The language game – tricks all the way down.
One, “minority.” Montgomerie is a white man, but he’s pretending to be part of an oppressed minority (which is what “minority” is shorthand for in these contexts). White men as such are not an oppressed minority. It could be that he’s homeless or disabled or an immigrant but I don’t think he is any of those things.
Two, “healthcare.” The medical experimentation done on trans people isn’t healthcare; it’s more like malpractice.
Rachel Cooke reviews Laurie Penny’s new “feminist” book:
If the tone of this book is almost comically relentless – if Penny, whose pronouns are they/them, says something once, they say it 54 times – it’s also oddly reminiscent of a superannuated self-help manual, its assumptions seemingly based mostly on the experiences of its author and their friends, a focus group to whom every possible Bad Thing has happened at least once (so handy).
…
For the reader, especially the reader who has never read a book or a newspaper, never watched any television or seen a film, Penny has all sorts of revelations.
Ouch! That does sound so exactly like LP – forever pointing out the obvious as if she’d only just noticed it.
But don’t be disheartened. Penny has good news, too. Like them, we may eventually be able to overcome our addiction to “predators with pretty eyes and a vacancy for a secret side-piece”. We may even wind up loving ourselves instead of just waiting around “for a man” to find us lovable (for someone who identifies as gender-queer, and who therefore has some trouble with the word woman, which does not reflect her “lived experience”, Penny uses “man” with an abandon that is quite dizzying).
Well you see men don’t have cis privilege, so it’s fine to talk about them, but women oppress trans women just by existing, so they have to be deleted from the discourse at all times.
Most crucially of all, something is now – out in the world, I mean – fighting to break out, as if from a shell: something “wet and angry”, with “claws”. By this, I think Penny is referring to the ongoing activism that was stirred by #MeToo, but I suppose it is possible – I’m troubled by the word “wet” – that I’ve got this entirely wrong.
If only Laurie Penny could write as well as Rachel Cooke.
(For a second I thought “But she would still be Laurie Penny,” but then I realized no, she wouldn’t. You have to be able to think well in order to write well, and a Laurie Penny who could think well would be a very different Laurie Penny indeed.)
But the reader waits in vain for Penny to offer solutions to the injustice she describes, for serious analysis of any kind. The best they can do is to suggest that affordable childcare might be of help. No shit, Sherlock.
The chapter devoted to sex work is utterly enraging, and not only because Penny clearly knows so little about it (where are the interviews, the statistics, the thoughts of experts in this field?). Having painstakingly explained that many women enjoy sex – that they do not, contrary to the old myths, only endure it, the better to keep their men happy – Penny then accuses those women, feminists and others, who are critical of the sex industry of, yes, a sort of twisted envy, because why should some women get paid for what others have to do for free? I’m afraid I clutched my own pearls (inherited, I should say, from a grandmother who left school at 13) at this point.
Having spent half of my life hoping for feminism’s revival – for it to be, if not fashionable, then proudly worn and meaningfully directed – it is lowering beyond words to see a serious publisher describe this ill-edited, ill-considered drivel as a manifesto for the cause. This isn’t feminism. This is a swizz.
But if it identifies as feminism…?
Sarah Ditum reviews Grace Lavery’s book for the Times:
And there is so much penis here. Not just in the title (if there’s a better literary pun this year than A Heartbreaking of Work of Staggering Penis, I’ll be highly surprised), but all the way through. On the first page, Lavery is having penis trouble. Since starting on hormones, she’s been experiencing semi-erections: her penis (a phrase I pray I never get used to writing) feels “as though I were laying my own miscarried foetus across my hand”.
Ah yes that’s very Lavery. He knows it will infuriate, and that’s why he does it. He loves to taunt women that way.
While trans-inclusive feminist writers speak delicately about identity, Lavery goes on a taboo-trashing rampage. She doesn’t quite ascend to the outrageous heights of fellow trans author Andrea Long Chu (whose 2020 book Females: A Concern defined the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”), but Lavery seems to have a good time trying to match them.
Life would be so dreary and empty if men like Chu and Lavery couldn’t taunt women and get applauded for it by people who consider themselves feminists.
… this is a relentlessly non-standard memoir. Chronology is smashed up, genres are rifled, truth is very rarely the point. “I’m not trying to be clever,” she says at one point, before adding, “obviously the book in general is an attempt to be clever”. But the fourth-wall breaking and self-referentiality gets tired fast: BS Johnson, but with narcissism instead of mordant self-loathing.
