Et tu The Globe?
That’s the spirit. Let’s turn all the famous women into men. Rosa Parks can be Roger Parks. Virginia Woolf can be Victor Woolf. Ruth Bader Ginsburg can be Ralph Bader Ginsburg. Rachel Maddow can be Robert Maddow. Give them all chest binders, call them all they them, erase women from everything. What’s not to love?
Look at this. Look at her smiling face, her swinging hair, her cheerful smiles and nods. Look at the extra smile she gives when she says “a hysterectomy is the removal of the uterus.” Look at the grin she gives when she says the Fallopian tubes are attached to the sides of the uterus. Look how enthusiastically she shakes her head, making her hair bounce, when she says “people getting gender-affirming hysterectomies do not have to have their ovaries removed.”
It’s a thing out of nightmares.
They asked Trump nicely before they raided the place.
Former President Donald J. Trump received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned boxes of material he had improperly taken with him upon moving out of the White House, three people familiar with the matter said.
The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned.
In other words Trump handed over some of the documents but secretly kept others. The raid this week was because of the others, the ones he secretly kept. That’s not something he was supposed to be doing. It’s more like something a double agent would be doing. A Kim Philby without the brains.
Two people briefed on the classified documents that investigators believe remained at Mar-a-Lago indicated that they were so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act.
I’ve seen people point out that Trump could have been planning to use the documents to extort favors or $$$ or both.
The subpoena factored into a visit that Jay Bratt, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, made with a small group of other federal officials to Mar-a-Lago weeks later, in early June, one of the people said.
The officials met with Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran. Mr. Trump, who likes to play host and has a long history of trying to charm officials inquiring about his practices, also made an appearance. During the visit, the officials examined a basement storage area where the former president had stowed material that had come with him from the White House.
I wonder what Trump does by way of trying to charm officials inquiring about his practices. I mean I genuinely wonder, because I’ve never seen any trace of the kind of charm that would work on grownup people with serious jobs. We’ve all seen him try it with reporters, right? Being “affable”? But his affable is as repellent as his raging or sneering or insulting. I don’t think he has the ghost of an idea how to charm grownup people with serious jobs.
Mr. Trump’s team has declined to disclose the contents of the search warrant. A number of organizations, including The New York Times, are seeking in federal court to have it unsealed.
Some senior Republicans have been warned by allies of Mr. Trump not to continue to be aggressive in criticizing the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the matter because it is possible that more damaging information related to the search will become public.
Oh really. So they’re saying back off because it’s going to get worse so let’s not piss off the feds too much now? Is that it?
When archivists recovered 15 boxes this year, they discovered several pages of classified material and referred the matter to the Justice Department. But officials later came to believe that additional classified material remained at Mar-a-Lago.
Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have maintained that they were trying all along to cooperate with federal officials and had kept an open line of communication.
But others familiar with federal officials’ efforts to recover the documents have said that Mr. Trump resisted returning property that belonged to the government, despite being told that he needed to.
What does that “trying all along to cooperate” mean? What’s to try? Trump had to hand over the documents, end of story – there’s no “trying” and no “cooperate,” there’s just doing what the law says he has to do. He’s not a god-emperor.
There’s nothing like starting a news story with an agentless passive voice claim that doesn’t mean anything.
The Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) is being urged to reconsider its decision to ban transgender women from female contact rugby competitions due to fears it will set a “dangerous precedent” in other sports.
Oooooh really? By whom? You? Your cat?
That’s such crappy manipulative sneaky concern-mongering disguised as journalism; there ought to be professional standards against that kind of thing.
What about the fears of other dangerous precedents, like the dangerous precedent of letting men take over women’s sports? I urge the Irish Independent to pay attention to that, and to skip the passive voice intro in the future.
Para 2:
Equality groups and rugby clubs have described the move as “regressive and disappointing”.
Equality groups and rugby clubs have described the move as about fucking time.
A spokesperson for Emerald Warriors RFC, Ireland’s first LGBTQ+ inclusive rugby team, said the “blanket ban on a section of our community” was hugely disappointing and regressive.
