The Guardian reports:

In Australia, 853 people have made a claim or substantiated complaint of child sexual abuse against one or more Christian Brothers, with 75% of victims under the age of 13 at the time, a royal commission has heard.

The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has turned its attention to the Christian Brothers as the third round of its hearings into the diocese of Ballarat began on Monday. A religious community within the Catholic church, the Christian Brothers primarily worked in educational facilities for children.

Where they had a selection of children to predate on, and a veil of piety to hide behind. Perfect setup, innit.

The commission’s data showed that the highest number of claims of child sexual abuse were against a brother identified only as Brother CCK, who had 46 complaints made against him about incidents in Victoria and Tasmania. The average age of his victims was 11 years old and the abuse occurred between 1963 and 1987, including in Ballarat.

Another Brother, Stephen Farrell, a Christian Brother at St Alpius Boys’ School in Ballarat East, had allegations of sexual abuse made against him from six people, with the abuse allegedly occurring between 1971 and 1974. In 1997, Farrell was convicted of nine counts of indecent assault against two boys aged nine and 10 at the school but his two-year prison sentence was wholly suspended.

If you’re a guy with a taste for raping children…what do you do? You have a think about where a lot of children can be found, then you have a think about how to get away with it.

One, Brother Edward Dowlan, “made little attempt to conceal his behaviour”, Barlow said, frequently placing his hands down boys’ pants while they walked around. In a previous commission hearing about Ballarat held last year, the commission heard from a witness that he was raped by Dowlan.

It was a survival of the fittest environment, Barlow said, describing how the Brothers beat him, including bashing him on the head, when he was 15 years old.

He said he tried to stick up for the younger children who he knew who were being abused by the Brothers but was not taken seriously, even when he called his mother from the school and told her what was happening.

“Looking back at my time at St Patrick’s we were in a dysfunctional and closed environment where the abnormal was normal,” Barlow said.

“As 15 to 16 year olds, we had no idea really of the outside codes of ethics, morality and justice, so it was not a notable thing for us to see that these things were happening.”

So perfect for the predators. Not so great for the prey.

From the Huffington Post UK:

A transgender student is set to make history and represent the UK’s female students by running to become the National Union of Students’ women’s officer.

Anna Lee, a student at Lancaster University who describes herself as a “queer trans disabled lesbian woman”, is the first openly trans woman to stand for election in a national role. Lee is currently her students’ union’s vice president for welfare and community, and says she is “passionate” about equal rights.

There’s a Facebook page for her campaign.

“I never believed that running to be national women’s officer was a possibility,” she said in a Facebook post. “I felt that I had hit a glass ceiling. Now, I find myself in unchartered waters, and some shards of that glass ceiling will undoubtedly hit me.

“I know the Women’s Campaign is ready. I know NUS is ready. I’m not convinced that the rest of society is.”

I don’t see why it should be. Why not have a national trans people’s officer instead? Or two of them? I don’t think a trans woman should seek to represent women, because trans women don’t have the common or garden version of the experience of growing up female in a still sexist world. They have the experience of being trans, instead.

“But – when the transphobic ‘feminists’ come and try to tear me down, I will just fight harder and with the help of amazing activists we will show them, together, that the NUS Women’s Campaign demonstrates a progressive approach to inclusive feminism.”

The maths student’s pledges include fighting for a “statutory, gender neutral sex education” for students, decriminalisation of sex workers, and lobbying for a debate in parliament over tampon tax in SUs.

Lee accuses mainstream feminism of “constantly” forgetting about trans women, and says the NUS should be fighting for all women, “not just a few”.

She wants to be the women’s officer and the very first thing she does is bash feminism. What good is an anti-feminist women’s officer? She wants to be the women’s officer and she considers women to be “just a few”? She wants to be the women’s officer and she thinks women are some tiny trivial minority that doesn’t count?

This is where trans activism is right now: constantly bashing women and feminism, and demanding that feminism put trans women first. It doesn’t have to be that way, it never had to be that way, but that’s how it’s playing out. It’s sad and destructive and pathetic.

You probably saw about the meta-study of all the studies the other day that found – surprise! – that homeopathy is as worthless as it says on the tin. The guy who chaired it did so much meta-studying he got bored.

Professor Paul Glasziou, a leading academic in evidence based medicine at Bond University, was the chair of a working party by the National Health and Medical Research Council which was tasked with reviewing the evidence of 176 trials of homeopathy to establish if the treatment is valid.

A total of 57 systematic reviews, containing the 176 individual studies, focused on 68 different health conditions – and found there to be no evidence homeopathy was more effective than placebo on any.

