The Glorious Cause.

What’s the rallying cry?

“FUCK YOU BITCH” over and over and over.

Monster egotist promises to continue monster egotistical plans. Now there’s a surprise.

Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday night as planned, according to multiple sources close to the former US president, inserting himself into the center of national politics as he attempts to box out potential rivals seeking the Republican nomination.

Of course he is. He’s bored.

Trump’s remarks were being finalized late into the night with a pair of speechwriters and his political team, the sources said, with aides keen for the former president to convey a degree of seriousness as he seeks voters to elevate him to a second term in the White House

You mean a degree of sounding like a grownup as opposed to a petulant noisy child? Don’t be silly.

The group urging a delay feared that Trump could sink the Senate runoff for Republicans as he is widely considered to have done in 2020, when he focused on his own angry complaints about the 2020 election rather than helping the party’s two candidates, who both ended up losing.

You can’t have it both ways. If you choose, with your eyes open, a furious narcissist as your party’s top guy, it’s silly to expect him to stop acting like a furious narcissist just because he will ruin everything for you. You brought him, you take him home.

To get ahead of rivals, reinforce his status as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and if nothing else, seize the limelight, Trump has been itching for some time to launch his 2024 campaign and has already started laying the groundwork for the effort.

Seize the limelight above all. He’s been out of it for two years, he misses it desperately.

Ah yes, so very progressive.

That’s “Ima beat yo’ ass, bitch.” From a very very very white guy.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out that the abuse of JK Rowling is classic sexism. One way we can tell is that men don’t get targeted the way she is.

“I think that she’s been treated abominably. And, I think a lot of that treatment is because she’s a woman,” she said. “I think that a man who aired his views, reasonable views, would not be treated in that way.”

Is Graham Linehan perhaps a counter-example? He’s certainly been a target, but JKR gets a lot of specifically sexual/sexist abuse. I don’t think that happens to men the same way.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Adichie told journalist Emma Barnett she thought it was “very dangerous” that people were “refusing to engage with what she (Rowling) said”, but were instead “hurling insults”. 

…

Adichie said some young people in Lagos, Nigeria, viewed Rowling as “transphobic” and even thought that “she wants to kill trans people”.

But when challenged about where in Rowling’s writing that had been stated or implied, “none of them could point it out to me”, she said.

Similarly, speaking with students on a US university campus, the author said she “felt as though they were repeating party lines”.

Part of the problem, she said, is that the strident opinions of young people are going unchallenged by adults.

Also that strident opinions of people old enough to know better are going unchallenged by people old enough to know better. There’s an orthodoxy-policing thing going on even among people over 19.

The 45-year-old said: “I sometimes feel as though we have abdicated our responsibility as grown-ups because I know what it was like to be young. I thought I knew everything. Now, I look back, I’m like, I knew nothing. I was wrong in many of my sort of fierce positions.”

Same. I’m very confident I didn’t know everything when I was young. Very confident indeed.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on What the future implications might be.

It sounds bloody awful, to be honest. It’s the ‘no co-morbidities part which has hitherto kept people alive long enough to survive the waiting list, get appropriate treatment, and go on to have a healthy life.

If you are suicidally miserable because you are in severe, intractable, possibly increasing pain from a condition which will imminently kill you, and want to die because facing further pain is pointless, then euthanasia is obviously a lot less cruel than making you wait for natural death.

However, if you are suicidally miserable solely due to a treatable mental illness or disorder, then it is the failure to treat which is immensely cruel, and killing you because you might appear to want that in the moment, because of under-funding of the resources which would restore your health, is abhorrent.

We’re seeing the same short-term thinking in the treatment of dysphoria in teens; the only difference is that the teens who undergo the appalling medical and surgical alternative to real treatment are still alive afterwards, and can sue for the abuse.

A dead person cannot sue; I don’t want to have to find out whether or not their bereaved families can.

Not that SciAm article again. How many biologists have to point out how many times that it’s woo-woo crap?

Is it medically assisted death or is it disposal of people with mental illness and no resources? The Globe and Mail:

Canada will have one of the most liberal euthanasia laws in the world, joining only a few other countries that allow assisted dying for mental illness.

It will be the most controversial expansion of MAID since a Supreme Court ruling led the federal government to legalize euthanasia in 2016. At that time, MAID was only for patients with a foreseeable death, but Parliament – with Bill C-7 – removed that requirement in 2021.

The original version of the bill did not allow assisted death for patients with mental disorders as a sole condition because, the government said at the time, there were outstanding questions about how illnesses such as depression could be safely included, and what the future implications might be. The Senate disagreed, removing that exclusion before the bill passed, but with one caveat: Parliament would study the issue for two years before any of those patients could receive MAID.

