Speaking of the necessity of choice between competition and inclusion –

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on When you operate with the value of compassion first.

If participation in sports is now to be based on “compassion,” and “inclusion,” then trans-identified prospective athletes are going to have to line up behind the millions of boys, girls, men, and women who fail to make the team of their choice. Or is their “exclusion” somehow okay? The vast majority of these “excludees” are not going to be allowed to try to game the rules by trying out teams they’re not qualified for. High-schoolers aren’t going to be permitted to sign up for primary school teams. Adults aren’t going to be allowed into children’s leagues. All for excellent reasons that everyone knows and abides by. Nobody calls that “cruel,” or “disgusting.” But somehow, girls and women are forced to give way to male players who are permitted on their teams? How many future Rapinoes are being denied spots on teams right now because of delusionally misguided notions of “inclusion?”

Many trans-supportive comments on twitter threads like this one decry the sudden “hypocritical” interest in women’s sports by those opposed to TiM “inclusion.” This is supposed to be some sort of “gotcha,” and that those supposedly being “caught” are only involved in the debate to stick it to trans identified people. Just like women who organize for the protection of their own rights and safety have no legitimate reason to do so, they are only doing so out of spiteful, malicious, genocidal, anti-trans bigotry. By this same logic, Black people organizing for their own interests don’t really have any reason to do so, they’re doing it for kicks because they just really hate White people.

Yes, that totally sounds like the right side of history to me.

I’m not into sports, but I still get to say “cheating is bad,” whether I follow sports or not. I get to say that permitting cheating, and encouraging cheating, is not good for society, even if I’m not cheated personally. Nobody gets to tell my to whom I am permitted to extend my concern. I get to feel anger and sympathy towards those who are cheated because I am human. That’s what we do. If the attention which that concern and interest shines on you does not put you in a good light, that’s on you, not me. I get to say that your hand is in the cookie jar, even if the cookies are not mine, and even if I don’t happen to like the kind of cookies you’re stealing. The important thing is the theft, not whether or not I happen to like particular sweet treats after meals. Letting you get away with it is not in my interest, or anyone else’s, because you might not limit your thieving to cookies.* Similarly, the sports cheating in question is not happening in a separate reality. The people doing the cheating and allowing it to happen live with the rest of us. How are they to be trusted outside the arena, gymnasium, or board room? Toxic dishonesty, entitlement, and impunity doesn’t wash down the drain in the locker room showers; it doesn’t get left behind under lock and key in the sporting authority’s office desk drawer. It gets carried out into the wider world. But there’s more at stake than broad, theoretical notions of ethics and morality. While the cheaters win their phony victories, women and girls suffer real harm. It is in everyone’s interest to stop that from happening, rather than celebrating and enabling it.

*Given the temperaments of many pro-TiM-inclusion commenters, it seems entirely appropriate that I pitch this argument to the level of a naughty child having to be told why stealing is bad. Mind you, they still wouldn’t get it. We’d get the usual “trans women ARE women,” which is about as cogent an argument as the schoolyard classic “I know you are, but what am I?”

About that World Athletics item – Sean Ingle yesterday:

The World Athletics president, Sebastian Coe, has hailed swimming’s decision to ban transgender women from elite female competition as in “the best interests of its sport” – and hinted that track and field could soon follow suit.

If it’s in the best interests of one sport it’s surely in the best interests of all of them.

Lord Coe was in Budapest on Sunday as swimming’s governing body, Fina, voted to bar from women’s events trans athletes who have experienced any part of male puberty. Within 24 hours he announced that the World Athletics council would also be reviewing its transgender and DSD (differences in sex development) athletes policies at the end of the year.

Good. Bring on the wave.

“My responsibility is to protect the integrity of women’s sport. We take that very seriously and, if it means that we have to make adjustments to protocols going forward, we will,” Coe said. “And I’ve always made it clear: if we ever get pushed into a corner to that point where we’re making a judgment about fairness or inclusion, I will always fall down on the side of fairness.”

