There was a follow-up tweet from the ABA that I missed because they locked their account; it contains yet more frantic self-flagellating histrionics.

A serious, violent incident; inexcusable; terrible incident; pain we caused; apologies are not enough; harm we caused.

It’s as if they have a literal gun to their literal heads.

Meanwhile, in the Advocacy section of the ABA website, we can see:

The American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE) is the bookseller’s voice in the fight for free speech. Its mission is to promote and protect the free exchange of ideas, particularly those contained in books, by opposing restrictions on the freedom of speech; issuing statements on significant free expression controversies; participating in legal cases involving First Amendment rights; collaborating with other groups with an interest in free speech; and providing education about the importance of free expression to booksellers, other members of the book industry, politicians, the press and the public.

Except…when…they…don’t…

Some of the people Fox News is killing:

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for 95 percent of Greene County’s new cases, according to Towns. It is spreading easily because people have ditched their masks, crowded into indoor spaces, resumed travel, and resisted vaccinations. Just 40 percent of people in Greene County are fully vaccinated. In some nearby counties, less than 20 percent of people are.

Why? Partly because they’ve been told vaccinations are for Democrats – in other words it’s tribal. Their tribe is wimpy and gets the Fauci ouchy, our tribe is tough and hell no we don’t get no stinkin’ vaccination.

Almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield’s hospitals is unvaccinated, and the dozen or so exceptions are all either elderly or immunocompromised people. The vaccines are working as intended, but the number of people who have refused to get their shots is crushing morale. Vaccines were meant to be the end of the pandemic. If people don’t get them, the actual end will look more like Springfield’s present: a succession of COVID-19 waves that will break unevenly across the country until everyone has either been vaccinated or infected…

That they are in this position despite the wide availability of vaccines turns difficult days into unbearable ones. As bad as the winter surge was, Springfield’s health-care workers shared a common purpose of serving their community, Steve Edwards, the president and CEO of CoxHealth, told me. But now they’re “putting themselves in harm’s way for people who’ve chosen not to protect themselves,” he said. While there were always ways of preventing COVID-19 infections, Missourians could have almost entirely prevented this surge through vaccination—but didn’t. “My sense of hope is dwindling,” Tracy Hill, a nurse at Mercy, told me. “I’m losing a little bit of faith in mankind. But you can’t just not go to work.”

Tucker Carlson, take a bow. Lauren Boebert, step up.

The grueling slog is harder now because it feels so needless, and because many patients don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late.

…

Missouri Governor Mike Parson never issued a statewide mask mandate, and the state’s biggest cities—Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, and Columbia—ended their local orders in May, after the CDC said that vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks indoors. In June, Parson signed a law that limits local governments’ ability to enact public-health restrictions. And even before the pandemic, Missouri ranked 41st out of all the states in terms of public-health funding. “We started in a hole and we’re trying to catch up,” Towns, the director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, told me.

Well, that’s unfortunate, but at least Trump and Tucker Carlson have had a lot of fun.

Now it’s the Vagina Museum doing it. Yes really – the Vagina Museum.

But women talking about things that concern women (and women only) don’t need to be “more inclusive.” It is just women who menstruate – men don’t menstruate.

But menstruation is “gender-specific” – or rather sex-specific. Women menstruate, men do not, the end.

No. No no no no no, and stop this self-hating women-hating women-disappearing bullshit.

But it’s not true that “anyone can menstruate” – only female people can menstruate. Girls and women can menstruate, boys and men can’t.

The replies seem to be all hostile. Good.

One of the comments allowed to remain on the American Booksellers Association’s Facebook post yesterday captures the eccentric nature of the ideology:

The book is a ploy for people to see gender dysphoria as a trend rather than a legitimate feeling. It’s ideology is one where being transgender is a “fad”. Someone’s gender identity is not a debate. It’s not something to question or say isn’t true based or crap science or psychology. The simple answer to the author’s “mysterious” question as to why gender dysphoria is more widely acknowledged is because society is finally opening up to discuss and talk about it. Not because it didn’t ever exist before. Society has purposefully been heteronormative and forced people with gender dysphoria to remain silent and stuck. This isn’t new. Gender dysphoria has existed as long as humans have. As have transgender individuals. And what they decide to do with their bodies is their choice.

First claim: gender dysphoria is a legitimate feeling.

