It’s about a culture of intolerance.

I wanted to use my story to explain that “cancel culture” is not mainly about being fired or even losing a platform; it’s about a culture of intolerance and its effect on free speech. When one’s own institution abandons its founding values, it abandons those who are working to uphold them. Being personally attacked for that work, especially when the institution appears to condone it, is quite disorienting, to put it mildly.

An inability to pursue one’s academic interests, the loss of friends, and damage to one’s reputation predictably lead to the ruination of careers and mental health. One way I know this is from all the feedback I’ve received from others who went through something similar. I believe this happens because of DEI culture, the values it emphasizes and the human weaknesses it exploits.

Each case like mine ripples through campus, intimidating and silencing others. What happens in universities should nurture a thriving democracy, but the opposite is happening. But there are solutions. When those with institutional power summon the courage to uphold the value of Veritas—which is not incompatible with a form of diversity and inclusion—we can return to open debate, discovery and excellence.

But coddling men who claim to be women is way more important than all that truth and freedom stuff.

Will Keir Starmer ever admit that men are not women?

It has been reported that Laura Pascal, the Labour candidate in a forthcoming local council by-election in London, has been suspended by her party. It is believed that this happened after complaints were made against her that she has deviated from the one true faith of transgenderism. “Trans women are not female,” she is reported to have stated on X (formerly known as Twitter). “By definition they are male.” A pinned post on her account reads: “My embodied reality as a member of the oppressed sex class is experienced in a world where biology has a significant impact.” 

It will be of great interest to see what the end result of this individual case is. Surely it has already been established that employees cannot be discriminated against for believing in the reality of biological sex and for demanding that biological women’s services, sports and spaces should be protected from intrusion from biological men, however they may present themselves.

Has it??? Where has that already been established?

Labour, or some elements within it, still believe they can take punitive action against difficult women who refuse to bow to the pressure of their peers.

They don’t just believe it, they revel in it. It’s like a luxury nine-course meal to them.

Yet here we are, watching as another woman – it’s always a woman, isn’t it? – is apparently demonised and punished for speaking out of turn, for saying things that are not only empirically and biologically true but are protected in law. 

When Stalin’s victims were hauled off to the gulag and firing squads by Soviet security forces, the victims would often insist that such punishment was being meted out without the knowledge of Comrade Stalin, who could be trusted to intervene on the side of justice once he found out. But he never did, because he knew exactly what was going on.

If Starmer knows about Laura Pascal and the reported witch trial to which she is being subjected, he should intervene now to halt it. And he must know, because you and I know, so why wouldn’t he? Let’s see what kind of leader he is.

Not the kind who gives a damn about women, we know that already.

This is suitable. The UCSB Resource Center for Sexual & Gender Diversity is having an astrology night! In fact it’s this very night so you could still make it if you hustled!

Join us for an unforgettable evening on Wednesday, January 17th from 5-7pm in the MCC Lounge with Astrologer Afiya Sunflower, where you’ll dive into the mesmerizing world of astrology without the stress.

Astrologer Afiya Sunflower – it just doesn’t get any better than that, does it. And diving into a mesmerizing world of bullshit is what trans-world is all about. Dive in and within minutes you’ll have lost all your critical faculties.

Uncover the mysteries of your birth chart, share insights in a welcoming group discussion, and forge meaningful connections within our vibrant community. Break free from your busy schedule and social worries to enjoy and create your own birth chart keychain. Don’t let busyness or anxiety hold you back; step into a space where cosmic revelations meet a warm, inclusive atmosphere. Don’t miss the cosmic connection at the Black QT Astrology Night.

There’s a funny thing about this though. There’s no engagement. No replies, no shares, no likes. Hmm…maybe there just aren’t enough Black Queer Trans women to get excited about it? But I scroll down and there’s nothing for any of the posts. Maybe the UCSB Resource Center for Sexual & Gender Diversity is just a sad little room that no one visits?

Also, that definition is full of sneaky distortions, aka lies.

Second sentence. There’s no such thing as “discrimination of.”

Third sentence. No, misogyny is not “the hatred and devaluation of femininity.” That’s a new, manipulative definition sneaked in to make the word “misogyny” apply to men who playact being women. Misogyny is the hatred of women, end of story. Men who playact being women don’t get to help themselves to that word.

Fourth sentence – yet another silly manipulative refinement: “transfeminine people” – get out of here.

