Two more rescued:

The Nigerian army says it has found two more of the female students abducted by Boko Haram militants from a secondary school more than eight years ago.

There was global outrage when Islamists seized nearly 300 girls in Nigeria’s north-eastern town of Chibok in 2014. Most of the victims have either been freed or escaped since then, but dozens remain unaccounted for.

It appears the two hostages gave birth while in captivity, as the army said they were both found with children.

Naturally. That’s what they’re for.

In total, 276 girls seized were from their school dormitory in the middle of the night on 14 April 2014. Within hours of their kidnapping, 57 managed to escape mostly by jumping off the lorries and running off into the bushes.

Around 100 are still missing.

Many other schools and universities in the region were attacked in the years following the 2014 Chibok kidnapping. Some of the assaults have been by jihadists – but more frequently by criminal groups known locally as “bandits”, who engage in mass abduction for ransom.

While the Nigerian government has reportedly paid Boko Haram some $3.3m (£2.4m) as ransom for Chibok girls freed in negotiations, recent school kidnappings have seen little government involvement. Instead, parents and relatives have been left to pay the amounts demanded by the bandits for their children’s release.

Private enterprise.

Allison won!!!

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The moment when we stop.

Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different types of “belief”:

1. You can believe in the actual descriptive content of a proposition, e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning (as seen from my frame of reference).

2. You can believe in whatever a proposition happens to mean, e.g. I believe that E = mc².

The first kind of belief requires you to actually understand the proposition in question (you cannot believe in the content without knowing what the content is), whereas the latter does not*. I have a vague, general notion what “E = mc²” means, but nothing that merits the label “understanding”. I simply trust that physicists know what they’re talking about. Dennett made the point that most religious “beliefs” seem to be of the latter kind, i.e. even the believers themselves don’t have any clear idea of what it actually is they believe in except that “whatever it happens to be” is called “God” etc. I think the same goes for the “beliefs” required by gender ideology which is why even asking TRAs to define what they mean by words like “woman”, “gender”, “trans”, “cis”, “(non-)binary” etc. is now considered a “transphobic dog-whistle” etc.

* In fact there doesn’t even have to be anything to understand. E.g. it’s perfectly possible to “believe” that “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe” even if there is no content to believe in.

More absurd than ever.

He was “made aware of an incident on Sunday where officers visited an address to provide words of advice to a resident after they had published a video blog online which may have caused offence or distress.”

Where to begin. The officers didn’t “visit an address,” they went to Kellie-Jay Keen’s address to scold her. They didn’t go there “to provide words of advice,” they went there to accuse and scold her. They weren’t the ones who published the video, she was. What made them think her video “may have caused offence or distress?” More to the point, do the police go bang on men’s doors to give them “words of advice” about misogynist sexist threatening insulting venomous videos and tweets and blog posts? EVER??? Not that I’ve ever heard of. That kind of thing is just normal, but skepticism about men who say they are women merits a visit from the plods.

It’s ridiculous, and worse than ridiculous.

The pope has said sorry about those residential schools.

Pope Francis issued a historic apology Monday for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations in ways still being felt today.

“I am sorry,” Francis said, to applause from school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered at a former residential school south of Edmonton, Alberta, the first event of Francis’ weeklong “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada.

The morning after he arrived in the country, Francis traveled to the lands of four Cree nations to pray at a cemetery. Four chiefs then escorted the pontiff in his wheelchair to powwow ceremonial grounds where he delivered the long-sought apology and was given a feathered headdress.

All very nice, no doubt, but what I want to know is, how does he explain this to himself? And then to Catholics in general? And then to the rest of us?

The church is the church. It tells us what to do, not the other way around. It’s supposed to be holy, and good, and right about everything. It’s not supposed to be blundering around making horrible mistakes like the rest of us.

So how did it get this so hideously wrong? Why did its people treat those children so cruelly? And while we’re on the subject how did it get the Magdalen laundries so wrong? And the Irish industrial schools and mother and baby homes? Why were nuns and priests so notoriously cruel to children and women and poor people? Why did the church protect rapey child-abusing priests decade after decade? And why, in light of all that, is Francis pope? Why does he stick with the evil institution? What does he even mean by apologizing?

None of it makes any kind of sense.

An exchange on Twitter has got me thinking about belief in the trans ideology, and whether I ever had any. I don’t think I did. From what I can remember, I didn’t believe in it, but I tried to prevent myself from really grasping how thoroughly I didn’t believe it. But maybe that’s not quite right – maybe I did grasp it but just pretended I didn’t. Basically, I lied about it, but what I’m not sure of is how aware of the lying I was.

The exchange:

My reply to that was “I didn’t so much accept it as do my best to steer around it. Until that day when it had grown too big to steer around.” Which I think is accurate as far as it goes, but what I’m not sure about now is how far I admitted to myself I was steering around it.

