A sequel we can all do without:

The Republican nominee for Congress in Texas’ 7th district is a self-proclaimed history buff, but his take on Anne Frank is not one that most historians would endorse.

Johnny Teague, an evangelical pastor and business owner who won the district’s primary in March, in 2020 published “The Lost Diary of Anne Frank,” a novel imagining the famous Jewish Holocaust victim’s final days in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps as she might have written them in her diary. 

The kicker: In Teague’s telling, Frank seems to embrace Christianity just before she is murdered by the Nazis.

Why stop there? Why not have her embrace Nazism too? It would make as much sense. Hitler’s hatred of “the Jews” was rooted in Christianity, so embracing Xianity in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen would be a pretty strange thing to do.

Published by Las Vegas-based publisher Histria Books, the speculative book attempts to faithfully extend the writing style of Frank’s “original” diary entries into her experiences in the camps: it “picks up where her original journey left off,” according to the promotional summary…

“I would love to learn more about Jesus and all He faced in His dear life as a Jewish teacher,” Teague’s Anne Frank character muses at one point, saying that her dad had tried to get her a copy of the New Testament. Anne’s father Otto Frank, who in real life did survive the Holocaust, seems to have been spared a tragic fate in Teague’s telling because of his interest in learning about Jesus. 

Later, Anne does learn about Jesus through other means, reciting psalms and expressing sympathy for Jesus’ plight.

It’s not just the conversion that’s repulsive, it’s also the presumption to try to continue the diary, to pretend to be able to imagine and convey what that was like from the point of view of a victim. We can’t imagine it and we sure as hell can’t convey it. It’s disgusting to pretend we can.

H/t What a Maroon

Varsity did an interview with Arif Ahmed last May…on the subject of free speech.

In an interview with Varsity, Arif Ahmed, an outspoken philosophy lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, said that “free speech is deeply radical and progressive”, but is currently under threat in Cambridge.

…

He believes such training is necessary because “it is a very natural impulse to try and suppress the views of people you don’t agree with.”

The philosopher is no stranger to defending free speech in Cambridge.

In 2020, he led the charge against the University’s plans for a new “free speech” policy which Ahmed wrote would have “required all of us to ‘respect’ the opinions and ‘identities’ of others” – plans which “offered practically endless scope for censorship”.

And for lavish magical “respect” for practically endless new magic meaningless “identities.” A vision of hell.

Cambridge students will get some training in not trying to suppress every opinion they dislike.

Students at the University of Cambridge will be given free-speech training in an effort to tackle so-called “cancel culture” against guest speakers.

The sessions by two academics will aim to teach undergraduates to tolerate views that they disagree with and could be rolled out to more universities if successful.

Note that what’s meant here by “tolerate views” is not agree with them or accept them or even try to understand them, it’s just allow them to be heard. That’s not asking all that much. Cambridge isn’t likely to invite professional racists to spew racist abuse for half an hour, so maybe the students can actually bring themselves to stop trying to filter out scary feminist speakers who think women matter.

A lot of scary events were cancelled last year, and this year hasn’t begun all that robustly.

Cambridge alumni threatened to pull funding from Gonville and Caius College after its master boycotted a gender-critical speaker last week. Helen Joyce, an author and former Economist journalist, was invited to the college by one of its fellows for a debate on gender ideology.

However, before she spoke, Professor Pippa Rogerson, the college’s master, joined Dr Andrew Spencer, the senior tutor, in telling students that Joyce’s views were “polemics”.The head of Cambridge’s sociology faculty also apologised to students for the “distress caused” after sending an email out inviting them to the talk.

It’s good that Pipps and Andy got named, given how they treated Helen Joyce. They should be getting some training themselves. Too bad the sociology weasel wasn’t named.

The new training scheme is being led by Arif Ahmed, an outspoken Cambridge philosophy professor, who will host a two-part series of free-speech training sessions at Gonville and Caius College next month.

Pipps and Andy, meet Arif. You have a lot to learn.

He said the training sessions were for students but he would consider opening them up to fellow academics and suggested that some employed by universities refused to tolerate views they disagreed with.

Why yes, they do. Sally Hines anyone? Alison Phipps? And of course our own Pipps & Andy.

He added: “As we have seen recently there are also many academics who don’t understand the importance of tolerating views that they find offensive. It may be that similar training is necessary for academics — as much as it horrifies me to say that.”

May we call you Professor Ahmed?

