I saw a couple of hours ago that Daniel Dennett has left the stage, and I put off mentioning it because it displeases me.

Let’s turn our minds back to December 2006 and the day Judge Jones issued his ruling in the Kitzmiller case. It inspired me to fire off an email to Richard Dawkins inviting him to comment for publication here, which he immediately did, eloquently.

Judge John Jones has given the Founding Fathers the first really good reason to stop spinning in their graves since the Bush junta moved in. It would have been a scandal if any judge had not found against the ID charlatans, but I had expected that he would do so with equivocation: some sort of ‘on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand’ consolation prize for the cavemen of creationism. Not a bit of it. Judge Jones rumbled them, correctly described them as liars and sent them packing, with the words “breathtaking inanity” burning in their ears. The fact that this splendid man is a republican has got to be a good sign for the future. I think the great republic has turned a corner this week and is now beginning the slow, painful haul back to its enlightened, secular foundations.

So I felt encouraged to ask more, and Daniel Dennett was the next up.

Judge John E. Jones’s opinion in the Dover Area School District case is an excellently clear and trenchant analysis of the issues, exposing the fatuity and disingenuousness of the ID movement both in this particular case and in general. However I found one point in it that left me uneasy. In the Conclusion, on page 136, Jones says “Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator [emphasis added].” I have not read the scientific experts’ testimony, and I wonder if Judge Jones has slightly distorted what they said. If they said that the theory of evolution in no way conflicts with the existence of a divine creator, then I must say that I find that claim to be disingenuous. The theory of evolution demolishes the best reason anyone has ever suggested for believing in a divine creator. This does not demonstrate that there is no divine creator, of course, but only shows that if there is one, it (He?) needn’t have bothered to create anything, since natural selection would have taken care of all that. Would the good judge similarly agree that when a defense team in a murder trial shows that the victim died of natural causes, that this in no way conflicts with the state’s contention that the death in question had an author, the accused? What’s the difference?

Gods have been given many job descriptions over the centuries, and science has conflicted with many of them. Astronomy conflicts with the idea of a god, the sun, driving a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses – a divine charioteer. Geology conflicts with the idea of a god who sculpted the Earth a few thousand years ago – a divine planet-former. Biology conflicts with the idea of a god who designed and built the different living species and all their working parts – a divine creator. We don’t ban astronomy and geology from science classes because they conflict with those backward religious doctrines, and we should also acknowledge that evolutionary biology does conflict with the idea of a divine creator and nevertheless belongs in science classes because it is good science.

I think that what the expert scientists may have meant was that the theory of evolution by natural selection in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine . . . prayer-hearer, or master of ceremonies, or figurehead. That is true. For people who need them, there are still plenty of job descriptions for God that are entirely outside the scope of evolutionary biology.

The Kitzmiller Decision

Victoria Smith on Scotland’s belated “pause”:

This is a tremendous relief and, to some of us, a surprise. As Dr Hilary Cass noted, evidence-based care for vulnerable children has been disrupted by those who prefer “a social justice model”. Being in favour of the sterilisation of autistic and gay children — or “protecting trans kids”, as it’s been known — has long been a way to advertise one’s right-side-of-history credentials. It has also, in the eyes of certain Scottish politicians, been a way to indicate that one’s own country is young, progressive, and forward-looking, rather than mired in stuffy old principles such as “child safeguarding”.

It’s worth pausing over that third sentence for an hour or two. All these people who have seen themselves, and tried to bully other people into seeing them, as “protecting trans kids” when what they’re doing is sterilizing kids who think they’re something called “trans” – are they ever going to realize what they’ve been doing?

It would have been a tragedy if, yet again, adults were permitted to sacrifice the health and future wellbeing of children for the sake of their own egos. Even so, the announcement on the Sandyford Gender Service website leaves a lot to be desired. There’s no shame, no apology, seemingly no awareness that if you are indeed lacking “evidence of safety and long-term impact” for the therapies you have already been prescribing, you are complicit in doing harm.

You are. Not the people who have been urging you to stop, but you.

I have a sickening feeling that one reason the medical interference has been seen as okie doke is because so many people were doing it at the same time. There’s a “community” being built, and when there’s a “community,” well at least you won’t be lonely with your ruined body, you’ll be able to find other people in the same boat. Once that stops being the case, the interference stops looking quite so progressive. What does this mean? That much of the fervid proselytizing for medical interference has been recruitment – so that people who have already trashed their bodies will have a pool of potential fellow-miserables. A circle of horror.

