Maybe it’s the name.

In October, Donald Trump announced he was planning to launch a revolutionary technology company.

“I created Truth Social… to stand up to the tyranny of big tech,” he said.

By which he meant a Twitter clone that would let him tell any lies and scream any insults he wanted to.

The app launched on Presidents’ Day, 21 February, but six weeks later is beset by problems. A waiting list of nearly 1.5 million are unable to use it.

Truth Social looks a lot like Twitter, which banned Mr Trump from posting on the platform after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol on 6 January, 2021. Twitter contended that Donald Trump, by making false claims the presidential election had been “stolen”, had incited violence. He was banned for life on 8 January, 2021.

Truth Social might look like Twitter, but it isn’t available on Android phones, web browsers or, apparently, to most people outside the US.

“It’s been a disaster,” Joshua Tucker, director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, said.

And that’s a good thing.

Hahahahahahaha I love it when that happens.

It happened to me once. I was arguing with some guy in comments at Crooked Timber (this was a long time ago) and he told me I would benefit from reading this amusing satirical guide to rhetoric on a website called Butterflies and Wheels. That was fun.

Hey what’s the deal with people having names that are spelled funny? Huh? What are they trying to do? Are they crazy or something?

Three days into his first term as a Republican congressman, Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, then just 33, pulled on a smoke hood and fled the Capitol as rioters invaded the House chamber on January 6. He later voted to certify the election results and ended up being one of nine Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection. Since then, Meijer has suffered death threats, a Trump-endorsed primary challenge, and now the indignity of having Trump make fun of his last name at a political rally in his home state.

Well. Be fair. “Meijer” – did you ever? I mean, really.

Last night, Trump appeared at a sports hall outside Detroit to promote the candidacy of a couple of low-level Republican candidates for state attorney general and secretary of state. As is often the case when he shows up to help another candidate, Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and insulting one of his enemies, in this case, fellow Republican Meijer. 

Talking about himself and insulting other people – sums him up.

“A guy who spells his name `M-E-I-J-E-R’ but they pronounce it `MY-er,’” Trump said. “The hell kind of a spelling is that? `MY-er.’ I said: `How the hell do you pronounce this guy’s name?’”

“Nobody knows him,” Trump said of Meijer. “He’s done nothing in Washington. I said `How do you pronounce his name? Is it ‘MAY-jer? MY-jer?’ They said it’s `MY-er.’ How the hell do you get `MY-er’ out of it?”

Same way you get “Yohan” out of “Johan” – you learn that several languages, like for instance Dutch and Swedish and (cough) German, pronounce J the way Anglophones pronounce Y.

But that won’t do, because that’s foreign. Foreign means bad.

The congressman’s last name is Dutch, and there’s a decent sized Dutch-American community in Western Michigan that tends to vote conservative Republican—a constituency Trump’s advisors apparently didn’t bother to brief him on. Meijer is also a household name in Michigan that adorns a beloved local chain of supermarkets that have, among other things, given away millions of dollars worth of free prescription drugs to treat diabetes and heart disease, as well as antibiotics and prenatal vitamins, the sort of meaningful philanthropy the Trump family has never even contemplated. 

Another fun fact: Trump’s grandfather immigrated to the US from Germany.

Speaking of the American right and how it’s not accurate or fair to translate it to “conservatives,” take just this one item from Trump’s Event yesterday:

Representative Lisa McClain, a Michigan Republican, claimed on Saturday that former President Donald Trump “caught” former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

McClain, who first entered Congress during the 2020 election with Trump’s endorsement, made the comment as she spoke ahead of the former president during a rally in Washington Township, Michigan. The GOP congresswoman lamented how she and many others view the country to be worse off under President Joe Biden than it was under Trump.

“While President Trump was in office, we didn’t have a war and I think he made three peace treaties,” McClain said during her speech. “Caught Osama bin Laden and Soleimani, al-Baghdadi. And this president is weak. And I’ll tell you weakness breeds aggression. We need strength.”

Yes I remember that night. I remember casually turning on the tv to find all the networks breathlessly telling us to stand by for news from the White House. I remember standing by, and watching crowds gather to stand by, and then Obama walking to the podium to tell us that Donald Trump had caught Osama bin Laden.

The Times article on Emily Bridges part 3:

The current version of the article has been amended. Fair Play for Women pointed out an error 9 hours ago.

That sentence has been deleted.

He or an editor must have changed it. He’s grumpy about it though.

It…wasn’t shouty.

Anyway. Section 195.

Section 195 ftw.