No, what’s disappointing and regressive is allowing men to invade women’s sports. Women are part of “our community” too you know – quite a large part.
The club said the move “further reduces spaces for transgender people to exist safely”, affecting rugby, sport and society.
What about spaces for women to exist safely? Why do men who call themselves trans get to overrule women’s safety?
“This step does not follow the values of our game,” the club said. “We are gravely concerned with the messaging to transgender youth, their families, friends and allies clearly making them no longer welcome in rugby.”
That’s a lie. The messaging is “play on the team that matches your sex.” Being welcome in rugby can’t be dependent on men both cheating and ruining women’s sport by playing on women’s teams. That would make women unwelcome in rugby.
Moninne Griffith, co-director of Trans Equality Together, said: “It is setting a dangerous precedent for other Irish sporting organisations to follow their lead in banning trans players.”
Trans players are not banned.
This reads more like a letter from a hostage than a policy statement from a sporting institution.
IRFU Updates Transgender Policy
The IRFU will amend its gender participation policy for rugby from the forthcoming season, based on medical and scientific evidence and in line with World Rugby guidance.
The IRFU is keenly aware that this is a sensitive and challenging area for those involved and the wider LGBT+ community and will continue to work with those impacted, providing support to ensure their ongoing involvement with the game.
Ok? Ok? Ok? We’re keenly aware, we promise we are, so so so aware, we totally get how sensitive and challenging and agonizing and torturous and sensitive it is, have we grovelled enough yet?
When has any organization ever talked about women’s concerns in that anxious caring hand-holding way?
Recent peer reviewed research provides evidence that there are physical differences between those people whose sex was assigned as male and those as female at birth, and advantages in strength, stamina and physique brought about by male puberty are significant and retained even after testosterone suppression.
You don’t say. Recent peer reviewed research reiterates what everyone already knew, which was why women had separate sports in the first place. I mean yay research, but the default should have been the obvious all along.
Anne Marie Hughes, Spirit of Rugby Manager, who has worked on policy development in this area since 2014, said,
“The IRFU is committed to inclusivity and has worked with the players and other groups in the LGBT+ community to explain that this change is based solely on new research related to safety. This is a particularly sensitive area, and it is important that respect is shown to all members of our rugby family and the wider community.
“We will continue to work to be as inclusive as we can be and to explore areas such as tag and touch rugby, which we know some of our players are already considering, refereeing, volunteering, and coaching.
“We continue to stand with the LGBT+ community, and while we accept that today some may feel disappointed in this decision, we want to again underline to them – there is a place for everyone in rugby, and we can all work together.”
So much grovelling and apologizing and wringing of hands just because they’ve decided not to let men trample all over women in rugby matches.
Also there is no LGBT+ community. There’s an LGB community, up to a point (since women and men often have competing interests), but the T is a different thing altogether. The + is just stupid. (How can people sign up to the + when nobody knows what it is? We don’t have Feminism Etc because we would need to know what the etc stands for before agreeing to it; the same ought to go for the +.)
On the one hand a law firm is working up a class action type case against the Tavistock GIDS; on the other hand a chain of banks is…doing this.
When did banks and corporations and other profit-seeking institutions get so childish? And how, and why?
Some news about the law firm that is planning to sue the Tavistock GIDS:
The U.K.-based plaintiffs firm PGMBM, which operates as a partnership between British, Brazilian and American lawyers, is launching an office in Rio de Janeiro following a significant win for claimants harmed by a dam collapse at a mine co-operated by BHP Inc. in Brazil.
The firm is also changing its name globally, and will now be known as Pogust Goodhead.
…
The firm has secured a series of high-profile litigation wins over the past 12 months.
In addition to the court victory against BHP, Pogust Goodhead notched a settlement in May on behalf of 15,000 claimants against the Volkswagen Group, and in 2021 it won an award for 16,000 victims of a British Airways data breach.
Maybe the source is a public relations outfit pretending to be a legal news outlet, but at any rate Pogust Goodhead doesn’t seem to be a couple of mail-order lawyers in a garage.
It must have been fun to be a political journalist reporting on Trump, right?