The remaining sentences build on this fatuous made-up hokum.

It issues from an academic institution.

Trump defies claims that he defamed E. Jean Carroll by noisily defaming her.

As he arrived at a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, Donald Trump’s Truth Social account released an avalanche of posts attacking E Jean Carroll, who is suing the former president for defamation.

A jury in New York City will determine what damages he owes Ms Carroll, whom Mr Trump defamed by repeatedly calling her a liar and denying that he sexually assaulted her.

…

In a series of posts on his Truth Social on Tuesday, as he was arriving in the courtroom and while he was seated with his attorneys, without his phone, Mr Trump repeated false claims that are at the centre of the defamation cases against him, including his claim that he has never met Ms Carroll, and called the case an “unAmerican injustice” and that he was “wrongfully accused”.

In other words he took the trouble to schedule his lies to appear while he was sitting in front of the judge.

In letters to the judge last week, attorneys for Ms Carroll warned that Mr Trump wants to use the proceedings to “sow chaos” in the case, pointing to his behaviour at his fraud trial.

Is that his “strategy”? Or is it just that sowing chaos is what he loves to do. Mostly the latter, I’m guessing.

“If Mr Trump appears at this trial, whether as a witness or otherwise, his recent statements and behavior strongly suggest that he will seek to sow chaos,” attorneys wrote. “Indeed, he may well perceive a benefit in seeking to poison these proceedings, where the only question for the jury is how much more he will have to pay in damages for defaming Ms Carroll. This Court should make clear from the outset that Mr Trump is forbidden [to engage] in such antics and will suffer consequences if he does so.”

Well, if the Court did make that clear, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

This is our world now: magazines for teenage girls encourage them to get their healthy breasts cut off.

The article is from last June, but apparently Teen Vogue just can’t get enough of urging teenage girls to cut their healthy breasts off.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on When in doubt, let the men cheat.

Really, the questions shouldn’t focus on “do they have a competitive advantage?” but rather “is there reason to have a category for female athletes?” and “are these athletes female?”. Because they don’t want to answer “no” to the second question, and because they can only think of “performance advantage” for the first one, they get all confused. There are age groups, there are leagues for people who are students at particular schools, and there are few cases where anyone says “Well, this person doesn’t fit the eligibility criteria, but he doesn’t have a performance advantage, so let him participate”.

This is very well put. Why are the governing bodies of so many sports assisting men in performing an end run around the eligibility criteria that they themselves establish and enforce? Why are they so keen on finding or creating loopholes for men who claim to be women?

It should be these authorities who have created this sitation who should be held accountable and forced to answer these questions; it shouldn’t be up to the women to point out and object to cheating men in order to protect their sports. The commisions and federations in question should have been standing up to keep women’s sports safe for women, not bending over backwards to find ways of letting men in.

It’s really not that hard. Watch. Humans can’t change sex. Men can’t be women. If you’re a man, you’re not eligible, so fuck off. Was that hard? No.

There’s no nuance present, no soul-searching or deliberation required, and anyone who thinks otherwise is going to sell out women’s sport and should not be on any such regulatory or governing body at any level whatsoever. Not grade school, not high schoool, not college or university, not amateur, professional, recreational or Olympic. Anyone in any of these positions who has proposed, voted for, supported, or enforced the inclusion of men in women’s sport (or boys in girls’ sport) should be struck off in disgrace.

“Inclusion” is bullshit. This is as reprehensible and corrupt as doping, cheating, or deliberately losing. It should be as scandalous and reputationally ruinous as all these other offences because it is cheating and doping (via hormonal construction of male muculoskeletal structures and metabolisms) put together.

Uh oh.

Ayodhya in the news again:

Frenzied construction work provided the backdrop in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya – a vast centre to welcome pilgrims, arched sandstone gates, a broad corridor leading to a grand new $217m (£170m) temple for the Hindu deity. A multi-billion dollar makeover has seen swathes of the city bulldozed to turn it into what some Hindu nationalist leaders are calling a “Hindu Vatican“.

And that’s a bad thing. “Holy” cities are bad things. Rome, Salt Lake City, Mecca, Jerusalem – all bad ideas, all lead to trouble. Theocracy is not a good political system.

Next week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will fulfil a decades-long Hindu nationalist pledge by opening the temple, which replaces a 16th-Century mosque that once stood here, on one of India’s most controversial religious sites. In 1992, Hindu mobs tore down the Babri mosque, claiming it was built by Muslim invaders on the ruins of a Ram temple, sparking nationwide riots that took nearly 2,000 lives.