The Times article on Emily Bridges part 2:

It was considered a short-term issue, one that the UCI would soon process, but senior figures in the sport believe the organisation has it within its power to continue excluding Bridges under regulations updated in 2020.

While British Cycling rules demand only that a transgender cyclist falls below a set testosterone threshold for a period of 12 months — indeed Bridges has been registered for the women’s events by the national governing body for the Nations Cup in Glasgow later this month — the UCI rules go further by referencing the need to “preserve the safety, fairness and integrity of the sport, for the benefit of all of its participants and stakeholders” within specific eligibility regulations for transgender athletes.

In other words the UCI rules actually take women into account.

The regulations cite the need to “protect the health and safety of participants” and “guarantee fair and meaningful competition that displays and rewards the fundamental values and meaning of the sport”. They add that the UCI wants “its athletes to be incentivised to make the huge commitments required to excel in the sport”, and “does not want to risk discouraging those aspirations by permitting competition that is not fair and meaningful”.

Which, of course, letting male-bodied people compete against women would do.

Perhaps most crucially, the regulations identify “the significant advantages in size, strength and power enjoyed (on average) by men over women from puberty onwards, due in large part to much higher levels of androgenic hormones, and the impact that such advantages can have on sporting performance, it is necessary to have separate competition categories for males and females”.

The regulations are open to interpretation, of course, and may well be challenged by transgender athletes.

Yes, and it’s “open to interpretation” whether men have physical advantages over women or not.

The Times reports:

The transgender cyclist prevented from participating in a national track event this weekend could be the subject of an indefinite ban under rules introduced by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the world governing body.

That’s a slightly misleading paragraph if you don’t already know the story. Why would anyone ban a cyclist from an event just because the cyclist is transgender?!! What shocking bigotry!

In other words Matt Lawton, Chief Sports Correspondent for the Times, buried the lede.

It’s not a “transgender cyclist” who was “prevented from participating in a national track event,” it’s a male cyclist who was prevented from participating in a women’s national track event. Omitting the sex from both the cyclist and the event is a misleading way of reporting this subject. Journalism should stop doing that.

Paula Radcliffe joins in:

Margaret Atwood won the Hitchens prize. The Atlantic shares her speech, in which she pointed out an important distinction:

I expect Hitch would join me in a distinction I have been making lately: that between belief and truth. It’s a comment on our special times that I’d even feel I have to make this distinction. A belief cannot be either proved or disproved. If you wish to believe that invisible flower spirits are causing your string beans to grow, there is no point in my trying to dissuade you, because these entities are invisible and immaterial. Something proposed as a truth can, however, be put to the test. In recent years, people have confused beliefs with truths. From this confusion have come ideologies and dogmas—the characteristic of a dogma being that it’s proposed as an absolute truth and cannot be disputed, and if you try disputing it, you’ll be burned as a heretic.

There’s also a distinction between feeling or “feeling like” and truth. Claims to “feel like” X also can’t be proved or disproved, and they also don’t mean very much.

Originally a comment by G on Captured.

The American right’s weaponized anti-trans politics — which genuinely is about generating and capitalizing on fear and hatred, not about protecting children, and even more clearly not about opposition to patriarchy and misogyny — practically guarantees that what passes for the left in the U.S. will embrace trans rights in the most knee-jerk and thought-free manner possible. And, I strongly suspect, there are some strategists on the right who fully realize this, and hope it will hurt the left with an American voting public that is, on average, distinctly uncomfortable with gender non-conformity in all forms.

This is part of an established historical pattern: When thoughtful feminist criticism of a social practice happens to align with what religious conservatives disapprove of on a completely different basis, the political left has turned on feminists — or worse, has insisted (with sadly high degrees of success) that feminism disfigure itself to embrace the oppression of women. (And, I should note, the ACLU has consistently been a leader in throwing feminists under the first passing bus in this way.) It happened with feminist criticism of pornography and the sex industry, which gave us various versions of “sex positive feminism” that is hardly recognizable as feminism at all. And it’s happening again with trans politics. The thought-stopping slogan “Sex work is work” even has exactly the same sentence structure as “Trans women are women” — and comes with the same assumption and insistence that anyone who dares disagree cannot have any actual reasonable concerns or objections (no matter how clearly they state them), but must be indistinguishable from a Bible-thumping bigot.