Which seems so obvious. Sport is inherently not about some kind of blanket inclusion, because it involves competition. Physical activities can be inclusive, but competitions can’t be.

Sean Ingle notes that finally the powers that be are having to pay attention.

The biggest battles in this summer of sport are being fought over in the boardrooms and backrooms, as federations wrestle with the thorniest question of all: should transgender women be allowed to participate in female sport?

It’s only “thorny” because fools made it thorny. It wasn’t thorny before. It was settled practice: men didn’t play on women’s teams or race against women or get in the ring with women.

For years most have regarded the issue as too dangerous to touch: the sporting equivalent of playing pass the parcel with a live grenade. Now, though, they have no choice. The emergence of elite trans women, such as the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the swimmer Lia Thomas and the cyclist Emily Bridges, has seen to that. Decisions are having to be made. Hard choices, too.

Elite? Elite? On the contrary. The whole point is that they’re middling at their sport, and pretend to be women in order to steal wins from women. They’re not elite athletes, and they are willing to harm women who are elite athletes for their own gratification.

But the decision of both swimming and rugby league in the past 48 hours to bar trans women from international competition does not necessarily mean that the majority of sports will follow suit. World Athletics is the most likely, given Sebastian Coe’s comments on Monday that “fairness is non-negotiable” and “biology trumps identity”. But after that the situation is murky – with most sports still using some form of testosterone limits, for all their flaws, to permit trans women to compete in the female category.

That breezy “for all their flaws” is nice. Their “flaws”=lying about the advantage to men and the unfairness to women. That’s not a flaw, it’s a calculated, persisted-in, determined insult to women.

Last Friday, for instance, cycling’s governing body, the UCI, opted to ride down a different path. It, too, accepts that the science shows that trans women have an advantage. But it says some unfairness to females in sport is acceptable in exchange for being inclusive.

Not unfairness to males of course. That would never do. It’s fine to accept unfairness (and it’s more than “some”) to women, because women just don’t matter.

Cycling’s new policy says cyclists such as Bridges can compete in the female category only if they keep their testosterone below 2.5ml for 24 months. But, in a crucial and under-reported passage, it also states that fair competition is not essential. “It may not be necessary, or even possible, to eliminate all individual advantages held by a transgender,” the UCI writes in a policy document. “It is paramount, however, that all athletes competing have a chance to succeed, albeit not necessarily an equal chance and in line with the true essence of sport.”

That’s opaque and downright incoherent, but I guess it doesn’t matter as long as the men get what they want.

Understandably women’s groups are angry, regarding such an approach as unscientific and unfair.

Of course it’s unfair! Why doesn’t everyone regard it as unfair?

Watching this happen is a very embittering experience, I have to say. It really does make it all too plain that most people are happy to shrug off women and their goals and ambitions and hopes.

Jeez. Trump can’t even subjunctive.

“If I didn’t endorse him [DeSantis], he wouldn’t have won,” Trump told the New Yorker, which published an in-depth story profiling DeSantis’s rise.

Tsssss. No no NO. “If I hadn’t endorsed him, he wouldn’t have won.”

Anyway, the point is, the repellent governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is getting too much attention for Trump’s liking, so he very naturally announces that that attention is all thanks to him, the great and powerful Oz.

The governor’s rising star and declining interest in hanging out with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, are fuelling resentment among the former president’s inner circle. One Republican political consultant told the New Yorker, “Trump World is working overtime to find ways to burn DeSantis down. They really hate him​.”

Good. Do this. Burn each other down.

Trump said much the same when asked for his thoughts on the 43-year-old governor running for the White House during a phone interview with the rightwing TV station Newsmax on Monday.

“I have a good relationship with Ron, I don’t know that he wants to run. I haven’t seen that. You’re telling me something that I’ve not seen, so we’ll see what happens,” he said. “But no, I was very responsible for getting him elected.”

