The Financial Times on this mess we’re in:

Just over a week ago, Kathleen Stock resigned from her post as professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, following a relentless three-year campaign of bullying, harassment and character assassination.

…

“I can’t keep working somewhere where . . . there’s such toxicity,” she had told me the previous week, when I’d gone to speak to her at the home she shares with her pregnant wife and two children. The strain Stock was under was palpable — she broke down in tears twice during our conversation; several days earlier, she had been signed off work by her doctor because of stress. At one point, we were interrupted by the delivery of a video doorbell camera, which the police had advised her to install.

“It’s not based on who I am, what I’m like, what I think — it’s just this caricature of a witch in the office next door . . . They don’t want to argue with me, these people. They just want to ruin my professional reputation.”

They don’t want to argue with anyone. That’s the problem. The whole ideology is just one massive fiat – a shut up and do what you’re told. Women have never been able to get that kind of deference, but for some reason trans women can, and trans men sneak in under their coats.

Those who argue that “cancel culture doesn’t exist” or, as the National Union of Students argues, that “there is no evidence of a freedom of expression crisis on campus”, might say this was an isolated case. But for those who worry that such a crisis is in full swing, Stock’s departure is symptomatic of a culture that prioritises the “emotional safety” of students over robust debate and the expression of lawful, evidence-based opinions, and which is threatening the integrity and reputation of Britain’s universities.

The culture prioritises the “emotional safety” of students over robust debate and it portrays robust debate as inherently and obviously the enemy of students’ “emotional safety.” But if students require “emotional safety” to survive, and robust debate aka different views is/are the enemy of that safety, what are they doing at a university at all? If you have an allergy to learning new things, you shouldn’t be attending any kind of educational institution. If students are so fucking fragile and unwell and tottering that learning makes them sick, then they shouldn’t be at university. There’s a massive conflict here, which doesn’t really get addressed enough. This fragility in the face of new knowledge is a profound disability, and requires treatment and a quiet, empty environment. It’s just cruel to let kids go to a university knowing it’s bound to make them sick as dogs. First treat the disease, then go to university.

In other words learning new things, including new ideas, is the whole point of going to a university, and if you can’t take it, you should get tf out and do something else with your life. It’s probably still possible to get technical training without getting deathly ill, but any branch of the humanities is right out, and so is a lot of science.

“I do notice a big difference between now and 10 years ago,” says Arif Ahmed, a philosopher at Cambridge who campaigns for free speech in universities. “Ten years ago, nobody felt their jobs might be in danger for what they said . . . Now we’re in a position where, as happened with Kathleen Stock and as I’ve experienced here at Cambridge, when you ask people . . . they’ll say in private they support you, but they won’t speak out publicly.”

…

Stock, Ahmed and others I spoke to cite the 2010 Equality Act as a factor in universities becoming so anxious about offending students. The act describes unlawful verbal harassment as behaviour that “has the purpose or effect of . . . creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”, which some university administrators have interpreted as an invitation to police speech or other behaviour they deem offensive as “microaggressions”. 

The odds are good that there are some gender critical students who find the atmosphere intimidating and hostile…

Another consequence of the act has been an increase in the number of non-academic administrators in universities, working for example for “equality, diversity and inclusion offices” that seek to fulfil the requirement to “advance equality of opportunity between people who do and do not share a protected characteristic”, such as race or disability. But the guiding principles of these administrators are often at odds with those of academics — they are geared not so much towards encouraging free expression and the exploration of ideas as the so-called student experience, which focuses on keeping students feeling happy and comfortable.

But also “inclusion” never means “of feminist women.”

A comrade responds to Grant Buttars:

God help any woman who works in Scottish higher education who says that sex is immutable and is relying on University and College Union (UCU) Scotland Executive member and Branch President (UCU Edinburgh) Grant Buttars to defend her if some students demand she should be sacked.

In the post-Trotskyist version of a witch trial Buttars produces some of the most appalling arguments ever adduced by a man to justify the sacking of a woman. After a long set up referencing a case of a racist advocate of paedophilia in “When is it right for a union to support dismissal?”, Buttars explains it is OK when the target is a racist, an advocate of paedophilia or a feminist who doesn’t agree with him on sex and gender.