Janice Turner on the theft of women’s sport:

Inclusion in sport matters but not more than the truth. In recent weeks I’ve read thousands of words justifying why the American trans swimmer Lia Thomas, 22, should compete in the women’s NCAA college games. Thomas was compared with black women or lesbian athletes who were also judged “unwomanly”. It was argued that sex categories in sport are out of step with “evolving science”. So much sophistry. The simple, inescapable fact is that as a man Thomas barely made the top 500 and never qualified for the NCAAs but as a woman came 1st, 5th and 8th.

Female swimmers were not asked for their views.

Silence was also imposed on British elite female cyclists, who in the national omnium championships tomorrow were due to race the trans woman Emily Bridges, 21, a junior champion who until just weeks ago raced as a man. British Cycling demands that members “must accept all participants in the gender they present” or face sanctions. The panel creating these rules includes the trans woman Philippa York, who in The Times accused Thomas’s female teammates of lying about their changing room distress.

Sisterhood!

No cyclist, not even Dame Laura Kenny, our greatest woman Olympian, dared speak out. Only when team rage quietly boiled into a threatened boycott did UCI, cycling’s international governing body, intervene. Bridges was dropped on a technicality from the omnium yet may still race as a woman at the Commonwealth Games. British Cycling’s statement regretted Bridges’s disappointment, noted the imperative of trans inclusion, but said not a word about female justice.

Trans women are new and interesting. Women are just yawn your sister or mother or math teacher. Or even you, but you still prefer people newer and more interesting than women. (See: Christa Peterson, Kate Mann, Rebecca Solnit, Sally Hines…)

Women’s sports are hard-won and, as Seb Coe observed, very fragile. The FA banned women’s football from its grounds from 1921 until 1971. Men’s cycling began with the modern Olympiad in 1896: women’s cycling was added in 1984. Now, after only 38 years, we must move aside, surrender our places, medals, records and glory to mediocre males or those like 44-year-old weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who fancied a retirement plan. We must allow our races to be cherry-picked by those like Thomas who coaches say threw her second two events to dampen outcry about initial victory.

It’s our own fault for being so boring.

Is everyone drunk?

Family doctors are to be paid for prescribing hormones to transgender patients, in the first scheme of its kind in the UK.

I don’t think family doctors work for free in the UK, so this “being paid” seems to amount to a sweetener for one particular kind of prescription. Kind of like a bribe. Is that really a good idea?

Under the programme, which was launched yesterday, GPs in Sussex will get £178 a year for every adult to whom they prescribe “cross sex hormone therapy”. They will also be able to claim an extra £91 a year for providing an annual health check to a transgender, non-binary or intersex (TNBI) patient.

“Extra” – so the £178 and the £91 are sweeteners. Bribes.

The scheme, which also requires staff to take training in transgender healthcare, is aimed at reducing the high rates of long-term physical and mental health problems in TNBI patients and improve their low levels of satisfaction with NHS care. Trans rights campaigners welcomed the programme. Patients referred to gender identity clinics (GICs) face waits of years, after referrals soared 240 per cent in five years.

So if all the kids were jumping off roofs would you give ladder-makers £178 a year for every kid who jumped? Maybe instead everyone should be pausing to ask why referrals have soared 240 per cent in five years. Social contagion anyone?

Trans men may be given hormones, such as testosterone, to help with masculinisation while trans women get hormones such as oestrogen to help with feminisation.

Let’s all masculinize or feminize; it sounds like such fun, and so healthy too.

To receive payments, participating surgeries are required to compile a register of anyone considered to be TNBI. The scheme will initially run for three years across Brighton and Hove, East Sussex and West Sussex. Participating GPs must undertake two and a half hours of online training.

Ooooooh two and a half hours, that’s more than enough.

Georgia Senate passes bill that limits how schools can teach about race.

House Bill 1084, the “Protect Students First Act”, was approved by the Georgia senate. The measure requires local school boards and administrators to ban discrimination on the “basis of race” by limiting how race can be discussed in classrooms.

Under the bill, discussion topics that would be banned include teaching that “one race is inherently superior to another race” or that the US is “fundamentally racist”, reported CNN.

“We can teach US history, the good, the bad and the ugly, without dividing children along racial lines,” said the Georgia senate president pro tem, Butch Miller, of the bill that passed 32-21.

Can we though? Maybe it’s not actually that easy.

Here’s the bill itself.

