Another step into the sunshine of utopia: we now get to know what pronouns courtroom lawyers “use.” Well, we don’t, but the lucky people of British Columbia do.

In an effort to be more inclusive of transgender people, the Provincial Court of B.C. has created a new policy asking lawyers to provide pronouns when introducing themselves and their clients in court.

While some lawyers have already started including pronouns in their introductions, the court will now expect everyone to share how they wish to be referred to.

In a press release, the provincial court provided an example of such an introduction: “My name is Ms. Jane Lee, spelled L-E-E. I use she/her pronouns. I am the lawyer for Mx. Joe Carter who uses they/them pronouns.” (Mx. is a gender-neutral title.)

The stupidity kind of takes my breath away. Talk of “using” pronouns is gibberish anyway, and likely to be incomprehensible to many of the people who will hear such an introduction. “Using” pronouns is saying them yourself, it’s not telling other people which ones to say when talking about you. That’s not what “use” means.

Besides which people are there to pay attention and make important decisions. Pointless distractions are pointless distractions.

The court said the policy change will improve the experiences of gender diverse people in the legal system and would help avoid confusion and the need for corrections when someone is misgendered.

Oh yes, I’m sure that’s going to help avoid all confusion.

Wednesday’s policy change is a step in the right direction, according to barbara findlay, a queer feminist lawyer with more than four decades of experience in B.C. courts who does not capitalize her name.

I DON’T CARE. I don’t care what queer blah blah does with her its their howloo name. Nobody cares, really, but some people pretend to. In grown up world we don’t spend our time finding out about the little quirks of strangers, because we don’t have time or attention or energy to spare for such a footling pursuit.

Hindu nationalists are still trying to bully the much-admired historian Romila Thapar.

Romila Thapar is the preeminent historian of ancient India, an octogenarian feted the world over for her scholarship excavating answers to questions at the heart of the country’s past. She holds honorary doctorates from top universities including Oxford, is the recipient of the Kluge Prize — akin to the Nobel in social sciences — and has lectured at colleges across the world.

All this makes her a fine target for religious fanatics.

At the age of 89, Thapar is the subject of attacks by supporters of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, who view her as an opponent to be discredited.

“In the early days, I used to get a little upset,” she said. Accusations of ignorance about ancient Indian history quickly devolve into “pornographic and sexist” remarks. “But it’s happened so frequently and regularly that it doesn’t distress me anymore,” she said.

…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pursuing an agenda that emphasizes Hindu primacy in India — a vast, multireligious democracy founded on secular ideals. History is a key part of that vision.

For Hindu nationalists, India’s past consists of a glorious Hindu civilization followed by centuries of Muslim rule that Modi has described as a thousand years of “slavery.”

Thapar considers such assertions both simplistic and incorrect. Based on extensive research of Sanskrit and Prakrit texts and drawing upon archaeological data, she presents a more complex picture of Indian history. Her research and writings undermines the ruling party’s efforts to project a unified Hindu tradition stretching back thousands of years and to paint Muslim rulers of India as nothing more than invaders or tyrants.

This all too familiar brand of murderous bullshit is a powerful reason for thinking the very idea of a god or gods is absurd. What kind of god or gods would arrange things this way? With centuries upon centuries of inter-religious hatred and violence? Only a sadistic kind, in which case let’s stop worshiping them.

Thapar said attempts to humiliate her for her work have come from even trusted institutions. In 2019, Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, where Thapar spent decades teaching, sent her a letter asking her to submit her curriculum vitae so officials could “review” her status as an emeritus professor, an honorary title normally given for life.

That’s grotesque, and disgusting.

(She didn’t comply, and the university dropped the “review” plan.)

Thapar and others said the incident is reflective of declining academic freedom as Modi’s party has sought to seize control of progressive, left-leaning institutions of higher education by appointing loyalists to key administrative positions.

You can see why Trump likes him.

Historians like Thapar have “undervalued and consciously rejected many of the achievements of ancient India,” said Rakesh Sinha, a right-leaning academic associated with Modi’s party. Sinha said Thapar was guided by Marxism and had a Eurocentric view. “They take only those parts of history which undermine India’s image as a cultural and intellectual society,” he said.

Uh huh, Marxism, right. Don Junior couldn’t have said it more stupidly.

