Miscellany Room 14
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403 responses to “Miscellany Room 14”
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Has anyone else here seen this *disgraceful* piece from “The New York Review of Books” ?
It’s called “The Anti-Trans Playbook” by a Mr. Paisley Currah. It seeks to defend the administration of harmful puberty blockers to minors and the allowing of natal males to compete in women’s sports.
It also argues “gender-critical feminism” is somehow anathema to feminism itself:
By campaigning to make birth sex the sole basis for legal distinctions between men and women, advocates of a “gender critical” feminism evidently hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood without jeopardizing cisgender women’s access to the rights and freedoms that feminism won. But the logic of this position in fact aligns with—and ultimately serves—the desire to roll back feminism itself.
Really? People with penises and testicles (hello, Jordan Gray!) are not women.
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hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood
In short, we hope to cordon off men from womanhood – a rational, logical goal. Men are not women; they are not any part of womanhood, therefore the word ‘rest’ is erroneous and misleading.
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It’s really disappointing to see this kind of article in the NYRB. Presumably they think that denying human physicality, letting unscrupulous men take away women’s privacy and rewards, and giving hideously dangerous drugs to children and teenagers will somehow magic away the Trump Administration.
And oh, look, Paisley Currah gives us a generous dose of modern-day Lysenkoism:
Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia. For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column…For cis, trans, and intersex people alike, many of the elements of sex vary over the course of a life: secondary sex characteristics like facial hair and breasts don’t develop until puberty, reproductive structures such as the uterus can be surgically removed, hormone levels fluctuate over time, and many people—cis and trans—take exogenous hormones.
This is ridiculous. Is he implying that an eight-year old boy with no facial hair, or a forty-five year old woman who's had a full hysterectomy, are members of a third or a fourth sex?
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A dose of common-sense from Jerry Coyne on the “intersex” issue:
…Attempts to define sex by combining various traits associated with gamete type, like chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, body hair and so on, lead to messy and confusing multivariate models that lack both the universality and explanatory power of the gametic concept.
Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary. Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly — without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)
In biology, then, a woman can be simply defined in four words: “An adult human female.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20241227095242/https://freethoughtnow.org/biology-is-not-bigotry/
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@3:
What makes me especially angry at this is the bait-and-switch:
Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia.
OK…
For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column…
You could say that, yes, figuring out the column for such people isn’t as easy. And while I might say “it’s the chromosomes, stupid”, I can see arguments for using different of the above criteria for some people for at least some situations, even if I don’t agree.
But then it goes on to talk about “trans”. So-called “trans” people are very clearly categorizable as their birth sex, based on all the criteria mentioned above: “sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia.”
Bait-and-switch. DSDs (misleadlingly called “intersex”), therefore trans! It’s magic!
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I do wonder how people with DSDs feel about being relabeled as ‘intersex’ and being added to the list of alphabet people. The only reason that ‘I’ is included is for misinformation. The misleading claim that that they are neither one thing nor the other but are instead a bit of both to varying degrees allows the trans PR machine to churn out the ‘see, sex is messy’ message, and the various DSD conditions lend superficial credibility to the notion of a ‘gender spectrum”.
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Acolyte of Sagan,
there was one woman with a DSD who posted on Mumsnet about this:
I am sick to death of DSDs being co-opted by the trans movement as “proof” that sex isn’t binary. I am not some weird third sex, I am not part of a spectrum, and I don’t feel the need to tell everyone about my condition.
I am sick to death of DSDs being misrepresented as an identity (looking at you, Fife NHS). It comes with some shitty elements such as infertility, but that is just one of many, many things that makes me who I am. I am a very ordinary middle-aged woman who shops in M&S and doesn’t have blue hair.
I don’t want to be in the sodding rainbow, I don’t want to be on a flag and I absolutely don’t want to be seen as synonymous with trans (looking at you, Women’s Institute).
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5380972-i-have-a-dsd-and-am-fed-up?page=1
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My guess? If they’re part of so-called Woke circles, they probably get a lot of attention and love it: they get to be “queer” without having to do anything, and their existence “validates” the existence of trans people.