He tries to justify the ousting of Kathleen Stock from her job at Sussex University following a sustained campaign of intimidation and harassment by students which was supported by the UCU branch there. His core argument is that women who openly question the effects of gender ideology on women’s lives are comparable to Nazis and should be treated as such.

And the two are comparable because………..?

Stock’s senior management were quite supportive of her when a group of masked protestors were on her campus and putting up stickers demanding she be sacked. What sort of union activist has a problem with a management protecting a worker facing unprecedented harassment? Grant Buttars is breaking new ground for trade unionism and 21st century revolutionary socialism. All the more so since RS21 only exist because they correctly identified the sexism in the Socialist Workers Party and left because of it. Now they are supporting the hounding of women for being feminists.

…

Solidarity with the oppressed also includes solidarity with women who know sex is real and say so in public. The RS21 piece is the latest and most extreme development in a prioritising of identity politics over material reality and class solidarity.

If we’re not allowed to recognize material reality when we see it, how can we deal with pandemics and global warming and heavily armed insurrectionists trying to cancel elections?

What are unions for? Holding workers up for the mob to stone, is it?

Originally a comment by Djolaman on What legal rights?

There’s a distinction between a ‘right’ in the sense of something you are entitled to do within the law and a ‘right’ in the sense of something that may not legitimately be denied to you.

For instance married couples in the uk can have their income tax liabilty evaluated so that some of the money earned by the higher earner is considered for tax purposes to have been earned by the lower earner, which often means it’s exempt from income tax as it falls below the tax threshold. This is a right in the sense that married people are perfectly entitled to claim this tax deduction. However, if the rules were to change so that this option were no longer open, married people wouldn’t be being deprived of their fundamental rights in the way they would be if they were no longer entitled to a trial if accused of a crime.

The right to have your gender identity displayed on legal documents is a right in that first sense – the law allows it. It’s not a right in the way that being able to come out as trans without being fired or evicted is a right. The slogan ‘trans rights are human rights’ is deliberately seeking to conflate these two senses of the word ‘right’, encouraging the listener to infer that the rights under threat are fundamental to trans people’s dignity as human beings, rather than being the sort of legal boundary setting that legislatures carry out as a matter of course.

There is no right, formally or fundamentally, to choose to use whichever bathroom feels appropriate. That isn’t the rule for anyone, trans or otherwise.

I’ve watched this twice today, and I think it will probably be a good idea to watch it at least daily from now on. Via Cameron Larios.

Info:

This quirky short film by Iqaluit filmmaker Becky Qilavvaq has caught a wave of viewers around YouTube recently. Feel the Inukness stars actor Anguti Johnston step dancing around Iqaluit to a Celtic jig, which is said to be similar to the footwork at Inuit celebrations. The work was well received by youth in the town, and Qilavvaq was awarded Ajjitt Media’s emerging filmmaker of the year.In an interview with Nunatsiaq Online, Qilavvaq spoke of a deeper message in the work: “It’s about being ourselves and embracing who we are … The message is essentially about not giving into the pressure to conform. … It’s difficult for a lot of Inuit with all the change we’ve lived in recent decades.”

Joan Smith talks to Jo Phoenix:

Jo Phoenix is a widely respected academic. Since 2016, she has been professor of criminology at the Open University, where her focus is on vulnerable women in the criminal justice system. Phoenix does not think of herself as vulnerable and she certainly never expected to be where she is now – diagnosed with acute PTSD and suing her employer for failing to protect her after what she describes as two years of harassment from colleagues. “I’m exhausted,” she tells me – and she sounds it.

…

Her voice breaks at some points in our conversation, as she describes how she became a hate figure, metaphorically put in the stocks by colleagues who accuse her of that contemporary catch-all offence, “transphobia”.

…

At the end of last month, somewhat late in the day, the OU seems to have finally woken up to the fact that one of its own staff might also be at risk. “While we are not aware of any current issues at the OU”, an email from a senior figure informed Phoenix, the university’s head of security would be happy to discuss “any concerns” she might have and conduct a risk assessment.

