Remember when Trump went to visit Macron for Bastille Day and was all excited about the parade with all the toys and wanted “his” generals to do the same next year?

The generals, to his bewilderment, reacted with disgust. “I’d rather swallow acid,” his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, said. Struggling to dissuade Trump, officials pointed out that the parade would cost millions of dollars and tear up the streets of the capital.

And would be a weirdly militaristic thing to do.

An Air Force general later spelled it out for him.

“So, what do you think of the parade?” Trump asked Selva. Instead of telling Trump what he wanted to hear, Selva was forthright.

“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” Selva said. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added, “It’s not who we are.”

Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous.

“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”

Right. That’s exactly why Trump wanted to do it.

Trump’s love affair with “my generals” was brief, and in a statement for this article the former President confirmed how much he had soured on them over time. “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system,” he said.

It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

“Which generals?” Kelly asked.

“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military.

The Third Reich model. Of course he did.

Say you’re Trump and you want to get rid of certain telltale notes – what do you do? You stuff them down the toilet, of course, flush once and walk away.

Remember our toilet scoop in Axios AM earlier this year? Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about former President Trump will report that White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher.

For the compelling reason that nobody else would be that stupid.

Haberman — who obtained the photos recently — shared them with us ahead of the Oct. 4 publication of her book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.”

…

Haberman’s sources report the document dumps happened multiple times at the White House, and on at least two foreign trips.

“That Mr. Trump was discarding documents this way was not widely known within the West Wing, but some aides were aware of the habit, which he engaged in repeatedly,” Haberman tells us.

“It was an extension of Trump’s term-long habit of ripping up documents that were supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act.”

And of his lifelong habit of ripping up anything he feels like ripping up because that’s the kind of guy he is.

Thought for the day:

By making the term “man” subsume “woman” and arrogate to itself the representation of all of humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of their thought. By taking the half for the whole, they have not only missed the essence of whatever they are describing, but they have distorted it in such a fashion that they cannot see it correctly. As long as men believed the earth to be flat, they could not understand its reality, its function, and its actual relationship to other bodies in the universe. As long as men believe their experiences, their viewpoint, and their ideas represent all of human experience and all of human thought, they are not only unable to define correctly in the abstract, but they are unable to describe reality accurately.

Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

That’s not how it works.

An Irish “LGBTQ+ Inclusive” football team beat out the female competition in the 2022 Junior J Shield Final, claiming a significant margin of victory in every placing that many attribute to the fact a biological male was on the team.

Silly many, what difference would that make?

Na Gaeil Aeracha, which bills itself as Ireland’s “first explicitly LGBTQ+ inclusive” football club was forced to lock down its social media accounts following backlash as sport fans noticed one of the players appeared to be an older man.

Giulia Valentino, a male who identifies as a transgender woman, was playing against young women and girls in the Ladies Gaelic Football Junior J Shield tournament on July 27 and August 3 on behalf of Na Gaeil Aeracha. Photos from the event began to circulate on social media after sport writer Ewan MacKenna called attention to the results.

MacKenna posted a screenshot of Na Gaeil Aeracha’s policy on inclusivity from their now-private Instagram page in which the team reiterated that its players “may play at training or in a match for the team they best identify with, without restriction.” Another policy posted by the football club explicitly states that medical transitioning is not necessary. Curiously, the only restriction the club has is on non-binary players due to a lack of gender neutral competitions.

Emphasis added. There’s your problem right there. No gender neutral competitions: therefore it makes zero sense, and is unfair, to tell players they can play on the team they best identify with, without restriction. That would be a gender neutral team. Create a gender neutral team then. Don’t have a women’s team and a men’s team and then tell people to play on whichever team they “identify with.” Pick a side. Have a gender neutral team, or don’t, but don’t create nonsense (and of course grotesque unfairness to women players) by having women’s and men’s teams but also telling players to inclusive themselves on whichever team they want. Do one or the other, not a stupid mishmash of both whose only result just happens to be cheating women.

The Na Gaeil Aeracha policy in their words on their website:

Any person playing for Na Gaeil Aeracha club may play at training or in a match for the team they best identify with, without restriction. 

