Nick Cohen on Elon Musk’s move to overthrow the UK government:

A billionaire American with extreme right-wing politics and a distant relationship to the truth wants to impose his will on us, and has found many eager collaborators here in the UK to help him do it.

The Financial Times reported three days ago: “Elon Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election.”

His “allies”? What are they? France, Germany, Sweden? Russia, China, North Korea? Does he think he’s a country?

And who might those allies be? The Mail reports this morning that the government believes Dominic Cummings, who orchestrated the “leave” victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum, “has encouraged Mr Musk’s incendiary social media posts calling for Sir Keir to be removed from office and even imprisoned amid criticism of the Prime Minister’s record on the grooming gangs scandal.”

How does Elon Musk think he has the right to do any of this?

Let us be clear: no inquiry will satisfy Musk and his friends. As Andrew Norfolk, the great Times reporter, who more than a decade ago revealed the widespread abuse of young white girls by predominantly Asian men in Rochdale, said a few days ago, “the truth is a concept that Elon Musk clearly has very little interest in.”

Norfolk continued that, far from being a villain, Keir Starmer did everything he could to tackle the abusers.

“I want to put the record straight on this. It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

…

For the UK government, the most staggering aspect of Musk’s power is that he is a member of the incoming administration of what was once our closest ally.

The UK has never experienced anything like this. Tied to the US through security and intelligence alliances, we now face a member of the Trump team spreading lies about our prime minister while threatening to incite racial violence on our streets.

Bad times today.

H/t Tim Harris

The International Cricket Council is happy.

I guess that’s all that matters, yeah?

Family life:

A woman alleged to have strangled and battered her mother in a row over table salt has been acquitted. Ami Avanti (46) was charged with non-fatal strangulation and assault occasioning actual bodily harm following an incident at her mother’s home on August 11 last year.

The alleged victim told police at the time her daughter had punched, kicked and choked her after the lid of a salt cellar had come loose when Avanti was trying to season her food. However, during a contest at Laganside Magistrates Court in Belfast this month she was acquitted of both charges due to issues around the evidence.

The court heard no statement of complaint was made by the defendant’s mother, but the prosecution proceeded with the body-worn footage obtained by police who attended the incident. The footage, which was played to the court, depicted Avanti’s elderly mother in a nightdress struggling for breath and with heavy bruising on her arms.

“He’s been drinking and had me by the throat in the hallway,” she tells officers, adding: “I managed to get away from him but it’s like a light switch, one minute everything is OK and the next it’s really bad.” The officer interjects: “He’s asked me to call him she,” to which the mother responds: “Yes.”

Ah. So this news outlet lied repeatedly about the defendant, pretending the case was about a woman battering her mother when in fact it was a man.

It does make a difference you know. Men can hit harder, much harder. Men can do more damage. Men are more terrifying. Men losing their tempers are way more terrifying. It does matter that this was a man punching kicking and choking his mother. News outlets should not lie about men who beat up women.

An oldy, but I happened to see it and it made me wonder, how does one address this kind of thing?

Philosophers, following Hume, talk of the is/ought gap. Short summary: they’re not the same thing, but humans like to mash them together.

What people, or asparagus, think about what we are is not the same thing as what we are.

I think working scientists in general are pretty aware of that. Gender patriotism seems to tug them, or at least one of them, in the other direction.

Here’s the skinny: men are men; women are women. How any of them feel about being either is another issue entirely. Disliking being a man does not make a man a woman. That’s just not how it works.

(Also, asparagus doesn’t feel anything about its gender.)

A very important question, one I fret about often.

Isaac de Tormes asked:

Question for British followers. Are there people in British media that are invited on shows to give an opinion on everything under the sun without having any particular background or experience in the topic? In Spanish, we call them “todólogos” or “everythingists”.

Here in the US we have just one for that job: David Brooks. I’ve been trying to figure out how he got the job for years, but I still have no clue.

It’s not that there’s anything in particular wrong with him, that I know of, it’s just that it’s so random. Why have random people pronouncing on everything? Why not find people who know something about the topic at hand instead?

Of course, he’s not entirely random. One aspect is not random at all. He’s not a woman.

Janice Turner on the fun new way to exploit and harm women:

At a trade fair called the Modern Family Show in a luxury London hotel I paid £32 to hear a PowerPoint presentation on how to buy a baby abroad. If you have $150,000 for a full “concierge service”, I was told, you send your embryos to be incubated by a stranger in America. But for a better “price point”, the hot new surrogacy destination, where UK agencies now have shiny clinics, is Mexico.

Oh dear god. Can you imagine it? For a luxury rent-a-woman go to the US, for a cheaper one go south of the border. Ugly enough yet?

