GCs don’t know better than teenagers? That’s just a blanket absolute rule is it? No gender critical adults know better than teenagers?

Come on. Teenagers don’t know everything. They’re young, and their brains haven’t finished developing yet. Of course they don’t know best on all occasions no matter what.

Lavery is an academic in the English department. Academics in the English department have a bad habit of considering themselves some kind of Universal Intellectual in a way that most other academics don’t. They talk as if they’re doing philosophy when they’re really not. We could blame Derrida and Foucault, or we could blame Leavis, or we could blame compensation (what does anyone even need a PhD in English for?), but either way it’s a thing. Lavery’s confidence in his own genius is unearned.

Disturbing indeed.

Disturbing footage posted to social media shows a fight breaking out at a Brazilian school allegedly after a girl confronted a trans-identified male in the women’s bathroom.

Or changing room (or both), I think, because the girl is barefoot.

A newly-posted recording uploaded to Twitter from inside a Brazilian public school caught a violent scene breaking out between a trans-identified male student and a young female. The male can be seen pulling the girl from the women’s restroom by her hair and throwing her to the floor where he begins to thrash and kick her repeatedly.

The fight purportedly broke out after the girl expressed discomfort with the male’s presence in the women’s restroom.

So the male showed her how mistaken her discomfort was by throwing her to the floor and stomping her.

The violence continues until a student in red shorts steps in and pulls the trans-identified male off of the girl, who quickly gets up and begins yelling “você não é mulher!” – or, “you are not a woman!”

The trans-identified male attempts to charge at the girl once again, but the student in red shorts continues to keep him at bay.

Red shorts guy is brilliant. He’s about 7 feet tall, and when trans boy tries to get at the girl again he (red shorts) just spins him around like a rag doll.

The footage, which has almost 500,000 views across all uploads as of this publishing, has ignited a wildfire of concern across Brazilian social media.

As it should. None of this is ok.

Watch.

When “activism” has a price.

Translation: Jolyon Maugham doesn’t get to see the case papers in the LGB Alliance appeal because everyone can see he would tweet about them.

Sigh. Et tu Washington state?

What I’m saying. Letters to the Guardian:

The results of this survey are sad but unsurprising (Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds, 7 November). At the weekend, I took my 12-year-old son by bus across west London to his football match. While the world discusses how to address climate change, everyone in west London is out driving a 4×4.

The vast majority of children going to play football and rugby on the pitches where we spent the morning were driven there. The roads were gridlocked, the car parks were full, and tempers were fraying. Yet the parents will make the same choices next weekend – and no doubt what I saw is reflected up and down the country. In London in particular there really is no excuse: the city has a comprehensive public transport system, with free buses for children. When will people wake up to the fact that they themselves are the traffic, the congestion and the pollution?

Never. The cruise ships go in and out (the season ended a couple of weeks ago but will resume in the spring), the planes fly overhead, the cars choke all the streets and sit with their engines running on every block.

Feel-good story:

Marcus Rashford has vowed to keep campaigning to lift children out of poverty after receiving his MBE, saying he will give the medal to his mum.

The England footballer, who last year forced two major government U-turns to extend free school meals into the school holidays, received his MBE for services to vulnerable children at Windsor Castle on Tuesday.

Rashford, 24, has helped raise enough money since March 2020 to help the food waste charity FareShare distribute more than 21m meals for families experiencing food insecurity.

Rashford was outspoken in his opposition to the government’s axing of the £1,040-a-year – £20-a-week – universal credit uplift on 6 October.

It’s not a particularly glamorous or sexy cause. Respect.

The Manchester United striker said he would continue to campaign to “give children the things I didn’t have when I was a kid”, adding: “If I did have, I would have been much better off and had many more options in my life.

“For me, it is a punishment for them not to be getting things like meals or supplies of books.”

A punishment and a handicap. Meals and books are basics for education, and education is basic for more options.

Meanwhile we continue to race toward the cliff.

The world is on track for disastrous levels of global heating far in excess of the limits in the Paris climate agreement, despite a flurry of carbon-cutting pledges from governments at the UN Cop26 summit.

“Pledges.” Pledges are cheap. Pledges butter no parsnips.

Temperature rises will top 2.4C by the end of this century, based on the short-term goals countries have set out, according to research published in Glasgow on Tuesday.

And they won’t meet the short-term goals anyway. It’s not “countries” setting out the goals but the governments of countries, which will be voted out by all the people who don’t want to do what it will take to prevent the drastic temperature rises. Human governments aren’t the right tool for this job, and humans have no idea how to come up with a better one. We’ve accidentally broken our own ecosystem and there’s nobody higher up the chain who can fix it.

