Good thing it’s a very level-headed, reasonable, thoughtful, careful, fair movement for social justice. Good thing it stays strictly away from hyperbolic claims about ideological rivals being genociders. Good thing it doesn’t pretend knowing what a woman is=systematic murder of millions of people.

This is unbelievably obnoxious and intrusive and aggressive.

It’s a captive “audience,” extremely tightly confined, with no escape possible. Standing up and making a lot of noise of any kind is grossly rude, and making a lot of religious noise is an outright insult.

Now Ilhan Omar is on the naughty stool because she asked what people would think if Muslims did it. Of course, in Islamist countries, Muslims do do it, but she’s not wrong to hint that no one should do it.

More treason in Congress.

The Times reports:

For weeks in late 2020, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, cheered on President Donald J. Trump’s effort to fight his election defeat, privately offering up “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”

In text messages to Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, Mr. Lee encouraged the Trump campaign to embrace Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer whom the senator described as a “straight shooter,” and said the president should “hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.”

But when Ms. Powell put forth wild claims of foreign rigging of election machines at a widely derided news conference in November, Mr. Lee was chagrined and quietly began to question what Mr. Trump was up to.

Mr. Trump was up to what it was obvious he was up to: trying to steal the election.

[The texts] provide a window into the eagerness of Republicans — even some who ended up voting on Jan. 6 to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory — to believe Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud and their willingness to go to great lengths, including attempts at exploiting the nation’s election laws, to keep him in power. They also illustrate how rapidly those efforts spiraled out of control, and they show a keen awareness on the part of at least some Republicans involved that the endeavor had become untenable to the point of being dangerous.

They were out of control and dangerous from the beginning. Who and what did they think Trump was? He’d spent five years showing us what a worthless but dangerous criminal monstrosity he is, so what was there to “spiral”?

“Me me me me me make it about me talk about me make the thing you’re talking about be about me.”

She doesn’t suspect any such thing.

The usual: calling attention to herself, and trashing feminists in the process.

Well, punk, are ya?

I’ll start. No, and I don’t want to be, and I’ve never wanted to be. (So I must be trans, right? No.)

No, I forget “daintiness” at all times. What a revolting word.

There is nothing I can wear and still be girlish, nor do I want to. I don’t wear slacks or shorts, I wear jeans or (inside) sweat pants. I don’t wear them girlishly, I just wear them.

What does “dressing for an evening date” mean? What are “mannish suits”?

I don’t think about white gloves or white collars at all.

No. I hate perfume and have no jewelry.

No. I sprawl whenever I feel like it.

No. I stride like a fucking kangaroo.

No. I use my voice to argue pugnaciously or to sing “Bad Moon Rising.” Deal with it.

If you’ve been thinking “At least cactus will flourish,” think again.

[E]ven these prickly survivors may be reaching their limits as the planet grows hotter and drier over the coming decades, according to research published on Thursday. The study estimates that, by midcentury, global warming could put 60 percent of cactus species at greater risk of extinction.

There’s nothing surprising in that really. Being adapted to the climate of Arizona doesn’t mean you’re adapted to the climate of a furnace.

Most cactus species “are in some way adapted to the climates and the environments that they live in,” said Michiel Pillet, a doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona who led the new study, which was published in the journal Nature Plants. “Even a slight change may be too much for them to adapt over shorter time scales.”

Adaptation can be fussy that way. “I didn’t say any old amount of heat, I said this heat right here.”

“It’s a popular image of cacti,” said David G. Williams, a professor of botany at the University of Wyoming who was not involved in the new research. “‘Ah, we don’t have to worry about cacti. Look at them, they’ve got spines, they grow in this terrible environment.’” But cactuses, like most plants, exist in delicate balance with the ecosystems around them, he said. “There are a lot of these tipping points and thresholds and interactions that are very fragile and responsive to changes in the environment, land use and climate change.”

…

Brazil is a hot spot for cactus diversity. As the country’s northeastern drylands experience hotter temperatures, more intense droughts and desertification, that plant wealth is in jeopardy, said Arnóbio de Mendonça, a climate and biodiversity researcher at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil who did not work on the new study.

“Species either adapt or they will go extinct,” he said. “As adaptation is a slow process and current climate change is occurring rapidly, it is likely that many species will be lost.”

