Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Becoming aware.

There seems to be this assumption that “the kids” are like prophets. Whatever they do is a sign of where History is headed. It is, in short, glorious and by-definition-good “Progress”. Why they do anything doesn’t matter, only that they do it. Progress has a plan, and Progress moves in mysterious ways.

If it’s got a rainbow or pastel flag, any change in its direction is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Why a change occurs is almost irrelevant from the perspective of those devoted to Progress, because action that brings the utopia nearer is good by definition. Such action is itself Progress, and Progress must be supported. If something happens as a result of Progress, then that, too, is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Is Genderism illogical and irrational? Does it demand the unethical? Leap past your concerns and doubts. Leave them behind, for Progress doesn’t require justification. Everything else must wait, because Progress demands your support, and Progress must be supported.

Kierkegaard wrote of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in Fear and Trembling to describe Abraham’s submission to God’s demand for the sacrifice of Isaac. God’s design, the telos that He impressed upon all of Creation, supersedes everything else. All ethical reasoning is suspended in submission to the divine will. Suspending ethical reasoning in this way is illogical and irrational, however, because the suspension itself can be analyzed in ethical terms. Getting past this metaphorical gap requires a mental leap away from logic and rationality. (One could even argue that such a gap is itself evidence of the divine.)

Now, I happen to think Kierkegaard was actually a literary troll doing performance art to mock the obscurantist mysticism of Continental philosophy, but this explicitly nonsensical idea of a teleological suspension of the ethical does seem like a decent account of how otherwise moral people can support monstrosity. They willingly suspend their normal ethical processing, and everything represented by the divine, or the ideology, or the party, or whatever becomes a self-justified good. Taken as a description of how people do behave rather than of how they should, it’s somewhat compelling. And horrifying.

Interesting. It seems that anti-abortion states have crap healthcare for pregnant women. Keep your damn baby but you’re on your own, bitch.

The chances that a woman can see a doctor while pregnant — or during a time when she might become pregnant — have fallen significantly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to a new report released Thursday.

The findings, from The Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan health care research foundation, show that women living in states with a history of health disparities — often in the Southeast — are affected the most. They are not only less likely to be able to afford a doctor’s appointment; they’re less likely to be able to find an OB/GYN in their area.

That “often in the Southeast” is interesting. The Southeast=the former slave states. The South (as it’s more usually called) is notoriously impoverished, illiberal, and reactionary. It’s almost as if there’s a connection.

The report looked at more than a dozen measures of women’s health care, including maternal mortality, preterm birth and postpartum depression, in all 50 states in 2022, the year of the Dobbs ruling.

That single action “significantly altered both access to reproductive health care services and how providers are able to treat pregnancy complications in the 21 states that ban or restrict abortion access,” the authors wrote.

States with the most restrictive abortion policies, including Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia, scored lowest in the new report. States that protected abortion care, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey, ranked highest.

Women must be forced to keep pregnancies they don’t want, but as for helping them have healthy pregnancies, well shoot, that would be socialism.

Ok yes sure that makes a whole lot of sense.

Republicans welcomed JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate on the same night devoted to blasting President Joe Biden’s leadership on the world stage.

Vance, the 39-year-old Ohio senator, offered his life story as a son of Appalachia to reaffirm Trump’s connections to Americans who feel alienated socially, economically and politically.

Oh those connections, right. Trump’s connections to Murkans who feel economically alienated – Trump with his palace in Miami and his palace overlooking Central Park and his satellite palaces in New Jersey and Scotland. I can totally see the connection, can’t we all?

Socially, well, sure, that’s a different story. Trump is “socially alienated” in the sense that he alienates people who prefer decent people to sadistic monsters, thoughtful people to bellowing idiots, generous people to greedy corrupt thieving cheats.

Politically is basically just socially all over again. Trump isn’t really political except in the sense that he wants to do whatever will piss off people who aim at fairness.

Tatchell does actually say that.

The Herald Scotland on Cameron Downing and his funny ways:

A former SNP equalities officer who sexually assaulted six young adults has been jailed for six years. 

Cameron Downing, 24, was also convicted of physically assaulting two women.

It’s so impressive when the lede is “former equalities officer sexually assaulted six people.” Much equalities!

Sentencing him on Tuesday, Judge Alison Stirling told Downing he had “the capacity to cause physical and sexual harm as well as psychological distress”.

