The BBC has been letting the children loose on their website again. The result is An Article About Bespoke Pronouns.

How to be an ally to friends who’ve changed their pronouns

Walk away. Don’t linger, don’t express regrets, don’t wave, just walk away.

There is no such thing as “their pronouns.” Pronouns aren’t a thing you can possess. Personal names, yes; pronouns, no. That’s pretty much the point of them. Personal names are, as the title suggests, personal to the people whose names they are. Pronouns are the short items that substitute for the personal names because it gets weird saying the name over and over. They are necessarily generic.

We all like to be referred to in a way that makes us feel accepted.

No we don’t. That’s childish. We don’t expect third parties to refer to us in a flattering or cuddly way at all times and in all circumstances. In fact not only do we not expect it, we would find it creepy and intrusive.

That claim is a claim for narcissism. That’s what’s wrong with Children’s Leftism these days: it’s all about the narcissism. There is nothing progressive about narcissism. Narcissism is inherently right-wing, and it’s also massively off-putting to people who aren’t narcissists. Don’t believe me? Look at Donald Trump.

This can include the use of our name, gender and pronouns.

Non-binary celebrities such as Jonathan Van Ness, Sam Smith and Lachlan Watson have done a lot to raise awareness and encourage conversations about being non-binary.

Well by god we certainly do want to derive our understanding of the world from non-binary celebrities such as Jonathan Van Ness, Sam Smith and Lachlan Watson, right?

But there’s a slight problem, which is that non-binary doesn’t mean anything. There is feeling that much of one’s behavior and appearance doesn’t match the irritating social rules about which sex does what, but that doesn’t = being literally neither female nor male.

On the back of this, you might have seen some discussions about pronouns online. But what are pronouns, how are they related to non-binary people, and why do you need to know?

Using information from Stonewall we’ve put together a quick guide to pronouns. Here are some tips and questions that can help you understand non-binary identities, and what you can do!

Oh hooray, information from Stonewall, put together quickly by deluded children who work for the BBC – what could go wrong?!

And of course right out of the gate, they get it…wrong.

Non-binary is an umbrella term for people who don’t fit comfortably into ‘male’ or ‘female’ categories. Not everyone uses ‘he’ or ‘she’ pronouns to express their identity.

Nobody uses third-person pronouns to express her/his identity, for the very simple reason that we don’t use third-person pronouns to refer to ourselves but only to other people. That’s why this whole idea of having bespoke pronouns for other people to use when talking about us is such a non-starter: we can’t control that. We can’t control it, and it’s narcissistic to want to, and it’s narcissistic plus idiotic to think we can.

There’s a bunch more stupid shite after that. It’s the usual stupid shite. It seems the BBC twitter person didn’t like the reaction to the stupid shite.

Trump wants to punish cities that don’t vote for Trump by starving them of funds.

The White House is considering slashing millions of dollars for coronavirus relief, HIV treatment, screenings for newborns and other programs in Democratic-led cities that President Donald Trump has deemed “anarchist jurisdictions,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

In other words anything to the left of Trump is basically criminal.

New York, Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., and Seattle could lose funding for a wide swath of programs that serve their poorest, sickest residents after the president moved last month to restrict funding, escalating his political battle against liberal cities he’s sought to use as a campaign foil.

“Kill the poor!”

“But sir, who then will maintain your golf courses and clean your hotel toilets?”

The Department of Health and Human Services has identified federal grants covering those services, which are among the nearly 200 health programs that could be in line for cuts as part of a sweeping government-wide directive the administration is advancing during the final weeks of the presidential campaign and amid an intensifying pandemic Trump has downplayed.

Trump in a Sept. 2 order called on federal agencies to curtail funding to jurisdictions that “disempower” police departments and promote “lawlessness.” The memo argued that the cities haven’t done enough to quash riots stemming from this summer’s protests over systemic racism and police violence.

Blah blah blah. They don’t vote for Trump; the rest is window dressing.

… while the White House pores over existing funds, at least one department has already moved to implement Trump’s directive for new funding. The Department of Transportation earlier this month said Trump’s “anarchy” memo would factor into the department’s review of applications for a new $10 million grant program supporting Covid-19 safety measures.