But being a political target for over three decades has not slowed Thapar. In October, her 30th book title, “Voices of Dissent,” tracing the history and evolution of dissent in the Indian subcontinent, was published. Critics of the government, including Thapar, say dissent is increasingly being criminalized.

It’s a trend.

Yo FBI listen up.

Well then.

A felony violation of Georgia law, she says (to underline the obvious). State crime. State crime=not federal crime. Trump can’t pardon himself out of this even if he does try the self-pardon thing (the legality of which is a matter of dispute).

And…you know…it’s not as if this is some triviality. It’s actually very non-trivial. He committed the felony in aid of trying to steal an election.

This is amusing:

The blockbot that blocks all the terven:

The column farthest to the right is followers. You can see that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have quite a few.

Did Trump break the law by making that call? Well, yes, but don’t go getting any wild ideas that he’ll be charged.

“It seems to me like what he did clearly violates Georgia statutes,” said Leigh Ann Webster, an Atlanta criminal defense lawyer, citing a state law that makes it illegal for anyone who “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage” in election fraud.

Which is what he did; we heard him do it.

But the meandering nature of the phone call and the fact that the president made no apparent attempt to conceal his actions as other call participants listened could allow Mr. Trump to argue that he did not intend to break the law or to argue that he did not know that a federal law existed apparently prohibiting his actions.

The federal law would also most likely require that Mr. Trump knew that he was pushing Mr. Raffensperger to fraudulently change the vote count, meaning prosecutors would have to prove that Mr. Trump knew he was lying in asserting that he was confident he had won the election in Georgia.

Now here’s a place where Trump’s matchless stupidity shows its value. It’s a fabulous alibi! “I’m not guilty, because I had no idea it’s a crime to try to bully people into flipping an election.” We know he is that dumb.

Congressional Democrats suggested they would examine the legal implications of the call. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the call raised new legal questions for Mr. Trump even if it was not a clear violation of the law.

“In threatening these officials with vague ‘criminal’ consequences, and in encouraging them to ‘find’ additional votes and hire investigators who ‘want to find answers,’ the president may have also subjected himself to additional criminal liability,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement.

17 days.

Oh good, Ichikawa the Good has a new Open Letter in the works. Of course he does.

Dear philosophers, it’s a disgrace that Stock got an honour, we must support our darling beloved fragile trans siblings at all costs and drive transphobic philosophers out of the profession entirely, yours, Jon the Pious.

I know, that’s why I said what a patronizing self-important smug goon he is here, instead.

It seems to be pretty normal for Jonathan Ichigawa at least. His level of smugness would break the smugness meter if there were such a thing.

Brian Leiter calls him smarmy.

Professor Antony Duff (emeritus, Stirling), a distinguished philosopher of law, sent me the letter, with this apt observation:

The draft “open letter” is of course disgraceful, though quite unsurprising, given its author(s), but I was particularly struck by the request that I not “pass on the details of this invitation, or this letter, for the time being”: I’m not sure whether to find this conspiratorial tone, with its suggestion of a risky attempt to fight back against oppressors from whom the plans for resistance must be kept secret, pathetic or sinister.

I can predict at least three dozen of the first signatories, as I’m sure any reader who has been following this nonsense can do as well.

Yep.

This again. Yet again. No, dude, it’s not your call. We don’t need your permission. You’re not the boss of us.

Feminism has nothing to do with being trans, so there is zero reason for feminism to be “trans-inclusive.” If the claim being smuggled in is that feminism has to “include” men who identify as women in feminism then it’s obviously bullshit, because feminism doesn’t have to “include” men any more than BLM has to “include” white people. Feminism gets to be for and about women and only women, and that’s all there is to it. It’s not for hipster dudes to tell us otherwise.

Who asked you? Why are you stepping up to police feminism?

In other words the people you know think like you. Imagine my astonishment.

How nice of the patronizing man to help guide women who are “unsure” what they think about feminism that is “inclusive” of men. How kind of him to tell them what to think.

So? indeed.

Here’s the audio.

Trump the hit man tries again.

President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.

That’s the restrained journalistic version. The reality is that Trump bullied and leaned on Raffensperger and his lawyer in an overtly “an offer you can’t refuse” kind of way. I listened to a four minute sample from the recording on Twitter just before it (apparently) got removed from everywhere, including the Post itself. I felt sick as I listened.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.

So Trump told him to find 11,780 votes. Literally find. I heard him say it.

At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

We won the state, with 11,779 fewer votes than that other guy, so all I want to do is add 11,780 to our number. That’s all. It’s so simple.