Title 20 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to education, is amended in

23 Article 1 of Chapter 1, relating to general provisions, by adding a new Code section to read

24 as follows:

“20-1-11.
26 (a) As used in this Code section, the term:
27 (1) ‘Divisive concepts’ means any of the following concepts, including views espousing
28 such concepts:
29 (A) One race is inherently superior to another race;
30 (B) The United States of America is fundamentally racist;
31 (C) An individual, by virtue of his or her race, is inherently or consciously racist or
32 oppressive toward individuals of other races;
33 (D) An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely
34 or partly because of his or her race;
35 (E) An individual’s moral character is inherently determined by his or her race;
36 (F) An individual, by virtue of his or her race, bears individual responsibility for
37 actions committed in the past by other individuals of the same race;
38 (G) An individual should feel anguish or any other form of psychological distress
39 because of his or her race;

And so on. You can see what they’re hinting at. Don’t dig too deep. Don’t say the whole problem was not solved when the Civil War ended or when Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee or when MLK gave the “I have a dream” speech or when Obama was elected. Don’t teach the truth about the defeat of Reconstruction. Don’t talk about prison plantations. Don’t talk about Jim Crow laws. Don’t talk about voting rights. Don’t talk about the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Don’t talk about mass incarceration and what color most of the mass is. Don’t talk about redlining. Don’t talk about the GI Bill. See appendix for several thousand more examples.

(3) ‘Race scapegoating’ means assigning fault or blame to a race, or to an individual of

49 a particular race because of his or her race. Such term includes, but is not limited to, any

50 claim that an individual of a particular race, consciously and by virtue of his or her race,

51 is inherently racist or is inherently inclined to oppress individuals of other races.

52 (4) ‘Race stereotyping’ means ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes,

53 status, or beliefs to an individual because of his or her race.

It’s cute, that one, because it’s crafted to sound like anti-racism but of course the point is to shut down anti-racism.

The whistleblower is Dr David Bell. The clip is valuable…and in fact humanist, the real kind.

Peak humanism.

“You’re a repulsive bigot,” says guy who calls himself The Humanist Report. “Go fuck yourself, transphobic trash.” Nine words total, for two coarse insults and a coarse command. I’m not seeing the humanism.

Has Biden ever talked this way about women or Black people or workers or immigrants? Biden who chaired the all-male committee that blew off Anita Hill’s testimony about Clarence Thomas? Biden who loves to go all “bipartisan” on unions and feminists and racial justice activists?

Emily (formerly Zack) Bridges has issued A Statement:

“I am an athlete, and I just want to race competitively,” he says, skipping lightly over the fact that he just wants to race competitively against people who are systematically smaller and less muscular than he is.

“No one should have to choose between who they are, and participating in the sport they love.”

But it isn’t who he is, it’s who he isn’t. Who he is is a man, with a massive physical advantage over the women he wants to race against. Yes he should have to choose, because it’s grossly unfair to the women if he doesn’t.

“I’ve been relentlessly harassed and demonised by those who have a specific agenda to push,” he says. What about his specific agenda? What about his specific agenda to compete against women when he has the body of a man? What about the obvious (yet widely ignored or hidden or both) unfairness of that?

No mention. Of course. It’s all about him.

Also he apparently included a photo with his “statement.”

Note the come-hither lips-ajar pose.

Updating to add a less artificial photo, courtesy of Lady Mondegreen:

Perhaps the concerns are real concerns.

How the experts got Russian military prowess so wrong:

The resilience of Ukrainian resistance is embarrassing for a Western think-tank and military community that had confidently predicted that the Russians would conquer Ukraine in a matter of days. For years, Western “experts” prattled on about the Russian military’s expensive, high-tech “modernization.” The Russians, we were told, had the better tanks and aircraft, including cutting-edge SU-34 fighter bombers and T-90 tanks, with some of the finest technical specifications in the world. The Russians had also ostensibly reorganized their army into a more professional, mostly voluntary force. They had rethought their offensive doctrine and created battalion tactical groups, flexible, heavily armored formations that were meant to be key to overwhelming the Ukrainians. Basically, many people had relied on the glamour of war, a sort of war pornography, to predict the outcome of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.

…

Though analysts and historians will spend years arguing about exactly why prewar assessments of the Russian military proved so flawed, two reasons are immediately apparent. First, Western analysts misunderstood the Russian military’s ability to undertake the most complex operations and the robustness of its logistical capabilities. And second, prognosticators paid too little attention to the basic motivations and morale of the soldiers who would be asked to use the Russian military’s allegedly excellent doctrine and equipment.

So soldiers aren’t as predictable as machines? Who knew?

The Guardian had a column called How to eat, which is now reaching an end. It sounds entertaining; I’ll have to browse the back catalogue. The idea originated in irritation at the pompous posh brand of food column.