Don’t look up.

Trump issues insults and taunts in observation of Giant Rabbit Day.

And carrots to the Rabbit, too.

“Cis” man singles out feminist woman for opprobrium again.

Of course the headline doesn’t say “I am being silenced” – it says “women won’t be silenced.” She’s not talking about herself, she’s talking about women. Maugham wouldn’t understand.

As if there aren’t “loads of powerful white men” on his side.

Stonewall “training” at Bristol University:

Women may not truly know they are women unless they have their chromosomes tested, Stonewall has told university staff in its latest diversity training.

Lucky lucky staff, getting trained by the best.

In a handout after the session, staff were given a series of tips for creating an inclusive environment. One stated: “Remove gendered language from key policies and support LGBT people to navigate policies which might exclude them including parental leave policies.”

Oh sure, just remove “gendered language” from everything, that’s a good idea. That way women won’t be able to talk back. Sit down, Karen!

The Stonewall handout, seen by The Telegraph, added that staff should “avoid gendered language such as girlfriend, boyfriend and normalise the introduction of pronouns”.

The introduction of pronouns? We’ve already been introduced. Pronouns are part of normal language acquisition. What Stonewall means is that staff should try to “normalise” telling everyone to use the wrong pronouns for people who claim to be the opposite sex.

Bristol staff were also encouraged to “keep things gender-neutral until you’ve been told someone’s pronouns or the gender of someone they’re referring to”.

No, don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t “keep things gender-neutral.” We live in the real world, where nothing is gender-neutral, so we need to have the words to talk about it.

Dr Sarah-Louise Dietz, an HR worker at Bristol, told The Telegraph she had to write a letter of apology after trans activists on a staff equality committee walked out last year over her defence of the word “maternity” in university policies.

While the word ultimately stayed, she said she was subject to a three-month informal probe when staff complained about the “problematic” and “exclusionary” term and said she had been offensive by stating only biological women can give birth.

“There is a culture of fear on campus. Female professor friends and I are scared to even talk about women’s rights in public spaces near the university,” she said. “We speak in hushed tones looking over our shoulders.”

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Casual observers.

Women’s sports only exist to exclude males. If women’s sports included males, there would no longer be women’s sports.

It’s a matter of fairness. As soon as anyone wants to be more “inclusive” you know fairness is about to get screwed over, and somebody is going to be cheated out of a spot on the team, or a place on the podium. When it comes to fairness in sports, segregation by sex is as basic as segregation by age, but does anyone push to include high school students “included” in primary school sports, or adults in children’s divisions? No. Why not?

We’re often told that “You’re as young as you feel.” Why shouldn’t anyone take this as literally as “TWAW?” It makes as much sense, and when you think about it, the “arguments” and claims of trans activism have already blazed a path that could as easily be followed by those who wish to put adults into children’s sports as it has been by those who have successfully put men and boys into female sports. Here’s why.

Every adult human being has actually already been a child. Most will retain memories of what their childhood was like, how it really was to be a child. Not a guess, not a costume, not a collection of stereotypes of what a child is “supposed” to do, or like, or appear. Actual experience. Short of the loss of memory through injury, trauma, or aging, nothing can take those memories and experiences away. Nobody will ever be able to claim you were never a child.

No man has ever been a woman. They have never experienced being a woman, and never will, whatever hormones, drugs or surgical procedures they put themselves through. The most they’ll be able to do is give an impression or performance, most likely based on sexist, patriarchal stereotypes. Everyone will know that he was never a girl or woman, and never will be.

Some adults and older children have “mental ages” that are much younger. For whatever reason, congenital or pathological, brain development, personality, information processing and intelligence are delayed, or stalled at what one would expect for someone younger. This is not always obvious by observing, but might show itself through interactions with others. There will be a range of abilities and deficits, with a spread of intelligence and aptitudes, with some individuals able to live healthy, independent lives, and others requiring life-long constant care and support, without which they would be unable to get by. There’s a wide range in between these extremes. Many people within this range of mental age, capability, and development will pass as neurotypical, and not exhibit any particular mental difficulty without interaction and careful observation. But in many instances, mentally at least, these people are stll, essentially, children.

