That’s ok Sonny, we know you meant well. Get on with the rest of your life.

A young man who was filmed punching a 71-year-old woman in the head during the heated Posie Parker counter-protest in Auckland last year has been granted a discharge without conviction and permanent name suppression.

Because men matter and women don’t, you see.

Judge Glubb said the gravity of a conviction on the young man would be out of proportion to the seriousness of his offending.

He fractured her skull. With his fist. In her face.

In a victim impact statement, she told the court that since the assault, she had been unable to go out and interact with people. She could not sleep without taking medication and any noise caused her severe stress, she said. “The crime itself has had a huge impact on my general wellbeing,” she said.

…

“I’m satisfied by a reasonably clear margin a conviction would be out of all proportion to the gravity of the offence,” Judge [Kevin] Glubb said.

I’m honestly astounded that a judge would say that. He’s saying a man punching a woman in the face so hard that he fractures her skull is trivial.

Open season on women. Go ahead, boys, you’re allowed.

Hell and damnation. The large young man who punched an elderly woman in the face and broke her eye socket in NZ last year has gotten away with it. He even gets to remain anonymous.

It’s just fucking open season on women, isn’t it.

JKR is kicking the ant nest today. Doing a fine job of it, too.

I’m jealous of “a lot of you think the UN should intervene whenever women bruise your egos.”

Uh oh uh oh! She roused the Willoughby!

How dare you! Recognized in law AND REALITY! I missed that bit – when did reality announce that it recognizes Willoughby as officially a woman? Someone alert the BBC.

Updating to add –

This is what it’s all about. Fact and opinion. It’s not an opinion that men are not women, it’s a fact, but it’s treated as if it were an opinion, and (not coincidentally) a forbidden one at that. Cath Walton at The Critic:

A funny thing happened to me on the way to BBC redundancy. I was put through a lengthy disciplinary process for saying truthful things about sex and gender — not quite the same as the very visible farce that unfolded last week around Justin Webb and the complaint against him, but an earlier example of the BBC’s festering problem with accuracy around biological sex.

The festering problem is the “It’s true but you mustn’t say it” one.

(There are plenty of truths one shouldn’t say in ordinary everyday non-journalistic life, but journalism is a different thing altogether. If it ain’t true it ain’t journalism.)

The truth has become punishable: the lie that trans-identified men are women is not. So here’s my tale, and I hope it helps explain the BBC’s contortionist thinking on accuracy and impartiality around sex and gender.

A couple of years ago the BBC started using the word “cis” as if it meant something real.

The BBC Academy teaches that it’s important journalists don’t adopt activist language as their own — and I feared that “cis” was to become normalised by repeated use, just as gender identity did.

It’s fascinating that the BBC teaches that because good grief.

So I decided to write a Twitter thread about “cis”, figuring that at least if someone complained, then editorial managers would have to read it, and any complaints would themselves prove it was a contested political term that shouldn’t be adopted.

The idea that if something is true, it is not an opinion, is at the root of this journalistic dilemma.

And the whole thing, really. The whole war over trans ideology. If it were true it wouldn’t be an ideology, but it’s not true, so there you go.

It explained that using “cis” involves accepting a system of belief underpinned by an understanding that there are two types of women, male women and female women, and this is as yet scientifically unsupported. (I didn’t really need the “as yet” but I thought I’d cover my bases).  

Or rather underpinned by a misunderstanding that there are two types of women. Underpinned by a confusion, or more bluntly, a lie. (Of course she didn’t want to put it that way to her bosses; I’m just pointing out how much truth she had to leave out because the BBC is so corrupted by this stupid ideology.)

Within about an hour I was told to take it down by my then boss on the News Channel for allegedly breaching the social media rules. After an afternoon of emailing, we brought another editor into the conversation. But neither was able to explain which part of the thread was untrue, and therefore might fall into the error of opinion.

Spoiler: they never were able to do that. They still aren’t.

So there was a hearing, there were reports, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, all without being able to find anything untrue in what she said.

Then Russia attacked Ukraine and she told her boss she was willing to delete, because she wanted to move on.

By then, deletion wasn’t enough. This is the most extraordinary part. I was told to admit to managers that I’d been wrong and would never do it again, or the disciplinary would proceed.

This wasn’t just policing of public speech, which is part and parcel of everyone’s contract. It was a demand that I internally confess my wrongthink, and repent. Obviously I wasn’t going to do that. Everything I’d said was true, and no one had been able to identify a single opinion I’d publicly expressed. In fact, to this day, that is the case.  