The problem is not just that evidence-based medicine was abandoned in favour of cultural trends. Any return to basic standards has to go hand-in-hand with a serious critique of the culture. On the same day the Sandyford decision was announced, it was reported that “LGBT champions” are visiting primary schools in Scotland to teach children as young as four about gender identity. That is, to teach them that if they are gender non-conforming they may in fact be the opposite sex — there is no real “championing” of LGB in this entire enterprise.

More recruits to share the misery, eh what?

The BBC reported yesterday:

Scotland’s NHS has paused prescribing puberty blockers to children referred by its specialist gender clinic. The Sandyford clinic in Glasgow also said new patients aged 16 or 17 would no longer receive other hormone treatments until they were 18. It follows a landmark review of gender services for under-18s in England. Dr Hilary Cass’s review said children had been let down by a lack of research and there was “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions.

And very drastic “medical interventions” they are, too – and in fact they’re not really “medical” as commonly understood. More like anti-medical.

Like other parts of the UK, Scotland has seen a rapid rise in the number of young people questioning their identity or experiencing gender dysphoria.

And why might that be? Could it possibly be because being trans is trendy? Could it possibly be because there is such an avalanche of fevered advertising for the joys of transition? Could it possibly be a fad, different from other fads only in how tragically drastic its effects are?

Dr Emilia Crighton, NHSGCC’s director of public health said: “The findings informing the Cass review are important, and we have reviewed the impact on our clinical pathways. The next step from here is to work with the Scottish government and academic partners to generate evidence that enables us to deliver safe care for our patients.”

I have to wonder why the fuck they weren’t doing that already.

Vic Valentine, of Scottish Trans and the Equality Network, said pausing puberty blockers was the wrong decision and said it would “harm trans children and young people”.

What if it’s the other way around, Vic? What if the harm is prescribing puberty blockers? What if it’s all been a horrible stupid fashionable mistake?

Labour has a new campaign ad.

Replies are scathing.

I find myself wondering why, when we’re told that the feeling of being trans is so real and overwhelming that it trumps the dull facts, it’s so urgent and imperative to change the body so that it matches the feeling.

Unless, of course, it turns out that this real and overwhelming feeling is solely about the appearance.

But then what becomes of the core claims about the self, the identity, the soul?

These thoughts arose as I was reading a rant by Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir on the Cass Report evil terfs etc etc etc.

Waiting lists for trans-related healthcare in the UK are atrocious, with people in England waiting an average of seven years for a first appointment, despite the NHS saying their target is no more than 18 weeks to be seen.  And that’s only the first appointment – if people want access to hormones or surgeries, they could still wait several more months or years.

It is clear to me that the NHS has failed trans people – some who are more than a decade in the system, waiting to be able to move on with their lives and get life-saving hormones and surgeries.

But why do they need hormones and surgeries to save their lives at all? They know who they are; why isn’t that the part that counts?

Just like my partner, Fox, I have also heard many stories of people facing prejudice, sexism and even feeling like they have to perform gender stereotypes in order to be taken seriously. They say they have to tell an ‘acceptable’ story to the medical professionals as a result – things like they prefer certain types of clothing, have traditional hobbies and interests and fit into the mould of your ‘typical woman’ or ‘typical man’.

And by the same token, they are told by trans activists themselves that they have to alter their bodies drastically in order to…fit into the mould of your ‘typical woman’ or ‘typical man’.

It’s all the same thing, isn’t it? Certain types of clothing, traditional interests, female bodies?

If it’s all about what’s in the individual mind, why is “transition” even a thing?

Simon Edge on why Ruth Hunt should not continue to be a peer:

[It’s a Twitter thread but I’m turning it into a short essay so as not to annoy.]

In May 2019 Ruth Hunt, who had just resigned as CEO of Stonewall, did a Q&A at the Oxford Union. Asked for tips on how to argue with people who didn’t agree with Stonewall on trans issues, she said: ‘Those who think transwomen are men? I wouldn’t even bother. Leave them to us.’