Nice. Seattle is one of the four…which makes me kind of proud, but also makes me flinch. Public transportation here has of course taken a massive hit: ridership fell off and no fares were collected for months. Nice of Trump to make it worse out of spite.

“My Administration will do everything in its power to prevent weak mayors and lawless cities from taking Federal dollars while they let anarchists harm people, burn buildings, and ruin lives and businesses,” Trump tweeted shortly after releasing the Sept. 2 defunding memo.

Almost three weeks later, Attorney General Bill Barr labeled New York City, Portland and Seattle as “anarchist jurisdictions.” The White House budget office also instructed departments to also scrutinize funding for Washington, D.C.

DC – too many…[whispers] black people.

Trump has done what he said he was going to do, and had the raw interview posted on Zoshal Meeja. It’s 37 minutes of stupid. I haven’t watched all of it yet; none of what I have watched is anything remotely unfamiliar. He brings out the same stock phrases and then repeats them 900 times. He translates everything Stahl asks into his own stock phrases which he answers with his own stock phrases – it becomes Trump interviewing Trump. At the end he indignantly repeats Stahl’s question, “Are you ready for tough questions?” over and over and each time he puts on a special “this is you” voice and face, which looks and sounds nothing like Leslie Stahl but conveys his brainless hostility and inability to act like an adult.

He’s very angry that Biden doesn’t get the same kind of tough questions. There’s an obvious reason for that – a reason other than “the media are all in bed with the far left.” The obvious reason is that Biden has never done anything even half as absurd or outrageous as the things Trump does all day every day. Even if you loathe Biden and the Democrats and Obama, that remains true. Biden doesn’t make a sarcastic face every time he repeats a journalist back to herself, Biden doesn’t tell 10 lies in every sentence, Biden doesn’t insult people every chance he gets, Biden doesn’t shove his tongue down Putin’s throat, Biden isn’t going to give all his relatives jobs in the White House, Biden didn’t fail disastrously to flatten the coronavirus curve, Biden isn’t a malignant narcissist who tries to destroy anyone who doesn’t flatter him enough…and so on. Trump gets tough questions because he’s a mind-blowingly terrible human being and he’s ruining the country. Biden is not in the same league.

This. This is what I keep saying. This is why I keep recording Trump’s outrages with fury and loathing. This is why I say I would despise and detest him even if he had outstanding policies. (He couldn’t, really, because the evil that wants to take health insurance away from people is the evil of everything else about him – but the point remains.)

“Sophie LaBelle” of Assigned Male Comics has a new one out:

That Genitalia Board in the first panel is enough to give you nightmares, but aside from that…

No it isn’t. Nobody is required to “date” (i.e. fuck) trans people. Nobody is required to do it and nobody is required to be silent about refusing to do it. “Sophie” is way too narcissistic and entitled to be an appealing “date” object.

Sorry about the image this conjures up…

The reputation of Rudy Giuliani could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat.

If you care about spoilers now is the time to exit.

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

If the cops did that it would be entrapment. It seems morally dubious, but then…it’s Giuliani.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

Good punchline.

Oh lord he’s done it again – tried to impress us with blank sheets of paper. Remember those action shots at Walter Reed of Trump signing the middle of a blank sheet of paper? And those boxes stacked on a table at the beginning of his “administration” that were supposed to convey how open he was being with his financial records? Except that the boxes were just boxes? He hasn’t learned.

Oopsie, they shouldn’t have let her open it.

Juliet Jacques at Newsweek assures us that no male person would ever pretend to be trans just to win at his chosen sport:

As a transsexual woman and fervent soccer player (and fan), the idea that someone would transition just to succeed in women’s sports because they couldn’t do so in men’s sports is absurd.

Not as any kind of writer though. Writers understand that you have to keep your subjects and verbs straight throughout the whole sentence. There should have been an “I find” before “the idea,” and the “is” before the last word should be gone. Then the whole thing should be re-worked because that second clause is too clumsy.

ANYway – like hell it’s absurd. Is it simply obvious that “Rachel” McKinnon is what he says he is? “Laurel” Hubbard? Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood?

