Agent-free passive voice and periphrasis dialed up to 1000:

H/t Sackbut

We’re not going to get any eclipse fun here in Seattle, because it’s all clouds up there. Nothing will change. It won’t even get darker.

But while we’re on the subject – this is a puzzle that doesn’t get discussed enough – how utterly bizarre is it that from here on this planet, the moon, which is practically next door, and the sun, which is way the fuck out there, ARE THE SAME SIZE???

I mean what are the odds? Eh? You wouldn’t place a bet on them. And yet there it is: from here, the moon can neatly block the sun such that only the corona is visible.

It’s downright creepy, is what it is.

Someone called Wren Sanders wrote a deferential piece on Judith Butler. Before we read it let’s find out who Wren Sanders is.

Wren Sanders (she/they) is an award-winning journalist and the editor of Them’s Community Section. Since joining the site in 2019, she has explored subjects such as Arca’s divine mutations, the case against LGBTQ+ military inclusion, and the power of trans monstrosity. As an editor, she is drawn to stories of resilience and insurgent joy, critiques of contemporary culture and politics, and visions of more livable worlds.

Is insurgent joy like trans joy, or is it a different kind of joy altogether? How do they both relate to intersectional joy? I’ll put research on that question aside for later, or never. So:

To be trans in the United States today is to live with a preternaturally high tolerance for the absurd. It was just a few years ago that conservative lawmakers in Ohio were faced with the mortal and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and chose to turn the state’s legislative focus to the “issue” of five transgender girls, out of some 400,000 high school athletes, competing in youth sports. 

Ah; so that’s where we are. We are of the school of thought that sneers when anyone says it’s not fair for male people to infiltrate women’s sports.

Hundreds of anti-trans bills later, it seems abundantly clear, if not painfully obvious, that there must be something deeper than rank transphobia fueling the right-wing fixation with our bodies and lives.

So Wren is a man who pretends to be a woman and treats the rights of actual women as disposable. Just the right fella to do another love letter to Butler.

The philosopher Judith Butler has spent the last several years searching for the roots of this gender panic. In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the famed critical theorist frames the scourge of anti-trans legislation here in the U.S. as just one tentacle of a global neo-fascist crusade. 

Oh dear. Wren is trying to write with style or panache or something, so we get a crusade with tentacles.

The “anti-gender ideology movement,” as Butler calls it, exists everywhere from Bolsanaro’s Brazil to Putin’s Russia to the TERFs of the United Kingdom and beyond. And though it may take slightly unique forms

Hahahaha “slightly unique” – this guy is a real ringer.

The interview itself is dull and badly written and edited. There is one interesting bit though where Butler just makes a dumb mistake. Not her usual word-salad “sophisticated” mistake but just a clunker. Wren invites her to demonize JKR some more and we get:

God, why does she do this? I’m going to just look this up…Oh here it is: “Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilized, resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses.” I see, so she’s making fun of us.

You know, I’m a parent. I didn’t give birth to anybody. I’m no less of a parent than somebody who did. When she talks that way, she’s putting down adoptive parents, she’s putting down blended families, she’s putting down all kinds of kinship arrangements where kids end up with new guardians or new parents after having lost theirs — in war, or through forcible migration, or any number of issues.

Except she’s not, because she didn’t say “parent,” she said “birthing parent.” See? Birthing. The point of that was to specify the kind of parent that gives birth as opposed to the kind that doesn’t.

Not one of Butler’s better chats.

Kara Dansky a few weeks ago:

I have been thinking about the potential conflict between laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” in places of public accommodation and criminal laws that prohibit voyeurism and indecent exposure at least since 2021, when a man named Darren Merager decided to parade his naked body (complete with erection) around the women’s section of Wi Spa, a Korean-style nude spa in Los Angeles.

You remember that incident, I’m sure.

A video of a woman named Cubana Angel complaining about the incident went viral. In the video, she is seen asking staff: 

I just want to be clear with you: It’s okay … for a man to go into the women’s section … He’s a man … HE IS A MAN … He’s not no female. 

The staff member refers to a law and Cubana Angel replies:

Really? What law?