And that sums up this whole god damn tedious war, doesn’t it. All we’re doing is telling the truth, and the result is endless denunciation and shunning and expulsion and sometimes outright violence.

What this says, in effect, is that if the facts are on one side of a debate, we mustn’t articulate them, because it would reveal your thinking. The very willingness to make certain indisputable statements about biological sex is the crime, because gender activists have rendered the debate landscape so toxic and chilling that truth has become an emblem of defiance rather than clarity.  

…

Many people have understood for some time that this is the case, but the Executive Complaints Unit ruling has now made it public policy. Biological sex has officially became a mere “viewpoint”. 

See also: the sex of men who murder other men by strangling them.

Voting for stupid.

[W]ith an entirely preventable outbreak of measles spreading across Florida, medical experts are questioning if quackery really has become official health policy in the nation’s third most-populous state.

As the highly contagious disease raged in a Broward county elementary school, [Florida Surgeon General Joseph] Ladapo, a politically appointed acolyte of Florida’s far-right governor Ron DeSantis, wrote to parents telling them it was perfectly fine for parents to continue to send in their unvaccinated children.

…

Ladapo’s advice deferring to parents or guardians [on] a decision about school attendance directly contradicts the official recommendation of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which calls for a 21-day period of quarantine for anybody without a history of prior infection or immunization.

It’s not a situation in which the glories of free choice should trump medical expertise. Choice is a good thing, ceteris paribus, but avoiding a dangerous disease is an even better thing.

It is also in keeping with Ladapo’s previous maverick proclamations about vaccines that health professionals say pose an unacceptable danger to the health of Florida residents. They include official guidance to shun mRNA Covid-19 boosters based on easily disprovable conspiracy theories that the shots alter human DNA and can potentially cause cancer – “scientific nonsense” in the view of Dr Ashish Jha, a former White House Covid response coordinator.

Yes but you see they’re all in on the plot. Just ask Naomi Wolff.

Reporting false information, incidentally, is something Ladapo is familiar with himself. He was found to have personally manipulated data in a 2022 study of Covid-19 vaccines to wrongly assert they posed an elevated risk of cardiac illness or death in young men.

Shouldn’t that get him disqualified? At a bare minimum?

Ladapo has been hailed a “superstar” by DeSantis, who sidelined then dumped his predecessor Scott Rivkees for contradicting the governor’s position on social distancing and face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ladapo became a vocal cheerleader of the governor’s anti-mask, vaccine and lockdown decrees; and was a prominent member of Frontline Doctors of America, a fringe cluster of radical physicians that pushed ineffective medicines such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Oh well. It’s not the most populous state in the country. Texas and California have more.

Happy to oblige.

Storyhouse part 2. To recap: Storyhouse Chester did a purported Weekend of Events Celebrating Women & Girls which included women on the stage berating women in the audience for not being on board with talking about men who playact women at an event celebrating women.

The chief berater on the stage, I’ve now learned, was Patsy Stevenson, the woman who bounced to fame by making the Sarah Everard vigil All About Her. Here she is again:

Listen to what she says. Those pesky women in the audience asking questions get trans people murdered. She actually said that. Someone applauded when she said that.

On the upside, there were roughly 40 people in the audience. The places seats 800.

Storyhouse’s promo for Patsy Stevenson’s talk:

Join us for an impactful afternoon with Patsy Stevenson, an award-winning Campaigner, Equal Rights Activist, public speaker, and writer. Patsy, named Harper’s Bazaar Woman of the Year, rose to prominence after her arrest at the Sarah Everard Vigil captured public attention. 

That is, she exploited Everard’s murder to “rise to prominence.”

Also: “impactful.” Get out. Go on, get out, right now.

In her keynote speech, Patsy will delve into the essence of activism, sharing personal anecdotes and the unexpected journey of her arrest photo going viral. She’ll address the issue of misogyny within the police force and explore community-driven solutions to reclaim our streets for safer walks home. Additionally, Patsy will unveil exciting news about her forthcoming book, set to be published in Spring 2024. 

In short, she’ll talk about herself.

This house is your house…unless, of course, you are a feminist woman.

“Proudly trans inclusive” means “proudly feminist excluding.”

