Well clearly this business of Musk and the grooming gangs is going to run and run, so let’s remind ourselves of the background.

The row between Mr Musk and Starmer centres around a series of high-profile cases where groups of men – mainly of Pakistani descent – were convicted of sexually abusing and raping predominantly young white girls around the UK.

In 2012 The Times newspaper investigated Rotherham grooming gangs, which led to a major inquiry. At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, according to a 2014 report written by Prof Alexis Jay. The report made headlines in the UK and around the world and led to major debates in Parliament.

Similar scandals also occurred in other towns, including Oldham, Oxford, Rochdale and Telford, leading to a national inquiry into child sexual abuse, which was also led by Prof Jay.

How did Oxford get in there along with three northern industrial cities?

The CPS was criticised for a decision not to proceed with a prosecution in Rochdale on the basis that it viewed the main victim as “unreliable” following an investigation between August 2008 and August 2009. That decision was overturned later by Nazir Afzal in 2011 after [he was] appointed by Starmer as the CPS chief prosecutor for north-west England.

Speaking to BBC Verify, Mr Afzal said that the view of prosecutors not to proceed to trial at the time was “if the police aren’t happy that she will give credible evidence then we’re not happy either”. He went on to say that he had reviewed and reversed the decision as “I believed what she [the victim] was saying”.

That’s always an issue in prosecution, as far as I know – there’s always worry about how a witness will come across to a jury, worry about how a victim will come across, worry about which way to jump. It’s not easy. We on the outside can think “They just should have [etc]” but we don’t know.

The elephant in the room is the question of whether the police and prosecutors erred on the side of doing nothing because the accused men were Pakistani, aka [whispers] Muslim. Would it be “Islamophobic” to prosecute them? Would it be controversial? Would it look like whities bullying brown people? Would it look like bullying [gasp] a community? I have no idea whether or how much that influenced decision making, but some people clearly suspect it did.

On a related note, Elon Musk is absolutely the wrong person to be re-lighting this fire.

Trudeau has resigned.

Trudeau, the latest incumbent to be driven out amid rising voter dissatisfaction worldwide, said it had become clear to him that he cannot “be the leader during the next elections due to internal battles.” He planned to stay on as prime minister until a new leader of the Liberal Party is chosen.

…

The political upheaval comes at a difficult moment for Canada internationally. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods if the government does not stem what Trump calls a flow of migrants and drugs in the U.S. — even though far fewer of them cross into the U.S. from Canada than from Mexico, which Trump has also threatened.

Canada is a major exporter of oil and natural gas to the U.S., which also relies on its northern neighbor for steel, aluminum and automobiles.

After Trudeau’s announcement, Trump, who for weeks has referred to Canada as the 51st state, did so again and incorrectly claimed on social media that the prime minister resigned because Canada relies on subsidies from the U.S. to stay afloat.

…

Trudeau had been planning to run for a fourth term despite his party’s displeasure. Prime ministers in Canada can stay in office as long as their government or party has the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, but no Canadian prime minister in more than a century has won four straight terms.

It seems that Labour made a slight error. It’s tricky finding an ordinary news story on it, because of the taboo on slang words for the female genitalia. Yet again social meeja has to substitute.

What was that about grooming again?

Politico on Macron on Musk:

Emmanuel Macron took a not-so-thinly veiled swipe at Elon Musk on Monday, accusing him of meddling in European politics and backing what the French president called a “reactionary movement” across the world.

While Macron did not name the controversial tech billionaire in his annual speech to French ambassadors gathered in Paris, the description was unmistakable.

“Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany,” Macron said in a wide-ranging foreign policy speech at the Elysée Palace.

Macron’s comments, however, did not go as far as those of Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who said Monday he found it “worrying” that Musk, “a man with enormous access to social media” would be so “directly involved” in the politics of other nations.

Musk is facing mainstream political backlash in Europe after wading into domestic politics in Germany and the United Kingdom. He came out in support of the far-right Alternative for Germany ahead of a snap legislative election in the country next month, which the government in Berlin and various political leaders argued amounted to election interference. Musk has also sparred with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and, in a surprising move, urged Nigel Farage to stand aside as leader of the right-wing Reform UK party.

There have been meddling grandiose right-wing media moguls before – William Randolph Hearst for one, Rupert Murdoch for another. They did a lot of damage.

The problem grows and grows.