I do remember a few incidents of inner eye-rolling, of wanting to say something in dissent but not doing it, but what I don’t remember is how much that bothered me. I don’t remember if I thought I should challenge this bullshit because it is such bullshit, or repressed that thought instead.

That’s not interesting in itself (except maybe to me), but it is interesting in relation to the whole question of how do people who seem otherwise rational swallow this blatant fantasy-mongering? The fact that I steered around it for several years means I have some idea why other people don’t go all gender critical, but at the same time, the fact that there came a point where the steering terminally broke down makes me wonder who the hell engineered these people’s steering.

What broke my steering was whichever pharyngulite goon it was who told me to stop talking about abortion as a women’s issue. I remember the smoke coming out of my ears. I remember the crunch-snap when the steering mechanism broke right off. I said no and a mob of goons yelled at me and I sort of partly backed down, cowardly idiot that I was, but the “do you believe, yes or no?” followed swiftly (in hours? days? I don’t remember) and that was the end.

But the end should have been earlier. I should have stopped steering around it sooner. I don’t really remember the mental state that prevented me.

Oh how interesting.

How The CEO Of A Leading LGBTQ Rights Group Played A Role During The Opioid Crisis

By “played a role” they mean “helped make it worse.”

Amit Paley, CEO of The Trevor Project, was part of a team advising Purdue Pharma on how to boost sales of opioids during his time at McKinsey & Co., according to a trove of documents reviewed by HuffPost.

How to boost sales of opioids aka how to get more people addicted to opioids.

It’s all about the getting people to buy more and more and more drugs. $$$

In the summer of 2016, America’s opioid epidemic was raging, and Purdue Pharma, one of the drug manufacturers at the center of the maelstrom, was seeking outside help to manage its collapsing reputation.

In the summer of 2016, America’s opioid epidemic was raging, and Purdue Pharma, one of the drug manufacturers at the center of the maelstrom, was seeking outside help to manage its collapsing reputation.

For Amit Paley, a rising associate partner at the global consulting giant McKinsey & Co., it was an opportunity.

What’s a consulting giant? What is “consulting”? It’s a very nebulous term, and it seems to be something people can claim to do without having to show any credentials or source of expertise.

He had worked closely with Purdue before and seemed eager to do so again. So, on a Friday evening in June, Paley scrambled to come up with a list of past examples of how companies selling dangerous products had reduced risk in order to avoid liability and salvaged their reputations with an outraged public.

Oh that’s the kind of work he does. I see. He works for the branch of capitalism that protects people who harm others for $$$. What a noble calling! Corporations foul your water supply, call a consultant. Corporations sell cigarettes in the full knowledge that they’re addictive and poisonous? Call a consultant. Corporations sell highly addictive drugs as the death toll climbs? Call a consultant. Corporations sell puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to people who think they’re the opposite sex? Call a consultant.

Today, Paley has a new job: executive director and CEO of the country’s largest LGBTQ crisis hotline, The Trevor Project, which he has led since 2017.

…

The Trevor Project is also among the countless nonprofits now grappling with the fallout of the opioid crisis: A report the group put out in January said the misuse of prescription drugs was associated with a threefold increase in suicide attempts by LGBTQ people.

And then there are the blockers and cross-sex hormones…

Besides helping McKinsey compete for Purdue’s crisis response business, Paley collaborated with Purdue executives over a period of four or five weeks on a strategic 10-year plan to boost the sales of opioids and other Purdue products. Later, as McKinsey competed to handle data analysis for Purdue, his team suggested ways to use data to support Purdue’s sales goals and undermine its critics.

“Seven years ago, when I was a consultant at McKinsey, I was assigned to a project for Purdue,” Paley said as part of a statement to HuffPost. “If I [had known] then what I know now, I would not have agreed to do any consulting for that company, and I regret that I did.”

Now he’s a pillar of a form of activism that urges people (including children and toddlers) to be drug-dependent in an exciting new way.

His role came to light thanks to McKinsey’s $573 million settlement with a coalition of 47 state attorneys general over the firm’s role in driving the opioid crisis. For more than a decade, McKinsey provided Purdue with detailed advice on how to maximize sales of its blockbuster opioid, OxyContin. The settlement terms allowed McKinsey to avoid any admission of wrongdoing, but required it to make public more than 100,000 emails, presentations, and other internal documents from the years it spent advising several of the nation’s leading opioid makers.

…

Big data could even help discredit negative press, [McKinsey] said in its pitch: Weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times dropped a damning report on how Purdue had marketed OxyContin as offering 12 hours of pain relief despite knowing that the effects often wore off sooner — “the perfect recipe for addiction,” in the words of a leading researcher. The story relied partly on research performed by Purdue itself. McKinsey nevertheless claimed it could produce data to counter the Times’ “anecdotal” reporting.

