely-related things. Altruism isn’t seen as “masculine.” It could be, but it isn’t. Wanting to feel macho=altruism is for bitches=I can do whatever I want.

Ironically, although men are often considered to be less sensitive than women, they seem to be particularly sensitive when it comes to perceptions of their gender identity. In fact, a previous study suggests that men find it to be more difficult than women to choose between masculine and feminine versions of everyday food and household items and will usually change their preferences to be more manly when allowed time to think about their decisions. Something as simple as holding a purse, ordering a colorful drink, or talking in a high voice can lead to social harm, so men tend to keep a sharp eye out for any of these potential snares. 

It’s something women don’t have to deal with, at least not as directly. We’re already in the disgraced category, so it’s pointless to be hyper-vigilant about markers of it; men on the other hand have their higher status to protect.

Having said that though, I have to admit that there are lot of girly-marked things that I dislike, so maybe I’m just as hyper-vigilant even though it’s futile.

It’s an interesting and depressing conundrum. I’ve been thinking about it since forever and still have no idea how to resolve it. We’re sexually dimorphic, men are stronger, ergo there is status anxiety, always.

H/t Omar

Recognised:

A trans media activist who has been made an OBE said she was afraid of the backlash she might receive as a result.

It’s a funny sort of gig, being an “activist” for pretending to be the sex you’re not. “Come on, kids, let’s get some more of you pretending to be the other sex! You boys especially – put some effort into it!”

Helen Belcher, from Wiltshire, director of Transactual and trustee of Trans Media Watch, has been recognised in the King’s New Year’s Honours list.

Claim to fame? Pretending to be a woman.

The 59-year-old councillor said she was afraid of what the press reaction might be towards her.

“I would hope it would mean things that we say are taken with a little bit more seriousness,” she added.

But the things you say are based on a fantasy. That’s a considerable impediment to taking them seriously.

Originally a comment by latsot on Scary guy.

I know we’ve all made this point a thousand times but I never claimed not to be boring: where are the skeptics?

They (we) were right there front and centre when homoeopathy was a hot topic. You know what? In retrospect I think we probably exaggerated the harms, I don’t mind admitting it. Not the harms of believing nonsense, I don’t think those can be overstated, but the harms of fannying about with water for pretend ailments or ones that will eventually sort themselves out anyway*… there’s a case to be made that we might have had our thumbs on the scale when we raved about it as a scourge. Understand that I regret nothing and I’m no less opposed to fake medicine than previously, but I wonder in retrospect whether we had a bit of a perspective problem and I think my focus might be different if I did it all again.

So if skeptics were – I hesitantly suggest – a touch over-zealous about quack medicine that was stupid and wrong and harmful – but perhaps not as harmful as we made out – why are so many of them cheerleaders for largely untested, off-label medicine which we know for scientific fact is extremely harmful and is being prescribed without adequate research, guidance or supervision?

The roster of former movement skeptics who are openly critical of puberty blockers is depressingly small. Ophelia, of course. Andy Lewis. Our own Arty. Moley (who I had the pleasure of meeting recently!) There are not many others. Where is Ben Goldacre? He wrote a whole book on ‘medicine’ that does more harm than good and another whole book on the dubious practices of pharmaceutical companies in selling medicines that have not been shown by any reasonable standard to work or be safe. Where is he? We used to be fairly regular correspondents because we were both stalked by the same deranged individual but now he wont talk to me at all. If anyone should be taking a stand against puberty blockers, it’s Ben.

He should be all over this.

Where.

Is.

He?

I made the point about our perhaps being over-zealous about the harms of certain quack medicines to throw the lack of outrage among movement skeptics about puberty blockers into sharp relief. Never mind the messy, politically-charged and deliberately-obfuscated business of whether humans can change sex or whether men should be allowed in women’s spaces**; this is an issue about whether a particular drug is safe and effective. It’s right up the skeptical movement’s alley. Where is everyone?

