Originally a comment by Freemage on What the United States really is.

3) The Harris campaign didn’t do enough to convince the Latino community that Harris was going to help them with their economic problems. The campaign assumed that because of Trump’s disgusting comments about Latino people, that this community automatically wouldn’t vote for him: they were wrong. Enough Latinos decided Trump was “stronger on the economy”, and decided to vote him in spite of his vile rhetoric.

Kamala Harris lost the Latino vote.

I’d say the biggest issue is the very notion of ‘the’ Latino vote, honestly. Democrats keep wanting to treat Hispanic-Americans as if they are a single voting bloc, like they do African-Americans. But Latinos have no overriding common historical trauma the way Black Americans do. Instead, they’re at least a half-dozen different sub-groups with agendas that make a very low-overlap Venn Diagram when it comes to what they want to hear. And I could see in the final months of the campaign that the Trump camp was doing a better job of addressing key sub-groups specifically (using lies, of course, but targeted lies on Spanish radio and TV).

Let me put it this way–you know that comedian who made the crack about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage, the one that everyone figured was going to secure “the Latino Vote” for Harris? Yeah, I estimate about 10-20% of my Mexican-American neighbors would’ve laughed at that joke, and maybe even made it themselves. And more still wouldn’t be more than generically offended about it, because in their minds, it wasn’t a joke directed at them, because they aren’t Puerto Rican.

And this sort of difference is rife within the broader Hispanic-American population. Hell, Mexican-Americans, in particular, have a non-trivial percentage of their population that are full-on with Deport Them All (where “Them” means undocumented immigrants)–because after all, they or their parents came here legally, and they are just as resentful as the local WASPs are at what they perceive as line-jumping.

Iraq wants 9-year-old girls raped.

Iraq is poised to slash the legal age of consent from 18 to nine, allowing men to marry young children.

Young girls, that is. I really doubt Iraq is allowing men to marry young boys.

The proposed legal change also deprives women of rights to divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Iraq’s parliament, which is dominated by a coalition of conservative Shia Muslim parties, is preparing to vote through an amendment that would overturn the country’s “personal status law”. The legislation, also known as Law 188, was heralded as one of the most progressive in the Middle East when it was introduced in 1959 and provides an overarching set of rules governing the affairs of Iraqi families, regardless of their religious sect.

As well as bringing down the legal marriage age, the amendment would also remove women’s rights to divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Isn’t it interesting how much of religious law is all about subordinating women? Gotta keep those bitches from spreading for every random guy within 5 miles, yeah?

The governing coalition says the move aligns with a strict interpretation of Islamic law and is intended to protect young girls from “immoral relationships”.

Nope nope nope nope nope. It’s intended to protect men from wasting resources on some other guy’s kid.

Athraa Al-Hassan, international human rights legal adviser and director of Model Iraqi Woman, told The Telegraph she is “afraid” Iraq’s system of governance will be replaced with a new system known as the Guardianship of the Jurist – a Shia system that puts religious rule above the state.

The system is the same one that underpins the regimes in Afghanistan and Iran, where a Guardian Jurist serves as supreme leader of the country.

That’s called “theocracy.” That’s a big word, I know, but we can all learn it. The-oc-racy: rule by god, aka goddy rule.

Libya goes full Afghanistan.

Libya’s interior minister has announced the reintroduction of the morality police to the streets to enforce what he called “society’s traditions” and restrict women’s freedom of movement.

On Wednesday, Emad al-Tarabulsi said the patrols would resume next month. They would target people with “strange” haircuts, ensure women wear “modest” clothing, and prevent gender mixing in public spaces. He also suggested that women would be barred from travelling within the country without a male guardian, adding that those “seeking personal freedom should go to Europe”.

That, or be male.

Since 2011, Libya has seen a decline in religious freedoms in the predominately Muslim country.

The circulation of non-Islamic religious materials, missionary activity and speech considered “offensive to Muslims” is illegal. In May, the GNU’s General Authority of Endowments and Islamic Affairs established what it called the “Guardians of Virtue” to protect Islamic values.

Like hatred of women for instance.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Drag them and burn them he says.

