Lionel Shriver on the incendiary tuber:

When conceiving Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce anticipated a rough ride. Sure enough, an initially interested literary agent who considered her proposal “well-argued”, “persuasive” and “timely” eventually demurred that Joyce would need an advocate to “weather the storm that publishing this book will create. I am sorry to say that I am not that person.”

One sceptical British editor wrote, “Debate over trans issues is incredibly polarised and siloed, and if we are going to torch our own credentials as woke members in good standing we would prefer to do it for a book that has some chance of selling.”

Oops. The book is selling like crazy. It’s doing so despite the best efforts of bookshops to sandbag it.

Unlike Ryan Anderson’s similarly “radioactive” When Harry Became Sally, Joyce’s terrifying book is still available on Amazon. But would-be book buyers object on Twitter that their local Waterstones shops are suppressing sales. The shops stock one or two copies at most — often shelved in bizarre locations like media studies or stashed under the counter. Customers are obliged to special-order or told that the print run was puny (a lie; warehouses have never run short of a book already in its third printing).

Mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC have spurned interviews. Intelligence Squared, which prides itself on addressing contemporary controversies, pulled its podcast invitation on the day of recording.

It’s funny how anti-feminist books never got this kind of treatment. Not really “funny,” more like disgusting.

Of all ostensibly “marginalised” groups, trans people are supposedly the most persecuted, though this small (if growing) cohort has received a unique degree of celebrative cultural attention for a decade, featuring in a deluge of uncritical documentaries, films, novels and television dramas. Irresistibly, too, this is a victim group that even men and white people can join.

Not only can join, but also (and this is key) damn well dominate. This is white men’s chance to be The Most Marginalized at last, and by god they’re seizing it. (White women are a very very distant second. Still women, you see – not the same kind of fun at all.)

Having documented the descent into ideological cannibalism in improbable niches like online knitting circles, Gavin Haynes coined the useful expression “purity spiral”, whereby the test of political sanctity amid a once-likeminded group grows ever stricter, until the very originators of a school of thought are eaten by their own. The French Revolution, the Salem witch trials and Mao’s cultural revolution all got sucked into purity spirals. Our so-called elite are caught up in the same take-no-prisoners, circling-the-drain self-destruction.

Couldn’t they just give all that up and focus on the climate emergency instead? That one isn’t going to disappoint them by becoming old news or too successful, so it doesn’t need any purity spiral to keep going – plus it’s a genuine emergency, plus (I can’t stress this enough) it’s real.

Virtually everyone wants transgender people treated with respect and granted their civil rights. But for activists, that’s not the goal. It’s no coincidence that the subtitles of three recent books on this lightning-rod subject — Gerard Casey’s Hidden Agender: Transgenderism’s Struggle Against Reality, Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, and Joyce’s Trans — all use the same word: reality.

This is what I’m saying. Move over to climate advocacy and you’ll never run out of reality again.

The blessings of religion:

An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective police custody in east Pakistan after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in the country.

Not a record Pakistan should be trying to set.

The boy’s family is in hiding and many of the Hindu community in the conservative district of Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab, have fled their homes after a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail last week. Troops were deployed to the area to quell any further unrest.

Muslims and Hindus duke it out again! Nostalgia for Partition or the Babri Masjid riots or both?

The boy is accused of intentionally urinating on a carpet in the library of a madrassa, where religious books were kept, last month. Blasphemy charges can carry the death penalty.

Ffs. It’s a room, a carpet. Get the carpet cleaned or get a new one. Move on. If the story is even true, which it probably isn’t.

If gods are real they can’t be harmed by humans pissing or saying things. Gods don’t need humans to punish other humans on behalf of the gods. The whole idea is stupid as well as murderous.

Blasphemy laws have been disproportionately used in the past against religious minorities in Pakistan. Although no blasphemy executions have been carried out in the country since the death penalty was introduced for the crime in 1986, suspects are often attacked and sometimes killed by mobs.

All because people choose to invent irritable gods who pick on smaller weaker beings – to invent them and then to worship them. Religion is like an instruction manual for bullies. Delete and start over.

Nowhere to hide:

The repeatedly ignored warnings of scientists over past decades have now become reality. Humanity, through its actions, or lack of action, has unequivocally overheated the planet. Nowhere on Earth is escaping rising temperatures, worse floods, hotter wildfires or more searing droughts.

…

The key aspect of the IPCC report is that the 42-page summary is agreed, line by line, by every government on the planet, with the scientists vetoing any politically convenient but unscientific proposal.

As a result, governments that continue to fail to take action have nowhere left to hide – the crystal-clear report has bust all of their alibis. “Too many ‘net-zero’ climate plans have been used to greenwash pollution and business as usual,” says Teresa Anderson at ActionAid International.