The estimate stands in sharp contrast to optimistic forecasts published last week that suggested heating could be held to 1.9C or 1.8C, thanks to commitments announced at the talks, now in their second week and scheduled to end this weekend.

And how can we believe the commitments anyway?

The analysts also found a chasm between what countries have said they will do on greenhouse gas emissions and their plans in reality. If current policies and measures are taken into account, rather than just goals, heating would rise to 2.7C, based on the CAT analysis.

What I’m saying. The goals and pledges are beside the point, because it won’t be possible to put them into effect. We didn’t tolerate the restrictions and disruptions of the pandemic very well, so what chance is there that we’ll put up with the much sharper restrictions that would be needed to avoid 2.4C? We can’t even give up the stupid cruise ships that burn 80 THOUSAND gallons of fuel per day, and we can’t give up air travel, and we can’t give up cars, so…?

The findings should serve as a “reality check” to the talks, said Niklas Höhne, one of the authors. “Countries’ long-term intentions are good, but their short-term implementation is inadequate,” he told the Guardian.

Or to put it another way, countries make long-term promises easily and can’t implement any promises now. Long-term promises are just air. Implementation is real and it’s not happening.

The 197 parties to the 2015 Paris agreement were asked to come to Glasgow with two aims: a long-term goal of reaching global net zero emissions around mid-century; and shorter-term national plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), pegging emissions reductions to 2030. Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions must fall by about 45% this decade for global temperatures to stay within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels.

Do we see that happening?

If we could realistically see that happening, then surely we would have had the good sense to mothball cruise ships altogether instead of bringing them back this past summer. We didn’t have that good sense. It’s a big industry, it makes big bucks, and ain’t nobody gonna shut it down. Apply that to all the other industries and there you go: greenhouse gas emissions are not going to fall by 45% this decade.

They must all know this. They put on the show while knowing the truth.

It’s unfortunate.

Arizona Lunatic Paul Gosar did what?

He tweeted a doctored anime video that shows him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, haw haw, very normal healthy sensible behavior.

Martin Pengelly reports:

Twitter attached a hateful conduct warning to Gosar’s tweet, which also showed the sword-wielding congressman appearing to threaten Joe Biden and was also posted to Instagram.

It’s not just “hateful” conduct though. That would be less alarming. It’s “get people killed” conduct. It’s incitement conduct.

The roughly 90-second video is an altered version of a Japanese anime series, interspersed with shots of border patrol officers and migrants at the US border with Mexico.

Because migrants at the southern border are a reason to get very very racist.

In one section, characters whose faces are replaced with those of Gosar and fellow extremist Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado are seen fighting other characters.

Again with the palliative language. “Extremist” is soothing; what they are is violent. This isn’t the stupid kind of “violent” like saying feminists are “violent” because they don’t think men can be women, this is the genuine kind of violent that incites people to perform actual literal physical lethal violence. This isn’t a game. January 6 was no game.

The Yale historian Joanne Freeman, author of The Field of Blood, a well-regarded history of violence in Congress before the civil war, wrote: “Threats of violence lead to actual violence. They clear the ground. They cow opposition. They plant the idea. They normalize it. They encourage it. They maim democracy. And run the risk of killing it.”

The US is in very deep trouble.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Another insipid essay.

I imagine that every religion does this, but I do find it amusing how Christians catapult themselves into the finals of “Science vs. Religion,” conveniently bypassing all the playoffs that would have to take place against all the other religions in order to actually earn that spot. Hell, there are hundreds of versions of Christianity alone that would have to go up against each other, too.

Before “Religion” gets to go head to head with Science in the Explaining Reality Championship, it has to figure out a few things. There are so many things that religions have never agreed upon with each other, even before facing Science.

One would think that the existence of a class of supernatural beings, attested to by most if no all cultures throughout history, would be an observable fact about the universe. The evidence would suggest otherwise. Still, we must not let “religion” off the hook. If its answers to the “Big Questions” are all different, then it doesn’t bode well for their chances in the finals. But even before we let them anywhere near big questions, they should answer a whole bunch of small ones about the basic ground rules of their particular brand of game-play. (Not that they haven’t been killing each other for centuries over obscure articles of faith; but still.) Here are a few bits of theological housekeeping they should clear up before wading into the questions of meaning and purpose upon which they are so keen to expound.