See? That’s why it’s such a bad idea.

Mr Modi opens the Ayodhya temple months before general elections, with his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) eyeing a record third consecutive term. He says the new temple will “unify the nation”. Senior minister Rajnath Singh believes the shrine would mark “the beginning of India’s cultural revival and restore national pride”.

By singling out one religion and conflating it with India itself.

Critics say the timing of the opening leans more towards political strategy than religious significance, building a Hindu nationalist momentum ahead of the polls. After all, they argue, the movement to build a temple was a major factor in propelling the BJP to a prominent position in Indian politics.

And the BJP is an avowedly theocratic party.

Julie Bindel points out a few facts about JK Rowling for the benefit of Nick Hilton:

So when I read podcast producer Nick Hilton’s ignorant and vitriolic attack on J.K. Rowling in the New Statesman – the magazine of choice for champagne-swigging socialists – I was furious.

Hilton’s article, published earlier this week, is as bizarre as it is defamatory. It labels the author ‘Britain’s nastiest novelist’, attacks her most recent books and even finds time to bemoan ‘child abuse, murder and torture’ in the beloved Harry Potter series.

…

While Hilton has since claimed he was writing only about her books, it is very clear he was using them as a means of launching a thinly-veiled sexist rant against the author herself.

Would he have been writing “about her books” at all if there had been no political background? And would the New Statesman have published his writing about her books in that case? I think not.

As an investigative journalist, who has dedicated their entire adult life to campaigning to end male violence against women, I am lucky enough to have become good friends with Rowling. She is, without doubt, one of the kindest, most generous and empathetic people on the planet. She has tirelessly used her wealth and platform to help others and the must rank as one of the most generous philanthropists in the world…And yet, despite the immeasurable good she has done, Left-wing commentators such as Hilton continue to attack her character.

The vilification of Rowling has long been led by aggressive woke activists who accuse her of being ‘transphobic’. Rowling is not a transphobe. She simply believes in the importance of biological sex. As a result, she takes the view that men who identify as women should not be allowed in women-only spaces – be it a changing room, prison or rape centre. Neither should they be allowed to compete in women’s sport or take women’s roles in business. Most importantly, they should not be allowed to insidiously roll back centuries of female emancipation.

But the Nick Hiltons think they absolutely should be allowed to do that.

We see you.

One problem with being a Donald Trump is that you’re a Donald Trump. It means a lot of people will avoid you, not necessarily for political reasons but because you’re a Donald Trump.

Donald Trump lost three of his lawyers in one day when attorney Joe Tacopina filed a declaration requesting the withdrawal of his firm’s representation of the former president in multiple lawsuits.

…

Tacopina withdrew his firm’s legal services from the hush money case only two months before the trial was set to start, at the end of March. Tacopina also requested to withdraw his firm’s legal services from E. Jean Carroll‘s civil defamation and battery case against Trump, which awarded the former Elle columnist $5 million in damages last May.

…

Tacopina will no longer represent the former president in any appeals related to the Carroll case, nor will his firm be involved in a separate defamation case against Trump from Carroll, which is set to start Tuesday.

Maybe he just has a dentist appointment that day.

Michael McAuliffe, a former federal prosecutor and former elected state attorney, told Newsweek that an attorney might withdraw legal services for various reasons.

“A lawyer might attempt to withdraw as counsel of record for a client in a pending case for a number of reasons,” McAuliffe said. “The attorney-client relationship might have suffered a fundamental breach of confidence, running in either or both directions. A strong-willed client who thinks he or she is more of a lawyer than the actual lawyer can create an untenable scenario for that lawyer to continue representing the client’s interests.

“However, with Donald Trump, any lawyer who agrees to act as his counsel is on clear notice on that front,” McAuliffe said.

A “strong-willed client” – aka a pig-headed dim-witted client who thinks he knows everything and never shuts up.

Ooooh that’s a tough one, we’ll get back to you in 20 years or so when we have the data.

Sex Matters has a new report:

A major new report launched today by Sex Matters reveals in shocking detail that leaders in the women’s sector who advocate for female-only services are routinely subjected to investigations, ostracisation, bullying and employment loss, and have been pressured into adopting policies that compromise women’s welfare and safety. 