Isn’t it enough to wring our hands? Surely we don’t have to change how we do things too?

The IPCC’s report means all the evidence that will ever be needed is now in place. “The continued dithering to address climate change is no longer about the lack of scientific evidence, but directly tied to a lack of political will,” says Kristina Dahl of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

That means political leaders are now in the dock and the vital UN Cop26 summit in Glasgow in November may be the last hearing at which they can avoid the judgment of history.

They won’t care though. They care about now, not the future and not history.

Originally a comment by Holms on Misinformation circulated.

…I was expected to agree that scientific facts such as sex are to be sidelined. This position has never been debated and agreed by Conference but appears to be an implicit consequence of the Party’s stance on trans rights.

An ‘implicit consequence’ is exactly right. Rejection of the very existence of sex is not a stance that any of them would have held ordinarily, it is a stance that they were forced to hold – or pretend to hold – as part of the support structure of beliefs build around TWAW/TMAM. This central belief is in need of such support specifically because it is untrue: when it clashes with some other aspect of reality, the believer is confronted with a choice between incompatible sets of information. TWAW is only true if sex is rejected, and so sex is rejected. The concomitant beleifs then creep outward, as more conflicts are encountered.

Some people overcome their better judgement for the first few of such rejections, but reach a point where they simply cannot reconcile what they are expected to support with other sense and information they have. At that point, for me at least and I suspect many others, there is a kind of a snap-back or rebound – the support structure of beliefs become too much, something gives way and the whole thing unravels rapidly. The person is back more or less where they were before the creeping acceptance of misinformation began, but with greater knowledge of what is going on. They have been peaked.

For others, it seems the acceptance of misinformation gets easier with practice.

Remember Andy Wightman? Resigned from the Scottish Green Party last December over the tension between women’s rights and (purported) trans rights. Now he’s been bullied into explaining his reasons.

I never intended to write further about my resignation from the Scottish Green Party. When I resigned, I agreed with the Party not to say anything further.

However, I am now aware that there has been some significant misinformation circulated by members and officials of the Party alleging to explain why I resigned.

I have seen emails, Slack channel communications, information from protected Twitter accounts and the Party’s Q&A following my resignation They make wild allegations about my motivations and character. Some of the claims being made are now being circulated and are having a negative impact on my reputation at a time when I am seeking work. I therefore wish to set the record straight.

It’s all too familiar, isn’t it. Of course they’re now lying about him. It’s what they do. (Who? Which “they”? The trans-fanatics, i.e. the real fanatics about trans ideology and the trans “right” to tell everyone what to think and say.)

Immediately prior to my resignation, Patrick Harvie wrote to me saying that my resignation would be a “huge loss to the Party and to Parliament”. Weeks later he was on national TV denouncing me as a transphobe.

Sigh. In a much much tinier and less consequential way, been there. One minute please don’t leave, the next minute beware the foul transphobe.

What led up to and prompted his resignation is a long story – long but interesting. I’ll share just an excerpt or two.

On reflection that evening I decided to resign from the Party for the simple reason that I could not work in an environment with such a censorious, bullying and intimidatory culture and where I was expected to agree that scientific facts such as sex are to be sidelined. This position has never been debated and agreed by Conference but appears to be an implicit consequence of the Party’s stance on trans rights.

I resigned the following Friday (resignation letter here). Party members whom I had regarded as good colleagues immediately denounced me as a transphobe, accusing me of wanting to participate in a moral panic about transpeople. One Edinburgh Councillor thanked me for all that I had done but, on learning of the circumstances of my resignation, recalled the message and said I was disgusting.

That too is entirely familiar.

The Q&A for Party members and other public statements are insistent that my fault was to have wanted to vote against Party policy on trans rights. This has never been the case. What has been the case is that the Green Group of MSPs insisted that this vote on an amendment to a Bill concerning victims of sexual assault should be viewed through the lens of trans rights and queer theory, and that there was a hostile and bullying culture within the Party.

I have never understood why one has to subscribe to queer theory and gender identity theory in order to improve the lives of trans people. But that’s the bar that has been set in the SGP.

To conclude, I resigned because I could no longer work in such an environment. That others can and do is fine and I am not seeking a debate as to whether I was right or wrong. But for me, I need an environment that is more tolerant, more questioning, more critical, more empathetic, and more willing to listen.

The Green Party loses good people because of a bullying loyalty to queer theory, and the forests continue to burn.

