FAQ Q&A your questions answered:

Isn’t there…isn’t there already an Alaska Pacific University?

There might be, sure. Lots of things have similar names, or share initials.

OK but “Pacific”?

Alaska borders the Pacific Ocean.

The reason that’s funny is that there already is a University of Texas at Austin, which is quite well known and well regarded. (It’s also, come to think of it, the location of that tower where one Charles Whitman locked himself in and shot a lot of people in 1966, a time when mass murders of that kind were a novelty. That part’s not funny.)

Will there be “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” at The APU?

No. No topics are disallowed and no uncomfortable subjects are off-limits at The APU.

Will The APU promote CRT or BDS?

No, The APU will not allow students or professors to practice the poisonous academic assault on American history known as Critical Race Theory, or to engage in political, cultural, or economic boycotts that unfairly target the only democracy in the Middle East.

…

What degree programs do you offer?

None.

Doesn’t a university almost definitionally have to offer degrees, and in fact isn’t the term generally understood to mean institutions with post-graduate programs?

The APU is not so vain as to imagine it can know what “most people” understand by the term “university.” All we know is that United States law does not specifically define what can and cannot be called a “university.” Maybe in other countries only “the queen” or “the state” get to define what is and isn’t a university; to us that smacks of intellectual authoritarianism.

OK well then what are the undergraduates you mentioned going to do if they can’t get a degree from The APU

We do plan to offer degrees eventually. We expect to offer our first MA program, Applied Entrepreneurial Optimism, to be ready by 2022.

Heh heh heh. Just what I thought – they sound much more like entrepreneurs than academics.

H/t Rob

Updating to add for the pre-caffeinated: this here is satire.

And we call that “theocracy.”

Sounds great, right? Like Pakistan, like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, like Afghanistan…like Ireland until quite recently, like El Salvador now. Mullahs or priests – always male, of course, and not “identifying as” male either but the real thing – telling you what you can and can’t do.

Oh will they now.

That’s rich seeing as how they’ve all shat on the source of their fame and wealth i.e. JK Rowling.

Two down…

Exactly a week after former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss unveiled the creation of a hypothetical new “university” stacked with advisers united by “a common dismay at the state of academic and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry,” two riders in that brave regiment have resigned their commissions.

Robert J. Zimmer, the chancellor of the University of Chicago, and Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, quit the University of Austin’s advisory board on Monday.

Just one week. It seems so embarrassing for the project.

“As is often the case with fast-moving start-ups,” a statement from the University of Austin said, “there were some missteps.” It noted that its website “initially failed to make clear the distinctions between the Founding Trustees and the Advisory Board.”

That’s the thing, though – universities aren’t usually “fast-moving start-ups.” That’s more profit-making entrepreneurial go-getter language than it is serious intellectual language. If you start up a university too fast you might find yourself holding a steering wheel connected to nothing.

While advisers were “aligned in general” with the project without necessarily endorsing everything the University of Austin says or does, the trustees “bear responsibility for those things.” This, the statement claimed without elaboration, “led to unnecessary complications” for advisers like Zimmer and Pinker.

Hahahaha we can imagine the panicky conversations. “Wait, what? I didn’t mean to sign up for all this crap!”

That’s the trouble with ideas: there’s overlap everywhere, and it’s easy to get confused, or recruited into something you don’t want to be in. Clearly that’s what happened with Zimmer.

Zimmer said in a statement posted to a UChicago news site that he’d resigned from his advisory role on Thursday. He wrote that while he valued the “new organization” and its commitment to freedom of expression, it “made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”

Some overlap and some sharp divergence.

It’s like the rupture with Pharyngula and similar – there’s still a massive amount of overlap there, but one issue made it all untenable.

The University of Austin, which is unaccredited and has yet to break ground on a physical campus, was launched last Monday and is “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth,” according to a triumphant post to Weiss’ Substack.

See that’s already a red flag, at least to me. You don’t want to flatter yourself too grossly in your advertising. You don’t want to claim too much for yourself because…well because everything, really. Because conceit is repellent, it’s trumpish, it’s absurd, it’s an accident waiting to happen. Screaming “WE ARE THE NEW FEARLESS WARRIORS” is just not cool.

Hm, not going so well.

University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer is distancing himself from the University of Austin, a newly announced institution that’s drawn scrutiny for its critiques of higher education and politicized nature, officials announced today.

Jeez. After a week?

Zimmer was initially listed as a member of the board of advisers when the website was launched last week, but he has since stepped aside, a U of C spokesman confirmed.