* I know there are cases of homoeopathic nonsense being responsible for suffering and death. I’m being deliberately flippant to eventually get around to making a point.

** Can’t, shouldn’t.

Originally a comment by Cluecat on Scary guy.

Strange, isn’t it, that just a few years ago there was a massive issue raised by the Skeptic/Autism Advocate communities about Autistic youngsters (primarily male) being fed Lupron as a supposed “cure” for their Autism – that was totally caused by mercury poisoning (somehow that none of these practitioners ever really managed to satisfactorily explain).

There was a huge fuss about how chemical castration doesn’t cure a neurological developmental disorder, and that feeding these kids the same stuff that everyone decided was too harsh to give to literal sex offenders was correctly recognised as medical abuse (often driven by the kind of parent that won’t accept a “defective” child), and totally unacceptable.

Whatever happened to all that outrage about poisoning children with drugs that affected every system in their bodies, that was well-documented to have horrific side-effects and long-term consequences?

Whatever happened to those people who were saying that the Geiers and their contemporary quacks deserved to lose their licences to practice, and that many of the “Autism Warrior Parents” were participating in what looked an awful lot like Munchausens by Proxy?

Whatever happened to the idea that this was a monstrous human rights abuse perpetrated against vulnerable youngsters by people who certainly didn’t have the child’s best interests in mind?

Whatever happened to the evidence from the young women that had been given these meds for legitimate reasons (precocious puberty, childhood cancers) who had documented those horrific side-effects and long-term consequences of being on these meds for a year or so (osteoporosis, factured hips in their 20’s, teeth crumbling, constant pain & fatigue, some are full-time wheelchair users because their bones just fall apart, etc.)? Or does none of that evidence matter because nobody listens to women & girls?

How did everyone suddenly switch to “it’s perfectly fine to sterilise and poison Autistic youngsters – and let’s add any potentially Lesbian and Gay kids, or anyone else who doesn’t fit into sex role stereotypes that would have been considered extreme during the 1950’s while we’re at it, and call anyone who objects ‘bigots’ who want to murder pwecious baybeez!”?

Concern for the well-being of children over the long-term isn’t “hatred”.

Wanting children to be able to live the best lives they can with the support they deserve isn’t “bigotry”.

Nobody with any sense accused those previously documenting the effects of Lupron on Autistic youngsters of “enacting genocide”.

The terrifying thing is that those people don’t see that this is the same lethal quackery it always was. The people who cheered as the Geiers were booted out of medicine are declaring the same “treatments” are “essential healthcare” and anyone with any concerns about what’s happening is “evil” and deserves to be tortured and murdered. How can they not see it? They’re not all making money from it.

People who think they’re (identifying as?) progressive are cheering this on. How many youngsters have to suffer before reality comes crashing back in?

And how many of the people cheering this on will ever take any responsibility for what they’re promoting?

Even if they did (which they won’t – see all human history), what could they even do to help those whose bodies have been poisoned and whose lives have been blighted by this insanity?

This is going to be the lobotomy craze turned up to eleven. How can humanity fail to learn from the same mistakes, over and over again?

The ACLU is promoting (on Facebook) a list it drew up last April of “10 Books Politicians Don’t Want You to Read.” Interesting. Something socialist no doubt, a communist item, an anarchist one, a Randesque libertarian one, maybe a Proud Boys tract, a sermon on gun rights…

No, not so much. What do we get?

Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”

“Heather Has Two Mommies” by Lesléa Newman

“All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Johnson

Ok I haven’t heard of that one, what is it? (And by the way it should be Not All Boys Are Blue, not All Boys Aren’t. Everybody gets that wrong these days; it’s irritating.)

In “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” LGBTQ+ activist George M. Johnson writes about growing up Black and queer, including about his experiences being bullied, his first sexual relationships, and other stories throughout his childhood and adolescence in New Jersey and Virginia. The book is currently being targeted for removal by at least 14 states because of its LGBTQ+ themes.