Mexico has replaced India, which banned foreign surrogacy after village women were corralled into “baby farms”, and Thailand, which followed suit after the infamous case of baby Gammy, a boy with Down’s syndrome rejected by an Australian couple when their Buddhist surrogate refused to abort him. (They took his “normal” twin sister home.)

Ugly enough now?

…underlying our law is an important principle: paying women to gestate another’s child is inherently exploitative. France, Finland, Germany, Iceland and, last year, Italy have banned even altruistic surrogacy for this reason. So why do we still permit babies born of commercial deals between rich couples (plus, increasingly, single men) and impoverished Mexican women to be brought into Britain?

Probably because it’s only women who are harmed. Meh.

The global market in commercial surrogacy grows every year: from $14 billion in 2022 to $17.9 billion in 2023, to a projected $129 billion by 2032. At its centre lie two competing notions of rights. The liberal argument for surrogacy — as with assisted dying or prostitution — is that a woman can do with her body what she wishes. But surrogacy is freighted with power and privilege: did any wealthy woman ever birth a child for a poorer family? Whether from Mexico’s favelas or Manchester’s council estates, women are not gestational vessels for the rich.

Any more than they’re holes for sale to men.

Joan Smith on The Usual Backlash:

For too long, a motley collection of trans activists and green zealots have only needed to threaten to withdraw from literary events, and the organisers have taken fright. Now the Oxford Literary Festival has discovered a backbone, inviting the gender-critical author Helen Joyce and the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel to take part in this year’s programme. Cue the predictable outrage.

There have been calls for authors to withdraw, on the dubious (some would say bonkers) premise that the invitation puts other writers at risk. Harry R. McCarthy, a lecturer in early modern literature, grandly announced that he had withdrawn from his scheduled session on “Shakespeare for the modern age” because Joyce and Bindel are part of the programme.

Attaboy Harry! Deprive the literary festival of your thoughts on Shakespeare and see if anyone gives the faintest tiniest damn. Do your best to punish women who don’t think what you think, and fail completely.

Then there was the American author, Hesse Phillips, who apparently uses “she/they” pronouns. “This decision was not taken lightly,” she/they declared in a lengthy statement this week. “I’ve conferred with other queer and trans authors, cis and straight authors, friends and family, and in the end I feel that stepping down from my panel is the only way forward, both for my personal safety and my conscience.”

Who? Hesse who? Author of what?

Self-importance is not a desirable quality.

A new Pliny:

Mike Davis: “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” from 30-odd years ago:

Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.

Malibu used to belong to one very rich guy, but then it was handed over to the real estate business, fire or no fire.

In hindsight, the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before the disaster, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.—the nation’s foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system—had come out in favor of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas between Topanga and Point Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted’s proposal for a great public domain in the Santa Monicas.

Nine decades later most of Malibu is still private and still bursting into flames regularly and still being protected at public expense.

Ultimately the 1956 fire—followed by two blazes, one month apart, in 1958–59 that severely burned eight firefighters and destroyed another hundred homes—proved the beginning of the end for bohemian Malibu. A perverse law of the new fire regime was that fire now stimulated both development and upward social succession. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established a precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire “victims.” As a result, renters and modest homeowners were displaced from areas like Broad Beach, Paradise Cove, and Point Dume by wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by artificially cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief, and an expansive public commitment to “defend Malibu.”

It could have been a national park. It could have been open to everyone, and free of combustible houses. It could have had brush fires in the fire season without burning down tens or hundreds of houses at public expense. But noooooooooooooo.

Yet, even as they were opening the floodgates to destructive overdevelopment, county and state officials were also turning down every opportunity to expand public beach frontage (a miserable 22 percent of the total in 1969). Nor did they show any interest in creating a public land trust in the mountains, which were now entirely under private ownership, right down to the streambeds. Consequently, most of Malibu remained as inaccessible to the general public as it had been in the Rindge era. (For people of color, moreover, it was absolutely off-limits.) As historians of the coastal access battle put it: “The seven million people within an hour’s drive of Malibu got Beach Boys music and surfer movies, but the twenty thousand residents kept the beach.”

We have mini-Malibus in Seattle, and I hate them – places along the Sound or Lake Washington where the houses sit right on the water, blocking it from us peasants. They don’t regularly start wildfires though, I’ll give them that.

Leave Title IX alone, Joe.

A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.

It’s not “sex discrimination” to decline to call a boy “she.” It’s more the other way around. Boys demanding to be called “she” are undercutting girls’ and women’s rights.

The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q. and pregnant students, among others, through Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. 

The usual gibberish. Lesbian and gay students have different needs and issues from trans students. The T and the Q are stowaways and should be pushed out of the plane.