And if they’re not in such circles, they probably dislike it.
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As it happens, there are more than a few trans-identified TRAs who claim to be “intersex” even though they’re clearly not, presumably because they seek this attention. Which is probably all the more infuriating for people who really have DSDs.
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Mosnae, I’m not sure they are ‘clearly not’. I had a student with a DSD; you could not tell it by looking at him. It was only when we were discussing male calico cats that he chose to reveal his condition. He had just learned from my lecture that he was likely infertile, which naturally had an impact on him. He only learned he had a DSD because he had his DNA analyzed by 23andMe, or whatever that place is. He didn’t have any external signs.
I’m not saying these trans-identified individuals are not DSD; it seems to me that it isn’t likely to be clear in many cases. And since they use sex as a ‘spectrum’, anyone not falling clearly into one ‘gender’ or the other could, in their definitions, be ‘intersex’. Which might fit all of us here, since I don’t think most of us are 100% conforming to the archaic, patriarchal gender expectations we were brought up with, and that the damned TRAs insist on reviving.
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One reason people who identify as trans may call themselves intersex is that they’re including “brain sex” — a neurological condition which tells you what sex you are — in with characteristics like chromosomes, gonads, reproductive organs, and genitalia.
In fact, brain-sex is the MOST important characteristic. If your mind doesn’t match your body, then your difference in sexual development is on the same level as an XY individual immune to male hormones, thus developing a uterus: you get to pick what feels “comfortable” to you.
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Glenna Goldis. Not a fan of the NYRB piece:
Feminism challenges “ideas about how women ought to be,” full stop. What is this decoupling business? Just kill the rules about how women should be!
Trans ideologues like @paisleycurrah want to keep sex norms alive but “decouple” them from biology. They can only make that sound feminist by falsely characterizing feminism.
https://x.com/glennagoldis/status/1995154599770980374#m
It might worthwhile for someone familiar with US feminist history and GC thought to go through Paisley Currah essay and write a rebuttal piece to it.
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iknklast, #10:
I agree with you; I did not mean to suggest that DSDs are always visible. Rather, I was thinking of people making contradictory statements (e.g. claiming to have Klinefelter syndrome and a uterus, which may or may not be a real example).
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Mostly Cloudy, #3.
Is he implying that an eight-year old boy with no facial hair, or a forty-five year old woman who’s had a full hysterectomy, are members of a third or a fourth sex?
Most likely, yes. I remember PZ making the same argument a few years ago in one of his fallacious animal analogies. According to PZ, we call male horses ‘colts’, ‘stallions’, or ‘geldings’, therefore sex is not binary!
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From today’s New York Times: a TIM sues the hospital that’s been treating his cancer because someone noted (while he was under anesthesia) that he had man bits.
Jennifer Capasso, a 42-year-old transgender woman, figured there was a good chance she would be dead within 18 months. Since her diagnosis of metastatic rectal cancer, her life had become a succession of treatments and surgeries as more tumors were found. On her liver, and her lungs, and her large intestine, and again on her lungs.
At her apartment in Long Island City, Queens, she read cancer research papers and estimated her chances of survival, updating the odds after each scan, each tumor, each treatment. She tried to remember exactly what her doctors had said, and the tone they had used.
It frustrated her that she was unconscious at the most crucial moments — as the surgeon removed each cancerous mass. What if the surgeon said something important, a stray comment that no one bothered to tell her about after the anesthesia wore off? She decided to record her next surgery, on March 7, 2022, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the renowned Manhattan hospital.
“I wanted to know what’s going on,” she recounted. She turned on the audio recorder on her phone before the anesthesia hit. “Knowledge is power.”
OK, so that seems reasonable. Maybe a bit creepy–surely he should’ve informed them that he was recording–but I can understand wanting to know what went on. But then–oh, the horror! Cover your eyes and hide the kids for the next part!
The surgeon removed part of her lung. She did not get around to playing the recording until a few weeks later. Though the audio was muffled, she could follow some of what the surgical team was saying before the procedure began. Someone was going out for coffee — did anyone want something from Starbucks? The conversation then shifted.
“ — still has man parts.”