It may be true that some male athletes who identify as women really are serious about it and not at all consciously cheating; it may be true that all of them are (though not likely); the point however is that it’s not self-evident that they all are, and that even if they are serious about how they identify, it’s still not fair to female people. Both of those are true. We don’t know that zero males who claim to be trans do it in order to win, and it’s not fair to female athletes in any case. The unfairness of keeping male-bodied people out of female sports is trivial compared to the unfairness of ruining female sports for females. I think male-bodied people should just recognize that and back off.

It does female athletes a massive disservice, assuming the inherent inferiority of any cis woman to any trans woman or cis man.

Because he really cares about that. Give me a break. Anyway yes, humans are sexually dimorphic and males do have a long list of physical advantages. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but it isn’t.

[T]he particular issue of transgender athletes has occupied sports leagues for only about 40 years, ever since the U.S. Tennis Association barred transsexual player Renée Richards from the U.S. Open in 1976, citing a hitherto unprecedented woman-at-birth policy. They borrowed this terminology from second-wave feminist circles, which were then embroiled in fierce debates about whether to allow transsexual women into women-only spaces, and about how to border and police the category of “woman.”

Mmyes, how dare women say that men are not women, that’s so police-like, so border patrol-like. Bitches. Karens.

From the voter intimidation file:

Voters in Alaska and Florida reported receiving emails on Tuesday that threatened “vote for Trump or else!” — messages that have prompted investigations in both states. “You are currently registered as a Democrat and we know this because we have gained access into the entire voting infrastructure,” said one of the emails obtained by Alaska Public Media. “You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply.”

It sounds so…Mississippi 1964.

The sender claimed to have the voter’s email, phone number and home address. Some of the emails were purportedly sent by the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group with ties to white nationalism that has clashed with law enforcement during recent protests. But cybersecurity experts say the origin of the messages is unclear, suggesting some of the emails appear to have originated from an Estonian server. The Proud Boys chairman has denied the group was involved.

…

The Alachua County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday that it is aware of the emails being circulated and is investigating.

“The email appears to be a scam and we will be initiating an investigation into the source of the email along with assistance from our partners on the federal level,” the sheriff’s office said.

TJ Pyche, a spokesman for the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections, told NPR that election officials are in contact with the FBI. Pyche said hundreds, if not thousands, of voters in the county received the emails and that voters in other Florida counties also received them.

…

Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation at the Wilson Center, said the reports are concerning.

“It fits into a pattern of voter intimidation we’ve been seeing coming from both foreign and domestic actors who have been pushing narratives about voter safety at the polls, both related to COVID-19 as well as potential violent incidents,” she told NPR.

It also fits into a pattern of citizen intimidation we’ve been seeing coming from Trump for the past five years.

It may be “simple,” in a sense, but as for showing you’re “inclusive” of trans and non-binary people…even if it’s true that “using pronouns” and “asking about pronouns” is a way of doing that, what about the fact that it’s also a way of showing you’re not “inclusive” of everyone else? What about the fact that it’s alienating to most people to force them to pretend that they chose their own sex? What about the fact that most people just do not believe the goofy fairy tale that physical sex is unreal and easy to switch while magic switchable GeNder is real and absolute and mandatory? What about the fact that most women just do not want to step back and let men do all the talking about what it is to be a woman? What about colonization? What about appropriation? What about punching down? What about respecting truth and reality?

But who cares that Woman’s Hour bigged up the claim that Fair Play For Women, Woman’s Place UK, and Filia are “transphobic”? Why does it matter? Fair Play For Women explains:

Trump is having a meltdown about an interview.

Oooh he looks very sulky.

A joint statement by Women’s Place UK, Filia, and Fair Play for Women:

Today, 20th Oct, BBC Woman’s Hour hosted an excellent discussion on the politicization of Mumsnet with feminist scholar Sarah Pedersen (at approx 25mins). The discussion looked at the growth of the popular Mumsnet feminist discussion boards and their role in promoting a nascent women’s movement advocating women’s rights, in particular informing discussion on GRA reform.