If that sounds faintly menacing, consider this: a few months later, the @AllianceLGB held its inaugural meeting, at a secret location. None of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people attending believed Hunt’s mantra that transwomen were women. One of those present, the black lesbian barrister Allison Bailey, afterwards tweeted enthusiastically about the meeting. Stonewall then wrote to her chambers demanding that she be sacked. It wrecked Allison’s career.

As Hunt confirmed to the Oxford Union, Stonewall didn’t behave like other charities. Since it raised all its money privately, it wasn’t subject to any of the normal constraints and could do what it liked. The treatment of Allison Bailey shows she wasn’t joking.

Another of the triumphs Hunt claimed was doubling Stonewall’s workforce and income in her five years as CEO. In fact she was exaggerating on the latter score: she increased it by 61%. Nonetheless, it was a hefty hike and all because, as she put it, Stonewall started ‘doing trans’. Set up as a gay rights charity, Stonewall had fulfilled its entire wishlist of law reform by the time Hunt got the job, and had been looking for a new role. On her watch, it decided to become the UK’s flagship lobbyist on trans issues, even when these conflicted with gay rights.

Trans activism, presenting itself as a new civil rights frontier, came with a lot of demands and language that were bewildering and unfamiliar to most people, including employers. Stonewall set out to talk to those employers, telling them what they [must] do and say to be trans-friendly. The charity’s greatest wheeze was to charge the very people it was lobbying. At the Oxford Union, Hunt boasted that she talked regularly to the security services and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Significantly, she referred to all such people as her ‘clients’. It’s a brilliant trick if you can pull it off. No wonder Hunt referred a number of times in her Q&A to her own cleverness, and boasted that Stonewall and its board were ‘a very bright bunch’. They had found a way to grow rich and powerful. Smugness was the order of the day.

Like many others, I loathe the way Stonewall operated. It exploited the goodwill built up over 30 years to promote gay conversion therapy, the reverse of its founding mission. I satirise this in my novel The End of the World is Flat (although the real version wasn’t at all funny).

However, that’s not why I set up a petition calling for Hunt to be stripped of the peerage which gives her life-time membership of our national legislature, with all the accompanying perks and privileges. I did that for a much narrower, [more] tightly focused reason, based on Hunt’s misguided and damaging conduct when it came to advising schools, who were at the coalface of a bizarre new social contagion among confused teenagers.

By the end of her time as CEO, there had been an alarming spike in the number of adolescent girls presenting with gender distress and wanting to surgically alter their bodies. This caused a particular dilemma for teachers. How were they meant to respond?

To try to help, a group called @Transgendertrd sent resource packs to schools. The packs advised that ‘social transition’ – ie going along with a pupil’s desire to be treated as the opposite sex – led in the great majority of cases to a medical pathway. That in turn meant puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, for which there was little supporting medical evidence. It also warned about the high incidence of autism and mental health issues among pupils saying they were trans.

Without social transition and medical intervention, most of those young people would grow out of their gender distress. Automatically ‘affirming’ their trans identities might well result in irreversible decisions that they would later regret. This is precisely what Hilary Cass has just concluded after her ground-breaking four-year study. Her conclusions have been accepted by the government and the Labour Party, which is likely to form the next government with a big majority.

But Stonewall reacted with the fury of a playground bully. It denounced these resource packs with their responsible, accurate advice as ‘dangerous’ and ‘deeply damaging’. In amazingly aggressive language, they told any teacher who found one to ‘shred it’. By 2019, Stonewall was working with 2,000 individual schools, so it wasn’t hard for the charity to get its way. It also had bigger levers to pull: it successfully lobbied local councils to tell their schools to comply with Stonewall’s ‘affirmation first’ approach.

We know from detransitioners how appalling the consequences have been for those confused and distressed young people who were put onto medical pathways without realising what they were letting themselves in for. We don’t know how many such people there are, because six out of seven adult gender services refused to co-operate with Cass and release follow-up information. To say this is odd behaviour for members of the medical profession using untested drugs is to put it mildly.

Did Ruth Hunt know how much havoc she was causing? Did she disseminate misinformation deliberately? I doubt it. But, as I’ve shown, she had supreme confidence in her own brilliance and was certain she was right, even when people politely told her she wasn’t.