Na Gaeil Aeracha will support any athlete who is interested in playing for our club and encourage them to play on the team that they feel most comfortable with.

In terms of non-binary athletes, as the GAA currently does not facilitate mixed team competitions, we only have an LGFA and GAA competitive teams. If you are comfortable playing for either of these teams, we will respect your pronouns regardless. 

We hope to set up a social mixed team in the future to facilitate those who do not feel comfortable playing on either of our current teams available, but just due to resources, we cannot do this just yet.

We don’t have mixed teams, but feel free to play on either team, so we do have mixed teams, or rather, we have a men’s team and a mixed team, but we don’t have a women’s team, because we tell men to feel free to play on the women’s team, so the only ones who lose out here are the women, so that’s grand, isn’t it boys.

A heavy foot on the scale again:

A Tasmania-based lesbian woman and supporter of the anti-trans group LGB Alliance, is raising funds to take her battle to ban trans women and men from her drag shows, to the High Court. 

The LGB Alliance is not “anti-trans.” Journalists get away with such flagrant lies when reporting on trans-related stories. Lies and libel.

That’s the first paragraph; the second is:

Trigger Warning: This story discusses comments against the transgender community, which might be distressing to some readers. For 24 hour crisis support and suicide prevention call Lifeline on 13 11 14. For Australia-wide LGBTQI peer support call QLife on 1800 184 527 or webchat.

There’s no such trigger warning for lesbians, and no such offer of crisis support and suicide prevention. Also the comments are not “against the transgender community.” They just lie, and lie and lie and lie.

Jessica Hoyle has raised over $3,300, since she launched her campaign on a fundraising platform last month. 

Her campaign to be allowed to do women-only drag shows. It’s not monstrous or evil to want to do women-only events.

Last year, Hoyle failed in her bid to get an exemption from the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to hold her “female-only event” and now plans to take her fight to the High Court.

Scare-quotes on “female-only event” as if there’s something outlandish about that.

Advocacy group Equality Tasmania said that Hoyle’s attempts to get the High Court to rule on watering down the state’s stringent anti-discrimination laws could set a dangerous precedent. 

Another egregious lie. It’s not “discrimination” for groups with less power and status to meet without their overlords present. It’s not “discrimination” for women to want to have some spaces and events without men.

“As a queer, cisgender woman, I know the overwhelming majority of Tasmanian queer, lesbian and bisexual women support equality for transgender women and oppose attempts to exclude them,” Equality Tasmania spokesperson, Dr Lucy Mercer Mapstone, said, in a statement. 

As “a queer, cisgender woman” this bizarre spokesperson is treating women as the oppressive bosses and men as the vulnerable victims. That’s backwards.

“Trans women are women. To say otherwise is inaccurate and distinctly anti-feminist,” said Dr Mapstone.

Wrong again. Accurate is precisely what it is. Trans women are men: we know this because of the two words, trans and women. It’s only women who are women. If you put “trans” in front you’re telling everyone that you’re talking about a man (who says he’s a woman or says he identifies as a woman or whatever the magic formula is that day). It is not in any way inaccurate to say that trans women are men. As for anti-feminist, fuck off with that.

Hoyle’s application for an exemption was refused by Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Sarah Bolt last year. The commissioner  said it was “offensive, humiliating, intimidating, insulting” to ask people to prove that they were biologically female. Hoyle’s application, the commissioner said, went beyond other exemptions and required “people to provide intimate information about their body to gain access to the proposed events”.

Whose fault is that? It’s the fault of the men who insist on forcing themselves on women’s events and spaces.

At the end of the story there’s yet more concern and cuddling.

If you feel distressed reading the story, you can reach out to support services.

For 24 hour crisis support and suicide prevention call Lifeline on 13 11 14

For Australia-wide LGBTQI peer support call QLife on 1800 184 527 or webchat.

That’s if you’re a trans woman of course. Actual women cannot reach out to support services.

Glinner knocks it out of the park for 15 minutes, starting at 30 minutes.

