Tribunal part 3:

AR – going back to charitable objects of LGB Alliance, same sex attraction and advocacy.

PR -yes,
AR – the elimination of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
PR – that’s what they claim.
AR – that’s quite a broad object many ways they could do that. AR – they do not hide their object that they are campaigning to maintain the definition as same sex attracted.
PR – what there aims are and what they do are different
AR – we are not talking yet about what they do, there is no dark agenda. They don’t lie about it. 

PR – what they say and what they are doing is different. I disagree.
AR – nothing they are doing is attempting to prevent trans people living their lives in peace and dignity
PR – I don’t agree, they are undermining trans rights in reality.

What are trans rights?

There is no “right” to force other people to see you the way you see yourself. There sure as hell is no “right” to force people to have sex with you despite the fact that they are not sexually attracted to you. Who is actually undermining rights here? I’d say it’s Paul Roberts, trying to guilt lesbians and gay men into having sex against their inclinations.

More tribunal:

AR – you agreed its transphobic to say that a person with a female body can be a gay man.

R – yes
AR – you believe that it is transphobic to say that gay men do not have sex with people with female bodies.
R – its not for me to say who should have sex with anyone. 

Naughty. That’s not the issue. The issue is definitions.

AR – I’m not talking about individuals. Is it a transphobic statement in general?

R – that puts it in a very binary way and I’m not sure I agree.

But that’s the whole point. The trans ideology does put it in a very binary way: it does shun and punish and exclude people for the crime of saying gay men do not have sex with people with female bodies. That’s what this hearing is about.

AR – anyone with a female body who is attracted to men is a heterosexual, that is an opinion held by many

R – there will be some who believe that
AR – you think it’s bigotry?
R – we are talking about preferences there and its up to that individual
AR – the view that someone with a female body attracted to men, is a heterosexual woman, that is inconsistent with the values of your organisations? 

R – yes, that is inconsistent with our values.

The truth at last.

AR – the phrase ‘same sex attraction’ had fallen out of currency until LGB Alliance was formed.

PR – yes, but practice was mixed.
AR – Stonewall formed using the term Same sex attraction’.
PR yes
AR – you say it’s not meant to be exclusionary but by its very nature it excludes people who are not same sex attracted.
PR – the difficulty is that it makes sex and gender binary
AR you no longer advocate for people for who are same sex attracted 

PR – we do advocate for them
AR – you advocate for same gender attraction not same sex

PR – we advocate for LGB trans people
AR – stonewall glossary, ‘homosexuality is a medical term for those who are attracted to the same gender’
PR – yes
AR – gender is to do with masculinity and femininity and are culturally determined. If it is culturally determined then it is not innate.
PR yes
AR – a man could be feminine and a woman could be masculine.
PR – people are who they are

Tautological but true, and men are not women.

AR – being attracted to people of the same gender is very different from being same sex attracted.
PR – I do not see the world as that binary.
AR – describes lesbian couples that may be one butch and one femme, aren’t they a straight couple based on gender identity?
PR – I don’t believe there are many lesbian couples like that (Outburst from spectators)

Hahahahaha I just bet there was.

AR – but will you not acknowledge that people who believe in same sex attraction exist?

PR – I believe if someone is denying the human rights of a trans person, that is transphobic.
AR – are you suggesting that Fanshawe and Harris are denying Human rights to trans people?
PR – I’m not accusing anyone of that, I’m not a legal expert.

AR – you exclude anyone who wishes to describe LGB as same sex attracted?
PR – we exclude organisations that would exclude trans men and trans women.
AR – that’s a yes, then
PR – yes. 

There you go.

Putative LGB organizations exclude actual LGB organizations that don’t pretend trans people are literally and for all purposes the sex they are not. The “rights” of trans people to be “validated” now trump the rights of LGB people to be same-sex attracted.

The Mermaids-LGB Alliance tribunal has resumed.

AR is Akua Reindorf for LGBA, R is Paul Roberts, CEO of LGBT Consortium, for Anti-LGBA. I’ve filled out some of the tweets a little without marking them because they’re quick stenography.

AR – you believe they have a transphobic agenda?

R – yes that is correct

AR – you believe that they have deliberately adopted a positive stance to deceive the Charity Commission and the wider community.
R – yes that is correct
AR – you describe their messages as innocuous, are they delivering Hidden messages?