You know, it’s one thing to have supreme confidence in your own brilliance, and it’s another to have that confidence about an issue with horrible consequences if your brilliance turns out to be dim. Egomania is one thing, and egomania coupled with reckless advice about other people’s bodies is another.

She wrote in 2017 that ‘very few young people who access support go on to transition’. We know now the reverse is true. Very few people who accessed gender services did not transition, even though Cass says it wasn’t the best way to manage their gender distress. She also said puberty blockers were reversible so ‘it’s pretty safe’. Aside from some of the gruesome side-effects that have been reported, including osteoporosis among transmen in their twenties, we know that puberty blockers almost always led to irreversible transition.

All her pronouncements, in other words, were the opposite of the truth. She was in a position of influence and authority, which is what made her misguided certainties so damaging.

In the Noughties, Sir Fred Goodwin got a knighthood for running RBS, the world’s biggest bank. When RBS crashed, nearly taking our economy with it, his knighthood was withdrawn. He didn’t crash the bank deliberately, but that wasn’t the point. He didn’t deserve the honour.

It’s the same with Hunt. Rewarding her with a peerage is an insult to all the confused young people and their families who were damaged, and to all the people who were denounced as bigots for expressing valid concerns.

The upper house has the power to remove a member under the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act of 2015. If you haven’t done so already, please sign my petition asking Hunt’s fellow peers to use that power.

A peerage means you get to be in the House of Lords for life. Ruth Hunt should not have that role.

So the question becomes how do you then find jurors who are mentally competent?

Jury selection resumed Thursday in a trial over allegations that Trump falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign. Ultimately, 12 jurors will determine the verdict, with six alternates on standby.

Nearly 200 potential jurors have been brought in. All potential jurors will be asked whether they can serve and be fair and impartial. Those who have said “no” have been sent home.

Lawyers on both sides then comb through answers prospective jurors provide orally in court to a set of 42 questions that probe whether they have been part of various extremist groups, have attended pro- or anti-Trump rallies, or have been involved with Trump’s political campaigns, among other things.

The judge can dismiss people who don’t seem likely to be impartial. Under state law, each side also gets to strike up to 10 potential jurors they don’t like, plus some additional strikes for potential alternate jurors.

That’s how it works, of course. I’ve been through voir dire twice so I’ve watched it doing its thing. But the question is, how can anyone with two brain cells to rub together be impartial about Trump?

I don’t think there’s an answer to that question. I don’t think anyone conscious can be impartial about Trump.

Straight man Jeremy Corbyn tells lesbians and gay men they can’t have solidarity for and with lesbians and gay men unless they include straight people who pretend to be the opposite sex.

I don’t think that’s his call, myself.

Today in You Cannot Be Serious: one Lloyd Evans, who writes for The Spectator.

The setup: a historian named Lea Ypi gave a lecture at Darwin College, which Lloyd Evans attended but didn’t actually listen to, because he was too preoccupied with her hair. It got him all worked up, so he bought some sex, and then he wrote this piquant episode up for The Spectator.

It’s interesting for a lot of reasons, one of which is the fact that the people at the Spectator couldn’t possibly not realize how insulting to women his story is, and therefore published it.

We get it. “Shut up, bitch, we don’t care what you think or say, just suck it for me.”

And when we look for solidarity, we get told we’re terfs, so shut up, bitch.

(By the way, a lecture on Kant and revolutions sounds damn interesting. I prefer reading to lectures, but the subject matter is A++.)

Grooming much?

Scottish primary schools are appointing children as “LGBT champions” and are being urged to ask pupils as young as four if they are gay, lesbian or trans, The Telegraph can reveal.

Documents show that schools are setting up LGBT clubs and “gender and sexual orientation alliance groups” for pupils as part of their membership of a scheme run by the charity LGBT Youth Scotland.

The charity, which received nearly £1 million of taxpayer’s money last year, also urges head teachers to install gender neutral toilets and mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, an event critics say is designed to reinforce myths spread by trans activists.

Wait, I have an idea. Here’s what you do: just change every child’s genitalia at birth. Boom! Problem solved – no more need for boring clubs and alliance groups and charities trying to nudge people into being Gender Special, just make everyone Gender Special from the outset and then you can focus on other things at last. Think of all the free time that suddenly opens up!