Homeopathy is an alternative medicine based on the idea of diluting a substance in water.

According to the NHS: “Practitioners believe that the more a substance is diluted in this way, the greater its power to treat symptoms. Many homeopathic remedies consist of substances that have been diluted many times in water until there is none or almost none of the original substance left.”

But why would more water than there is in the known universe have power to treat symptoms? Unless the symptoms are all thirst, I suppose. But I don’t grasp the basic principle that more dilution equals more power. Dilution should make the power less, not more. If you dilute coffee it doesn’t make you more awake. I suspect a practical joke lasting centuries here.

Writing in a blog for the British Medical Journal, Professor Glasziou states:

“As chair of the working party which produced the report I was simply relieved that the arduous journey of sifting and synthesising the evidence was at an end.

“I had begun the journey with an ‘I don’t know attitude’, curious about whether this unlikely treatment could ever work… but I lost interest after looking at the 57 systematic reviews which contained 176 individual studies and finding no discernible convincing effects beyond placebo.”

Poor guy. It does sound deadly boring.

H/t Omar

This piece by Bailey Lamon, Why This Radical Leftist is Disillusioned by Leftist Culture, is being passed around. I certainly recognize the culture she’s talking about.

I’m tired of the cliques, the hierarchies, the policing of others, and the power imbalances that exist between people who claim to be friends and comrades. I am exhausted and saddened by the fact that any type of disagreement or difference of opinion in an activist circle will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people, deeming them “unsafe” as well as public shaming and slander. It is disgusting that we claim to be building a new world, a new society, a better way of dealing with social problems — but if a person makes a mistake, says and/or does something wrong, they are not even given a chance to explain their side of what happened because the process of conflict resolution is in itself driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts. Actually, in today’s activist circles one is lucky to be given any sort of due process at all, while everyone is put under social pressure to believe everything they are told regardless of what actually occurred in a given situation. This is not freedom. This is not social justice. There is nothing “progressive” or “radical” about it, unless you are referring to fascism.

I would expand her description, because it’s not even limited to when “a person makes a mistake, says and/or does something wrong” – it also covers when a person says something perceived as wrong, like for instance when she dissents from a local bit of dogma that’s only been dogma for about five minutes and will probably be overturned by tomorrow. It also covers when the only mistake the person made was letting the policers into the room. It also covers when the person flatly refuses to believe things simply because someone said them. It covers a whole lot of situations that people have no business policing at all.

This is why yes we do get to discuss gender:

Let Clothes Be Clothes

On the right: a blouse with pink flowers and frills and lettering and the words “Berry cute like Mummy”

On the left: a sweatshirt with blue spots and collar and the words “Wheelie cool just like Daddy”

From the Space Needle webcam this morning (click to embiggen):

Have a brilliant Storify by Blair Braverman about a 200 mile dogsled race interrupted by finding a hypothermic musher lying in the snow.

After we left downtown, the trail ran between a highway and stormy @LakeSuperior. 45mph wind, whiteout conditions. I couldn’t see my dogs.

2:33 PM – 18 Feb 2016

The third stage of the race was when things got exciting. The dogs looked great and I was feeling good about our chances of finishing.

23 miles into the wilderness, I came around a corner and there was a woman lying on the trail.

She could barely talk. I put hand warmers on her neck and made her eat candy. It was 18 below zero and she’d been lying there for hours.

So. Let’s drop in on the Socratic Club at Oregon State University for a moment.

They were going to hold a debate about gender, but then they decided not to.

We are sorry to have to inform you that the debate on Thursday, February 25th on the topic “Is Gender a Choice?” has been canceled. Our debaters were informed that some students on campus are offended by the topic of the debate and may plan to protest the event as transphobic, despite the fact that we had both sides fully represented. Because of this one of our speakers did not feel comfortable proceeding with the event. We are disappointed, but understand.

Both sides of what? There are two sides, and only two sides? Well it was a debate, and I suppose debates generally do have two sides, except for political ones which can have anything up to 375.

Anyway, the thing that interested me was this comment by someone named Arlo:

Gender is not a topic for a bunch of cis people to sit around and theorize about, or debate about, as if trans people don’t really exist, or that their identities are something that can be questioned.
This is the transphobic BS we have to deal with daily.
So when we practice our free speech to point out how things are affecting us as a marginalized group, and people actually listen and do something about it, doesn’t mean you’ve been denied anything.
Get over yourselves. The fact that you are all on here arguing that you should be able to be bigoted shitbags shows that you have not lost your freedom of speech. You’re just getting called out on it.