Yet a new poll has found that the British public strongly backs single-sex support for women who have been the victims of rape, sexual assault or domestic violence, with 84% believing such women should have access to female-only services.

I’m even more crazy-radical than that: I think all women should have access to female-only services.

The report, titled Women’s services: A sector silenced, is the first of its kind globally. It is based on interviews with 19 experts and leaders in the sector from a wide range of organisations providing support services to women. These include rape-crisis centres, domestic-violence refuges and support services, support for trafficked women and women in prostitution, and prison and probation services that engage with female offenders, many of whom are survivors of abuse. 

Interviewees warned that the issues go far beyond the risk that women may be put at risk or be attacked. When women victims of male violence are left doubting whether a service is truly single-sex, and when they are banned from using clear language to talk about this, they may be retraumatised and fearful, and lose trust. They may self-exclude from support services.

For the sake of the fantasies of a few men, women self-exclude from support services intended for women. Seems fair.

Another tribunal. ERCC is Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.

MW is Mridul Wadhwa, the trans-identifying man who is the head of Edinburgh RAPE CRISIS Centre.

Didn’t we all.

The rape crisis centre run by a man told the woman who needed women-only group therapy was turned away. That’s progressive!

No, sorry, because women are all Karens and don’t deserve information and choice.

More about Hvaldimir:

On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.

When a commercial fisherman named Joar Hesten got a closer look, he realized that the whale was in fact wearing a harness: one strap girdling his neck and another gripping his torso just behind his flippers. Hesten contacted a local scientist, and word eventually reached the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, which dispatched an inspector, Jorgen Ree Wiig. After several failed attempts by Wiig and a colleague to free the beluga while onboard a dinghy, Hesten put on an immersion suit and plunged into the water. Though the whale was not quite as hefty as an average adult male of his species, he was still a formidable presence, by best estimates close to 14 feet long and about 2,700 pounds. Swimming beside him, Hesten managed to unclasp one of the straps. Together, they used a grappling-hook-like device to remove the rest of the stubborn harness.

A few days later, the beluga followed a boat to Hammerfest, one of the northernmost towns in the world, where he took up residence, frequently interacting with people in the harbor. 

He became a celebrity…which is not really what you want for a whale.

He’d been spying for the Russkies.

The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.

His future is uncertain and perilous.

H/t Harald Hanche-Olsen

The Holocaust Encyclopedia on Lebensraum:

The concept of Lebensraum—or “living space”—served as a critical component in the Nazi worldview that drove both its military conquests and racial policy.

…

Long before the Nazi period, many Germans looked to eastern Europe as the natural source of their Lebensraum. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the social and economic pressures of over-population in the German states had led to a steady colonization of Germanic peoples in eastern Europe. Increasingly by the twentieth century, however, scholars and the public alike began to view the East as a region whose vast natural resources were wasted on racially “inferior” peoples like Slavs and Jews. A biological view of Lebensraum resonated with an inaccurate historical view of the German role in the East during the ancient and medieval periods. Expansionists clung to this mythic German “history” in eastern Europe, arguing that these regions were actually lost German lands. As one German publication stated in 1916, “we Germanic people build up—create—the Slav broods and dreams—like his earth.”

…

In the Nazi state, Lebensraum became not just a romantic yearning for a return to the East but a vital strategic component of its imperial and racist visions. For the Germans, eastern Europe represented their “Manifest Destiny.” Hitler and other Nazi thinkers drew direct comparisons to American expansion in the West. During one of his famous “table talks,” Hitler decreed that “there’s only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”

…

The concept of Lebensraum was not solely responsible for the Holocaust, but powerfully connected a variety of imperialist, nationalist, and racist currents that would contribute to the murder of the Jews of Europe.

Not a word to deploy lightly.

A guy wrote a long piece in The New Statesman explaining how terrible JK Rowling is.

His smoking gun is that she…liked a tweet.

The NY Times looks at a Michigan bible college’s efforts to help Trump steal the election.

Last July, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, brought felony charges against all 16 of the state’s bogus Trump electors; she has said that her investigation remains open, raising questions about whether more charges might be coming. And while the Michigan indictments were the first stemming from the Trump campaign’s effort to seize electoral votes, at least four other swing states are now pursuing criminal investigations.

Hillsdale administrators declined to be interviewed for this article. But in response to written questions, the college said its officials had acted and spoken in a “personal capacity” regarding the 2020 election.

