On the one hand down with hate speech, on the other hand “suck my dick you transphobic cunts” is just strong feelings. Libby Purves in the Times:

Several evangelists have been convicted for lumbering around with placards against homosexuality, a chap got six months suspended for leaving a stupid cartoon in an airport prayer room and a peerlessly silly YouTube comedian got arrested for teaching a pug to do a Nazi salute. Quivering with sensibility, we proudly cherish our disapproval of “distressing” anyone, even if that distress is theoretical and caused by some harmless stranger’s moral opinion. There is little backing now for the tough old saying, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me.”

Unless it’s about women defending their boundaries.

Yet as we have been rightly reminded by weary MPs after the killing of Sir David Amess, real and explicit death threats are commonplaces of public life. Every few weeks Tulip Siddiq finds herself informed by some random fellow citizen that she will be raped and murdered, her family butchered. Jess Phillips has to report similar messages “all the time” to the police. The mayor of London needs 24-hour security and Rosie Duffield missed the Labour conference because of the danger posed by transgender activists. Elected officials at every level and public health scientists have had their addresses published with explicit violent menaces, often mentioning or involving their families…

Being gender critical deserves all the abuse it gets, but genuine explicit death threats are ok.

Only very occasionally is someone brought to book for such threats: only four prosecutions can I find from last year. Meanwhile the learned, thoughtful academic philosopher Kathleen Stock, who again wields no actual power, has been advised by the police to teach online, install CCTV and take bodyguards on campus.

The people bullying her, on the other hand, wear masks.

They just never get the point.

The first tweet should begin “One of the protesters,” not “Thanks be” – autocorrect struck again.

“Emotions had run high”=it’s understandable and forgivable to call women “cunts.”

This is not an argument you ever see applied to the word “nigger” in internecine disputes among the left. No one on the left thinks that’s understandable and forgivable because of high emotions.

But when it’s women somehow that’s different. It’s just passion, it’s just excess zeal, it’s just emotions running high.

They don’t get it. They don’t ever fucking get it. The fact that when emotions are running high men start calling women “cunts” is the whole point. Yes of course it’s because the sign-maker was furious at the feminist women at the conference; that’s our point. Step one is calling us cunts, step two is beating us up. When men lose their tempers at women, violence becomes all too likely. It’s not mollifying to tell us that guy who called us cunts was just really pissed off. We already know that.

Julie Bindel on the conference and its misogynist enemies:

On arrival at the venue I saw the usual array of blue fringed students and other hangers on, some draped in trans flags, others with slogan T-shirts declaring themselves non-binary, genderqueer, he/him, they/them, zi/zir, idi/ot. They were protesting, yes, protesting, a conference with a key aim to campaign to end male violence towards women and girls, and to offer support and solidarity to the victims and survivors of that violence. Of course, the reason put forward by the blue fringes, including those that had waged a war against the conference venue from the moment it was announced, was that the organisers and attendees were anti-trans, as though everything is about them.

Specifically as though everything about women is about them – even more specifically as though everything about feminist women is about them. It’s feminist women who don’t “center” men who say they are women who really get their protest energies going. Men who don’t “center” women who say they are men? Pff, they don’t matter, because they’re men. Men’s hearts are always in the right place. It’s feminist women who are the real demons in the word – conniving, sly, cruel, witchy.

I met some women I had only ever seen on Zoom, such as the amazingly talented Vaishnavi Sundar, a filmmaker from South India and the founder of Women Making Films. Vaishnavi has worked with marginalised women all her life and campaigns against male violence. Her achievements are impressive – Vaishnavi successfully fought for women to be able to access morning-after contraception in the state of Tamil Nadu. In 2018 she began making a film about sexual harassment of Indian women, including the voices of lower-caste women in the workplace as a way to hold the Indian criminal justice system to account for the lack of implementation of its laws. The film, But What Was She Wearing?, was finished in 2020 and Vaishnavi secured screenings in North America before showing it in India. Her reputation is such that her work is always warmly welcomed in both the Global North and South. But shortly before a screening of the film in New York, Vaishnavi was emailed by the organisers and told that she was no longer welcome and the event was cancelled along with Sundar and her film, due to her ‘transphobia’. Their evidence? Tweets such as “A safe space for trans women is not inside a woman’s bathroom”, posted by Vaishnavi.