Trump always says much the same. Always. It’s one of the many obvious signs of his mental vacancy.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on When politics becomes identity.

Re. communist China, on of the main lessons I learned from Jung Chang’s biography of Chairman Mao was that the endless purges and show-trials were not even meant to smoke out any real dissenters. At least that wasn’t their main function. The real purpose was conveying the following message: “Someone is going to get it during the next purge whether they are in fact guilty or not. Make sure it’s not you!”. And of course the way to make sure it wasn’t you was by making sure it was somebody else. In other words, it wasn’t enough to be “innocent” of any heretical tendencies. In fact, you didn’t even have to be suspected of any heresy. Insufficient eagerness to inform on others was enough to get in trouble yourself. It didn’t matter how actively complicit you were in pursuing heretics and thought criminals if most of your neighbors were even more complicit. That way everyone was forced to compete to stay out of trouble, and someone was inevitably going to lose. There was no way to be safe.

Another point that too often gets overlooked is this: Terror was seen as desirable not just for its effects on the victims, but just as much for its effects on the perpetrators. Making people get their hands dirty was a means to get them under Mao’s control. The perpetrators were supposed to deduce for themselves “If the chairman goes down, his enemies are going to come after me as one of his accomplices, therefore I have a stake in keeping the Chairman in power for ever”. Another advantage of making people actively complicit in the crimes of the regime was to encourage them to rationalize their behavior and get a justification spiral going: “Only a spineless, despicable coward with no integrity or principles would persecute innocent people on behalf of a psychopatic tyrant to save his own skin. But I’m not a spineless, despicable coward, and I did persecute those those people, therefore it had to be the right thing to do.”

I think all of this applies to wokism to some degree. The endless purity spirals basically force everyone to compete to stay out of trouble, and there is no such thing as “where the line goes”, no way to be safe. Getting people actively engaged in attacking and vilifying others as bigots, haters, TERFs, transphobes, or even Nazis advocating murder and genocide, creates a stake – psychologically as well as strategically – in helping the TRAs win whether or not it’s “right” or “wrong”.

Gee, thanks, BBC. What star woman athlete did they book onto the Today program to talk about men in women’s sports?

Fallon Fox. A man who broke a woman’s skull.

Man who identifies as woman says it’s all a big mistake.

Those who support these moves sometimes argue that segregation between trans and cisgender women in sports is regrettable, but necessary for fairness.

It’s not “segregation.” That’s a loaded word in this context, and it’s not the right one in any case. Women and men are already separate categories – women and men. That’s not “segregation,” it’s reality.

Also, I don’t say keeping men out of women’s sports is regrettable. I don’t think it’s the least bit regrettable; what’s regrettable is not doing that. What’s regrettable is letting William Thomas and Rhys McKinnon steal all those wins from women.

They argue that the performance gap is so large that a cisgender woman would be unlikely to ever win against a trans woman.

No, that’s not what I argue. There’s no such thing as “cis women” for a start. I note that men have massive physical advantages over women, and the rest follows from that.

Fina argues that they have found an approach that “emphasis[es] competitive fairness”. But this can only be true if you ignore that trans women like Thomas will now be required to race against men with whom they could never effectively compete.

Tough. shit. They decided to “transition”; it’s their problem. It’s certainly not the problem of the women they want to compete against. Women don’t exist to take the consequences of men’s mistakes.

Any suggestion that it’s fairer for Thomas, an elite athlete before and after her transition, to compete with men who win with times 25 seconds faster than her, than for her to compete with women who are behind by a second, is a farce. It can only be justified by arguing that trans women have no right to expect competitive fairness at all.

Trans women put themselves in a bind by transitioning. They’ve been dealing with it by cheating women. There’s nothing fair about that. I really don’t care whether or not they can compete in the future. I don’t think it’s important.

The comments of Fina representatives are full of self-congratulation. They call the move “only a first step towards full inclusion”, “comprehensive, science-based and inclusive”, and say that it “protect[s] competitive fairness”. But these claims are false.