Well, no. I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure. He’d been around forever and his political act was largely derivative. His promise to “drain the swamp” was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” in 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign had vowed to “Make America Great Again” in 1980.
Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end.
It’s the truth. He’s mind-numbingly empty and boring and trivial. He’s that guy you hope doesn’t sit next to you on the bus.
Bottom line, Trump is an extremely tedious dude to have had in our face for seven years and running. My former New York Times colleague David Brooks wrote it best: “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”
There’s nothing to understand. It’s all out there in the open – what you see is what there is. There’s nothing to probe or question or elucidate. He has the mind of a very young boring child.
The article is about why so many adult politicians helped the six fireflies in a jar. Lindsey Graham for example:
Graham was always saying how important it was to “get the joke” about Trump. “Getting the joke” is a timeworn Washington expression, referring to a person’s ability to grasp a shared truth about something best left unspoken. In the case of Trump, the “joke” was that he was, at best, not a serious person or a good president and, at worst, a dangerous and potentially criminal jackass.
Hey, that’s a really funny joke, isn’t it.
“Oh, everybody gets the joke,” Mitt Romney assured me in early 2022 when I asked him if Senate Republicans really believed what they said in public about how wonderful Trump was. “They still are very aware of his, uh, what’s a good word, idiosyncrasies.”
Cool cool cool, everybody gets the joke, but everybody goes right on helping the fireflies destroy everything.
Originally a comment by Papito on Boston Children’s Hospital.
In many American states (I haven’t added up which ones lately), therapy for kids identified as suffering from gender dysphoria, which does not affirm their transition, is considered to be “conversion therapy,” and is illegal.
In Massachusetts, the law is HR 140, passed in 2019.
The law has specific exceptions for therapists who are encouraging children to change their gender identification to the opposite gender. It only prohibits providing therapy to children that affirms their actual sex.
This law, similar to laws in dozens of other states, all passed in the last decade, makes it possible that a therapist could not only lose his license to practice, but be sued or prosecuted for providing therapy to a child that does not confirm and cement the child’s stated belief of being transgender.
In practice, this means that almost no therapists want to go anywhere near kids with gender issues, except for those therapists who most enthusiastically “affirm,” such as the ideologues hired by gender clinics. It’s hot potato with these kids until they get to a place like Children’s, which fits them in the surgical disassembly line.
Boston Children’s you might want to pay close attention to this report in the Times:
The Tavistock gender clinic is facing mass legal action from youngsters who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers.
Mass legal action? How mass?
Lawyers expect about 1,000 families to join a medical negligence lawsuit alleging vulnerable children have been misdiagnosed and placed on a damaging medical pathway.
Yikes! Very mass!
They are accusing the gender identity development service [GIDS] at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust of multiple failures in its duty of care.
Starting with failing to be not credulous idiots. These are doctors, not teenagers; why did they fall for this destructive nonsense?
This includes allegations it recklessly prescribed puberty blockers with harmful side effects and adopted an “unquestioning, affirmative approach” to children identifying as transgender.
For reasons that are not medical but political.
Last month we learned that GIDS was closing.
The law firm Pogust Goodhead has since announced it is pursuing a group litigation order against the trust, which has treated 19,000 children with gender dysphoria (the feeling that one’s emotional and psychological identity differs from one’s birth sex) since 1989.
…
The allegations of medical negligence are based on the findings of an interim report by Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who is leading a review of the service.
If the gender clinic had listened to a few terfs maybe they would have spared themselves and a lot of kids this horrible outcome.
Someone ratted the trumpster out.
The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek.
That person had better go far away and hunker way down.
The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away.
Well duh. Nobody wants to spend time with the trumpster for the fun of it.
FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.
And knows an asshole when he sees one.
Both senior government officials say the raid was scheduled with no political motive, the FBI solely intent on recovering highly classified documents that were illegally removed from the White House.
This is one of a thousand reasons it’s bad to have a criminal as a head of state. Nothing you do to or about or around the criminal is going to be seen as “with no political motive.” That ship sailed when the criminal decided to go into politics. It’s not the FBI’s fault that searching Trump’s safe is being called political: that’s how Trump set things up.