Wait a little longer.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. temporarily halted the release of former President Donald Trump’s tax records to a congressional committee, and called for more briefing in the case by Thursday.

Without the Supreme Court’s intervention, the records were set to be turned over to the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday.

And we can’t have that, can we. Trump must be protected. Not that this has anything to do with partisanship at all.

Mike Pence has written a memoir.

A post-election meeting at which advisers led by Rudy Giuliani attacked campaign lawyers and urged Donald Trump not to accept his election defeat was “a new low” for a president “well acquainted with rough-and-tumble debates”, Mike Pence writes in a forthcoming memoir.

That is, a president who is a notorious crook and cheat and bully, whose every act is a new low because everything he does and says is low so each new item is automatically a new low. Mike Pence was part of the crook’s team, so it’s way too late for him to be talking about new lows.

Of the meeting in November 2020, the former vice-president writes: “In the end, that day the president made the fateful decision to put Giuliani and [attorney] Sidney Powell in charge of the legal strategy … The seeds were being sown for a tragic day in January.”

Not tragic, evil. That day was all Trump’s doing, and the doing was evil. Pence is prettying it up because he was part of it.

By openly blaming Trump for events leading to the January 6 insurrection, when a pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, Pence risks angering Republicans he must court as he considers the next nomination for president.

Diddums. Pence should go away from any form of politics forever. He worked for Trump throughout his “administration” and he should isolate himself in shame and regret.

Ah the ol’ tax returns – you know, the ones he couldn’t release because he was being audited, even though being audited doesn’t in any way prevent the release of tax returns.

Former President Trump on Monday filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to temporarily block a House committee from obtaining his tax returns.

The ones he could have released back in 2015 if he hadn’t been such a crook. It’s not required, but presidential candidates have been doing it for years, and he was the first to refuse in all those years. Why would he do that? Same reason he’d take the 5th, probably, but in this case we get to draw conclusions from the refusal. My conclusion: he’s dirty.

His request comes after a federal appeals court last week declined the former president’s request to block the release of his tax returns, CNN reports.

They must be Communists and Antifa and filthy immigrants on that court, right? No decent American patriot would decline a request from Trump.

CNN has more:

The House Ways and Means Committee is set to receive former President Donald Trump’s IRS tax returns in one week after a federal appeals court on Thursday declined Trump’s request to hold up the release.

The Supreme Court could still intervene if Trump appeals.

A three-judge panel on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided they won’t put the handover of the former president’s tax returns on hold after the full appeals court rejected Trump’s request that they review an earlier decision allowing for the release of the returns.

The god-emperor doesn’t win every time.

New boss just like the old boss. Again.

But what is he calling “trans rights”? What are the rights that are specific to trans people? Do they conflict with other people’s rights? Do they conflict with women’s rights? If they do, why does he refuse to discuss the issue?

Same old same old same old. We have to assume that all demands by all people who call themselves trans have to be met without question and without delay. We have to assume that any objections to the loss of their own rights coming from women and/or LGB people are evil and outrageous and to be ignored.

Sorry, that doesn’t work for us.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is underwhelmed by Elon Musk.

It took less than 48 hours for Elon Musk to reveal just how dangerous his new toy can be to this world. Replying to a tweet from former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the man worth more than $210bn with more than 112 million Twitter followers spread a dangerous conspiracy theory intended to distract people from an attempted political assassination just one week before a major US election.

Clinton had warned that “the Republican party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories”, in response not just to the attack on home and spouse of Nancy Pelosi but a slew of attempted kidnappings and threats against elected officials who have stood up to the Trump agenda and the attempted overthrow of the US government in January 2021.

Musk replied to it by citing a discredited rightwing blog claiming there was something else at work in the hammer attack that put Paul Pelosi into the hospital, that it might not have been motivated by animus on the extreme right. Musk later deleted his response. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk wrote on Sunday morning.

The trouble is that like so many extremely rich people, he’s not particularly thoughtful or intelligent.

Then again, everything that Musk expresses is unclear. It’s a series of hunches and feelings, devoid of learning, analysis, rigour or consideration of consequences.

Musk, despite his wealth, good fortune and global influence, is not a serious person. He never exhibits any deep grasp of any issue of substance. He’s shown from the beginning of his dance with buying Twitter that he does not understand the company, how it makes money, how or why it tries to keep the experience pleasant and clear for its 230 million users, or why it’s such a terribly run business.

