Originally a Facebook post by an anonymous thoughts-haver.

Something about the way Matthew 6:5-6 (the bit about going into your closet to pray) is being shared around in the wake of the school prayer ruling has been bothering me, and I finally kind of figured out what it is. First, though, a disclaimer: I am an atheist who has read the whole bible more than once. I took some comparative religion classes in college, but I have never been a Christian and anything I say is coming from a theoretical understanding, not practical.

So, here’s a thing. The term “prayer” does not mean one simple thing. It doesn’t mean the same thing in all contexts, and it doesn’t mean the same thing to all people. When I see a football coach midfield praising Jesus for the game they just played, it’s easy for me, a nonbeliever, to say “what a hypocrite, praying in public like Matthew says not to do”. But that coach might not even think of it as praying, because to him prayer is the thing he only does in private. What he’s doing in public is witnessing, which is something his holy text calls for him to do. Mark 16:15: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”

There is no conflict in his mind between the admonition to pray in private and his making a spectacle of himself in public if what he’s doing in public isn’t praying. And if you call him on it, you are only reinforcing his belief that he is doing the right thing. Matthew 5:10-12: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

Does that make what he’s doing any less coercive and less of a violation of the separation of church and state? Not by any sane standard (which is to say, to anyone who isn’t in the majority on the Supreme Court right now). But it does point to a problem that I think the left has right now, which is that it thinks using tactics which would work against it are going to work against the right.

I skimmed a study recently, and I wish I could find it now. What I remember it saying, though is this: conservatives are better at modelling the thought processes of liberals than vice versa. When given a list of questions to answer twice, once as yourself and once as you imagine a person on the opposite side of the political spectrum would answer, conservatives were better at answering how they thought liberals would than the other way around. They’re better at coming up with tactics which work in the real world, because they’re better at thinking about what would work on them if they were on the other side. They can look at our arguments and say “I understand what makes you think that, but here’s why I think you’re wrong”, while we’re looking at their arguments and saying “you think that because you’re bad”.

To call someone a hypocrite, you need to understand how their actions are in conflict with their beliefs. If you don’t know what their beliefs are, how are you supposed to do that? You can only be right accidentally, and that’s no way to be.

Make your language more inclusive, or you’re a bad person.

The trouble with that is, language can’t be “inclusive.” If it’s inclusive it will stop meaning anything, and then it will be useless. We need language. It does so much work for us. Imagine being suddenly transported to a tiny distant country where you don’t know the language and the people there don’t know yours – imagine how helpless you would feel.

We need the word “women,” the actual word that means what it has meant all these centuries. We need it and we need it to go on meaning what it has meant. If we’re forced to change it to mean “and some men” we’ll just have to find a new word to mean what women meant until that day. There’s no point in telling us to make it more “inclusive” because that’s not its job.

The outrage engine is overheating.

It’s possible that people are getting tired of hearing quite so much from “transgender people and their allies.”

“A few small healthcare cases”??? Give me a break.

“They had no skeletons pre-Enlightenment” hahahahahahahahaha

By the way what was that tweet?

The Willoughby dude is as usual doing his best to punish and exclude women.

Owen Jones talks of a “reversal on LGBTQ rights,” but of course what he means is mostly the T bit, which doesn’t belong with the LGB bit in the first place. As usual this ploy enables a lot of dishonest framing.

Even more terrifying is Texas’s banning of gender-affirming healthcare for young trans people, with their parents now legally defined as child abusers if they seek it.

But of course it’s not “healthcare.” Switch the frame and it’s mutilation and/or dangerous and damaging use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. It’s not healthcare as commonly understood at all. “Gender-affirming” is not a medical term – it’s a political one. No one can change sex, and “affirming” gender is just feel-good drivel. “Young trans people” is a very squishy category, because so is “trans” itself. It’s basically just an thought-balloon. There’s an idea that there’s such a thing as “trans” and that self-reporting is 100% reliable, but both of those claims are highly debatable.

In January, the Council of Europe placed the UK in the same category as Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey for its position on LGBTQ rights, while for the third year running the UK has been relegated in the annual ranking of LGBTQ rights across Europe. The overriding reason is the anti-trans moral panic that grips British society, fostered by an overwhelmingly hostile media and a government that is using trans people as a prop in a “culture war” (just as Margaret Thatcher used gay people in the 1980s), and has refused to ban trans conversion practices.

Owen Jones is himself using trans people as a prop in a culture war, at the same time as he uses verbal nudges like “gender-affirming healthcare” and “trans conversion practices.” We’re supposed to think “trans conversion” is exactly comparable to gay conversion therapy, i.e. psychiatry coaxing or pushing lesbians and gays to go straight, but in fact they’re different. There’s no delusion involved in being same-sex attracted, while thinking you can become the other sex is a delusion full stop.