When the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was asked in an interview about the barrage of insults being directed at him and other German leaders by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, his reply was: “Don’t feed the troll.”

Speaking to the German weekly Stern, Scholz described the criticisms as nothing new. “You have to stay cool,” he said in the interview. “As Social Democrats, we have long been used to the fact that there are rich media entrepreneurs who do not appreciate social democratic politics – and do not hide their opinions.”

He said he would make no efforts to engage with Musk, who has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in next month’s federal elections and will host a live discussion on his social media platform X with its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said. “The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”

Meanwhile the troll is munching on all of us.

Since taking the reins of X, Musk has increasingly used the social media platform’s global reach to push his own political views. After spending a quarter of a billion dollars to help secure Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Musk has used his influence to back far-right and anti-establishment parties across the continent, while attacking some of its most prominent centre-left leaders.

…

In recent days Musk has waded into UK politics, calling on King Charles to step in and dissolve parliament as he criticised the government over child grooming cases

Unelected strongman calls to unelected strongman to stamp out democracy. Good plan.

Musk sez: Declare war on the UK, or no?

Elon Musk has questioned whether the United States should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government” after hitting out [raging] at top U.K. lawmakers.

…

Musk accused the U.K. Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist” on Friday, before publishing a series of posts calling for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be ousted and face jail time over how child grooming gangs and other criminals who targeted children have been prosecuted.

His criticisms of the U.K. government over the weekend culminated in a poll, where he posed the concept of “liberating the people of Britain” to the platform’s users.

He’s not even a little bit funny.

The Pissed Off Lawyer, aka the lawyer who claims to be a man but is a woman, has a pattern. It’s not a good pattern.

No. That’s wrong. The issue really is the ideology. Nobody wants to genocide the people who believe trans ideology, we want to get rid of the ideology. Those really are two different things.

But, the next day…

One reason trans ideology is so goddam warped is because it insists on this translation of “trans ideology is dumm” to “they wanna kill us.”

Lying, exaggerating, translating, catastrophizing are all bad, especially for the ability to think. Live long and prosper, without the ideology.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Friends in high places.

Taiwan is almost the size of Australia, population-wise. The idea that the democratic freedom of some 23 million people ought to be erased for any reason, let alone some romantic interpretation of the Maoist takeover of Beijing in 1949 or whatever, is absurd to me.

I know that “freedom” is a word that has been somewhat tainted by the Right, turned into empty jingo, but seriously: freedom versus non-freedom is not a two-way street. When people obtain freedom, they have to fight to keep it. And when they lose it, it’s often almost impossible to get it back. The Chinese Communist Party is a force for destroying individuals’ freedom, and the Taiwanese democracy is its opposite: a force for human rights. The millions of Taiwanese are not pawns and it’s not arbitrary which government they end up subjected to. Under the CCP, their lives and freedoms are immeasurably worse off, and their ability to voice their disapproval and choose for themselves a better alternative is also cut off: under China it’s a one-way street. It’s night and day. For the Taiwanese people, I choose day over night.

(In my local Chinatown, even though the grocers are all Mainland Chinese, they hawk imported green Taiwanese pomelos, which have become symbols of Taiwan’s independence. Baskets of them are kept next to the cash-out like impulse purchases, where you’d normally find packs of gum or candy bars. Tossing one of these overpriced imported sour grapefruits into your grocery bag has become an act of defiance against China’s attempts at authoritarian control over the island. It seems to have had an effect. Long live the Taiwanese pomelo! Long live Taiwan!)

Helen Lewis makes an important point in her piece in the Atlantic on male trans athletes in women’s sport.

The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.

It’s obvious but it doesn’t get put that way often enough. Bro, your “inclusion” is our exclusion so shut up.

…the performance gap between men and women is estimated to vary from 10 to 50 percent, depending on the sport. Yet progressives have downplayed that sex difference—which is obvious to many casual observers—because it challenges the idea that transgender women should be treated as women in all circumstances.

And transgender women, aka men, have somehow become the most fragile, the most needy, the most neglected, the most urgent, the most tragic set of people on the planet, and the consequence of that is that women have become the most cruel, heartless, hardened, domineering, unjust set of people on the planet.

On Joe Biden’s first day in office as president, he issued an executive order opposing discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Its language did not explicitly address college athletics but declared that all “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.”

Because it’s fine for girls to be unable to learn without worrying about encountering a boy in the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.