Carolyn Brown, an educational psychologist, said: “Children of primary school age are very suggestible and are still at a very early stage of their psychological and emotional development. What we are seeing here is the product placement of gender ideology in schools which is potentially very harmful. Kids in primary school cannot possibly know if they are LGBT because biologically, psychologically and emotionally they will not yet have the capacity.”

Right, so just decide it for them with the progressive genitalia switch the moment they pop out.

LGBT Youth Scotland states that it has trained more than 5,000 teachers since 2021 and that its scheme means it is “reaching a minimum of 30,000 young people” and successfully changing the “culture and ethos” of Scottish schools.

Well, that would explain a lot.

Has Hamza Yousaf been sitting in on these trainings? Is that what explains him?

More stupid stuff to round out the day:

Humza Yousaf has hit back at [retorted to] JK Rowling over her “ludicrous” outspoken attack on his plans to ensure biological men identifying as female are protected by a new misogyny law.

The Harry Potter author accused Mr Yousaf of displaying “absolute contempt for women” on Tuesday after he said transgender women would fall within the scope of the legislation.

…

He insisted that extending the law to transgender people did not diminish the protection being offered to women as he hit out at rebuked “bad faith actors” who are “intent on turning every issue into a culture war”.

Mr Yousaf also accused them of “deliberate disinformation” and argued it made no “logical sense” for Rowling to accuse a government bringing forward misogyny legislation of having no respect for women.

It makes sense because it’s an afterthought. Yousaf produced his shiny new hate crime law that ignored women and the hatred women deal with. Yes, bro, that is misogyny.

The new hate crime laws, which came into force in Scotland on Apr 1, gives protection against people “stirring up hatred” on the basis of age, disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.

However, sex was not included and Mr Yousaf has said separate misogyny legislation will be introduced instead.

Exactly. Why? Why “instead”? Why ignore women in the first one? Why include the very rare and specialized (not to say invented) “transgender idenniny” while excluding women?

Mr Yousaf took to X, formerly Twitter, to hit back at dispute Rowling’s argument that trans women should not be included in the legislation.

That’s the third time this journalist talks about hitting when he means disagreeing. It’s stupid.

The First Minister said that the legislation would deal with the perception of the accused, rather than the status of the victim.

“If a man threatens to rape a woman, he is unlikely to know if the victim is born a woman or a trans woman. That behaviour should logically be seen as misogynistic,” he added.

That’s even stupider.

Originally a comment by Papito on Peaceful but conspicuous.

The greatest amount of coercion employed in this “not very subtle form of proselytising” is against other Muslims, or people who were born Muslim and may be moving away from Islam. The rest of the students are just “kafirs” and the holy rollers don’t really care about them. Group prayer serves a function of guarding a society against apostasy – whoever didn’t show up and participate properly can be persecuted. Unlike in many other modern religions, in Islam apostasy is very strictly judged – it is punishable by death in some countries. Insisting on group prayer is insisting that you can do violence to those who waver.

The ruling was absolutely correct. A community school is no place to impose Sharia. As the headmistress said, the group prayer ban occurred “against a backdrop of events including violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment of our teachers.” This is what the parents and students who insisted they get to turn all schools into madrassas did to the teachers and to other students, and it’s not random, it’s part and parcel of an intolerant and aggressive system of beliefs. People who want to live like that should just choose a different school, and leave alone the kids who want to be free of such impositions.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on How not to change minds.

I understood that she had received unacceptable abuse…

But some abuse is acceptable?

…and had been taken unawares by the responses to her initial feelings.

I’m sure she had a very good idea of what she was in for when she posted her “This is not a drill” message in support of Maya Forestater. And, she’s received abuse over saying facts, not over “feelings.”

Latterly I felt she could have been calmer & kinder …/

Tell that to those who continue to smear her and heap abuse on her. Tell us why Rowling is not entitled to use all the anger, sarcasm, and disdain at her disposal when dealing with the liars, cheats, and frauds that constitute so much of the trans “rights” brigade? That’s your side. That’s what you’re defending. If you feel upset or targeted by her righteous fury that’s too fucking bad. Stop defending the indefensible. Stop pretending that the trans lobby is innocent and powerless when it is neither. Stop letting them use children as human shields to destroy women’s rights. Stop defending the destruction of children’s lives. Stop making mealy-mouthed, bullshit “both sides” arguments that fail to address the abusiveness of trans activism. Just stop.

