Graham Linehan on Jon Ronson on Michfest:

His documentary about Michfest is, of course, a disgrace: the denigration of second-wave feminists is so facile that it actually includes a reference to them “not shaving their legs”; his barely-disguised cheerleading of third-wave feminism—what a coincidence, the porn-positive feminism that most benefits Jon—is grimly revealing. Jon’s compassion is infinite… if you’re male. If you’re female, your rights are subject to the whims of fashion.

Not shaving their legs? Really? Does Jon Ronson shave his?

And of course, there is the unmistakable attempt, one with which feminists are wearily familiar, to place trans-identified males inside the same moral framework as black people experiencing racism. This relentless propaganda, combined with the ambient soundtrack which swells every time words like ‘intersectional’ come up, have the effect of making it feel like a cult initiation recording.

Most insultingly, he portrays AGPs bullying a lesbian festival out of existence as if it was the Camp David accords. It’s a grotesque piece of revisionism. In one section, the principles behind the protest are breathlessly described.. “…headway was made at Camp trans, not least because of the guidelines that Nancy and her friends drew up. “Most festival goers are thoughtful and open minded. Listen carefully and remain calm and patient. Do not call anyone names or belittle their point of view or imply that they are irrational. An atmosphere with love and joy will attract people to us, anger and hostility or turn them away.””

Be polite and tactful as you invade a women-only festival and demand to be incloooded.

Isn’t that lovely? But the worst aspect of the program is not what it contains but what it does not. Ronson fails to even mention that Michfest ended—properly ended—when two lesbians and their adopted son were murdered by one of the Camp Trans protestors.

That would harsh the mellow.

Not a good sign.

BBC Live says all signs are that Russia is invading Ukraine.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says “All the indicators point to increasing numbers and readiness of Russian forces.”

He says the pledge to withdraw Russian troops from Belarus at the end of their joint military drills “was not carried out”.

“The exercise has now been extended until further notice,” he says.

Not good.

And the rest of it.

This is excellent. GB News was looking for volunteers on Twitter earlier because someone else had to back out, and Dennis raised his hand and so did Jon Pike.

Help friends harm enemies: Republican ethics in a nutshell.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is backing a controversial proposal to strip $200m in education funding from Democratic counties that defied his executive order last year banning mask mandates in schools.

The Democratic counties did what they thought would help protect students and teachers from a dangerous virus, while the Republican ones took the “don’t tell us what to do” route, which is not always clever in matters of public health. In other words the Dem counties didn’t do anything actually wrong or malicious. It seems very piggy to punish the schools in those counties for that kind of best judgement decision.

Promoting women is sex discrimination, giving scholarships to minorities is majority discrimination, free school lunches are wealth discrimination, yaddayaddayadda.

The Republican senator Ted Cruz complained on Sunday that Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court was an instance of racial discrimination…

No it’s a correction of generations of racial and sex discrimination. I’m sure he understands that point, it’s not very complicated, but one must throw red meat to The Base.

“Democrats today believe in racial discrimination,” Cruz told Fox News Sunday. “They’re they’re committed to it as a political proposition. I think it is wrong to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to discriminate.’”

But it’s perfectly all right to discriminate in favor of white men as long as you don’t spell out that that’s what you’re doing.

Brendan O’Neill, in one of his getting something right moments, points out the flaw in Laurie Penny’s “feminism”:

Penny writes an awful lot about women for someone who doesn’t know what a woman is. Ostensibly this is a feminist tract, about how humanity faces a terrifying choice – it either carries on down the road to fascism or it embraces the corrective of Laurie Penny’s feminism. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!) And yet it’s a strange feminist tome that thinks men can be women, too. Penny gets it out of the way early. ‘In this book, when I talk about “men” and “women”… I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories’, she says on page 8. So she’s not really talking about men and women at all. What a way to blow up your own thesis. Men have ruined everything, and only a progressive women’s politics can save us, but men can be women too if they want, so this progressive women’s politics will sometimes include men – that’s this book boiled down.

But Laurie Penny will just say they’re not men, because they say so.

And then there’s the part that crosses paths with the detransition article I quoted this morning:

I really wish that Penny – and all the other talking heads of our fashionably traumatised era – would just keep things to herself. Do we need to know that Penny starved herself as a teenager and ended up in hospital? Do we need to know that all her friends seem to have had terrible and frightening sexual experiences? (Where are they hanging out?) Penny says that she and others – the enlightened ones, presumably – have ‘realised and accepted that we are being abused and terrorised’. I call bullshit. Terrorised how? Again, why should we be made to suffer the neurotic cries of the leisured classes? Penny doesn’t need a political movement – she needs a therapist.