Woman’s Place UK (WPUK), Fair Play for Women (FPFW) and FiLiA were highlighted as groups popular with and representative of women’s rights issues. At this point Jane Garvey, the BBC presenter felt it necessary to interject “We have to be clear, which are groups that some people have described, in some circumstances, as transphobic”.

Which kind of boils down to saying that trans activism is more important than feminism, and women should just sit down and defer to trans women instead of continuing to advocate for women’s rights. Otherwise she wouldn’t have said it. The BBC doesn’t interject into discussions of anti-racism the fact that racists consider anti-racism an evil and seditious thing, does it? Why did Garvey find it necessary to accuse three feminist groups of “transphobia”? Because that particular accusation is at the top of the list; it trumps all others. Sexism and misogyny on the other hand are at the bottom of the list. The trouble with women is that they might be terfs, and you just never know. Better not to risk it.

FiLiA, FPFW and WPUK are not transphobic. It is not acceptable for a BBC journalist to repeat libellous comment about us as if it is fair comment or a balancing of the discussion. There is simply no basis in fact for this comment to be made. It is the repetition of misogynist slander to which too many women are subjected.

It reminds me of the way the BBC used to talk about Salman Rushdie – it always “balanced” every damn discussion by bringing in the MCB to see what they thought.

These comments are seriously prejudicial to the reputations of women involved with these organisations, some of whom have previously been invited on the programme.

We urge BBC Woman’s Hour to correct this inaccurate reporting and we would like to thank Sarah Pedersen for her excellent and informative analysis of the feminist phenomenon that is Mumsnet.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the BBC to correct it.

The Guardian collects the ways Trump has trashed the environment.

“I want crystal clean water and air.”

That’s what Donald Trump said in the first chaotic presidential debate with Joe Biden.

It drives me crazy that he keeps putting it that way, because it shows how completely he doesn’t even get it. He hears “the environment” and he pictures a god damn glass of water. Water can be muddy and murky and be exactly right for its local environment. Environmental issues are not solely about what Donald Trump can safely put in his mouth; he can’t drink ocean water but humans sure as hell depend on that undrinkable water, as does much of the rest of life on the planet.

Experts agree that the climate crisis’s most destructive manifestations, on display in a particularly difficult year for the US, barely scratch the surface of the catastrophes to come. Yet the president appears unmoved by the enormous wildfires, devastating hurricanes, widespread water problems and persistent air pollution that disproportionately blights black and Latino communities. His administration has scrapped climate regulations, rolled back clean water rules and loosened pollution standards. Protections for public land and threatened species have been shrunk while new oil pipelines and coal mining have been encouraged.

Then they provide a very useful list.

I saw this

So I looked it up. What is ACAS? Google says:

The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service is a Crown non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom. Its purpose is to improve organisations and working life through the promotion and facilitation of strong industrial relations practice.

Under Workplace Problems they have Discrimination, bullying and harassment, and under that they have Sexual harassment, and sure enough under that they have the anyones.

What sexual harassment is

Sexual harassment is unwanted behaviour of a sexual nature.

It can happen to men, women and people of any gender or sexual orientation. It can be carried out by anyone of the same sex, opposite sex or anyone of any gender identity.

Now…wait a minute. Back up. It isn’t that simple. They’re leaving out the whole power imbalance aspect. The larger category, to repeat, is Discrimination, bullying and harassment, and what do all of those involve? A power imbalance. That’s how these things work. The peasants can’t bully the lord, the workers can’t discriminate against the owner, the women can’t sexually harass the men.

Ok there are exceptions, as MenAtWork says. A rich and powerful woman boss can sexually harass a subordinate, and people are weird so no doubt there are such cases, but there is also a fundamental power imbalance between women and men, and women are the ones with less power. ACAS could say there are exceptions, and make it clear that men can report sexual harassment too, without occluding the pattern altogether.

The law on harassment

Harassment includes bullying because of certain ‘protected characteristics’ and is against the law.

Sex is one of the protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010.

The full list is:

• age
• disability
• gender reassignment
• pregnancy and maternity
• race
• religion or belief
• sex
• sexual orientation

So that has to mean “sex” as in “female sex.” It can’t mean both sexes, because that would be incoherent.