The fact that any of you think trans people are just a small population of people just goes to show how little you know about the population whose identities you wanna debate about.

That interested me, especially the first sentence.

Gender is not a subject for “cis” people to talk about? It’s only trans people who get to talk about gender? Gender belongs to trans people, and no one else?

Why would that be? How could that possibly be the case? How could anyone think that? What is it about the current state of trans activism that is causing impressionable people to pick up such ideas? How could anyone think that trans people have a monopoly on gender, and only trans people have an interest in it?

Gender oppresses everyone. Gender oppresses boys and men who get bullied for not being tough and brutal enough. Gender oppresses girls and women for reasons I’ve been yammering about since before the railroads were built. Yes it is a subject for us to “sit around and theorize about” – all day long, in all weathers, in any company, whenever we feel like it. It’s not owned or monopolized or incorporated or patented by anyone who gets to shut us out of discussions about it.

A political movement that’s shot through with bullshit has am unhappy future. I hope trans activism can start to do better soon.

Speaking of faking up the wildlife footage – you know that trope about lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs? To quote Elaine in Seinfeld: fake fake fake fake.

Snopes has the story:

Some of the most memorable scenes in White Wilderness, Disney’s 1958 Academy Award-winning “True-Life Adventure” nature documentary about wildlife in the snowy northern portions of the North American continent, were ones featuring the death of lemmings who drowned after jumping off cliffs and into the sea. But the scenes shown in the documentary were staged by filmmakers in order to replicate supposed real-life behavior of lemmings that could not be captured on film, and thus did Disney perpetuate for generations to come the legend of periodic, inexplicable mass suicides by lemmings who die by hurling themselves off of cliffs.

The narration in the film accompanying the lemmings scenes begins as follows:

It is said of this tiny animal that it commits mass suicide by rushing into the sea in droves. The story is one of the persistent tales of the Arctic, and as often happens in Man’s nature lore, it is a story both true and false, as we shall see in a moment.

What the audience then sees is what appears to be a horde of lemmings entering the Arctic sea by jumping off cliffs and scampering across rock-covered beaches to enter the water from the shore, whereupon they swim out to sea and (we’re told by the narrator) eventually drown — not quite because they’re simply committing suicide, the film states, but because they’ve supposedly mistaken the vast expanse of the Arctic sea for a lake and assumed there’s a reachable shore just across the water.

But it was faked up.

None of what was shown in the film was realistic lemming behavior, however. Disney’sWhite Wilderness was filmed the Canadian province of Alberta, which is not a native habitat for lemmings and is landlocked with no outlet to the sea. The filmmakers had to import lemmings to Alberta for use in the documentary (reportedly by purchasing them from Inuit children who had caught them in other provinces); through the use of carefully controlled camera angles and tight editing, the filmmakers made no more than a few dozen lemmings look like a much larger number, placing them on turntables to create a frenzied migration effect and then herding them off a cliff and into the water (which was actually the Bow River, not an Arctic sea).

Nine photographers spent three years stitching it all together.

Certainly nature documentaries are notoriously difficult to film as wild animals are not terribly cooperative, and many nature shows and films of this era (including Disney’s “True-Life Adventure” movies and the Wild Kingdom television series) staged events to capture exciting footage for their audiences. Nonetheless, in this case what was depicted on screen was a complete fabrication, not a recreation of real animal behavior that filmmakers were unable to capture on film.

Lemmings do not periodically hurl themselves off cliffs and into the sea. Cyclical explosions in population do occasionally induce lemmings to attempt to migrate to areas of lesser population density, and when such migrations occur, some lemmings do die by falling over cliffs or drowning in lakes or rivers. These deaths are neither acts of “suicide” nor the result of compulsive unreasoning behavior, however; they’re accidental deaths resulting from lemmings’ venturing into unfamiliar territories and being crowded and pushed over dangerous ledges or venturing into the water in a quest to reach new territory.

You know all those desperate refugees who drown in the Mediterranean trying to escape from Syria or Libya? Yeah.

H/t Dale Husband

There’s a popular open Facebook group, Occupy Menstruation.

Today it has a post excited about degendering menstruation.

Degendering Menstruation: It’s Beginning

I see a shift happening in the collective consciousness of the menstrual activist community. People are posting simple reminders that it is not only women who bleed, and slowly this is changing the language chosen for posts—rather than talking about women all of the time, people can start talking about menstruators.

Well thank fuck for that, right? I’m so sick of people talking about women all the time. Goddam women – they suck up all the oxygen in the room and then ask for even more. Women dominate everything, and nobody else can ever get a word in.