It seemed to Ms. Capasso that they were talking about her genitalia.
Well, yes. Yes, they were. That seems somehow pertinent to the work of the medical team. Kind of like, I dunno, you probably wouldn’t want your car to be mistaken for a watch when it’s in the shop (or vice versa).
Anyway, someone(s) expressed some more thoughtcrimes, and they changed his designation from “F” to “M” in their records, and now he’s suing the hospital while still getting treatment from them.
There’s a lot more in the article. It’s all very tedious. But I’d think that if I were getting treated for a very aggressive cancer, I’d want my medical team to have accurate information about my body, even if that information doesn’t fit my self-image.
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The Times certainly makes up for the “still has man parts” shock-horror by using Female Pronouns every third word or so.
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Yeah, I considered going through and “[sic]”ing every example, but it was too much work. (Also, I found myself referring to him as “she” at one point. Hard to get away from that.)
Also, the hospital in its response refers to sex “assigned at birth”. Doubleplusungood.
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Dearie Me, Mr. Andrew Kaveney is even more furious with the British media than usual:
Something needs to be done about the Guardian and the New Statesman. It ought to be utterly unacceptable that they sing from the same songsheet as the rest of the media on this…By now, any feminism that remains in that tradition has forgotten to ask ‘Who? Whom?’ and allied itself with the oppressors of all women. You can’t think of yourself as on the Left or as a feminist if you share your analysis with Thiel and Putin’.
https://bsky.app/profile/rozkaveney.bsky.social/post/3m73pyycvtk2y
So if you believe in human sexual dimorphism you are on the same side as Thiel and Putin. Logical fallacy 101.
Bluesky seems to be people like Kaveney marinading in the same old Novara Media / Momentum-style smelly sauce.
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Mostly Cloudy, if it weren’t for logical fallacies, the trans lobby would have nothing to say. They are one big, walking, whining, logical fallacy. I don’t think they’ve met a logical fallacy they don’t like…even when pointing out examples of same on the other side, and examples that aren’t necessarily logical fallacies.
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New racism allegations swirl around the odious Nigel Farage:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/04/europe/nigel-farage-racism-allegations-reform-intl-cmd
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Well, this made me laugh for a solid five minutes.
United States President Donald Trump received the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize before the draw for the 2026 Fifa World Cup. The award has been introduced this year by Fifa president Gianni Infantino, designated for a person who has “taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace” and “united people across the world”….As well as receiving a large golden trophy, Trump was also given a medal and certificate by Infantino before making a speech.
Reading the backstory it seems that the whole thing was arranged by Infantino without consulting the Fifa council, so not dissimilar to the way Trump does things without consulting the Senate. What’s really funny, though, is that despite this ‘award’ being an obvious sham concocted by the giant infant and Infantino, the giant infant still appears to think it means something!
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Oh ffs.
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…the giant infant still appears to think it means something!
Played like a fiddle. Of course, Trump will claim that “people are saying” that this “peace prize” is much bigger, better, and more important than the Nobel, and he’ll display the “large gold trophy” in a prominant place in the Oval Office (though how he’ll prevent it being lost amidst the surfet of gilded effluvia encrusting the walls is another story).
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Trump keeps finding new lows.
The Trump administration has removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from next year’s calendar of entrance fee-free days for national parks and added President Trump’s birthday to the list, according to the National Park Service, as the administration continues to push back against a reckoning of the country’s racist history on federal lands.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/06/g-s1-101090/national-parks-fee-free-calendar-mlk-juneteenth
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What’s going on here?
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Collapse.
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President Donald Trump has launched a scheme offering fast-tracked US visas to wealthy foreigners who can pay at least $1m (£750,000).
The card will give buyers a “direct path to Citizenship for all qualified and vetted people. SO EXCITING! Our Great American Companies can finally keep their invaluable Talent,” Trump said on social media on Wednesday.
The card looks as tacky as it sounds, complete with Trump’s scowling face, and he appears to have an eagle sat on his knee!
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Hey everyone — Ophelia’s OK, she’s dealing with clusterfuck computer issues!