Would there be mileage, we wondered, in sending up such high-handed advice in a clearly tongue-in-cheek, OTT way? But by flipping the subject matter and talking enthusiastically about everyday foods – beans on toast, lasagne, pesto, Magnums, pasties, hummus – in a way that would generate engaged, friendly debate below the line (BTL)? Note: the bottom half of the internet was less toxic then.

Sounds interesting but wait a second – pesto and hummus and lasagne and beans on toast? One of these is not like the others. The first three are foreign, yes, but that’s not the most relevant difference. The important difference is that they’re good. Beans on toast are not.

Naturally, some people got very angry. The implicit How to eat vibe was: please yourself, each to their own, crack on. I wasn’t going to come around and shout through your letterbox because you were serving (grotesque, medieval) bread sauce with Christmas dinner. But personal taste is sensitive. A cohort took How to eat at its word and saw any criticism of their dishes as an insult. Even under mildly amusing pieces about crumpets or coleslaw, the Guardian comment moderators had work to do.

Of course. Also, beans on toast are an insult to human intelligence.

The philosopher and writer Julian Baggini, an early contributor BTL, finds it fascinating how, when discussing food, rather than holding true to the Latin maxim de gustibus non est disputandum (in matters of taste there can be no disputes), rational people “find themselves acting as though … the whole point is to dispute”.

Guilty as charged! At least, when the subject is beans on toast. I can refrain from disputing a lot of food tastes, but the worthlessness of beans on toast is an objective fact. (Beans on toast, for non-UK readers who may not be aware, doesn’t mean some deliciously seasoned and sauced beans with an inexplicable piece of toast under them, it means canned beans made by Heinz with an inexplicable piece of toast under them.)

“Philosophers are drawn to aporias,” he emails, “two or more individually compelling but collectively incompatible claims. How to eat is the Platonic form of such a contradiction. It is absurd to say there is one right way to eat a food, and also obvious that cream before jam on a scone or pineapple on pizza is wrong. In philosophy such contradictions are torturous. With food, we get to enjoy them.”

Heh. I’m agnostic on the cream/jam question but emphatically gnostic about pineapple on pizza – it’s criminal.

They conclude with a few certainties of their own.

2 Raw bell peppers, ruin of many a pizza or tuna sandwich mix (particularly, those bitter green vibe killers), have fewer supporters. Rise up, Britain, rise up!

Hang on! Raw red or orange bell peppers are delicious. Really. Very different from the green ones, and very good, and crawling with vitamins. They’re also good cooked, especially of course with garlic and onions, but a raw red pepper in the afternoon is a fine snack. But I wouldn’t put raw ones on a pizza, no. Wrong vibe.

14 There are certain foods – ice-cream, chips, cheese, crisps, toast – that, even at their worst, are still enjoyable. As How to eat put it in 2012: “With its killer combination of fat, salt and umami, it is impossible to be a snob about cheese.” This, it transpires, is not a universal view.

Agreed, except about chips aka french fries. I don’t hate them but I don’t like them much either – they just seem dull to me. I never eat them. Potato salad, potatoes cooked with cheese in some way, hash browns, mashed, little red potatoes with lots of garlic and parsley, yes, but chips/french fries no.

18 Make a mess. Proudly wear your dinner. Get the kitchen roll on the table. Or just wipe your hands on your jeans. How to eat spent a lot of time debunking the myths of good manners: tip that soup bowl towards you; eat on the bus; chill out about double-dipping (this was pre-Covid).

No no no. Again, one of these is not like the others. Eating on the bus affects other people on the bus, people who have not chosen you as a munching companion, so broadly speaking, don’t eat on the bus unless you have the seat to yourself and it’s something quiet and not smelly.

19 When you start talking about how acrid bitterness is a positive characteristic in food and drink (grapefruit, coffee, slightly burned jacket potatoes, west coast IPAs), people start looking at you funny.

Well then they should have some beans on toast. Of course it is. Dark chocolate is another, and so is kale. I hated that last acrid bitterness as a child, but bitterness is an acquired taste. I done acquired it.

On lasagne: “Like a good U2 song, impressive vegetable lasagne is possible but so vanishingly rare as to be statistically insignificant. For every exquisite artichoke or wild mushroom [version], there are 10,000 lumpen veggie lasagnes layered with a ‘Mediterranean’ vegetable slurry that has all the sunshine flavour of an abandoned graveyard in Telford.”

To put it as tactfully as I can, that might be a British cooking thing as opposed to a vegetable lasagne thing.