As Timothy Snyder put it, they are clearly (from memory) preparing the ground for worse things to come. I don’t know to what degree it’s a conscious strategy (as opposed to instinctual, trial and error etc.), but anyway it’s a prime example of the weaponization of cognitive dissonance: Signal your illiberal and authoritarian agenda in advance while making sure there is just enough plausible deniability to give you an alibi (”it’s just trolling”, ”not to be taken literally” etc.). Get your followers into the habit of going along with, excusing or explaining away, even actively applauding increasingly dehumanizing and violent rhetoric, unambiguous, shameless lies, blatant corruption, openly authoritarian and illiberal behaviors etc. until such trangressions have definitely become normalized, legitimate, within the range of acceptable behavior. Then, once the actual violence begins, your followers have no face-saving way of turning back. Claiming ignorance is definitely not an available option at this point, nor, for that matter, has it been since before Trump was first elected back in 2016. The guy is many things, but subtle is not among them.

I take no comfort in the idea that there will be another election in four years, nor in the idea that a president can only serve for two terms. That was under the old rules. The rewriting of the rule book has already begun, and with foxes now in complete control of all the henhouses the way things have always worked in the past is hardly a reliable indicator of what can or cannot happen in the future. The same trends we have seen in the U.S. have already killed democracies elsewhere, and judging by everything we have observed so far I see little to support the American exceptionalist idea that ”it can’t happen here”.

I often worry that I’m becoming a bit of an ”alarmist”, a ”doomsayer”, an ”apocalypticist” etc., but in this case, as it turns out, even my pessimism didn’t go far enough. As I have previously stated, I would have been surprised if Trump didn’t win the election, but I also predicted that he wouldn’t win the popular vote. I stand corrected.

Of course Trump himself is not going to live forever, but Trumpism is going to be with us for the rest of our lives, and with a popular majority now having a stake in defending their choice, just like the other frequently prophesied ”Peak Tr…”, I wouldn’t count on ”Peak Trump” to happen anytime soon.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room.

Another neighbourhood vignette. Trans bullshit makes me cranky. Maybe at this point I’m spending too much time looking for it, but its omnipresence makes it hard to avoid. Today’s encounter with it took place in a local store selling handicrafts. Right at the door was a little Pride Progress flag (complete with the Intersex yellowtiangle with purple circle). Beside it was a happy rainbow sticker assuring those in need of such reassurance that You Are Safe Here. Of course this wasn’t telling everyone entering the store that the building they were entering was up to code and therefore unlikely to burst into flame or collapse onto us during our shopping visit. No. This is a different kind of “safety” we’re talking about here, and this “safety” is reserved for Special People, as the sticker was gaudily announcing that the store was not just a retail establishment, but also a 2SLGBTQIA+ Safe Space. One wonders if there are any regulations or guidelines for that. Not just any old place can be a daycare centre, for example. Restaurants here are required to display the results of the latest health inspection. Somehow I doubt there is any such certification or registration needed, and that any store can simply “identify” as a safe space, with no need to fulfil any requirements other than a desire to advertise one’s piety and righteousness. You just slap on a sticker here and there and voila, you’re an Ally! And, despite the rest of the flag, I think at this point. these displays of obedience and loyalty are all about the Trans. If it was about gay rights, you’d just have the good, old fashion Pride Flag, except that it’s now insufficiently “inclusive”, and about as welcome as a Swastika flag, or the Confederate one, as it is verboten to have anything LGB without the T.

These stickers operate on several levels at once. However much of a “welcome” they might be for the target audience, they are also a warning. They mean, theoretically, that the staff will not only not challenge trans bullshit, but also defend and enforce it. I would expect any sticker-displaying establishment large enough to have separate male and female bathroom facilities would allow men-pretending-to-be-women to use what, until recently, would have been exclusively female spaces. If anyone questions their use of women’s spaces, staff will defend the intruder, rather than the intrudeed upon. So, not “safe” for women, then.

More insidiously, these stickers play into the trans victimization and fragility narrative. If the store is a “safe space,” then by implication everywhere else is hostile. THE WHOLE WORLD IS OUT TO GET YOU! COME INSIDE: YOU’LL BE SAFE HERE! As if hatred falls from the sky like rain, and stores with stickers are offering life-saving shelter from the storm. But there’s more than one storm brewing, as women well know, having had their own safety eroded in favour of the validation of delusional males.

Do trans activists really assume that any store without a sticker is “unsafe”? Is that even the actual point? Displaying such stickers advertises putative allyship, but it also shows surrender and obedience to gender ideology. It represents a promise to comply. This puts pressure on other shopkeepers to announce their own stores’ “safety”.