All these unconvincing claims to victimhood play an important role, however. They are the means through which the new commentariat launders its privilege and turns it into suffering.

Ah-ha. The same insight, you see. How does one get out of being a privileged white cishet Karen? By being trans or enby, or by telling us about a traumatic teenagerhood.

This is the fundamental function of identity politics – it allows those from wealthy, comfortable backgrounds to position themselves as the new oppressed. So Ms Penny – privately educated, time-rich, her labour unsold, her hands uncalloused, straight, married, etc etc – can magically reposition herself as a member of the downtrodden by announcing that she is genderqueer, a they/them, abused, terrorised, yada yada. And so do the privileged elites culturally appropriate the language of oppression and position us as the oppressors of them.

He’s not wrong.

Andy Lewis pointed out this article (to Aaron Rabinowitz specifically) by a detransitioned young woman, and it’s got some strikingly explanatory observations. For her it all started with Tumblr.

A major aspect of Tumblr culture has always been social justice ideology. Things that are now being played out and witnessed by the general public on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, like dissociative identity disorder LARPers, demisexuals, neopronouns, otherkin, and everything you see on @LibsOfTikTok, have long existed in an uncannily identical form on tumblr.com. The oppression hierarchy of racial and gender identities now being written into law in many of our once serious nations was the state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr long before your political junkie uncle knew the term “CRT”.  As cultish religions tend to operate, open devotion to the religion is mandatory. Perhaps the outsiders most likely to understand the way social dynamics worked on that website would be survivors of Scientology or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.

All that is very recognizable, and far from exclusive to Tumblr, but it’s interesting that it’s so integral to a [whatever Tumblr is] populated by teenage girls.

And there’s a problem.

On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world. No hardship you could possibly go through could ever be as bad as the prejudice and genocide POC and LGBT people face every. Single. Day. Insert clap emoji. LGBT people and POC can’t even walk out of their houses without being murdered by cishet white people just like you!

I recognize it, but didn’t know it started so young. It sounds like Pharyngula commenters. Maybe they all migrate from Tumblr?

Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face.

Ahhhh yes. That fits like a key in the right lock. It fits a thought I’ve had a billion times, which is that this absurd ideology is terribly convenient for people who want a little of that nice cuddly sympathy-for-the-oppressed that’s going around. You don’t have to do anything – you can just say.

Back in November “Grace” Lavery was pining for a debate.

Helen Joyce took him up on it.

Let’s do this thing!

Or…

Everybody is laughing at him.

Another thing about this – or maybe it’s the same thing but just louder –

The other thing. There is no Harry Potter without its creator. Why? Because she’s the one who created it. That thing they love so much? (I don’t love it, myself, so I can take a detached view of the fandom and the ardor.) That thing they love so much is the work of the woman they think they hate so much. You can’t have a Harry Potter without its creator, because that would be something completely different. The creator isn’t incidental to the creation; she’s prior and essential.

Their adoration of Harry Potter means they adore her, whether they know it or not. This isn’t her fingernails we’re talking about here, it’s the product of her mind. In their passion for Harry they have a passion for Jo. It’s idiotic that they think they can split the two.

But then they think they can split people from their sex, so there you go.

Check out this thread if you want a furious denunciation of the Times for publicly trashing JKR.

Shahrar Ali is suing the Green Party.

A Green Party spokesman is bringing legal action against his former colleagues after he was sacked because of his views on the transgender debate.

Shahrar Ali, 53, was removed as the spokesman for policing and domestic safety on February 5 after activists complained that his tweets about women’s sex-based rights were transphobic.

It’s a neat trick to label non-belief in your magical mystery woo “phobic.” I don’t believe extraterrestrials drop in on us now and then for a chat; that’s not “phobic.” I just don’t believe it.

Party officials ruled that “his decision to champion a highly controversial position in the trans rights debate is not compatible” with his role.

But it’s fine to champion the other highly controversial position, in fact judging by this it’s mandatory.

And what are trans rights? For the billionth time, no one wants to take away their rights. There is no “right” to identify as other people and seize their rights.

Dr Ali, a former deputy leader who was a spokesman for nine years, has publicly backed the rights of women to defend single-sex spaces such as prisons, refuges and sports categories, rather than for them to be opened without limits to males who identify as women.