So the screening of a film about a film about sexual harassment of Indian women, including lower-caste women, was canceled because everything is about men who call themselves women. Men’s need to play-act being women is more significant and support-worthy than women’s need to be free of harassment and violence. What gruesome priorites.

Oh gosh the calendar has gotten away from me again. It’s just three days to International Pronoun Day!!

International Pronouns Day seeks to make respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace.

Referring to people by the pronouns they determine for themselves is basic to human dignity. Being referred to by the wrong pronouns particularly affects transgender and gender nonconforming people. Together, we can transform society to celebrate people’s multiple, intersecting identities.

One, no, referring to people by “the pronouns they determine for themselves” is not basic to human dignity. It really really isn’t. The whole idea is trivial as well as stupid. Things that are trivial and stupid can’t be basic to human dignity. Some things are basic to human dignity, but customized pronouns are not one of them. Treating language as an opportunity to impose personal whims on all other speakers of the language is itself undignified; it’s babyish and dopy. There’s no such thing as “determining” pronouns for oneself. That’s not how language works; that’s not what language is for. Failure to understand that is like a giant custard pie in the face. Dignity is nowhere to be seen.

Two, no, together we can’t transform society to celebrate people’s multiple, intersecting identities. It’s not that easy to transform society, and doing it in aid of something stupid and childish is extra difficult, and also not worth doing in the first place. Celebration of identities is a terrible goal for a transformed society. Identities are about the self, and the more people focus on their own precious selves, the less use they are to the world. Forget about fucking identities and just do something helpful.

Dang, says it all.

Tweet one says an African woman at the FILIA conference is talking about her experience of rape and ethnic cleansing, while “protesters” outside are shouting and drowning her out. The “protesters” at the conference were trans activists and allies who want to force women to be “inclusive” of trans women, i.e. men who call themselves women, in everything women do. This noble cause of forcing women to include men in everything we do drowned out the words of an African woman talking about rape and ethnic cleansing. Their trivial and unreasonable grievance over not being allowed to grab everything that belongs to women drowned out genuine and hideous violations of women’s rights in Africa.

The egomania of it is suffocating. And this “Steph” says if only FILIA were reasonable the egomaniacs wouldn’t have been punishing them. Sounds so familiar.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on This time it’s global.*

We humans see species being lost in huge numbers, but nothing catastrophic happening as a result. So we shrug and call environmental scientists alarmists, infuriating iknklast in particular. But obviously this is only sustainable for a little while and when climate change and habitat loss reach such a level that key species disappear and damage begins to propagate exponentially… well, we’re certainly going to notice then.

The short human lifespan (and even shorter business and election cycles) offer a poor basis for judging the results of our environmental perturbations. Our timescales are not well attuned to slow changes in our surroundings. Even outside of human activity, the Northern hemisphere is still undergoing post-glacial isostatic rebound after the most recent retreat of the great ice sheets. We even have a hard time noticing changes from events orders of magnitude faster, assuming we’re interested in paying attention to them in the first place. In Harold Edgerton’s high speed photographs of bullets passing through balloons, the punctured ballons retain their prior form for a brief instant before exploding and collapsing into a shapeless mess. When it comes to evaluating our impact on the environment we’re still in that instant before the explosion and resultant shapeless mess.

In the West the concept of extinction itself is barely 200 years old. Just looking at our destruction of a few species of birds, it’s only been about a thousand years since the extinction of Madagascar’s Aepyornis, about 600 years since the demise of Moa species in New Zealand, 350 since the death of the Dodo and just over 200 years since the functional extinction of the Great Auk. The passenger pigeon has been gone for just over a century. On top of the extirpation of these birds, we also cleared land, planted crops, and introduced other species, both wanted and unwanted, into most of their former haunts. In the waters where Auks once lived, we mined cod to the point of collapse. So we piled change upon change in rapid succession, heedless of the results of the initial destruction, ignorant of unintended conseqences, barely cognisant of what we actually did do.

An ecosystem which has suffered the extinction of one or more of its constituent species can never “return” to its previous “balance”. It must find a new shape. Given our continued disruption of so much of Earth’s environments, that new shape and balance, the accomodation to the imposed new order, is still being worked out, in many cases without the courtesy of our notice or concern until that new configuration and functionality has some unfortunate, unforeseen impact on our interests, comfort, or profits.