The school is being established to combat cancel culture and promote intellectual diversity, its founders say. They also lamented that higher education is fundamentally broken and that elite schools are failing students.

And Bari Weiss is front and center, which…

“University of Chicago Chancellor Robert J. Zimmer was asked to serve in an advisory role (without fiduciary, oversight or management responsibilities) to the newly formed University of Austin by its founding president, Dr. Pano Kanelos,” the U of C said in a statement. “Chancellor Zimmer informed Dr. Kanelos on Nov. 11 that he was resigning from the advisory board, noting that ‘the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.’ The University of Chicago is committed to upholding the core value of free expression as articulated by our faculty and university leaders over many decades, most recently in the faculty committee Report of the Committee on Free Expression, now widely known as the Chicago Principles.”

In other words they carried on as if they were the first people ever to talk about the value of free expression, so it all seemed a little bit…Bari Weiss.

The Adrian Harrop tribunal started today. The issue: was his Twitter activity inappropriate for a medical doctor? As is only right, there is a Harrop tribunal Twitter account.

Yes, they all see that as their job. Not all of them see patients though.

God he’s a nightmare.

There will be more tomorrow.

Steve Bannon is starring in The Steve Bannon Turns Himself In show.

Bannon arrived at the FBI Washington field office in a black SUV shortly before 9:40 a.m. He was met by a swarm of media and was defiant when addressing TV cameras outside the building, saying, “We’re taking down the Biden regime.”

Anything for attention.

Moments before turning himself in Monday, Bannon went live on social media and told his supporters to “stay focused.”

“I don’t want anybody to take their eye off the ball from what we do every day, OK,” Bannon said to a camera for his online show “WarRoom.”

“I want you guys to stay focused on message,” he added before walking into the FBI office. “Thank you very much.”

Jawohl mein Führer.

There may be many hooray responses to the LGBTQ+ letter to Middle Temple on Twitter that I’m not seeing because Twitter selects what we see, but the ones I am seeing are not at all impressed. They are especially not impressed that these are people who argue for a living, and yet they pitch a fit because ooooh a dissenter ewwwwww.

Here we go again.

You can’t do that, you can’t say that, you can’t invite her, you can’t do anything without our prior approval.

I did read it. It’s utterly typical and utterly contemptible.

None of them are “LGBTQ+” because no one can be all of those things. By “allies” they don’t mean people who think same-sex attraction should not be ostracized or shamed in any way, they mean people who are eager to enforce a new and stupid doctrine of Magic Gender on the entire world. With Allies like that who needs an Axis?

By the same token there’s no such thing as “an affirming environment for LGBTQ+ members” because they have different and incompatible goals and worldviews, whether they realize it or not.

In both cases of course the wording is meant to function as a threat and a shaming device. “Y R U abusing the LGBTQ+ communiddy?”

Ah the inclusion of the last speaker is the problem, is it? Inclusion for me but not for thee.

What are her crimes?

She has said that in the particular post she is writing she won’t refer to a man who calls himself a woman as a woman, because the fact that he’s a man is at the heart of what she’s writing about.

She wrote that post about Mridul Wadwha, a man who applied for a job as head of a rape crisis centre advertised as women-only, and she referred to him as a man, because putting a man in charge of a rape crisis centre is a very bad thing to do.

But these bedwetters want all that covered up and concealed in language that pretends Wadwha is a woman, and they want groveling and reparations and everybody gets a new car because Naomi Cunningham was invited to their dire “annual dinner and discussion.”

Oops.

Sam Smith, the pop singer whose gender identity is non-binary, has been excluded from the gendered categories at the 2021 Brit awards.

Well he would, wouldn’t he. Or was he expecting to be nominated in both categories as opposed to neither?

The awards system has maintained its usual artist categories, with prizes for British solo male and British solo female. That means there is no room for Smith…

It’s not that there’s no room for him (poor little baby Jesus), it’s that he doesn’t fit. If you’re a sculptor you can’t expect to be nominated for a Booker prize, either. You have to fit the categories.

In a statement on Instagram, Smith said: “The Brits have been an important part of my career … Music for me has always been about unification not division. I look forward to a time where awards shows can be reflective of the society we live in. Let’s celebrate everybody, regardless of gender, race, age, ability, sexuality and class.”

All must win, all must have prizes!

Hm.

Well, no doubt, because it’s more soothing to be cuddled and flattered than it is to be disputed and asked for reasons, but the fact remains that we can’t have good policies or ideas or institutions if we refuse to think carefully about what they are.