(Dr Frankenstein voice): SHE’S ALIVE!
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Thank you for the update, Mondegreen.
Thank goodness it’s computer gremlins! (Well, not thank goodness for the troubles. Thank goodness it’s nothing more serious is what I mean.)
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Thanks Lady
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Thanks for the update, Lady.
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Is “no news”, “good news”?
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Telegraph: Green Party tearing itself apart over trans rights, leaked dossier reveals (archive link)
The Green Party is tearing itself apart over internal trans guidance, a leaked dossier has revealed.
The 53-page report on legal and reputational risk to the party, leaked to The Telegraph, exposes an extraordinary row over the party’s policies on transgender and LGBT rights.
It poses material legal and financial risks to Zack Polanski’s movement, the dossier reveals.
The report, drawn up by the party’s own lawyers, raises concerns over “expulsions” of members who question gender ideology.
It says these have not always followed “due process”, suggesting party lieutenants have been taking disciplinary action against members because of “individual hostility to gender-critical beliefs, or assumed beliefs”.
It warns such sanctions “should only be undertaken in extreme circumstances” and that action against gender-critical members is sapping morale and “failing to inspire the trust and confidence of large numbers of party members”.
The 53-page report contains a set of 15 urgent recommendations to help resolve the issues.
As might be expected, a party spokesman minimized the concerns from the report.
I was wondering what could possibly take 53 pages, but it appears that the report contains a lot of specifics about incidents, finances, and legal issues.
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Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia.
And yet, they leave out the key characteristic of gametes, the actual determinant of the role a person’s body plays in sexual reproduction. You don’t have to actually produce gametes to be the sex you are, but the reproductive system is aligned either with the production of small gametes (male) or large gametes (female). I am given to understand that even people with DSDs (misleadingly and stubbornly called “intersex” by the trans lobby, no matter how many times they have been corrected [so much for “now you’ve been told how people prefer to be called, you bigot,” and the “just be kind” brigade]) are determinable either a male or a female person, to whom the disorder of sexual development has happened.
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determinable = determinably
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I agree with #34 for criticizing that blockquote for listing structures but omitting gametes. I think about gametes in two steps: (1) Sexual reproduction is one thing, and (2) Classification of individuals for their “sex” is another thing. There are no gametes between sperm and egg called sperg or spegg.
I think it was Helen Joyce who said in an interview that DSDs are like a cleft palate but for genitals. That helps me see that formation of structures is not a good way to classify sex of individuals.
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That helps me see that formation of structures is not a good way to classify sex of individuals.
And yet..,humans are good at telling the sex of a person they are interacting with, and they cannot see gametes. In general, we determine a person’s sex by their external genitalia and other, secondary sexual characteristics. This is the only actual way we have of telling male/female on the fly, and it is an important determination. We must know the sex of the individual in many situations; the most primary are for the purpose of selecting a mate, and for the purpose of protecting our bodies.
Yes, there are a few exceptions in terms of external structures. There are also some individuals who are deliberately androgynous (and even they will usually have some identifying clues, such as an Adam’s apple). None of the external features on their own can determine a person’s actual sex; they must be taken all together, and the biological determination of sex determined by things we may not be able to see…but the external features are almost always a good clue.
I have a friend who is over six feet tall; I knew immediately upon meeting her that she was female. My ex has a higher voice than typical for a man; I knew immediately upon meeting him that he was male (and since we had a child together, that is a confirmation),
Eternal features are actually a good identifier in most cases, just like we can identify lips (even if they are cleft). Brushing aside external features is what the trans lobby wants us to do, because that gives them another argument for ‘see? you can’t tell who is male or who is female”. It is not a perfect system, but then, neither is gametes, because if a person makes no gametes, and that is the only determinate feature, we would indeed be unable to identify to sex, even if we say that gametes are more reliable unless we can use the external features for that identification.
Oh, dear. Baby A is clearly male, Baby B is clearly female, but Baby C does not produce gametes. How will we ever know what Baby C should be called? We look at Baby C and note presence or absence of penis, vulva, and any other determining features. As Baby C grows, he/she will develop the secondary sexual characteristics associated with their sex even if they do not produce gametes. DNA is also a reliable indicator, even in spite of DSDs; that is often how they determine the actual sex of someone with DSDs.