Wait til you hear the claims of trans women!

Originally a comment by Artymorty on A broader range of social justice causes.

All across the left, we’re seeing this. It’s because the left have conceptualized the causes we hold dear — the environment, gay rights, anti-racism, women’s reproductive rights — not as fixed, external objectives we’re trying to achieve at this point in time in political history (reduction in greenhouse gases, equal rights for sexual and racial minorities, access to contraception and abortion, etc.) but as relative, internalized political identities on an ever-shifting political spectrum. When a progressive cause gains ground and enters the mainstream zeitgeist, it’s not seen as a victory but a loss: the cause is no longer appealing to the activists who championed it because it doesn’t line up with their internal political identity as being more progressive relative to the mainstream.

This is our old friend the Overton Window of course. But there are two extra effects at play here. One is a sort-of feedback loop that develops between the zeitgeist and progressive politics; it seems to be a repeating pattern in history: the point where progressivism suddenly and rapidly melts down into totalitarianism. (I suppose you could call it a “China Syndrome” in more ways than one?) It goes something like this: progressive cause succeeds in shifting the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist now sees that the progressive side is probably correct, and decides that in future it will be quicker to adopt the progressive position. Progressives now see that their cause is no longer progressive, so they quickly shift to a more progressive position. The zeitgeist moves even faster this time to incorporate the progressive position; the progressive wing moves even faster to an even more hardline-progressive position, yadda yadda the feedback loop has a meltdown and we end up with totalitarianism.

The other effect at play is that the “extremification” of the left isn’t just becoming more hardline about progressive causes, it eventually turns hostile to the very causes it started with. In the end, the Chinese Communist Revolution did the exact opposite of abolishing the ruling class and ushering in equality and freedom. Trans is an especially good (bad) example, because it is fundamentally about an inversion: flipping the sexes, thus flipping the polarity of the power structure behind sexism and homophobia, literally putting men and straights (even misogynist men and anti-gay straights) at the forefront of women’s rights and gay rights. Lots of people have pointed out that some of the more extreme “anti-racist” positions around things like cultural appropriation are sounding more and more like old-fashioned segregationism.

As for the environment, I won’t be surprised if eventually some self-styled environmentalists start embracing pro-coal and pro-oil policies under some Byzantine rubric of anti-racism or queer whatever. It sounds absurd, but hey, so much on the left has gone absurd lately. I can already picture a future Greenpeace news release:

“Why shutting down coal power plants is literal violence because it disproportionately harms BAME and Queer Bodies.”

Two steps forward one step back.

British sports governing bodies are under mounting pressure to reform their policies after world swimming banned transgender athletes who reached male puberty from elite women’s events.

Although the policy could have been passed just by Fina’s executive bureau, endorsement was sought from national governing bodies at an extraordinary general congress in Budapest ahead of the World Swimming Championships.

More than 70 per cent of governing bodies agreed, with 15.3 per cent against, and 13.1 per cent who abstained.

Those are the forward. Now the back.

The International Cycling Union (UCI) announced a new policy on Thursday, opting to allow transgender women to compete if they have gone through puberty provided their testosterone has been suppressed to below 2.5nmol per litre for at least two years. That would potentially mean Welsh cyclist Emily Bridges could still compete in women’s events at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

That’s a crap new policy. Puberty gives male people a whole slew of permanent advantages, that don’t go away with later puberty suppression. This has been pointed out some 90 billion times over the past couple of years so surely it should have sunk in by now.

Cycling’s decision to reduce its limit still faced a backlash from campaigners, who believe that crucial physical advantages remain after puberty even if testosterone has been suppressed.

They don’t “believe” it, they know it. They recognize it. It’s a fact.

British swimmer Sharron Davies, who was denied Olympic gold in 1980 by state-sponsored doping in East Germany, called on other sports to follow swimming’s lead.