With four months to go, there is still no consensus in the mental health community – and, in fact, doctors remain deeply divided. There are no finalized national standards, no transparent review process in place to watch for mistakes, and hospitals are still figuring out how they would implement the change.

Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest psychiatric teaching hospital, has said that assisted dying shouldn’t expand without more study. And the Canadian Mental Heath Association has raised serious concerns about expanding MAID without first increasing mental health care funding. In Quebec, after public consultations, a legislative committee has recommended against the province expanding MAID to mental illness at all.

I don’t know what I think about this. It’s very thorny. Is it just brutally disposing of people who don’t fit in well enough or aren’t useful enough? Or is it humanely helping people for whom living is a misery?

Expert dissension, a law without clarity, the arbitrary legislative finish line – all of this would be worrisome, even in normal times. But Bill C-7 passed before the full consequences of COVID-19 were known, before the pandemic ripped through the health care system and left it in tatters.

The law requires patients asking for MAID to be informed of possible treatment options that might alleviate their suffering. But this assumes those are readily available. Instead, wait times to see mental health clinicians have only increased.

Psychotherapy, a recommended treatment for most mental disorders, remains too expensive for many Canadians. In Toronto alone, an estimated 16,000 people are waiting for supportive housing for mental illness and addiction.

In Ontario, nearly 6,000 patients with the most severe mental disorders are on a years-long list for specialist community-based care.

So it becomes a resources issue, a money issue, which is surely a very bad reason to help people kill themselves. Then again there’s still the issue of people whose lives are nothing but misery.

The rising cost of rent and foodis also taking a particular toll on people with chronic mental illness, who are often already the poorest in society – and the very candidates who will qualify for assisted dying under the new law.

Assisted dying for people who can’t afford the rent…no that doesn’t sound good at all.

Another snip from the Times article:

The first trans patient treated with blockers, from age 13 to 18, moved on to testosterone, the male sex hormone. Halting female puberty had offered emotional relief and helped him look more masculine. As the Dutch clinicians prescribed blockers, followed by hormones, to a half-dozen other patients in those early years, the medical team found that their mental health and well-being improved.

“They were usually coming in very miserable, feeling like an outsider in school, depressed or anxious,” recalled Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, a retired psychologist at the clinic. “And then you start to do this treatment, and a few years later, you see them blossoming.”

Wait. Wait just a minute. Think about this. What else is going on here? Besides the “treatment”? There’s a clue right there in what she says. A few years later. How do they know that’s the treatment working as opposed to teenagers becoming young adults? Am I wrong in thinking it’s a fairly common experience to be better at life after the teenage years? Am I wrong in thinking it matters that the brain isn’t fully developed until age 25? I would really, seriously like to know if they took the passage of time into account in their thinking. The wording of Dr. Cohen-Kettenis certainly doesn’t look that way.

The New York Times rows back just a little:

As the number of adolescents who identify as transgender grows, drugs known as puberty blockers have become the first line of intervention for the youngest ones seeking medical treatment.

Which is a very worrying observation all by itself. The number of adolescents who identify as transgender is growing…so the medical system is stepping in to block their puberties. The medical system is treating something that’s obviously a trend, a fashion, an idea-based cool kids thing to do, as a reason to interfere with a crucial stage of development. It’s batshit crazy.

But as an increasing number of adolescents identify as transgender — in the United States, an estimated 300,000 ages 13 to 17 and an untold number who are younger — concerns are growing among some medical professionals about the consequences of the drugs, a New York Times examination found.

Good but what took them so long?

Dutch doctors first offered puberty blockers to transgender adolescents three decades ago, typically following up with hormone treatment to help patients transition. Since then, the practice has spread to other countries, with varying protocols, little documentation of outcomes and no government approval of the drugs for that use, including by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Well, hey, it’s just a little thing, like cutting your fingernails or ripping out your pubic hair, so no need for all those fiddly precautions and documentations. Right?

Well not quite, on account of how for instance it may weaken the bones.

“There’s going to be a price,” said Dr. Sundeep Khosla, who leads a bone research lab at the Mayo Clinic. “And the price is probably going to be some deficit in skeletal mass.”

Oh well, bones. Nobody sees them, so why worry?

Many physicians in the United States and elsewhere are prescribing blockers to patients at the first stage of puberty — as early as age 8 — and allowing them to progress to sex hormones as soon as 12 or 13. Starting treatment at young ages, they believe, helps patients become better aligned physically with their gender identity and helps protect their bones.