R – Yes
AR – CC decision looked at LGBA inevitably denigrates T people. Quoting from website, ‘respect’, ‘tolerance’ ‘dialogue’ ‘disagreement is not hate’. Do you believe those words are a sham and deceitful?
R – I disagree that that is how they are operating.

AR: now referring to witness statements from Bev Jackson and Kate Harris. Both discuss pride and history of lesbian activism.
R – that what is written here.
AR – that is 100 years of activism for progressive causes.
R – activism yes, not sure it is progressive

Bam. Decades of activism for lesbians and gay men, he’s not sure it’s progressive.

AR – you believe that they have set up this charity with sole objective of removing rights from trans people?
R – yes, I believe that is their prime objective
AR -you realise that they are bombarded daily on social media with accusations of being a hate group?
R – yes, I understand that. 

AR -tweet from J Maugham, describing LGB Alliance as a dark money funded hate group. O Wilson: similar tweet.
R – yes I see that
AR – you may not know how many followers they have but they are influential.
R – yes

I think O Wilson must be Owen Jones. They’re transcribing at lightning speed so flubs are inevitable.

They discuss transphobia and “a disgust for trans people,” R agrees that’s what he thinks they have.

AR: are you prepared to entertain that they are acting in good faith?

R – they might believe they are acting in good faith, I believe they are not.
AR: you say earlier they have deliberately deceived the Charity Commission, therefore they must be acting in Bad faith.
R – yes, I agree.
AR: so you are not prepared to entertain that they may be acting in good faith.
R – they are trying to remove rights from trans people. That can’t be good faith.

R is talking about removing rights from trans people without spelling out what rights he’s talking about. That can’t be good faith.

They talk about how recent the addition (aka “inclusion”) of trans to LGB is.

AR: the opposition is that LGB are sexual orientation and T is about identities. 

R – That is the argument.
AR – you don’t see that there are any conflicts between LGB and T rights.
R – I see that some might disagree.
AR – but you are exclusive of people who disagree with including T with LGB.
R – we are not inclusive of those who exclude T 

But they are inclusive of those who exclude the LG who exclude the T.

AR – you expect members to be inclusive. An org that focuses on gay men must include trans gay men

R – yes.
AR – that means that an org that focuses on gay men, must include people who are born female, but identify as men and are exclusively attracted to gay men. 

With the interesting result that an organization that focuses on gay men no longer focuses on gay men. It’s compelled heterosexuality under a “progressive” label.

AR – going back to the example, anyone who identifies as a man is quite a wide population.

R – yes.
AR – may not have surgery or taken hormones etc
R -yes
AR – so we are talking about self-identification.
R – yes.
AR – you mean that they are literally men?
R – no, there would be differences but my understanding is that they are men under the law

Ah, there would be differences. Interesting. There would be differences but the law says they are men, and everyone must obey the law. I wonder if the law can compel the gay men in these organizations that focus on gay men to be attracted to the women who are “men under the law.”

R – you keep using the word literally, what do you mean.

AR – actually, objectively.
R – trans men are men and should be treated as such.
AR – orgs must accept that a person with a female body can be a gay man. it is transphobic to say otherwise.
R – if someone is being Denied access to a service yes.
AR – do you believe it is transphobic to say that someone with a female body cannot be a gay man?
R – yes, I agree. 

Because sex isn’t about bodies, it’s about gendered souls.

To be continued

This comment of Sastra’s sent me to the source to get the full context.

The source is

SEC. 1101. DEFINITIONS AND RULES.
``(1) Race; color; religion; sex; sexual orientation; 
        gender identity; national origin.--The term `race', `color', 
        `religion', `sex', `sexual orientation', `gender identity', or 
        `national origin', used with respect to an individual, 
        includes--
 ``(A) the race, color, religion, sex, sexual 
                orientation, gender identity, or national origin, 
                respectively, of another person with whom the 
                individual is associated or has been associated; and
                    ``(B) a perception or belief, even if inaccurate, 
                concerning the race, color, religion, sex, sexual 
                orientation, gender identity, or national origin, 
                respectively, of the individual.

``(2) Gender identity.--The term `gender identity' means 
        the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other 
        gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of 
        the individual's designated sex at birth.

There.

It’s disconcerting. How? In its flimsiness, its triviality, its lack of the heft, the inescapability, the reality of race and sex and the others. Mannerisms??? We’re basing equality legislation on mannerisms now? Are they serious? There’s also the circularity of course. What does gender identity mean? It means the gender-related identity. Ohhhhh, thanks, that clears that up.