The law the staff member was referring to is California Civil Code § 51, also known as the Unruh Act. That law, among other things, prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation (like spas, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc.) on the basis of sex. Section (e)(5) of the Act states that sex includes, but is not limited to:

a person’s gender. “Gender” means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender expression. “Gender expression” means a person’s gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.

Ok but I was just reading about the Unruh Act, before I read Kara’s post, and here’s the thing: it was passed in 1959. Legislators weren’t burbling about “gender expression” and similar bullshit in 1959. Section (e)(5) must be a very recent update, perhaps written by the ACLU and smuggled in in a box of cough drops.

At any rate the point of it, of course, is that all these driveling idiots have made it, or are trying to make it, legal for men to prance naked into women’s locker rooms and illegal for women to insist on locker rooms without naked men prancing around, and the ACLU simply cannot contain its joy.

Can a gym or spa deny me service, or exclude me from gender-segregated spaces, because I’m transgender and/or nonbinary?

No. Under the Unruh Civil Rights Act (Civil Code § 51), business establishments in California may not deny anyone “full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services” because of their sex, gender, gender identity, or gender expression (as well as other traits like race, national origin, religion, and disability). This means people who are transgender or nonbinary have the right to full and equal participation in a gym or spa experience, including access to locker rooms and other spaces based on their gender identity.

But it also means that people who are women or girls do not have the right to full and equal participation in a gym or spa experience, including access to locker rooms and other spaces without boys and men in them.

I hate the ACLU with such a passion.

The argument from they exist:

Compelling.

Likewise, frimblz exist and frimblz are frimblz. Why, because frimblz exist, that’s why.

You can’t argue with that.

Willz is now reporting people to the police for laughing.

The cells are going to fill to the brim before you can say “knife.”

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Shelf life.

Trans women like Patiha are among the most affected by extreme weather linked to climate change, as well as suffering disproportionately when disasters strike.

“Women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are mentioned, but there is no provision for sexual and gender minorities,” Darmawan said.

Perhaps TiMs are more absorbent, or prone to melting than mere mortals in the face of climate change. They are, by their own admission, “the most vulnerable and marginalized” ever, of everyone. Their misery and poverty is ever so much worse than anyone else’s. They are uniquely disadvantaged and targeted amongst all humans, and most endangered species. Why shouldn’t they also be preferrentially prone to any kind of misfortune, human or natural? So we should be expecting them to demand special mention, attention, and provision in other disaster warnings and responses. It’s only fair, right?

In earthquakes, they are more squishy than everyone else. (If they’ve been on puberty blockers, with their resultant bone loss, this is doubly true.) They get first crack at all the seismology alerts, and the safest spots to stand.

In fires, they are extremely flammable. (Think of all the product in their hair.) They get all the fire extinguishers.

In volcanic erruptions, they attract lava and pumice. And don’t get me started on pyroclastic clouds! They get evacuated first.

In thunderstorms, they are like lightning rods. They get all the rubber soled shoes.

In Tornado Alley, they’re like human trailer parks. They get their own portable storm cellars, strategically placed every hundred yards or so, for their exclusive use.

On airliners, their seats must be more robustly built and crash-survivable than even the flight data recorders.

When the sun goes nova, they’re on the first ships to leave.

Etc.

No cost is too high to protect the Most Vulnerable of All, Ever, and Always. If you haven’t planned for their safety and protection specifically, above and beyond all other so-called marginalized and “at risk” groups, it’s because you want them DEAD.

What was the US justice system thinking?

Every night since August 2022, a small crowd has gathered outside the Washington DC Central Jail, through frigid winter nights and under spring rain, to protest against the US justice system.

The protesters outside the red-brick buildings of the facility pray, discuss the news, and broadcast telephone calls with prisoners inside the jail, where hundreds of accused or convicted rioters have been held in the three years since the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol.

What are the protesters protesting? Is the thinking here that violent assaults on the federal government should be legal?

In recent months, as Donald Trump has gripped the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, the protesters have taken heart from the ex-president’s vocal public support for those who attacked Congress.

If we’re really really lucky he’ll be president again by this time next year, and laws will cease to exist.

At rallies, Mr Trump plays a version of the national anthem recorded by the J6 Prison Choir – an anonymous group of prisoners thought to include several violent offenders. On Wednesday, he posted a video of the song on his Truth Social account, describing them as “January 6th hostages” – a term he has increasingly used in reference to the rioters.