There are children who suffer from Progeria, a condition which results in abnormally rapid aging. It is not evident at birth, but can show itself within a year or two, most often initially as a slowing of growth. According to the Mayo Clinic: Heart problems or strokes are the eventual cause of death in most children with progeria. The average life expectancy for a child with progeria is about 13 years. Some with the disease may die younger and others may live longer, even up to 20 years.

I am not going to make any further mention of adults who have the mental age of children, or children who age prematurely, but I know that like trans activism’s opportunistic appropriation and invocation of “intersex”, I can deploy the fact of their existence when needed. I don’t even have to twist and distort these conditions to the same degree as genderists do with people who have DSDs. The point, however, is the same. If I am allowed to muddy the concept of “biological age” sufficiently, I can blunt, or even destroy its meaningful use as grounds for counterargument. Age is a spectrum; You’re As Young As You Feel. Or, more militantly, YAYAYF! NO DEBATE!

As an added, bonus parallel, just as trans activism supports (and is lead by) AGPs demanding to be treated as women, so too does trans-agism have its own fetishistic poster-children of adults (mostly, if not all males as far as I know) who demand to be treated as children and infants. They could come out of the shadows, like their much more fortunate and celebrated AGP bretheren, to partake in the benefits of Stunning Bravery. Why not? After all, anything else would be kink-shaming. If it’s allowed for one, why not the other?

In trans thought, while typical “feminine” appearance is often helpful, “passing” is irrelevent; it’s the inner feeling of “being” the other sex that counts. Some women have beards. Some have penises. Get over it. We’re supposed to ignore obviously male bodies that have bone structure, muscle mass and cardiovascular performance of bodies that have gone through male puberty. Why can’t we just as easily be convinced to ignore the obviously adult bodies on the playing field amongst children? We’ve already given up both safety and fairness for women; why not children too? We’ve gone far enough down the line of crushing the athletic dreams of girls for the sake of TiMs, why can’t we do the same for all children, so that Child-Identified Adults can take part in children’s sports? Why are they excluded? Age is just a number. Fair is fair. Right?

Of course, as in the trans activist version of this vision, as soon as more than one participant breaks the barrier on a given team, then it’s game over, and our brave, progressive Vanguard of the Right Side of History becomes just another also-ran, and has to find a new team to join in order to make it meaningfully worthwhile to participate. It’s no longer fun if you can’t win. Just ask the women and girls.

We’ve been told we must ignore our fine-tuned sense of who is male and who is female, to sacrifice fairness itself in the name of “inclusivity?” Why is that? Why do women bear this burden almost exclusively, often on pain of expulsion from their own teams and leagues, should they dare protest this injustice? Why is there no equivalent movement to allow adults into children’s sports in the name of inclusivity? Most of the arguments against doing so are exactly the same as those that have already been brushed aside in the name of trans inclusivity. Such a push would be no less unfair than what has already been done to women and girls. Why not let all parents have to face the heartache, helplessness, and rage that the parents of girls and young women who have been forced to accept boys and young men (and not so young in their sports, showers, and locker rooms have had to endure?

So why not let adults compete against children, just as boys and men have been unleashed against girls and women? The advantages of performance, courtesy of greater physical development, are the same in both cases. The manifest unfairness, as well as the risks to safety and safeguarding are exactly the same. Forget Rachel Dolezal, whose performance of “blackness” is somehow nothing like the TiM performance of “womanness.” I would love to hear an advocate for trans “inclusion” argue their way out of the conclusion that adults should be allowed to compete against children. They’ve already used most of the points I have to support their own position. Why can’t I enjoy the same thrill of being the advance guard of the next big rights movement. One is a thought experiment. The other is already happening. One would be considered an outrage, the other is considered the height of compassion and justice. Funny old world. Funny old people.

Remember. You’re As Young As You Feel. Let no one tell you otherwise.

The NY Times offers a tale of discrimination:

A same-sex married couple said in a complaint filed Tuesday that the City of New York discriminated against them in denying them in vitro fertilization coverage under the city’s insurance plan for employees.

But wait! There’s a catch. The same sex they are is the male one. In vitro fertilization don’t do you no good if you ain’t got no egg. They ain’t got no egg, on account of how they’re men.