Sure it is. There must be lots of kinds of dysphoria and they’re all legitimate feelings, because what would an illegitimate feeling be? You feel what you feel. But that doesn’t mean what you feel reflects a truth about the world, or that what you feel imposes some kind of obligation on everyone else.

Second claim: the book’s ideology is one where being transgender is a “fad”.

Yes, and? Of course it’s a fad. Its faddishness is reflected in the comment itself. It’s reflected in the melodramatic language of the ABA’s apology. It’s reflected in the numbers. It could be a harmless fad, or a benign fad, or a wonderful fad that will reverse climate change – but it’s clearly a fad.

Third claim: Someone’s gender identity is not a debate.

That’s the core mistake. Yes it is. If someone’s [___] identity contradicts external reality and has an impact on other people then yes it is [up for] debate. Absolutist libertarianism about something called gender identity is not reasonable except for the single occupants of desert islands.

Third claim restated: It’s not something to question or say isn’t true based o[n] crap science or psychology.

Yes it is. It’s something to question based on a number of things, including our own perceptions. We’re not required to perceive other people as the sex they aren’t simply because they order us to. We’re not required to and besides that we can’t – we can’t override our perceptions that way.

That’s the core issue, that third claim – that people’s internal fantasies about themselves are a mandate for the rest of the world. The wack nature of that claim is why the whole movement is so absurd and bonkers and hyperbolic and melodramatic. We can’t do that, we can’t believe personal claims that deny reality, and a pseudo-political movement that tries to force us to is doomed to drill its way into the center of the earth and expire.

It’s a fierce competition for who can shout the loudest.

The American Booksellers Association is facing withering criticism from booksellers after walking back its promotion of an anti-trans title to member bookstores. Among the promotional items included in the ABA July “white box” mailing sent to 750 bookstores, the organization included a copy of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, as well as a sell sheet.

So Publishers Weekly poisons the well in the first sentence (and the title) by calling the book “anti-trans.” What does “anti-trans” mean? It implies, and I think is generally taken to mean, hostile to trans people, but usually the subject is the truth claims about what “trans” means and how anyone knows any of them are true. It’s not necessarily hostility to trans people (to people who consider themselves trans) to question the truth claims about what “trans” means.

Meanwhile, the ABA issued a groveling apology, as we know, accusing itself of “violence.”

But booksellers said the statement fell short, calling out the organization’s use of the passive voice in the opening sentence. They also demanded greater transparency about how the decision to include the book was initially made, and called for demonstrable steps to restore trust with trans book workers and authors. Some called on the ABA to offer promotions for trans authors’ books at no cost.

Why stop there? Why not send trans authors on a luxury multi-week tour of Europe at no cost?

ABA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee member Luis Correa, who works as a bookseller at Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., was first made aware of the issue when fellow booksellers emailed him Morrissey’s tweet. Correa identifies as a queer, Latino, and fat-bodied person, and said he thought the apology was flawed.

Of course it’s flawed, it didn’t address the queer Latino fat-bodied community. Where’s that free trip to Europe?! (Also what happened to Latinx? Uh oh, better cancel Correa; no free trip to Europe for him.)

Regnery, the publisher of Irreversible Damage, sent the copies to booksellers to promote the book’s forthcoming paperback release. First published in hardcover in 2020, the critical reception to the book varied widely and the book has become the subject of fierce debate. Psychology Today criticized the author’s reliance on a controversial gender dysphoria theory and her rejection of basic science.

What rejection of basic science is that, exactly? What does the trans ideology have to do with any kind of science, basic or advanced?

The publisher defended the book, but Publishers Weekly knows better.

Among booksellers, however, there was little disagreement about the content of the book. “As longtime @ABAbook members with beloved staff across the gender spectrum, we’re extremely disappointed and angered to see the ABA promoting dangerous, widely discredited anti-trans propaganda, and we’re calling for accountability,” the Harvard Book Store wrote on Twitter.

But what does “anti-trans” mean?

DEI committee member Correa said he is cautiously optimistic that the ABA will take steps that demonstrate a commitment to doing right by booksellers, and believes that the decision to take the coming weeks to outline steps was more prudent than rushing. In the past, he said ABA has been responsive on issues that are important to trans booksellers, including adding functionality to the Indie Commerce websites that many member bookstores use so that they can remove anti-trans titles from the ordering database. Still, he is wary.

“We’re dealing with a historically white, cis organization in a white supremacist society. So there are going to be a lot of missteps,” he told PW.