I know, it’s just Twitter, but really the argument is so powerful I have to share it.

See what I mean?

One powerful argument after another. Hume isn’t in it; Mill wishes he’d decided to be a gardener.

Now THERE is a message!

It wasn’t just about her testimony, it was about the possibility that her testimony would draw more. That’s happening.

Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger has said that bombshell testimony given by Cassidy Hutchinson to the January 6 hearings last week has inspired more witnesses to come forward and the committee is getting more new evidence by the day.

…

“There will be way more information and stay tuned,” Kinzinger told CNN’s State of the Union co-anchor Dana Bash. “Every day, we get new people that come forward and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t think maybe this piece of a story that I knew was important, but now I do see how this plays in here.’”

…

In a separate interview, another committee member, Congressman Adam Schiff, said: “There’s certainly more information that is coming forward … we are following additional leads. I think those leads will lead to new testimony.”

Schiff added that part of the reason the committee had wanted to put Hutchinson to testify would be to encourage others to do so as well. “We were hoping it would generate others stepping forward, seeing her courage would inspire them to show the same kind of courage,” he said.

Bring it on.

What if the pregnant rape victim is ten years old? Any concern for her?

The case of a 10-year-old child rape victim in Ohio who was six weeks pregnant, ineligible for an abortion in her own state, and forced to travel to Indiana for the procedure has spotlighted the shocking impact of the US supreme court ruling on abortion.

…

Dr Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, said she had received a call from a colleague doctor in Ohio who treats child abuse victims and asked for help. Indiana’s lawmakers have not yet banned or restricted abortion, but they are likely to do so when a special session of the state assembly convenes later this month.

Abortion providers like Bernard say they are receiving a sharp increase in the number of patients coming to their clinics for abortion from the neighboring states where such procedures are now restricted or banned.

“It’s hard to imagine that in just a few short weeks we will have no ability to provide that care,” Bernard told the Columbus Dispatch.

It will be 1960 again. We’ll be Ireland, while Ireland is now where we were until the other day.

Philip Pullman yet again.

As far as I can tell (replies are numerous and they go off into nested threads and subthreads and disappear into infinity) he never did: never specified and never apologized. Instead he pretended he wasn’t talking about Jo Bartosch’s article at all.

No. Zero points. He said it in reply to a tweet sharing the article, so he was necessarily badmouthing the article, even if he didn’t intend to in the moment. A decent person would grasp that and apologize if he really never intended to badmouth the article.

That’s just cheap. At that point he must have become aware, if he hadn’t noticed before, that he was in effect dissing Bartosch’s article. He should have just admitted it and made amends. He’s really not a very decent guy.

An interesting Facebook post (public) from last October (anonymously written) on pregnancy as a kind of battle:

I think it’s culturally time for us to re-frame how we think about the uterus.

It’s not a nurturing organ—it doesn’t need to be. A fetus is frighteningly good at getting the resources it needs to nurture itself. If they are implanted anywhere other than the womb (most often the fallopian tube, but also sometimes the bladder, intestine, pelvic muscles and connective tissue, and the liver) placental cells will rip through a body, slaughtering everything in their path as they seek out arteries to slake their hunger for nutrients.

Fetal cells will happily grow in any of these places, digesting and puncturing tissue, paralyzing and enlarging arteries, raising blood pressure to feed itself more, faster; but it will be unable to be ejected. It’s no coincidence that genes involved in embryonic development have been implicated in how cancer spreads.

Rather than a soft cozy nest, a womb is a fortress designed to protect the person from the developing cells inside them.

Uh oh. It took a few paragraphs to get us here, but here we are, and here we stay. Emphasis always mine.

Because of our huge and (metabolically speaking) expensive brains, human fetal development requires unrestricted access to a parent’s blood supply, which makes pregnancy (and miscarriage) incredibly dangerous for the carrier. The uterus has evolved to control and restrict whether placental cells can get that access, and to eject it before it develops enough to kill the host. THE FUNCTION OF THE WOMB IS TO PROTECT THE PARENT’S LIFE. The very structure of the womb very firmly prioritizes the life of the parent over the life of the fetus.

Even with modern medical care, at least 800 people die EVERY DAY from pregnancy (and childbirth-related causes). Among developed countries, the United States has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, and Texas has one of the highest rates within that. The rate is even higher when viewed among BIPOC only.

Whoops! How did that “maternal” get in there?

Pregnancy may be necessary for the continuation of the species, but it is not a joke. It is a life-threatening event, a parasitic attack on a human body; just one we have romanticized and been desensitized to.