I suspect Lavery is too busy loathing women to have time to loathe himself. Besides…would he ever?
Yeah no.
“People are more than their sex organs. People are more than their sex organs, you cannot reduce a human being down to their sex organs. I’m a woman, it does not matter what is in my pants.”
Yeah it does. Knowing which is which isn’t “reducing people down to” anything, it’s just knowing which is which. We need to know which is which, for a whole slew of reasons, including safety. Vehement guy with curly hair telling us otherwise is just wrong.
“It is not about physicality, woman is something far deeper and far more complex than that.”
Yes, physicality is so crude and simple and of the earth earthy, we Platonists and spiritualists know that is all dross and what matters is the soul.
Adults who work at a university?
Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.
There are no “neopronouns.” There is slang, argot, jargon, dialect, in-group code, and so on – but no neopronouns. Nobody needs lectures on how to make discourse more muddled and laborious and full of traps.
The University of Bristol has provided guidance for its staff on “using pronouns at work”, urging them to declare in verbal introductions and email signatures whether they use he/him, she/her or they/them, to support transgender students.
Even the Telegraph can’t get it right. We don’t “use” the pronouns other people refer to us – it’s the other people who use them, and it’s nonsense to talk about “using” the pronouns other people call us. Also, this nonsense does nothing to “support transgender students.”
But unlike myriad pronoun manuals on other campuses, Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns”, where colourful digital icons – commonplace on social media – are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation.
Naturally. Thin end of the wedge, innit – unless it’s mockery. How, by the way, does one use a colorful digital icon to represent gender in spoken conversation? Does one keep little digital icons in one’s pocket to whip out on these occasions?
Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments”. The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.”
Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline”. The word nyan is Japanese for “meow”.
This may all be very meaningful for small groups of intense post-adolescents who haven’t grown up enough yet, but for actual functioning adults working in universities it’s an insult.
The Telegraph understands that a University of Bristol staff member was invited to a meeting with a senior diversity manager after objecting to being encouraged to add pronouns to emails, fearing that it undermined the concept of binary biological sex.
Ah a senior diversity manager was it. There’s your problem right there.
Speaking of oversharing and related issues…poor old Hazza is becoming such a joke. It’s a funny joke though, so I’m not complaining.
I see from his latest video that Prince Harry, living in California, is now fluent in Peloton, or at least some kind of Yoga-with-Adrienne-style “mental toolbox” iterative blah. Speaking from beneath a sprig of newly farmed carrot hair with a panel of sculpted execs, the prince explained in an interview on Thursday for his wellness app how he dealt with the extreme mental burden of living in a $14 million mansion with 16 loos.
Every day he strives for “mental fitness”. He will try to find a “slate of white space” after the school run. “I now put in half an hour or 45 minutes in the morning when one of the kids has gone to school and the other is taking a nap,” he said.
Ah yes, he “puts in” that 30 to 45 minutes – sweating at the coal face.
How does he think it looks to claim he has suffered from “burnout” when the most stressful thing he now experiences is probably the occasional subpar morning affirmation and not-quite-right American-style grass? Burnout from what, anyway? From taking four private jets a week? From his wife? Everything he says assumes poor mental health is the default, which is, in itself, mad.
Burnout from being absurd, maybe?
I wonder what the Kween herself is thinking as she watches Harry’s latest attempt to dress up navel-gazing as “boldly committing to inner work”. Today is the beginning of her Platinum Jubilee — or, as one run of souvenir crockery hilariously misspelt it, her “Platinum Jubbly”.
As a woman who specialises in sincere, short and savagely to-the-point haikus — “recollections may vary” — she must look at Harry with his sprawling, meaningless bromides and wonder what has gone wrong in the past 70 years.
To be fair, that’s the other end of the spectrum as opposed to a happy or sensible or compromise middle. There’s excessive navel gazing on the one hand and there’s not looking behind the curtains at all ever on the other hand.
Harry claims he is now so mentally fragile that he needs to surround himself with “people who I would happily have washing the [mental] windscreen”. Charles, of course, calls such people “valets”. I find it interesting that nearly everything Harry speaks about involves not what he can do for others but what others can do for him.
That’s the thing. So many people confuse “thinking” with “thinking about the self.” There’s an infinite supply of things to think about that are not the self. Bonus: doing that tends to put the self in perspective, at least a little. You get your “the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” from directing your attention out instead of in, and that’s a good thing.