For the purpose of persuading people to go on taking OxyContin despite all the bad news. $$$

“The Trevor Project CEO search was a thorough and robust process which resulted in hiring the most qualified candidate in Amit Paley,” Gina Muñoz, the chair of the board of directors, said in a statement. “The Board of Directors remains steadfast in our choice of CEO and we are proud of the transformational growth and expansion of life-saving programming at The Trevor Project that Amit has led since the start of his tenure.”

What life-saving programming is that? Does it have anything to do with taking puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones?

Paley’s team leaders at McKinsey seemed acutely aware that their work could be reputationally toxic. In May 2017, Moran, his supervisor on several projects, told another consultant, Arnab Ghatak, that she planned to give Purdue print copies of a presentation rather than a digital version. “These guys will be deposed,” she reasoned. “Best our emails are not sucked into it.”

Whoops. She shouldn’t have said that in a digital version either.

Stonewall thinks two-year-olds can be trans.

Ok let’s read their statement.

On Friday we put out a tweet that was unclear, relating to gender stereotypes and nursery age children, leading some supporters to ask us what we meant.

And others to say they’re dangerous loonies.

We were commenting on an article written by a parent reflecting on how their child was being cared for at nursery. The parent was worried that their child was being pressured to fit in with stereotypes about boys and girls. While we don’t actively work on nursery education, we believe that young children should be able to play, explore and learn about who they are, and the world around them, without having adults’ ideas imposed upon them.

Any adults’ ideas? How can they learn about the world around them without asking adults questions and listening to the answers? That’s an incredibly stupid thing for Stonewall to say, and tells me they’re not thinking at all, just shaking the box of slogans and tweeting whatever is on top.

But wait, it turns out they don’t mean that at all – at least, they immediately say the exact opposite.

We support existing provisions to ensure primary and secondary school pupils learn about LGBTQ+ identities in an age-appropriate and timely manner.

So they do need to have adults’ ideas imposed on them, provided those ideas are the ones approved by Stonewall, like for instance that a boy is a girl if he says he is.

This is vital for making sure that today’s children do not grow up living with the stigma of being LGBTQ+.

So they won’t grow up to be L or G or T? Stonewall must have meant something like “This is vital for making sure that today’s children grow up in a world where being LGBT is not stigmatized.” You’d think they’d know how to say that clearly after all this time.

For primary school aged children, this might mean, for example, learning that some children have two mummies, some have two daddies. It might mean not forcing children to conform to stereotypes, and it might mean challenging bullying that relates to perceived difference.

What about children who have two man-mummies or woman-daddies? Or a man-mummy and a woman-mummy, or a woman-daddy or a man-daddy. I wonder why they left that bit out.

Whatever. The kids should just ignore everything the adults say, and they’ll be fine.

The left is split over sophie graces, the right is split over trump: hero or tyrant?

The Jan. 6 House select committee’s revelations have grown so overwhelmingly powerful that even some right-wing media figures have begun acknowledging their seriousness. This is fracturing conservative media: A few high-profile personalities and institutions are admitting the obvious, while many other outlets continue running outright propaganda on Trump’s behalf.

That’s been true all along, what with The Lincoln Project and George Conway and similar. But now some of the more rabid trumpies are wobbling.

This split became more visible over the weekend when Fox News anchor Bret Baier — unlike most Fox personalities — sharply denounced Trump over new revelations that Trump deliberately allowed the mob rampage to continue on Jan. 6, 2021.

…

He criticized Trump over the 187 minutes that passed before he finally called on the rioters to stand down. Trump’s own advisers strongly suggested in testimony that he deliberately refrained, apparently to keep pressure on his vice president, Mike Pence, to disrupt the electoral count in service of Trump’s coup scheme.

I thought it was more general than that – he deliberately refrained in hopes that the attack would succeed, enemy senators and representatives would be killed, Trump would be declared god-emperor.

That 187 minutes was also too much for several right-leaning editorial boards. A Wall Street Journal editorial slammed Trump for violating his oath of office and duty to the country, declaring that he “has shown not an iota of regret.”

To the surprise of no one.

Julian expands on his brief interview with “Sophie Grace” Chappell:

The published profile is short and allows Chappell to speak for herself with no criticism and minimal eyebrow-raising from me. The source interview, however, left me worried that mutual comprehension between the main actors this fight (for that is what is has become) is now almost impossible. (Supporters can listen to the entire interview here.) 

Mutual comprehension is indeed very difficult. I for one find it impossible to understand how so many otherwise reasonable people can believe (or at least constantly repeat) the core claim.