…

How did a small college in Michigan, self-defined by the idea that the project of American democracy is the realization of millenniums of Western wisdom, get mixed up in a plot to subvert it?

Millenniums? Have we given up on millennia? Just as we’ve apparently given up past-tense “forecast” for the clanging “forecasted”?

Anyway, yeah. Another way of putting it would be how could a conservative bible college see a Donald Trump as in any way acceptable? Don’t even conservative colleges and churches see the first and most basic filter as some form of human kindness? Don’t they have that initial screen that rejects mean angry hostile cruel venomous sadistic shits? If they don’t, why don’t they?

Maybe they cling to a tiny shred of that filter?

Like others in his intellectual camp, Arnn seemed to love Trumpism more than the man himself. (“There’s obviously a lot of things that are really great about that guy, but we don’t teach our students at Hillsdale College to act the way he does on all occasions,” he quipped during a 2017 speech.) 

Hurhur. So, not the “you can grab them by the pussy” part of him? The mocking a disabled reporter part? The threats, the sneers, the lies, the threats?

I don’t know. Journalism tends not to ask questions of that kind.

Reconstruction meets Trump:

[Last] Tuesday, in response to the federal case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith over Trump’s alleged role in the January 6 insurrection, Trump threatened a new round of violence – or “bedlam” – if he loses the election. In early February, the US supreme court will also rule on the Colorado supreme court’s decision to disqualify Trump from the state’s ballot for his part in the insurrection.

The two cases might appear to be disconnected, but they are inseparable in law and history. They are united by Congress’s Reconstruction-era action to enforce the 14th amendment’s extension of constitutional rights against the former Confederates’ campaign of racial and political violence – the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871.

Trump is a one-man KKK.

Smith has indicted Trump under the KKK Act, which incorporates the 14th amendment, section 3, of the constitution. The Colorado court’s disqualification comes under the third section of the amendment, which disqualifies from office anyone who has engaged in insurrection against the United States. There are clear and compelling reasons why Trump has been indicted under the KKK Act and disqualified under the 14th amendment, section 3. Those reasons are stated in the indictments and court rulings.

Trump has been charged on the same grounds that Klansmen were prosecuted, not only during Reconstruction but also during the civil rights era of the 1960s, and he has been removed from the ballot on the same basis as Confederate traitors were removed from elective office.

…

It is precisely under section 241 of the Ku Klux Klan Act, upheld by the supreme court in an opinion that establishes the broadest possible application, that the justice department indicted Donald Trump on 1 August 2023. The indictment was not restricted to Trump’s activities during the January 6 US Capitol riot, but to the period of his conspiracy to stage a coup, a span that began after the election to the day he left office.

To wit, count 4: “From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States – that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”

The special prosecutor then made clear that the law that Trump had violated was the pertinent section of the KKK Act: “In violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 241.”

Trump is the KKK brought back to life.

It’s massively depressing.

Tweeting from DragCon:

They’re no Karens.

From Fair Play for Women:

NEW REPORT: How trans inclusion in sport is harming women and girls

For years women and girls have been facing unfair, and sometimes unsafe, sport because of trans inclusion – which means male inclusion in women’s teams, events and changing rooms. You can read some background on that here and here is the timeline.

The scale of the problem, and its effect on women and girls, has been concealed by the fear around this issue. A culture of intimidation and silencing has forced women to keep quiet or walk away. This is not inclusion, it’s female exclusion.

That even understates it a little. It’s a culture of intimidation and silencing enforced by bullying, punishing, excluding, firing, arresting. It’s not just rhetoric, it’s not just threats of punishment, it’s punishment itself.

Fair Play For Women has heard personal reports from across 35 sports in the UK. From these, we have compiled around 50 personal testimonies representing 25 sports. We have protected their identities because they are worried about reprisals in their sport, or about the possible impact on relationships or on their jobs. Given that women have lost their jobs for expressing opinions about this, they are probably right to be cautious.

To put it mildly.

Our report gives them a voice. This, the first ever report on the impact of trans inclusion in the UK, shows a widespread problem, affecting many women and girls all over the country, at all levels, from juniors to masters and at all levels of competition and participation. Women and girls are being put at risk and their legitimate concerns disregarded. Their stories debunk the claims that this is a small problem, affecting only a few, and that it does no harm. They include big sports like football, athletics, swimming and cycling, and contact sports like judo, American football, ice hockey and roller-derby.

Read the report here