But that could force life-altering choices, other doctors warn, before patients know who they really are. Puberty can help clarify gender, the doctors say — for some adolescents reinforcing their sex at birth, and for others confirming that they are transgender.

Newsflash: people never know who they really are. That’s not a thing. People change from year to year and from moment to moment – there is no “really are.” Forget about the self, forget about Who You Really Are, look outward and move on with life.

Republican governors and lawmakers in more than a dozen states are working to limit or even criminalize the treatments, as some in their party also seek to restrict access to sports and bathrooms, ban discussion of gender in public schools, and call into question whether transgender identity even exists.

Even in a “wait let’s think some more about this” piece they can’t get it right. Nobody is seeking “to restrict access to sports and bathrooms.” Nobody wants kids who claim to be trans to hold their pee all day or give up sports. The issue is toilets divided by sex and sports divided by sex. Yes it’s very unfortunate that the Dems are so stupid and wrong on this and that the Republicans for once are right, but don’t put a brick on the scale by wording things wrong.

Ah yes the old “My beliefs are not an ideology!!!” gambit.

Really. There is no transgender ideology. Then what does “transgender” mean? What does “cis” mean? What does “transphobia” mean? What does “terf” mean? What are “trans rights”? What do we talk about when we talk about trans people and trans rights and transphobia?

The ideology is all there is. The whole thing is an idea, one that rejects reality and chooses fantasy in its place. Without the ideology all the dressing up and poster-creating make no sense.

No you can’t say men are not women. If you try there will be blood.

Sorry, sovereign women don’t speak after all, because the “activists” won’t let them.

“Trans-Exterminationists.” As if feminist women who point out that men are not women are thereby exterminating men who claim to be women. Exterminating them, like with Zyklon-B. We’re not exterminating anyone, we’re telling the truth about men and magic gender, in order to defend our rights, which have always been precarious at best, since contempt for women is all but universal, drummed into us as soon as we can understand words and gestures.

And what’s this “our turf” shit? Apart from the pun? It’s not “their” turf, it’s a public space. Women are allowed to leave the house, we’re allowed to meet up and gather, we’re allowed to speak. This isn’t fucking Afghanistan.

Paris 25 August 1944 Kherson 11 November 2022

Intersectional beyond the call of duty.

It’s “ironic” of course, which is to say it’s annoying on purpose rather than by accident, but it’s genuinely annoying all the same. In fact by rights annoying on purpose should be more annoying rather than less.

That “y’all” for one thing is extremely grating. The ironist is at Macquarie University in Sydney; “y’all” is not Australian argot. The ironist is not from the Southern US, much less a descendant of enslaved people.

But the “setting homework” is even more annoying.

And then the content of the “homework” is level 3 annoying. No, I won’t know that; no, I won’t mean that. No.

Who is Sandy O’Sullivan? A Fine Art PhD with a nice line in bullshit.

Sandy is a Wiradjuri transgender/non-binary person. 

They are a 2020-2024 ARC Future Fellow, with a project titled Saving Lives: Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ creative artists. The project will explore the unique contribution and influence of queer artists to understand how modelling complex identities contributes to the wellbeing of all First Nations’ peoples. 

Since 1991 they have taught and researched across gender and sexuality, museums, the body, performance, design and First Nations’ identity. Sandy was the inaugural director of the Centre for Collaborative First Nations’ Research at Batchelor Institute in the Northern Territory…

I have to wonder how Wiradjuri Sandy really is though. I realize it’s taboo to question that kind of thing, but isn’t it also taboo to imply or hint or pretend that you’re more first nations or indigenous than you really are? Especially when it looks as if you’re doing it for academic glory?

I’m not as bossy as Sandy though. This isn’t homework; you don’t have to answer the questions.

Speaking of A oppressing B and B oppressing C – the UK Green Party says women must pretend men are women when told.

Green Party Women must remain trans-inclusive

Must. Orders are to be obeyed. Hop to it.

The intrinsically linked nature of social and climate justice isn’t news to anyone who has been involved with the Green Party for more than a few minutes. From tackling the disproportionate impact of deadly air pollution on people of colour, to opposing the running of privatised public transport for profit, the solutions to the climate crisis are so often those which promote societal equality and which tackle historic and contemporary injustice. Liberation politics is at the heart of all of this: ‘for people and planet’ means for all people, not merely those free from societal oppression.

Meh. I don’t buy it. I’m sure there’s plenty of overlap, but “intrinsically linked” is overstating it. Circumstantially often linked, yes, but intrinsically, no. It’s not the same kind of thing. The fixes are technical far more than they’re political or social. Poor people have more trouble getting broken plumbing fixed because it costs money, but the fixing itself is technical.