Behold, how inclusive:

It was a Weekend of Events Celebrating Women & Girls and yet…

Hadley Freeman:

The convicted murderer Scarlet Blake, previously known as Fangze Wang, is male. That is why he is going to a men’s prison, after being found guilty last week of strangling Jorge Martin Carreno in what was described in court as a sexually motivated killing. And yet, Thames Valley police have recorded Blake’s crime as having been committed by a woman: “Blake identified as a female in custody. As such, Blake is recorded as female in our recording system,” a spokesman for the force said.

That’s stupid. What if Blake identified as Rishi Sunak? Or Charles Windsor? Or Maggie Smith? Or a detective chief inspector with Thames Valley Police?

Yet because gender ideologues have energetically promoted the idea that gender identity is sacred, and that a man who says he’s a woman should be treated with the same respect as one who comes out as gay, the media, the police and even the court have dutifully referred to Blake as “she”.

You know what else is “sacred” i.e. worthy of respect in a democratic society? Telling the truth. That applies especially to items like who bashed and strangled and drowned this man?

…as a teenager Blake was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock in London, the NHS’s only youth gender clinic, which has since been shut after numerous concerns about its methods.

He was given puberty blockers at 17 and hormone treatment the following year. He is now 26, so this would mean he was under the Tavistock’s care in about 2015-2016, a period when — as Hannah Barnes details in her 2023 book about the Tavistock, Time to Think — the clinic was prescribing blockers with especial enthusiasm, even though it was known that they affect bone density and cognitive and sexual development.

I suspect they don’t affect cognitive development in a good way.

Oh dear, no one seems to have noticed.

Learn to spell “head.”

Depressing for them that no one paid any attention.

Is this the V&A? Looks like the V&A.

Why this object in this place? What’s it got to do with the price of food?

Ok, I know, no need to shout – no reason and nothing. A moment of attention on Twitter. Achievement unlocked.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Of the communinny.

Of course the outsize benefit of identifying as trans is why we’re seeing more and more charlatans seize on trans identities as a get-rich-quick scheme, like Dylan Mulvaney, Abigail Thorn, and thousands and thousands more cropping up everywhere.

Plus there’s the fact that when you’re inside a “community” that brooks no dissent, you’re not going to say anything if you’re unhappy. If you do a comprehensive survey of Scientologists, they’ll report being the happiest, most satisfied people in the country — a 100% perfect satisfaction rate. After all, Scientology is the greatest discovery on the planet, and on all the other planets, too! They’ll also report that Scientologists face more discrimination from outsiders than any other group. That outsiders who don’t agree with the in-group’s most bizarre demands are an existential threat is a core tenet of any cult or sect. (And it’s actually true: rational ideas do indeed threaten people’s commitment to Scientology, or gender identity ideology.)

Honestly, why do people bother doing surveys like this? We already know exactly what responses are and aren’t allowed to be expressed by this group. What’s next? “Over 99% of Muslims in Saudi Arabia report a strong belief in the holy truth of the Quran and high levels of satisfaction with their religion.” No fucking shit; thanks for clearing that up.

Interesting. One football club drops a player who was charged with domestic abuse, and another football club grabs him up. Thanks, lads.

On Thursday, with his team mired in the Championship’s relegation zone, [Sheffield Wednesday head coach Danny] Rohl announced his intention to sign free-agent left-back Nico Schulz. Schulz had been training at the club.

Why is he a free agent? He was released by Borussia Dortmund last year after being charged with domestic abuse. Schulz denied the allegations.

Legal proceedings came to an end this week when the case against him was dropped. Schulz agreed to pay €150,000 (£128,000) to domestic violence charities — but was not convicted, with the case officially dropped.

SO let’s err on the side of “the bitch lied” and get on with training.

Schulz’s former partner reported him to German police over domestic abuse allegations in June 2022. The Dortmund district court approved charges against him in February 2023, before the city’s public prosecutor brought those charges to court last December.

The public prosecutor’s office declared charges over the following three accusations:

• (January 2020) After throwing a cup of water on the floor, Schulz allegedly kicked her in the stomach, pushed her against a door, pulled her hair, and threw her against a mirror.
• (March 2020) Straight after coming out of the shower, Schulz pulled her down, kicked her stomach, choked her, and hit her twice.
• (August 2020) While pregnant, he targeted her with misogynistic language, took a key from her, and spat in her face, leading to her fleeing into a nearby business.