There are some woo comments on that post.

Miranda Grey whose next Worldwide Womb Blessing is coming on on Monday, February 22, issued a very inclusive statement recently saying that the Divine Feminine energies belong to everyone. “The Womb Blessing is open to all who resonate with the energy, with or without a womb or a cycle,” she wrote and specifically welcomed trans gender people to explore her womb blessing.

Oh yes the Divine Feminine energies handing out womb blessings – it doesn’t get any better than that.

Menstrual blood is sacred. It contains coded dna reflections of our current levels of consciousness. As well as ancestral information. It also contains the building blocks of life…creating a human. Inserting a vagina onto a man will not be able to replicate that. He doesn’t have the necessary inner workings to bleed as a biological female does.
Man has his own sacred fluid which is sperm containing his genetic and spiritual codes. Yes the collective consciousness now wants to evolve beyond male and female restrictions and according to many it has been on the cards for some time for humanity.

Menstrual blood contains coded DNA reflections of our current levels of consciousness? I did not know that. I thought it contained chunks of endometrial tissue.

Me, I hate the whole linkage of women with that kind of bullshit. I identify as bullshit-averse.

More support for Fran Cowling and indignation with Peter Tatchell. Also – coincidentally? or not? – more bad writing. This time it’s an open letter to Peter by a guy called Chris Hubley. He points out that there have been a lot of articles on the subject of Cowling v Tatchell.

However what is missing from all this is that you were never actually under attack. Fran isn’t a well known figure beyond their own circles, and they weren’t even making these comments publicly – it all happened in private emails between them and the organisers of the event. They had been invited to speak alongside you, and they responded that they didn’t want to.

Wait, I’m lost already. Who? Who weren’t? Who had? Who did?

There are actually reasons for using singular pronouns when you’re talking about one person and plural ones when you’re talking about several, reasons that have nothing to do with transphobia or snooty prescriptivism about language. Hubley seems to be serenely unaware that he’s talking about an individual and a group in the same paragraph, and that he’ll confuse us if he uses “they” when he means the one individual. Also, as I said yesterday, it’s not obvious to me why he’s calling Fran Cowling “they” at all. When it’s not obvious, maybe it’s a silly thing to do.

Now this is something which they are completely within their right to do, freedom of speech is also freedom to not engage. So then it seems the organisers forwarded the email onto you. It’s understandable that you might want to reach out to them, to see if you could talk it through. But they didn’t want to have that conversation with you, which again they are free to do.

Same again but more so. That part is even less clear. Reach out to the organizers, or Cowling? Cowling didn’t want to, or the organizers? Who knows.

Then Hubley says it was uncool of Tatchell to take it all public.

Meanwhile when you google Fran Cowling the results are dominated by articles about you. Everyone is writing about them, and the tone ranges from the mainstream broadsheets cooly reporting on your original statement to aggressive hate filled rants about how Fran represents everything that’s wrong with modern student activism. How do you think this has affected them, and will affect them in the future? So far it’s resulted in them shutting down their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and I’ve heard from those close to her that it’s been incredibly difficult for them…

Ooops! He slipped up there.

There’s one simple fact that you don’t seem to understand in this situation where you’ve painted yourself as the poor victim of an over-zealous oppressor, and that is that you are the one with the power in this situation. Fran is a young student activist, while you are a celebrity with a Guardian column and a foundation named after yourself. Fran Cowling is not a threat to your freedom of speech. However your actions have harmed her in a way which sends a clear message that you are not to be messed with or criticised, even in private, otherwise all hell will break loose and you’ll release the hounds/press releases. Now I don’t know about you but that sure doesn’t sound like a situation conducive to freedom of speech to me.

Ooops! He slipped up again.

As for the substance – he does have something of a point, I guess. Tatchell does have far more media power than Cowling does. But given that she was telling event organizers that he was a Particular Kind of Bad Person, I can well understand why he wanted to set the record straight. I’m not sure what to think about this one.

The BBC has had to tell some of its people they can’t do any more filming unless/until they can show they’ve been to Don’t Fake Your Footage school. How embarrassing.

Staff at the BBC’s flagship Natural History Unit will be banned from programme-making until they have been sent on a tough new anti-fakery course, after two of the division’s shows were found to have contained serious breaches of the corporation’s editorial guidelines.

The editorial guidelines that go “First, fake no footage.”

The BBC Trust, the broadcaster’s governing body, ruled yesterday that Patagonia: Earth’s Secret Paradise, a BBC Two series shown last year, misled viewers by passing off composite footage of different volcanic eruptions as a single event.