Listening to Chappell, you would think that the gender critical feminists – derogatorily called TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminist) – are almost always malign, denigrating and misrepresenting trans people, while their opponents are overwhelmingly reasonable and moderate. So if you’ve been told trans activists are pushing for anything silly or extreme, that’s just misinformation. 

Like a man running the Edinburgh rape crisis centre for instance? Like Lia Thomas competing against women? Like Lia Thomas being nominated Woman of the Year? Like the National Women’s History Museum featuring a page of three men who identify as women? Like removing the words “women” and “mother” from discussion of abortion rights? None of that is silly or extreme?

For example, Chappell argues that trans activism is not captured by any ideology. She said that she didn’t even have a gender theory or ideology and that neither is central to the fight for trans rights.

No theory? Then what makes him think he’s a woman? How did he ever get there? If there’s no theory how does he not just know he’s a man the way other men just know they’re men? How are the facts of his body not enough to convince him he’s a man, in the absence of a theory that explains how people can be women despite having male bodies? PLEASE EXPLAIN.

Julian Baggini talks to fellow philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell at Prospect:

Eight years ago, Sophie Grace Chappell came out as the UK’s first trans philosopher.

Well, not trans philosopher. Real philosopher in the sense of having the right academic credentials; no “identifying as” required. Trans woman, i.e. man who identifies as a woman. His self-renaming is interesting. He started out as Timothy David John Chappell, which is a lot of male names to have to deal with. For his transformation he chose two female names that are also flattery names – I wonder if he and Sophie LaBelle are friends or rivals. (If you’re wondering why “Sophie” is flattering, it’s because “sophia” in Greek means wisdom. Philosophers of course are well aware of the etymology.)

I think this is kind of relevant. It’s almost as if he’s signaling. “I’m a trans woman, and I like to flatter myself.” Am I crazy for thinking that’s true of a lot of trans women? That the fad for being a trans women tends to attract self-flattering men and/or men who seek attention?

“We have a society at large where a lot of frankly very transphobic stuff has been normalised,” says Chappell. “It’s also a problem that a lot of the time people see this as a debate with two sides in a way that they wouldn’t see debates that are comparable about race or being gay.”

There’s a reason for that. Here’s the reason: it’s because they’re not comparable. Being trans isn’t like being Of Color or gay. It’s very different in several important ways. Sophie Grace Chappell is not like John Lewis or Alan Turing.

Chappell and her allies consider many gender-critical views to be transphobic. Nonetheless, she insists that “there are no questions that I refuse to engage with.” It’s the questioners she avoids, when she judges that they’re not “in good faith” or “getting it.” 

Back atcha, pal.

So what are the things that gender-critical feminists say which Chappell believes shows they’re not listening? “I’ll give you three examples. First of all, trans women—they don’t normally talk about trans men in this context—are sexual predators, a threat to women’s safety. Secondly, there’s no such thing as a trans kid, and thirdly, trans people are delusional.”

The first one is dishonest. We don’t say trans women in general are sexual predators, we say we don’t know who is and the trans label is a perfect cover for men who are sexual predators.

The second one – how does Chappell know there is such a thing as a trans kid? How does he know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that kids who call themselves trans know they are trans and are not simply joining a trend aka a fashion?

The third one – does Chappell know for certain that all trans people really are the sex they say they are, which is the opposite of the one their bodies indicate? If so, how does he know that? The way I see it is that sex just is what the body indicates and that it’s absurd to insist that one is literally in every sense the Other sex. I’m not sure I would say “trans people are delusional” just like that, but I do think they’ve bought into a mass delusion. Once a mass delusion has taken hold, it’s not exactly delusional to buy into it, because buying into what other people have bought into is how we function in the social world. It’s more that they’re conforming to a delusion.

Julian points out that the more serious gender critical feminists don’t say such things.

“There can sometimes be inconsistencies between people’s comments on social media and what they put in their books, and often it’s not actually very clear which of two conflicting positions people really take,” she responds, at pains to avoid naming names. “You also find prominent people in that ideological neck of the woods who are quite happy, for example, to give approbation to people on social media who one would think of as much more violent activists, who say things like: ‘We should have guards with guns in women’s loos to keep the “transes” out.’”

More violent activists? The violence hasn’t been coming from the feminists. And anyone can make up stupid “say things like” pseudo-quotations, but I haven’t seen much if any talk of guards with guns.

Chappell would prefer to be on the same side as the gender-critical feminists, fighting for women’s rights against the patriarchy. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t agree some targets and work together towards those targets,” she says, such as resisting the attack on bodily autonomy represented by the overturning of Roe v Wade. Given the mistrust and animosity on both sides, however, such a united front looks distant.

For the same reason that BLM activists don’t always want to work together with white people. We don’t have skin in the game in the same way, so sometimes we just need to step back. It’s the same with men, however they identify: we don’t always want to work together with them to fight the patriarchy. The overturning of Roe v Wade isn’t an attack on Chappell the way it is on women. If he were a woman he would probably get that.