But she didn’t want to give evidence, so

…this week the court decided to drop the case if he paid five different charities, including one focused on domestic violence, €30,000 (£26,000) each within three months. He will not have a criminal record.

So Borussia Dortmund thought it worth dropping him but Sheffield Wednesday thought it worth hiring him.

How nice for him. Not so nice for the women he cheated.

Nice smirk, too.

Survey finds.

A survey of more than 90,000 transgender people in the U.S. — the largest nationwide survey of the community ever — found that trans people continue to experience workplace and medical discrimination. However, the overwhelming majority of them still report more life satisfaction after having transitioned. 

That’s all very well but it’s far from the only question. You could let a bunch of people do whatever they want and then survey them and find they liked doing whatever they want. It’s not surprising that people like to do something they want to do. The question remains, what about everyone else?

To be blunt, at this point I don’t even care whether trans people experience more life satisfaction or not. I’m too busy caring about the rest of us and our life satisfaction. Other things being equal, sure, it would be great if everyone had peak life satisfaction, but when one tiny set of people’s life satisfaction depends on fracturing the rights of women and same-sex attracted people and confused children, then I can’t really celebrate the news that our trans siblings are enjoying their new prominence.

Naomi Wolf apparently doesn’t realize that weather can change from day to day, or hour to hour.

She also appears to have cirrus clouds confused with cumulus clouds. Cirrus are the ones that don’t have crisp edges while cumulus are the ones that do.

Doc Stock on brilliant form at Unherd:

Is it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there were some classic stories served up this week for civilians to laugh at.

In the Daily Mail we read that policies at Glasgow University and Imperial College London now direct staff and students to avoid the phrase “the most qualified person should get the job” because this counts as a microaggression.

So the least qualified person should get the job? Innnnteresting.

Over in the US, yet another professor resplendent in beadwork and buckskin has admitted to falsely claiming possession of Native American ancestry. And an article just out in the Applied Linguistics Review provides a brand new excuse to lazy researchers: the requirement of a literature review in some disciplines imposes “particular configurations of privileged knowledge” amounting to an “enactment of symbolic violence”.

It’s true enough. That whole system in which people have to learn a lot of material in order to qualify to do various kinds of work is inherently hierarchical. It’s grossly unfair to the lazy, and is why I’ve never been a surgeon or an engineer or a Supreme Court justice. Many of us can say the same. The problem is, that same many of us also want to be safe getting on a plane. We want the skilled professionals and we want to skip all that pesky learning stuff. Taking the “privileged knowledge” route feels good in the moment but not so much when you need an expert.

The organisation that first uncovered the story about microaggressions is the Committee for Academic Freedom, newly formed by philosophy lecturer Edward Skidelsky to push back against institutional incursions on free inquiry. During drinks at the committee’s launch, where I was a guest speaker, more astonishing tales were aired. I heard of endocrinologists at one Russell Group institution being forced to disavow binary theories of biological sex; of male trans-identified dance students at a prestigious arts establishment insisting they be allowed to perform lead ballerina roles and be hoisted aloft during lifts; and of a reading list in one department with pronouns added for every cited author, including those of Osama Bin Laden (“He/Him”, in case you’re wondering).

Well now how did they know that? Did they ask him before that encounter in the secret compound?

Sadly, there are few if any left to complain.

…it is still true that most employees within relevant institutions remain po-faced and acquiescent in the light of blatantly stupid initiatives by their managers and colleagues. Partly this is because they are frightened to do otherwise, as new research also published this week by CAF suggests. But partly, perhaps, it’s because nearly all of the personality types who might in the past have viciously mocked, scathingly critiqued, or otherwise put up an intellectual fight have been weeded out of the system.

Leaving behind a wasteland of piety and censorious meddling.

Part of the problem, Stock goes on, is the idea of the student as customer.

For trailing in the wake of the new breed of customer came the smooth professionals good at customer service — lecturers adept at producing fancy PowerPoints and ticking items off on promotion checklists, but low on intellectual aggression and the will to stand against the mob. Out were the mercurial and antisocial intellectuals of yore, in love with complex ideas for their own sake and gloriously scathing when others trampled all over them…

And yet we need such characters more than ever. Or at least, we need to adopt their magnificently scathing contempt for daft claims, sloppy thinking, and fallacious reasoning. Not all ideas are created equal, and academics must stop acting as if they are: nit-picking endlessly over small intellectual differences but going quiet about the big ones. It is admirable that there are legislators and organisations now talking about the value of academic freedom in the abstract, and attempting to create a space for it. But unless thinkers fill that space with arguments that take deliberate aim at the stupidity of colleagues and managers, it will remain a vacuum.