Most of the products were fairly typical craft items, mostly handmade. Felted, knitted, or crocheted animals, jewelery, candles, soaps. You get the picture. But one item was a “Rainbow Certified” tote bag emblazoned with the slogan “Support LGBTQ+”, with fluffy clouds, flowers, and a rainbow. (The company’s website informs me that Rainbow Certified is a queer owned small business who makes apparel & accessories for the LGBTQ+ community. I feel excluded already. Am I allowed to even look at this tote bag? Why yes, I am. Read on.) Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but notice that it’s not a simple statement in which the person carrying the bag is declaring “I support LGBTQ+”, but a demand that the viewer do so. It might be printed in a 60’s-esque flower-power kind of font, but it’s still a demand, and a forced-teaming one at that. Read and obey. Cutesy pushy is still pushy. Push someone else.

Shopping doesn’t usually make me this crotchety, but I get tired of all of this public display trans crap. It feels like swimming through a treacly sea of lies. Lies that I’m supposed to accept and believe. We’re supposed to be happy with our own coercion. All the rainbow colours and glitter hide an underlying malice and darkness that comes to the fore in accusations of bigotry and hatred. As I’ve commented before, the Progress Pride flag feels like the flag of a hostile, occupying force, passed off as the banner of a well-meaning, public-spirited campaign of kindness, compassion and concern. Look more closely, and the actual focus of that “compassion” and “concern” is very narrow. Its demands are enforced with very little kindness, and at a very steep cost to women and girls.

Trump Attorney General Hopeful Vows to Drag Bodies Through the Street

Mike Davis, a right-wing activist considered a leading candidate for Trump’s attorney general, on Wednesday threatened to (legally) “drag their dead political bodies through the streets” and burn them, referring to enemies of Trump and the right.

He did say that.

Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch who calls himself “Trump’s viceroy,” is not likely to show any restraint in exercising retribution on behalf of the president. He’s already threatened special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw the investigation and prosecution of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as well as his mishandling of classified documents, to “lawyer up.”

The fact that a legal troll like Davis is considered a front-runner to head the Justice Department reveals how many conservative lawyers Trump burned through during his first term and after his attempts to cling to power following his 2020 election loss. Many of these lawyers either want nothing to do with him now, or are facing disbarment and criminal charges for their efforts to help Trump. The lawyers who have stuck around are more MAGA true believers than top conservative legal minds.

These lawyers will be tasked with tearing down any legal obstacles to Trump’s agenda as well as that of his far-right allies. These include whatever checks on the presidency exist in law, and whatever regulations stand in the way of business leaders tied to conservatism. As Davis’s post demonstrates, they will also help to bring the full force of the DOJ against Trump’s enemies.

Even if Davis isn’t picked to be the next A.G., he will undoubtedly be a part of Trump’s legal army, which will have a big agenda. There’s already talk of a mass pardon of January 6 rioters, and other Trump allies have enemies lists of their own. A plan to purge the federal workforce of those who would oppose him has already been devised, too. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Trump faces few, if any, legal constraints, and we’re about to find out what still stands in his way.

Convicted felon wins election, high jinks ensue.

It seems the Yay Nazis wing is celebrating. The New Republic reports:

The immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election win is already a bad omen for women and minorities across the nation, who within less than 48 hours have found themselves the subjects of hate campaigns designed to belittle and marginalize them.

“Your body, my choice. Forever,” posted white supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes hours before the race had even been called in Trump’s favor.

…

A text campaign—and obvious hate crime—issued a threat to students of color across the nation, claiming the recipients had been “selected” as “house slaves” and were due to appear at plantations.

Just kids blowing off steam.

And we wonder why Dems are unpopular.

Check out the self-righteous beardy white guy shouting down the black guy who had the unmitigated temerity to say the words “boys playing in girls’ sports.”

He’s why Trump won.

Ok not all of why Trump won, but a big chunk of it.

Via Kathleen Stock, a seminar at Sussex in 2021.

I find it so fascinating, that substitution of the image for the reality. It’s not a brute physical fact that children are children, no no no no, how crude and philistine would that be? No no, it’s an image, conjured up by evil cruel weird “transphobic activists.” It’s not a brute physical fact that mutilating genitals is mutilating genitals, no no, it’s a paranoid fantasy in the contemporary landscape. Everything is an image and a fantasy, nothing is physical or real – except of course for the obvious unmistakable fact that the trans child is the trans child.

This should cheer us up – Susan B. Glasser at the New Yorker on Trump’s revenge.

Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.

…

Trump has now achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Even his four criminal indictments have served only to revive and reinvigorate his hold on the Republican Party, which is now centered more than ever on the personality and the grievances of one man. Almost sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than seventy-four million cast their ballots for him in 2020. 

More than 74 million people look at Trump and like what they see.