That led me to this from a year ago, which I think I missed at the time:

Seriously??

According to The Australian, yes:

Lesbians will be breaking the law if they exclude biological males who are transgender from social events, after a controversial discrimination ruling set to become a national test case.

Lesbians will be breaking the law if they exclude biological males who are transgender from social events, after a controversial discrimination ruling set to become a national test case. The law will be forcing women to let men attend their social events. The law might as well say women will be breaking the law if they refuse sex. The law might as well be written by the fucking Taliban.

Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination commissioner Sarah Bolt has ruled lesbian events that exclude trans-women carry a “significant risk” of breaching legislation.

A woman herself, and she drops women’s most basic rights into the dispose-all.

In a decision earlier this month not yet publicised, Ms Bolt refused to grant an exemption to allow the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Alliance to exclude “biological men” from lesbian events.

…

Transforming Tasmania said the exclusion of trans-women from lesbian events was discriminatory. “Ultimately, it’s denying the reality of the existence of trans-women, in fact all trans-people,” said Transforming Tasmania spokesperson Charlie Burton.

No, it isn’t denying the reality of the existence of anyone, it’s denying the reality of men becoming women by an act of will or assertion. The men are real, and nobody denies they’re real, but their self-description is a lie.

“Trans-women are women. Full stop. It’s baffling that (LGB Alliance) don’t accept that … Trans and gender-diverse people … have long been an integral part of the broader community.”

Trans women are men. “Full stop” doesn’t make a lie true. It’s not a bit baffling that the LGB Alliance and anyone else knows people can’t change sex. What’s baffling is the eagerness of so many people to pretend the lie is true.

It seems the slogan “No LGB without the T” is not as popular as it once was.

Amnesty is Thorry You Were Offen-ded.

Amnesty International has said it “deeply regrets the distress and anger” caused after it alleged that Ukrainian forces were flouting international law by exposing civilians to Russian fire.

We deeply regret your feefees but you’re wrong to have them.

Amnesty sparked outrage in Ukraine with the publication of a report on Thursday that accused the military of endangering civilians by establishing bases in schools and hospitals, and launching counterattacks from heavily populated areas.

The head of Amnesty’s Ukraine office resigned in protest, accusing the rights organisation of parroting Kremlin propaganda.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the group had tried to “shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim”.

We see a lot of that kind of thing these days.

You don’t like the drought? Ok have a flood.

Photographer John Sirlin was in a canyon in the northeast part of Death Valley National Park late Thursday to shoot lightning in an expected thunderstorm.

Then the lightning petered out and the storm became a nonstop torrential downpour that lasted for hours, bringing near-record rainfall to one of the hottest, driest places on Earth.

Which isn’t what you want in drought conditions. You want slow steady non-torrential rain that has time to soak in, not a blast that washes away all the topsoil.

More analysis will be needed to determine whether climate change helped drive the storm’s intensity. But its extreme nature is consistent with what can be expected as global temperatures rise, experts said, drawing parallels with the historic flooding that damaged Yellowstone National Park in June.

You can have drought, or you can have a firehose. Nothing in between. Sorry!

Death Valley has averaged about 1.96 inches of precipitation per year since record keeping began in 1911, according to the Western Regional Climate Center. Nearly 75% of that amount fell in the space of a few hours on Friday.

Every single road in the park was damaged.

Now that Earth has warmed 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial levels, the odds are elevated that when factors known to produce intense storms do align, their effects will be even more extreme, Diffenbaugh said.

“What we’re seeing with climate change consistently is that when the conditions that are well understood to produce intense precipitation do come together, the fact that there’s more moisture in the atmosphere as a result of long-term warming means that those conditions are primed to produce more intense precipitation,” he said.

Although it can seem counterintuitive, he said, the same dynamic — often described as the increasing thirst of the atmosphere — is also contributing to the historic drought, more intense, frequent heat waves and increasingly extreme wildfire behavior that have beset the western United States.

Whatever it is will be bad.

A reporter at Open Democracy sent For Women Scotland a “when did you stop beating your trans people?” set of questions, so For Women Scotland is sharing the obnoxious questions with us.