The Metropolitan Police is looking worse by the day.
Back in 2011 –
Kristina O’Connor, now 33, called 101 after being attacked by a group of men who tried to steal her phone. When she was interviewed about the mugging by Detective Chief Inspector James Mason, who later became a right-hand man to Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner, he instead turned the conversation towards her love life and asked her out for dinner.
In emails sent from his official account, Mason, 43, then a detective sergeant, told her he was as “determined in my pursuit of criminals as I am of beautiful women”. Describing her as “amazingly hot”, he said that rejection of an officer’s advances was “frowned upon”.
What an interesting concept. It means that reporting a crime, for women, entails a risk of rape, and not just rape but rape you can’t report to the police because it’s a police who raped you. If the victim is not allowed to “reject an officer’s advances” then that officer is free to rape the victim. I had no idea this was official Met policy.
After her complaint, Mason, who received a commendation for resilience and professionalism in his handling of the response to the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack, was found guilty at a hearing last year of gross misconduct that was sexually motivated. He kept his job and rank and still serves in the Met.
And that’s why she’s now suing them.
The force has faced heavy criticism since PC Wayne Couzens abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard, 33, last March. Last month the academic Dr Koshka Duff was paid compensation after she was strip-searched by Met officers, with others laughing as they said: “What’s that smell? Oh, it’s her knickers.” Last week the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that officers at the Met’s Charing Cross branch had joked in messages about rape, domestic violence and killing black children.
Hur hur, smelly knickers, you’re not allowed to say no to the police, hur hur.
Interesting plot twist:
Her legal case, supported by the Good Law Project, which has taken on the Met for its initial failure to investigate the No 10 parties, also names Mason and the IOPC as interested parties.
So Jolyon can get something right.
Marie Le Conte writes for the New Statesman and has the Approved Views. She’s sad about those people who have the Unapproved Views – they’re so obsessed.
Her thoughts on this were prompted by a Mumsnet discussion with MPs Stella Creasy and Caroline Nokes on what women should care about.
Though some questions focused on childcare for politicians and media attacks on the appearance of female MPs, the vast majority concerned one topic. “Should males be included in women-only shortlists?” was one. “Would you be happy if Labour’s first woman leader were a transwoman? (Biological male)” was another.
Le Conte found it “odd” that so many women asked questions about that one topic. She tweeted about it and got more replies than she wanted.
I am not here to complain about it or to make a case for transgender rights. I am not going to convince anyone to change their mind in a handful of sentences, and see no point in attempting to do so. Instead, I would like to point to two worrying developments in online feminism, which I believe were made depressingly clear by this incident.
The first is the obsessiveness of the “gender critical” movement.
We think about it and talk about it way too much. She, the normal one, doesn’t think about it that much, and neither do her trans friends. Normal people just get on with life. If only gender critical feminists were normal like her.
This leads us to the second point. By deciding to centre their online persona and their feminism around gender issues, these women now refuse to recognise the legitimacy of those with opposing views. It does not matter that feminism has always had strands and internal disagreements; if you support transgender people, you cannot be a feminist.
What would a feminism that doesn’t focus on gender issues look like? Like a big box with nothing in it, right? Like zero. Like empty space. Like nothing. She might as well rebuke BLM for focusing on racial issues.
As for opposing views and internal disagreements – as with everything, there are minor disagreements that needn’t lead to a split and then there are fundamental ones that can’t be ignored or accommodated. If you think men who say they are women are literally women, and that feminism is for them too, and not just “too” but “instead” and “more,” then your feminism is no longer feminism. It’s all in the “fem” part.
I have been called a handmaiden, a “pick me” girl, and been accused of vying for male attention. It does not matter that I have been a feminist all my life and have the receipts to prove it; my views on gender apparently mean I have taken the side of sexist men.
If your “views on gender” include the view that men are women if they say they are, then I don’t know what to tell you. You are in fact in solidarity with men in a disagreement over what feminism is, so yes, it’s true that you’re not a feminist, despite the receipts.
Ok now all you aspiring tv writers – I have just the thing for you. Vulnerable lawyers. Comedy, not drama. I owe the idea to Sarah Phillimore and Dennis Kavanagh.
“Bringing your whole self to work” is the very last thing people should be doing. No no no no no that’s all wrong: leave most of your self at home. Nobody wants to see that. Nobody wants the moods, the hidden injuries, the regrets, the resentments, the obsessions – none of it. Do not bring it to work.