The “miracle” of birth is that we have a protective organ designed to, if all goes well, let us survive it. It doesn’t always go well. It is life or death. Someone who chooses to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and carry a fetus to delivery is legitimately choosing to risk their life to do it. Nobody else has the right to make anyone do that, and nobody should be punished or vilified for not wanting to do it. Forcing someone to carry a pregnancy, ANY pregnancy, is attempted murder.

—Anonymous via UniteWomen.org

Unite Women? How shocking. Obviously that should be Unite People.

Originally a comment by Enzyme on The old style of fascist often hid behind tears.

[I]t just so happens that protecting this minority requires us to reform society by jettisoning the hard-won freedoms of assembly and expression, along with the presumption of innocence and the ability for a professional to disagree with whatever governing body claims the consensus to be.

I want to suggest that it’s worse – deeper, more radical, more sinister – than that. What’s being jettisoned is the stability of the language in which any claim to rights must be articulated.

Yes, rights of assembly and expression and so on might be under threat, but they’re still thinkable as rights. Suppose you live in a society in which members of a given demographic group are told that they must pay a higher tax rate, or must not go to school, or must wear a green hat on Wednesdays whether they like it or not. All these things are bad to varying extents. They are also straightforwardly wrongs: one may have a right to go to school, and even if we think that there is not a right to go to school, we can still hold that there is a higher-order right not to be treated differently from others within the community simply because of one’s demographic.

But in all those cases, we know what we’re up against.

Let’s say that there’s a law against women attending university; and let’s say that – either because there is a fundamental right to go to university, or because there is a fundamental right to have the same educational opportunities whatever they are irrespective of sex – this policy violates at least one of the rights of women.

Well, in a funny sort of way, OK. We know what’s going on here. Anyone opposed to the policy can articulate objections to it, and that’s substantially because we know what it means: what the parameters of the words in the law are, how they’re used, to whom the law applies and doesn’t apply, and in what way it applies and doesn’t apply.

One may not like the land on which one stands, but at least it’s stable. One can at least imagine doing something to reconfigure things.

But what we are seeing is a world in which the very words in which laws and rights must be articulated are being unmoored – and not by accident, but gleefully and deliberately, and in a manner that is almost completely arbitrary, save for the one criterion of whether it happens to serve certain political ends.

That’s horrifying.

Once words become bent around outcomes, we’re all sunk – and that includes those who do the bending, would that they could see it.

Fox News is finding out that you can’t tell damaging lies about people and organizations with impunity. Who knew?!

In the months after the 2020 US presidential election, rightwing TV news in America was a wild west, an apparently lawless free-for-all where conspiracy theories about voting machines, ballot-stuffed suitcases and dead Venezuelan leaders were repeated to viewers around the clock.

There seemed to be little consequence for peddling the most outrageous ideas on primetime.

But now, unfortunately for Fox News, One America News Network (OAN) and Newsmax, it turns out that this brave new world was not free from legal jurisdiction – with the three networks now facing billion-dollar lawsuits as a result of their baseless accusations.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing them.

Fingers crossed.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Entry points.

On one level, Julia Carrie Wong is correct — instrumentalising the concept of “transphobia”, as a particularly-potent example of the more general “phobia”-based political discourse which has come to dominate rhetoric over the last couple of decades, *is* a tributary that leads to a sort of popularist authoritarianism that is becoming the modern conception of fascism.

But of course Wong doesn’t see that it is she who, by attempting to direct the rivers of fear and hatred and contempt into controlling how other people express themselves and even what they are allowed to think, is the mouthpiece for modern fascism. Of course she is simply defending what she sees as the truth, and she is working to protect the most vulnerable minority in the history of the world — it just so happens that protecting this minority requires us to reform society by jettisoning the hard-won freedoms of assembly and expression, along with the presumption of innocence and the ability for a professional to disagree with whatever governing body claims the consensus to be. And she believes that dismantling these things in the name of fighting fascism will only have positive consequences (at least until the society she helps to build decides that she is a fascist after all, and devours her as she wishes it would devour so many others).

The more traditional conception of fascism as blood-and-soil authoritarian nationalism has been dead and buried for about eighty years. But even in its time, the old style of fascists often hid behind tears, claiming to be the victims of a uniquely evil history, grasping for the power to overcome and revenge themselves upon that history. The new fascists, whatever their ostensible cause, are not so different from the old.

A reporter for the Guardian US – she calls herself “senior reporter” but the Guardian itself just calls her a reporter, as far as I can see. At any rate it would be good if she had some kind of grip on reality.

That’s just a fucking stupid, uninformed thing to say. We know she’s talking about the radical feminists, not actual far-right street brawlers. She’s talking about Bindel and Stock and Rowling and the rest – feminist women who are about as far from fascist as it’s possible to get.