And that’s when we’re talking about real oppression. When we’re talking about the absurd made-up reverse victim and offender kind, it becomes even flimsier.

Next week, Green Party Women, a self organised liberation group within the party, will vote on a new constitution. This proposed constitution would remove the right of non-binary people and trans people who do not identify as women to vote in Green Party Women democracy, or to stand for election to its committee. It is vital that this constitution is be rejected.

Green Party Women want to keep men from voting in a women’s group, and we’re told they must not be allowed to keep a thing for women for women.

Time and time again, the Green Party membership has reiterated its support for trans-inclusive feminism, passing a policy for the self identification of gender, and for the recognition of non-binary identities. Liberation from patriarchy must be inclusive and universal. To exclude trans and non-binary voices from Green Party Women is to absorb the system of oppression against which feminism fights into our own ranks.

Bollocks, kid. Women get to organize as women, which entails not being “inclusive” of men no matter how the men choose to “identify.” What if oil company executives started “identifying as” Green and wanted to gobble up the Green Party? Would you be all gung ho about that?

Self organised liberation groups in the Green Party of England and Wales represent an important principle within the fight for social justice: ‘nothing about us without us’. Ensuring that the voices of those affected are centred in the struggle for liberation is crucial — after all, there is no one more qualified to speak on the extent of queerphobia than queer people, no more legitimate voice than that of disabled people in the fight against ableism in society.

One, ok, but what does that have to do with Green?

Two, ok, but then why don’t women get to say “after all, there is no one more qualified to speak on the extent of sexism and misogyny than women”?

Our liberation groups organise against these forms of structural oppression, envisaging and mobilising for a world free from discrimination and prejudice where everyone is free to be who they are, and where barriers to societal participation are broken down.

You say “free to be who they are” but what you mean is “free to be who they are not.” You’re talking about people being free to claim to be the sex they are not, thus displacing people who are that sex. When the sex in question is the subordinated one, that becomes a problem.

This extends, of course, to the fight against patriarchal oppression. From the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States earlier this autumn, to the Conservative government refusing to take a clear stance on abortion here in the UK, whilst continuing to fail to make misogyny a hate crime, it’s clear that patriarchy is alive and thriving. In the fourth richest economy in the world, tampons are still financially out of reach for millions, menstrual leave is but a pipe dream, and just 1% of reported rapes lead to a charge — let alone a conviction.

Well said. So why are you putting your efforts into forcing women to pretend men are women if they say they are?

Liberation.

H/t KB Player

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany 9.

We have all seen countless lists outlining the various features of pseudoscience such as Bob Park’s “The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”. Some of us have even written such lists ourselves. I thought it might be interesting to attempt something similar for Bogus Social Justice Movements (henceforth referred to as BSJMs). Examples of BSJMs include MRAs, incels, the dominant strand of trans rights activism, NAMBLA, the pro porn/pro “sex work” lobby etc*. Attempts to portray legitimate criticisms of Islamism as “Islamophobia” or portray legitimate criticisms of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “antisemitism” can be understood in the same terms**. As with pseudoscience, there is no non-arbitrary place to “draw a line”, such that everything on one side is 100% legitimate social justice activism and everything on the other side is 100% bogus social justice activism. Rather than a sharp definition we must make do with a set of criteria. Most BSJMs will probably meet most of these criteria to some degree, but none has to meet all of them 100%. So, without further ado, I give you

The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Social Justice Movements

1. People vs. Ideas

• The goal of every legitimate social justice movement is to protect real live human beings from injustice and harm.

• BSJMs are usually more concerned with protecting ideas, behaviors, belief systems, ideologies, cultures, traditions, policies, or ways of life. Criticism of what people think, say, or do is re-interpreted as an attack on who they are.

2. Unstated Premises

• BSJMs make frequent appeals to non-specific “rights” that their opponents are accused of denying or violating. Even the most basic tenets of their cause are based on premises and definitions that are best left unspecified.

3. Dubious Connection to Harm

• Every legitimate social justice movement can provide endless examples of obvious, demonstrable injustice and harm.

• BSJMs make exaggerated claims of “harm”, as well as “oppression”, “hate”, “persecution”, “violence” etc. based on a Danish cartoon or the proper use of pronouns (!). The alleged “harm” only shows up at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations and stretching of word-meanings beyond the breaking point. Quite frequently the apocalyptic rhetoric boils down to the implicit threat that the alleged “victims” themselves will hurt themselves or others if they don’t get their way.

4. No Debate

• Every legitimate social justice movement is actively seeking to change hearts and minds through open debate. If anything, their opponents are the ones who are trying to shut down debate because their position is indefensible.