But we’re not even allowed to say “stupidity” or “daft” or any related words because that’s “ableist.”

And philosophy itself has a crucial role to play here. So many humanities departments house people who call themselves philosophers but who are no such thing, according to the traditional understanding of that term. Out of politeness or fear of intellectual confrontation, they have been allowed by actual philosophers to get away with it. 

Judith Butler please note.

The predictable result is thousands upon thousands of former students who sincerely believe that truth is relative, sex is fluid, cis het white men are scum and all the rest of it. We need to wrest the discipline back from these charlatans.

Starting with Judith Butler, please.

Permanent fires:

As of Friday, the Smokehouse Creek Fire had affected more than a million acres, making it the largest wildfire in Texas history, and one of the biggest in the history of the country. Still only 15 percent contained, it has crossed into Oklahoma, leaving in its wake herds of dead cattle and dozens of burned homes. At least two people have died. The forecast is for what people in the firefighting business call “fire weather” — hot, dry and windy. Under these conditions, the dozen fires in the region could, theoretically, keep burning indefinitely.

Texans know that fires aren’t uncommon in the Panhandle this time of year, and neither is snow. But huge, lethal fires like Smokehouse Creek represent something different. Winter fires on this scale signal a much larger disruption to climate stability that will distort not only our concept of seasons, but everything we do and care about.

…

For weeks now, red flag warnings from the National Weather Service indicating elevated wildfire risk have been popping up all across the United States — from the Mexican border to the Great Lakes and the Florida panhandle. Similar warnings are appearing north of the Canadian border. On Feb. 20, the province of Alberta, the Texas-size petro-state above Montana, declared the official start to fire season. This was nearly two weeks earlier than last year, and six weeks earlier than a couple of decades ago. Alberta is in the heart of Canada, a famously cold and snowy place, and yet some 50 wildfires are burning across that province. In neighboring British Columbia, where I live, there are nearly 100 active fires, a number of which carried over from last year’s legendary fire season (the worst in Canadian history) linked to low snowpack and above average winter temperatures.

…What is happening in North America is not a regional aberration; it’s part of a global departure — what climate scientists call a phase shift. The past year has seen virtually every metric of planetary distress lurch into uncharted territory: sea surface temperature, air temperature, polar ice loss, fire intensity — you name it, it is off the charts. 

Gonna be a bumpy ride.

Waterstones spits in our eye again.

Juno Dawson ain’t no female author.

Don’t brag at us about how you’re celebrating female authors and then start with a man who pretends to be a woman. That’s insulting.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on A new power.

It’s insane. This bill is so childish. It’s basically the BAD PEOPLE BILL. They’ve decided there are BAD, HATEFUL PEOPLE and they must legislate to punish them. But they’re leaving it ENTIRELY UP TO LATER to define who these bad people are.

The people supporting this bill aren’t even asking WHO will be doing this crucial defining. It’s a nightmare.

It’s literally impossible to ethically support a bill that proposes a bunch of penalties — right up to the nation’s maximum penalty of life imprisonment — before anyone has bothered to set the fucking definitional terms of what they’re criminalizing. It’s purely an irrational appeal to emotion. That always works out well, right?

Ban it first; define it later.

I can predict all the excuses:

“The definition is self-explanatory, ok? It’s just hate.” I can hear people argue that. “Look, hate is just bad. No one has ever politicized the definition of hate before, right?”

(Ridiculous!)

It’s going to become life and death what counts as hate in Canada. But nobody can fucking bother to decide who makes that call. There are stupid situations, and then there are STUPID SITUATIONS.

And yet, even SKEPTICS of this turd of a bill fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book: the original draft was LIGHT YEARS WORSE, and now that the government has retreated and then returned to proffer a “moderate” proposal RELATIVE TO THE ORIGINAL SHITSHOW, the loudest critics have fallen for it and they’re cooing about how reasonable the new version of the bill is (Overton Window Suckers), and they’re now placated enough to not be raising nuclear alarms…

I despair at the state of Canada right now. The Online Harms Bill seems very obviously like a disaster to me.

Oh dear. That’s such a rookie error. The scorn and hilarity must be scalding for the “Prof”.

O what an ignoble mind is here o’erthrown.