Throughout the Biden administration, activist groups waved away tough questions, claiming that there was no evidence of “trans athletes” having advantages. But such generic phrasing is deceptive. No one is arguing that trans men have an advantage over biological males; when trans men compete in the male category, they tend to struggle. The actual question is whether natal males have an advantage over natal females. 

This is why I keep insistently pointing out that dishonest generic “trans athletes” that news outlets like the BBC are so very fond of. It’s blatant shameless manipulation and it needs to stop.

When all else fails there’s still the hilarity of Musk v Everyone.

Elon Musk has called for Nigel Farage to be replaced as leader of Reform UK, just weeks after reports the multi-billionaire was in talks to donate to the party.

In a post on his social media site X, Musk said Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party – but did not explain his reasoning.

Farage suggested this was due to a disagreement over Musk’s support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

No you’re the sellout no you are no you are

The comment from the tech entrepreneur comes hours after Farage described Musk as a “friend” in an interview on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme.

Of course it does. That’s Musk’s sense of humor, as well as his sense of entitlement and his sense of spite and his sense of Musk First. “Call me a friend will you??! Like hell I am!”

In the interview broadcast earlier on Sunday, Farage told the BBC that the fact that Musk “supports me politically and supports Reform doesn’t mean I have to agree with every single statement he makes on X”.

So Musk hastened to provide him with statements on X to not agree with. Everyone wins!

Originally a comment by Arcadia on Sez who?

This one chafes, it really does. I’m a lifelong couch potato, and ParkRun has been instrumental in changing that for me, in my forties. ParkRun is inclusive, in genuine and meaningful ways. When I go, I see all elements of society, coming together to cover five kilometres on foot or in a wheelchair. There’s no judgment over being slow, old, overweight, uncool, poorly coordinated, disabled, etc. There’s hardcore fitness fanatics, gym bros, skinny young fashionable types, parents with kids, pregnant women, young keen kids dragging their parents along, young sulky kids being dragged along, middle aged walkers, older ex triathletes, a young disabled man with his carer who can keep up and his mum who has a harder time keeping up with him at her age, two wheelchair users, a young man doing Olympic style race walking, fundraisers in logo shirts, silly hats or pink tutus, people who are rehabbing back injuries and more. Gender special people too. You can’t even come last: that’s the tail walker’s job (which you can volunteer for if you like).

I’ve been to more than fifty now. My sister has done 200. It means something to me.

However, ParkRun has very few winners, and they’re all male anyway, obviously. ParkRun has no bathrooms, no separate men’s and women’s events, no pronouns required. Yes, you can Self ID when you sign up, but that only impacts the statistics pretty mildly, unless you’re actually a competitive woman (and I’m not, most women are better than me still).

I won’t stop being angry about this, but I won’t stop going either. I won’t stop advocating that they restore the women’s category, especially where the seizure of women’s wins is particularly egregious, such as by criminals.

I also suspect the vast majority of attendees have no idea, which is all the more reason to keep going and keep grumbling about it.

I’ve written about the grooming gangs many times over the years. It’s a very large and very horrible subject.

Today in the Telegraph:

How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.

A review of the abuse in Oldham was released in 2022, but its terms of reference only stretched from 2011-2014. Survivors from the town said that they wanted a government-led inquiry to cover a longer period, and catch what the previous review had missed. In Jess Phillips’s letter to the council, revealed by GB News, she said she understood the strength of feeling in the town, but thought it best for another local review to take place.

I take it “local review” means smaller review with smaller audience that will draw less attention and create less of a fuss. Well why do that? Why not draw more attention and more of a fuss? (This is apparently why Musk is weighing in. I still think he’s the wrong guy to do any weighing in, for a lot of reasons.)

Across the country, in towns and in cities, on our streets and in the state institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to horrific abuse of largely white children by gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Over time, details have come to light about abuse in Rotherham, in Telford, in Rochdale and in dozens of other places. But with the stories released in dribs and drabs, and the details so horrific as to be almost unreadable, the full scale of the scandal has still to reach the public.

Those dribs and drabs are why I’ve written about it so many times. I guess dribs and drabs can be shrugged off as local aberrations.

The Telford Inquiry found particularly brutal threats. When one victim aged 12 told her mother, and the mother called the police, “there was about six or seven Asian men who came to my house. They threatened my mum saying they’ll petrol bomb my house if we don’t drop the charges.”