This, despite the fact that Phoenix has become a pariah at work. The OU Gender Critical Network, which she founded, has been denounced as “fundamentally hostile to the rights of trans people” in an open letter signed by no fewer than 360 colleagues. “The signatures came from across the university, including people I directly work with,” Phoenix tells me. “I received threatening emails from anonymous senders.” When I ask her to elaborate, she says she was told that activists “were out to get me” and “I ought to watch myself”.

Why? Because she argues that trans women

should not share intimate spaces with female prisoners. It is a view widely shared by feminist organisations, who point to the fact that a transgender inmate sexually assaulted two women while on remand at a women’s prison in West Yorkshire in 2017.

Even so, Phoenix has been pilloried. A couple of years ago, after she gave a talk for the campaigning organisation A Woman’s Place UK, a colleague got in touch to express disappointment that she had disrupted the “smooth family functioning” of their workplace. What does that even mean, I ask? Her reply is staggering: “I was told I was like the racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table.” When Phoenix started to cry, the colleague gave her the number of the OU counselling service.

The “colleague.”

In December 2019 Essex University cancelled an invitation to speak at a seminar, and it’s been downhill ever since.

Phoenix is now back at work, but allowed to do “research duties only – I was advised not to go into my office”. It is clear that her “dream job” at the OU has become a nightmare, her life made impossible by strident accusations of “transphobia” at every turn.

It is all the more galling, she says, because of her background. “I’ve been an out lesbian since 1979. I’ve never in my life been transphobic. The word is meaningless.” She says she is happy to support people expressing any sense of gender identity they choose. “Why wouldn’t I do that? I have tattoos. I have short hair. I ride a motorbike.” What she does not support, she says, is the idea that if you criticise the LBGT organisation Stonewall – widely criticised for giving incorrect advice about the law to a number of organisations – you must automatically be transphobic.

So she’s had enough.

On 17 October, she announced that she was crowd-funding legal action against the OU at an employment tribunal, in the hope the case will force universities to “protect female academics from the vicious bullying perpetrated by those who disagree with our beliefs in sex and gender”. After only four days, she had raised more than £60,000 – on Tuesday, she “cried with relief” as she hit her £80,000 target and her case against the OU was filed with the employment tribunal yesterday.

Avanti!

I asked OJ what he meant an hour or two ago. It’s a futile exercise, because he has too many followers to answer questions, but I did it anyway.

OJ and people like OJ want to insist (and do insist) that it’s about bad women wanting to “abolish” the legal rights of trans people, while feminist women counter-insist that we’re seeking to protect our rights, and that some claimed “rights” of trans people are not actually rights.

As far as I can tell the issue is that [some] trans people want it to be a “right” to be accepted as, even “validated” as, whatever sex one says one is, regardless of any actual fact of the matter, while women want to continue to have the right to get away from men in some circumstances, and to have promotions and scholarships and prizes and jobs and sporting competitions intended for women that go to women and not to trans women. The issue is that [some] trans people consider their “validation” more important than women’s rights to privacy and safety and promotions, scholarships and the rest. The issue is that women see this as insultingly indifferent to women’s real needs. The issue is that we’re fucking tired of seeing the gains we’ve made over the past 50 years grabbed back.

Cutting edge political analysis.

So…it’s the young who get everything right, and the middle-aged and older who are the smug comfortable clueless Wrong people who stifle all the youthful rightness and ruin everything.

I wonder if OJ can see a downside to that way of looking at it. What downside? The fact that if that’s true then we might as well all give up, because nothing can ever improve. Why? Because young people become middle-aged people (OJ himself is middle-aged). Those young people who are so shiningly Right about everything now will be older and Wrong about everything tomorrow. It’s just a constant churn that never gets anywhere.

That could be true, of course, and we know of some ways in which it is true. The most glaring way is the failure to stop killing the planet, which can be seen as a shockingly callous indifference to younger people. But it doesn’t actually follow that young people can See the Truth of everything while everyone else is blind to it. OJ’s take is glib and hackneyed, which is pretty typical for him. (It’s probably because he’s so old.)

Our new overlords let us know what we’re allowed to think.