…

Musk is unserious but is toying with dangerous ideologies nonetheless. He subscribes to “longtermism”, a muddled pseudo-philosophy that emerged from an amalgam of radical utilitarianism and “effective altruism”. It exhibits complete faith in the ability of technological and financial elites like Musk himself to re-engineer humanity, transcend corporeal limits, embrace other planets as homes and destinations, and surrender autonomy to elites instead of people. It’s fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-humanistic.

Not to mention anti-knowing what’s possible. We can’t stop destroying this planet but we can figure out a way to move the necessary contents of this planet to a different planet so that we can move ourselves there?

Any group or force that can disrupt or distract serious thought about serious problems serves the cause of longtermism. If enough people resign from the public sphere and surrender their autonomy to technology, those who control that technology can guide us anywhere they want, regardless of the pain suffered along the way. The basic tenet of longtermism is something like: “As long as we can check out of this hotel room, we might as well trash it. We will build and own a better hotel in the long term.”

Except that we won’t, because we can’t, because it can’t be done.

A man tells the world what a magnificent, subversive act it is for a man to sing a song about how much better than women he is and then get naked on live tv.

Maybe the problem is that the naked body was transgender? he says. And/or that he called Jordan’s penis and boobs magnificent?

I called them that because their very exposure felt like a magnificent, subversive act, saying as it did, “Here I am.”

That’s so interesting because you know what it feels like to a woman? It feels like all those other times a man has exposed his penis [though usually not his “boobs”] to them without invitation, starting in childhood. To us it doesn’t feel magnificent or subversive, it just feels like the same old sly power move.

It takes really impressive stupidity and obliviousness to blather in public about the magnificent subversion of a man getting his dick out when it’s not exactly a secret that girls and women are all too familiar with this particular brand of “subversion.” It’s like calling it magnificent and subversive to walk around in a KKK t-shirt. It’s like calling it magnificent and subversive to slap posters of lynchings on telephone poles. The penis has a very dual nature for women, inevitably. It’s one thing for lovers and spouses, and very much another for strangers. An unrequested penis is not just a gesture, subversive or otherwise; it’s also a threat and potentially a weapon. That’s sad but it’s the reality. How utterly indifferent to female people do you have to be not to know that?

A piece of good news! “Teresa,” the woman in the Princess Grace Hospital fuckup, is having her surgery today. Also, she doesn’t want to sue and she doesn’t want compensation.

I’ll just quote the rest of the thread to avoid twittershock.

I’m sending this message which I hope will travel far and wide through Nutmeg to offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has given me support since Princess Grace Hospital cancelled my surgery, saying “We do not share your beliefs”. This followed my refusal to engage with pronouns, and my reporting of a Patient Dignity Breach by a male with a ‘gender identity’.

My beliefs are protected by the UK Equality Act 2010, as per the judgment in the landmark appeal case of Forstater v CGD Europe (2021). I do not believe that a person can change sex. I will not use the language of gender ideology.

Legions of people, of all political persuasions and backgrounds, coalesced to launch a truly spectacular campaign on my behalf. As a direct result, @HCAHospitalsUK (owner of Princess Grace Hospital) has offered me surgery at its Wellington Hospital in London on October 31. The surgery will be with the original surgeons in attendance in a double robotic suite. I’ve also been assured of single sex nursing care and am receiving superb service from the Wellington. I have full confidence in my surgical and nursing team.

I don’t know where to start to express my overwhelming gratitude to the thousands of people who fought so vigorously on my behalf. Thanks to you all, I now have the best possible chance of recovery and a full life.

The next few tweets are illustrated so hold your breath to avoid twittershock.

The yellow Lab is a particularly dedicated women’s right activist bless him.

There.

Imagine my surprise: another report on how indifferent police departments are to misogyny in the ranks.

A former police officer says she has lost all faith in Police Scotland’s capacity to tackle bullying and misogyny within its ranks, as an ex-colleague awaits sentence for sexually assaulting her more than four years after she initially made a complaint.

Gemma MacRae says she was targeted by a “boys’ club” of colleagues at Forres police station, in Moray, after she accused her ex-partner, also a police officer, of domestic abuse, and that as the intimidation grew worse her superiors “did nothing to protect me”.

Boys stick together.

MacRae told Elgin sheriff court that Scott Gallop, who was allowed to continue working after the initial complaint was lodged in February 2018 until he retired from the force at the end of that year, had touched her inappropriately on her bottom and waist on a number of occasions, as well as sending her sexually explicit text messages.

MacRae, who says she endured extensive bullying from other colleagues, is taking the force to an employment tribunal, which was paused while the criminal case was heard.