The couple, Nicholas Maggipinto, 36, and Corey Briskin, 33, claim the policy discriminates against them based on their sex and sexual orientation and that if they were female or in a heterosexual relationship they would have access to the I.V.F. benefits that city employees are entitled to. Mr. Briskin was, until recently, an assistant district attorney.

Yes, but that’s because of the non-negotiable requirement for an egg, not because the policy “discriminates against” them. Nature discriminates against them, if you want to put it that way, but the City of New York doesn’t.

Under the city’s insurance benefits policy, a covered person is only eligible for such services when they are deemed infertile. The policy defines infertility as the inability to conceive after “12 months of unprotected intercourse,” or intrauterine insemination — a procedure that inserts sperm directly inside a uterus — for a period of time.

Intercourse is not defined in the policy, but the complaint claims New York City and its insurers “have interpreted it to mean intercourse between a man and a female.”

A man and a female. Interesting. They really don’t see women as human, do they. Egg-havers, and cruel withholding Kareny egg havers at that.

That language, the complaint said, made it impossible for Mr. Briskin and Mr. Maggipinto, who will need to use a surrogate, to ever be deemed infertile, effectively blocking them from receiving any I.V.F. insurance coverage.

They’ll “need” to “use” a “surrogate”? You’d think they were talking about a food processor here. What the Times means is that these two men intend to use a woman like an appliance to cook a fetus for them, and they think their city insurance should pay for them to rent the appliance. Meanwhile, what about those terfs, eh?

Mr. Briskin said after gay marriage became legal across the country he never would have imagined that fighting for I.V.F. benefits would be a new obstacle gay men would have to overcome.

“It’s mind blowing that in 2022 we’re still having this conversation about a policy that so clearly excludes gay men because of horribly antiquated views of homosexuality,” he said. “We got the ability to get married and the rest would have been kind of smooth sailing, but we were sorely mistaken.”

Hello? It’s not “views” of homosexuality at all, it’s reality. Gay men can’t make a baby because they don’t have the egg. That has nothing whatever to do with any views of homosexuality, antiquated or sparkling new. Getting married doesn’t cause the egg to show up and hover in the air waiting to be fertilized.

The couple claims the policy reinforces the idea that gay men are not fit to be parents.

Again – not about an idea – about a reality. Men don’t have eggs.

And another thing. Women don’t owe men eggs. There is no law or rule that says some woman somewhere has to be that couple’s surrogate, or else. No woman anywhere has to be that couple’s surrogate.

Mr. Romer-Friedman said that along with hopes the city will change the policy to be inclusive of gay men, the couple is also seeking monetary compensation for themselves and other gay male employees who have been denied benefits in the past.

Mr. Maggipinto said: “The other thing that we don’t want to lose sight of is that we want to bring home a baby, and short of getting the benefit, we can’t do that from a financial perspective. We just don’t have the money.”

How about somebody to clean the place? The city should be paying some bitch to do that too, right? Maybe at the same time as hatching the egg?

And what about cooking? They don’t want to eat out every night, unless the baby is being super annoying. Another bitch the city should pay for. Yes that will be one egg, one cleaner, and one cook with deep knowledge of Indian, Thai, and Japanese cooking.

Oh look, another venomous liar.

She’s off the charts angry at feminists who express sympathy (and horror and so on) at the murder of two gay men. What a thing to be angry about! What a disgusting sentiment! And no, being gender critical doesn’t “feed into” hatred of lesbians and gays. That’s just a made-up chain of causation, made up as a way to punish and isolate and indeed incite hatred of gender critical feminists. And LGB doesn’t go “with the T”; the two are different, and she doesn’t get to assume that a murderer of gay men would murder trans people instead if only the opportunity arose.

She uses hate speech to complain about women she accuses of inciting murder.

Bill McKibben in the NYRB a couple of years ago:

Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct possibility, as Mark Lynas’s new book, Our Final Warning, makes painfully clear.