But how is he defining “transphobia”? And “anti-trans behaviours”? And “being transphobic”? What does it mean to say that all are “prohibited from being transphobic”? Is it even true? I don’t think so. I don’t think laws are formulated that way, not least because they would be unenforceable. The law deals with acts, including speech acts; it can’t deal with being. The first Queen Elizabeth said “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” The people who tried to make such windows in the 16th century did it via torture, which is not a very reliable method.

It wouldn’t matter except that Breslow is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the London School of Economics.

And there’s this:

Anne-Marie Angelo has (of course) now protected her account. Fucking Stalinist.

Julie Bindel also interviewed Doc Stock today, but they’re friends, so it’s different. (I thought Emma Barnett was ok though. I expected her to be a little disapproving, but I don’t think she did.)

I have known Kathleen since 2018, when I discovered her research on gender identity and women’s sex-based rights. We have remained close since then, and I have looked on with horror at the abhorrent treatment she has been forced to endure in recent months.

…

[T]o implement self-identification without question is to ignore a key safeguarding problem. As Kathleen puts it, “Self  ID policies trade on a fantasy that suddenly putting on a dress or saying ‘I’m a woman’ will change your basic nature. But, in fact, what was there before will be there after. Humans are humans, and if you make it the case that you can self identify into a better situation than you were in — i.e. a woman’s prison as opposed to a male prison, which are usually less intense, aggressive places — then some people will do it, whether they’re trans or not.” And as both Kathleen and I keep saying, this isn’t about every trans person. It’s a safeguarding policy.

She used the f word – fantasy. I keep saying that. It’s a fantasy. Fantasy can be good and healthy if you don’t let it out of the box. Trans ideology lets it out of the box and then uses the box to light a fire.

“These academics were not attending to the obvious consequences for women,” she says. “Yet on the other hand, there were plenty of academics who were cheerleading self-ID, ostentatiously moralising about it, and talking about Terfs and transphobia.”

Ostentatiously moralising about it – that’s another one. The ostentation is very important. If you don’t ostentate somebody might suspect you’re a secret doubter. WIIIIIIIIIIIIITCH

But also the ostentation is a little present to the self. Look at the good I do. Look at my tender concern for the Most Vulnerable (the men in lipstick) and my scorching fury at dissenters (women who know that men are men).

Kathleen continues: “Gender identity theory is egregiously false. It is a terrible, pseudo philosophy and would fail a first-year essay. As a philosopher who cares about logic and truth at a basic level, I couldn’t believe that all these academics were just waving it through.”

But lived experience. Inclusion. Most vulnerable. Case closed.

Speaking of that disgusting article by Grant Buttars, Kathleen shared her view of it hours ago.

Now it’s discrimination in banking. No bank account for you, bitches! Get back in the kitchen!

So there, bitches! You have to include men in your feminist group or we’ll just close your account. Sluts.

Yet more poisonous bullying from people who fancy themselves comrades:

He’s president of Edinburgh UCU. His “little something” explains why it’s good for a union to throw a member to the wolves.

When is it right for a union to support dismissal?

Transphobic philosophy professor Kathleen Stock recently resigned from her position at the University of Sussex, shortly after tweeting that the Sussex branch of UCU ‘effectively ended’ her career by releasing a statement in solidarity with trans and nonbinary communities at the university. Stock has not been a UCU member for some time. Before her resignation there would have been a clear case for the union to support her dismissal even if she were a member.

First word of the piece he calls her “transphobic,” which is a lie, and in the circumstances an evil malicious harm-doing lie.

In the furore that has followed students at the University of Sussex protesting against transphobic philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, UCU has come into the firing line from Stock supporters.

She’s not “transphobic.” Poisoning the well is cheating.

UCU is unequivocally inclusive. Our policy has been developed via numerous motions, particularly since 2017, and is detailed here.

“Inclusive” of what? Or whom? What is that supposed to mean? UCU is obviously not “inclusive” of Stock. Is UCU “inclusive” of racists? Of racism? Of violence and people who perpetrate violence? Of bullying and bullies? If you’re trying to make an argument you need to do better than using a buzzword that needs defining. If you look at the url in the “here” you’ll see that it spells out trans inclusion. Why didn’t Buttars? Maybe because he was helping himself to some extra cred by appearing to be for a sweeping embracing humanitarian incloooosion of all the world, in order to contrast himself and UCU with the evil You Know Who.