And yet what a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for his party to embrace this twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted con man from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular G.O.P. candidate. He was an outlier in every possible way. In 2016, perhaps it was conceivable for voters upset with the status quo to see Trump, a celebrity businessman, as the outsider who would finally shake things up in Washington. But this is the post-2020 Trump—an older, angrier, more profane Trump, who demanded that his followers embrace his big lie about the last election and whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic in modern history. His slogan is now openly the stuff of strongmen—Trump alone can fix it—and he will return to office unconstrained by the establishment Republicans who challenged him on Capitol Hill and from inside his own Cabinet. 

Unconstrained by anything at all, I would think.

An interesting development:

UPDATE: A source with knowledge in the matter has told me that the ACLU is considering sacking its star transgender attorney, Chase Strangio, from leading oral arguments on Dec 4 in U.S. vs. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court case involving Tennessee’s ban on pediatric sex “change” Rx. According to my source, Strangio is “Not dealing well with the stress, not being sufficiently respectful” of LGBT org veterans, “running their mouth in social media, inexperienced.” The concern on the part of LGBT groups “is that Strangio does not care (and has actually said so) if Bostock [vs. Clayton County, the precedent being invoked by the DOJ/ACLU] gets a haircut that screws gays.” This is still unconfirmed, but I’m told will be reported on (and likely spun) by a prominent transgender activist very soon. Or not, now that I’ve made it public.

Strangio’s Twitter account just went down. That’s odd. pic.twitter.com/GG9Kdaplj4

— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) November 7, 2024

Now it’s gone to “This account doesn’t exist.”

See ya.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Historians will.

Did you stop for a minute to really think about what exactly “trans” IS? There’s no question that you love your child. Isn’t that all the more reason to look long and hard at what’s going on with your child, no matter how frightening it may seem to look directly at it?

I’ll tell you what trans is NOT: it is not some innate state of being. “Being trans” is not like being gay, which is inborn. “Transness” is not something anyone is born with. Your child was not born “trans” and your child is not fated to “be trans” for the rest of their days. Transness is an idea in people’s heads, and it’s one that causes very real emotional distress. But it is nevertheless still just an idea in people’s heads. (Gayness is not. Gayness can be materially measured and studied via numerous methods.)

There have never been people anytime in history who exhibit the symptoms that young “trans people” have begun exhibiting in our current culture, right after social media came to prominence. You can prove this to yourself by simply looking at your own high school yearbook. Anyone over age 40 can do the same. This isn’t because some vast subset of the human population has up until practically yesterday suffered and died in some kind of transgender closet, with all of those deaths being somehow magically erased from any and all logs of history. It’s because until the idea that it’s possible to have been “born in the wrong body” was planted in people’s minds and then advertised 24/7 on social media, virtually nobody thought to be distressed about it before. That’s what’s called a social contagion.

Whatever your child is experiencing, they are experiencing it entirely because of ideas they were exposed to in their cultural environment. (I say “they” so as not to offend, but it sounds like you have a daughter who is in denial about her sex, because she is confused about the concept of sex, because a subculture has emerged on the Internet whose adherents set out to make everyone confused about the concept of sex. And because she is in distress about the sexist social ideas that are laden on women and girls by our sexist society.)

There are no trans kids. Only kids confused about sex. Read this essay about it, if you’re interested.

Watch the clip.

The chief anti-Holocaust-denialism scholar, Deborah Lipstadt:

Horrified by the attacks tonight in Amsterdam, which are terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom. I am also deeply disturbed by how long the reported attacks lasted and call on the government to conduct a thorough investigation into security force intervention and on how these despicable attacks transpired. In terrible historical irony, this is happening two days before the grim anniversary of Reichspogromnacht in 1938, when Nazi-sanctioned and led pogroms against Jews erupted across the German Reich.

Ah yes, “Zionist hooligans.” That explains everything.

“Maccabi Tel Aviv Hooligans” – that’s just lovely.

Yes, the one consolation for the victory of the convicted felon is that he’s not a TransAlly and won’t be appointing any men who pretend to be women to cabinet posts. No, that’s not because he respects women.

In other words, what she said.

All of what she said:

In case I haven’t been clear in the numerous articles I have written in which I slate and heavily criticise what passes for the modern left these days, including Biden and Harris. I understand, as far as I am able, whyTrump was elected, and the absolute shit show surrounding the Democrats. What I have been astounded about are all of these women and men making statements about how Trump will now protect women and children, and will make that his priority. That women and girls will be safe under Trump. I’m sorry if this has offended you, but I stand by it. And yes, he does know what a woman is. You are certainly right about that.