Rowling’s “insulating wealth and enormous influence” have allowed her to champion the rights of women in a way that many others are unable to because of the viciousness and vindictiveness of this same trans “rights” movement you’re defending, which targets any woman who says “no” to their agenda, or any woman who stands against them with truth and facts that destroy their claims. Why aren’t you standing with those women too?

I think there’s a whole lot of “disturbing bigotry” (misogyny, homophobia, ageism just for starters) on the trans “rights” side that you’re missing, or giving a pass to. You probably believe that calling a man a man is “disturbing bigotry”; this is odd, because being triggered by simple biological truths would indicate that your “disturbing” meter is set to such an extremely high level of sensitivity that I find it difficult to believe that it could possibly miss all the shit coming from “your” side.

I can’t even imagine the contortions you must put yourself through in order to stick your head above the parapet when, clearly, it’s still firmly stuck up your ass.

Someone called Kirstie Allsop has been doing a lot of clueless uninformed social media lecturing on How To Be Kind to our trans siblings blah blah blah, so I finally got exasperated enough to find out who she is to be lecturing from such a great height.

She’s a tv personality.

Gareth Roberts at Spiked almost exactly a year ago:

We all know people who are totally unaware of the complexities of a situation, but who are still totally confident in opening their big gob to pronounce on it…For much of the past week, I’ve been watching with a mixture of amusement and horror at the Twitter travails of TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who has now entered the trans debate.

The amiable host of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location first piped up to defend American performance artist and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney has documented every day of his imaginary transformation to the female sex. He has been rewarded handsomely for this, with corporate sponsorships…

After US conservatives started to boycott Bud Light, following its partnership with Mulvaney, up piped Allsopp to ask what all the fuss was about. She said of his TikToks: ‘Childish perhaps, a bit silly arguably, but they don’t threaten me or any women I know. There are issues to debate, but Dylan isn’t the problem and targeting her is bullying’ (sic).

Mulvaney isn’t the problem, but he’s certainly a conspicuous beneficiary of the problem, and he’s certainly a problem.

To say that we should laugh off Mulvaney is pretty much like expecting black people to accept that a white person covered in boot polish is merely ‘childish and a bit silly’. But this was only the start. Over the days that followed, Kirstie dropped a series of ever bigger, ever more staggeringly uninformed clangers. ‘Using preferred pronouns is simply good manners’, said Rip van Allsopp, just waking up from 2012. When Olympic athlete and tireless campaigner for women’s sports Sharron Davies had a polite word, Kirstie demanded of her: ‘Who is telling children they can change biological sex?’ Where has she been?

And now a year later she’s popped up to do the same thing all over again.

Yes it’s always best to have “debates” with people who know nothing about the topic of debate.

She’s a martyr! It’s tragic!

She’s like a saint, you know?

Trump thought he was supposed to be able to reject as many jurors as he wanted.

Donald Trump complained Wednesday that his lawyers were not given “unlimited” chances to reject prospective jurors at his New York criminal hush money trial.

Mr Sir, if you could reject prospective jurors without limit, then there would never be a trial at all. That’s not how this works. Hope that helps.

“I thought STRIKES were supposed to be ‘unlimited’ when we were picking our jury?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Imagine admitting you’re that stupid. Imagine making it public of your own free will.

Samantha Chorny, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City, told CNBC that if there were unlimited peremptory strikes, as Trump wants, “I mean, no one would ever pick a jury.”

I managed to figure that out without even going to law school.

Wrong.

It’s a secular school, which means it’s open to children from all religious backgrounds and none. Group public prayers go against that. Runnymede Trust should have a long hard think about the moral pressure public prayers exert on other children from Muslim backgrounds at that school.

Public prayer is a not very subtle form of proselytizing. Secular schools should not be forced to allow it.

Joan Smith on Humza Yousaf and misogyny and law:

Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, let the cat out of the bag when he revealed yesterday the real intention behind the SNP’s proposal to bring in a standalone law on misogyny.

Yousaf claims that men can be victims of misogyny — and that they’re as or more likely to be targets than women. “Trans women will be protected as well, as they will often be the ones who suffer threats of rape or threats of disfigurement for example,” he said, offering no evidence for the assertion.

And also, of course, offering no reason to believe that men can be women.