Judith Butler blows up her own argument in the middle of a sentence – and doesn’t correct it, even though it’s not a live conversation but an email exchange with a New Statesman writer.

When Justice Ginsburg established “sex” discrimination as a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed right to be treated equally, she underscored that equality was the basis for feminist legal victories. What if access to certain kinds of healthcare, including abortion, is a matter of equality? If men have adequate healthcare, and women do not, then women, or those who are pregnant, suffer discrimination. 

No, you can’t flip your own argument mid-sentence like that. You end up with gibberish. “If men have adequate healthcare, and women do not, then women, or men who are pregnant, suffer discrimination.” Wut? But you just said men have adequate healthcare, in contrast to women, not in contrast to women or men. Sometimes remembering to be incloooooooosive makes nonsense of your argument. 

Then it’s stupid in a different way.

Something similar is happening with trans healthcare. If people who are not trans get the healthcare they require, and trans people face discrimination at healthcare facilities, then they suffer discrimination.

That argument should be “If people who are not trans get the healthcare they require, and trans people don’t get the healthcare they require, then they suffer discrimination.” I wonder if she changed it because of unease – possibly unconscious – about the nature of that “healthcare.” As many of us point out several times a day, it is at the very least questionable that trying to change people’s sex with surgeries and cross-sex hormones can be called “health care.” I for one don’t think it is health care, I think it’s quackery and health damage.

This is an email interview, not a live one. You’d think she could do better.

Consider, then, that when we say that the denial of abortion rights is discrimination on the basis of sex, we may be saying that sex plays a role in the judgement to deny those rights that is unfair and unjust. We do not need to adjudicate whether the denial of abortion rights gets the sex right – probably not. So it is not on the basis of sex as it is that discrimination occurs. Discrimination makes reference to sex in unfair and discriminatory ways, and the only “sex” that legally matters is the one figured and operative in a discrimination action.

I have no idea what she thinks she means by that.

So when some feminists now make claims like, “the patriarchal oppression of women is heavily rooted in our reproductive systems”, it can sound like those reproductive systems are the cause of the oppression. That is muddled thinking, wrong, and does not advance feminist aims. It is the social organisation of reproduction that leads to the conclusion that abortion should or should not happen. The state is claiming that it has interests in the womb, and it is figuring the womb as its province, rather than the province of those who actually have them. It is precisely the anti-feminist forces that figure the womb in that way that we must oppose. Otherwise, we attribute the existence of oppressive systems to biology, when we should be asking how those oppressive systems contort biological claims to their own ends.

Wut?

No the state isn’t claiming it has “interests in the womb.” The state, aka the collective of anti-abortion fanatics in Congress and state legislatures and the courts, is claiming it gets to force women to stay pregnant. It’s not about disembodied wombs, it’s about the treacherous sneaky selfish inferior beings who have those wombs. It’s about women’s ability (and purported duty) to produce babies, but not disembodied from the women themselves. There’s sadism and resentment and power-tripping involved here along with the Baby Imperative, and if you think there isn’t you’re on the wrong drugs.

Texas lawmakers test just how much they can punish women for being women.

Republican lawmakers have sent legal threats to Texas organizations that offer to fund out-of-state travel for abortions, potentially setting up a showdown between abortion law and long-held constitutional rights such as freedom of association and freedom of travel.

The Texas Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction of Republicans in the state legislature, sent a letter on 7 July to a law firm that offered to cover employees’ expenses if they travelled for abortion. It threatened Sidley LLP with felony charges, claiming Texas can criminalize anyone who “furnishes the means” for an abortion, regardless of where the abortion occurs. The letter cites a 1925 law which was not formally repealed after the supreme court codified the right to abortion in Roe v Wade in 1973; last week, the Texas supreme court confirmed the 1925 law can be applied.

The “freedom” caucus. Whose freedom? What kind of freedom? When do women get to have some?

The lawmakers also outlined proposed legislation that would allow individuals to sue anyone who financially assists with a Texan’s abortion, regardless of where the abortion occurs. The law proposes that such assistance be considered criminal even if a Texan travelled out of state for a medication abortion and took part of the drug in Texas.

Third paragraph, so naturally it’s time to break out the awkward replacements for “a woman.” A Texan what?

The letter is just the latest move by rightwing lawmakers, lawyers and activists to crack down on abortion provision in Texas. Last week, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued the Biden administration for mandating that states provide abortions in medical emergencies. In March, a state legislator, Briscoe Cain, sent a cease and desist letter to Citibank, who had announced a policy to pay for employees’ out of state abortion expenses.

Ken Paxton wants women to die in medical emergencies. He’s probably planning to go watch, with popcorn enough for several hours of viewing pleasure.