Stock meanwhile, as a Trustee of the transphobic hate group LGB Alliance and as a signatory of the Women’s Human Rights Declaration (WHRC), which calls for the ‘elimination’ of ‘the practice of transgenderism’ as well as the repeal of the Gender Recognition Act, has a position that is completely at odds with this. 

The LGB Alliance is neither a hate group nor transphobic.

I’m so sick of these people. They don’t have a real case so they intensify the lying and name-calling, even of a feminist woman who just got bullied out of a job she loved. I’m sick of them.

His conclusion:

As socialists and trade unionists we must side with the oppressed – always. That is solidarity. 

Except when they’re feminist women.

It was only a month ago that Liam Hackett verbally abused Kathleen Stock on Twitter.

This barely literate young punk calls a woman “dangerous” and “toxic.”

And worse.

Ugly stuff.

Interesting development.

Could anything go wrong?

Twelve trans prisoners convicted of violence or sexual crimes have been accommodated in Scottish women’s jails within the past 18 months, according to figures released under Freedom of Information laws.

The writing is annoyingly imprecise. Are the trans prisoners male? Probably, but it’s important to make it clear. “Trans prisoners” does not make it clear.

A long-awaited review by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) into Scotland’s transgender prison policy will consider ending the rare practice of transitioning male inmates demanding a move to female housing.

Only one of the prisoners had completed transition and the other 11 were self-identifying as female, it has emerged.

Finally we get clarity. We shouldn’t have to wait until the third paragraph (that second paragraph is a dog’s breakfast). 12 violent men have been placed in women’s prisons because the men demanded it. What a disgusting, contemptuous, misogynist policy.

Dr Kate Coleman, the director of the campaign group Keep Prisons Single Sex, urged prison bosses to take account of the impact on women of housing trans prisoners among them.

Why do they have to be urged to do that? Why isn’t it just standard practice? Why isn’t the reply to the men’s demands a swift and simple “No”?

According to the SPS, management of the risks involved in requests from trans prisoners to transfer to the female estate is through individual assessment.

Well it shouldn’t be. The answer to male (not “trans” but male) prisoners wanting to move to the female estate should be a blanket No.

The spokesman said: “All cases are treated on an individual basis and are risk-assessed through a multi-disciplinary case conference, transgender case conference supported by transgender policy.”

Fuck transgender policy. Have a policy for women. Put that first, because women are more vulnerable than men are. Don’t lock women up with men, because it’s not safe.

A spokesman for the SPS said: “One of the groups we will be particularly keen to consult is the female prison population, who have not been specifically consulted about this before.”

Jesus christ. These people are such idiots.

All very normal.

At the site overlooking where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated nearly six decades ago, scores of QAnon believers outfitted with “Trump-Kennedy 2024” shirts, flags and other merchandise gathered. They forecast the president’s son John F. Kennedy Jr., who has been dead for over 20 years, would appear at that spot, emerging from anonymity to become Donald Trump’s vice president when the former president is reinstated. The prophecy foretold online, of course, did not come true.

When 12:30 p.m. came, the time when Kennedy was shot, they recited the Pledge of Allegiance, journalist Steven Monacelli reported. The crowd lingered, some for more than an hour, eventually trickling away, a few vowing the Kennedy known as John-John will reappear at a Rolling Stone concert later in the night.

And if he doesn’t appear at the concert he’ll appear at the Frankford Road Applebee’s two days from now, and if not then he’ll be at DFW next week, and if not then he’ll be inspecting the Greenland ice shelf next month, and if…

The claim about Kennedy Jr. is considered fringe even for supporters of QAnon, a collective of baseless conspiracy theories revolving around an idea that Trump is battling a Satan-worshiping cabal that traffics children for sex. The sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology has radicalized its followers and incited violence and criminal acts. The FBI has designated it a domestic terrorism threat.

We need a higher quality domestic terrorism threat.

Kathleen Stock is on Woman’s Hour.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on How can Manchin.