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One evening not long after I got my license, while I was driving home along the Mass Pike, I stopped at one of those huge rest areas for a bathroom break. When I entered the restroom, my first reaction was to wonder why there were so many women in the men’s bathroom. Then when dawn broke over Marblehead, I slunk out and went to the men’s room.
TRAs like to accuse us of wanting to inspect people’s genitalia before they enter the bathroom, but I did not see anyone’s genitalia, or even a bare breast, and yet it was clear to me that everyone else in that restroom (with the possible exception of some young children) was female. And anyone who saw me most likely recognized that I was male.
Somehow we managed for more than a century to have bathrooms segregated by sex, without anyone standing at the entrance asking everyone to drop their pants or raise their skirts. Surely we could still do that; we aren’t that much stupider now, are we?
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So back in November our current government in NZ (central-right/right coalition) enacted a regulation that banned the use of puberty blockers for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria or as part of trans care.
A Court has now issued a temporary injunction preventing the enforcement of the regulation, pending a Judicial Review of the legality of the regulation. The party bringing the claim is PATHA (Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa). This is essentially a trade organisation made up of people (paid or unpaid) involved in the delivery of care or support services to trans people. I actually found it very hard to find out much about who they are because their website doesn’t list any members, executive, or advisory board. The only names associated seem to be in press clippings when the then serving President or vice-President made public statements. PATHA is the local affiliate of WPATH though.
Here’s are links to the news report and the Courts interim judgment.
https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/cases/2025/2025-NZHC-4045.pdf
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I see #34, #35, #36 as ontology (defining the underlying categories), and #37, #38 as epistemology (of how we recognize the underlying categories). They work together, as ontology and epistemology.
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In truly miscellaneous news, today’s New York Times Crossword was created by not-so-“friendy” asshole Hemant Mehta. So I will be boycotting it.
Ugh, I can’t stand how much transgender politics has infiltrated into my cozy little world of crosswords. The clues increasingly focus on gender shit. (“aro” is a normalized word now, for “aromantic”, as is “enby” and “they” as a pronoun, etc.)
The worst moment was when the New Yorker crossword offered the clue “A certain prejudiced individual” and the answer was TERF. I closed that tab on the spot, and I vowed never to touch a New Yorker crossword again.
But to see the NYT crossword — the gold standard in the field — authored by a raging bigot? Fuck, this sucks.
Crosswords are supposed to be my little break, my little getaway from the madness.
Grrr.
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Mehta, ugh.
Not believing in the god of Abraham may classify you (in most circles) as an atheist, but believing that people can actually change sex makes you a *true believer.* Funny how that bit of cognitive dissonance works.
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Owen Jones is transphobic, pass it on:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5444811-owen-jones
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The Background to OJ’s trans transgression:
StatsforLefties
Owen, their name is Amu Gib and their pronouns are they/them. Please do not misgender them when they are going through hell
Owen Jones
@owenjonesjourno
Dec 18
I obviously did not realise this.
https://xcancel.com/LeftieStats/status/2001623003529191590#m
Poor Owen must go to a struggle session where he will be made to publicly re-affirm his loyalty to Munroe Bergdorf and Shon Faye.
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I do not believe that the DOJ should be setting a bounty on transgender ideologists or medical malpractictioners even if it means protecting children. I think that this will create a backlash that will make convincing the larger public that trans is not an actual state but a misdiagnosis of a reaction to toxic masculinity that much harder.
Atheist groups could be targeted as well:
The Bondi memo was leaked on December 8, and on Tuesday, LGBTQ Nation first reported on the fact that the memo includes “radical gender ideology” as part of its definition of “domestic terrorism.” In additional to “radical gender ideology,” the memo also defines potential domestic terrorist ideologies as “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders… anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity… hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality,” and more. Under the Trump administration, “radical gender ideology” has been used as a catchall phrase to encompass issues related to trans and nonbinary communities.