In other words he’s doing the right thing, and the demands are an encroachment on women’s rights.

No, really????

Trans inmates revert to males when they leave Scottish prisons

I’m stunned. It never ever occurred to me for a second that they would do that. I thought they were totally sincere.

A study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, also revealed that some of these prisoners may only have identified as women in order to have sex with female inmates.

Staggered again!

No I’m not. This is what women have been saying all along.

The SPS said it has no plans to make use of the new research.

Sure. It’s only women who are affected, so who cares.

This dreck is so maddening and frustrating. “We enlightened ones know how much better it is to just identify out of being women than to insist that women are not inferior.”

Oh yes, if she were alive today – if only she’d had the good sense to do her living while we brilliant all-seeing perfected humans are making everything glorious, instead of that stupid boring wrong clueless thing known as “the past.” How pathetic of her them to be a she when she they could have been a xir.

She didn’t “describe herself as a woman,” she was a woman.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on To scour the text.

And, of course, it often doesn’t even work. Sensitivity readers are self-selected (if not to say self-identified), claiming to speak for a particular group or so-called lived experience. Yet nobody (but nobody!) can realistically claim to account for every perspective within a group or class of people who share similar life experiences, and so anyone claiming to offer this is selling a bill of goods.

All too often, despite having engaged one or more of these charlatans, a work is still held up for a roasting by professional rivals or overenthusiastic “fans” who’ve attempted to fill the void of meaning in their lives with obsessive policing of other people’s creative output. Such heresy hunts are especially common in YA Twitter (which is to say among any author who wants to publish in YA at all). Occasionally a foment will rise so high that an agent will throw an author under the bus, as I believe B&W has already covered.

This is wokeness moral panic in a nutshell; insisting that everyone engage in a certain action and, at the same time, insisting that this action has no actual power, either in intent or in effect. It is in the same epiphenomenon class as a religion insisting that God made each individual human special, and that every human is a wretched sinner. The carrot and the stick, wrapped in one, with the only true answer being to give ever more power to the priests and priest-aspirants.

You don’t have to like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even be to the left of Lindsey Graham to find it disturbing that Fox personalities single her out for sustained personalized bullying.

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.

“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.

A “Karen.” It’s interesting how right-wing men and left-wing men join hands to abuse women.

Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.

From the Bronx? That doesn’t tell us much. Puerto Rico at least hints at Hispanic, though of course it’s possible to be from there without being Hispanic, but the Bronx hints at…what? Could be anything.

Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.

“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!

“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”

As I say – disturbing. It’s not commentary, it’s not politics, it’s certainly not news – it’s just abuse. What’s the point of it other than to gin up hatred?

Maybe it’s the permafrost that’s doing it. Anything to distract us from the realization that the pot is heating up.

News from Ottawa:

Canadian police on Saturday deployed pepper spray and stun grenades in a continuing effort to break up the blockade of trucks and demonstrators that has occupied downtown Ottawa for more than three weeks in a protest against pandemic protocols.

More than three weeks seems like ample time to get a point across. It seems like way too much time when the point in question is such a selfish and dimwitted point as refusing to get vaccinated during a pandemic.

In a tweet addressed to the truckers, police said: “We told you to leave. We gave you time to leave. We were slow and methodical, yet you were assaultive and aggressive with officers and the horses.”

The horses ffs. As if it’s their fault.

Peter Tatchell should look in the damn mirror before he yells “SHAME!” at women.

So tell us more about sensitivity readers.

The Times explores the question:

Joanne Harris*, the author of Chocolat, took umbrage: “I think you’re confusing sensitivity with weakness . . . It takes courage for an author to admit they may not have all the answers.” Dickens had revised his depiction of the Jewish character Fagin in Oliver Twist, she argued, removing many references to the character’s religion after corresponding with a Jewish critic, Eliza Davis. “He showed the capacity to grow. Perhaps that’s what makes a great writer.”

*The Joanne Harris who declined to remove a “fuck” from her latest novel for a US publisher.

But a Jewish critic who enlightened Dickens isn’t a “sensitivity reader,” she’s a reader with knowledge of a particular subject – a particular set of people – that Dickens didn’t have.

Other writers are incensed by sensitivity readers. None more so than Kate Clanchy, the author who was accused of using racial tropes in her 2019 memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. After the furore, her former publishers, Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, sent the book to a number of sensitivity readers to scour the text for problematic content before it was reprinted.