Is there one god, or are their multiple gods?

Are gods begotten, created, or eternal?

Do gods have a sex? How could one tell?

Do gods ever mate with each other?

Do they ever mate with humans?

Are there things beyond the power and abilities of gods to know, do, or create?

Religions over time and space have come up with different answers for all of these questions. Before being allowed to enter the contest with Science, they should be expected to answer these questions, and to justify the answers they give.

ALL the red lights were blinking.

The head of intelligence at D.C.’s homeland security office was growing desperate. For days, Donell Harvin and his team had spotted increasing signs that supporters of President Donald Trump were planning violence when Congress met to formalize the electoral college vote, but federal law enforcement agencies did not seem to share his sense of urgency. On Saturday, Jan. 2, he picked up the phone and called his counterpart in San Francisco, waking Mike Sena before dawn.

Sena listened with alarm. The Northern California intelligence office he commanded had also been inundated with political threats flagged by social media companies, several involving plans to disrupt the joint session or hurt lawmakers on Jan. 6.

He organized an unusual call for all of the nation’s regional homeland security offices — known as fusion centers — to find out what others were seeing. Sena expected a couple dozen people to get on the line that Monday. But then the number of callers hit 100. Then 200. Then nearly 300. Officials from nearly all 80 regions, from New York to Guam, logged on.

In the 20 years since the country had created fusion centers in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sena couldn’t remember a moment like this. For the first time, from coast to coast, the centers were blinking red. The hour, date and location of concern was the same: 1 p.m., the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6.

And they were right – but they weren’t able to stop it.

Forty-eight hours before the attack, Harvin began pressing every alarm button he could. He invited the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, military intelligence services and other agencies to see the information in real time as his team collected it. 

He told all the local hospitals to prepare for mass casualties.

Harvin was one of numerous people inside and outside of government who alerted authorities to the growing likelihood of deadly violence on Jan. 6, according to a Washington Post investigation, which found a cascade of previously undisclosed warnings preceded the attack on the Capitol. Alerts were raised by local officials, FBI informants, social media companies, former national security officials, researchers, lawmakers and tipsters, new documents and firsthand accounts show.

And it happened anyway.

It’s pretty terrifying. We could become another Belarus in a heartbeat.

Law enforcement officials were prepared for an attack by foreign terrorizers, but not local ones. They just couldn’t wrap their minds around it…so it went ahead.

Intelligence officials certainly never envisioned a mass attack against the government incited by the sitting president.

Which is odd when they’d had four years to take in what a ruthless value-free self-dealing horror that sitting president was and is.

The FBI, the nation’s primary domestic intelligence agency, received numerous alerts of people vowing to violently confront Congress, but largely regarded social media posts about planning for Jan. 6 — even those discussing bringing firearms, arresting lawmakers and shooting police — as protected First Amendment speech. 

I wonder if the FBI would have seen those social media posts the same way if most of the people posting had been black.

Imagine getting Covid because Fox News told you to.

The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.

Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent. (Look up your county.)

It seems a high price to pay for the fun of having a jackass in the White House.

Well I couldn’t pass that up.

So I read it.

I have never had much interest in faith versus science debates. They simply did not resonate with me. I believe God created the world, but I never felt the need to nail down the details or method of creation. 

Well naturally not! “God created the world” is just a claim of magic, and there’s no nailing down the details of that, or the “method” either. You could pause to wonder what “God” means and how anyone knows, but we wouldn’t want you to go to too much trouble. “God did it” is the easy way out.

I have long been influenced by early church theologians like Augustine of Hippo, who understood the biblical creation account as primarily making theological claims instead of offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins.

You don’t say. It seems to me you don’t really need to go to Augustine for that, bless his North African heart, because obviously the biblical creation account is not offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins – it says nothing explanatory at all.

She was happy with this arrangement until churchy anti-vaxxers started messing up her head. Why weren’t they being churchy and pro-science like her? What had gone wrong?

I asked Haarsma who is to blame. Is it the fault of religious communities for denigrating science or the scientific community for denigrating faith? She laughed and said there’s plenty of blame to go around.

At times, a vocal minority of prominent scientists have marginalized religious communities. Haarsma cited a tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a prominent astrophysicist, from Christmas morning 2014: “On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton.” That’s clever, but it appeared to mock Christians on one of our most sacred holidays. These sorts of messages spur needless animosity. If the cultural conversation requires people to choose between their faith and science, most will choose faith, but we don’t have to ask people to choose. This is a false choice.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said happy birthday to Isaac Newton, so god-botherers are spreading the virus to their friends and neighbors. Makes sense.