That’s it! The new Fawlty Towers crossed with Boston Legal: vulnerable lawyers.
I’m not even kidding. It could be stomach-hurtingly funny.
Lily Maynard takes an in-depth look at Sidhbh Gallagher, a woman who is making a lot of money cutting girls’ breasts off.
Between 2015 and 2018 she reports that she performed more than 200 surgeries on trans-identified people, removing and reconstructing body parts and tissue in what she calls ‘gender affirmation surgery’.
…
Her practice specialises in performing elective double mastectomies on gender dysphoric young women at a cost of around $9-12,000. ‘Top surgery’ is her signature dish, but there are plenty of other strings to Gallagher’s bow- and she offers something for the lads as well.
She’ll cut their testicles off for a price.
It’s Spring 2018. “Summer is coming!” Gallagher reminds her followers, retweeting photos of a selection of the young women whose healthy breasts she has removed. Once you’ve had your breasts cut off, of course, there’s no need for the T shirt or bikini top that society expects women to ‘cover up’ with. Let the fun times begin!
Hm. Which is more irksome – wearing a T shirt or having your breasts cut off? I think I’m going to go with door number 2.
Lily provides screenshots of a bunch of tweets showing post-mastectomy women enjoying the luxury of being outside with no shirt on, and a string of frivolous remarks by Gallagher about the awesomeness of the surgically-altered chest. Such as:
‘Monday morning masculoplasty motivation! Let’s make shirtless fall pictures a thing!’
That’s not creepy at all.
What about the ones with regrets?
In 2021 Gallagher recorded a short video for LGBTQ and ALL, on the importance of mental health.
She spoke of how some patients experience feelings of guilt or regret – or even become clinically depressed – after surgery. This could happen after any surgery, she hastens to add, but feelings of guilt and regret surrounding elective surgery can make it worse. It’s important
it isto encourage patients to plan in advance ‘while they’re in their right mind’ how they will deal with post-op depression, for example by booking an appointment with their therapist in advance.
Or they could avoid the post-op depression by not getting their tits cut off at all, but Gallagher doesn’t suggest that.
The darker side of ‘top surgery’, the physical and mental health issues that it may cause- or fail to resolve- is not one that young women tend to talk about on social media. Instagram is full of teenage girls who are convinced this surgery will be an answer to all their problems. Expressing regret is a great way to get yourself ostracised from the online community that lovebombs you before your own surgery; from the other girls who would do almost anything to fulfil their own ‘top surgery’ dream.
It sounds like any other cult. Most cults don’t cut women’s breasts off though.
Having your breasts removed with Dr Gallagher costs $9-$12,000. It’s hard to get all, if any of it covered on insurance. Many of Gallagher’s patients have worked two jobs, their parents have remortgaged their houses; some have crowdfunded for their surgery.
But it’s worth it, because you can go outside without a T shirt.
Gallagher has a startling social media presence and an attitude towards her potential clients like no other surgeon I’ve come across. The best word I can think of to describe it is frivolous. Nothing is serious. Everything will be fine! She is the cool, quirky big sister.
Who will happily cut your breasts off, and tweet about it afterwards.
Gallagher’s TikTok account, where she has 191.1k followers and over 4 million ‘likes’, is if anything more surreal, featuring a variety of videos where she skips around like an excited, wide-eyed gazelle, erasing potential problems and complications from your ‘top surgery’ with a swish of the gender fairy’s wand and the occassional swing from a jaunty ponytail.
It’s all just such fun.
Read the whole thing. It’s a long, detailed, horror-filled post, much more than the sample I’ve quoted. Read it all. You’ll regret it but it’s necessary. Not medically necessary, as Gallagher grotesquely insists breast-removal is, but necessary for the sake of resistance to this appalling reckless profit-making slicing and dicing of confused teenagers.
Shahrar Ali’s account:
Ok why is his view highly controversial and bad while the opposing view is…what? Wholly uncontroversial and benign? Is it as simple as: “genocide: yes or no?”?
He’s suing.
This happened.
Bright Green provides background:
The Green Party of England and Wales has removed Shahrar Ali from his role as the party’s spokesperson for policing and domestic safety. The decision was confirmed by the chair of the party’s executive Liz Reason on Twitter…
Ali was appointed to the position in June 2021. At the time of his appointment, Ali came under considerable criticism from party members and others, many of whom alleged that he had a record of transphobia. The following month, the party’s official youth and student wing – the Young Greens – passed a motion calling for his removal.