Yousaf doubled down, repeating one of the most cherished illusions of trans-identified males. “When a trans woman is walking down the street and a threat of rape is made against them, the man making the threat doesn’t know if they are a trans woman or a cis woman,” he claimed.

Yeah right.

Very few men who have gone through male puberty are able to “pass” as women, a fact revealed by constant complaints from trans women about being “misgendered”. One of the first things we notice about another human being is their sex, and understandably so — because men are responsible for the vast majority of violence against women.

Now Scotland’s most powerful politician is telling us that trans women are indistinguishable from biological women. Not just that: he is arguing that a law against misogyny is needed to protect the very people who categorically cannot experience it.

And who categorically can express it, act on it, big it up.

It’s a backdoor way of getting the courts to recognise “gender identity”, creating another opportunity for men to be addressed as women in the criminal justice system. Misogyny is real and it affects every woman, but the law should not be misused to affirm men’s “inner feelings”. Do we really want to risk a ludicrous situation where a gender-critical woman finds herself in court, accused of misogyny by a man who claims to be a woman?

We don’t, but they do.

No YOU are.

Whittle thinks that our awareness that people can’t change sex will one day strike us as “absurd, even unhinged.”

That day will not arrive. Why not? Because people can’t change sex, and we won’t one day decide they can, just as we won’t one day decide that people can fly or live under water or pick up the Chrysler building with one hand.

We’re not the absurd, even unhinged ones in this brawl. The absurdity is insisting that people can change sex, or that they can have a sex that’s the opposite of the one their bodies are.

It’s not absurd or unhinged in the same way to think that it’s “kind” to pretend that people can change sex, and that we ought to do so because it’s kind. It’s wrong, but not absurd/unhinged the way believing in magic gender is.

I remember when Republicans were the Law n Order party. Seems like forever ago.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of a charge federal prosecutors have lodged against hundreds of people who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

While the court’s three-justice liberal wing signaled support for the charge, the conservative majority raised a series of skeptical questions about its potential scope and whether it would criminalize other conduct, such as protests.

A decision against the government could reopen some 350 cases in which defendants have been charged with “obstructing” an official proceeding by pushing their way into the Capitol in 2021. The charge can tack up to 20 years onto a prison sentence.

I mean honestly. If people physically violently bashing their way into the Capitol is okie doke then what would be obstructing an official proceeding? Dropping nukes?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The Three Anti-imperialists.

I’ve never understood people who worship Marx like a god and treat his writings like holy text. The philosophers and thinkers of the past had good ideas and bad ones. As I see it, the general rule is, the further back you go in time, the more surprising it is to find good ideas that hold up today — and the more credit is due to those who came up with them — and the more apt you are to find bad ones that didn’t hold up so well. Because that’s how knowledge is built: over time. So it seems weird to me that anyone would revere thinkers from centuries past beyond merely admiring them for what they did in the context of their time.

Like, say, Freud: amazing that he got people thinking about the human mind like that. Credit where it’s due in the context of his time and place. But the “Freudians” who take his nonsense literally today? Ridiculous!

Kant? Hume? Adam Smith? Great stuff! For their time. Even Darwin — even Einstein — they didn’t get everything right. Evolutionary biologists and quantum physicists get this. They take delight in showing where their fields have moved beyond their great founders’ texts. It’s a sign of how much those fields have grown.

Not so much with the Marxists, with their worldview seemingly set in amber. Is it just me who feels like they take his extremely out-of-date prescriptions for how the world should be organized far too literally? We tried applying a lot of Marx’s theories in the real world over the last one hundred years. Tens of millions of dead bodies later, it’s safe to say the ideas, radical as they were, and influential they have been, they needed a little finessing. They shouldn’t be taken at face value today.

It feels very religion-y, the Marx worship. The way even moderate Christians talk like the Bible is this great source of moral knowledge. In its day, two thousand years ago, the New Testament was radical, sure. Nowadays, we’ve built up a body of knowledge that cancels out a good three quarters or so of Jesus’s moral ideas.

I used to have lunch with a Muslim colleague every day, and one of the things that really surprised me was his inverse view of progress: that the world was perfect in Mohammed’s time, and the further we get from it as we move forward in time, the more corrupt the world becomes. His idea of progress was literally my idea of regress.

I sense the Marxists pine for a glorious past in the same vein.