“Rightwing activists, lawyers and legislators have taken on a coordinated effort to intimidate and threaten anyone who advocates for helping people women obtain reproductive care, without any concern for whether their actions are legal or constitutional,” said Jennifer Ecklund, a lawyer for Thompson Coburn, which is currently working on behalf of most abortion funds in Texas.

“If they can scare everybody out of supporting pregnant people women who need care, then they’ve achieved their end, no matter what a court says two years from now,” she added.

I hope two years from now everyone will at least be able to say “women.”

Ominous:

To those who track anti-democratic movements there is a chilling familiarity to this rich evocation of a president descending into an abyss of fantasy, fury and possible illegality. “The picture that the hearings depict is of a coup leader,” said the Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky. “This is a guy who was unwilling to accept defeat and was prepared to use virtually any means to try to stay illegally in power.”

Levitsky is co-author of the influential book How Democracies Die which traces the collapse of once-proud democratic nations – in some cases through wrenching upheavals, but more often in modern times through a tip-toeing into authoritarianism. Levitsky is also an authority on Latin America, a region from which he draws a compelling parallel.

Levitsky told the Guardian that the Trump who emerges from the hearings was a coup leader, “but not a very sophisticated one. Not a very experienced one. A petty autocrat. A type of leader more familiar to someone like me, a student of Latin American politics.”

There was nothing very sophisticated or experienced about Hitler, either. He was a punk, but that didn’t stop him.

The media bubble is not the only barrier standing between the January 6 committee and a major repair of the country’s damaged democratic infrastructure. While the hearings focused heavily on the figure of Trump, Levitsky argues that an arguably even greater threat is now posed by the Republican party which enabled him.

“In a two-party system, if one political party is not committed to democratic rules of the game, democracy is not likely to survive for very long,” Levitsky said. “The party has revealed itself, from top to bottom, to be a majority anti-democratic party.”

Levitsky cites an analysis by the Republican Accountability Project, a group of anti-Trump conservatives, of the public statements made by all 261 Republicans in the US House and Senate in the wake of the 2020 election. It found that 224 of them – a staggering 86% of all Republicans in Congress – cast doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s win in what amounted to a mass “attack on a cornerstone of our democracy”.

Levitsky warns that the hearings have illuminated two great dangers for America, both relating to Republicans. The first is that the party’s strategists have acquired, through Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, a roadmap to the vulnerabilities of the electoral system.

“They discovered that there is a plethora of opportunities for subverting an election, from blocking certification to sending alternate slates of electors to Congress. Armed with that knowledge, they may well do it much better next time.”

The second lesson for Levitsky relates to accountability, or the lack of it. The Republicans who played with fire, openly backing the anti-democratic movement, found that they were largely immune to the consequences.

“They learned that if you try to overturn the election you will not be punished by Republican voters, activists or donors. For the most part, you’ll be rewarded for it. And to me, that is terrifying.”

Same.

Local residents astonished that desert basin is desert basin.

The few who live along the shores of Mono Lake are accustomed to the peculiarities of this high desert basin.

Famously strange limestone spires known as tufa towers rise from the water. The lake contains so much salt that it’s barren of fish. In the arid sands beyond, sagebrush thrives, and that’s about it.

But the alkali flats that are emerging from the lake’s surface, ghost white, aren’t just another nod to the uniqueness of this ancient place. They’re a sign of trouble. Amid a third year of drought, the sprawling lake on the remote east side of the Sierra Nevada is sharply receding, and the small towns and wildlife so closely tied to the water are feeling the pinch.

Drought? Drought??? Who could possibly have seen that coming?

The drought bearing down on Mono Lake and the rest of California picks up on a two-decade run of extreme warming and drying. It’s a product of the changing climate that has begun to profoundly reshape the landscape of the West and how people live within it. From less alpine snow and emptying reservoirs to parched forests and increased wildfire, the change is posing new, and often difficult, challenges.

Now why would reservoirs be emptying just because the planet is heating and people keep building new houses in deserts? I just can’t figure it out, can anyone?

For eight decades, the city of Los Angeles has piped water from four creeks that feed the lake to its facilities 350 miles to the south, sometimes diverting almost all of the inflow. It’s a familiar California tale of old water rights yielding inordinate benefit.

“Excuse us, we need this water for our city 350 miles from here, thanks, bye.”

The concerns at the lake, though, were supposed to have been resolved. In 1994, after a lengthy environmental campaign that spurred “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers on vehicles up and down California, state water regulators put caps on L.A.’s exports. Slowly, lake levels rose. But they did not rise as much as they were supposed to.

Scold them. Tell them they’re not living up to their part of the bargain. Remind them it’s a signed agreement.