He commented on this post of mine from June 2019, in which I berated him for apologizing to the bullies for attending a meeting where Julie Bindel spoke while not saying anything about the attack on her at that meeting. He commented to say he’d done so on Twitter, and I replied to say yes but not in the statement and then added what, sadly, he now knows all too well.

I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s pretty appalling that you threw Julie under the bus yesterday, even though you condemned “all such violent incidents but especially when directed at women” the day before. I know very well the kind of pressure the trans army applies, but I think it has to be resisted rather than obeyed.

Harsh, and I think I felt guiltily harsh about saying it, but at the same time what about Julie? But he took it in impressively good part, and now…well, he’s resisted instead of obeying. The trans army is good at pushing people over the cliff that way.

Another last minute tune-changer:

An anti-vaccine right-wing radio host in West Palm Beach, Florida died Wednesday from COVID-19 complications.

Dick Farrel, 65, used his local talk show and social media to rail against Dr. Anthony Fauci, who he called a “power tripping lying freak,” and say that no one should get the coronavirus vaccine. When COVID-19 sent him to the hospital for three weeks, though, he changed his tune, urging friends to get vaccinated, friends told local station WPTV.

Of the two, which is more of a power-tripping lying freak? The medical expert with decades of experience with lethal viruses and how to prevent and treat them? Or the bloviating radio host who took it all back once the virus bit him in the ass?

I’m fed up with this shit. I’m fed up to the back teeth with lying grifting shouting screaming know-nothing murderous MEDIA HACKS busily undoing the work of people like Fauci. I’m all the more fed up because I’ve just been reading the Twitter rants of a former friend, someone who used to comment here, someone who used to be sane, who has now joined the campaign to persuade people that Fauci is evil, that vaccination is evil, that people who urge vaccination are evil. In the choice between urging people not to get COVID and urging people to get COVID, he’s chosen the second. It’s gruesome.

Back to dead radio host:

Farrel wrote in early July, “Vaccine Bogus Bull Shid!, Two peeps I know, got vaxed, now have Corona, hospitalized critical. Thank you Moderna, FOR NOTHING!” He erroneously told his followers they would not need the vaccine if they had already survived COVID-19. The CDC has advised former coronavirus patients to get vaccinated.

Two days later, he wrote, “Why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks.” He called Fauci “FOOT-chee” and said that the infectious disease expert and “power trip libb loons” Democrats were conspiring to make it seem like the pandemic was ongoing so they could grab more power.

In late June, he wrote, “So, u think it wasn’t a SCAM DEMIC? NOT ONE ELECTED DEMOCRAT ever tested positive.” He called masks “face diapers” and “face pantys.”

…

Farrel is one among several recent deaths of anti-vaccine advocates who have succumbed to COVID-19. Just this week, a Republican city councilman in Texas fought rapid and fatal bout with the virus that saw him hospitalized and dead within three days. He had used his position to advocate against vaccines and face masks.

People should stop doing that. They should stop using any position (including a Twitter account) to advocate against vaccines and masks. Doing that is evil and people should stop it.

Speaking of no it’s not a matter of if, it’s already happening, Mendocino is running out of water.

For the past century, misty, forested Mendocino – despite being nestled along a number of major rivers, creeks and springs – has relied on shallow wells for water. But amid a historic drought dessicating the US west, the aquifers beneath the town’s damp fog layer have rapidly declined, threatening to sink the region’s tourism industry and the residents who rely on it.

Café Beaujolais, which normally draws all its water for cooking and cleaning from two small wells on its property, has already been shelling out thousands of dollars to have water trucked in from nearby towns and cities.

Restaurants trucking in water: not sustainable. (Also, of course, simply adds its bit to the problem.)

A few minutes from Lopez’s restaurant, the Good Life Café and Bakery recently closed its restrooms. The throngs of tourists who line up down the block to sample the café’s quiches, cappuccinos and organic salads are directed instead to the portable toilets set up in the back parking lot. The owners of the local Harvest grocery market have brought in portable toilets as well.

Few things enhance the tourist experience quite like a visit to one of those smelly tin cans.

When marketing discovers trans rhetoric and cannot believe its luck.

If you were marketing baby formula wouldn’t you be hugging yourself with glee? You get to talk about “putting breastfeeding on a pedestal”!! Without shame! In fact with a glow of righteous fervor, because you’re on the side of the downtrodden! Those selfish arrogant bitches, I mean cows, who can nurse their babies have lorded it over the men who identify as women for too long, so buy our formula and strike a blow for justice. #ShakeTheStigma

Remember the Nestlé scandal? Mike Muller in The Guardian in 2013:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, I gave Nestlé chair Peter Brabeck, a present – an original, signed copy of The Baby Killer, the 1974 report that I wrote for War on Want.