…

When a mob of Mr Trump’s supporters breached the US Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, the images of police and security officers under attack and armed rioters surging into the centre of American democracy shocked the country.

Around 140 police officers were assaulted, according to justice department figures. In total, more than 1,350 people have been arrested since then. Nearly 30 January 6 inmates are reported to be currently held in the DC jail, most of them charged with assaulting officers.

30. I was confused by the bit where the BBC said “prisoners inside the jail, where hundreds of accused or convicted rioters have been held” because that sounded like way too many, but now I get it: they meant hundreds over the past four years, not hundreds now. Werdz are tricky.

There’s a tiny thread of hope here.

Polling, however, suggests the idea that the Capitol rioters are being treated unfairly is broadly rejected by most Americans.

A Washington Post-University of Maryland survey in December 2023 found that nearly three-quarters of respondents believed punishments had either been “fair” or “not harsh enough”. And a recent survey by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found two-thirds of Americans thought the riot was “very” or “extremely” violent.

…

Gunner Ramer, political director of Republican Accountability, a political action committee opposed to Mr Trump, said the campaign rhetoric about January 6 “hostages” could be particularly damaging among voters that might ultimately determine the outcome of the election.

“Trump talking about ‘political prisoners’ activates victimhood grievance politics and connects with Republican primary voters,” he said. “But when you’re talking about swing voters – those who supported Trump in 2016 but not in 2020 – they are absolutely repulsed by January 6.”

Maybe it will be his undoing. Fingers crossed.

Originally a comment by Athel Cornish-Bowden on Local misogyny.

Kaspar Zeta-Skeet said there was an “assumption” among some teenagers he taught “that women are things just to be observed”

I fear that that is indeed a common assumption of boys, made much worse by social media.

In France, we are experiencing a particularly nasty series of violent attacks on teenagers by other teenagers — three in three days, not all girls. The first concerned a young girl of 13 in Montpellier. She had been bullied for around 18 months, especially by a somewhat older girl who considered that she wasn’t a proper Muslim because she wore normal clothes and joined in regular school activities. This older girl, or one of her friends, sent a telephone message to many people at her school asking them to meet outside the school to teach the younger one a lesson. About 20 people, mostly or all teenagers, did exactly that, and gathered outside the entrance. Three of them (including the older girl) knocked the victim down and kicked her, on the head and elsewhere, until she was unconscious and had a brain haemorrhage. She was taken to hospital and fortunately her life is no longer in danger. What the other 17 were doing I don’t know, maybe just enjoying the spectacle, or taking videos on their telephones.

The second occurred in the outskirts of Paris the next day and concerned a boy on his way back from school. He was attacked by five older boys in balaclavas and left unconscious in the middle of the road. Tragically, the doctors weren’t able to save him, and he died. They’ve not revealed any information about the apparent motives. The boy was called Shemasedine, so maybe this also had a religious motive.

The third occurred in Tours the following day, but they haven’t revealed any details.

In the1990s and earlier hazing was a big problem in the cours préparatoires for preparing for the examinations for the Grandes Écoles. The then Minister of Education, Ségolène Royal, ended it in 1998 almost from one day to the next by announcing the principals of Lycées would be held personally responsible for any hazing that occurred and if they said that they couldn’t prevent it they would be relieved of their positions and replaced by someone who could. Suddenly they all found that they could prevent it. That was in 1998; in 1999, when our daughter went to the Lycée Thiers in Marseilles, which had had some of the worst cases, there was no hazing at all, and she loved the two years she there. I think something along the same lines with schools that today don’t prevent bullying and sometimes violence might have a good effect.

So is Mr Menno.

His rage is heartwarming.

Dennis is pissed off.

I won’t be cow’ed by them. This is anti-homosexual campaigning and surprise, surprise, the target is, yet again, lesbians. The fact they are selected over gay men tells you everything one needs to about how this movement regards sexually non compliant women. This is rape culture. It is a pathetic attempt at shaming. It is anti gay and it is two scruffy ugly kids who hate lesbians. They are both scum. Utter scum.

He’s right you know.

Sex Matters goes on to note how Stonewall has also moved the goalposts.