Yet in a pattern that would repeat itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”.

Sigh. This is one reason I keep pointing out the relentless tedious touchy-feely use of “communniny” to bully everyone into blind obedience. It’s such a cuddly word – but not all “communities” are cuddly. The Nazi community was a bit rough, the Ku Klux Klan community was brusque, the rapist community is a nuisance to women and girls. If you call it the “Asian community” you’re implying that all this rape is a gemütlich family affair, a little horsing around among friends.

And above all, there was the concern over community relations: senior council staff were terrified that the abuse of children “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”.

So a few more children thrown into the fire every week to keep the dragon pacified.

Even now, discussing primarily Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs as primarily Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs causes problems; IPSO waded in to censure Home Secretary Suella Braverman for this claim last year, citing deeply flawed Home Office research in its ruling. Yet if we can’t be honest about the problems we’re facing, we won’t be able to address them.

In the words of Guy Dampier, a researcher at The Legatum Institute think tank: “The rape gangs scandal was a product of multiculturalism, which in practice meant the authorities turning a blind eye because victims were mostly white and their abusers largely ethnically Pakistani.”

It’s not evil to want to avoid being racist. It’s not evil to worry about prosecuting underdogs. On the other hand it’s pretty clueless to see men as underdogs and the young girls they rape as overdogs.

As shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick recently wrote in these pages, “a national inquiry is just the start: we need justice for the victims”. In his words, “this appalling scandal continues today because perpetrators still walk free and the officials who covered it up have been let off. The individuals who turned a blind eye to these crimes – and fed the most vulnerable women to the wolves – should be in jail.”

I expect this story is going to run and run…

Besties fall out already.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has distanced himself from Elon Musk’s support for jailed far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. The tech multi-billionaire added his voice to calls to release Yaxley-Lennon, who was jailed in October after admitting contempt of court by repeating false claims against a Syrian refugee.

Farage has been proud to show off the support of Musk, flying to Florida to meet the owner of social media site X, who helped President-elect Donald Trump win the US election. But Musk’s support for Yaxley-Lennon is uncomfortable for Farage, who has made it clear over a number of years that he does not want him in his political party.

Welp, thieves fall out, as the saying goes.

On Friday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting hit out at [criticized] Musk’s attack on the government’s handling of grooming gangs, calling it “misjudged and certainly misinformed”.

Musk had posted a series of messages on X, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute gangs that systematically groomed and raped young girls, and calling for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed.

I hereby call for Musk to be jailed. This is a fun game, and very useful.

A puberty blockers resignation:

A councillor has quit the Labour Party in a row over its transgender policies. Zoe Hughes, Exeter City Council member, said the party’s support of a ban on puberty blockers for under-18s questioning their gender identity was “a policy I refuse to stand by and accept”.

So she’s confident it’s a good thing to tamper with teenagers’ puberties? She’s that sure it’s better to stop normal physical maturation than it is to let it proceed without interference? It’s an odd thing to be that confident about. It’s not as if being frozen physically at age 12 or 13 has no consequences.

The Labour Party said it was putting the welfare of children first and its decision had been based on all of the available evidence.

Because puberty isn’t a disease. It’s right to try to block cancer and other progressive diseases, but puberty isn’t a disease. Blocking it is a very young fad, and it’s entirely possible that it’s a mistake.

Hughes said: “As a queer person, I have often felt alone and marginalised within society. However, I historically have felt that at least the Labour Party had my back.”

Hughes, who uses “they” and “them” as personal pronouns, said they were “nervous” when the Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he wanted to meet the author JK Rowling, who has expressed concerns about how trans issues affect women’s rights. Hughes said there would be “increasing self-harm” as a result of the decision on puberty blockers in “an already vulnerable and marginalised group”.

They added: “We have let the LGBT+ community down and I want no part of it – there is no LGB without the T for me, it is that simple.”

It may be that simple for her [them] but it’s not that simple in reality. It’s not just self-evidently true that tampering with children’s maturation is the pro-LGB thing to do.

Not surprisingly, Musk’s insults and interventions aren’t all that popular in Germany.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling in second place at 20% and has seen prominent support by multibillionaire Elon Musk.

The South African-born entrepreneur, 53, is seen as having intervened directly in the election campaign, as well as making provocative attacks on the leaders of Germany’s highest democratic institutions: first the chancellor and then the head of state, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. 