And on the basis of this circular absurd trivial nonsense they passed a law protecting men who want to elbow women out of women’s sports and prizes and jobs and everything else. Based on the men’s mannerisms.

Christ on a bike.

Guest post by James Garnett.

More and more these days I keep seeing pop technologists ranting on about AI and “transhumanism”, which is to say, moving beyond biology and injecting our consciousness into machines. There is so much wrong with this even from a merely technical standpoint that I don’t even know where to start.

So much of our consciousness and the way we understand and interpret the world is tied up with our physical bodies and the inseparable link between them and our minds (yes, I said “inseparable”) as to make talking about one without integrating the other almost nonsensical. It betrays the blindered standpoint of persons without disability or dysfunction; people who can mostly ignore the presence of their bodies because nothing impinges upon their awareness to force them to observe.

One person I spoke to recently said that this is exactly what the “Singularity” will mean (downloading one’s consciousness into a computer): freedom from awareness or worries about biology and the body. I submit that this is wholly and completely wrong and mistaken: being unaware of a body that is functioning perfectly is completely different from being cut off from that same body, or from living insensate, or living with a body that doesn’t do what our instinct tells us that it should. It doesn’t take much malfunction to make us very, very aware that we live within it, and that its proper function is absolutely fundamental to our ability (should we enjoy it) of being unaware of its daily operation.

Even the very formation of our thinking and the thoughts within are formed, molded, and ultimately limited by the fact that we have binocular vision facing forwards, or that we stand upright, or that we have two hands instead of eight tentacles, or that we have basic biological firmware mechanisms built in to our very brains that prevent us from doing such things as walking off a cliff, and so on et cetera.

Anyway. Just random blitherings on a lazy sunday afternoon.

Global warming–>more frequent droughts–>crop failures–>famines.

California rice fields:

Normally, by September, the drive north from Sacramento on Interstate 5 showcases vast stretches of flooded rice fields on both sides, farms bustling with tractors and workers preparing for fall harvest.

Not this year, said Kurt Richter, a third-generation rice farmer in Colusa, the rice capital of California where the local economy relies heavily on agriculture. “It is now just a wasteland,” he said.

As drought endures for a third year with record-breaking temperatures and diminishing water supplies, more than half of California’s rice fields are estimated to be left barren without harvest — about 300,000 out of the 550,000 or so in reported acres, provisional data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows. This year, rice is estimated to account for just 2% of total planted acres across the state.

That’s a lot of missing rice.

Espino, the Butte-based farm advisor, said the options are limited for rice farmers in the Sacramento River Valley, and continued drought would likely result in only those with the economic capacity to withstand the financial swings brought forth by the drought remaining.

But it’s hard to predict what exactly will happen this winter — if there will be plentiful rain to nourish these lands once more. “Nobody really knows what’s going to happen,” he said. “The only thing we can do is keep positive and hope for rain.”

Cross all those fingers.

There’s an awful lot of flapdoodle around over the public’s supposed “grief” – and not for the first time.

Ours what? Our “grief”? Come on.

The queen said so herself – the fictional one at least.

Erin Friday on the move to change Title IX at the expense of women and girls:

While U.S. citizens, and particularly women and parents, should be celebrating the golden jubilee of Title IX, marking 50 years of protection against sex discrimination, they are instead feverishly trying to stop the Biden administration from implementing sweeping changes to the 1972 federal civil rights law. The proposed regulations undermine the initial premise of Title IX, prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. These regulations will chill speech and enshrine gender identity as a reality…

When reality, oddly enough, is the very thing it isn’t.

Imagine changing federal laws to enshrine other fantasies. Affirmative action for white people who identify as black! Protections for people who were born here to people who were born here but identify as immigrants! Federal scholarships for Wasps who identify as first nations! Stipends for billionaires who identify as penniless!

On Sept. 12, 2022, the Department of Education will close public comments to its Notice of Proposal Rulemaking, a 700-page document rife with inconsistencies and double-speak. Essentially, the executive branch will promulgate new law expanding discrimination protections based on sex to include gender identity and sexual orientation. Notably, none of these terms are defined, resulting in incomprehensible regulations that guarantee a barrage of lawsuits from both sides of the aisle. Few students, from preschool to graduate school, will be immune to the deleterious effects of these regulations should they be enacted.