Drought, on top of a climate that’s changed faster than expected, has slowed progress. On April 1, the typical start of the lake’s runoff season, the water level measured 6,379.9 feet above sea level, about 12 feet short of the state target. Before Los Angeles began drawing water from the creeks here, the lake was nearly 40 feet higher.

Who knew that if you use something up then it’s gone?

So this is what it looks like when you build ever more new houses in a desert and the water dries up.

As the Southwest enters its second decade of megadrought, and the Colorado River sinks to alarmingly low levels, Rio Verde, a largely upscale community that real-estate agents bill as North Scottsdale, though it is a thirty-mile drive from Scottsdale proper, is finding itself on the front lines of the water wars. Some homeowners’ wells are drying up, while others who get water delivered have recently been told that their source will be cut off on January 1st. 

Because it’s a desert. Did anyone mention that it’s a desert before you bought new houses there? Did you look out the window at all?

The Southwest’s water issues are at a point of crisis. “What has been a slow-motion train wreck for twenty years is accelerating, and the moment of reckoning is near,” John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, told Congress earlier this year. Arizona is one of seven states that, along with parts of Mexico, draw water from the Colorado River, which accounts for about a third of the state’s supply. (In the nineteen-seventies, Arizona built an extensive aqueduct system to channel river water to the central and southern regions of the state, in part to allay fears that it was overtaxing its finite supply of groundwater.) But the agreement divvying up the Colorado’s water was made at a time when flows were higher than they are now. In recent years, states that rely on that supply have had to contend with shortages, and experts predict that the situation is only going to get worse.

Probably because there are more and more people there, and none of them can survive without water. Also, it’s getting hotter.

Most Foothills residents draw their water from wells, but several hundred homes sit on land without reliable access to water, so the inhabitants rely on cisterns, which they fill with a delivery from a water truck every month or so. 

Ahhh the water is trucked in. That sounds like an excellent plan. Not at all grotesque.

In 2018, Phoenix, concerned about its own supply, stopped selling water to haulers who serviced New River, an unincorporated community north of the city. Nabity grew worried that Scottsdale might make a similar decision and cut off supply to Rio Verde Foothills. If that happened, the water haulers could look for other sources, but trucking water in from farther away would cost significantly more. And what if other communities also stopped wanting to sell their scarce water to outsiders? Nabity, a real-estate agent, worried that water insecurity could prevent her from selling her home someday. But, when she and others began raising the issue, some of her neighbors accused her of fearmongering. Scottsdale promised to be a good neighbor, they insisted. The Foothills weren’t going to get cut off.

Because the water supply is infinite, even in the desert. Really.

Then, last August, the Department of the Interior issued its first-ever formal water-shortage declaration for the Colorado River. A few months later, Scottsdale became the first city in Arizona to announce that it had entered Stage One of its drought-management plan. (Several other cities have since followed suit.) The city asked Scottsdale residents to decrease water consumption by five per cent. It also informed the water haulers that, starting in 2023, they could no longer buy Scottsdale water to deliver outside city limits—including to the Rio Verde Foothills.

Oops.

“Where does new water come from in the Southwest? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Loquvam said. “All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, water-wise. There is a second tier of water resources—it exists. But they are significantly more expensive than the existing water supply. Water prices that seem expensive right now will probably seem reasonable in ten years. There’s going to be a lot of outrage.”

Pssst. It has to do with living in a desert.

epcor has been eying one of those second-tier options: groundwater from the Harquahala Valley basin, west of Phoenix. Arizona law mandates that, while a political subdivision such as a dwid can purchase groundwater from the basin, private companies such as epcor cannot. In recent years, though, the state has expanded private companies’ ability to buy water. In 2020, the Arizona Department of Water Resources endorsed a plan that would allow an investment company’s purchase of rural farmland in order to sell water access to developers in a Phoenix suburb.

Yes! Brilliant idea! Convert farmland to a water source for suburban development in a desert! What could possibly go wrong? Besides totally using up every last drop of water?

After all the discussions I’d had with Foothills residents about water scarcity, it was disconcerting to drive down the community’s mostly unpaved roads and see dozens of new houses under construction. Despite the ruptures within the community, the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that there was way too much development in the Rio Verde Foothills. Last year, Maricopa County added more residents than any other county in the country. 

God people are stupid.

Many of the new homes will rely on hauled water—if it’s available. Arizona has long been aware of its finite water supply; a 1980 law requires developers to secure a hundred years’ worth of water for their projects. But the Foothills is plagued by what are known as wildcat builders. Because the hundred-year law applies only to subdivisions of more than five houses, wildcat builders often split parcels into five or fewer lots.

Great! “Here’s your new house. By the way there’s no water. Bye-eeeeeeeeeeeee.”