…like everyone else, he is unable to imagine a life different than the one we live.

Well, if we just wait a little, we won’t have to imagine at all: it will be here.

I tell people the economy is man-made, the ecology is not. The ecology is more complex by orders of magnitude than the economy, and we understand it far less. Which one should we be thinking about changing?

Very well put. Our global economy is a pale, weak imitation of the exchange of energy, information, and elements that happens in nature, which we have been inerfering with and disrupting to our shame, and at our peril. Yes, a company going out of business is nothing compared to species going extinct. The former is like a car running out of gas; the latter more like multiple organ failure.

Economist Dani Rodrik’s political trilemma is illustrative of the choices we are faced with. According to Rodrik, democracy, national sovereignty, and global economic integration each have conflicts between them, and while you can combine any two of these three you can’t have all three simultaneously and in full.

What about a stable, functioning biosphere? Without one of those, the other three items aren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

From what I’ve read on renewable energy, the U.S. can replace up to 80% of its current fossil fuel use via solar and wind and biomass fuels, while other measures like improving dwelling energy efficiency and building more densely can help with the rest.

The more I read, the more that 80% figure sounds like a fantasy. The amount of fossil fuels that would be expended to “replace” that 80% would be enormous, vitiating the supposed “cleanliness” of these energy sources. Certainly increasing efficiency is good, but actual reductions in energy use are what’s required.

Yes, it will cost a lot of money but as the kids these days put it, I’m happy to pay it forward.

Problem is the true cost of the “improvements” proposed is not monetary. If money were the only problem, we’d be laughing. Solar panels and batteries are technologies that depend upon mining rare earth metals, which results in massive ecological damage to wherever they are extracted; the ores then rely on extremely toxic refinement and processing, which is dangerous to whatever locality these steps are taken. Both of these steps need huge amounts of (fossil fuel) energy for the machinery and processes involved. On top of that are the inputs required for transport, installation, maintenance, as well as replacement and disposal at the end of these items’ service lives. Almost all of this chain is toxic and destructive. Yet it is called “green.” The monetary cost is trivial in comparison. There’s plenty of room for profit, too. For too many, that’s the important part. All that toxicity and habitat destruction are “externalities” that can be written off, ignored and forgotten. Until they come back and bite our heads off.

Here’s a simple proposition: when the economic system comes into conflict with the ecological one, it is the economic one that must give way.

You’d think this would be foundational to any and all economic theories and practices. The fact that it is not shows you that economics is not dealing with reality.

This is what no one wants to hear, so we continue to think up simple solutions to complex problems, simple solutions that promise to leave everything essentially as it is, no lifestyle changes necessary.

If we do not solve our end of these problems ourselves, they will be solved for us, with a comprehensiveness and ferocity which will be terrible to behold, let alone experience first hand. We have yet to see the totality of Nature’s “market corrections.” If we are very lucky, we never will.

The simple truth is, we can’t solve this problem while there are 7 billion people in the world. Every solution we come up with will “hurt the poor” …

Democracies seem to be not very good at selling bad news. Who will be first to declare that economic growth is bad? How do you get elected calling for wartime levels of sacrifice in a war where the enemy is the electorate’s lifestyle? What party looking for votes is going to promote a “No Children” Policy? Nobody is going to run on a platform that clearly outlines the actual problems we face, or solutions that will actually work. Those solutions would require degrees of self-sacrifice, self-denial, and surrender of accustomed comforts and privileges that nobody has ever had to deal with willingly. As things get worse, protecting natural refugia that will be needed as loci of healing, regeneration and restoration will be harder and harder as humans become more desperate (and as some continue the cycle of despoilation which has been, up to now, so profitable for them). Earth is going to have the final say, but nobody is courting its vote, or pandering to the non-human inhabitants of any country.

What we need to do requires actual change, sacrifice and, in Western countries at least, a sharp reduction in our standard of living. Yet a non-trivial percentage of the populations of over-developed countries don’t believe there is any crisis at all. We’re having trouble convincing some people to get free shots and wear masks during a pandemic. How the fuck do we save the world? Unfortunately, I can’t see solutions that don’t involve draconian enforcement.