But on the plus side, there will be more and more and more precious gender angels everywhere.

Call to action.

The trans and lesbian communities have always been intertwined??? Meaning lesbians have always been intertwined with men who claim to be lesbians? I don’t think so. I really really don’t think so. Why would they be?

Also, there’s no such thing as a “trans lesbian.” Men can’t be lesbians. Men aren’t lesbians. Lesbians are under no obligation to “validate” or embrace or protect or prioritize or defend or scrub the toilets of men who call themselves lesbians.

Also the brandished axes are duly noted. Of course the pretense is that they represent the labrys, which has been a lesbian symbol for decades, but the (at least) double meaning is obvious. “Shut up and comply, bitches, or we’ll chop you up with these here axes.”

I remember when Republicans and the right wing were all about law n order. Seems like a century ago now.

Donald Trump’s non-stop drive to paint the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents as a political witch hunt is drawing rebukes from ex-justice department and FBI officials who warn such attacks can spur violence and pose a real threat to the physical safety of law enforcement.

But the concerns have not deterred Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and other Trump allies from making inflammatory remarks echoing the former US president.

The unrelenting attacks by Trump and loyalists such as McCarthy, senator Lindsey Graham, Steve Bannon and false conspiracy theorist Alex Jones against law enforcement have continued despite strong evidence that Trump kept hundreds of classified documents illegally.

Evidence shmevidence. The point is that Trump is Our Guy.

“I have been dealing with law enforcement and the criminal justice system for close to 40 years. I have never seen the type or virulence of attacks being made every day against the FBI, DoJ lawyers, and judges,” former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich told the Guardian. “It’s a chorus led by Trump but that includes elected officials at every level. It is dangerous and unacceptable.”

Bromwich added: “It’s one thing for professional rabble rousers, liars, and nihilists – such as Bannon and Jones – to attack law enforcement and DoJ in the way that they have since the search; it’s quite another for so-called respectable political figures such as McCarthy and Graham to do so. Their recent actions and words reflect that theirs is a politics detached from facts and principle.”

They’re not really respectable political figures any more. They hold respectable offices, but they themselves are just common or garden self-dealing bullies like Trump.

Judge throws out ludicrous lawsuit:

A federal judge in Florida dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, saying there was no basis for the former president to claim that Clinton and her allies harmed him with an orchestrated plan to spread false information that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race.

What means this word “basis”? If Trump thinks it, it’s true; that’s how the world works.

Trump “is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum,” Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida wrote in a scathing 65-page ruling released Friday. The judge also wrote about “the audacity of Plaintiff’s legal theories and the manner in which they clearly contravene binding case law.”

Other than that, decent effort.

The judge explains Trump in one paragraph:

“What the Amended Complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances,” Middlebrooks wrote.

That is Trump. He lacks substance in every department; he knows nothing about anything; all he has is endless bluster and sadism. A talkative bully=Donald Trump.

Middlebrooks pointedly took a shot at what he said was the lawsuit’s sweeping attempt to criminalize criticism of Trump, writing: “Neither politically opposing Plaintiff, disliking Plaintiff, nor engaging in political speech about Plaintiff that casts him in a negative light is illegal.”

And if anyone in the world is deserving of a great deal of speech that casts him in a negative light, it’s Plaintiff.

Middlebrooks also highlights the difference between being in conflict with Trump and causing him harm: “Opposing Plaintiff’s presidential campaign does not amount to a realized pecuniary loss. Statements to law enforcement or comments made in a political campaign are not intended to induce others not to deal with Plaintiff or his business, or to cause direct or immediate financial loss.”

In other words, in less technical language: no, bozo, of course you can’t sue someone for running against you in a political campaign, that’s not how any of this works.

How to pretend women are included even when they’re not:

Bros review – Billy Eichner’s all-LGBTQ+ romantic comedy is a winner

What the Guardian goes on to describe, though, is a movie about gay men. Which is fine, but don’t pretend it’s also about lesbians.

Billy Eichner’s slick Judd Apatow-produced gay comedy Bros carries with it the specific sort of baggage that only a “first” is forced to carry. As the first theatrically released studio gay rom-com, the first studio film co-written by and starring an openly gay man and the first studio film with a majority LGBTQ+ cast, it’s a light movie made heavy with expectation – will it be gay enough or good enough or accessible enough or profitable enough – an unfair yet unavoidable heap of crosses to bear.