So Johnson is lesbian and gay and bi and trans and queer? Where does he find the time?

4. “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe

Nonbinary and asexual author Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, details eir journey through adolescence and coming into eir self-identity in “Gender Queer,” an autobiographical graphic novel about what it’s like to not fit into traditional norms of gender and sexuality.

5. “Melissa”* by Alex Gino

*Formerly published as “George” until April 2022

So books are transing now?

The protagonist of the children’s novel “Melissa” is a fourth-grader coming into her own identity as a trans girl in a world that knows her only as “Melissa.” The author, who goes by they/them/their pronouns and identifies as genderqueer, wrote the book due to a longstanding void of voices like theirs in literature. “I wrote it because it was the book I wanted to read,” Gino explained. “I wanted trans voices telling trans stories.”

So that’s half of the ten, and four of the five are about lesbian/gay or trans stories. Four of the last five are about race and one is about “6-year-old Starr Carter, a student at an affluent prep school who comes from a low-income community.” That’s the closest they get to the Marxist or socialist or libertarian tract.

The ACLU seems to be run entirely by very young people who don’t yet know much.

Commenter guest reminded us that Jack Turban has conflicts of interest. Let’s refresh our memories on those conflicts.

Uncommon ground in August 2020:

Jack Turban, insistent critic of Abigail Shrier’s book on transitioning of young girls, constantly claims puberty blockers are safe. He is paid by a firm that manufactures them.

And this isn’t, like, an acne cream or an over the counter cold remedy. It’s halting an adolescent’s puberty, with all the attendant consequences we’ve been learning about over the past several years. It’s a very drastic intervention, even if you believe everyone who claims to be trans really is trans and really does need medical intervention. If you believe that at least some people who claim that are ensnared by a fad as opposed to really trans, then it’s even worse. Jack Turban accepts money from people who profit from the interventions.

Jack Turban, MD, fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of medicine, bills himself as an Allopathic & Osteopathic Physician. But he’s famous for his advocacy for certain positions regarding transgender medicine – for advocating for the ‘Gender Affirming Care for Trans and ‘gender-diverse’ youth’ as part of his work on ‘Pediatric Gender Identity’ and vigorously advocating for, and downplaying the risks of, medical transition, while selling books on the same.

Again, “gender-affirming” care is very drastic. It seems like the kind of thing medical professionals ought to treat with caution and low speed and more caution.

He is most popular for labeling any medical professional or medical research that finds success in psychosocial treatments for kids with gender identity disorder, without putting them on puberty blockers and setting them on a path to cross sex hormone treatment and surgery, as ‘conversion therapy,’ that awful throwback to electroshock torture of gay people.

Case in point:

When in doubt…trans all the children. Especially if there’s money in it.

According to Open Payments Search Tool used to track payments made by drug and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals, Jack Turban has received at least  $15,000 (US) from Arbor Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Triptodur™, (triptorelin) which, through extended release injectable suspension, has been shown to arrest or reverse the clinical signs of puberty, in cases of precocious puberty – the exact purpose Arbor advocates Triptodur for.

Now if this were a matter of a medication that has some risks but also has unmistakable benefits for unmistakable physical problems, it would be a more complicated story, but the purported benefits of “gender-affirming care” are so heavily dependent on believing in the ideology of fungible gender that it becomes very difficult (or just sinister) to say “Yes it’s risky but it’s worth the risk.” Doing so while accepting money from the makers of the medication is not a good look.

The Ginni Thomas transcript is finally out. She admits she was just bullshitting when she tried to help overturn the election.

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, admitted that she was not aware of any specific evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election at the time she personally lobbied senior White House officials to overturn the results.

She had no evidence but she lobbied anyway. To overturn an election. On behalf of an openly criminal thieving pussygrabbing sadistic bully and thug. Conservative values!