But of course we know that claims of “transphobia” generally mean just everyday feminism and/or everyday knowing the difference between women and men and the reality of human sexual dimorphism.
Following the criticism of his initial appointment, Ali told Bright Green in June 2021 that he had “fought for the human rights of the marginalised and voiceless in our society for decades”.
Doesn’t matter. It must repeat the creed or it gets the hose.
Prior to the decision to remove him as a spokesperson Ali released a statement in which he referred to “a recommendation from a newly formed Spokespeople Support and Monitoring Sub-committee that [his] Spokesperson appointment be suspended.” In this statement, Ali claimed to have “done nothing wrong” and to have “stood by the principles and values of the Party for twenty years; nine years as a national Spokesperson, two of which as Deputy Leader.”
Alongside this statement, Ali launched a crowdfunder for a legal case he intends to bring against the party. In doing so, he claims to have been “subjected to unrelenting abuse, harassment and detriment” for expressing “gender critical views”. He goes on to allege that by removing him as a spokesperson, the party is in breach of the 2010 Equality Act. At the time of publication, the crowdfunder [h]as received over £11,000 in donations.
…
Prior to the decision being taken, a member of the party’s executive – Zoe Hatch – publicly resigned from the body and from the party in protest over being asked to remove Ali as a spokesperson. In her resignation statement, Hatch said removing Ali would be “wrong on the basis of freedom of speech”. She also claimed that people who advocate for trans people to be recognised as their gender on the basis of self-identification “inadvertently support nefarious individuals, male predators and abusers”.
Not always inadvertently – all too often they do it despite being told they are aiding and abetting nefarious male predators and abusers.
Media coverage of transgender healthcare judged to be “negative” was associated with a drop of around 30% in referral rates to gender identity clinics in Sweden among young people under age 19, a new study indicates.
“Associated with”=correlation as opposed to causation.
Malin Indremo, MS, from the Department of Neuroscience, Uppsala University, Sweden, and colleagues explored the effect of the documentaries, “The Trans Train and Teenage Girls,” which they explain was a “Swedish public service television show” representing “investigative journalism.” The two-part documentary series was aired in Sweden in April 2019 and October 2019, respectively, and is now available in English on YouTube.
In their article published online in JAMA Network Open, the authors say they consider “The Trans Train” programs to be “negative” media coverage because the “documentaries addressed the distinct increase among adolescents referred to gender identity clinics in recent years. Two young adults who regretted their transition and parents of transgender individuals who questioned the clinics’ assessments of their children were interviewed, and concerns were raised about whether gender-confirming treatments are based on sufficient scientific evidence.”
The programs, they suggest, may have influenced and jeopardized young transgender individuals’ access to transgender-specific healthcare.
Sooooo they think adolescents should be making drastic changes to their bodies without considering the risks and potential regrets. Interesting.
Which is the real jeopardy? Thinking seriously about the long-term effects of “gender-confirming” treatments? Or rushing to get “gender-confirming treatments” without doing any serious thinking?
The lies are already in the headline. CNN sets us up with:
Trans swimmer’s teammates claim she has ‘unfair advantage’
Scare-quotes on unfair advantage, no scare-quotes on trans or she.
Which is the real fiction here? That a large young man has an athletic advantage over young women? Or that a large young man who didn’t do particularly well competing against men but is breaking records competing against women turns out to be a woman?
Which is the more hard to believe of the two claims? Is it hard to believe that a large man has an athletic advantage over women? Is it hard to believe that a man who was meh swimming with men last year but now smashes records swimming with women is literally a woman?
I say no to the first and yes to the second. Of course it’s not hard to believe that a large man has an athletic advantage over women. (It’s also not hard to believe that a small man has such an advantage, but his size makes the nonsense all the more obvious.) Of course it is hard to believe that that same large man is actually a woman just because he says so.
You could make a credibility score, and the difference between the two scores would be stark…unless you cheated, as so many people are doing.
And yet, a reputable news outlet like CNN puts the scare quote on “unfair advantage” and leaves the “trans” and “she” alone, thus nudging readers into believing the grotesquely manipulative dishonest ideology.
Updating to add – All that and still I missed one.
“Claim” – it was right there and I missed it. The women “claim” the hulking man has an unfair advantage over them. Bitches. Karens. Terfs.
Ideologue Ben Hunte has a bad stupid mindless hit piece on the EHRC in Vice.