But hang on. Who are these sensitivity readers, and what is their training? What do they know and how do they know it? How do publishers know what they know and how they know it? How does any of this work?

Clanchy also claims that a sensitivity reader flagged her use of “gay”, saying that she should have used “LGBTQ”…

Like hell! The meanings are sharply different, and it’s not more “sensitive” to use the ever more useless catchall LGBTQ+#%&&%@. T is not at all the same as L and G, so no, that is bad wrong illiterate flagging.

Sensitivity readers are hired by editors and authors to review manuscripts before publication. They check for stereotypes, dialogue that doesn’t ring true or language that may cause offence. Although much of their work focuses on race, advice is offered in subjects ranging from “dating while fat” to “tiger parents” and age-gap relationships.

That’s all interesting but again I ask: how do they know any of this? Where do they get their expertise? How does anyone know they know more about it than we do? Where are the Sensitivity training colleges or academies or institutes? Who are these people?

Those who welcome sensitivity readers see them as a way to ensure authenticity when writing about communities a writer does not belong to, in the same way a sci-fi writer would consult a scientist. “I don’t see them as being antagonistic to free speech; it’s more a different layer of research,” Harris says.

Ah but it’s not “in the same way” at all. Presumably a sci-fi writer wouldn’t just consult a random scientist, but someone with specific knowledge of a specific subject. “Sensitivity” isn’t specific. What is it about sensitivity readers that makes them informed about all “communities”? Please do explain, I’m fascinated.

Maybe the brief isn’t “inform the author about this particular community or issue” at all but rather “search for everything anyone could possibly fly into a rage about.” If you hire “sensitivity” people to search for “sensitive” writings, they’re going to find them, so that you’ll hire them again. Baby needs new shoes.

A cancel-cancel:

The bestselling author Joanne Harris has turned down a US book deal after the publishers demanded she take out an “f-bomb” from the novel.

Well done that woman.

The Chocolat author, who lives near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, tweeted on Saturday: “Today I turned down a book deal in the US because they wanted to edit out my use of ‘the f-bomb’. I refused for two reasons: one, because I don’t use words accidentally. They matter. And second, because I don’t believe my use of the word ‘fuck’ harms anyone.”

Exactly so. I do a bit of writing myself and I don’t use words accidentally. I thought we’d agreed as a society or a grown-up reading public that the word “fuck” doesn’t harm anyone several decades ago.

Which reminds me of a thing. My first ever bad edit, and in this case I was not given the option of rejecting it. My senior year at the tiny girls’ school I’d attended since kindergarten I won the story contest so my story was published in the yearbook – and when the yearbooks arrived shortly before graduation I found that a word had been changed. I was enraged, and my English teacher who was also the yearbook supervisor was annoyed too if I remember correctly. It’s hard to figure out what gave a company whose job it was to put a book between hard covers the right to change the content without asking. We were the editors, not the company. Anyway, the word – I’d had a character exclaim “Shit!” in anger or shock, and they changed it to “Shoot!” It’s not just that it’s ooh no swearing, it’s that the substitution is terrible. A character exclaiming “Shoot!” is just stupid. So, yeah, rock on Jane Harris.

Harris added: “I gave it some thought, and the decision was mine to take. That’s how publishing works, and I’m happy with my choice.

“In context it was a characterisation device, and would have sounded weak if I’d taken it out.”

Exactly.

She’s not annoyed at the publisher though.

Harris said that she did not feel offended by the request from the publisher, which she described as a house with a strong “cosy” branding, adding, “I understand, but that’s not me”.

“I made my choice and so did they,” she said. “I don’t remotely feel as if I’ve been ‘cancelled’.”

Fair enough.

Harris said she chose to make the decision public on the back of a discussion on social media prompted by John Boyne, the author of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, criticising the increasing use by authors and publishers of “sensitivity readers” to ensure that they are representing certain groups correctly or to avoid causing offence.

Harris was quoted in the media on her thoughts, and expanded on them on her blog, where she wrote: “I think a lot of people (some of them authors, most of them not) misunderstand the role of a sensitivity reader. That’s probably mostly because they’ve never used one, and are misled by the word ‘sensitivity’, which, in a world of toxic masculinity, is often mistaken for weakness. To these people, hiring someone to check one’s work for sensitivity purposes implies a surrendering of control, a shift in the balance of power.”

I think it’s a little more complicated than that…