In the aftermath of that election, Ms Thomas personally lobbied White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to text messages obtained by the committee and leaked to journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” she wrote on November 10, after Joe Biden had been projected as the winner.

Trump was standing for America’s constitutional governance? On the contrary, he was doing everything he could think of to drive a tank through it.

In an interview with the January 6 Committee, which took place on 29 September 2022, committee members repeatedly pressed Ms Thomas to reveal what evidence of election fraud had motivated her to approach Mr Meadows.

“I can’t say that I was familiar at the time with any specific evidence. I was just hearing it from news reports and friends on the ground, grassroots activists who were inside of various polling places that found things suspicious,” Ms Thomas said in response to a question from committee member Jamie Raskin about the most significant evidence she had seen.

Later asked by Republican committee member Liz Cheney to confirm that she had seen no list of fraud or irregularities, Ms Thomas replied: “Right. I know. I wasn’t very deep; I admit it.”

But she tried to overturn the election anyway. That’s just great.

You know who helped get Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court? At the expense of Anita Hill? Joe Biden, that’s who. Ironic, ain’t it.

In Scientific American of all places. I know they have precedent, thanks to that crappy article the zealots used to point to, but there oughta be a limit. Jack Turban of all people – and the title Trans Girls Belong on Girls’ Sports Teams. Yeah sure: boys belong on girls’ sports teams, SciAm says so.

You may be wondering what this is doing in a science magazine, but the subtitle explains all:

There is no scientific case for excluding them

That’s sneaky, of course, because it’s not a purely scientific issue in the first place. It’s not science that says grown men shouldn’t punch babies in the face. There are some relevant facts though, which can be disputed or backed up or rejected via evidence, some of which we know via scientific research. Summary version: males have physical advantages compared to females. For more see a biology textbook. The second step isn’t science, it’s a should: males shouldn’t exploit that advantage; fair sport shouldn’t allow (let alone encourage) males to do that.

So what does Jack Turban say?

There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. 

What if there were? If it’s a problem when there’s an epidemic of it why would it be ok when only a few do it?

Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children

blows whistle Manipulative wording cheat! Red card! Nobody is forcing boys who claim to be girls to do anything. but people who give a shit about fairness want to stop boys invading girls’ sports.

As a child psychiatry fellow, I spend a lot of time with kids. They have many worries on their minds: bullying, sexual assault, divorcing parents, concerns they won’t get into college. What they’re not worried about is transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams.

Unless of course they are girls on such teams, but we’ll just pretend they don’t exist.

It’s pathetic that SciAm published this male-centric special pleading nonsense.

News from the MidAmerica branch of Unitarian Universalistism:

UUMA/UUA Neurodiversity Skill Up Series: Rev. Leela Sinha

Rev. Leela Sinha (ze/zim/zir) is a brown, queer, genderqueer, entrepreneurial community minister with a theology of pleasure and a habit of transformative mischief. In zir work, ze offers leadership coaching, training, and keynotes, working with leaders and organizations to develop and delight in the power and intensity we have, and to use that power for good.

Wait a second. Who is this “we”? Did anyone ask what our pronouns are? And by “our” of course I mean “fm”.

Ze has been a UU all zir life, and lives and works in the Bay Area. Check out zir’s work with zir Sinha Intensive/Expansive Framework, work supporting teams and individuals working together, and podcast The Intensives Institute. We’re excited to welcome Leela because zir’s framework of supporting individuals and teams in embracing their strengths and working together even with different brains does not depend on medical diagnosis.

I think the real reason they’re excited is because of the fun and danger of keeping track of all those specialty pronouns. Do you know the difference between zir and zir’s? Because I gotta tellya, I sure don’t.

Also…brown?

A euphemism too many:

Police Scotland has used the term “minor-attracted people” to describe paedophiles in a major report despite warnings it normalises child abuse.

It is a literal translation, but the overtones are very different, which is surely the point. Why would it be necessary or useful to come up with a less judgey label for sexual abuse of children? There’s no push to euphemise the words for other crimes is there? No calls to rename murder “premature involuntary termination”? Why euphemise sexual abuse of children?