Employees are quitting Britain’s equalities and human rights watchdog because they say it has become “transphobic” and “the enemy of human rights”, VICE World News has learned.
…
Three whistleblowers – still working at the EHRC – told VICE World News about an “anti-LGBT” culture being adopted by senior leaders at the organisation which is compelling non-executive staff to quit.
But of course they don’t actually mean “LGBT” – they mean T.
This comes as VICE World News obtained leaked emails and documents showing leaders at the EHRC being actively involved in removing rights from trans people in the courts, as well as holding meetings with “gender critical” groups.
That of course is classic trans “activism” – shouting about “rights” without ever spelling out what rights they mean. The EHRC is not removing rights from trans people.
An employee who recently left said: “When I started in 2018, we were all celebrating LGBT rights and the EHRC was pushing to make the UK better for LGBT people. It’s like working for a different organisation now.”
There it is again. It’s not about LGBT rights, it’s about claimed trans rights, which aren’t genuine rights at all. There is no “right” to force people to treat you as if you were a woman when you are in fact a man.
One former employee told the credulous Hunte:
“Staff are being pushed to not be so ‘woke’, and forced to be more impartial, but then we’re seeing statements from our leaders that are transphobic, or racist, and incredibly damaging.”
I bet they’re not seeing any such thing. I bet they’re seeing statements they don’t like, which they are calling “transphobic”…and “racist” for good measure, as they so often do.
The EHRC was established in 2007 by the then Labour government to monitor human rights in England, Wales and Scotland, and to enforce equality laws based on protected characteristics, such as sexuality, gender reassignment, race and religion.
But not sex? Trans women are protected but women are not? Or is that just Ben Hunte’s omission, not the EHRC’s?
Another former employee – who left at the end of 2021 – told VICE World News that Falkner had personally changed EHRC publications about trans people, making the documents more critical of gender identity, and actively going against the organisation’s own guidance to protect people’s rights based on gender reassignment.
But what are those rights? If they’re not spelled out, we don’t know if they can be rights or not. No doubt that’s why they’re not spelled out.
Jo Maugham, director of the Good Law Project campaign group, said: “Under the EHRC human rights have turned 180 degrees. No longer are they protection for minorities against populist sentiment. Now they are mechanics which turn that sentiment – and the hostility of Ministers – into policy.”
Ah yes good old Jo Maugham, almost as reliably partisan as Ben Hunte.
Then we get a quote from Mermaids.
Impeccable journalism.
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Waaz ya sensa yuma?
Humour is a funny thing. Any subject can in principle be fit for a joke…or, rather, a joke can be fashioned out of any subject, even the ones which common decency insists there is no acceptable joke. Larry David has made jokes about the Holocaust, and Hannibal Burress has made jokes about rape, which many people have found hilarious and inoffensive (or at least inoffensive to human decency, rather than the social mores that many if not most jokes are crafted to offend).
In the former case the speaker is a Jewish man with a penchant for cynicism and self-deprecation, and in the latter case the speaker put his own career on the line to give credibility to Bill Cosby’s accusers, and can be given a non-trivial amount of credit for the latter’s fall from grace. And these jokes were well-crafted besides, targeted at least as much at the audience’s moral hypocrisy and lack of rhetorical sophistication, in effect aiming to get the audience to laugh not at victims of the Holocaust or of rape, but rather at themselves.
This, much more than the simplistic “punching up” or “punching down” framing of comedy, is what moves a large part of comedy as an art form; holding up a mirror to an audience, playing with their taboos and their presuppositions of their own morals, and subtly guiding them to realise that much of the mental world in which they live is kind of a ridiculous and laughable sham. When it is done well, it is a transcendent experience of a piece with losing oneself in a painting or a song.
Richard Spencer is no Larry David. He is a brute, promoting a brutal philosophy, and the only thing funny in this situation is how transparent his lies about it are. Like all brutes, he deserves some measure of pity and guarded sympathy for the circumstances which led him to his brutality, but he also deserves a good measure of scorn and ridicule for his inability to see how laughably ridiculous his own mental world has become.
Colin Wright on the “pronouns” question:
‘What are your pronouns?” is a seemingly innocuous question that has become increasingly common. Pronouns are now frequently displayed prominently in social-media bios, email signatures and conference name tags.
…
The Human Rights Campaign, which claims to be the “nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization,” recently tweeted that we should all begin conversations with “Hi, my pronouns are _____. What are yours?” We are told that asking for, sharing and respecting pronouns is “inclusive” to trans and nonbinary people, and that failing to do so may even constitute violence and oppression.