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your hugely revealing question set about our shadowy operation. I am only amazed that you forgot to ask about the top speed of our broomsticks and whether they were diesel or electric (0-60 in 20 secs), or, indeed, whether we favour Eye of Newt over Fillet of Fenny Snake (personally, I find Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting are best for date night!). I’m afraid that I must be brief as we are off to dance widdershins round a churchyard by moonlight and those hexes won’t cast themselves!

Adam Ramsay is the “reporter.” I hope his face is scarlet.

Read the whole thing.

Anti-Semitic dogwhistle, from a current Senator. Awesome.

Drag doesn’t have to be misogynist or trans or groomerish. Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:

A not-small number of hours in my early 20s were spent attending drag shows in a basement-level gay club in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. What you would do is arrive around midnight when “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé was playing, and by the time you’d heard “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé for the eighth or 40th replay, it was time to go home.

In between were drag performers. Drag kings, mostly (this was ladies’ night), who would dress in fedoras or leather chaps and lip-sync to James Brown or Justin Timberlake. There was a performer who went by Ken Vegas. My friends and I thought Ken Vegas was a bona fide celebrity, and I’ve never really recovered from learning that Ken was just Kendra in daylight hours and worked in graphic design.

It was silly, it was campy — Lord, how many debates we could skirt these days if only every Republican would read and understand Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” — and it made me think in new ways about what it meant to behave as a man, or behave as a woman, to perform masculinity or perform femininity.

It sounds like a lost Utopia, doesn’t it?

But then we move on to the current scene, where we never ask why it’s only Drag Queen Story Hour and never Drag King, or better yet, both at once.

Some conservatives have decided that — forget about childhood poverty, or vaccine paranoia, or lax gun laws — the real threat to our children is when performers in glamorous hair and makeup come to libraries to teach lessons of tolerance and self-acceptance and read books out loud.

But why is it only the ones in glam hair and makeup? Why none in work boots and five o’clock shadow? Is there an extra message beyond the one of tolerance and self-acceptance? And anyway what do we mean by self-acceptance? Some people are all too self-accepting, to the point that they force their self-accepted selves on everyone else, including people who aren’t interested.

And so I’ve been asking myself whether I would have been comfortable with those performers reading a story to my daughter in the children’s section of the library on Tuesday morning. The answer I’ve been able to come up with is, Does anybody have Ken Vegas’s number?

But it isn’t about Ken Vegas. It’s not at all clear that Ken Vegas could get an invitation. Ken Vegas is a woman, and women aren’t cool any more, women are Karens. How about Karen Vegas? Would she do?

I just listened to most of this Radio 4 item on drag queen story hour, in which Jo Bartosch argued against and some young guy who says “like” way too often argued for. The host was, predictably, somewhat flippant about the whole thing, but what really annoys me is that no one at any point stopped to ask why is this only one-way? Why is it monodirectional? Why is there no drag king story hour? Why is it all about men making a joke of women while no one is making a joke of men?

I would really like to know.

They talk about panto, and someone (I think the like-saying guy) mentions Shakespeare, meaning actually theater in general at that time and before: women did not perform on stage, end of story. So ok drag queens have roots in theater history, perhaps. Fine, but this is now. Women are allowed to perform on stage and in films and on television. They can’t get parts written for them, they can’t get producers to hire them, but they are formally permitted to do the work.

This is now. The whole idea of drag queens reading stories to children in high squeaky voices is very now. So why is it all men??? Why do men get to go to libraries and make fun of women and get paid for it, while women don’t get to go to libraries and make fun of men?

I’d like to know.

It’s very odd that no one brought that up, not even Jo (though she did make the necessary point about the fact that drag basically mocks women and that shouldn’t just be ignored). It needs to be brought up more. Drag queens are a thing; drag kings are not (at least not in libraries); why not? What does that tell us?

David Frum on how it could play out:

[S]crape aside the audacity, the self-pity, and the self-aggrandizement, and there was indeed an idea in Donald Trump’s speech at a conference hosted by the America First Policy Institute: a sinister idea, but one to take seriously.