The rambling and at times incoherent conversation offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.

It’s true. He sounds frantic. He sounds hopped-up and emotional in a way I don’t think I’ve heard before. The pitch of his voice is higher.

So that’s scary.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Raffensperger, saying the secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the “ballots under table” scam, ballot destruction, out of state “voters”, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

Raffensperger responded with his own tweet: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.”

“Respectfully, you out of control mob boss-wannabe loon, what you’re saying is a bunch of lies.”

During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s legal counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.

“That’s a criminal offense,” he said. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”

Why would we not want to re-elect this wonderful, responsible, public-spirited man?

Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger put him in legally questionable territory, legal experts said. By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy investigators who “want to find answers,” Trump appears to be encouraging him to doctor the election outcome in Georgia.

Ya think?

(To be accurate, I suppose I think it’s possible that he has himself convinced by all the bullshit claims coming out of OAN and Breitbart and the rest, but since that ability to be convinced rests heavily on his authoritarian determination to keep his death grip on power, it doesn’t really equal “sincere” belief.)

“So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it, and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people who don’t want to find answers.”

That is, reexamine it with people who are determined to find what I tell them to find, not people who are not determined to do that.

Trump did most of the talking on the call. He was angry and impatient, calling Raffensperger a “child” and “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing there was widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta — and twice calling himself a “schmuck” for endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in particular contempt for not embracing his claims of fraud.

In the end, Trump asked Germany to sit down with one of his attorneys to go over the allegations. Germany agreed.

Yet Trump also recognized that he was failing to persuade Raffensperger or Germany of anything, saying toward the end, “I know this phone call is going nowhere.”

But he continued to make his case in repetitive fashion, until finally, after more than an hour, Raffensperger put an end to the conversation: “Thank you, President Trump, for your time.”

17 days.

Ugly.

As the world ramps up what is already on track to become a highly unequal vaccination push – with people in richer nations first to be inoculated – the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories provides a stark example of the divide.

Israel transports batches of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine deep inside the West Bank. But they are only distributed to Jewish settlers, and not the roughly 2.7 million Palestinians living around them who may have to wait for weeks or months.

What does that sound like?

Israeli officials have suggested they might provide surplus vaccines to Palestinians and claim they are not responsible for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, pointing to 1990s-era interim agreements that required the authority to observe international vaccination standards.

Those deals envisioned a fuller peace agreement within five years, an event that never occurred. Almost three decades later, Israeli, Palestinian and international rights groups have accused Israel of dodging moral, humanitarian and legal obligations as an occupying power during the pandemic.

Gisha, an Israeli rights group, said Palestinian efforts so far to look elsewhere for vaccines “does not absolve Israel from its ultimate responsibility toward Palestinians under occupation”.

Even occupation has rules.

Maya Forstater on gender fluid people in the workplace:

The case of Taylor v Jaguar Land Rover has been trumpeted as a “landmark”  employment tribunal decision recognising that people who identify as non-binary or gender-fluid can be covered by the Equality Act protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”.  

The case concerns Mr/Ms Taylor, a man who began to wear women’s clothing to work in 2017 as part of a process of exploring his gender.

It makes me feel tired already. Work is work, it’s not therapy, it’s not your living room, it’s not a place to “explore” your anything. Do your exploring and navel-gazing and self-actualizing and diary-keeping and mirror gazing on your own time, away from the job and your bosses and above all your fellow workers, who have other things to do and don’t want to have to spend their time and attention on your Journey.

The Equal Treatment Benchbook, which guides judges’ conduct, says:

It is important to respect a person’s gender identity by using appropriate terms of address, names and pronouns.

It isn’t though. It isn’t important. It’s trivial. People have been shouting and screaming it into importance over the past 10 or 20 years, but that’s what people do; in reality it isn’t important, it’s silly. It’s just silly. It’s like saying it’s important to respect a person’s Star Wars identity by using appropriate terms of address, names and pronouns. It’s treating adults like very young children, and playing along with them.

But what if following this guidance means the court loses sight of reality itself? 

What indeed.

Jaguar Land Rover is a male dominated company.  Women make up 1 in 10 of the workforce. With 50,000 staff in the West Midlands, it is the region’s largest employer. Sean Taylor had worked at Jaguar Land Rover as an engineer for 20 years.  He was based at Gaydon – a complex with some 13,000 staff; the size of a small town. In the building where he worked there were over 1,000 people. 