“Sometimes people say things like, ‘If everyone would just accept the science, the world would be great,’” Haarsma said. But she notes that science doesn’t solve everything and that scientific communities have to “acknowledge the value of religion as a way of answering life’s biggest questions.”

No, actually, they don’t, because religion has no such value, because it isn’t a way of answering life’s biggest questions. It may be a way of cheering yourself up, but answering questions (in the sense of giving an answer that’s truthful), no.

Originally a comment by J.A. on A set of contingencies that can be played with.

You mean that if I really, really, really, love my velveteen rabbit enough that someday it will really will become real?

That said, the story of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams is a classic and deservedly so, because it shows how human love and affection can be imparted to what is an inanimate object in a fictional tale, and it’s impossible to read that story to a child without there being a bit of a tear in one’s own eye. We humans are capable of feeling affection for animate beings like puppies and kittens and by extension their inanimate imitations.

Children though don’t then believe that veleveteen rabbits really do become real. They do however understand the fictional truth of the story of how the velveteen rabbit has a happy life with the boy until it is discarded and to be burnt (which is truly a horrible end) and then have the velveeteen rabbit saved by magic because of the love the boy had for it as a toy. That by magic it then becomes a real rabbit makes for a very happy ending.

Now getting back to my first sentence and why fantasizing about changing sex doesn’t actually change sex, to cut to the chase it’s about making a category error where wishes are held to be actual fishes. While one can certainly pretend to be something they’re not, or mimic it to the extent they appear to be something they’re not, they still aren’t the sex they’re not because reality isn’t a fiction and philosophers as well as scientists tend to be a bit tetchy about such things. Q.E.D.

Fantasy spreads until it pervades everything…

Grace Lavery back in June explaining how it really really is true that you can change sex.

Berkeley News: Your work in trans feminist studies focuses on the belief that transition works — that it is truly possible to change sex. Can you talk more about what you’ve found in your research? Did you begin to explore the idea during your own transition?

Grace Lavery: I suppose, on some level, I’m bound to cop to that: Research is me-search, as they say. I think what my research has come to demonstrate is that for the past 150 years or so, roughly since the time that people started performing transition or transitioning or whatever you want to call it, there has been this enormous public effort or attempt to produce a cast-iron reason why it doesn’t work or why it is suspicious.

It doesn’t work for the same reason it doesn’t work to “perform transition” or “transition” or whatever you want to call it to a horse or a table or Mars. It doesn’t work because fantasy is fantasy, pretending is pretending, the mind isn’t magic.

There is a kind of conservative feminist position that argues that sex is set in stone, is assigned at birth. And I don’t agree with that. Most scientists I’ve spoken to seem pretty comfortable with the idea that sex, like any other biological category, is not a cast-iron law, but rather a sort of set of contingencies that can be played with and culturally reinforced or not culturally reinforced.

Oh yes that definitely sounds like how scientists think. Everything “can be played with” and once you’ve played with it long enough and whimsically enough, the magic happens and the biological category is…something else.

Postponed.

The government’s much-hyped information campaign targeting perpetrators of violence against women will not be launched until next year, the Observer has learned. This comes just as new research indicates the vast majority of females have experienced unwanted violent, aggressive or sexual behaviours on UK public transport.

Sorry and everything. We’d hurry if it were important but as it’s only women, we’ll get to it when we get to it.

As part of the home secretary’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls launched in July, Priti Patel promised a “multimillion communications campaign with a focus on targeting perpetrators and harmful misogynistic attitudes”.

Like calling women terfs and cunts and telling them “suck my dick” when they hold a conference? Those hateful misogynistic attitudes?

However, concern is growing that the campaign will not be up and running until 2022, with sources saying it remains at a “concept” stage more than three months after it was unveiled. The delay means it will not be launched until after Christmas – a period that tends to witness a rise in domestic violence – but also comes against a backdrop of concerted calls for the government to start prioritising measures to tackle violence against women and girls.

But they might be terfs. Surely you can see the problem.

The Telegraph article that Priyamvada Ghopal mentioned:

The Telegraph has spoken to academics, who wish to remain anonymous, who claim that Prof Alison Phipps, a former colleague of Prof Stock’s, was one of those leading the criticism of her, which ultimately led to her resignation.

Prof Phipps was a professor of gender studies at Sussex University, and has recently taken up a post as professor of sociology at Newcastle University. 