Like, what does Bartram mean about being LGBTQ+? Does it mean being all those things? Some of which are incompatible with each other?

And if we don’t know the answer to that question, how can we know what it is that’s being loved and affirmed? You don’t want to go around loving and affirming pure evil, so you really do have to know what you mean before you say it, instead of just singing a few words as if they’re poetry and leaving it at that.

And by praising Jolyon Maugham’s presumptuous question, Bartlam is withholding love an affirmation from a fellow member of the alphabet community, so how does that work? Love and affirmation for me but not for thee?

It’s all just “shut up and don’t ask questions,” and it’s not a good trend.

Uh huh. What I said. They can’t and won’t. They can’t because we won’t – we won’t give up the luxuries we’re used to, and if they try to force us they’ll lose.

China and India will have to explain themselves to climate-vulnerable nations, COP26 President Alok Sharma has said as the summit ends. It comes after the two nations pushed for the language on coal to change from “phase out” to “phase down” in the deal agreed in Glasgow.

By which they mean “do as little as possible.”

Mr Sharma said the deal struck in the Glasgow climate pact was a “fragile win” and urged China and India to “justify” their actions to nations that are more vulnerable to the effects of global warming.

I think the justification is “we can’t and we won’t.”

The post by Naomi Cunningham that Maugham calls “profoundly offensive to trans people and their allies”:

Mridul Wadhwa is the CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. The job was advertised as being restricted to women, under schedule 9 of the Equality Act 2010. 

So they hired a man.

At this point I must digress briefly. I have written before about “misgendering” (here and here). In writing about Wadhwa’s appointment to this role, I will use the nouns and pronouns appropriate to his biological sex. I do not apologise for doing so. I do so because I am writing about a situation in which sex matters. I have a serious point to make, and I intend to make it as clearly and powerfully as I am able to; I am not prepared to obscure my message with misplaced politeness.  

Indeed. The more we obscure our message by going along with the fantasy that some men are women, the less we can resist this relentless pressure to shut up about losing all our rights.

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre didn’t have to hire Wadhwa, but it did anyway, despite advertising the job with “only women need apply.”

They declared an occupational requirement to be a woman in their job advert; but when Wadhwa applied for the job, they waived it in his favour. 

…

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre’s misuse of its schedule 9 freedom to restrict a role to women has received wide public attention and has been the subject of many news reports. Its appointment of a man to its CEO role has operated – whether by accident or design – as a prominent show of strength: a demonstration to abused and traumatised women that there is no sanctuary for them where they can be sure that no men are present, and sure that no men are making decisions.

I’m sure they saw it as a much-needed warning to terfs.

But let’s cut to the chase.

That’s the legal situation as I understand it. But in truth, the legalities of the situation are peripheral. What really matters is the concrete reality. The concrete reality looks like this. 

Wadhwa is a man who has secured and continues to hold an appointment as CEO of a rape crisis centre that purports to provide an all-women space, to the profound dismay of many of its potential users (see e.g. Jo Bartosch’s account in her powerful piece in The Critic of the flood of responses from survivors that she received to a call for information; and this blog). 

Wadhwa is a man who has prioritised his own needs over the needs of service users, and has brought his male body into a space that should be wholly controlled by women; entered only with their consent, freely given. He has done that despite vociferous objections from many of the women concerned. He has implicitly characterised service users who object as “bigots.” 

No man should be made CEO of a rape crisis centre that purports to offer a female-only service; but especially not a man whose actions have demonstrated the open contempt for women’s boundaries that Wadhwa’s have. 

Wadhwa should resign.

Emphasis on “a man who has prioritised his own needs over the needs of service users” mine.

That’s the thing, see. It’s not even just that He’s A Man, it’s also that he’s the kind of man who puts what he wants ahead of the needs of abused women. It’s that it’s that it’s that. On the one hand women who have been through a hideous trauma and need help from fellow women who will understand the nature of the trauma, and on the other hand a selfish overbearing aggressive man who wants what he wants and does not care that it’s exactly what those women want to get away from. It’s appalling, and utterly disqualifying. His desire to get the job should have disqualified him from having the job.

The arrogance of this guy.

This isn’t Maugham talking to Middle Temple, this is Maugham bullying Middle Temple in public.

It clearly doesn’t concern him at all that appointing a man CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre is profoundly offensive to women.

Now to discuss that Naomi Cunningham post.

A BBC boss had to tell staff to get used to encountering ideas they don’t like. One wonders what job they thought they were in, if they needed to have that spelled out to them.