The case against Jaguar Land Rover was that in not protecting him from colleagues’ comments, and asking him at one point to use the accessible unisex toilets, they engaged in a course of harrassment and discrimination. 

Harassment in the Equality Act is defined as “unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, and which has the purpose or effect of violating a person’s dignity, or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

I wonder how many women dealt with unwanted conduct of that kind at Jaguar Land Rover. I wonder how much time anyone spent fixing that problem.

There was a big issue about the toilets. Which oh which oh which toilets to use.

On 16 July 2017 Taylor wrote to HR saying he was not sure what the toilet arrangements should be.

On 19 September 2017 Taylor sent an email to a manager, saying: “I don’t know what toilet to use, I raised this three times with no progress over six weeks. I spoke to HR twice about moving as part of the transition at work, but this was ignored.”

How about using the same ones you’ve been using for 20 years? That way you won’t be bothering the women in their toilets – or maybe you don’t care about that. Maybe it’s all about you and your “exploring.”

Finally, following on from the grievance meeting there were a series of discussions between local management and HR, and it was decided to allow Taylor to use whatever toilets he wanted on any given day…

Ah that’s great. And if any women on any given day don’t want to use a toilet with him in it well that’s just tough shit, isn’t it. It always is.

The tension between the exception applied to Taylor and the general rules of the company quickly became a  problem.  Taylor complained that the women’s toilets were locked (with a code) in some locations to avoid vandalism, and this caused him stress. He was concerned that trying to gain access to the women’s toilets would involve “difficult conversations with local staff”.

He was apparently not, however, concerned that trying to gain access to the women’s toilets would be unpleasant for the women who needed them.

The employment tribunal was keen on grand gestures – comparing Taylor to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, and rewriting history so that the events it considered appear to relate to a woman called Rose, rather than a man called Sean. They refer to Taylor, a man in his 40s, as a “poster girl for LGBT+ rights”. 

So much more interesting and glamorous than mere boring women, who are just women. Yawn.

They are less keen on the idea of occupational health support for Taylor’s mental health issues, including self-harm and suicidal ideation, saying these were only the symptoms. They diagnose the way Taylor was treated by colleagues as the cause of his distress, apparently without the benefit of any expert evidence.

It is notable that Taylor began the “social transition” to dress in women’s clothing at work without any diagnosis, or medical or psychological support. His mental health seriously deteriorated. A therapist might have been able to better prepare him; helping him to anticipate how colleagues might respond, and supporting him to develop resilience strategies for when those responses did not align with his inner world.

The tribunal’s enthusiasm for playing along with the fantasy meant that it failed to consider the practical dilemma faced by Jaguar Land Rover, namely, where there was a mismatch between Mr Taylor’s self-perception and material reality, what exactly should the company have done to protect him from feeling distress at how others perceived him? What rules should it have communicated to all employees? 

And even more basically, why should a workplace play along with one employee’s fantasy (at the expense of all the other employees) in the first place? Why has this whole idea of playing along with the fantasy of “becoming a woman” taken over so completely? It’s definitely not a general rule that employers and workers have to play along with other workers’ fantasies on the job. Why is this one fantasy treated so differently? Massive social pressure is one reason, but why isn’t there more resistance to the massive social pressure?

Maybe someday people will start to notice how damn silly it all is.

Republicans continue the effort to break what’s left of democracy in the US.

Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and nine other Republican US senators or senators-elect said on Saturday they will reject presidential electors from states where results are contested by Donald Trump’s campaign, “unless and until [an] emergency 10-day audit is completed”.

Which is anti-democracy, because they’re “contested” because Trump wants to steal the election. It’s like going into someone else’s house and screaming “This house is mine!!!” and then announcing that the ownership of the house is contested.

Cruz and Johnson were joined in issuing a statement on Saturday by Senators James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy (Louisiana), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Mike Braun (Indiana).

Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) also signed on.

“The election of 2020,” they said, “like the election of 2016, was hard fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”

There again – the allegations are bogus. They’re just Trump screaming “This election is mine!!!”

Regardless, the senators said Congress “should immediately appoint an electoral commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”

The senators made reference to the most direct precedent for their demand, the contested election of 1876, which ended in the appointment of such a commission.

“We should follow that precedent,” the Republicans said.