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trans is…a reaction to toxic masculinity
I’ve never heard that but it does make sense, at least in some scenarios. But yes I agree, labelling trans or atheists, or even immigrants of the ‘wrong’ skin color *or economic class* as domestic terrorists puts a target on their backs. Look at the murdering they are doing to Venezuelan civilians in the name of “terrorism” (“narco-terrorism” in this case). This administration is made up of a bunch of xenophobic chickenshits who should not have any power over anyone, much less the control of the US military to conduct their illicit attacks on those who don’t meet their standards of white nationalist neo-herrenvolk.
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I just checked: there’s been no Twitter activity from Ophelia for the past two weeks. So whatever the issue is, it doesn’t appear to be limited to WordPress. :(
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It appears to be true of Facebook as well? I don’t see any posts for 12 days there. I hope everything is okay offline, even if she’s still having online issues.
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I don’t like this :(
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Something’s not right. No contact online at all via any channels for two weeks? I want to respect privacy and all, but I’m also deeply concerned. I’m not trying to pry, or to violate boundaries. I just care, and I want to make sure she’s ok! I’m gravely concerned. Friends, what can we do? What *should* we do? What’s appropriate?
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I have no idea what to do.
But I’ll help with any plan if I can.
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Count me as concerned as well. This is a pretty long break.
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If Lady Mondegreen has a contact with her, perhaps she could be our contact. I too think it’s been a long time absent, and I worry.
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If anyone is still on Facebook, they could try to get in touch with James Garnett. I believe they’re old friends. When Ophelia was having internet issues a few years ago, he sent someone over to check in on her. That’s how I learned that she was ok.
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This is very concerning. Two weeks with no new posts, and no explanation given either.
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Ok, so, let’s coordinate, then. Our leads so far are Lady M, and James Garnett. Has anyone gotten in touch with Garnett? If so, could they report back here so we can know where things stand? Is anyone able to get a hold of Lady M?
Lady M, if you’re reading, can you please give us another update? Even a simple, “She’s alive; can’t go into details right now” would be great. Just want to be sure we’re covering the basics; this is a wellness check on our friend, not a demand to intrude on what might be private matters.
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Btw, anyone can reach out to me anytime in private. I’m at
arrtymorty
(note the extra “r” in there. Like a pirate: arr!)
at gmail dot com.
Messages welcome!
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Sent a message to James through Facebook this morning. I will report back when he responds.
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Ok, I just sent a dm to Lady Mondegreen (at least I think it’s Lady Mondegreen) on X, asking if she knows anything. So we’ll see.
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Thanks so much, Mike!
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Thanks Sastra!
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I also sent a message to Lady M, asking her to post here if she’s got an update.
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James reported back that he’s got no news and hasn’t been in contact with her for a while.
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Thank you all.
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I wrote to Ophelia at her personal email address on the 19th, and I’ve had no reply either.
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Well, given Lady M’s statement that Ophelia was dealing with “clusterfuck computer issues”, it’s hardly a surprise if she lacks access to her mail, as well as facebook and this blog. It is worrying that dealing with the issue takes this long, though.
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Computer issues don’t explain it, as we can all access email and websites via our phones. I was thinking an online detox as Arty suggested, but now y’all got me worried.
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I took What a Maroon’s comment on December 19th to mean that she probably hadn’t returned to her home yet. Perhaps WaM can (dis)confirm my interpretation on this point? Of course we already knew she’d been away for some unspecified period of time (although that was only supposed to last “for a couple more days”). We also knew that as late as ten days ago she’s was “OK”, but dealing with “clusterfuck computer issues”. Everything we know so far is consistent with her being away from home and unable to get online. Still, ten days without any signs of life is a long time for someone who almost never misses a day of blogging… :-/
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Don’t make me have to fly out there!
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I’m posting this again (without the links this time) since the first attempt got stuck in moderation:
I took What a Maroon’s comment [see Ophelia’s last blog post] on December 19th to mean that she probably hadn’t returned to her home yet. Perhaps WaM can (dis)confirm my interpretation on this point? Of course we already knew she’d been away for some unspecified period of time (although that was only supposed to last “for a couple more days”). We also knew that as late as ten days ago she’s was “OK”, but dealing with “clusterfuck computer issues”. Everything we know so far is consistent with her being away from home and unable to get online. Still, ten days without any signs of life is a long time for someone who almost never misses a day of blogging… :-/
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Computer issues don’t explain it, as we can all access email and websites via our phones.