So why is their advice on sexual harassment written as if it’s a toss-up which sex is generally the one being harassed?

The marketing of “surrogacy”…

No, the “essence” of “a surrogate” is not providing a family or helping have a baby. The essence of surrogacy is using a woman’s body to gestate a baby for other people, as if women are factories for the manufacture of babies.

The company doing this advertising is in the “surrogacy” – business; it does indeed broker the rental of women for gestation purposes.

Well, no………………

It’s true enough that nothing about a girl’s body makes her more or less of a girl…but the point here is to claim that nothing about a boy’s body makes him less of a girl [if he identifies as a girl]. That’s just dumb. Why do people fall over like ninepins at all this dumb? Girls have lots of different types of body, true, but they don’t have boys’ bodies, because if they have those then they’re boys, not girls. Freckles, cheekbones, tall, short – none of those determine what sex you are, but that doesn’t mean that nothing about your body determines what sex you are.

Enough with the dumb already!

I was saying how energized and high Trump gets from his rallies. This one from today is a good example.

The content is grotesque but leaving that aside for the moment – look at how juiced he is. Look at how much more fluent and confident and actory he is. It’s all disgusting but it’s skilled, in its way – which his non-rally performances just are not. Press conferences, speeches, announcements – he’s more like a gas station inflatable doll, luring in the crowds by lurching back and forth in the breeze and gesticulating.

It’s creepy. It’s creepy that he’s so tuned in to crowd-love. It’s creepy that crowd-love can change his speech patterns and energy levels and timing that much. It’s creepy that he needs it that badly.

Really?

I could see it if Alison Phipps were a novelist…although I would still disagree, because extended criticism of a bad novel can be both entertaining and enlightening. But Alison Phipps isn’t a novelist, she’s a “Professor of Gender Studies” – i.e. an academic. Academics don’t usually think, or at least don’t usually say, that if you can’t say something nice you should be brief and then change the subject. Academics do a lot of extensive analysis of each other’s work, and they don’t observe any rule that I’ve ever heard of mandating brevity in disagreement.

Why spend so much time and energy? Because bad ideas can have bad consequences, and they can also be interesting routes to better ideas, and they can be instructive about what not to write/do/say, and they often have implications for how people think, how they reason, how they explain the world, and so on. Saying what’s bad about a bad idea is important work, and it’s a major part of academics’ work, and yes sometimes that’s even to the tune of several thousand words.

Sometimes I think “Gender Studies” have not been very good for the thinking skills of its adepts.

Sometimes when you hire your Medical Experts on the basis of their Fox News commentary as opposed to their medical expertise you get…well you get Scott Atlas.

As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response.

Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.

Trump might as well have shoved Fauci aside in order to put Cookie Monster in charge of the coronavirus task force.

Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.

It’s 100% about Trump’s affection and 0% about relevant expertise.

Discord on the coronavirus task force has worsened since the arrival in late summer of Atlas, whom colleagues said they regard as ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest. As the White House coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx is tasked with collecting and analyzing infection data and compiling charts detailing upticks and other trends. But Atlas routinely has challenged Birx’s analysis and those of other doctors, including Anthony S. Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, with what the other doctors considered junk science, according to three senior administration officials.

Might as well call it Fox News science.

Birx tried to get Pence to dump Atlas but instead the bozo from Indiana told them to work it out themselves.

The result has been a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end.

It turns out competence matters!

On Saturday, Atlas wrote on Twitter that masks do not work, prompting the social media site to remove the tweet for violating its safety rules for spreading misinformation. Several medical and public health experts flagged the tweet as dangerous misinformation coming from a primary adviser to the president.

“Masks work? NO,” Atlas wrote in the tweet, followed by other misrepresentations about the science behind masks. He linked to an article from the American Institute for Economic Research — a libertarian think tank behind the Barrington effort — that argued against masks and dismissed the threat of the virus as overblown.

Fauci and Birx have been trying to get the administration to do more testing as winter approaches, but Atlas says no no and throws it all out the window.

Trump and Atlas will be responsible for a lot of deaths before they’re thrown out.