In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, as it had proposed last year.

“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote. “Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”

Exactly. It’s ridiculous that the Education can’t or won’t grasp that.

Arwa Mahdawi on the fires and women and Musk:

On Wednesday, for example, Musk took some time out from obsessively tweeting about whether the US should “liberate” Britain to proclaim that the Los Angeles fire department (LAFD) “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes”. He has continued to post spurious claims about diversity initiatives (for example, “DEI means people DIE”) for days now, along with posts insinuating that if LAFD’s fire chief weren’t a woman, then things would be very different.

If only no one were a woman. You know? Wouldn’t that be great? Male competence replacing female incompetence everywhere? Imagine the efficiency, the inspiration, the superhuman strength.

There are, to be clear, various nuanced issues that have contributed to the wildfires spreading with the ferocity that they have. But the climate crisis is clearly a major factor. According to one 2021 study, climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States. Greed and hubris are other factors: speculators keep building houses in areas that are prone to flooding and wildfires. There’s a much-cited essay from 1995 by urban theorist Mike Davis called The Case for Letting Malibu Burn that later became a chapter in a book called Ecology of Fear. In it, Davis argues that spending millions saving homes in areas never meant for neighborhoods and power lines is not just foolish, but a waste of public resources.

Malibu and Pacific Palisades feature houses built on the beach; not just near the beach but on it. Little monopolies on beach and ocean. I consider that terrible urban planning even before fires and droughts come into it; I don’t think there should be any monopolies on beaches and oceans and other large bodies of water.

“I’m infamous for suggesting that the broader public should not have to pay a cent to protect or rebuild mansions on sites that will inevitably burn every 20 or 25 years,” Davis told the LA Times in 2018, when the Woolsey fire broke out in Malibu. “My opinion hasn’t changed.”

So now it’s every seven years. Or five, or two, or just non-stop.

This is truly staggering.

Updating to add transcript, thanks to NightCrow.

Question: Hi. Washington State is being sued by a woman who was forced to share a jail cell with a six foot four male who sexually harassed and assaulted her over many days and weeks. And she was told by the prison the Washington State Prison to not report it because she might get retaliated against. She had to suffer that for a long time until he was found on top of her when she was unconscious. His hands on her body and it’s being sued. There are many, there are about a dozen males in the Washington State Prison for women, and women are being traumatized. This is a Geneva Convention violation against women again, against women’s rights. What, what will you do to stop it, especially since you passed a bill that made it harder to find out which males are in the women’s jail? Thank you.

Response: So before getting elected, I worked on an organization called Disability Rights Washington. And at this organization I did some work around this issue of making sure that trans women who are incarcerated had what they needed to be able to navigate safely through our business system. I’m proud of the work that we did there. One of the bills, I’m not sure if it’s what you’re referring to, but one of the bills that I worked on was actually to make sure that things like sensitive images are not released to our public records act. One of the things that we found out in our work with trans women was that you know, those big body scanners you go through at the airport, walk through them to stand up with your arms up. The prisons have similar ones but that are much more high tech, so they don’t have to do invasive cavity searches, but they take pictures of naked bodies and that was subject to our Public Records Act. So we went in and we made that change to protect not just trans women, but to protect all people who were having to go through that to make sure that their naked bodies did not end up in a public records disclosure somewhere. I’m proud of the work that we did there. We need to hold to the work that we did there and we were always gonna stand up for folks who are incarcerated, who are dealing with all sorts of different horrible situations. We can do that. I continue to work on that the community safety committee, and I find it important to state that we’ll always stand with the LGB LGBTQ community.

Transcript courtesy of Erin Brewer

Another conversation with Humanists UK:

Forced teaming creates yet another mess.

Humanists UK can’t explain.

There is no such thing as “LGBT”.

L stands for lesbians. These are women who are sexually attracted to other women. That is not a mental illness and only certain religious extremists make that absurd and offensive argument.

G stands for gay men. These are men who are sexually attracted to other men. That is not a mental illness and only certain religious extremists make that absurd and offensive argument.

B stands for bisexuals. These are people who are attracted to both men and women. That is not a mental illness and only certain religious extremists make that absurd and offensive argument.

T stands for trans. According to Stonewall’s glossary, this is a very large collection of different kinds of people including transgender, transsexual, genderqueer (GQ), genderfluid, non-binary, gender-variant, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bigender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois. Until last summer it also included cross-dressers. The definition is a bit fluid…

Some of these people believe they are the opposite sex. That is a denial of reality. Some of them (neutrois) want to have their genitals removed entirely to have a smooth exterior. It is perfectly valid to suggest that some of these people suffer from mental illness. In fact, denying it is quite cruel, since it may deter them from seeking help.