“All the sports should be doing this,” she said. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of my sport for doing the science, asking the athletes/coaches, and standing up for fair sport. Biological females deserve the same opportunities of success in sport as their male counterparts.” 

All the sports should be doing this. Now.

The thing about “the environment” is, we all live in it. We all depend on it for life. In that sense it’s not really political, and working to preserve it is not really political, because of the “all” bit.

But apparently activism to do that has become increasingly political.

When Aaron Mair ascended to the board presidency of the Sierra Club, he brought a new mission to the century-old environmental group: Where once it devoted itself solely to conservation issues, now it would embrace a much broader range of social justice causes.

That makes no sense to me. Social justice causes are fine, but conservation needs full attention all by itself.

Mair’s arrival accelerated then-executive director Michael Brune’s own progressive moves. Brune had taken over just a few years before from the Rainforest Action Network, a more activist, protest-oriented group. He took the Sierra Club in an overtly political direction, aligning it with the Democratic Party to create a “green line” of defense, as environmental groups called it, against Republican policies in Congress.

Under Mair and Brune, records show, the Sierra Club funneled its own funds into the groups Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice. In 2017, Brune threw the club’s support behind citizenship for children brought to the country illegally. In June 2021, Sierra Club backed reparations for Black Americans. It changed its definition of environment to the “environmental health of all communities, especially those communities that continue to endure deep trauma resulting from a legacy of colonialism, genocide, land theft, enslavement, racial terror, racial capitalism, structural discrimination, and exclusion.”

All true enough, but a change of subject. Social justice isn’t going to mean anything on a planet humans can’t live on.

Greenpeace USA is the latest major environmental organization riven with dissension. Interviews with 10 current and former staffers and documents obtained by POLITICO reveal an organization divided by tension between senior management and its younger workers over race and gender issues, culminating in a 2019 audit that blamed top-level management for creating a “culture of suffering and overworking” that was “guided by fear.”

…

“I have a lot of people ask me, ‘What happened to Greenpeace? Where’s Greenpeace? Where’s the campaigns? Where’s the expertise?,’” said Ivy Schlegel, who left a senior position after nearly 12 years with the organization last year. “I feel like we’re just watching Greenpeace crumble away.”

…

Indeed, in this new phase of environmentalism, Big Green organizations are extending themselves into labor rights, immigration, housing and democracy reform. Some groups are aiming to stir millions of latent Democratic voters across the country; to defeat state-level voter suppression initiatives; to make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states; to end the Senate filibuster and erode structural imbalances favoring red-leaning states.

But in the process they’re stamping global warming as a solely lefty issue, and that is not a clever plan.

One former staffer at Earthjustice, which does environmental law work, who was granted anonymity to discuss confidential interactions, said some funders have told the group to stick to what it knows. That person recalled battles with a member of the board of directors when Earthjustice tried to navigate statements on police brutality, where the group sided with “defund the police” activists who wanted to divert police budgets to mental health funding and community resources. Staff drove the shifts from the inside, the person said.

“For the most part, people funding Earthjustice signed up to protect the polar bears, not defund the police,” the person added.

Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen said in a statement that “Systemic racism and social injustice are at the root of the environmental problems we are trying to address,” and that when “we speak out on injustice, and we are explicit with our donors and supporters about why that is mission critical.”

Are they though? At the root, of all those environmental problems? I get they’re at the root of some of them, like where polluting industries are located and who checks the safety of the water supply, but I don’t think it’s true that they’re at the root of all of them, and especially not planet-heating because that’s going to catch up with everyone.

H/t Sackbut

Yet more terms that need to be defined. “Compassion” for instance.

If you operate with the value of compassion first, why does the compassion go to the Lia Thomases and not to the women he deprives of wins and medals? Why does he get compassion while they get told to accept it and shut up? Why does he matter while they don’t?