Trump sketched out a vision that a new Republican Congress could enact sweeping new emergency powers for the next Republican president. The president would be empowered to disregard state jurisdiction over criminal law. The president would be allowed to push aside a “weak, foolish, and stupid governor,” and to fire “radical and racist prosecutors”—racist here meaning “anti-white.” The president could federalize state National Guards for law-enforcement duties, stop and frisk suspects for illegal weapons, and impose death sentences on drug dealers after expedited trials.

That may all be just Trump’s Favorite Fantasy, but it’s useful to know what he’s dreaming of.

Trump’s first term was mitigated by his ignorance, indolence, and incompetence. Since the humiliation of his 2020 defeat, however, Trump has been studying how to use a second chance if he gets one. The one abiding interest of his life, revenge, will provide the impetus. Next time, he will have the wholehearted support of a White House staff selected to enable him. Next time, he will have the backing in Congress of a party remade in his own image. Next time, he’ll be acting to ensure that his opponents never again get a “next time” of their own.

We have to hope his head explodes first.

I seized the opportunity presented by No Internet to read some of White Fragility, and found it not as terrible as I expected, but hardly a work of staggering genius. There is this air of unfalsifiability about the whole thing, because she treats any disagreement with her or challenge to anything she says as an example and illustration of WhiteFragility, which amounts to declaring herself always right from the outset. It’s quite like Freud that way. Your resistance simply shows how right I am.

John McWhorter of course makes the same point:

DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward. Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. DiAngelo is less a coach than a proselytizer.

When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times, even though white guilt and politesse have apparently distracted many readers from the book’s numerous obvious flaws.

I love that. When writers who come across as dogmatic and over-confident and smug, it’s exciting when they nevertheless make a compelling case! Hahahaha yes it is.

For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality.

There’s one place where she makes a wild claim about citizenship that gets the history completely wrong.

DiAngelo insinuates that, when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago. But how would she know? Where is the evidence for this presumptuous claim?

It’s in the Karenpedia.

White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.

I have to say, if I were forced to choose between two writers as my only reading from now on, and those two were DiAngelo and McWhorter, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat.

Originally a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany Room.

Among the comic strips I follow is Heart of the City, a charming strip about a young girl named Heart, her friends, and their lives in Philadelphia. It was created by Mark Tatulli, and he wrote the strip for many years. A few years ago he passed the strip along to Christina “Steenz” Stewart. She is Black, and she made significant changes to the strip over the few years, in addition to having a drastically different art style. Many characters were added, several faded away, the cast became much more racially diverse, and there was a bit more focus on the differences between the life experiences of girls and boys. I was wary at first, change is hard, but I’ve really come to like where Steenz is taking the strip.

Recent outrage over the use of the phrase “people who bleed” reminded me that a current plot line is Heart starting her period. This is the first standard newspaper strip I can recall that has ever touched on that topic. It’s being handled really well.

I looked up information about the strip and about Steenz. She was inspired by seeing an African-American woman cartoonist, which helped her realize she could do this, too.

But she identifies as non-binary and prefers “they”.

So this woman, who writes so well about the experience of being a girl, and who was inspired by another Black woman, has decided she’s not a woman. This makes me sad. She gets a “first” added to her bio, but it’s unfortunate to see her reject such an important aspect of her life and what (not who) she is.

“Inclusive” sport in Ireland:

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never going back.

I have been thinking a lot about intellectually compelling problems vs. emotionally compelling problems lately: Considering that climate change – along with the strongly interlinked problem of ocean acidification, the mass-extinction of species, and the general toll the human economy is taking on ecosystems and the natural world – is the most dire existential emergency our species has ever faced, many have struggled to explain why – despite constant claims of “alarmism” and “hysteria” – there isn’t more alarm and public outrage around the issue.