• BSJMs are more concerned with silencing dissent and forcing their views down people’s throats unexamined through intimidation and bullying. Anything other than blind, unconditional agreement in advance is spun as debating their “right to exist” (#2) etc.

5. Conflicts with Real Social Justice Movements

• No real social justice movement is attempting to make other oppressed or marginalized groups less safe from injustice or harm.

• What BSJMs call “oppression” usually boils down to other groups having rights on their own (the right to free speech, the right to leave the dominant religion, the right of lesbians to be uninterested in your “lady cock” etc.).

6. Appropriation/Forced Teaming

• BSJMs appropriate real social justice movements and claim monopoly on speaking in their name while being actively hostile to their goals (#5). Every right and protection gained by other marginalized groups is re-interpreted as belonging to the usurpers instead of the people for whom they were originally intended (and the people who did all the actual work fighting for them).

7. Institutional Capture

• Real social justice movement usually play with open cards.

• BSJMs are more inclined to work by stealth to capture institutions from the inside and change legislation with little or no meaningful debate or accountability (#4). One favorite strategy is sneaking weasel words into bills that were introduced to protect other groups (#6) and use them as a trojan horse for the BSJM’s own agenda.

* As I recently commented there was a time, not too long ago, when the same applied to smokers.

** This remains true even if we concede that bigotry and hate against Muslims and Jews is a real and very serious problem.

After liberating his village.

Another man stomps all over women to public acclaim.

I wondered how Doctor Teetus Deletus is doing these days so I went looking. The Daily Mail (sorry) reports:

A Florida-based plastic surgeon who dubs herself ‘Dr Teetus Deletus’ — a glib reference to breast removal surgery — has been reported to America’s consumer watchdog for using her huge TikTok following to ‘unfairly and deceptively’ sway teens into having sex-change operations.

In other words she promotes such operations, she markets them, she advertises them. She acts like a Hollywood cosmetic surgeon, as opposed to a responsible health-oriented medical doctor. Her clients, however, have immature brains, so they’re less defended against her marketing than full adults are.

A complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) obtained by DailyMail.com, says Dr Sidhbh Gallagher, who runs Gallagher Plastic Surgery in Miami, talks up the benefits and downplays the risks of sex-reassignment surgeries.

Besides which, the “benefits” in question are very doubtful – they risk being temporary, and in the long term extremely harmful. A girl who gets her breasts cut off at 15 because Gallagher’s marketing convinced her it would be good fun could be in for decades of furious regret.

It accuses Dr Gallagher, who says she carries out between 400-500 gender-affirmation surgeries a year, of using catchy videos with pop music backing tracks on social media platforms as a marketing gimmick to attract ‘vulnerable and impressionable’ minors to everything from breast removals to ‘bottom surgery’.

Is there some other reason for using catchy videos with pop music backing tracks on social media platforms?

The clinic said in a statement that the videos aim to ‘educate’ and ‘celebrate’ a marginalized group, and that Dr Gallagher has become a ‘target of attacks and complaints’ because of her politically-charged work with transgender teens.

And why is the work “politically charged”? Because it’s quackery, and highly destructive, and because Gallagher’s approach is grotesquely flippant and reckless.

How exactly are we defining “discrimination” here?

Hospital managers have been warned they could be guilty of discrimination if they put transwomen in single rooms to avoid upsetting patients in female-only wards.

That’s bad stupid wording, that insinuates women are neurotic whiny bitches for not wanting men in women-only wards. Hospital managers have been warned they could be guilty of discrimination if they put men who claim to be trans in single rooms to avoid forcing them on women at the expense of the women’s safety, privacy, and comfort.

Also “have been warned” is pointlessly obscure. Why not say who did the “warning” in the lede?

Guidance for Scotland’s biggest health board also says that any woman who complains about a transwoman sharing their ward should be advised that “the ward is indeed female-only and that there are no men present”.

It comes as ministers have asked health boards around the country to explain how they accommodate trans patients, with some campaigners concerned that the trans-rights agenda could put the safety of women in female-only spaces at risk.

More crappy wording. There’s no “could” about it: of course the “agenda” to force men on women in women-only wards will put the women’s safety at risk.

The campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) described the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde guidance as “gaslighting and insulting”.

None of your silly journalistic circumlocution for them.

A spokeswoman said: “No ill and vulnerable woman wants to wake up from an operation to find a bloke staring at her from the next bed. If the NHS can’t tell the difference between a male body and a female body then it really is in dire straits.”

Sadly, we know the NHS can tell the difference, and is choosing to ignore it for the sake of a trendy but stupid ideology.