Many well-informed voices would suggest that would be a bad idea, given that process led to a political deal which put an end to the process of Reconstruction and led to the institution of racist Jim Crow laws across the formerly slave-owning south

Unfortunately that’s what they like about it.

In August, the Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “The election of 1876 would not have been disputed at all if there hadn’t been massive violence in the south to prevent black people from voting and voter suppression like we have today. Now, voter suppression is mostly legal.”

Presciently, given claims by Trump and his supporters that mail-in voting used under a pandemic was widely abused by Democrats, he added: “Today, I can certainly see the Trump people challenging these mail-in ballots: ‘They’re all fraudulent, they shouldn’t be counted.’ Challenging people’s voting.”

Yay, we’ve gone back to 1876 and the murder of Reconstruction.

It started earlier. It started Thursday.

Too many of you fail to rage daily about transphobia when as everyone knows it’s BY FAR the most urgent brand of phobia in the entire world. Fear and hatred of women, of infidels, of other races, of immigrants, of workers, of lesbians and gays, of foreigners, of Jews, of socialists, of witches – all those are trivial compared to transphobia.

And of course by transphobes he means not people who harass others in public places, but people who disagree with the truth claims about men who say they are women and women who say they are men.

I doubt that he has the power to make gender skeptics unwelcome anywhere he works (how would he even go about that?), but the fact that he says it is ugly enough.

BLOCK EVERYONE. Just to be on the safe side.

Dominic Berry is (according to his profile) a historian and philosopher of science.

Yeesh. He cares so much that he goes to the trouble of figuring out how many of his followers also follow Nigel, and he then tries to use that knowledge as a cudgel to convince them to stop following Nigel. I in that situation would of course stop following the dictatorial intrusive cudgel-waver instead. I would first tell him off for being so intrusive and dictatorial.

And this goon is a philosopher.

Ah good, they’re doing that very thing.

“You must choose! You must choose between following Warburton or following me!”

“Ok bud, that’s an easy one.”

Updating to add:

Hilarious. On the one hand stop following Warburton this instant, and I know who you are so don’t think you can escape, and oh also please tell me what he says about me kthxbye.

First,

Next,

A couple of weeks ago,

So it’s “taking sides” to congratulate Kathleen Stock on an honour, but it’s not taking sides to congratulate Sophie Grace Chappell on finishing a book and promote the book and a talk Sophie Grace gives on the book. The tweet congratulating Kathleen Stock must be taken down, but the tweets promoting Sophie Grace Chappell’s book and talk and congratulating her for finishing the book must remain.

Why?

Allison Bailey is deeply unimpressed by Judith Butler.

Feminist “icon” Judith Butler is shitting on women from a great height. Very iconic.

It is. It’s stunningly disgusting.

Party? What party?

Guests who paid four-figures for tickets to President Donald Trump’s annual New Year’s Eve party were left to party with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, his two adult sons and various figures from the conservative media — none of whom wore masks — after the President made a last-minute decision to ditch the event and return to Washington.

No refunds, folks. In fact, kindly donate another four figures, or why not make it five, to my campaign to remain president for all eternity and to buy more ice cream for me.

No official explanation for the President’s early departure from Mar-a-Lago was given, though he remains consumed with efforts to overturn the election results and tensions are ratcheting up in the Persian Gulf ahead of the one-year anniversary of the US killing of Iran’s top general.

Peasants don’t get explanations. Peasants give money to Trump.

Without the President as the centerpiece, the wattage of Thursday evening’s party was somewhat dimmer. Performers whose heyday came decades ago — Vanilla Ice and Berlin — performed from the ballroom’s main stage. Guests angled for selfies with Giuliani, who was wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket, and Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, along with personalities from the right-wing television network OANN.

In short, it was excruciating. (I can’t say I think Trump’s presence would have made it better though.)

But hey Don 2 and Eric were there with their squeezes, and Tiffany was around somewhere. Princess Ivanka and Prince Pencilneck were no-shows – probably snuggling on the sofa reading novels about rich people.

The tables were set for ten people, with no social distancing. Dinner was beef with cheese tortellini and Trump “wedge” salad. Sounds like a Denny’s, but whatever.

The President had been expected to attend as late as Wednesday. But by the evening, word had emerged that he and the first lady would be departing early the next day. Trump remained largely out of sight at his club during his stay as he fixated on the election results and the January 6 effort to delay certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

In other words he was watching tv and shouting.