We’re living in the midst of a massive, multi-generational, uncontrolled and unrepeatable experiment on the entire biosphere of the only planet in the universe known to support life. Poorly designed, and launched without any ethical review, carried out with little or no follow-up, this experiment, thousands of years into its run, is only now stirring concerns about its effects and morality. Well, better late than never, I guess.

*Which is his own post. It feels faintly absurd to guest post a comment on the guest poster’s own guest post, but it can’t be helped.

This is repulsive coming from an MP.

They’re not a hate group! That’s such a foul thing to say.

He has me blocked on Twitter. I have no idea why, which means he probably subscribes to one of those “automatically block all the feminists” lists.

Misogyny is the new “progressive.”

We’re not allowed to talk about that, declares enlightened academic Alison Phipps.

“Trans lives are not up for debate” is a slogan meant to shut people up without saying “shut up.” What does it mean? Besides “shut up,” that is.

It means that we’re not allowed to question, or point out the flaws in, the elaborate claims about “gender identity” that are meant to underpin the political campaign to force everyone to pretend that men are women if they say they are. If a huge furious man with clenched fists shouts at you that he is a woman, you’re not allowed to point out that he’s acting like a man, and is threatening to you, and could do you harm if he threw a punch with one of those fists. It means the huge man’s claim to be a woman is his life and is a trans life and is not up for debate.

If that’s not up for debate then what is up for debate? If we can’t question claims as flagrantly untrue and untethered to reality is that then what can we question?

Whose rights to what.

The Government is spending £150 million at women’s jails on 500 new cells which can be used for transgender lags.

They will be single occupancy with ensuite loos and showers. But some will enable women to have their kids overnight to prepare for life at home.

Tory Baroness Scott of Bybrook confirmed the cells plan to support “transgender needs” as required by law and jail policy.

In July, a High Court Judge ruled holding transgender women in female jails is lawful because a ban would ignore their right to live as their ­chosen gender.

Their what? What right? What right is that?

There is no such right. That’s not a right. There’s no such thing as a “right” to live as any fictional category. There’s no right to live as a leprechaun, there’s no right to live as a visitor from another planet, there’s no right to live as a talking rabbit. None of that is forbidden, either, and people can fantasize whatever they like, but when it comes to requiring expensive special arrangements paid for by other people – forget it. When it comes to demolishing the rights of other people, knock it over the head.

Poisoning the well much? The day before the Filia conference started:

Flagpoles in Guildhall Square are currently flying the colours of trans, LGBTQ+ and non-binary people, as well as suffragettes.

“trans, LGBTQ+ and non-binary” – so trans and non-binary get mentioned twice, while boring old lesbian and gay have to make do with once.

It comes ahead of a two-day ‘peaceful’ protest in support of trans rights that has been organised over the weekend (October 16-17).

That is, over the weekend of and in front of the feminist conference, protesting feminism. That protest.

Attendees of the Standing Against Transphobia will meet as a conference hosted by women’s liberation group Filia – which is accused of being ‘transphobic’ – will be held inside the Guildhall.

Thus sending the message that feminist women are evil and oppressive.

One of the protest’s organisers, Councillor Claire Udy, said: ‘This is a clear message from the council that trans and non binary lives are valid.

‘It also sends a message that it is time to reclaim the women’s suffrage flag, which has been co-opted by a transphobic movement.’

That is, it sends a message that it’s time (yet again) to tell women to stop talking about their issues and focus on trans issues instead, aka suck my dick you cunts.

Just last month a peaceful trans rights protest was held outside a University of Portsmouth building as a talk on single-sex spaces by Woman’s Place UK took place inside.

Peaceful or not, why is anyone protesting single-sex spaces? Why can’t women be allowed their own spaces?

But the piece does give Raquel Rosario-Sanchez the last word.

‘We support everyone’s right to protest but we do not support the way these protesters target and vilify us as women just because we are enacting our rights.’

I don’t support anything about these protesters.

The ACLU’s fascination with customized pronouns goes back several years. It’s a deeply peculiar cause for a civil liberties organization to focus on, because it has nothing to do with civil liberties – on the contrary, it’s a campaign to coerce people’s language for no good reason.

A blog post from ACLU Northern California in July 2015:

“Hello, my name is Anna and my pronouns are she, her, and hers.” That has now become my standard greeting at meetings and events. It wasn’t something that happened naturally, but with a little practice and intention, it became a habit.

Sure, anything can become a habit. “Hello, my name is Anna and I’m a wombat” could just as easily become a habit, but that doesn’t make it a sensible thing to say unless you’re joking.