On Monday at about 10 a.m. EST, two dozen FBI agents and technicians showed up at Donald Trump’s Florida home to execute a search warrant to obtain any government-owned documents that might be in the possession of Trump but are required to be delivered to the Archives under the provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act. (In response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, Trump himself signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain classified documents.)
So we know Trump has committed multiple felonies.
Trump said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and did not answer questions during a deposition on Wednesday with New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office.
In a lengthy public statement, Trump lambasted James as a “failed politician” and accused her of having “intentionally colluded with others” in her three-year probe of the Trump Organization, calling the inquiry a political fishing expedition against his family.
Please. That pool is so full of fish they don’t have room to swim.
The statement continued: “If there was any question in my mind, the raid of my home, Mar-a-Lago, on Monday by the FBI, just two days prior to this deposition, wiped out any uncertainty. I have absolutely no choice because the current Administration and many prosecutors in this Country have lost all moral and ethical bounds of decency.”
Evil criminal is furious that law enforcement is looking into his evil crimes.
James is wrapping up an aggressive three-year probe into a decade-long pattern of alleged financial wrongdoing at the Trump Organization, the multi-billion-dollar conglomerate for which Trump is the sole owner and beneficiary.
James has signaled that after her investigation wraps up, her office will bring a several-hundred-page lawsuit against Trump and his business that could seek millions in fines and even the dissolution of the company itself.
I look forward to reading the several hundred pages!
If James’ eventual lawsuit against Trump lands before a jury, Trump’s taped deposition, in which he repeatedly pleads the Fifth, would be played in open court. Under New York law, the judge would then instruct jurors that they are allowed to draw what’s called an “adverse inference” from the tape.
In other words, unlike in a criminal case, the jury would be able to hold Trump’s refusal to answer questions against him as an indication of guilt.
But it’s his conssisooshunall right.
The UK Health Security Agency said that, since early February, 116 polioviruses had been identified in 19 sewage samples from boroughs in north-east and central London including Barnet, Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Waltham Forest.
…
While a small number of polioviruses are detected in sewage in the UK each year, the large number detected over recent months is unusual, and appears to reflect transmission of the virus in the community.
…
Public health experts said it appeared such transmission was asymptomatic, and was likely to have been caused by an individual recently vaccinated with live oral polio vaccine (OPV) entering the UK. OPV generates excellent gut immunity against polio; however, people who have been recently vaccinated can shed vaccine-like virus in their faeces.
While this weakened form of the virus does not cause illness, the concern is that if it circulates it can gain mutations that increase its virulence, resulting in vaccine-derived poliovirus – which has the potential, albeit rare, to cause paralysis in those who are unvaccinated.
Kids 1 through 9 should get a booster.
Wait what?
Hysterectomies at a children’s hospital???
No joke.
Meet the Center for Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital:
Gender dysphoria occurs when there is a conflict between the gender you were assigned at birth and the gender with which you identity. This can create significant distress, and you may feel uncomfortable in your body. The Center for Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital offers gender affirmation surgery services to eligible adolescents and young adults who are ready to take this step in their journey. It is the first center of its kind in the U.S. in a major pediatric hospital setting.
Well isn’t that just lovely. Congratulations on your first.
As the first pediatric center in the country dedicated to the surgical care of transgender patients, we take an interdisciplinary approach from the start to ensure exceptional patient care. Our skilled team includes specialists in plastic surgery, urology, endocrinology, nursing, gender management, and social work, who collaborate to provide a full suite of surgical options for transgender teens and young adults. Our experienced anesthesia team works to provide culturally sensitive care to the gender-diverse community. By partnering with the hospital’s nationally recognized Gender Management Service (GeMS), which provides a range of medical options for transgender youth, we help young people with gender identity concerns transfer seamlessly to surgical care if and when they are ready.
The Center currently offers vaginoplasty, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction, breast augmentation, facial harmonization and other gender affirmation surgeries to eligible patients. We follow the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines to surgically treat people who are stable in their gender identity and have documentation of persistent gender dysphoria. You do not need to be a GeMS patient to have surgery at the Center.