Even if you accept that claim (which I don’t), what about everyone else? What about being inclusive to people who understand what pronouns are and thus find it absurd to talk about your my our her his pronouns? What about people who want to be intelligible? What about people who are allergic to bullshit?
While being subjected to constant rituals of pronoun exchanges may seem silly or annoying at best and exhausting at worst, in reality participating in this ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on society.
That too. That’s the most important reason for not complying, but there are also aesthetic, epistemic, moral, and other kinds of reasons. There are a lot of reasons not to and no good reasons pointing the other way.
Gender activists believe that being a man or a woman requires embracing stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, respectively, or the different social roles and expectations society imposes on people because of their sex. Planned Parenthood explicitly states that gender identity is “how you feel inside,” defines “gender” as a “a social and legal status, a set of expectations from society, about behaviors, characteristics, and thoughts,” and asserts that “it’s more about how you’re expected to act, because of your sex.”
…
The clear message of gender ideology is that, if you’re a female who doesn’t “identify with” the social roles and stereotypes of femininity, then you’re not a woman; if you’re a male who similarly rejects the social roles and stereotypes of masculinity, then you’re not a man. Instead, you’re considered either transgender or nonbinary, and Planned Parenthood assures you that “there are medical treatments you can use to help your body better reflect who you are.” According to this line of thinking, certain personalities, behaviors and preferences are incompatible with certain types of anatomy.
So Planned Parenthood is actually encouraging people to mutilate themselves and/or mess with their hormones. It’s shockingly reckless and destructive.
So when someone asks for your pronouns, and you respond with “she/her,” even though you may be communicating the simple fact that you’re female, a gender ideologue would interpret this as an admission that you embrace femininity and the social roles and expectations associated with being female.
Are there separate pronouns for feminists? No, of course not, so we’re stuck with this “I’m a woman and that means I embrace all the stupid rules imposed on female people” – and bang goes centuries of work trying to get rid of those stupid rules.
Coercing people into publicly stating their pronouns in the name of “inclusion” is a Trojan horse that empowers gender ideology and expands its reach.
Along with being embarrassing and pathetic. I’ve never been asked, but if I ever am, I don’t imagine it will go smoothly.
Teaching about systemic racism is not permissible. Trying to overthrow the government on the other hand is fine.
The Republican Party on Friday censured U.S. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for joining Congress’ probe of then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, calling the Jan. 6 Capitol attack “legitimate political discourse.”
Ah yes, legitimate political discourse, with sticks and clubs and guns to back it up.
It’s too obvious to say but I’ll say it anyway: imagine the Republican Party saying that about a BLM protest at the Capitol that was half as violent as the January 6th one. It is to laugh.
The Republican National Committee on Friday passed a resolution rebuking Cheney and Kinzinger for their involvement on the Jan. 6 select committee, accusing them of “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
The resolution passed on a voice vote as 168 members of the RNC gathered for their winter meeting in Salt Lake City. The yes votes were overwhelming, with a handful of nays, according to reporters at the meeting.
So they’re basically announcing they’re the pro-coup party.
Is it edgy comedy to have a good laugh about a particular genocide?
Jimmy Carr has been condemned by anti-hate groups including the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Auschwitz Memorial and Hope Not Hate for his comments about the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community in his Netflix special.
I have no idea who Jimmy Carr is, apart from someone who had a Netflix special and fancies himself a comedian.
Carr said: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis.
“No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”
I saw the clip earlier today. There was laughter but it wasn’t a great big roar. There’s no indication of how big the audience was so maybe it was a big roar for that particular audience, but it wasn’t the kind of torrent you usually hear for killer jokes. In short it was my impression that not everyone laughed.
Anyway, point is – genocide jokes at the expense of the victims as opposed to the perps are not so much “edgy” as…that other thing. Carr said it was edgy though.
The Auschwitz Memorial urged Carr to “learn about the fate of some 23 thousand Roma & Sinti deported to Auschwitz” in a tweet to their 1.2m followers.
Well I think he knows their fate; that’s what the joke was about.
The Guardian sums up:
It will be an unwelcome row for Netflix, who last year faced an intense backlash and a staff walk out after comments made by Dave Chappelle about transgender people in his comedy special.
Not comparable. Not comparable at all; not even close. Transgender people are not being packed into cattle cars and sent to gas chambers. It’s not necessary to catastrophize about trans people on every occasion.