And where’s the civil liberty? Whose civil liberty is being fostered here? Is it a civil liberty to be called by a customized (i.e. inaccurate) pronoun? It is not.

As an Organizer with the ACLU of Northern California, I spend much of my time advocating for schools that are welcoming and inclusive to transgender students. Part of that advocacy includes talking to people about gender, and educating people about transgender issues.

That’s not much about civil liberties either. Maybe a little bit, in that people can’t exercise their civil liberties if they’re being bullied or abused, but the ever-expanding claims about what it takes to make schools and everywhere else “welcoming and inclusive to transgender students” are more in conflict with civil liberties than they are protective of them. Women, in particular, are being ordered to give up a lot of civil liberties in order to be “welcoming and inclusive” to our trans sisters, i.e. men.

All people are impacted by gender and have identities that need to be affirmed and respected, but many cisgender people do not need to worry about having our gender identities recognized. We have the privilege of not having to think much about our gender or about people respecting our names and pronouns.

We also have the “privilege” of not having to think much about our species or about people thinking we’re tigers or naked mole rats or fruit flies. It’s a novel idea that there’s such a thing as “gender identity” and that everyone has it and that some tragic people have an opposite one and we have to rearrange all of life to make them feel more cozy – a novel idea and a batshit crazy one.

That is not the case for many gender nonconforming and transgender folks. Many transgender people fight on a daily basis to have their names and pronouns respected, which is no small or trivial feat. Names and pronouns shape how we are viewed in the world and are important pieces of our identities.

Where are the civil liberties? All this explaining and still not a word about them. It’s not a civil liberty to force the world to “validate” personal fantasies. If you’re trying to force people to “validate” personal fantasies you’re coming perilously close to trying to impose a theocracy. We don’t have to “validate” fantasy genders any more than we have to “validate” the father the son and the holy ghost.

The ACLU appears to have completely lost the plot.

The ACLU wants to force people to use weird counter-intuitive inaccurate pronouns. Force them. That’s a civil liberty?

To be more accurate myself, the ACLU isn’t actually trying to do the forcing itself, it filed an amicus brief explaining why it’s wrong and evil not to.

There’s no such thing as “trans and non-binary students’ pronouns.” Nobody owns pronouns. We don’t each have our own pronouns. In English the convention is to call female people she or her and male people he or him. That’s it, it’s just the convention, it’s there to make communication flow. It’s meaningless to talk about “using a student’s pronouns.”

Also the cutesie goggly eyes don’t add anything. This isn’t a fucking joke. This is the ACLU helping maniacs try to force us to use Special Words just for them. Not going to happen.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The climate has no pronouns.

Yes, the climate disaster is here, and it is going to get worse, especially for people who aren’t lucky enough to make it to rich Western countries. Some smart dude has a couple of posts about how it isn’t going to be end-of-civilisation bad which have caused me to re-think my own position slightly from “humans will probably go extinct in the next thousand years” to “billions of people will remain a permanent underclass while a small percentage of the species explores and colonises space”.

I’m just thinking out loud here, too.

I think humans as a species are tough and resilient; it’s civilization that is fragile. For the forseeable future, as long as Earth remains to any degree habitable, humans are going to be inhabiting it, albeit in far smaller numbers, as iknklast noted. Supporting billions of people requires civilization, and if that collapses, then you can’t feed billions of people, so there won’t be billions of people, “underclass” or no. The surviviors of such a collapse will be those who are able to exist within the limits of natural, living systems rather than artificial, industrial ones. The West’s dependence on a small number of industrialized monocultures requiring massive inputs of industrialized chemicals and machinery for planting, growth, and harvesting is a weak point, not a strength. The few human communities which have managed to remain unentangled with and dependent upon modern civilization may have a better chance of survival if they can adapt their lifeways to the changing world around them.

As temperatures rise, climate zones and biomes will tend to shift northward. If they can. Not all of the things that make up a given biome can just get up and trek north. Like soil. There will be massive disruption. Some species and combinations thereof will be squeezed out as they run out of “north” to go, or leave conditions upon which they’d depended behind them. This will be as true for human agriculture as it is for natural ecosystems. The Canadian Shield is not noted for its crop-ready acreage.