Fran Unsworth, who is due to leave the corporation in January, was speaking on an often-hostile Zoom call with the BBC’s Pride network on Friday morning.

The meeting, in which Tim Davie, the director-general, also tried to reassure staff that he was concerned about LGBT inclusivity, was held in the wake of the corporation’s departure from Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme, under which it paid for advice and assessment from the charity.

There’s no such thing as “LGBT inclusivity” though. You can’t be incloosive of all the claims of all four categories because some of them are in tension with others. The T is not the same as the L and the G, so the claims aren’t all going to be compatible with each other.

Two sources who attended the meeting said Unsworth, 63, told staff: “You’ll hear things you don’t personally like and see things you don’t like — that’s what the BBC is, and you have to get used to that.” She added: “These are the stories we tell. We can’t walk away from the conversation.”

Again: it’s a large news organization. Of course you’ll hear things you don’t like.

A BBC journalist said: “Fran was totally calm but determined about it. She was reacting to questions from the network that implied people shouldn’t come across views they disliked. To me, it felt like she was having to explain journalism to idiots.”

There you go. That’s exactly what it sounds like.

A BBC source added that the meeting was “extremely hostile” towards Davie, 54, who was previously chairman of a lesbian, gay and bisexual working group at the BBC. “He was told by one member of staff that he was not in a position to make decisions on this issue, because he’s not trans,” the source said. “Another said the BBC was institutionally transphobic.”

Which is exactly why all this has to stop. We’ve all been told, constantly, that trans demands and taboos outrank all others, including all others combined. That means lesbians and gays and women just have to shut up and listen while our rights are dismantled. We don’t agree and we refuse to shut up. We will listen, but we will then go on to say what bullshit we just listened to. The trans dogma is utter nonsense, and that fact is finally becoming more apparent to the movers and shakers.

A culture war has long been simmering in BBC newsrooms over its handling of transgender issues. Some staff, especially younger employees, argue that the rights of the minority group should not be debated; others believe that the BBC had become in thrall to Stonewall and journalists were not allowed to challenge the charity’s views. The latter group, many of whom are older female staff, believe that some of the policies transgender campaigners advocate infringe upon women’s rights, such as the right to single-sex spaces including refuges.

Not so much a belief as an unmistakable fact. Where the belief comes in is when we discuss whether that matters or not. We pesky older female people think it fucking well does matter and that it’s sheer misogyny to wave it away.

Some said they felt unable to express such views at the BBC. “If you mention it, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers: everyone goes quiet and their faces go blank. Since Wednesday, conversations are already a lot freer,” one added.

Brilliant. Keep that going.

It gets stupider and stupider by the day.

You’ll never guess – never never never never.

Sasha Jane Lowerson doesn’t identify as a transgender woman, just simply a woman with a “trans-experience”.

Just simply a man wearing a dress and doing a stupid thing with his foot.

But the Mandurah surfer is making a difference for all transgender people with her quest for more equality in her sport. In her former life, Lowerson was among the top longboard surfers in the country and the world but now living her full truth, as her authentic self, she said the sport that helps her feel “as free as a bird” is now caging her in like a criminal.

More equality? How is it more equality for a middle-aged man to pretend to be a woman?

In December 2020, she began her journey to be given the right to compete as the gender with which she identifies.

In other words to exploit his male advantage in order to disadvantage the women he’d bee competing against. “Her quest for more equality” forsooth. Ask those women.

“I want change for myself as an elite athlete but I also want to see fairness in community-level sport and for a better future for the next generation,” she said.

Oh yes? Then get out of women’s sports. All the way out, and don’t come back.

The 43-year-old said if the rules were to changed she would feel included in the sport that she has given so much to.

If the rules were changed to give him an unfair advantage he would feel included. Yes I daresay he would. Ask the women.

“I’m not doing it to take over, trans-girls aren’t going to take over the world, we just want to be included, we’re humans too.”

He’s forty-three. He ain’t no girl.

More on those “jokes” of the Unite the Right crowd:

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt told a jury in Charlottesville Wednesday that she was shocked by the extent to which antisemitism defined the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally.

She’s the historian David Irving sued for libel because she called him a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. He lost. He lost because Richard Evans was able to show that he was in fact a Holocaust denier, via minute checking of Irving’s evidence.

“There was a great deal of overt antisemitism and adulation of the Third Reich throughout the evidence I looked at,” said Lipstadt, an expert witness in a case against rally organizers.