…

A survey of the damage done at one degree is impressive and unsettling, especially since in almost every case it exceeds what scientists would have predicted thirty years ago. (Scientists, it turns out, are by nature cautious.) Lynas offers a planetary tour of the current carnage, ranging from Greenland (where melt rates are already at the level once predicted for 2070); to the world’s forests (across the planet, fire season has increased in duration by a fifth); to urban areas in Asia and the Middle East, which in the last few summers have seen the highest reliably recorded temperatures on Earth, approaching 54 degrees Celsius, or 130 degrees Fahrenheit. It is a one-degree world that has seen a girdle of bleached coral across the tropics—a 90 percent collapse in reproductive success along the Great Barrier Reef, the planet’s largest living structure—and the appalling scenes from Australia in December, as thousands of people waded into the ocean at resort towns to escape the firestorms barreling down from the hills.

And that was a couple of years ago. It’s worse now.

At two degrees’ elevated temperature, “scientists are now confident” that we will see an Arctic Ocean free of ice in the summer—when already the loss of ice in the North has dramatically altered weather systems, apparently weakening the jet stream and stalling weather patterns in North America and elsewhere. A two-degree rise in temperature could see 40 percent of the permafrost region melt away, which in turn would release massive amounts of methane and carbon, which would whisk us nearer to three degrees. But we’re getting ahead of the story. Two degrees likely also initiates the “irreversible loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet.” Even modest estimates of the resulting sea-level rise project that 79 million people will be displaced, and protecting vulnerable cities and towns just along the Eastern Seaboard of the US behind dikes and walls will cost as much as $1 million per person. 

At four degrees, of course, it gets much worse again.

Depending on the study, the risk of “very large fires” in the western US rises between 100 and 600 percent; the risk of flooding in India rises twenty-fold. Right now the risk that the biggest grain-growing regions will have simultaneous crop failures due to drought is “virtually zero,” but at four degrees “this probability rises to 86%.” Vast “marine heatwaves” will scour the oceans: “One study projects that in a four-degree world sea temperatures will be above the thermal tolerance threshold of 100% of species in many tropical marine ecoregions.” The extinctions on land and sea will certainly be the worst since the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, when an asteroid helped bring the age of the dinosaurs to an end. “The difference,” Lynas notes, “is that this time the ‘meteor’ was visible decades in advance, but we simply turned away as it loomed ever larger in the sky.”

Don’t Look Up.

What Lynas’s book should perhaps have made slightly more explicit is how little margin we have to accomplish these tasks. In a coda, he writes valiantly, “It is not too late, and in fact it never will be too late. Just as 1.5°C is better than 2°C, so 2°C is better than 2.5°C, 3°C is better than 3.5°C and so on. We should never give up.” This is inarguable, at least emotionally. It’s just that, as the studies he cites makes clear, if we go to two degrees, that will cause feedbacks that take us automatically higher. At a certain point, it will be too late.

The cruise ship season has begun here. 80 thousand gallons a day.

Expel the witch.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has sided with Tony Abbott and refused to join a “pile on” calling for embattled Liberal candidate Katherine Deves to be axed as the party’s candidate in the formerly blue-ribbon seat of Warringah.

Furious lobbying is under way with the Liberal Party to have Deves axed from the ticket in Warringah and a replacement candidate named before April 21, which is the cut-off date.

The Liberal Party is the right-wing party.

NSW Treasurer Matt Kean launched a blistering attack on Deves on Friday night, declaring she had to be dumped as the Liberal candidate for Warringah because of her comments about gender identity and LGBTQ issues.

“There should be no place for bigotry in a mainstream political party, let alone anywhere,” Kean told The Sydney Morning Herald.

“The Liberal Party should be about building a better country for everyone not dividing people based on their identity.”

Who is this terrible person, so bigoted that she offends even the right-wing party?

Deves runs a lobby group, Save Women’s Sport, which is opposed to the inclusion of trans women in women’s sport. She deleted her Twitter account but old tweets resurfaced in which she called trans children “surgically mutilated and sterilised” and said she was triggered by the rainbow flag.

But trans children [if they get surgery and/or puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones] are surgically mutilated and sterilized. Saying so is not an insult to the children, it’s an accusation of the reckless adults who make it happen.

Meanwhile in Guam –

The High School Rugby League season got underway Saturday, but not without incident.

Word quickly spread around the island’s sports community about a transgender athlete playing for the Guam High girls rugby team. The Panthers had three matches against the Tiyan Titans, Academy Cougars and ND Royals.