The term MAP is contentious because child abusers are trying to escape the stigma attached to paedophilia and maintain they should be regarded as a niche group alongside the LGBT community.

The “LGBT community” has too many niche groups as it is, thanks very much. It has so many it’s no longer a “community” – the T and the LG are very prone to clash and argue and fight.

Kenny McAskill, Scotland’s former justice secretary, said using euphemisms for paedophiles simply “masks the reality and their danger”.

The argument is that attraction by itself isn’t abuse, but we all know from having been alive for more than five minutes that people’s ability to keep attraction separate from acting on the attraction is as feeble as dandelion fluff.

Maggie Mellon, an independent social work consultant, said the term MAP risked “the danger of normalising and therefore perhaps decriminalising a serious offence”.

She added: “There should be diagnostic and treatment options for those who present a risk to children but the police are not a therapeutic service – they should be devoting their resources to closing down porn sites that feature children and abuse of women and upping their detection and conviction rates for those promoting child abuse.”

Well put. Way too many institutions have decided they’re therapeutic services when that’s not their job at all. Some distinctions are necessary.

Not just a social media influencer any more.

Social media influencer Andrew Tate has been arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group, prosecutors have confirmed.

Now that’s the big time.

The 36-year-old British-American and his brother Tristan were arrested on Thursday evening and are being detained for 24 hours alongside two Romanian suspects, prosecutors in the country said.

“The four suspects… appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost,” prosecutors said.

Imagine being a person who would do that – what can it be like? It would be very up close and personal so what can it be like to be that dead inside?

Tate, a former kickboxer, was banned from Twitter in 2017 for his misogynistic views and hate speech but reinstated last month.

Good work, Elon. Platform the rapists!

Tate first rose to fame in 2016 for being removed from the reality TV show Big Brother after a video appeared to show him attacking a woman with a belt – he claimed the clip was edited.

He has suggested rape victims “bear some responsibility” for being attacked and has described women as “property” belonging to men.

It’s almost impossible not to see that kind of thing as deliberate provocation, exaggerating for effect, baiting the feminists, all that – but clearly it can be all too literal.

As a result, concerns have been raised about his influence on young people, particularly young men.

Oh no I’m sure he’s a very benign, healthy influence. Women get away with too much, it’s time to teach us a lesson.

Elon Musk is saving Twitter from going broke by not paying the rent. That should work.

Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

Don’t pay the rent; don’t buy toilet paper. The future looks bright!

Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions with Twitter. Some were logged out, while others encountered error messages while visiting the website.

All that and no toilet paper.

Mr. Musk’s erratic and hands-on style has thrown off a number of workers, as he often interrupts meetings seemingly at random, talking for long stretches and asking some top leaders to be sounding boards for his ideas, two people familiar with his management of Twitter said.

Erratic, hands-on and narcissistic – people who talk for long stretches are the worst.

[T]he training process for new employees has been significantly reduced, cutting to 90 minutes what was once three days of orientation that included information on compliance with privacy and security agreements with global regulators, three people said.

Yes, from three days to 90 minutes is indeed significant. 90 minutes is barely enough to show the new employees where to store their toilet paper stash.

But

H/t GW

I should check out Greta Thunberg’s Twitter more often. She retweets urgent news items.

David Folkenflik at NPR in September 2020:

Now comes the claim that you can’t expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson’s mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson’s critics. It’s being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News’s own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.

Just read U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil’s opinion, leaning heavily on the arguments of Fox’s lawyers: The “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ “

And yet he’s not a performer on Saturday Night Live, he’s a performer on Fox News. I think news programs are generally expected to refrain from “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary” – aka lying.

Vyskocil, an appointee of President Trump’s, added, “Whether the Court frames Mr. Carlson’s statements as ‘exaggeration,’ ‘non-literal commentary,’ or simply bloviating for his audience, the conclusion remains the same — the statements are not actionable.”