The Baby Killer explained how multinational milk companies like his were causing infant illness and death in poor communities by promoting bottle feeding and discouraging breast feeding.

Our Swiss associates were less subtle. They titled the report “Nestlé Toten Babies” (or Nestlé Kills Babies), which a Swiss court found was libelous. On the substance of the argument, however, the judge warned Nestlé that if the company did not want to face accusations of causing death and illness through sales practices such as using sales reps dressed in nurses’ uniforms, they should change the way that they did business.

No more need for that, now they can just burble about supporting every kind of Feeding Journey.

A new report on climate change will say (no surprise ahead) that the trend is not good. Not good at all.

The planet is odds-on to hit 1.5C of global warming within 20 years, the world’s leading climate scientists will warn in a milestone report tomorrow.

…

A 1.5C rise in average global temperatures on pre-industrial levels is widely considered to be the point beyond which climate change will become increasingly dangerous. 

Eh? It’s already becoming increasingly dangerous – it’s been doing that for decades, or ever since we started burning coal and oil at steadily escalating rates.

The cabinet minister Alok Sharma, president of Cop26, said countries must work harder to reduce emissions and ensure the threshold is not breached. “This report will be a big wake-up call for countries to do even more,” he said.

Even more than what? Countries aren’t really doing anything, are they? Other than talking? Cars, planes, container ships, cruise ships – they’re all still out there doing their thing.

Professor Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at Reading University and a lead author of the report, declined to discuss the content of the paper, but said: “Every fraction of the degree matters. There’s no cliff edge where impacts suddenly go from being fine to being disastrous. It’s a gradual worsening of the impacts as global temperatures rise.”

What I’m saying. It’s not as if everything’s ok now, because we haven’t hit the 1.5 mark yet. Greece and California are in flames; everything’s not ok.

Nick Cohen on Tucker Carlson:

Carlson is the dependable voice of the dominant force on the right that will destroy democracy in the name of “the people”.

Last week, Carlson’s Fox News beamed an admiring show from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, even though there is every indication that Orbán will make it Europe’s first rightwing dictatorship since the fall of Franco’s Spain in 1975.

Or rather because Orban is the next Franco. Fox News doesn’t have any scruples about such things.

Like the unforgivably overrated Roger Scruton, Trump’s mentor Steve Bannon, that part-time defender of free speech Jordan Peterson, and until recently the leaders of Europe’s nominally anti-dictatorial Christian Democrat parties, Carlson was comfortable with his own hypocrisy. The right he represents says it believes in freedom of speech when liberals threaten it. Yet in Hungary, freedom of the press is in its death agonies.

If Fox and Carlson really believed in a free press they wouldn’t tell so many lies. A press that mostly lies isn’t really a free press, it’s more like a tool press.

So the UK has its own Tucker Carlson, in the shape of Toby Young. Last January he got caught telling a whopper about the virus.

The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over a “significantly misleading” column written by Toby Young, press regulator Ipso has ruled.

The July 2020 article claimed the common cold could provide “natural immunity” to Covid-19 and London was “probably approaching herd immunity”.

But on Thursday Ipso found the paper had “failed to take care not to publish inaccurate and misleading information”.

About a pandemic that kills.

I still find it hard to believe that people happily spout off on medical issues in ways that encourage people to catch a lethal virus, for the sake of politics or attention or laughs or all three.

He’s still doing it.

In our next episode of The War on Feminist Women, we have Index on Censorship publishing an article by a Gender-Special person saying that oh yes Maya Forstater is too so twanzphobic.

I guess Index on Censorship has decided “Let’s just censor her a little bit. To be on the safe side.”

Owen Jones wrote a long “I never did!!” post in response to Douglas Murray in The Spectator. He took pains to accuse Suzanne Moore of lying.

Hadley Freeman was in the room and she says it did happen, as Suzanne says it did.

That’s why we’re interested in it.

Rebecca Solnit addresses this constant puzzle of the politicization of death-avoidance in a pandemic:

Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.

It’s true and I never really will understand why. It just doesn’t seem worth it. The political payoff, if any, is so remote and conjectural while the deaths are so prompt and real that it doesn’t seem worth it by any earth-based standard.

Call Jared Kushner the spiritual heir of the army besieging the city of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, which, according to a contemporaneous account, catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls. This is sometimes said to be how the Black Death came to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions of people – a third of the European population – over the next 15 years.

Except not, though, because this isn’t sending infection to an enemy in wartime, this is sending infection to your own supporters as a matter of political rivalry.