Like for instance:

Antisemitic riots in Amsterdam:

Israeli commercial planes on Friday were bringing home citizens injured in Amsterdam after bursts of violence tied to a soccer game between a Dutch and an Israeli team that Israeli and Dutch officials described as antisemitic attacks.

…

While the exact sequence of events remained unclear, the violence appeared to be the product of two combustible forces in Europe: the unrest that often accompanies gatherings of hard-core soccer fans and tensions over the yearlong Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

In other words men lose control.

Videos circulating on social media and a video distributed by The Associated Press provide a glimpse of the tensions in the hours leading up to the violence. In the A.P. clip, dozens of men wearing scarves with the colors of the Israeli soccer club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, are seen gathering on Thursday at Amsterdam’s central Dam Square, where flares are being lit amid a heavy police presence.

Other video footage verified by The Times shows a group of men trying to take down a Palestinian flag from a building on Rokin, a street in central Amsterdam. One man is heard saying in Hebrew, “The people of Israel live,” while others shout anti-Palestinian chants using expletives. The earliest versions of the videos appeared on social media in the early hours of Thursday.

It’s almost funny, in a way. What’s it about? Israel and Palestine? Or football?

Europe has experienced an increase in antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 and the ensuing war in Gaza. On Thursday, a broad coalition of German lawmakers passed a resolution calling on the government to do more to criminalize and otherwise punish antisemitic acts.

Gaza? Or football?

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Historians will.

@Bevin

If you and your child were to be honest about what is going on with the trans issue, you would be more able to resolve it in a way that protects him, or her in the long run. The transgender issue is an artifact of toxic masculinity. Those children who experience the sexism and bullying of not conforming to the gender expectations of their sex are now being shepherded into a belief that they have a gender identity that is different from their sex, and that the gender identity is what takes primacy in defining whether they are male or female; and that is a dangerous social lie that has taken hold.

Rather than resolving the identity issue, the transgender movement exacerbates it because it affirms that male superior roles are “natural,” while female subservient roles are also natural. We should instead be affirming that males with femimine personae are still males, and that females with masculine personae are yet females. But now we are swimming against a tidal wave of gender confusion with the belief in gender identity. To question it in any way is considered bigotry, and so few people want to be thought of as bigoted (except for the redhatted uglies, of course) that they don’t look at this issue with any sort of skepticism.

I’m sure that you honestly believe that your child is trans and needs your protection as such. But this belief is a result of a social phenomenon that actively puts women at risk of violence, preventing women from having safe private spaces away from males and especially when women are vulnerable. There are men who are keenly aware of the social stigma of questioning trans identities, and so they use this to claim they are trans in order to access women’s private spaces. In clamoring to ensure that men who identify as women are safe from men who get freaked out about such things, society has ensured that women will be cornered in locker rooms, in restrooms, in homeless shelters, in rape crisis centers, and other refuges women have fought for in order to have respite from the dangers of male dominance.

Protect your child, yes, but protect him or her by helping them resolve their sexual identity in a way that affirms rather than denies their true nature. There’s confusion among adults in this issue, not helped by the stigma attached to those who are trying to right it. Imagine how it is for children, who are trying to figure out gender even in the best of circumstances.

Maybe, just maybe, this was never a good idea in the first place.

Trans men sue NHS over ‘half-built’ genitalia

Sorry, mate, just can’t get the parts.

Human rights lawyers are representing patients who have been left with “indeterminate genitalia” and “psychological distress” after their surgery processes were unexpectedly halted.

NHS England had commissioned St Peter’s Andrology Centre, a private clinic in north London, to carry out the surgeries but did not renew the contract upon its expiry in March 2020.

Good old Saint Peter, patron saint of rebuilt peters.

Seeking further information, I learn that andrology is a real thing. Creating a penis out of thigh skin on the other hand, not so much. Whatever you create that way it’s not a penis.

The two genital surgeries in question are metoidioplasty and phalloplasty, in which a penis is created from existing genital tissue or from skin grafts from elsewhere on the body, respectively. They are complex procedures that commonly require three stages of surgery.

It isn’t, though. A pseudo-penis, a dummy penis, a pretend penis, a fake penis – but not a penis.

Department of silly titles department.

Trump’s triumph is a disaster for Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signalling elites

Well, yes, but it’s not quite that simple. Just for one thing it’s also a festival for the rich, destructive, profit at all costs elites.

Preening virtue-signaling thought-policing lefties can be annoying, especially when they forget that women are not The Enemy, but that doesn’t make the blunt misogyny and racism and generalized contempt of Trump more acceptable. The choice is not between gender police and Trump; there’s a huge amount of territory between those two silly poles.

That territory is where most people live.