Now, it has emerged that she posted a series of tweets suggesting that “gender critical feminists” are also “racist and ableist”, and accused colleagues of being “bigots”.

Screenshots of the now-deleted tweets show that in January, Prof Phipps wrote: “I’d be interested to hear how many people with a prominent ‘free speech warrior’* at their workplace – whether that’s a racist, a transphobe and/or another flavour – have been subject to threats or official complaints from said warrior after criticising them in public.”

She followed this up with an asterixed “*bigot” and with another tweet saying: “(Any resemblance to my own workplace is, of course, entirely coincidental).”

In another tweet, posted in July 2020, Prof Phipps said: “Of course ‘gender critical’ feminists are also racist and ableist: their politics based on entitlement to define, speak for and dominate others makes all sorts of things possible, and a one-dimensional analysis of gender means a lack of intersectionality across the board.”

Except “of course” that’s not true. It’s not even a little bit true.

In January 2020, Prof Stock challenged Prof Phipps to a debate, saying: “Each time a news article about gender critical academics comes out, you tweet that Sussex Uni trans students and staff are made unsafe by us. 

“Instead why not engage with me in public debate at Sussex or elsewhere?”

Prof Phipps responded: “‘Reasonable debate’ cannot counter unreasonable ideas. History has shown this repeatedly. Insisting on ‘debate’ is about giving credibility where there is none.”

So the thing to do is lie about gender critical academics on Twitter.

Prof Phipps wrote the book Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism, which questions whether white feminists need to ask themselves whether they are causing harm when they fight sexual violence.

She’s the sociologist of Karen.

“White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetuate through white supremacy,” she wrote.

The book, which faced criticism after it was recommended in an Oxfam staff training document, says “privileged white women” are supporting the root causes of sexual violence by wanting “bad men” imprisoned.

The book faced criticism after people read it, because it’s so bad.

Ugly.

I think that “false flag opportunists” remark borders on libel. Yes it’s so opportunistic to get bullied out of a job you love.

For anyone laughing off the very idea that anti-Semitic tropes and images and movies and plays are something to object to, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a collection you could take a look at.

Anti-Jewish hatred has pervaded Western art, politics, and popular culture for centuries. Perceptions and understandings of Jews throughout history were manifested in objects—from fine arts and crafts for the elite to everyday toys and knickknacks and household items. Many of these objects promoted negative attitudes and stereotypes about Jews.

The Katz Ehrenthal Collection—acquired through the generosity of the Katz family—consists of over 900 individual objects depicting Jews and antisemitic and anti-Jewish propaganda from the Medieval to the modern era, created and distributed throughout Europe, Russia, and the United States. The same hateful stereotypes reappear throughout the collection, spanning centuries and continents. Not all of the objects are antisemitic, however, a small portion of the collection documents or combats specific antisemitic episodes.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi propagandists used these same stereotypes with deadly consequences. For example, feature films, newsreels, toys, and games helped intensify negative stereotypes of Jews. Already portrayed as second-class citizens, they were increasingly characterized as “degenerates, criminals, and racially inferior corrupters of German society.” Some of the same beliefs are still prevalent in Western countries today.

This isn’t over-indulged students squawking about imaginary transphobia.

Wait, are you saying that a fictional character’s being named Hershel Fink suggests that the character is Jewish??? The Royal Court theatre is shocked shocked to hear it.

[Al] Smith, the author of a new play coming to the Royal Court theatre this week, had given a lead character the name of Hershel Fink. But publicity for the production prompted angry complaints about Jewish stereotyping. In response, the famous venue on Sloane Square in London has now apologised and agreed to change the name, admitting that it was “unconscious bias” that had led to the Silicon Valley billionaire in the work being given this identity.

Being given this name, I think that should read. The Royal Court people claiming the character wasn’t given Jewish “identity” and that the name was…just a name.

In an official statement, the theatre management added that the character in Smith’s play, Rare Earth Mettle, which stars former Doctor Who actor Arthur Darvill, is not Jewish and that there is no reference to his faith or Jewishness in the show.

Except for the name. Ohhhh the name, says the Royal Court. We didn’t notice.

“The Royal Court claims they didn’t realise ‘Hershel Fink’ was a Jewish name. Hmmm. Somehow it just sounded so right for a world-conquering billionaire,” Baddiel posted on Twitter. This February, Baddiel’s new book, Jews Don’t Count, argued that antisemitic bias is the one prejudice that remains largely unpoliced in the “culture wars”.