Is it historically male at all? Or is that something that just doesn’t matter these days.

David Aaronovitch reviews Helen Joyce’s Trans:

I didn’t look too closely when in 2015 a Conservative administration proposed changing the law on gender recognition. A few trans people want more easily to get official confirmation for the new gender they have become? Well, I thought, that’s probably OK. No skin off any part of me.

Then the issue appeared to morph into a different kind of conflict. It had clearly somewhere along the line become impermissible for those who thought that there was something ineluctable about biological sex to say so. It wasn’t whether they were correct or mistaken on the subject that was in question, but their right even to express their view.

That had definitely happened by 2015 – that’s when I was explicitly and furiously told that I had zero right to express such a view, by people who 5 minutes earlier had been friends.

Here I drew the line. I saw people I knew being bullied and harassed for having an opinion on biological sex (actually the majority opinion on biological sex), and even if I didn’t know whether I agreed with them, I knew that was wrong. And wrote so, inevitably drawing the accusation from Britain’s most-followed far leftist, Owen Jones, that I was an “apologist for transphobia”, a sentiment published to his one million followers on Twitter.

As to the subject of the dispute itself, I was still deliberately agnostic. But two things were beginning to worry me. The first was the absurdity of what was happening to the language. For health publications to eschew using the word “women” in relation to the need for cervical smears, substituting the phrase “people with cervixes” seemed not just awkward but damaging. Some women, for example, might not even know they had cervixes. Why would a transwoman feel her existence was denied by health authorities recognising that people with cervixes were, to a statistical vanishing point, women?

It’s much more than that though – much more. We need the word “woman” for more than just medical tests. If we can’t have the word “woman” we can’t have feminism. We have to have feminism.

The point Joyce is establishing is that you cannot simply become a woman or a man by saying so. But that in recent times a fashion, an industry, has developed based around the idea that you can. Not long ago, Joyce writes, “the idea of a non-hormone, non-op transwoman — someone who retains a physiologically normal male body but understands themselves to be a woman because that is their ‘gender identity’ and expects everyone else to agree — would have seemed nonsensical to almost everybody”. And now in many places it’s the law.

Joyce places the origin of this development — which, as she establishes, has (unlike debates over gay equality or reproductive rights) somehow sneaked onto the statute books of several countries — in a new ideology about gender. This holds that biological sex is as much a “social construct” as the idea of gender is.

One benefit of Joyce’s book is its intellectual clarity and its refusal to compromise. So she takes apart this ideology of gender with a cold rigour. What, after all, is the woman or man you want to become, if there’s no such thing as a woman or man? The thing that is yearned for will often be precisely the fashionable and frankly prejudiced notion of what a person who was born a woman or man would ideally be like. So you ditch biological reality for a set of shifting aspirations and call it progress?

Correct. Women don’t get to call themselves women, and everyone is required to call men women on demand.

Something odd has happened and is happening. Younger people in particular are, out of good-natured tolerance, accepting an ideology that is so empty that its proponents hugely prefer assertion and “cancellation” to argument. But in seeking to cancel JK Rowling, trans activists met their Joe McCarthy accuses the US army moment — the point at which they tried to take down a loved and respected institution and came unstuck.

I’m off the fence. I will call people by the name and pronouns they tell me they want to be called by. I am prepared to defend their right not to be discriminated against at work and in shops, to defend them against bullying and harassment. But as Joyce says so passionately, that doesn’t change reality. A penis is a male sex organ, men don’t have babies. Women exist.

And without women, no humans exist.

Trump and “like a dog” – Philip Rucker in the Post in 2018:

In President Trump’s singular lexicon, there is no more vicious put-down than likening an adversary to a dog.

“Choked like a dog.”

“Fired like a dog.”

“Sweat like a dog.”

Then there is what Trump said Tuesday of Omarosa Manigault Newman, his former reality television protege and White House staffer who is now scorned and telling all in her new book, “Unhinged,” and accompanying media tour.

“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” Trump tweeted. “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

Animalistic slurs come easily to Trump, who over the past few years has likened a long list of perceived enemies to dogs — including former FBI director James B. Comey, former acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates, former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), journalist David Gregory and conservative commentator Erick Erickson.

Calling a woman a dog is just old-style frat house sexism, where it meant “not sexually attractive to frat boys.” Calling anyone and everyone you don’t like a dog is weird.