The fact that it’s called Bros kind of hints that lesbians don’t get a whole lot of screen time.

The review as a whole makes it pretty clear that it’s about a gay couple, and that there are some “LGBTQ+” parts for the crowd scenes. Again, that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s about lesbians.

One of the two toxic traits, so of course I had to decide what the other was before reading on.

A former lawyer who served in the White House during Donald Trump’s administration, said the ex-president is a “deeply wounded narcissist”, claiming that’s one of the two toxic traits that dictate his actions and decision making.

Well of course the other one is obvious, it’s just that there are a lot of ways to name it. Complete lack of conscience is one way; complete lack of any kind of regard or concern for other people is another. Brutality is another; piggy selfish bullying mean rude aggression is another. It’s why I’ll never understand his popularity. I can grasp admiring someone who can be cruel on occasion, but when it’s someone who is relentlessly shamelessly brazenly horrible at all times, I just can’t get my head around it.

Anyway yes that was it. One he’s a narcissist, two he’s a shit.

Ty Cobb, who stepped down in 2018 because of Trump’s disapproval of his “conciliatory” approach, also said Trump is “incapable of acting other than in his perceived self-interest or for revenge”.

Or a third motivation: sheer pleasure in bullying and injuring people. He loves doing it. He feeds on it, like a hummingbird sucking down the nectar.

During the CBS interview, Cobb also said the current justice department investigation about Trump allegedly stealing highly classified documents from the White House is aimed to cover a wider ground including his involvement in January 6 riots and schemes to undermine the 2020 elections.

Oh good. Go for it, justice people.

“I think the Department of Justice intends to prosecute him no matter what,” he said.

The search warrant is “very, very comprehensive in terms of the types of documents that the government could take”, Cobb added.

Good. Git him.

Stonewall to Oxford: don’t refer to mothers as “she” if you want to score well.

Stonewall told Oxford University to stop referring to mothers as “she” in order to win a higher place on its controversial employer scheme, new documents have revealed.

…

The university had tried to keep its correspondence with the lobby group secret. However, it was ordered to release the documents after the information commissioner ruled that participation in the Workplace Equality Index allowed Stonewall to “exercise a significant degree of influence” over the policies of public organisations.

And in doing so, telling them to erase women from the language.

Oxford University was ranked 93rd in the 2019 Workplace Equality Index. A year later, it climbed to 76th place.

Big jump!

The documents show that in its 2020 feedback, Stonewall took issue with Oxford referring to mothers as “she” in its maternity policies, despite its advice to make the language gender neutral.

“There is good work on your policies, and it’s good to see clear commitments to trans staff,” the Stonewall assessor wrote. “The majority of your family policies are gender neutral which is good, but you use ‘she’ in the maternity policy and I recommend reviewing the glossary to expand the definition of ‘mother’ to ensure it is fully inclusive.”

What glossary would that be? The one that says men can be mothers?

Men can’t be mothers though. That’s one of the most basic things humans know – it’s female people who are mothers, female people exclusively.

In its 2019 feedback, Stonewall said: “Some great work here and clear thought-out responses to the questions. Please keep in mind that any examples in your training should cover sexual orientation and gender identity, there is a lot here which are examples of homophobia but not biphobia and/or transphobia.”

Probably because they’re not real.

Stonewall said: “We are absolutely not trying to eliminate the word ‘mother’. Every parent should be supported by their employers, and our advice simply highlights the importance of inclusive language in ensuring that HR policies, such as family and parental leave policies, are inclusive of all lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer staff.”

Blah blah blah every parent, but it’s women who face particular hardships and demands that stem from motherhood. And how exactly can maternal leave be “inclusive” of queer people? When nobody knows what “queer” even means?

More from Pakistan:

Between 5% and 10% of the city’s population of 350,000 are still stuck in their flooded homes. Those who can, travel around by boat. Others swim in the flood waters with a stick to get about. Sewage and flood waters have mixed to a dirty green. Interviews with local people painted a picture of a disaster on a scale that the government and NGOs were unable to cope with.

…

Dadu and neighbouring Qambar Shahdadkot are the worst-affected districts in the Sindh province, itself the worst-hit province. Flood water inundates roads for miles, making many towns inaccessible. Displaced people live in tents and makeshift homes on roadsides.