Your thoughtless statements are adding to the existing stigma attached to mental illness. They are ignorant and profoundly unhelpful.

And not all that humanistish.

Hm. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say don’t do this.

The pink hair ribs-deficient person is male.

Originally a comment by Coel on Brought to you by.

Since climate change matters and since the science of climate change is important:

Whenever there is a cold snap or a snow storm some will inevitably quip “so much for global warming” and use one weather event as an excuse to ignore the settled opinion about climate change. They are very wrong to do so.

It is equally wrong to point to a drought event, a drought-caused fire, or indeed a hurricane, and suggest that it is due to climate change, or even to suggest that climate change has made those events much more likely. We don’t know enough to know that. After all, California is a semi-desert and prolonged droughts are normal for California (Bristlecone pines show this over eons).

Now, climate models do suggest that the likelihood of a severe Californian drought should have increased, owing to AGW, but only by about 30 percent or so. And this is a really hard thing to model. At this level of prediction, such models are not really verified by data. The model uncertainties are about at the same level as the predicted effects.

Such models also predict that hurricane frequency and intensity should be increasing (global warming => more energy in the system). The problem is that the data don’t show this. So that means that there is a lot that we don’t understand about the formation of hurricanes (which is not a surprise, we know that we don’t know).

So is climate change increasing drought likelihood in California? Well, maybe, but we really don’t know that. We don’t have a good-enough record of data to answer that directly, and we need to bear in mind the limitations of the models; it is wrong to overclaim.

Note that uncertainties in whether climate change is increasing drought likelihood in California is a very different matter from whether climate change is happening globally (that is settled, yes it is). That’s because it is way easier to model the global response to things like CO2 and the global climate as a whole than it is to then reliably predict local fluctuations in one small part of the system (such as Californian droughts).

As I said, understanding the science of climate change does matter and it’s important to avoid overclaiming (and hence: “this drought is caused by climate change” is as dubious as “this cold snap refutes global warming”).

I was reading someone burbling about trans women menstruating and blah blah blah and a thought suddenly occurred to me (weirdly late, I think) – we’ve heard a lot about gender dysphoria, and especially a lot about men who have it, but what about other kinds of dysphoria? Specifically what about gay men who have to tell people they’re gay? You know what I mean? Gay men who appear straight – not necessarily football playerish, not necessarily muscular or domineering or anything else in particular, but just not clockable as gay.

(I don’t think it works the same way with lesbians. Lots are not clockable. Let me know if I’m wrong.)

I wonder if that can cause a form of dysphoria.

I had a co-worker like that years ago when I worked at the zoo – we worked with the elephants. We had some entertaining conversations about his non-clockability. It didn’t perturb him at all, but I wonder if it does others. If so I wonder how that relates to gender dysphoria and what it feels like. A mismatch between the outside and the inside.

It interests me because maybe if we had a better understanding of gender dysphoria we could figure out better ways to deal with it – ways that don’t trample all over women’s rights and safety and the like.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Making everything worse.

The climate catastrophe deniers have long given up on any attempt to argue a case. They tried that long and hard but there’s only so many times you can use sleight of hand* as an argumentative technique. The Trump technique of more or less random abuse of anyone perceived to be less than 100% supportive of your grift is just so much more effective so everyone is doing it now.

*Favourite sleight of hand techniques that I have personally encountered, in most cases multiple times:

1. cite a scientific paper as demonstrating your point when the paper does no such thing. Indeed in many cases the paper is only tenuously related to the subject under the discussion – the important thing is that the title suggests that it might do what you say since the sucker is not actually intended to follow the link let alone do any reading

2. If 1. seems too much like hard work just make up a title and give it a non-working link to a reputable scientific publication. If someone bothers to follow the link they will hopefully just put it down to link rot or some sort of screw-up.

3. If you’re cashed up hire a PR agency to call itself an institute and have it put out a “report” saying whatever you want them to.

4. Lord Monckton. Just bloody Lord Monckton.

News from Sussex:

A mental health nurse has been struck off after asking a Polish colleague whether he was “some sort of Nazi” while out on a Christmas do.

Rachel Hole was also accused of using the N-word while out with work colleagues amid a string of racist incidents spanning a number of years while working as a ward manager on The Hazel Ward, a Low Secure Mental Health Ward at The Chichester Centre in Chichester.

Ms Hole also scared a BAME colleague by putting a white sheet over her head in a Halloween prank but later defended herself by saying she was “hardly one of the Ku Klux Klan”.

And so on and so on – it continues for 22 paragraphs like that without ever mentioning that “Ms Hole” is a man or that “Hole” is a name he bestowed on himself for reasons we’re all too familiar with.