During one incident, MacRae says, colleagues (Gallop was not involved) drove her to an isolated forest late at night on the pretext of attending an incident. She was ordered out of the van, which drove off at speed, leaving her alone in the dark.

“I remember it was pitch black, and I was shocked and scared. I thought: I can’t come into work on a daily basis not knowing whether I’ll be safe. I stood there in complete despair for my life. Those male officers did this to me knowing what I had reported about my former partner.”

They returned after half an hour. That must have been a pleasant drive back for her.

The new owner of Twitter steps up.

Three days after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the billionaire posted a tweet that advanced baseless allegations about the recent attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

What could possibly go wrong??

On Saturday, Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, posted a tweet assailing Republicans for spreading “hate and deranged conspiracy theories” that she said had emboldened the man who attacked Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, inside the couple’s home in San Francisco early Friday.

Mr. Musk’s tweet was later deleted, and it was not immediately clear who had deleted it.

In a reply to Mrs. Clinton’s tweet, Mr. Musk wrote, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye” and then shared a link to an article in the Santa Monica Observer. The article alleges that Mr. Pelosi was drunk and in a fight with a male prostitute.

A 2021 editorial in The Los Angeles Times about websites that “masquerade as legitimate local newspapers” noted that the Santa Monica Observer, “owned by onetime City Council candidate David Ganezer, is notorious for publishing false news.” In 2016, for example, the publication advanced a claim that Mrs. Clinton had died and that a body double was sent to debate the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump.

Not even so much false news as grotesque absurd fantasizing. (We get fantasies from all directions these days – men fantasizing they are sexy sexy ladeez, and Magas fantasizing drunken brawls with male prostitutes.)

There’s a surprise – Bolsonaro lost.

Challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won Brazil’s election after defeating incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in a razor-close vote.

According to the country’s election authority, Lula secured 50.8 percent of the vote compared to 49.2 percent for Bolsonaro on Sunday.

So we can expect Stop the Steal agitation and violence, with Trump egging it on. Bad moon rising.

It remained to be seen if Bolsonaro would concede defeat. Without proof, he has described the voting system as fraud-prone, raising concern he may not concede, following the example of his ideological ally, former US President Donald Trump.

Bad moon.

What’s left of the Amazon hangs in the balance.

“Just get it right, and you won’t have to get sprayed.”

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Just a reminder.

Apart from the sting of invalidation, how are transmen and enbies hurt if abortion is treated as a women’s issue?

I think the real pushback against the framing of abortion as a women’s issue is from TiMs. Campaigns for “inclusive” language that erase women by reducing them to body parts and functions is not equally applied to men. That tells you all you need to know about the politics and optics of this “movement.” Men are the Standard; women are the Other. The Other is defined by, and in contrast to the Standard. Can’t go messing with the Standard now, can we? There’s no telling where that might lead!

Who is it that benefits from the disconnection of the definition of “woman” from material reality? Men who claim to be women. Decoupling the material facts of female embodiment from the definition of “woman” (not all women have a uterus, some women have penises, men can get pregnant, etc.) dissolves that material definition, and removes it from a straightforward state of being, into an amorphous laundry list of attitudes, proclivities, and preferences. This allows men, who embody none of the material facts, to claim womanhood (and femaleness) through the idea of womanhood, by performative mimicry of some or all of this laundry list. Note that the performance is partial and often exaggerated; you’re going to see more glamourous, dolled-up, hypersexualized performances than those that take on the role of the underpaid, scut-working charwoman.

Notice how the fight for abortion rights is now often subsumed into a general fight for “bodily autonomy” that is the focus of TiMs (!) invited to speak at pro-choice events. They can never get pregnant, but such opportunities make a great platform to centre their own needs, whether it’s wrong sex hormones or ramping up the transing of kids to recruit the next cohort of fully committed trans activists. At some point this redirection and dilution will see nominal “abortion rights” campaigns that fail to use the word “abortion.” There are already plenty of such campaigns that have stopped using the word “woman.” See above. If you stop using the word “woman” it’s harder to see (or correct) the fact that bans on abortion target women. If it targets “all gender identities” then it’s no longer about women at all, and the underlying sexism and patriarchal power go unaddressed. Which is the point of the operation. Struggles focused on “gender identity” liberate nobody. The existing chains just get doubled, and painted in pink and baby blue.