The Center’s setting in an academic medical center means that our clinicians are able to benefit from Boston Children’s rich community of scientific and clinical resources. As the Center grows, we hope to further expand our understanding of gender concerns and surgical techniques by leading and participating in various research projects. Our areas of interest include access improvements to gender-affirming surgery, fertility intentions and concerns of transgender young adults, and educational interventions regarding post-surgical self-care.
What could possibly go wrong…
The Huffington Post, or Alanna Vagianos who writes for it, or both, doesn’t/don’t know which people do the baby-having.
They know, of course, but they pretend not to.
Emphasis added:
[Kris] Kobach has continually called for the Supreme Court to repeal Roe v. Wade, and believes there should be no exceptions for abortion restrictions. In 2018, Kobach supported legislation to ban all abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected. In 2004, he was a proponent of a bill that requires people seeking an abortion to get an ultrasound and mandates the state to tell patients that an abortion will cause a fetus to feel pain — an often cited anti-choice talking point that has not been scientifically proven.
…
Since Roe fell in June, around a dozen states in the South and Midwest have severely restricted or banned abortion — making Kansas an unlikely sanctuary state. And the fact that Kansas is now a refuge for millions of Americans seeking abortion shows just how dire access to care really is.
Abortion is already heavily regulated in Kansas: It’s banned after 22 weeks except to save the life of the pregnant person, and government funding for abortion care is outlawed.
It’s the new burqa.
Marina Hyde on The Great Intrusion:
FBI raids on former presidents; filing stuff in the U-bend – another hugely uplifting 24 hours in politics. Not for the first time, much of the most unwittingly revealing commentary on it all comes from Trump himself, who says of the raid, “nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before”. Well quite.
Well quite, indeed. Why would that be? Oooh it’s a tough one…let me think hard for a second…oh I know, couldn’t it be because no president of the US has been such a determined criminal before? Not even Nixon?
The whole business has appalled freedom-loving anti-elitist Nigel Farage, who this morning announced himself to be “shocked” by the FBI’s presence at Trump’s property, before concluding that “the deep state truly does exist”. Carry yourself with the moral and intellectual consistency of Nigel, who believes that rich and powerful men who are the subject of multiple active criminal investigations should be above the law, while he himself has previously endorsed a US political candidate who – among other things – believes that all homosexuality should be made illegal.
Maybe Nigel and Donald could become a comedy duo type of thing. Not quite Pete and Dud, not quite Laurie and Fry, but maybe up there with Abbott and Costello?
Some gossip about the Conceptual James v Twitter quarrel:
Even if you’ve never heard of James Lindsay, you probably know a few of his hits.
He was part of that “grievance studies hoax” a few years back, where he and a couple of other anti-woke activists published a handful of ridiculous papers (the most headline-grabbing was arguably one about “rape culture” at Portland dog parks) in academic journals. It became known as the “Sokal Squared Hoax,” and to its admirers it was a devastating exposé of how far the humanities in higher education had sunk in service of identity politics.
The couple of other activists were Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose.
At the time, in 2018, Lindsay insisted he was a “left-leaning liberal,” a fellow traveler of the erstwhile anti-woke collective that once called it itself the “Intellectual Dark Web,” and he was praised and promoted by some of its leading figures as an important and brave public intellectual.
But in 2022, he’s a Trump-supporting, Big Lie-espousing, vaccine-denying, far-right bigot who thinks Sen. Joe McCarthy “had it right” and “didn’t go nearly far enough” during his infamous (and near-universally repudiated) witch hunts of suspected communists during the 1950s.
And until the other day a very prolific composer of tweets.
It’s Lindsay’s style of trolling—his hundreds of shitposts per day which drew over 300,000 Twitter followers, and which has on more than one occasion manifested itself as straight-up harassment—that I consider a legitimate contender for platform moderation.
On occasion, I’ve mixed it up with Lindsay on Twitter, and I can attest that the resultant swarm of anonymous psycho @conceptualames fan accounts that floods your mentions for a few days isn’t fun. (Ask any woman who has run afoul of Lindsay online, his Twitter minions target those who displease him online with disgusting, misogynistic, and bigoted attacks—frequently earning Lindsay’s approvals with amplifying retweets.)