“Steinmeier is an anti-democratic tyrant!” Musk wrote on his social media platform X. “Shame on him.”

In sharp contrast to Donald Trump, yeah? Nothing tyrannical or anti-democratic about him, right?

Musk’s latest remarks came after he published an opinion piece in a German daily supporting the far-right AfD. A German government spokesperson later referred to the op-ed as evidence that Musk was seeking to sway the election.

…

The US billionaire’s next show of support for the AfD is expected to come soon: According to an AfD spokesperson, concrete plans are being made for a meeting between Musk and AfD leader Alice Weidel on the X-Space chat feature.

He’s not the boss of us.

Trump seeks clemency for…TikTok.

The U.S. Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court late on Friday to reject President-elect Donald Trump’s request to delay implementation of a law that would ban popular social media app TikTok or force its sale by Jan. 19.

Last week, Trump filed a legal brief arguing he should have time after taking office on Jan. 20 to pursue a “political resolution” to the issue. The court is set to hear arguments in the case on Jan. 10. The law, passed in April, requires TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest the platform’s U.S. assets or face a ban. TikTok did not immediately comment.

The DOJ said in its filing that Trump’s request could only be granted if ByteDance had established it was likely to succeed on the merits but the company had not done so. DOJ said no one disputes China “seeks to undermine U.S. interests by amassing sensitive data about Americans and engaging in covert and malign influence operations.”

The government asserted that “no one can seriously dispute that (China’s) control of TikTok through ByteDance represents a grave threat to national security: TikTok’s collection of reams of sensitive data about 170 million Americans and their contacts makes it a powerful tool for espionage.”

Ok ok but Trump thinks it’s good for him, so you do the math. National security on the one hand, and Trump on the other.

Musk is throwing his weight around more by the hour. It’s more than slightly alarming.

Musk has feverishly spent the past few days boosting disinformation and divisive rhetoric on X about Muslim grooming gangs in the UK, posting almost 200 times, a WIRED review of the centibillionaire’s output has found.

These “grooming gangs” reference an organized child sexual abuse scandal that came to light in 2014 involving gangs of British Pakastani men who abused an estimated thousands of girls in several towns in the north of England over the course of several decades.

It is in fact an important subject, but Musk doesn’t really give a shit about thousands of girls in working class cities, he gives a shit about sticking it to the brown people. It’s an important subject but he is the wrong person to big it up. He’s acting like a very unelected dictator of the world, and doing it more noisily by the hour.

During his three-day posting binge, Musk has called for UK government officials to be hanged and jailed, demanded the removal of Keir Starmer as UK prime minister, and suggested notorious far-right activist Tommy Robinson be released from prison.

See, that’s not ok. His fame and billions give him notoriety, and he’s parlaying that notoriety into trying to run the planet. The grooming gangs were and are an outrage, but he’s the wrong guy to be saying so.

Musk’s posts, which have racked up hundreds of millions of views on X, are just his latest effort at inserting himself into UK politics. In the wake of his successful efforts to aid president-elect Donald Trump in the US election, Musk has turned his attention to supporting the right-wing Reform Party in the UK. The party is headed by Trump ally Nigel Farage; Musk met him at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in December. Musk’s public endorsement of Reform has raised questions in the UK about the potential influence of foreign donors on UK elections.

What other countries are on his list? Russia? China? North Korea? Saudi Arabia? Or is he just doing the easy ones.

Dawkins is in good form in the Spectator:

In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian”, and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking these days.

Of course I’m a cultural Christian. Always have been. Packed off to Anglican schools, I was confirmed when too young to know better. Large chunks of the English Hymnal were imprinted in my long-term memory, and duly pop out when I’m fooling around with my electronic clarinet. I know my way around the Bible, at least well enough to take an allusion when I encounter one. I love mediaeval cathedrals. I’ve never met a parson, of either sex, that I didn’t like. But none of that undermines my conviction that what they believe about the nature of reality is nonsense.

I too went to an Anglican school, which is odd since it was in New Jersey, but there you go. Mind you I don’t think it called itself Anglican (Episcopalian maybe?) but the tropes were there. I too still like some of those hymns.

An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?”

Heh. Hoisting themselves with their own petards, aren’t they. “What do you expect, if people give up one fantasy? They’re going to find a new fantasy!” So you’re saying theism is a fantasy; our point exactly.