Well…if it’s composite footage and they didn’t say that, then yes, they misled viewers. If I see footage of an eruption, I assume it’s one eruption.

Another natural history programme, Human Planet: Deserts – Life in the Furnace, which aired in 2011, included scenes in which a wolf was shown being hunted by Mongolian camel herdsmen. It later emerged that the animal was semi-domesticated, and that the footage had been faked.

Obviates the need for all that tedious waiting for the camel herders to find an actual wolf.

Both errors were described by the Trust as having constituted a “serious breach” of the BBC’s accuracy rules, and are the latest in a series of fakery scandals to have hit the NHU. In 2011 it emerged that scenes in Frozen Planet, voiced by Sir David Attenborough, which showed the birth of polar bear cubs, had actually been filmed in a Dutch wildlife centre.

You know, I think there’s an argument that that’s the more humane way to get that particular kind of footage. It should probably be permissible and fine for tv shows to substitute humane alternatives for some shots as long as you say that’s what you’re doing.

So tilted.

There exists a statement of solidarity with Fran Cowling. It’s not clear who wrote it or posted it or is hosting it – it’s just some words floating in cyberspace. It purports to be on a blog called Solidarity for Students with a subhead (or section) called Student Solidarity, but when you click on either one, it just takes you to the page you’re already on. A bit Alice Through the Looking-glass, that.

So these floating words.

We stand in solidarity with NUS LGBT+ Officer Fran Cowling and support their right to choose who they share a platform with according to their own values and beliefs. We believe fundamentally in the right to freedom of speech and association but that both of these carry with them the right to choose to neither speak nor associate with someone and Fran has every right to exercise those rights however they deem fit.

Wow that’s terrible writing. It’s awful bureaucratic boilerplate, but worse, it loses track of the syntax before it gets to the end of those awful sentences. You can’t believe in something and but that something in the same clause, let alone add yet a third item about what Fran has every right to exercise.

Also why is Fran Cowling “they”? The news outlets didn’t call her “they”; did they all have it wrong? Is it just considered rude now not to call people “they”? If so, why? Are we that ashamed of not being trans?

Anyway.

We are appalled at Peter Tatchell’s actions in dragging a dedicated, hard-working and passionate activist through an appalling media circus which has led to them receiving a torrent of vile abuse with no other apparent purpose than to salve his own ego.

Appalled at Tatchell’s actions, but it’s perfectly fine for Fran Cowling to email all and sundry saying how terrible he is. Why’s that then? Why is she allowed to barf all over him while he is expected to shut up and take it? I bet Fran Cowling isn’t such a “a dedicated, hard-working and passionate activist” as Peter Tatchell is.

We believe that whether Peter Tatchell feels he is racist or transphobic is ultimately irrelevant as none of us is best placed to be an objective judge of our own behaviour and Fran’s decision to listen to the voices of People of Colour and Trans people who have raised issues with his behaviour was the right decision for them to make and should be supported. Whilst also recognising that those opinions are not universal amongst People of Colour and Trans people, nor should there ever be expectation that they would be, because neither group is comprised of identical clones and where differing opinions exist the choice of who to side with remains with the individual.

Okay, there’s the nub of the issue.

Why was Fran’s decision to listen to the voices of People of Colour and Trans people who have raised issues with his behaviour the right decision for her to make? What if they’re wrong? What if they’re making it up? What if they’re both? Why is it just self-evidently true that it’s right for her to listen to them and then email a bunch of people to say he’s shitty?

And then the dismissal of the fact that other members of the People of Identity would contradict the ones Fran Cowling “listened to” on the grounds that everybody’s different is just contemptible. Yes, people are different, and if they differ over the facts about Peter Tatchell, then some are right and others are wrong, and it makes a difference which ones Fran Cowling “listens to.”

If the composer of this mess is a student, I seriously hope intensive tutoring is available. It’s desperately needed.

A friend had to go the the ER for sudden crippling back pain. They refused to give my friend adequate pain relief. They have this helpful sign telling people what they can’t have:

The Journal.ie draws our attention to a Der Stürmer-level magazine cover from Poland:

A right-wing Polish magazine cover emblazoned with the headline “The Islamic rape of Europe” triggered a storm of criticism on social media, with some comments comparing it to World War II fascist propaganda.

The cover of the news weekly “w Sieci” (In the net) showed a posed photo of a blue-eyed blonde woman, wrapped in an EU flag, looking terrified as she is groped by hairy-armed men.

Hairy-armed men whose skin is a lot browner than hers.

Bad, bad stuff. Don’t do that.