So if you’re a really shameless and blatant liar, you get to slander people with impunity, even though the medium of your shameless blatant lying is a factual one.

H/t James Garnett

Took his “anti-feminism” a little too far did he?

Anti-feminist social media personality Andrew Tate ‘arrested’ in Romania on human trafficking charges

The self-styled misogynist internet celebrity Andrew Tate has reportedly been arrested in Romania…British-American Tate, 36, has amassed a huge following of young men via Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Training young men to hate women more than they already do for fun and profit; it’s almost as good as charging women $5k and a fancy dinner for the privilege of being shamed.

Former Big Brother contestant Tate has almost 3.5 million Twitter followers. He recently got into a social media spat with climate activist Greta Thunberg. After [his] bragging about the carbon emissions of his supercars, Thunberg replied that Tate had “small dick energy”.

The punch line is how he (reportedly) got arrested. He did a short video rant about her and…

Oopsy.

Updating to add: the “reportedly” bit is being widely corrected. It seems the police already knew he was in Romania, the pizza box simply indicated he was at home.

That unpleasant JJ Wells guy who was so merrily abusing JK Rowling and Fred Sargeant yesterday may have taken it a little too far for his own good.

Yes let’s.

One subject of one of Helen Lewis’s new gurus podcast is the “race2dinner” pair Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. Remember them? I did a post on them in May 2021. They’re the ones who charge five THOUSAND dollars for you to make or order in a fancy dinner with you (a white woman) and your white women friends where they (Jackson and Rao) tell you how racist you are. Peak social justice, and a nice little earner!

So they’re still doing it, which means there are still rich white women willing to spend five THOUSAND dollars for this treat.

It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as racism, or that white people shouldn’t confront it, or that white people shouldn’t be urged to examine their own dear selves for racism. It’s that, for one thing, it’s weird to single out white women as if women had all the power in this scenario, and that for another you could do far more useful anti-racist things with that five THOUSAND dollars than give it to a pair of snotty grifters.

The charmers just wrote an article for TIME three weeks ago. The blurb is not entirely forthcoming.

Rao and Jackson are the founders of Race2Dinner, a program that initiates and empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression. Deconstructing Karen, the documentary about Regina Jackson and Saira Rao’s work, is out now. They are the authors of White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better

Notice something missing? TIME forgot to say that their program empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression among white women. It forgot to say that they single out women for their interrogation and hostility, as if women were the dominant sex.

It also forgot to say that they charge $5K for these dinners (and that the white women pay for the dinners).

You’ll be amazed to learn that Jackson and Rao do the same thing themselves.

In 2019, we decided to host anti-racism events in white women’s dining rooms for one specific reason: To turn the age-old adage, “it’s rude to talk about politics at the dinner table” on its head.

This is what we’ve learned—if you don’t talk about racism, you can’t dismantle it. But it isn’t just over the dinner table that this “niceness” rules.

They do mention the “white women” angle but then they drop it, instead of explaining why they single out white women for their missionary work.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, you were eager, frenzied even, to do this work. 

Wrong word. “Frenzied” doesn’t mean “very eager.” The right word would be “desperate”…but maybe they wanted to avoid that one because of the stupid insulting “desperate housewives” franchise. They are of course intimately related to that franchise, but I doubt they want anyone to notice.

A mere two years later, not only is that excitement for anti-racism work gone, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, into a verifiable whitelash against anti-racism work.

If white womanhood is a house, your need to be perfect is the foundation.

But white womanhood isn’t a house, so what’s your point? Why just women???

Being perfect is the key to your happiness, to your success, to your very existence.

Citation?

Perfect hair. Perfect clothes. Perfect grades. Perfect nails. Perfect weddings. Perfect bodies. Perfect adoring and supportive wife and mother. Perfect employee and colleague.

This is an extract from their book. It’s embarrassing.