The most obvious answer, and usually the first one that comes to mind – is that tackling the problem puts you on a direct collision course with powerful vested interests. The fossil fuel industry is the richest, most profitable industry in history, and is thus able to spend practically unlimited resources financing disinformation campaigns, lobbying buying politicians etc. But there’s more to it than that. Even if only a relatively small percentage of the population get their income directly from the fossil fuel industry, we are all invested in the modern, high-tech, consumerist life-style, and while I don’t think there’s much evidence that consumerism ever made us any happier (I’m strongly inclined to suspect the opposite is true!), it’s certainly addictive as hell, very much like heroin or alcohol in this respect. You can learn pretty much everything there is to know about human self-deception, rationalization, compartmentalization etc. by studying addicts alone, and we’re all addicts when it comes to fossil fuel.

Another common explanation is that the issue has become so heavily politicized that many also have an ideological stake in denying the problem, especially in the U.S. where it’s become just another proxy issue in the ongoing Culture War between Democrats and Republicans for the soul of the nation. In reality, of course, neither Democrats nor Republicans have any real interest in doing anything about the problem that has any chance of actually working. But since Democrats at the very least tend to accept the problem as real and pay lip-service to doing something about it, even acknowledging that the problem exists has come to be seen as a “liberal” or “leftist” position and hence a proxy for everything people dislike about taxes and regulations, immigration, abortion, gun control, political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism, secularism etc. Thus rejecting it out of hand becomes about group identity (“My kind of people don’t believe things like that!”), tribal loyalty, rooting for your team, booing the other team, etc. The actual facts of the matter hardly enter into your considerations at all.

But this still doesn’t quite explain why even people who accept all the facts, understand what’s happening on an intellectual level, and are able accurately assess the danger, are mostly not motivated to do anything about it. Of course there is a game-theory aspect to it: Why should I give up the benefit (in the short term) of fossil fuels if others won’t and the world gets screwed anyway? And of course the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies is only too obvious.

But I also think there’s a lot of truth in what people like Daniel Kahneman have said about apathy and indifference to climate change and human psychology. The human brain evolved to react strongly to a sudden danger or threat. It did not evolve to react to a gradual worsening of conditions over time. We’re all familiar with the (probably apocryphal, but never mind) claim about frogs in hot water: If you put a frog directly into scolding hot water, so the story goes, it will instantly jump out and save its own life. If you put the same frog in lukewarm water and gradually heat it to that exact same temperature, it will look in vain for the “line” where the temperature changes from acceptable to unacceptable and hence remain passive and indecisive while it’s slowly boiled to death. The claim doesn’t have to be literally true (after all, the topic at hand wasn’t frogs anyway) to be instructive.

The human brain also evolved to react strongly to a threat from a clearly identifiable and hostile external agent (a predator, a rivaling tribe etc.). Climate change offers none of these psychological triggers. The problem is incremental rather than binary (i.e. all or nothing), and while wildfires and extreme weather events can be both sudden and dramatic when they occur, it’s not like they never happened in the past. Rather than a sharp line we’re once again looking at a gradual increase in the statistical frequency and intensity of such events. Nor is there a clearly identifiable external enemy. Blaming politicians or even the fossil fuel industry doesn’t quite do it justice since ultimately we’re the ones who keep electing those politicians and paying those companies to fuel our cars, heat our homes etc. As someone once put it, the elephant in the room is all of us. And so even if you understand the problem on an intellectual level, it doesn’t trigger the kind of instinctive, visceral fear reaction required to motivate action. In other words, it may be an intellectually compelling problem but it’s not an emotionally compelling problem, and only emotions can generate motivation.

Compare it to, say, the threat of Islamist terrorism. If you’re an average citizen in the West and you look at the most statistically probable causes of death for people within your demographic, Islamist terrorism should rank very low on your list of concerns – certainly orders of magnitude lower than climate change. But here we have almost the opposite dynamic going on: It may not be an intellectually compelling problem, but it sure is emotionally compelling. Terrorist attacks are usually sudden and dramatic when they occur and conjure up images of dangerous fanatics shouting violent slogans who hate us and want to destroy us. It ticks all the right boxes and pushes all the right buttons.