The Wall Street Journal:

The American Booksellers Association apologized Wednesday for a “terrible” and “serious, violent incident.” What dastardly offense did it commit? The profound trauma occurred this month when the trade group dedicated to selling books sent out a paperback copy of a book some of its members don’t like.

So its members have all liked every single book the ABA has ever sent out? This shocking violence of sending one that some didn’t like is a brand new event in the world?

No, it’s not that, it’s that Abigail Shrier’s book is different. It’s violent enough to say that some girls who say they are trans are just caught up in a fad.

Ms. Shrier’s book nonetheless offends the sensibilities of the woke left, which has tried to censor research into rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the regret felt by some who have undergone gender transitions. Twitter mobs are now leading a campaign to ensure that the public can’t buy or read Ms. Shrier’s book.

The American Booksellers Association did not respond to a request for comment, but its groveling statement makes clear it caved to the censors. The group apologized for mailing the “anti-trans” book to its members, calling it an “inexcusable” act that went against “everything we believe and support.” It also promised to take “concrete steps to address the harm we caused,” since “apologies are not enough.”

Then they flagellated themselves with knotted cords until the blood ran.

The trade group isn’t alone. On Thursday afternoon Ms. Shrier’s book no longer appeared to be available on the website of Target, the giant retailer. (Target didn’t respond to a request for comment.) This week NBC News reported that two Amazon employees resigned after the company continued to offer Ms. Shrier’s book. Hundreds more have called in a petition for the book’s removal from the online marketplace.

Oh well. Climate changes has passed the tipping point so none of this will matter for much longer.

And they’ve also deleted dissenting comments from the Facebook post, and blocked some people from commenting – like me, for instance.

What a shower of class traitors and scabs and informers. What a complete shit-show.

Pathetic and shameful.

Well it’s another Streisand effect – the ABA’s idiotic groveling apology has resulted in Shrier’s book trending on Twitter.

First, CNN reported:

The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or take other dangerous or illegal measures after the November election that Milley and other top officials informally planned for different ways to stop Trump, according to excerpts [from] an upcoming book obtained by CNN.

The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, describes how Milley and the other Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one by one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, dangerous or ill-advised.

…

Milley viewed Trump as “the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose,” the authors write, and he saw parallels between Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric as a victim and savior and Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Nothing to lose and nothing to inhibit, either – no scruples, no conscience, no sense of obligation, no understanding of history, no wisdom, no humility, no feeling of responsibility.

Second, Trump issued a “statement.”

Despite massive Voter Fraud and Irregularities during the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, that we are now seeing play out in very big and important States, I never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government.

He’s such an elegant stylist, isn’t he?

So ridiculous! Sorry to inform you, but an Election is my form of “coup,” and if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley. He got his job only because the world’s most overrated general, James Mattis, could not stand him, had no respect for him, and would not recommend him. To me the fact that Mattis didn’t like him, just like Obama didn’t like him and actually fired Milley, was a good thing, not a bad thing. I often act counter to people’s advice who I don’t respect.  

Wut?

I’d never wanna do a coup with Milley, who this other terrible general hated him and so did I hate both of them so I hired the one because the other hated him, plus besides also Obama hated him too so that’s why I hired him, a good thing, not a bad thing.

I lost respect for Milley when we walked together to St. John’s Church (which was still smoldering from a Radical Left fire set the day before), side by side, a walk that has now been proven to be totally appropriate—and the following day Milley choked like a dog in front of the Fake News when they told him they thought he should not have been walking with the President, which turned out to be incorrect.

How can a walk be proven to be totally appropriate? What would that even mean? And what is choking like a dog? And what turned out to be incorrect?

In fact, around the same time Milley, in a conversation, was an advocate of changing all of the names of our Military Forts and Bases.  I realized then, also, he was a much different person than I had hoped.

Yeah he wanted a general who would rub those Confederate generals in everybody’s faces, like a real man.

But never during my Administration did Milley display what he is showing now. He was not “woke.”  Actually, I don’t believe he ever was, but the way I look at Milley, he’s just a better politician than a general, trying to curry favor with the Radical Left and the absolute crazy people espousing a philosophy which will destroy our Country! 

Ok then!

Another beautifully crafted former-presidential Statement for the record books.

I hate to cite the Daily Wire but they took the trouble to ask the Toronto police about that “woman” whose photograph makes it so obvious that he’s a man.