There again, it needs to be spelled out. It’s implied, but it needs to be spelled out. There was a boy playing for the Guam High School girls rugby team.

“I was shocked to discover that a male player from Guam High School was on the field charging through my female players with nearly no resistance, imposing injuries along the way,” said Tiyan head coach and long-time rugby advocate Conrad Kerber.

Cheating, innit. An advantage for one girls’ team, but unfair and dangerous for the other team.

Despite the safety concerns, Kerber respects the freedom of choice on identifying one self.

Yeah we all do. That’s personal, and it’s no one else’s business, and knock yourself out. We don’t care about that. We don’t care about your fist until it makes contact with our face.

Now let’s read the insulting sexist dude’s piece about how women need to shut up and go away while the men say how much women’s sport they can have.

Given the urgent call-to-arms from select activists and politicians, casual observers could be forgiven for thinking Australian sport is about to be swamped by transgender athletes seeking to exploit any advantage they can on the playing fields of women’s sport.

No they couldn’t. Never mind about “swamped”; there’s no good reason women should be expected to put up with any men in women’s sports.

Liberal senator Claire Chandler has been at the vanguard of a movement she insists is designed to protect the fairness and integrity of female competition. 

Gee, I wonder why she insists that. Maybe because it’s true?

Her private member’s bill, which has the support of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, has re-emerged as a talking point off the back of a series of major international stories centred on the performance of transgender athletes in elite sport.

Foul! Evasive, dishonest. Not “transgender athletes,” as he knows perfectly well; men who are or claim to be trans and want to invade women’s sports.

Experts have questioned the effectiveness of blanket policy as a blunt instrument of change across a complicated and evolving field.

Blah blah blah. It’s not complicated. The instrument is no more “blunt” than it ever was. Just don’t allow men to invade women’s sports, no matter how they identify.

He then says the same thing over again, in more words.

Later he talks about the difference between elite sport and community sport.

“What we need to remember is when we are talking about community sport, we are talking about someone wanting to go down to the local tennis club or play a social netball game. The people not wanting that to happen are literally not wanting trans people to exist in a sporting environment,” says Ryan Storr, who co-founded Proud2Play, the peak LGBTIQ+ body for engagement in sport in Victoria.

But nobody does not want that to happen. For the millionth time: the issue is men competing against women. The goal is not No Trans People in Sport, it’s male trans people staying out of women’s sport at least at the elite level. It may matter less in community sport, but even there you can have mixed or all-women’s, and I think it should be up to the women if they want to include men. I don’t think it’s Phil Lutton’s call whether they should be forced to put up with it or not.

“Trying to ban someone from community sport, it does not sit anywhere in terms of legal aspects. It’s purely ideological.”

Again: issue is not banning, issue is which sex. It’s not “ideological” it’s physical.

Storr remains frustrated at the hysteria being encouraged by the issue becoming a political one in Australia, especially when the policy bedrock is already so strong, and insists women’s sport has far greater issues at hand, most of which receive little widespread coverage.

There it is. Women made crazy by the uterus. They should be locked up.

Never mind. It’s just some angry witchy screechy bitchy women getting all frenzied in the uterus.

It’s just hysterics I tells ya. We all know how women are.

“Helen, you’re an angry witchy screechy bitchy hysterics-having slag yourself, which you would realise if you’d seen your own comments.”

Jason Weinberg at Daily Nous is applauding from the sidelines again as another gender critical book is surrounded by the baying mob.

Two open letters are circulating regarding the decision of Oxford University Press to publish Gender-Critical Feminism, a forthcoming book by Holly Lawford-Smith, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

One letter, posted by Eugenia Zuroski of McMaster University (who notes that it was “very much a collaborative effort”), is from “members of the international scholarly community with a relationship of some kind, or several kinds, to Oxford University Press,” including authors, reviewers, series and journal editors, translators, instructors who teach OUP’s books, and readers. In the letter they express their “profound disappointment” with OUP’s decision to publish the book. They note that they are not aiming to “censor ideas” and do not call for the decision to publish the book to be reversed.

They just express their profound disappointment. Completely different thing.

Remember Eugenia Zuroski from last weekend? She was fun. Very scholarly.