…

Manzoor Ali, also from Nurang Chandio, said villagers had built the tents and makeshift houses on their own. “We are running out of food,” he said. “We eat once a day. My daughter, who is just two years old, has a recurrent high fever and there are no medical facilities here.”

Holding her son close to her, Ghulam e Kubra said: “There is nothing for us. Children are falling sick and we are helpless. We don’t have clean drinking water, food and medicine. We don’t know what to do with our lives.”

Here the cruise ships are getting ready for another afternoon departure.

Fatima Bhutto tells us about the disaster in Pakistan:

This summer, erratic monsoon rains battered the country from north to south – Sindh, the southernmost province, received 464% more rain over the last few weeks than the 30-year average for the period.

At the same time, Pakistan’s glaciers are melting at a rate never seen before. These two consequences of the climate crisis have combined to create a monstrous super-flood that has ravaged the country.

Ninety per cent of crops in Sindh have been damaged; Faisal Edhi, who runs Pakistan’s largest social welfare organisation, the Edhi Foundation, has warned that those who don’t die from the floods risk death by starvation.

A famine is coming; the only question is how soon? Economic losses are estimated to be in excess of $30bn, 50 million people have been internally displaced, there is the threat of a malaria epidemic as floodwater lies stagnant – satellite images have shown the shocking formation of a 100km-wide inland lake in Sindh due to overflowing from the Indus River – and there is no doubt that a generation will be cast backwards as already meagre education and health services are violently disrupted. More than 400 children have died and with winter coming and millions left without shelter, many more will.

It’s like Katrina times a very large number.

Prospect gives us a typically smug “what’s all this fuss about trans rights?” piece by a typically smug dude who isn’t affected by the issue the way women are, and who is so smug he doesn’t notice or care that he isn’t affected by the issue the way women are.

You may have noticed, whether or not you are interested in transgender issues, a fascination with them in the press that borders on the obsessional. 

Ur hur hur, fascination, obsessional, ur hur hur, Y R people so interested?

It’s no skin off his ass so why is it skin off anyone else’s ass?

You may have got the impression, because much of the writing asserts or implies this, that trans people are a threat to women, want to abolish lesbianism, send disgusting messages and make ridiculous demands, and that dangerous ideologues are rushing young girls into operating theatres if they show an interest in things traditionally considered male. 

Aren’t people silly??? Zero trans people of either sex pose any threat at all to any women anywhere, as everyone knows. Lia Thomas? No threat to women at all in any way! Rapists in women’s prisons? No threat!! Men taking women’s prizes, jobs, scholarships? No threat!! A cosmetic surgeon who rejoices at yeeting the teets? Not a threat!!

The imbalance is not confined to the conservative press. Take one BBC article, which concerned trans women allegedly pressuring lesbians who are cisgender—identifying with the gender they were assigned at birth—into having sex with them. It uncritically quoted a transphobic individual and cited partisan and valueless research. It’s still there, though with the headline changed and the more questionable material removed. One trans woman who doesn’t want to be identified—I’ll call her Clare—says that “you wouldn’t see stuff like this about any other group. It is the acceptable face of bigotry.” 

Stuff like what? We don’t know. All we have is “It uncritically quoted a transphobic individual and cited partisan and valueless research,” which is 1. vague and 2. entirely according to the clueless and biased Rowan Moore.

In contentious debates where there are two or more positions to be taken, the media often take the one least favourable to what most trans people feel are their rights.

Ok, bub, then spell them out. Spell out the rights. Is it a right for men to take women’s prizes and places on teams because they claim to identify as women? If you think that’s a right, kindly go on to explain why you think so and how you explain away women’s rights in that situation.

Supposed victims of cancel culture are given the opportunity to lament, loudly and often, that they have been silenced. Meanwhile, in the storm of words about their identities and their futures, the voices of transgender people are hard to find.

The hell they are. The voices of “transgender people” are loud and everywhere.

China’s heatwave:

[T]he heat wave that baked China for weeks was startling in its scale, duration and intensity. Through July and August, it shattered temperature records, dried up rivers, withered crops, sparked wildfires and caused deaths from heatstroke. It may have been the most severe heat wave ever recorded.

And it laid bare frightening realities about how humanity is expected to adapt.

With temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, electricity usage soared as hundreds of millions of Chinese switched on air-conditioners. But where was that power supposed to come from? Severe drought had dried up the rivers on which the country depends for much of its clean hydroelectricity, crippling output.