Bottom line, visceral fear – and hence motivation to act – often has very little to do with any objective assessment of risk, and so people burn enormous amounts of calories worrying about vanishingly improbable dangers and act accordingly while the greatest existential threat to our collective survival is treated with about as much urgency as a bad haircut. Well… Not quite that much…

The Guardian does a long conversation with athlete and “LGBTQ+” activist Tom Daley:

Isn’t part of the problem that the LGBTQ+ community is at war with itself over trans rights? The level of fury between trans rights activists and gender-critical feminists astonishes me, I say. Daley nods, and says it’s dangerous. “The LGBT community is so fractured right now over certain issues. And that’s when the right are going to get us. They’re going to try to break us down. And if you think they’re just going to take away trans people’s rights, you’re wrong. It’s going to go much further than that, and we have to stick together as an LGBTQIA+ community to stop that happening.”

But it isn’t a community. The T part is a different subject, a different category, a different issue. Mashing them together is very useful for the T but very the opposite of useful for the L and the G. The G are being very slow to figure that out, probably because they’re not the ones who have to deal with the men invading women’s sports and women’s rape shelters and women’s changing rooms.

Daley goes on to perform this very “not my problem” blindness:

Daley has 2.2m followers on Twitter. In June, speaking at the British LGBT awards, where he was named Sports Personality of the Year, he condemned the decision of Fina (the administrative body for international water sport) to ban trans athletes who have been through any part of male puberty from elite women’s competition. Daley said when he heard the ruling, “I was furious. Anyone that’s told that they can’t compete or can’t do something they love just because of who they are, it’s not on. It’s something I feel really strongly about – giving trans people the chance to share their side.”

He feels very strongly about letting men ruin women’s sport. How women will feel about that simply doesn’t impinge on his awareness at all. Women, meh, who cares, they need to shut up and take it.

For so long, Daley has been regarded as a national treasure. But as he takes a more active role in the charged debate about trans athletes, it is inevitable that opinions about him will become divided. In an interview with GB News, former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies responded to Daley’s speech by suggesting that as a male athlete he doesn’t have any skin in the game: “Tom is male and this does not affect him in the slightest … I think we have to listen to the women, and Fina were the first governing body since 2015 to actually poll their female athletes and listen to their coaches.”

That’s not suggesting, it’s pointing out, and rightly so. Of course he fucking doesn’t have any skin in the game. He’s a man. I am so sick of watching men blithely ignoring women’s rights in favor of the made-up “rights” of men to “do something they love” even when that means women don’t get to do the same something they love.

Does he think that ultimately inclusion trumps fairness? “No, of course not. But, as human beings, we have to be a little bit more thoughtful before banning people completely from something. If kids are doomed to never be able to do what they love, they may well just give up.”

That applies to female kids too, you stupid prick. What about the female kids who just give up???

The issue of trans women even became the battleground for the Tory leadership election. Penny Mordaunt, a contestant on Daley’s ITV celebrity diving show Splash! in 2014, was accused by rivals of being a “woke warrior” for her previous support of trans women. Mordaunt desperately tried to distance herself, insisting she had never claimed “trans women are women”.

Is this what he means by LGBT issues being hijacked? He nods. “Think of the tiny percentage of trans people in the population, and prospective Tory leaders are using that to win votes. I don’t understand why people think they have to be less woke in order to lead a country. “How can understanding people’s feelings be a bad thing?” He trails off, lost for words.

Again. Listen carefully. Women have feelings too. Women. have. feelings. too.

aley has always been one of life’s planners. I met him again in 2015 when he’d just turned 21 and was living with Black, a prominent campaigner in the fight for US marriage equality. Daley was mapping out his future – a gold medal at Rio, a career in television after diving, marriage and kids at some point. He said he knew he’d be the disciplinarian because he was tougher than Black, despite the fact that his partner was 20 years older. Two years later he and Black married, and in 2018 Robbie was born with the help of an egg donor and a surrogate.

You know – some woman and some other woman. A couple of women. Bitches. Karens. People who don’t matter. Trivial worthless people without feelings or ambitions or goals who just happen to have the eggs we want and the ability to gestate the baby we want. Technology, basically.

He’s planning to order a second baby. Yet more Karens to deal with.