Back to Daily Nous:

The authors are troubled by the book because, they write, “‘gender critical’ discourse attempts to deny transgender rights under the guise of scholarly inquiry,” and that it is

not a scholarly field, but a coordinated polemical intervention, unsubstantiated by peer-reviewed research in the fields of gender, sexuality, queer, and trans studies, that promotes itself by the deliberate sowing of public “controversy” without being held accountable for very real and dangerous consequences of these discourses for entire demographics of human beings.

The usual much-repeated jargon, in short. But they don’t want to censor ideas! Not at all!

Then there’s one from OUP employees who cheerfully say they do want to censor the book, then Weinberg says he doesn’t have time to say what he thinks. All very edifying and collegial.

I’m reading through Craig Murray’s blog – about his appeal of his sentence, his bad health, his fury at Nicola Sturgeon – and finding some interesting parallels.

May 21, 2021:

Dave Llewellyn sat next to me in the public gallery of the Salmond trial as we witnessed the defence witnesses – largely female – who shredded the prosecution case. A few weeks ago, seven detectives of the Serious Crime Squad raided Dave’s home at 5am, handcuffed him and questioned him over conspiracy to murder – in relation to a public Facebook post. Dave has now been charged with a lesser but still imprisonable offence.

You will recall Mark Hirst, friend of both Dave and I [me], being charged with threatening communication for using the expression “reap the whirlwind” in a political sense – a charge from the Crown Office so outrageous that it was eventually thrown out by the court as “no case to answer”. Well, the Dave Llewellyn case is extremely similar.

Future poet laureate John Betjeman should have been hung, drawn and quartered, oh at least three times, for writing in his famous poem “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough”, if the standard of pretend literalness and credulity being applied by Police Scotland and the Crown Office had been applied to Betjeman. (And no, Dave’s post does not reference bombs.)

The truth is that in Scotland we now have a police, prosecutorial and justice system which is at the disposal of the Sturgeon clique for the pursuit of their private vendettas against political opponents. The fact that I am set to be jailed for “jigsaw identification”, when I demonstrably and provably did far less of this difficult to define activity than the mainstream media, who have not been prosecuted, is further evidence of that, as were the charges against Mark Hirst, and indeed Jeremy Gilchrist.

I have no idea how true it is that he’s being unfairly singled out, but what he says about Scotland’s police, prosecutorial and justice system is all too familiar from the “women won’t wheesht” persecution. He of course would say Marion Millar deserved to be persecuted, but all the same, the overlap is interesting.

So this is who Craig Murray is. The BBC March 25, a mere three weeks ago:

A former diplomat has lost a legal challenge against a jail sentence imposed on him over blogs he wrote about the trial of Alex Salmond.

Craig Murray posted a series of articles online about the former first minister’s high court case in 2020.

He was jailed for eight months for contempt of court after prosecutors raised concerns that complainers could be identified by his writing.

The 63-year-old served four months in prison before being granted parole.

So his verbal abuse of the lunch-having women wasn’t a one-off but part of a pattern.

Scotland’s senior judge, the Lord Justice General Lord Carloway, said: “The petitioner (Murray) is an intelligent person whose actions were deliberate and calculated. They clearly showed contempt for the court’s order and for the rule of law. They created serious risks for the complainers’ mental and physical health.”

…

Lord Carloway said the contempt committed by Murray was of “very great gravity”. He added: “The petitioner deliberately set out to publish information likely to lead to the identification of the complainers and did so.

“The revelation of the identities of the complainers would be likely to result in considerable abuse and harassment (particularly on social media) against them. There was a real danger that they would be physically harmed.”

So now he’s taking his revenge on JKR and her lunch guests. What a horrible man.

Trial judge Lady Dorrian had made an order during the trial to prohibit the identity of the women involved – or any information which could lead to them being identified – from being disclosed.

During the virtual sentencing, Lady Dorian said Murray knew there were court orders giving the women anonymity and he was “relishing” the potential disclosure of their identities.

She said Murray deliberately risked jigsaw identification and that revealing complainers’ identities was “abhorrent”.

Murray was told the posts could lead to the identification of the women, but he left them up, unredacted.

H/t KB Player