As for just disgusting, it’s what Rapinoe says that’s just disgusting. It doesn’t have to be every scholarship and sport and title to be unfair. There isn’t a rule that says a few people can cheat because it’s only a few. And it’s women who lose these scholarships and titles, women specifically, not men, because women have overall physical disadvantages compared to men. It’s not as if Rapinoe doesn’t know this, but she throws women overboard anyway and urges “compassion” for men who steal women’s places and medals.

Well that’s normal and safe and decent, just the sort of thing we want in a member of the US Senate.

Don’t be fooled. He doesn’t just stand there with the gun, and give us a talk. He goes all the way.

Bill Donahue at the Post says it’s a trend:

In late April, Republican Senate candidate and former Missouri governor Eric Greitens posted on Twitter a rather unsubtle video that captured him visiting a shooting range with Donald Trump Jr. As the clip opens, Greitens and the former first son are already hunched over their semiautomatic rifles. One second in, we watch as the shooters fire a hail of bullets — two hails, actually — until they pulverize and then fell a body-shaped metal target. “Liberals, beware!” Greitens soon intones with a grim “Terminator”-like finality.

Today’s video makes that one sound like a clip of puppies and kittens frolicking in a garden full of peonies.

During the Super Bowl, Senate candidate Jim Lamon of Arizona ran an ad that was styled to look like an old western movie and starred himself as a gun-twirling sheriff firing at a sheepish actor dressed to resemble Joe Biden. In Georgia, Mike Collins, a Republican in a U.S. House race, trundled a wheelbarrow full of paper into the forest, then shot at it as viewers realized he was turning “Nancy Pelosi’s Plan for America” into a cloud of confetti and smoke.

Let’s promote shooting at stuff!!! That’s a good idea!! We’re not addicted to shooting at stuff enough yet!! Buffalo and Uvalde weren’t enough, we need more!!!!!!

It seems the Bristol police did as little as possible to stop the intimidation.

Mark Shelford is Avon and Somerset Police and Crime Commissioner, and ASPBristol is the Bristol police.

Women are still the enemy.

Shouty men out in force in Bristol today, bellowing in the faces of women.

Colston is the slave merchant whose statue was thrown in the harbor.

The blessings of empire:

During the heyday of the British empire, thousands of women from India and other parts of Asia were brought to London to look after young children – but many of these nannies were later abandoned and left to fend for themselves. Now, a building in London which housed them is set to be commemorated with a blue plaque.

That’s nice. Drag them half way around the world and then abandon them.

“Ayahs and amahs were basically domestic workers and the backbone of British families in colonial India. They looked after the children, entertained them, told them stories, and rocked them to sleep,” says Rozina Visram, historian and author of Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History.

When these families returned to Britain, they would often bring their ayahs back with them. Some were asked to accompany the families just for the long, difficult voyage, Ms Visram says, while others were employed for a few years.

Usually they were given a ticket back home when the time came, but many were just dumped.

By the second half of the 19th Century, as the empire grew stronger, travel between England and India became more regular – and the number of nannies travelling to Britain also increased.

“Every year up to 200 ayahs stayed at the Ayahs’ Home. Some stayed for a few days whereas some stayed for months,” Dr Visram says.

Stranded amid the alien corn.

They just can’t ever word it honestly. BBC headline:

Fina stops transgender swimmers from competing in women’s elite events

Male swimmers.

Fina, swimming’s world governing body, has voted to stop transgender athletes from competing in women’s elite races if they have gone through any part of the process of male puberty.

They could have worded it so that the male puberty part comes first, but no, it has to be the “transgender” part first.

The decision was made during an extraordinary general congress at the ongoing World Championships in Budapest.

…

The issue in swimming has been catapulted into the spotlight by the experiences of American Lia Thomas.

Not so much the experiences as the photos and video clips. We can all see how massive he is, so we can all see how grotesquely unfair it is. (We can also see how little he seems to be even pretending to think he’s actually female.)