In states across the country, laws have been passed or introduced restricting what teachers can discuss in the classroom and what subjects and ideas should be banned from curricula. These restrictions mostly apply to subject matter pertaining to race, sexual orientation, gender identity and political ideologies and philosophies. Many of these restrictions cover K-12 schools, as well as colleges and universities.
Since January 2021, 137 bills restricting what can be taught have been introduced or pre-filed in 35 different states. Over 87 of those bills are from this year. Restrictive laws have been passed in 10 states. My guest, Jeffrey Sachs, has been tracking these new laws and bills for PEN America, a writers organization dedicated to free speech. He teaches political science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. His areas of specialization include free speech issues and authoritarianism.
Both of which are decidedly in play here. Right-wing authoritarians don’t want us to be free to learn about other views. (Same with left-wing authoritarians, but their methods are a little different.)
The interview starts with “critical race theory.” What is?
JEFFREY SACHS: In many of the bills, it’s not defined at all. The term is just deployed in the text and then left hanging without any definition attached to it, which is the kind of ambiguity that the most paranoid teacher or outraged parent can fill with whatever meaning they want.
A problem we’ve run into here a lot.
In other bills, they do offer a definition. For instance, they’ll single out ideas like, quote, “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex.” In other cases, the bills will prohibit teachers from discussing systemic racism or suggesting that racism is anything other than the consequence of individual prejudice.
Which, ironically, is Robin DiAngelo’s whole shtick, and she presents herself as anti-racist! (She also, I learned the other day, is making a fortune off this grift. She charges tens of thousands of dollars for a talk or “training” session.)
SACHS:… a bill in Indiana that is currently under consideration would require, among other things, that in the runup to any general election in the state, students must be taught, quote, “socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded.” And it goes on to say, as such, socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism or similar political systems are detrimental to the people of the United States.
Hello 1952, where ya been?
GROSS: So in Tennessee, there’s a law that allows teachers to teach slavery and how Native Americans were treated, but you can’t discuss that in the context of current events. So you can’t, for instance, talk about the George Floyd protests or Black Lives Matter and connect that to the civil rights movement or, you know, to anything else in history that might explain what’s happening now.
SACHS: That’s right. The Tennessee law is a great example of this, the dilemma I’m describing. It does include a carve-out saying that the list of prohibited ideas may be discussed in the context of an historical discussion of past discrimination. But for present-day events, like Black Lives Matter, it would be – the prohibitions would be in place. It would mean that a teacher could not discuss a present-day idea in Tennessee, like Black Lives Matter, if that idea, quote, “promotes division between or resentment of a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people,” which essentially means that a teacher has to avoid any current event that might possibly cause one student or a parent to feel feelings of resentment towards another.
Which, of course, would be everything. Everything might possibly do that, especially with Fox News in the room.
SACHS: Well, there’s a law currently on the books in North Dakota that was passed last November after just five days of consideration that has me up at night. This is a law that attempts to prohibit critical race theory in K-12 schools. And I just want to reemphasize here, this is not a law that prohibits people from endorsing or promoting critical race theory. It’s a law that forbids them from even including critical race theory in the classroom. And the way that that law defines critical race theory is what has me so concerned. This is a law that prohibits K-12 public schools from including in the classroom quote, “critical race theory, which is defined as the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.”
So in other words by law schools have to teach children that racism is not systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality. But what if that’s not true? What if some of that systemically embedded racism has been slowly and painfully deleted, but not all of it? What then? What if it’s a mistake to teach fake history?
GROSS: How do you talk about American slavery or mandated segregation without saying that was part of the system? It was – this was like legally-mandated stuff. Would you say it was a bunch of individuals who were racist and happened to own slaves or a bunch of individuals who passed laws? I mean, how do you – these were created legally in the American system.
SACHS: Exactly. This is exactly the concern that’s shared by the North Dakota ACLU, which is investigating this law now and is terrified that whenever you discuss slavery, you’re a teacher, you’re right, would have to essentially say the slaveholders were racist. The system that they were in, the laws that supported them, the economy that made that business profitable, that is – you’d have to separate those institutional features and describe slavery purely as a product of individual bias, which does violence to the topic. It fails to educate students and I think might discourage students from thinking critically about contemporary institutions and identifying whether or not they also might be guilty of systemic racism.
It also completely fails to describe or explain what happened between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.
Hail, ignorance.