Many of the new houses in the Foothills were built by Morgan Taylor Homes, one of the biggest developers in Maricopa County. Instead of sprawling ranches, they are mostly two- and three-bedroom houses. Their prices, however, are not particularly modest: one eighteen-hundred-square-foot house near Riddle’s was listed at a little less than six hundred thousand dollars. “Who’s gonna spend five hundred ninety-five thousand dollars for a house with no water?” Riddle asked incredulously.

For a house in the Arizona desert with no water! By the way note the meaning of the name “Arizona.” They weren’t joking.*

As the January 1st deadline approaches, many Foothills residents still don’t know where their water will come from. The uncertainty and drama that keeps Nabity up at night doesn’t seem to be dissuading newcomers, though. “I just sold my daughter’s house, next door,” she said, shaking her head. “We got two great offers in, and neither of them cared about the water situation. They believe that the county is not going to let five hundred homes next to one of the wealthiest cities go without water.”

Therefore the county will perform an act of magic, and the Colorado river will fill all the way up in 3.5 hours.

*Wrong. See Skeletor’s correction. Google confirms.

Melted brains.

In the months before she started nursery, my four-year-old daughter would often say she was a boy. 

Little kids say they’re lots of things.

It came unprompted, bubbling up from somewhere pure and certain inside her.

Little kids can be certain of all kinds of things that aren’t true. Certainly is almost always a bad thing, and in a child of four it means nothing.

But the obstacles to her sense of self have started looming, ever since she started nursery in September 2021. 

After she’d been attending for a few weeks, she said to me again she was a boy. But then she looked troubled and added that her teacher told her she’s a girl, that she’s always a girl. 

Teachers are not there to lie to the children they teach.

I suspect her teachers don’t think she’s ‘old enough’ for gender nonconformity, despite published research confirming that children as young as two to three recognise their gender, and can identify their own transness.

Published where? TikTok?

Sometimes she still broaches the topic of wanting to be a boy. She’s pointed to male characters in books and said she looks like them. We say teachers can’t tell her who she is, but she comes back with the same contradiction – if my teacher said this, it must be true.

Well, ya know, in this case, given that the kid’s parents have mush for brains, she’s right – the teacher is more likely to be right than the parents are.

No matter how much you’ve taught them yourself, in the end their teachers become their educational authority. My child’s already learning from her teacher to doubt her thoughts and fear her mind, her very self.

Or maybe she’s learning from her teacher not to believe her daydreams are all true.

Plot twist:

Anti-bullying policies aren’t cutting it. Not for my daughter, or for anyone in the trans community – as a trans man, I know this firsthand.

Ohhhhhhh – you should have said.

No wonder the kid started saying she was a boy.

This poor kid is going to have one confusing childhood.

Another direct insult, as direct and insulting as nominating William “Lia” Thomas Woman of the Year:

The National Women’s History Museum’s current Biography page:

All three are men.

The pope “apologized” about the residential schools, but not really. (“About” rather than “for” is deliberate.)

Pope Francis made a public statement today to the delegations of Indigenous people who met with him this week to discuss personal experiences in residential schools or their harmful legacies.

His statement included the words “I am very sorry,” and is being reported as an apology for residential schools.

Journalism is so deferential to the popes. Why is that? The Vatican is a religious version of the Mafia; it’s not something to defer to.

There are several kinds of wrongs associated with residential schools. There were abusive and often criminal actions by individuals who worked in these institutions. Those in authority covered up abuses and failed to protect children. And the residential school system advanced an assimilationist policy.

Individual criminal responsibility and general institutional responsibility may also overlap. The many unmarked graves and unheeded calls to address deathly conditions in the schools speak to the wrongs and traumatic legacies of these institutions.

Pope Francis most clearly addressed the abusive actions by individuals — the “deplorable conduct” of “a number of Catholics” — about which he expressed sorrow and shame. He also acknowledged the painful experiences of those who shared their stories with him.

The Pope did not acknowledge that the church as an institution embraced assimilationist policy in its decision to run the schools.

And that’s the most important bit. The nuns who ran Goldenbridge were horrible to the children locked up there, but it matters far more that the church supported and administered the entire system of imprisonment and punishment of children.

As is unfortunately common in many church apology statements, when those who utter the apology use the passive voice, it’s unclear who was the agent of the actions in question.

Pope Francis spoke about “a colonization that lacked respect for you,” and acknowledged that “great harm was done to your identity and your culture.” But who was responsible? He spoke about “attempts to impose a uniformity” to which “great numbers of children fell victim” that were based on “programs devised in offices.” But which offices?

The Pope positions the church as being on the side of outrage and sorrow for this colonization — “sadly, this colonial mentality remains widespread” — and as a partner in overcoming it, rather than as an active agent of its perpetration.

Very active indeed.

Yay let’s trans toddlers! What could go wrong?!