Stonewall also responded, publishing a statement that presents “misgendering” as akin to criticising religion. 

“The PM, and high-profile commentators, are incorrect when they suggest that misgendering or ‘stating facts on biology’ would be criminalised. This is no more true than stating that the existing law has criminalised the criticism of religion. This kind of misrepresentation about the Act and its purpose only serves to trivialise the violence committed against us in the name of hate.”

This is a big shift in position. 

To put it mildly. What does “terf” even mean now?

In Stonewall’s hate-crime resource, it defines being “insulted, pestered, intimidated or harassed” as a hate crime. In its Transphobic Hate Crime Report in 2020, Galop UK, a partner organisation of Stonewall, stated that the top three hate crimes against trans people were “invasive questioning”, “deadnaming” and “verbal abuse” (vaguely defined). 

But now they’re all “Don’t be so silly, of course stating facts won’t be criminialised.”

As Sex Matters wrote in February, even before the Scottish hate-crime law, women and men were being investigated, questioned and arrested for gender-critical speech. Stonewall has never previously stated that “misgendering” is not abuse, or that gender-critical people’s freedom of expression should be protected. In fact, it has said quite the contrary. 

Sex Matters provides a string of examples.

The reality is they’re all winging it, so they won’t arrest you if you happen to be JK Rowling but they will arrest you if you’re some boring nobody woman while no one is paying attention.

The new act states that a person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”. Defenders of the law cite the “reasonable person” as a safeguard for free speech. It is worth considering, then, whether an employee of Stonewall would be considered a “reasonable person”. Stonewall continues to be considered an authority by many on issues relating to sex and gender – including, until recently at least, both Police Scotland and the Scottish government. 

I suppose “reasonable person” is like “reasonable doubt”? A legal term of art? But…fuzzy? How do we know what’s a reasonable doubt and what isn’t? Ditto person? Is the answer “That’s what judges are for”? But how do we civilians know how to avoid committing the crime of abusive speech as opposed to the non-crime of offensive speech? Should we all keep a judge on speed-dial in case we need to ask mid-conversation? Are there enough judges to handle the calls, and are they willing to?

Within political parties as elsewhere, there is much disagreement over what constitutes “transphobia”, and whether gender-critical speech is a matter of disciplinary action. In 2022, Scottish Green Party MSP Patrick Harvie accused “high-profile people within the SNP” of being “allowed” to “get away with promoting transphobia,” and spoke of reforming internal disciplinary processes. 

…

During the process of drafting the new law, several MSPs put forward amendments intended to protect freedom of expression. These were dismissed. As documented by policy analysts MurrayBlackburnMackenzie (MBM), the amendments were described by Harvie as hostile and as legitimising attacks on trans rights. 

Maybe one or more of those dismissed amendments explained the difference between “abusive” and “offensive.”

Another Scottish Green Party MSP, John Finnie, approvingly cited a briefing by the Equality Network, a Scottish charity. This briefing responded to one of the dismissed amendments – which listed several straightforward gender-critical statements as examples of what would not be caught by the new law, such as that sex is a physical binary characteristic that cannot be changed – characterising it as undermining the Act’s purpose: “To add into legislation a list of ‘approved’ statements that include attacks on the fundamental rights of one group of people is entirely wrong.” 

There’s another one of those contested terms. What exactly are “the fundamental rights” of trans people? What does John Finnie think they are? Is it a “fundamental right” of trans people to force everyone to agree that they are the sex that does not match their bodies? What other fundamental right is like that? Who else has a fundamental right to force other people to agree that an impossible thing is possible?

Despite promising that it would do so, the Scottish government failed to meet with MBM to discuss concerns regarding the law’s impact on gender-critical people, apparently because it did not want to “upset the transgender lobby”.

But apparently the Scottish government is fine with upsetting the women lobby, the people who know a man when they see one lobby, the reality lobby.

Women’s fears concerning the new law’s implementation have not come from nowhere. In a briefing submitted to MSPs as the bill was going through the Scottish Parliament, MBM provided evidence of women across the UK having already lost jobs, faced disciplinary action, been interviewed by the police or had details recorded on police databases simply for asserting that biological sex matters. 