Her “cause” is frivolous and childish at best – the cause of forcing the world to agree that men get to define themselves as women and force everyone else to agree. In other words it’s a giant game of Let’s Pretend, transferred from the living room floor to the entire world. It’s trivial as well as wrong and stupid. How to make it sound important and serious? I know! Call disagreement the entry to fascism! That’ll do it!

Mostly Cloudy just drew our attention to another one.

We’re not Nazis, we’re not fascists, we’re not the narrow road to fascism, we’re mostly-lefty feminist women. Women’s rights matter, men’s games of let’s pretend don’t.

The NY Times allows Pamela Paul to say the forbidden: the left hates women just as much as the right does.

There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women’s rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.

But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”

And if you object to the unwieldy terms and the disappearance of women, you are threatened and bullied and excluded up one side and down the other.

Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”

It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

With a calculated insult. It’s not ideal, is it. Good that the Times has finally allowed a woman to say so.

Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.

And an emphatic reminder that we don’t matter, we’re just women, we’re bitches and cunts and Karens, we’re sluts and whores and slags.

Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere.

…

If only women’s voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up.

We’re on our own.

The “Feminist” Library.

Via Facebook, credited to Elizabeth Haney:

Pro Lifer: Well the mother should just give the baby up for adoption if she doesn’t want the baby.

Me: So who will adopt the baby?

PL: I don’t know there’s lots of couples who want to adopt.

Me: Do you know any couple who is waiting to adopt?

PL: Um well not personally but like I know there’s lots of people waiting to adopt.

Me: Do you know what a domestic adoption costs?

PL: I don’t know. $15,000 maybe?

Me: The average cost of domestic adoption in the United States is $70,000 if you go through a private agency.

PL: Oh I didn’t realize it was that much.

Me: Yep it’s really expensive. It can be more if you want a newborn straight from the hospital. Up to $120,000.

PL: Well, all life is precious.

Me: It really is. I’ve adopted through foster care and am currently a licensed foster parent. Would you be interested in becoming a foster parent yourself?

PL: Oh no, I couldn’t do it.

Me: Why not?

PL: It would just be too much for me right now.

Me: Why is that?

PL: It would be too hard to handle all the issues that came with it. I’ve heard horror stories.

Me: Yep it can be extremely difficult. But what if I told you that you were required by law to become a foster parent?

PL: what?

Me: what if you had to become a foster parent by law?

PL: they would never do that. That would never happen.

Me; Well, if a woman is forced to bear a child she doesn’t want, and she goes ahead and has that child, someone has to care for the child either through adoption or foster care. You have to do one of those two things.

PL: But I don’t want any more kids.

Me: So you don’t want someone forcing you to have a child in your home that you don’t want or aren’t able to care for?

PL: no, that’s not my job to raise someone else’s child.

There it is, folks. Have the baby, but we don’t want anything to do with it afterwards.I personally cannot reiterate how many times I have had this EXACT conversation with “pro life” ppl.

Jo Bartosch on Mermaids in 2020:

Mermaids advertises itself simply as a support service for children, young people and families. But there is a political dimension to it. Its recommendations to government include: the right of children to take legal action, without parental consent, against schools which do not refer to them by their chosen names and pronouns; the provision of hormone-replacement therapy for children under 16; and the fast-tracking of appointments and physical interventions for pubescent young people.

I assume “appointments” in that last clause means medical consultations.

It is understandable that a child who knows him or herself to be different might latch on to the idea that he or she really is the opposite sex. At secondary school, Green’s child Jackie wore a girls’ uniform and long hair. After Jackie was bullied, and became depressed, Green turned online for support and found a US-based doctor, who was willing to prescribe drugs to delay puberty – so-called puberty-blockers, or hormone-blockers, which were unavailable for off-label use in the UK at the time. According to Green, the treatment was both ‘life-changing and life-saving’, and she unequivocally stands by her position, arguing that ‘medical intervention is very important, especially for teenagers who are already in puberty’.

Which is odd given the fact that Susie Green doesn’t know that medical intervention is the best thing for all teenagers who claim to be trans, not just now but for the next fifty or seventy years as well. She can’t know that, because it’s too new. Teenagers want and think they need a lot of things that they won’t want or think they need when they’re 25 or 35 or 50. It’s bizarrely reckless for Green to be so confident about such an extreme remedy with such a tiny evidence base.

[T]he safety of such drugs has been questioned by experts, including Oxford professor Michael Biggs who, following his investigation into the use of blockers by the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), revealed that far from alleviating distress, ‘puberty-blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria’. After a year of treatment, reported Biggs, there was ‘a significant increase’ in patients who had been born female self-reporting that they ‘deliberately try to hurt or kill’ themselves.

Ok but other than that…

Philip Pullman today:

Still at it.

If it were “people” it would have been legal all along.