Of course there are other kinds of fantasy, including ones that don’t rely on or demand actual belief. Novels, plays, movies – fiction, in short. If you’re getting the aches because you miss religion surely Middlemarch is a better substitute than trying to change sex.

The scientific reasons [for rejecting trans nonsense] are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”.

Ah I like that – some kind of hovering inner self. Kat Grant should take some writing lessons from this fella.

Far from playing into the hands of these preachers, my colleagues and I are opposed to all faith creeds, all non-evidence-based belief systems. This includes traditional supernatural religions, but it also includes younger faith systems such as that in which a man literally becomes a woman (or a woman a man) by fiat. Or by legal decision (you could as well legally repeal the laws of thermodynamics so we can have perpetual motion machines).

How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.

What is God shaped like anyway? A starfish? A galaxy? An atom? A bowl of soup?

Updating to add a recent Pliny work:

Behold: an ethicist. “Friendly” Atheist tells us:

The following is a guest post by Aaron Rabinowitz, the ethics director of the Creator Accountability Network and host of two philosophy podcasts: Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space.

Awesome, a philosopher of ethics at last; now all will be plain.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation recently faced criticism for posting and then removing an editorial by Jerry Coyne entitled “Biology is Not Bigotry,” which he wrote in response to an FFRF article by Kat Grant entitled “What is a Woman?” In his piece, Coyne used specious reasoning and flawed research to argue that transgender individuals are more likely to be sexual predators than cisgender individuals and that they should therefore be barred from some jobs and female-only spaces.

Well, speaking of ethics, I don’t think it’s all that ethical to single out one paragraph of a longish article as if it summed up the entire contents of the article. There are ten paragraphs before the one about sexual predators, ten paragraphs about the biology of sex, written by a biologist. The one about sexual predators is specifically a response to a claim of Grant’s.

But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Notice how cautiously Coyne words it, and how incautiously Rabinowitz describes his wording. I don’t think I’ll be consulting him on ethics any time soon.

However, focusing too much on debunking Coyne’s empirical claims ignores how irrelevant their accuracy is to his ethical inferences. Even if the data [were] high quality, arguing from that data to the claim that trans individuals should be barred from various professions, social activities, and female-only spaces is not only straightforwardly discriminatory, it’s terrible ethics.

But of course that’s not the claim. This is the claim:

It is not “transphobic” to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights. Transgender people should surely enjoy all the moral and legal rights of everyone else. But moral and legal rights do not extend to areas in which the “indelible stamp” of sex results in compromising the legal and moral rights of others. Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison. 

Ethics guy says “the claim that trans individuals should be barred from various professions”; Coyne says “transgender women…should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters.” That’s not “various professions”; it’s one profession, or line of work. Rabinowitz words it so that it sounds as if Coyne is saying trans people should not be lawyers, doctors, engineers, and similar. Coyne is pointing out that men should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters, for reasons that ought to be too god damn obvious for discussion. Ethics guy perpetrated a very glaring distortion there. Not all that ethicsy.

And then he repeats it.

It’s important to note that, even if Coyne’s biological definitions and data were high quality, a variety of confounding variables would still block the empirical inference that trans individuals are more likely to be sex predators. However, it is equally important to note that, even if all those variables were controlled for, Coyne would still need to make an ethical argument that the differences between trans and cis individuals are sufficient to justify denying trans individuals equal access in our society, with all the ethical costs that entails.

Coyne is not arguing for “denying trans individuals equal access in our society.” He’s arguing for not letting men serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters. There’s a yawning gap between those two claims.

Dud ethics, bro.

Thanks for the help Mr Musk but we’re the professionals so go away.

Elon Musk’s attack on the government’s handling of grooming gangs is “misjudged and certainly misinformed”, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said.

Tech multi-billionaire Musk has posted a series of messages on his social media site X, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute gangs that systematically groomed and raped young girls, and calling for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed.

Lots of people say lots of things, but Musk has a very large amount of money so what he says must be important. Whether it’s accurate or not is another question.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has called for a full national public inquiry into what she called the UK’s “rape gangs scandal”. But the party has also criticised Musk for “sharing things that are factually inaccurate” and distanced itself from his call for Phillips to be jailed.

Yes but he’s a billionaire, so he doesn’t have to be accurate.