She said: “You have distorted views regarding intimate partner violence, and you have shown no remorse or insight into how your actions may have affected your victim.”

The judge added: “Your offences are likely to have caused significant psychological and physical harm to all of your victims, and their psychological recovery from your actions could be prolonged.”

And yet he was an equalities officer!

Maybe there’s a downside to all this fervent promotion of people who claim to be the opposite sex. Trans ideology often overlaps with other brands of sexual non-conformity, not all of which are automatically benign.

She said Downing showed a “hostility towards women, lack of concern for others, sexual preoccupation and deviant sexual preference”, and that he was at high risk of reoffending.

That’s part of what I’m getting at. Trans ideology often goes with hostility towards women and lack of concern for others, just for a start.

In 2022, it emerged that Downing had tweeted that he wanted to “beat the fuck out of some terfs and transphobes”. He also tweeted: “I fucking hate terfs and transphobes with such a passion.”

The tweets caused Harry Potter author JK Rowling to tweet: “Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland: A place where an equalities officer feels free to declare in public how much he wants to beat up non-compliant women.”

Exactly so.

Easy for him to say.

In a 2021 interview with Spectrum News, [J.D.] Vance was asked if he believes a woman should be forced to carry a baby to term after she has been a victim of rape or incest.

The Ohio Republican suggested the framing of the question was flawed.

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance said. “The question really, to me, is about the baby.”

But of course it is whether a woman should be forced to bring a pregnancy to term, because that’s the very thing being talked about. It can’t be “about the baby” and nothing else, because without the woman, there is no baby and never was any baby. This isn’t some baby lying on a park bench waiting to be adopted, this is a process inside the body of a woman, a process that ends with squeezing a baby’s head through a hole in her body that is too small for the job. It’s the woman’s body, not anyone else’s.

Vance’s contempt for women is evident in that casual “the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient” – somehow, as if he wouldn’t find it inconvenient to have an ever larger heavier body growing in his abdomen that he then had to push out through his dick.

Cathy Young on which twin indulges in the most violent rhetoric:

FOLLOWING THE JULY 13 ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION of Donald Trump, his supporters—and many anti-anti-Trump commentators—have been wringing their hands about the supposed rhetorical extremism of Democrats and other Trump foes. It’s all a bit rich, though, given that violent, fearmongering, and dehumanizing rhetoric has been Trump’s stock in trade over the past decade.

And before. Remember that full page ad demanding the death penalty for the Central Park 5, who…had not done the crime.

So, bearing in mind that nothing Trump has said or done excuses or mitigates the horrific acts of his would-be assassin, here’s a list of instances of Trump normalizing, endorsing, promoting, or winking at political and other violence.

In a Fox News interview, Trump defends the actions of his supporters who were caught on video shoving, punching, and kicking a protester at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama after the man interrupted the rally by shouting, “Black lives matter!” According to Trump: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”

You know who is an even more obnoxious guy?

February 22, 2016

Trump reacts to a nonviolent heckler in Las Vegas, Nevada with nostalgia for more violent times: “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. . . . I’d like to punch him in the face, I tell you.”

…

October 30–November 1, 2020

After a Biden campaign bus on a tour in Texas is harassed on the interstate highway by a caravan of forty-some Trump flag-sporting trucks—causing a minor collision, endangering nearby traffic, and forcing the Biden campaign to cancel several events due to safety concerns—Trump tweets a video of the highway “Trump Train” with the comment, “I LOVE TEXAS!” The next day, he tweets, “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” and slams the FBI’s San Antonio office for investigating the case.

She lists many more examples. We’ve all seen and heard Trump encouraging violence against people he dislikes.

The NIH censors gender-atheists.

About 20 minutes into Dr. Tucker Pyle’s session titled “Sex and Gender in the Clinic,” a window popped up stating, “The host has removed you from the webinar.”

When I tried to rejoin the webinar, I was told I could not rejoin.

According to the event description, this is a “public two-day National Institutes of Health (NIH) symposium” that “brings together experts from the biological and social sciences to clarify and contextualize – but not resolve – the complexities around sex, gender, and genomics by considering them in their scientific, ethical, and historical contexts.”