But don’t worry about that, it was conclusively established in all cases that those women were abusive as opposed to merely offensive. The evidence for this conclusive establishing is in a locked drawer in a filing cabinet behind a boxcar in a locked room in a locked basement of a building that fell down yesterday.

Sex Matters wrote a post yesterday about the same glaring unknown that I wrote about: how the hell do we know what is “abusive” as opposed to “offensive” or “insulting” or “upsetting”? Hamza Yousaf says his shiny new law applies only to “abusive” content, not merely “offensive” or “insulting” or “upsetting” content, but he doesn’t spell out which is which and how we all know.

Sex Matters says:

One of the most controversial aspects is the extension of so-called “stirring up” provisions to characteristics other than race, including transgender identities (which expressly covers non-binary identities and cross-dressers). The threshold for what counts as hateful is set low – at a single act of speech that is merely “abusive” and not threatening or violent.

But also, Yousaf said, not “offensive” or “insulting” or “upsetting”. Not merely offensive but abusive; not merely insulting but abusive; not merely upsetting but abusive. How do we know? How do we distinguish among those? Are they defined so narrowly that everyone knows which is which, with no doubt or ambiguity? Like hell they are.

After years in which transactivist lobby groups have trained police forces and judges to embrace gender ideology, and to view “misgendering” as offensive, women’s-rights groups have feared that simply mentioning the biological sex of trans individuals could result in investigation and even prosecution.

Which of course was their goal.

JK Rowling marked the new law by tweeting that certain high-profile “transwomen” are in fact men, daring Police Scotland to charge her. 

The force has confirmed that there were complaints, but it will not take them further and they will not be recorded as a non-crime hate incident. First Minister Humza Yousaf said Rowling’s posts on X were a “perfect example” of the distinction between stirring up hatred and people “being offended or upset or insulted”. He added: “Anybody who read the act will not have been surprised at all that there’s no arrests made.” 

Which is completely ridiculous. Is there a clear, obvious, widely understood distinction between stirring up hatred and people “being offended or upset or insulted”? There is one such distinction, which is if you say the thing to one person, with no witnesses, it can’t be stirring up hatred. But that doesn’t get us an inch closer to a general distinction, because the Act is of course about public speech.

As far as I can tell the reality is that Yousaf was just bullshitting, and there is zero reason to be confident that Police Scotland won’t be seeing “abuse” where the rest of us see “being upset” on hearing the truth.

Huh. It turns out the people really harmed by climate change are trans sex workers. I did not know that. The Independent informs us:

Joya Patiha, a 43-year-old Indonesian transgender woman, first started to notice that changing weather patterns in the mountain-ringed city of Bandung were affecting her income as a sex worker a decade ago.

Her income as a sex worker? He had a fixed income “as a sex worker”? I think what the reporter probably meant is that Patiha can’t get as many paying customers as he could a decade ago. So no one told him that men think women are old hags at age 25? He thinks it’s the weather that’s the problem? And the reporter takes him seriously?

The rainy season was lasting longer across the West Java province, winds were stronger and in some particularly bad years Patiha lost up to 80% of her earnings.

What “her earnings”? What lost? He earned less than he had before because it was rainy; he didn’t “lose” some percentage of a fixed salary.

Trans women like Patiha are among the most affected by extreme weather linked to climate change, as well as suffering disproportionately when disasters strike.

How? Why? Who says?

“No one is coming out during the longer rainy season,” said Patiha. “It is very hard to make money during that unpredictable weather.”

Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and trans women, who tend to face more stigma and marginalisation than trans men or other LGBTQ+ Indonesians, are also among those hardest hit by extreme weather.

Are they? Or is this dim-witted reporter just claiming they are because it’s The Done Thing?

Finally we do get something of an explanation:

The Indonesian government has a five-year plan setting out its development objectives and how it will manage the impacts of climate change and although this includes provisions for vulnerable groups, trans people are not listed among them.

“Women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are mentioned, but there is no provision for sexual and gender minorities,” Darmawan said. The lack of government recognition of their precarity means trans people have few social safety nets, he added.

That is at least specific as opposed to vague hand-wavey. On the other hand it’s not clear why “sexual and gender minorities” particularly need “provision” more than the population at large. Women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are not as strong as young able-bodied males, so it makes sense to provide for them but not necessarily for young able-bodied male trans people.