More than 300 college, Team USA and Olympic swimmers signed an open letter in support of Thomas and all transgender and non-binary swimmers, but other athletes and organisations have raised concerns about trans inclusion.

There it is again. Put the rah-rah trans bullshit first and the reality second.

A win at last!

I had to look up FINA: it’s a [or the] competitive swimming organization type thing.

The vote was massive.

Good news at last.

Man tries to get group of women barred from popular London pub:

He likes to go there himself. He doesn’t want those icky women in a place where he likes to go.

Everyone should have the right to tell bars and pubs and restaurants and bowling alleys to bar groups of women from going there. It’s only fair.

Why we can’t do anything about climate change chapter eleventy billion:

Within days, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision that could severely limit the federal government’s authority to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants — pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

It shouldn’t be optional. It shouldn’t be up for grabs. We shouldn’t have the power to decide future generations have to face the full horror show.

The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.

Nobody should be doing anything to weaken anyone’s ability to slow global warming. But here we are.

The plaintiffs want to hem in what they call the administrative state, the E.P.A. and other federal agencies that set rules and regulations that affect the American economy. That should be the role of Congress, which is more accountable to voters, said Jeff Landry, the Louisiana attorney general and one of the leaders of the Republican group bringing the lawsuits.

No. Wrong. Here’s why: global warming pays zero attention to voters. Voters can’t vote global warming out. It’s not a policy, it’s a process, one that’s spiraled way out of our control. Votes are irrelevant.

If you’re in a big city that’s in the path of a colossal tornado, you don’t ask the city council to vote on what to do, you take shelter. If your house is on fire you don’t poll the neighbors on how to act, you call in the fire trucks. If the planet is on a path to catastrophic heating you don’t take a god damn vote on what to do about it.

But Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change. Instead, for decades it has delegated authority to the agencies because it lacks the expertise possessed by the specialists who write complicated rules and regulations and who can respond quickly to changing science, particularly when Capitol Hill is gridlocked.

That’s the other half. The emergency nature of the problem is one half and the technical nature of the subject is the other. Democracy is a good thing except when it isn’t.

West Virginia v. E.P.A., No. 20–1530 on the court docket, is also notable for the tangle of connections between the plaintiffs and the Supreme Court justices who will decide their case. The Republican plaintiffs share many of the same donors behind efforts to nominate and confirm five of the Republicans on the bench — John G. Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

In short the process is corrupt as well as mistaken and the highway to mass extinction. Brilliant.

The pattern is repeated in other climate cases filed by the Republican attorneys general and now advancing through the lower courts: The plaintiffs are supported by the same network of conservative donors who helped former President Donald J. Trump place more than 200 federal judges, many now in position to rule on the climate cases in the coming year.

At least two of the cases feature an unusual approach that demonstrates the aggressive nature of the legal campaign. In those suits, the plaintiffs are challenging regulations or policies that don’t yet exist. They want to pre-empt efforts by President Biden to deliver on his promise to pivot the country away from fossil fuels, while at the same time aiming to prevent a future president from trying anything similar.

These people are consigning their children and grandchildren to a hideous future and short, painful lives. It’s a strange thing to watch.

If they win the feds won’t be able to slash tailpipe emissions or force electric utilities to replace fossil fuel-fired power plants with wind and solar, or consider the economic costs of climate change when deciding whether to approve a new oil pipeline or similar project or environmental rule.

Those limitations on climate action in the United States, which has pumped more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, would quite likely doom the world’s goal of cutting enough emissions to keep the planet from heating up more than an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with the preindustrial age. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic hurricanes, drought, heat waves and wildfires significantly increases.

And when all those things increase, crops fail, and famine spreads. When that happens people try to move to more hospitable places, and the people already there try to stop them, and you get border wars everywhere. It seems this is what “conservative activists” want.

Who does this guy think he is??

Who does he think he is interrupting women on Twitter to demand when they are going to start doing what he tells them?

Who DOES he think he is? When is he going to get back to not telling women what to do?