In a follow-up email, The Daily Wire asked the department to confirm Ruby’s biological sex and to “please indicate if the suspect was booked in a male or female facility.”

Toronto Police Service’s Meaghan Gray replied (emphasis added):

Your question, and the answer, are irrelevant to our investigation. Our focus is on the sexual assault of a child and identifying any additional victims. The best way to do that is to share information with the public that would assist them with recognizing the person involved, such as a name and photograph. In this case, this person identifies as a woman, named Ruby, using the pronouns she/her. It is our practice to use the names and pronouns with which a person identifies, and to use a photograph that most closely resembles their current likeness.  That was done in this case.

That’s ridiculous. Sure, the photograph and the name are useful, but that doesn’t make the accurate sex irrelevant – the more accurate information the better, as I’m quite sure the police know perfectly well. The actual sex of the suspect is not irrelevant. Saying “such as a name and photograph” makes it sound as if minimal information is best, like a strong ingredient in a recipe – you don’t want to overpower the dish with this one strong flavor. It’s not like that. Knowing a name and the sex and a photo is better than two of the three.

The American Booksellers Association also has that stupid crawling lying apology on its Facebook page, but this one is signed.

Again, from the section of the ABA website that celebrates and promotes Banned Books Week:

Banned Books Week was founded in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, students, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.

Unless they’re Abigail Shrier’s ideas. That’s entirely different. Then the ideas become “violent.”

The American Booksellers Association has a website.

On that website it has a section for…Banned Books Week.

I’m not making it up.

The most recent item is April 13:

Lovely.

But, so…why are they now screaming that sending Abigail Shrier’s book out to booksellers is “violent” and in need of prompt and searching atonement?

On April 13, the Banned Books Week Coalition announced that Jason Reynolds has been named the inaugural Honorary Chair for Banned Books Week 2021. The New York Times bestselling author will headline the annual celebration of the right to read, which takes place September 26–October 2, 2021, and features the theme: Books Unite Us, Censorship Divides Us.

A couple of months away. How’s that going to work out?

Since it was founded in 1982, Banned Books Week has highlighted the value of free and open access to information by drawing attention to the attempts to remove books and other materials from libraries, schools, and bookstores.

Like the attempt that the ABA is submitting to right now, as we speak.

I imagine there must be quite some ruckus going on behind the scenes.

What has happened to the grownups? This is the second time in as many days I’ve asked that.

A “violent” incident – that’s teenager talk, it’s the worst kind of idiot-Twitter talk, it’s frenzied catastrophizing tantrum talk.

Executions? Torture? Banishment?

Women not wheeshting.

There are lots of these.

Sometimes it turns out to be a mistake to tell women to shut up about women and their rights.

He’s gone quiet.

It’s about the conflict over “trans rights”:

Siân Berry is to quit as leader of the Greens, citing conflict within the party over transgender rights and claiming it had been a “failure of leadership” on her part that the party was sending “mixed messages”.

What are transgender rights though? That’s the problem, isn’t it – they turn out to be a very peculiar form of “rights,” that are not really rights at all.

“There is now an inconsistency between the sincere promise to fight for trans rights and inclusion in my work and the message sent by the party’s choice of frontbench representatives,” she said.

Again, that’s a trick claim. Normally “inclusion” means just not invidious exclusion for bad, prejudiced reasons, but in the case of “trans rights” it also means “inclusion” in the sex that the trans person is not. Those are two very different kinds of inclusion. Women don’t want to be forced to “include” men as women, because that would make a mockery of our rights.

There’s a widespread delusion that men who are trans are feminists because they are women, but that’s completely wrong. Most men who are trans have zero clue about feminism and care even less than that. Men who are trans are interested in what they want, not what women need.

She said the forthcoming leadership election would mean serious questions must be asked of the party. Berry said: “Will we continue to embrace the principles of listening and solidarity when minority groups are singled out for attack?”

What about when women are singled out for attack?

Why is Berry so much more focused on trans people than she is on women? Why does she think trans people matter so much more than women?

“It is important to recognise that women’s rights and trans rights go hand in hand and the party conference continues to consider policy proposals on this issue,” the spokesperson said.

But they don’t. It’s not “important to recognise” that, because it’s not true. Everything would be so much easier if it were true, but it’s not.

This is what I keep wondering – how is it ok for a tv personality to keep killing people by using his tv celebrity to tell people not to get vaccinated?