I was not disruptive and could not have been, even if I had wanted to, because the webinar was view-only. I did not submit any questions in the Q&A chat window either. I was just quietly watching. I signed up for the webinar because, as a scientist involved in influencing policy on sex and gender, I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how these concepts are being applied in medicine and genomics. If anyone should be attending this event, it’s me. The event claims to be an “interdisciplinary conversation,” yet the speaker lineup consists entirely of ideologically aligned sex and gender activists who promote radical and pseudoscientific views of sex and gender. Additionally,

@TomasBogardus, an academic who has also voiced dissent from activist orthodoxy on sex and gender issues, was removed from the event around the same time I was. This is completely unacceptable. I demand that Eric D. Green (@NHGRI_Director), the director of the @genome_gov at the @NIH, who gave the opening remarks, explain why Dr. Bogardus and I were kicked out of the event.

This is a government event. What right do they have to kick people out because they don’t obey the current ideology?

Jolyon Maugham is recklessly (at best) “warning” of a flood of suicides (more threatening than warning), and the trouble with doing that is…

I’ll just quote the rest of what Jen says, to spare you the twittering.

There is a very clear link between coverage of suicides in the media and people ending their own life. Research showed an estimated 400-500 additional deaths by suicide in the aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s death. That may not sound like much but it’s half the people at Jonestown.

Most of those copycatted her method. Any mention of suicide method leads to an upswing in attempts and successes using that method. From my own experience for a year after a very well publicised event of the death of 2 teenagers we were still getting people talking of that method (which was unusual) as being their preferred method. And a family member sadly took his life using a method publicised by a columnist in the week before his death. These effects are real and it’s real people and families who suffer as a result.

If you think ‘oh they would have done that anyway’ no they would not. Prevention works because people dont get a fixed idea in their head and go through with it no matter what. We know that from decades of studies which show that rates fall when access to methods [is] removed.

So why did his tweet make me so angry? Because it assumes people will take their lives. It even gives them a reason to take their life, as a means of pressuring the govt which means in the context of what I’ve said I see him as encouraging suicide. He’s doing it for a cynical reason because he wants to use their deaths to force the government to do what he thinks is right, and ignore the scientific evidence. He has spoken much about supposed additional deaths as a result of changes in policy but by this tweet, in the terms he wrote, he shows us he does not actually care about those people dying. They are nothing more than yet another manipulation tool to get his own way but this time his attempt to manipulate could see vulnerable people dying needlessly. But should the worst happen he’ll use their deaths and blame others for them.

It’s truly grim.

I’m stealing that punchline.

Some people have stealing luggage privilege.

Former Biden-administration nuclear official Sam Brinton, charged with felony suitcase theft, pleaded guilty to petit larceny in a sweetheart plea deal in Virginia that results in no jail time for him.

…

Brinton, who identifies as non-binary, uses they/them pronouns, and dresses in women’s clothes, worked as deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy before being sacked following his luggage-theft scandal. His appointment as a nuclear-waste official in the Biden administration was widely touted as a historic accomplishment for the LGBT community.

But there is no such community. The T is the cuckoo in the nest.

In February 2023, he was charged with grand larceny for allegedly taking Tanzanian designer’s Asya Khamsin’s luggage from Ronald Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va. It was the third such incident of luggage theft Brinton was allegedly associated with.

…

Brinton was jailed in Virginia for about two weeks in relation to the Khamsin theft after being released on bond.

As part of the deal finalized last week, Brinton entered into an adult diversion program in which he committed to undergo a mental-health evaluation, write a letter of apology, return any stolen property, and complete 50 hours of community service assisting the elderly, according to prosecutors. The arrangement also involved downgrading Brinton’s grand-larceny felony charges to petit larceny, a misdemeanor. Brinton will avoid a prison sentence, which for grand larceny in Virginia can go up to as many as 20 years.

But that’s ok, everyone who steals thousands of dollars worth of goods gets a deal like that.

Brinton allegedly stole luggage from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nev., on July 6, 2022, raising questions about his claim that the earlier instance of alleged theft of the designer’s belongings was a mix-up. There was a federal warrant out for Brinton’s arrest on grand-larceny charges for stealing property worth between $1,200 and $5,000. Police said Brinton was caught on surveillance footage running off with a suitcase filled with over $3,500 worth of jewelry, clothing, and make-up on July 6, 2022.

He’s just misunderstood.

Department of weird priorities:

Police Scotland is paying its officers to take part in Pride parades at the same time as it is cutting back on fighting crime and scores of staff are leaving. The revelation was described as “setting a dangerous precedent” for the under-fire force which is grappling with financial issues.