Whatever. Climate change is going to drag everyone down, so it’s a little pointless to try to score trans ally points by pretending it’s worse for our trans siblings.

Suzanne Moore on JKR v Humza Yousaf:

Humza Yousaf had been warned that this legislation was unworkable by numerous women’s groups. Men who identified as women were protected but women weren’t. How on earth were the police going to deal with this?

Who would blink first? Rowling or the police? When what she said was not deemed a hate crime, everything began to fall apart. “Oh, it’s OK for her with her wealth” some said and there she was again, asserting that if any other woman was arrested, she would repeat those words and be arrested alongside them.

Here was a lesson in solidarity, in sisterhood and the simple but incendiary power of saying no.

Much of this fight has been about just that. Women saying no and women having boundaries and that is why the liberal left has been so fundamentally useless with their blurry “be kind” mantras, which mean be kind only to men. Or anyone who claims a minority identity.

Or when you get right down to it anyone except women.

Yousaf pretends his thrilling new law is not aimed at defiant women:

Humza Yousaf said he was “not surprised” police had assessed JK Rowling’s online posts challenging the new hate crime law to be non-criminal.

Well no, I’m sure he wasn’t surprised, because I’m sure he knew that the police know better than to tangle with JKR as opposed to women who are not rich and famous.

Mr Yousaf told BBC Scotland News: “Those new offences that have been created by the act have a very high threshold for criminality. The behaviour has to be threatening or abusive and intends to stir up hatred. So it doesn’t deal with people just being offended or upset or insulted.”

That’s nice; now explain to us exactly what the difference is between threatening or abusive or intended to stir up hatred, and offensive or upsetting or insulting. Explain exactly what the difference is and how we know what the difference is and how we detect the difference and how we demonstrate the difference to the police when they turn up at the door.

The first minister added: “Anybody who read the act will not have been surprised at all that there’s no arrests made. JK Rowling’s tweets may well be offensive, upsetting and insulting to trans people. But it doesn’t mean that they meet a threshold of criminality of being threatening or abusive and intending to stir up hatred.”

But how do we know? How do we know? No, seriously, how do we know? Especially given the history of the police and uppity women in Scotland? How will women who aren’t JK Rowling know for sure that what they say is “offensive” but not “abusive”? When the police in Scotland have in fact pursued and hounded women for saying things that don’t strike most of us as even offensive?

The BBC reports that phones teach boys to be aggressive misogynist little piggies.

Sexism is on the rise in schools because of harmful content on children’s phones, according to the National Education Union’s (NEU) general secretary. Daniel Kebede said boys watched “aggressive and violent pornography” and influencer content that “completely distorts their view of women”.

…

Mr Kebede’s comments come as teachers at the NEU conference, in Bournemouth, prepare to debate a motion about the rise of online misogyny and its impact in the classroom.

Kaspar Zeta-Skeet said there was an “assumption” among some teenagers he taught “that women are things just to be observed” and he had heard words such as “slut” and “whore” being used about female pupils and staff. “We know where this is coming from in terms of the social-media content surrounding… what it is to be a ‘real man’,” he said.

Yes yes yes but the important question is how does this harm our trans siblings?

Um. I don’t much want to promote Jonathan Choe, who is a Discovery Institute honcho of some kind, but I can’t just ignore this…eccentric public defender.

I don’t understand why it’s allowed. Courts wouldn’t allow a guy in a fuzzy bear costume to do the public defender thing would they? Or, more parallel to this guy’s prank, courts wouldn’t allow someone dressed up like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer to play public defender would they?

I’m baffled.

The Taliban promises to torture women to death:

The Taliban’s Supreme Leader has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he declared the fight against Western democracy will continue.

“You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” said Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in a voice message, aired on state television over the weekend, addressing Western officials. “But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public,” he declared in his harshest comments since taking over Kabul in August 2021.

“Harshest”? Careful, Telegraph, you don’t want to be too…er…harsh.

Also “comments”? I don’t call a promise to torture women to death in public a “comment.”

The news media seem not to have the language to talk about items like murderous hatred of women.

This isn’t a “harsh comment”; this is a vow to torture women to death for the pleasure of an audience of men. This is peak genocidal loathing of women, but the news media are too busy trying to soothe the tantrums of men in lipstick to report on it properly.