Life on Earth is actually pretty resilient, too, if not particular species and ecosystems. We are disrupting the current configuration of plants, animals and climate, but we are not destroying the foundations for life itself. A new balance will emerge, but not necessarily on a timescale convenient for human lifespans, or conducive to human civilization, but life will go on, with or without us. As for putting our hopes on space for continued human survival, even a post-nuclear-holocaust, post-climate-change world will be far more hospitable to life than anywhere in the solar system we can get to or build. Any space colony will always be a few critical technical failures away from extinction.

But it seems…funny, to me, how so many people in the West can look at the most prosperous and healthy and free and equal society in the history of the world and only see doom and gloom and evil and suffering. Yes, doom and gloom and evil and suffering all exist, but they have existed everywhere, for all time. And every generation has had lots of people who were absolutely certain that theirs would be the last generation, or at least would be the apex, with nothing but chaos and dissolution and destruction to follow. It has been that way at least as long as we have written records, and likely far longer. Yet we are still here, and we have made a civil society out of the chaos of nature, regardless.

The problem is how much of Western prosperity, freedom and equality is dependent upon the infliction of doom, gloom and evil upon others? As iknklast noted, humans are operating beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Earth cannot support seven billion people living at a North American or European standard of living; it’s just not possible. Stripmining asteroids only works for some materials. It doesn’t address the destruction of biodiversity brought about by expanding agricultural production. Either we reduce our numbers, or it will be done for us. We are swiftly destroying the natural systems upon which our own civilization depends, before we’ve had a chance to figure out how they all work and interact. We are in fact, entirely dependent on “the chaos of nature.” As we diminish the natural world, we destroy the very foundations upon which civil society is built. That society is only possible because of nature, not in spite of it.

Previous collapses of cultures and civilizations have been relatively local. This time it’s global. There will be no safe havens. Western wealth and power will insulate us from disaster for only so long. Grotesque levels of inequality can be maintained for only so long. We are animals. We have to eat. We can’t eat money. We are dependent upon the air, water and soil just like everyone else. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.

See this is how we know nobody who could is going to do anything to slow global warming:

The most powerful part of President Biden’s climate agenda — a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy — will likely be dropped from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, according to congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.

Why? Because Joe Manchin doesn’t like it. One guy who is beholden to the coal industry is all it takes, and we have the one guy. We’ll always have the one guy, or whatever equivalent for want of a nail the war was lost it takes. There will always be some missing nail.

Senator Joe Manchin III, the Democrat from coal-rich West Virginia whose vote is crucial to passage of the bill, has told the White House that he strongly opposes the clean electricity program, according to three of those people. As a result, White House staffers are now rewriting the legislation without that climate provision, and are trying to cobble together a mix of other policies that could also cut emissions.

One guy. Just one guy, who puts his career interest ahead of the planet and the beings that live on it. Joe Manchin might lose the next election if he voted for the bill so go ahead, planet, keep getting hotter.

It will always be like that. One person’s self-interest versus the planet. One person’s self-interest will always win.

Democratic presidents have tried but failed to enact climate change legislation since the Clinton administration. During a year of record and deadly droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that scientists say are worsened by climate change, Democrats had hoped to finally garner enough political support to enact a strong climate law, even as scientific reports say that the window is rapidly closing to avoid the most devastating impacts of a warming planet.

Short-term self-interest is always going to win.

Julie on the misogyny of trans activists:

To the annual FiLiA conference in Portsmouth. A 1,000-strong gathering of women of all ages and viewpoints, united by a desire and commitment to ending male violence, oppression and domination of women and girls.

Everyone there is interested in dipping their toes in the water of the women’s liberation movement. A big focus is the campaign to end rape, domestic abuse, commercial sexual exploitation, and femicide, the killing of women and girls by men because they are women and girls.

As I approach the Guildhall where the conference is taking place I hear the now only-too familiar chants by trans activists: “Trans women are women!”, “No TERFS on Pompey”. One sign reads: “Imagine calling yourself a feminist while trying to dismantle the rights of a marginalised group of women and girls.”

But of course that sign is talking about men and boys, ones who say they identify as women and girls. However marginalized they are, they are not a group of women and girls. Only women and girls are women and girls; men and boys are not women and girls. Feminism is for women. It’s not for men. Also, we (feminists) are not trying to dismantle any rights of men and boys who call themselves women and girls. There’s no such thing as a “right” for men to force women to agree that men are women.