Cops are being encouraged to represent the service at LGBTI events in exchange of either pay or a day off in lieu. It comes as cuts see some communities without a local bobbie to deal with issues.

Dealing with crime is a lower priority for the police than marching in Pride parades.

Just Pride, mind you. Not any other kind of march. Nobody else matters the way the People of Pride matter. Not women, not workers, not migrants, not people of color, not the unemployed, not people with disabilities – none of them matter as much as teenagers who call themselves “queer”.

Shun the witch and her witchy Report:

The New Statesman can reveal that tomorrow (Wednesday July 17) the governing body of the British Medical Association (BMA) – the doctors’ trade union – will vote on whether or not to “disavow” the Cass Review.

To “disavow.” They might as well say it has cooties.

The motion, first drafted as an emergency measure in June, was not discussed at the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) last month. BMA rules would suggest that for it now to be going to the union’s governing body, the proposal has gained the support of at least 10 members – about one in six – of the BMA’s Council in the intervening weeks. That makes it eligible to be voted on. The motion alleges that the Cass Review contains “unsubstantiated recommendations driven by unexplained study protocol deviations” and is concerned at its “exclusion of trans-affirming evidence”. It calls on the BMA to “publicly disavow the Cass Review” and to “lobby and work with other relevant organisations and stakeholders to oppose the implementation of the recommendations made by the Cass Review”. It also calls for the union to “lobby the government and NHS in all four nations to ensure continuity in provision of transgender health care for patients younger than 18 years old”.

Keep destroying children, full speed ahead.

The BMA is an outlier here, Hannah Barnes goes on to say, in having not yet responded to the Cass Review.

The Royal College of GPs and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have both accepted Dr Cass’s recommendations and said that it will inform their practices going forward. So too has the Association of Clinical Psychologists.

But not the BMA. Too frightened of the zealots?

Commenting on the BMA vote proposed for 17 July, Dr Cass said: “It is disappointing that a professional organisation should choose to determine whether to support the findings of my report based on the votes of Council, rather than a transparent and scientific appraisal of the report.” She added that were the BMA to invite her to discuss her work with its members, she would “happily accept”.

Well that won’t do. Then they would have to come up with reasons.

Yet for people like me, who hoped that the Dr Hilary Cass’s painstaking work would lead to calmer, more nuanced discussion – and to an agreement that the previous model of care has diverged far from ethical medical practice – the past couple of weeks have proved otherwise. Not just the revelation that the body that represents the UK’s doctors would consider rejecting it, but also the response to the new Labour health secretary Wes Streeting’s indication that he intends to make a ban on the private prescription of puberty blockers permanent. Streeting has faced abuse and name-calling, being accused by former Mermaids boss Susie Green of having “blood on his hands”, and by lawyer Jolyon Maugham of killing trans children.

Because trans is a religion. It’s fighting heretics and blasphemers.

Well that’s a kind of activism I guess.

A former SNP activist who once tweeted how he wanted “beat the fuck” out of feminists has been jailed for six years for a series of sexual assaults. Cameron Downing, 24, preyed on six victims at locations across Scotland during a course of conduct which began when he was just 16-years-old.

Whaddya know. Rape and fantasizing about beating the fuck out of feminists in one guy. Who could possibly imagine?

Downing, a former Drama student and an equalities convenor for the SNP’s London branch, spent his trial denying any wrongdoing. The accused told the jury in his evidence that they identified as being non binary, said he hadn’t been threatening the male and was battling ‘complex’ mental health issues at the time of the abuse.

“The accused told the jury in his evidence that they identified as being non binary” – so he told the jury that the jury identified as non binary? Seems odd.

Last month, jurors spent two days deliberating their verdicts before returning guilty verdicts on charges of physical and sexual assaults on Downing, whose pronouns are he/they.

So he’s male and non binary. Seems not so much odd as a flat contradiction.

It is not the first time that Downing has come to public attention.

In 2022, it emerged that Downing tweeted about how he wanted to “beat the fuck out of some terfs and transphobes”. He also tweeted “I fucking hate terfs and transphobes with such a passion.” The tweets caused Harry Potter author JK Rowling to say: “Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland: A place where an equalities officer feels free to declare in public how much he wants to beat up non-compliant women.”