This forced China, which pumps more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, to double down on carbon-belching coal to make up the power shortfall. The heat wave had created a vicious cycle that, if replicated across the globe during future extreme weather events, will deeply complicate efforts to combat some of the worst effects of climate change.

“Complicate” looks like a euphemism there. Burning more coal doesn’t so much “complicate” efforts to fight climate change as it renders them useless.

We drove through normally verdant farmland toward Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu, passing miles of withered cornfields and bumper-to-bumper traffic that flowed in the opposite direction toward the mountains. With hydropower output crippled, the authorities had imposed power-saving blackouts that closed businesses and rendered air-conditioners useless. People were fleeing to higher, cooler ground.

…

Chengdu wasn’t the only place. At least 262 weather stations nationwide tied or set heat records, and rivers that are important arteries for shipping and transportation became unnavigable. Water levels in the Yangtze, the world’s third-longest river, hit record lows, dropping as much as 20 feet below recent averages.

…

The Chinese government has now warned that the autumn harvest is at risk, prompting fears that increased demands for food imports could exacerbate a global food crisis. And ominously, the power crunch caused by the heat wave has given rise to calls for China to slow down its transition from coal to renewable energy in order to keep the economy running.

Not good.

How did I miss this?? Republicans cheering Viktor Orban:

All you need to know about the state of the Republican Party today is what happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday [last month]. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been destroying his country’s democracy, received a standing ovation less than two weeks after he gave a speech in Romania in which he endorsed the white supremacist “replacement theory” and denounced a “mixed-race world.”

Texas Monthly has more:

Last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán traveled to Romania to deliver a fiery speech denouncing the “mixing” of European and non-European peoples. “We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race . . . and we do not want to become a mixed race,” Orbán told his audience. Countries that accepted race-mixing, he said, were “no longer nations; they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.” The next day, one of Orbán’s longest-serving advisers resigned, calling the address a “pure Nazi speech” that was “worthy of Goebbels.” 

On Thursday, in Dallas, Orbán received a standing ovation at the semiannual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), America’s most important right-wing political event. He spent much of his speech defending his vision of a “zero-migration” country defined by ethnic homogeneity and Judeo-Christian values. “The globalists can all go to hell,” he declared to an audience of several thousand activists. “I have come to Texas.” 

Yeah boy there’s nothing more valuable than “ethnic homogeneity.” It’s like…I dunno…cookies. You got your chocolate chip cookies and your ginger cookies and you don’t want to go mixing them because they wouldn’t taste good. Humans are exactly like that. Mixing is yuck.

He had come to the right place. Speaking at CPAC on the same day as Orbán, Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick echoed the Hungarian leader’s Christian nationalist rhetoric. “The framers did not write the Constitution,” Patrick asserted, “God wrote the Constitution. We are a Christian nation.”

I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on the facts there. I’m pretty sure we know exactly what guys wrote the Constitution, and that they were particular 18th century guys as opposed to being “God.” Also by the way there is no such person as “God” and there are no books or documents or shopping lists written by “God,” because of the whole no such person thing.

Viktor Orban. Honestly.

More on this we’re definitely going to pass a lot of tipping points story today:

The drought- and flood-stricken summer of 2022 has shown the impact of 1.1° Celsius of global warming — the amount that’s already occurred since pre-industrial times. Now a major scientific reassessment finds that several critical planetary systems are at risk of breaking beyond repair even if nations restrain warming to 1.5°C, the lower threshold stipulated by the Paris Agreement. 

At that level of warming, coral reefs may die off, ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic may melt and permafrost may abruptly thaw, according to a new paper in the journal Science. 

Which will cause a whole lot more critical planetary systems to break beyond repair.

At about 1.5°C some tipping points may be reached, including for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, accelerated thawing of boreal permafrost, and die-off of tropical coral reefs. But the authors “cannot rule out” that ice-sheet tipping points have already been passed and that some other tipping elements have minimum thresholds in range of 1.1°C to 1.5°C of warming. 

…

“Our assessment provides strong scientific evidence for urgent action to mitigate climate change,” the scientists write in a summary. “We show that even the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C is not safe as 1.5°C and above risks crossing multiple tipping points [CTPs]. Crossing these CTPs can generate positive feedbacks that increase the likelihood of crossing other CTPs.”

Meanwhile we do nothing. We can’t. We didn’t evolve to do the kind of thing that needs to be done.