During my session on the themes in my book on feminism, trans activists positioned themselves directly outside the windows, and attempted to drown out my words with “Blow jobs are real jobs” (they also object to any critique of the sex trade).

…

At the end of today’s conference, there will be a vigil to honour the many victims of femicide. The plan was to be outside, in the weak autumn sunshine, reading out the names of the women who died at the hands of men and to call for an end to deadly male violence. The fact that we will have to do this on a pavement defaced with such misogynistic graffiti is as heart-breaking as it is infuriating.

The pavement was covered with a feminist colors flag.

That doesn’t make the misogynist graffiti one bit less disgusting or infuriating or heartbreaking.

More on That conference.

“SUCK MY DICK YOU TRANSPHOBIC CUNTS” has certainly convinced me that trans women are women.

The kitchen table is always there.

Senior academics protesting a feminist conference. Is it 1950?

From That conference;

Ok now I have to pause to mop my eyes.

Tom Ball in the Times:

Students calling for the resignation of Kathleen Stock have said their campaign has been “cloak and dagger” in order to protect their own members from online harassment.

Ahhhhh I see – they want to protect themselves from harassment…so that they can harass Kathleen Stock. Interesting take.

But after all, Kathleen is the tyrannical unelected head of state who tortures and imprisons protesters and poisons her critics, and is protected by a heavily armed military.

Just kidding. She’s an academic, a professor and writer. She tortures and imprisons no one and is protected by no one. She has opinions on the fungibility of sex that the brave “cloak and dagger” students don’t like, so they hide their identities while they try to bully her out of Sussex University.

Organisers of a protest planned in the centre of campus have advised attendees to “conceal your identity to protect yourself and others”. One of the campaign leaders said that activists did not want to reveal their identities for fear of opening themselves up to abuse or potential defamation claims.

Just as bank robbers don’t want to reveal their identities for fear of ending up in prison.

[Rio] Jacques, who is the first activist from the campaign to speak openly, added: “It’s very much cloak and dagger, but that’s not the way we want it to be. The masks — it’s not meant to be threatening. It’s just for the protection of the people that want to be vocal.”

It’s for the protection of the people who want to abuse and threaten Kathleen Stock with no cost to themselves.

“No one wants to lose their place at university, but at the same time we don’t want to sacrifice our right to defend ourselves with our words.”

Defend themselves from what? Stock doesn’t bully or threaten them. They are the aggressors here.

In its manifesto, Anti Terf Sussex describes Stock as “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes, espousing a bastardised variation of radical feminism”. It claims she is harmful and dangerous to trans people adding: “We’re not up for debate. We cannot be reasoned out of existence.”

The group’s suggested reading includes an essay by Christa Peterson, a PhD student at the University of Southern California. For the past two years years, Peterson has led a Twitter campaign against Stock, culminating in the essay published earlier this year.

Christa Peterson is an absolutely poisonous individual, and she does indeed spend an astonishing amount of time shouting at Kathleen on Twitter.

Much mockery about this story of a primary school canceling a Halloween parade:

An elementary school in Seattle has cancelled its annual Halloween parade this year as the event “marginalises students of colour who do not celebrate the holiday”.

The Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary School’s racial equity team decided to cancel the “Pumpkin Parade”, where students dress up in Halloween costumes, after deliberating for five years. Parents were told about their decision on 8 October through a newsletter.

…

In the newsletter sent to parents, the school noted that costume parties could become uncomfortable for some students and distract them from learning.

Halloween events create a situation where some students must be “excluded for their beliefs, financial status, or life experience”, the school said. “It’s uncomfortable and upsetting for kids”. According to nonprofit organisation GreatSchools, 15 per cent of the students at the elementary school belong to low-income families.

So it’s not so much about students of color as it is about students of not much money. Here’s a shocker: I don’t think this decision is absurd; on the contrary, I wonder why schools need “Halloween parades” in the first place. Halloween is a pseudo-holiday that’s been inflating absurdly over the past…I don’t know, decade? Couple of decades? So apparently schools are joining in, but that seems stupid to me. Halloween is basically about demanding candy from the neighbors. It’s also about the fun of dressing up, but what’s that got to do with school? Nothing.

Holidays are all, without exception, gigantic marketing opportunities, and that’s how they get so ridiculously inflated. Somebody is making a fortune out of conning people into buying yards and yards of white fluff that is supposed to suggest cobwebs and spoils the appearance of October front gardens. Schools don’t need to observe Halloween.

Happening now.