Solnit’s explanation is that they thought it was going to hit cities that vote Democratic much harder than the other kind. Maybe so, but now they know they’re telling their own fans to expose themselves to the virus – in many cases (or most or all?) when they’ve been vaccinated themselves. “I’m vaxxed but you patriots out there, don’t you get that nasty antifa vaccination.”

The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”

Where’s the payoff in that? I’m not seeing it. I think maybe it’s just that they’re so wedded to the habit of playing Opposite Everything that they can’t stop even when they know they’re telling their own voters to die in order to stick it to the libtards.

Call Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham the spiritual heirs of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British military commander who in 1763 wrote to an underling, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?”

…

It’s safe to assume that the Republican leadership knows better, and that some of their followers do and some don’t. Some have chosen to engage in biological warfare; some are merely tools being used in that warfare. That is, some of them are unwitting corpses being catapulted over the walls, unconscious smallpox blankets; some of them are Amherst in spirit. A friend of a friend of mine, a masseuse, had a client who laughed at the end of their session and revealed that her vaccination card was fake: definitely an Amherst.

I’ll never understand people.

Marjorie Taylor Greene urges her fans to murder more federal workers.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., suggested at a recent Republican fundraiser in Alabama that Southerners could threaten President Joe Biden’s “police state friends” with guns if they show up at their homes asking about their coronavirus vaccination status.

The late-July event in Dothan was closed to the media, but a video clip of some of her comments leaked, according to the Alabama Political Reporter.

What’s the world coming to when a pro-fascist member of the House can’t foment insurrection in private?

“You lucky people here in Alabama might get a knock on your door, because I hear Alabama might be one of the most unvaccinated states,” Greene told the crowd, prompting cheers and applause over the state’s low vaccination rate. “Well, Joe Biden wants to come talk to you guys. He’s going to be sending one of his police state friends to your front door to knock on the door, take down your name, your address, your family members’ names, your phone numbers, your cellphone numbers, probably ask for your Social Security number and whether you’ve taken the vaccine or not.”

She continued: “What they don’t know is in the South, we all love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not real big on strangers showing up on our front door, are we? They might not like the welcome they get.”

The feds don’t know the South has a lot of gun nuts? Of course they know that. They’d have to be remarkably oblivious not to know it in the light of recent events, not to mention people like Greene shouting about it constantly.

In remarks last month, Greene made another Nazi-era comparison regarding the coronavirus response, saying people who knock on doors encouraging vaccinations are “medical brown shirts,” referring to the paramilitary organization that helped facilitate the rise of the Nazis and Hitler.

No the Nazis and Hitler are on her team, not ours. She’s basically trying to spark another Kristalnacht every time she opens her mouth.

The guy dressed as a baby at the “trans rights” protest is very indignant that people noticed he was dressed as a baby.

Is it?

I don’t know; maybe. For a day at the beach or a pool party it may be. For other purposes? I would think not. Mostly, adults don’t want to be seen as pretending to be children, or dressing up to look like children, for a whole host of reasons. Maybe that’s unfair, maybe we should be more relaxed about the self-presentation of adults just as we should be more relaxed about men who say they are women…but I don’t think that case has been made yet.

Meanwhile he says no you’re the pedophiles.

Me? I didn’t rape him. I’ll cop to boring, for sure, but raping Pastel Rompers Guy, no.

Anyway, never mind all that, the important thing is he looked FABulous.

Oops.

Oh how special: Fox News rodent Tucker Carlson is on a jaunt to Hungary to hang out with good ol’ boy Viktor Orban.

US guest of honour and Fox News host Tucker Carlson was granted a lightning visit by military helicopter to Hungary’s 175km (109-mile) high-tech, high-cost razor-wire border fence with Serbia this week.

Border wall! To keep the Untermenschen out! Makes a proud boy proud!

He liked what he saw. After praising the fence for being so “clean and orderly”, in contrast to the “chaos” on the US-Mexican border, he told his viewers: “It doesn’t require a GDP the size of the US, it doesn’t require high-tech walls, guns, or surveillance equipment. All it requires is the will to do it.”

Triumph of the will, baby.

“Because the lessons are so obvious, and such a clear refutation to the policies we currently have, and the people who instituted those policies, Hungary and its government have been ruthlessly attacked and unfairly attacked: ‘It’s authoritarian, they’re fascists…’ There are many lies being told right now, that may be the greatest of all.”

I’m definitely going to take Tucker Carlson’s word on that.

Sorry to cite Andy Ngô but sometimes it can’t be helped.

The recital of the creed:

I think the guy in the pastel play clothes identifies as a baby. For real.

There’s the trans baby again. I wonder what his demands are.

Oh the irony when even Woman’s Hour avoids the word.

WOMAN’S HOUR FFS.