That’s where I first heard of him: Gamergate and all that. Practically a generation ago.
Another defender was Lindsay’s fellow “grievance studies” hoaxer Peter Boghossian, who tweeted that Twitter “arbitrarily” enforces its speech codes, and that the company did so when it banned Lindsay. He’s got a point. The tweet that supposedly got Lindsay banned wasn’t much different than thousands of other posts in which he’s spouted bigoted bile or sicced his followers on a target of his ire. (The Daily Beast reached out to a Twitter spokesperson for clarification on why Lindsay was permanently suspended, but has yet to receive a response.)
Who knows, maybe there’s a numerical cap on tweets of that kind and Lindsay blew past it.
Trump is using it to demand more money. Of course he is.
Donald Trump on Tuesday tried to turn the news of an FBI search of his Florida estate to his benefit, citing the investigation in text messages and emails soliciting political donations from his supporters.
“I’m a criminal, send $$$.”
“As they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop the Republican Party and me once more,” Trump said in a fundraising email on Tuesday. “The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt, must be exposed and stopped.”
Therefore, send $$$$$$$.
Eric Trump, one of Trump’s adult children, told Fox News on Monday the search concerned boxes of documents that his father brought from the White House.
So in other words semi-adult Eric told Fox News that Trump violated the Presidential Records Act? Smart move.
A federal law called the U.S. Presidential Records Act requires the preservation of memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other written communications related to a president’s official duties.
So any “boxes of documents” Trump “brought from the White House” would be documents he had no right to remove from the White House.
Womanhood is a tent big enough to accommodate Kim Kardashian and trans women, according to Val McDermid, the crime writer, who claims that concern about transgender rights is overblown.
No it’s not; it’s not any kind of tent, big or small. It’s not a tent and it’s not expandable in the sense that it can mean itself and also its opposite. If “woman” can mean “man” then it no longer means “woman,” so what use is it? We still need a word that means what “woman” used to mean, so why not just save ourselves the trouble and stick with the word we already have? If men who consider themselves woman-like want a word for themselves they should invent a new one; the word “woman” is already taken.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, McDermid says: “I can remember [Section] 28. I can remember people saying: “You’re not a proper woman. I don’t want you in the same changing room as my wife. We are doing the same thing again.”
No we’re not, we’re doing a different thing. Lesbians are women. Men are not women. That’s why it’s not the same thing.
Originally a comment by Rob on You must tell the truth while you testify.
I’m sure Jones does know the difference between truth and bullshit. Even between the shades of truth that a complex world throws up. I don’t think he cares. Neither does Trump. Or anyone else in that broad camp. For that matter the same could be said for some on the activist left (TRA’s anybody?). The common thread for all these people with megaphones is that they are appealing to the emotions of their audiences. The words don’t have to be true (and usually are not). They have to evoke the feeling that the audience craves. It’s especially dangerous because it’s addictive, probably in a literal sense. The more someone gets high on listening to emotionally powerful nonsense, the more detached they become from the reality that could give them pause. The more they crave the next hit that makes them feel justified in their beliefs, the more they reject other views. The more they get dragged to the extreme end of their views because people there accept and encourage them, while others begin to shun them, the more they need and seek out the reinforcement and the more they shun reality as being a conspiracy and a sham.
I suspect that in pre-information age society people like this were kept functioning within broadly normal bounds by the social pressure of neighbours, bosses, co-workers, and family. They probably made up about the same percentage of the population, but except for the odd sudden mass social disruption things ticked along. Those who didn’t were the madmen, the social outcasts. Now, with social isolation being the norm in our culture, and a hosepipe of any sort on online, cable, or TV of your individual taste available, those susceptible are able to mainline the extreme without connection to the rest of us.
Looking at history I’d normally say this would be sorted by a war or a brutal government, or eventually fade out to background again over 2-3 generations. With the rising pressure of resource shortages and climate change added to the mix, it’s hard to see a benign outcome.