No one has meltdowns when breast cancer-related activism frames breast cancer as a women’s health issue, even though breast cancer also affects actual adult human males, albeit in far lesser numbers. In fact, men could conceivably make the case that they are ill-served by the branding of breast cancer as a women’s disease.

It’s not uncommon to see online threads about Female Genital Mutilation get mobbed or trolled by men wanting to include or shift the focus to circumcision. So much easier to take over someone else’s campaign than it is to put in the hard work of launching one’s own. (See: forced teaming of T with LGB.)

TiFs and enbies are useful tools and camouflage, but the campaign isn’t really for their benefit. If this were a movement exclusively by and for them, it wouldn’t have got very far at all. They’re just convenient pretexts for dismantling “woman” and rebuilding it in Man’s image.

Very normal. Not at all catastrophizing or narcissistic, no no.

He’s “been asked to comment” – he is just that important. Asked by whom? Modesty forbids. It was probably the pope, or the UN, or Amnesty International.

Of course Jolyon is too important and too much asked to comment to pause to tell us what rights he’s talking about.

Yeah we have trouble holding our heads up in polite company on account of we still think women have rights. How shameful of us!

Women who think women have rights are “fascist adjacents.” What a nice man he is.

Willoughby illustrates.

Willoughby of course is not at all desperate. Placid as a stagnant pond, he is.

Updating to add his not at all outrageous retort.

Uh huh. White man Willoughby claims persecuted minority status for himself. Very convincing.

More ways to make it a crime to feminism:

New laws will criminalise incitement to hatred against transgender people and those with a disability, the [Irish] Cabinet agreed on Tuesday when approving a Bill intended to make prosecutions for hate speech and hate crimes easier.

The Bill will add gender, including gender expression and identity, as well as disability to a list of “protected characteristics” which already include race, colour, nationality, religion, ethnicity or national origin and sexual orientation.

But not sex. Being a woman is not a protected characteristic, while being a man who pretends to be a woman is. Women can be punished for not agreeing that men are women, but men are free to incite hatred against women.

Ministers were told the protected characteristics are being expanded based on best practice internationally. In the case of gender and sex characteristics, this was to reflect the experiences of certain groups of people targeted for hate crime.

And among those groups you will not find women. It seems women are not targeted for hate crime. Who knew??

The BBC on The bleak reality behind the red light district:

Behind Amsterdam’s red light district hides a secret world of sexual exploitation and human trafficking. What is viewed by many as little more than an edgy tourist attraction is in fact an area rife with crime.

“Edgy” here refers to men renting women. Right up there with a canal ride or a visit to the Rijksmuseum.

With the advent of mass tourism, the situation has become even more out of hand. Throngs of tourists flood the narrow streets and alleys. In a bid to combat the problems, and create better working conditions for the sex workers, the mayor of Amsterdam has proposed a plan to close the windows and to set up an erotic centre elsewhere in the city.

An erotic centre forsooth. I think we’ve attained peak euphemism. The point of this documentary is clearly that the famous legalized prostitution of Amsterdam is actually legalized rape, yet we still get “erotic centre” as opposed to knocking shop.

Meanwhile, vulnerable women continue to be subjected to harassment, violence and exploitation. Former sex workers and other people who know what really goes on in the world of window prostitution share stories of extreme tourist nuisance, violence against sex workers, and forced prostitution. Will the Dutch capital ever regain control over what once was one of its most beautiful historic neighbourhoods?

What are we talking about here? Brutalized exploited women, or beautiful historic neighborhoods? Make up your damn mind.

The FFRF (or its Twitter wrangler) didn’t answer my question about what they meant by “queer” in tweeting

“In Nebraska, kids were getting the same Sex Ed. their grandparents received. We finally updated the curriculum.” — NE State Sen. Megan Hunt, first queer woman elected to district

so I looked it up. Voterly tells us

Megan Catherine Hunt (born May 9, 1986) is an American entrepreneur and politician serving as a member of the Nebraska Legislature. A member of the Democratic Party, Hunt represents the 8th legislative district in Omaha, consisting of the midtown neighborhoods of Dundee, Benson, and Keystone. She succeeded term-limited Nebraska State Senator Burke Haar. She identifies as bisexual, and was the first openly LGBT person elected to the state legislature of Nebraska, as well as the first woman to represent the 8th district. 

There are many other sources saying the same thing.

Ok so why did FFRF, or its Twitter handler, translate “bisexual” to “queer”?

I would really be interested to know. I also wonder if Megan Hunt wants to be called that, and if anyone asked her before calling her that.