His remarks have incited outrage among Afghans, with some calling on the international community to increase pressure on the Taliban. “The money that they receive from the international community as humanitarian aid is just feeding them against women,” Tala, a former civil servant, told The Telegraph from the capital Kabul. “As a woman, I don’t feel safe and secure in Afghanistan. Each morning starts with a barrage of notices and orders imposing restrictions and stringent rules on women, stripping away even the smallest joys and extinguishing hope for a brighter future,” she added. “We, the women, are living in prison,” Tala said, “And the Taliban are making it smaller for us every passing day.”

Smaller and more deadly.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Well knock me down with a feather.

How have so many of them managed to convince themselves that children who “have doubts about their gender identity” are in touch with a great truth as opposed to just being uncomfortable in an ordinary way that dissipates over time? How have so many managed to convince themselves that it’s better to tamper with children’s sexes rather than watch and wait?

Nobody likes Nazi Germany analogies, but the phenomenon where everybody remains complicit even in the face of the worst atrocities under certain circumstances when the social system is arranged just-so… I suspect this has to be some kind of vestigial behavioural trait from our bygone tribal apehood. (As so much of human irrational behaviour is.)

The tell that there’s something deeply primitive going on, to me, is that over and over again I hear the same thing: those of us with our eyes open make a good-faith effort to try and show our friends what’s going on, and they flat-out refuse to see or hear it, often on the verge of panic while doing so. Repeatedly, from different people on different continents, I’ve heard about lifelong friends or relatives literally putting their fingers in their ears rather than hearing us, usually right at the point when the listeners seem to know that they’re about to hear something they can’t disprove or ignore. Same with the strange phenomenon of people being less likely to read articles about transgender if they’re presented as more likely to change their minds about it.

A Hannah Arendt-ian view might say that on the matter of transgender, these people prefer to be nobodies rather than somebodies. They place the locus of responsibility outside themselves and they refuse to be persons. Their moral framework rests fundamentally on their sense of obligation to fit into the social groups they’re in. This is in contrast to the “upstanders” (as therapist Stella O’Malley calls them) for whom their moral framework rests on an inner dialogue about right and wrong, who will naturally deviate from the group if their inner moral compasses direct them to. The first group can’t bear the idea that they might have to build up a moral framework about transgenderism out of a sense of right and wrong that comes from inside their own minds — this is completely alien to them. For the second group, the locus of right and wrong already resides inside their own inner dialogue with themselves, so it comes naturally.

…they did not feel an obligation but acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them. Hence their conscience, if that is what it was, had no obligatory character, it said, ‘This I can’t do,’ rather than, ‘This I ought not to do.’

It’s strange; there are parallels between Arendt’s philosophical ideas about individuals’ morality and ideas from anthopology and sociology about how societies are organized overall. They both come into play around the subject of gender. Arendt says that people seem to naturally gravitate towards one of two internal moral frameworks: most people rely on obligations to their in-group collective, but a minority rely on their individual, internally-constructed sense of right and wrong instead. Anthropologists say that societies tend to be organized around collectivist values or individualist ones. And furthermore, collectivistic cultures teach people to fit into the gender roles prescribed by the culture they’re in, and individualistic cultures teach people to follow their individual sense of self, which comes from within. See the parallel? People with collectivistic moral frameworks don’t see the problem with transgender, and people with individualistic moral frameworks do, just as societies with collectivistic frameworks foster gender norms and rigid gender roles, and individualistic ones don’t.

If the age of enlightenment was ushered in when individualistic thinkers with individualistic internal moral frameworks took leadership over societies — I’m thinking of the Founding Fathers, specifically — and established that the values of individualism would dominate in society, perhaps our current age, which has suddenly lurched regressively back to old collectivist gender roles, reflects a fundamental shift back to a dominance of collectivistic values over individualistic ones.

You could probably argue that we as a society have rapidly become more influenced by our social interactions with social media apps than we are by social interactions within our local communities. Social media is a collectivist as it gets: an endless popularity contest of likes, on literally a global scale.

Maybe the drug of social media is rewiring everyone’s brains to be less capable of formulating their own sense of right from wrong anymore.

Upstanders just don’t get enough likes.