…

Defendant Christopher Cantwell, on trial alongside white nationalist pundit Richard Spencer and 12 other men for what plaintiffs injured in the Unite the Right rally allege was a conspiracy to commit racist violence, briefly cross-examined Lipstadt.

He attempted to suggest that many of the statements and symbols Lipstadt had identified as evidence of strident antisemitism by organizers of Unite the Right were, in fact, jokes.

“There’s no such thing as an innocent antisemitic joke?” Cantwell asked Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish studies at Emory University.

He later followed up: “If somebody was going to make a joke about the Jewish people, would the Holocaust be an easy target?”

“I find it hard to imagine using a genocide, which killed six million people, irrespective of their religion, their identity, their nationality, as a topic of jokes,” replied Lipstadt, a former Forward Association member and former Forward columnist.

Richard Spencer, not so much.

Dahlia Lithwick tells us the Charlottesville defendants are pretending it was all a joke.

The federal civil trial of the 20 alleged organizers of Charlottesville’s 2017 Unite the Right rally features a grab bag of white supremacists, some of whom are representing themselves in court. This has meant that from the first day of opening arguments, we’ve heard white supremacist Chris Cantwell, the “Crying Nazi,” hold himself out as a purveyor of a podcast “product” (sign up now!), cite Mein Kampf, and use the N-word. He’s described himself as a “professional entertainer,” “talented,” and “good-looking.” As part of his opening statement Cantwell told the jury he’d dabbled in stand-up comedy, then read out the URL for his website, urging the jury that, “I hope you can all become diehard fans, and together we can save the country.”

…

Cantwell, who is currently incarcerated for an unrelated extortion incident, would watch Tucker Carlson’s show with a group of fellow white supremacist prison inmates to prepare for trial, according to BuzzFeed News. Indeed, a central component of the white supremacist end game here lies not in prevailing at trial, but in using the trial to feel famous and to become more so.

Both can be true of course. I’m sure they’re enjoying their notoriety and chance to show off and so on, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real white supremacists. Lots of racists and women-haters and gay-bashers think they’re funny.

One of the tricks for getting famous is to be entertaining. Another is to be funny. Defendant Matthew Heimbach, founder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, certainly knows the drill—in one court exchange, he cheerfully described the alt-right leader Richard Spencer as “bougie,” saying, “I kind of always viewed you as a bit of a dandy,” to which Spencer retorted, “Did you ever see me wear boat shoes?” Good fun all around. Cantwell at one point asked Heimbach to tell his “favorite Holocaust joke.” He asked Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, one of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses on the symbols of antisemitism, if it was ever OK to tell Holocaust jokes.

That sounds familiar, oddly enough. It sounds like those strange people at the “slyme pit”; they fancied themselves comedians.

These joking little exchanges are all part of the “we were only kidding” defense, already deeply entrenched in the alt-right, as is the “we were just trying to trigger the liberal snowflakes” defense. 

Yes, that’s what I mean. It sounds very slime pit, very Twitter troll, very bros just wanna have fun.

Even Boris Johnson’s people are pushing the Stonewall line.

A group of Boris Johnson’s most senior advisers are allowing government policy on trans rights to be dictated by Stonewall, a former aide to the prime minister has warned.

It seems that Stonewall are viewed as The Experts when in fact they’re The Quacks.

Nikki da Costa, who stood down as Johnson’s director of legislative affairs in August, claimed the prime minister was being presented with “skewed” advice by a powerful lobby in No 10 that was undermining women’s rights.

Maybe that’s the appeal.

She alleged this extended to deciding what Johnson saw in his red boxes and refusing to arrange meetings with people who would present opposing views. She added it was having a “chilling” effect on some staff who risked being seen as “difficult” by the most senior political officials.

…

Da Costa claimed the prime minister was only getting the view of Stonewall on the clash between sex-based rights and those based on gender identity. “The PM is not receiving the range of opinions on the debate around gender identity that he should,” she said.

…

Da Costa cited the government consultation on banning conversion therapy that could potentially make it a criminal offence for therapists to try to help patients with gender dysphoria to feel comfortable in their birth sex.

The consultation period was halved from the normal 12-week period to six weeks, which Da Costa said was “driven” by a desire “to get a good news story” in time for next year’s government-backed LGBTQ equality conference.

“The fear is that if we don’t get this right then therapists, doing perfectly legitimate work, particularly supporting vulnerable children, could find themselves in court accused of coercing someone into not undergoing gender alignment surgery. There’s no reason why the government can’t take a few more weeks, even a couple months to get this right.”

Especially when getting it wrong could mean hundreds or thousands of teenagers permanently ruining their own lives.