Trans ideology has made it acceptable again to trash and threaten women. No wonder men like Billy Bragg and Jolyon Maugham love it so much.

Anti-Trump Republicans are aghast.

Funny kind of “teaching.”

And do we in fact know “how important it is to listen, and be respectful, when somebody tells you who they are and how they feel”? I don’t know that. Suppose it’s a stranger sitting next to you on the bus, for instance? Or someone you work with but don’t know well? Or a neighbor you don’t like? I don’t think I have any duty to fall silent and listen when random people talk to me about themselves.

This may seem peripheral but I don’t think it is. I think gender-woo and self-obsession and self-importance are inextricably linked. The belief that people can swap genders goes with the belief that people should think about themselves most of the time and that they should also talk about themselves all the time regardless of whether anyone wants to hear them or not.

New York state is suing a county to force it to let males ruin female sports.

New York’s attorney general sued Nassau County on Monday to block enforcement of a new law banning transgender athletes from playing in girls’ and women’s sports at county-owned parks and facilities.

The issue is not that they’re “transgender” but that they’re male. Males should not be playing in girls’ and women’s sports. (Nor should girls and women who are on testosterone, but for some strange reason that doesn’t come up as much.)

In the complaint, Attorney General Letitia James said the new law, “Fairness for Women and Girls in Sports,” is “in fact not an act of fairness,” but entrenches “regressive and invasive” gender stereotypes.

Like the “stereotype” that males have numerous physical advantages over females? The stereotype that’s not a stereotype but just the reality? And what’s “invasive” is letting men and boys invade and destroy women’s and girls’ sports.

“Here in New York, every person has the right to be exactly who they are free from discrimination, and my office will always protect that right,” James said in a statement.

But what she’s defending is the right to be exactly who they are NOT. Men are exactly not women.

At least the people of New York state are saner than Letitia James.

In a Siena College poll, opens new tab in April, 66% of New York voters favored requiring high school athletes to compete only with people of the sex they were assigned at birth, with just 27% opposed. Democrats also favored such a requirement, by a 52% to 38% margin, while Republicans voted 83% to 15% in favor.

Supporters of restrictions have said transgender females have competitive advantages that make their participation in girls’ and women’s competitions unfair.

There’s a reason for their saying that. It’s true.

Behold: an idiot.

…this idea that like well, ok, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them, and making it easier for people to shift spouses, like they change their underwear, that’s gunna make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, I’m skeptical, but it really didn’t work out for the kids in those marriages, and that’s what I think all of us should [clip ends]

So it works out for kids to grow up in a family where there is violence, which of course Vance doesn’t mention is nearly always man on woman violence? It’s healthy and inspiring for kids to see their fathers beating up their mothers?

I am skeptical.

From the Times live updates:

The sweep of Cannon’s decision was a surprise at the Justice Department. The outcome was not. Jack Smith’s team saw the Trump documents case as essentially stalled out for months because of Cannon’s slow pace and had more or less written off the possibility of a trial this year.

That’s probably because the Justice Department and Jack Smith are aware that Cannon is a freakishly underqualified judge appointed by the freakishly underqualified Trump to serve Trump’s interests as he tries to get away with anything and everything.

Even before her bombshell decision on Monday to dismiss former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, Judge Aileen M. Cannon has made any number of unorthodox rulings.

Since taking control of the case last June, in fact, many of her decisions have been so outside the norm that they have come to seem like business as usual.

Still, almost no one — including some defense lawyers working on the case — expected Judge Cannon to kill the documents case by ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been unconstitutionally appointed to his job. And her timing could not have been more shocking, delivering Mr. Trump a major legal victory on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, where he will soon be formally named as his party’s nominee for president.

I suppose the point is to rub our noses in it. “Haha we can do anything we want and you can’t do jackshit about it.”

Many legal experts questioned her decision to hold a hearing last month on the question of Mr. Smith’s appointment, arguing that several courts reaching back to the Watergate era had already upheld the legality of independent prosecutors. The hearing was even odder, the experts pointed out, because Judge Cannon allowed outside parties who had filed friend-of-the-court briefs to address her directly for up to 30 minutes — a practice that rarely takes place at the trial level and is more common in appellate-level courts like the Supreme Court.

So she likes to have a little fun at our expense, is that so wrong?

Look if you have to borrow a megaphone are you really ready to change the world?