You’re right; I sort of thought she might not have a smartphone (my wife doesn’t, despite my encouraging her to get one). But since she has posted photos from her walks, I assume she does have one. Not everyone sets up email on their phone, though. I generally find the experience of mail on the phone rather dismal myself.
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@Bjarte,
I was just quoting the first line from The Band’s song “Ophelia”. Unfortunately I don’t have any information on her whereabouts, but I hope she comes back home; her neighborhood just isn’t the same.
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Ok, my mistake, thank you.
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Harald, yes, I didn’t get a smartphone myself until 2017, which was relatively late to the game, but I did have a regular cellphone with a camera before that, so I suppose it’s possible she doesn’t have web access on it. Also, knowing how frugal she is (by her own account), I don’t know how appealing or necessary a $500-1000 phone would be to her either, so who knows.
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Folks, Ophelia’s fine. She’s still waiting on some doohickey she needs for her computer. She asked me to tell you all that she’s sorry for being away for so long.
In the meantime, O says, if anyone would like to share an essay, please post it here, and when she returns (hopefully soon!) she will guest-post it. ❤️
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Bjarte, I think that post was referring to her absence on the 8th.
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Thanks Lady M. Cheers!
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O doesn’t have a Smartphone. “They’re too big,” she told me, and she doesn’t want to have Two Things.
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Thank you Lady M for the update!
Delighted to hear she’s having computer problems. Looking forward to her return.
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Thanks, Lady M!
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Thanks for the update, Lady Mondegreen
That’s all we needed to know.
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Looking forward to Ophelia’s Christmas presence. ;)
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That’s the best bad news I’ve had all month!
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Add me to the list of concerned folks.
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Thank you, Lady M. Ophelia’s unexplained absence had been concerning us.
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Thank you very much, Lady M!
I was thinking the worst.
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Whew!! Thank you, Lady Mondegreen!
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I’m glad to hear it! And I’m glad to hear she doesn’t have a smartphone. I don’t, either. I really don’t like having a flip phone, but I put up with it mostly for website verifications and travel.
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I have a “smartphone” but I don’t use it. I carry it for “emergencies”.
I’d go back to my flip phone if I knew where it was.
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I am going to bed a bit less stressed tonight.
Happy Seasonal Whatevers to all
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Thank you so much, Lady Mondegreen! I haven’t been a B&W reader for nearly as long as many here, and I feel a bit amiss among so many intellectuals, but I’ve still grown so fond of this website I really can’t put my relief into words. (And as a smartphone-shunner myself, I now like Ophelia even more.)
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Thanks so much for the update, Lady M!
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Thanks, Lady M. I’ve been as worried as everyone else, but didn’t find anything useful to say.
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Thanks Lady M. Looking forward to the eventual return of our regularly scheduled program. We miss you, Ophelia!
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While we wait for the return of Ophelia, here is a very interesting article I found.
It’s called Memory-Hole Archive: Sex and (Trans) Gender Wars, by Jamie Paul, published on the “American Dreaming” website.
https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/memory-hole-archive-sex-and-transgender
It covers the appearance and growth of transgender ideology, mainly in the United States. It explains that this is distinctive new form of trans ideology, different from the old late 20th views on trans (adherents of this ideology were now demonized as the hated “truscum”).
It also delineates the extraordinary power this ideology gained, with the backing of major Corporations, NGOs and the US government.
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Hello!
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Good lord, it worked. I didn’t think it would. Am on a borroewed ttiny apple laptop and don’t know what I’m doing so mistakes are frequent.
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It’s been a comedy of errors but I think the end is in sight…i.e. within a few days.
Pro-tip: never leave your cord/charger behind, You can’t replace it. You can try, but it won’t work.
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It’s true about the smart phone. Two things are too many. I have a dumb phone.
Now if only I could see how to enlarge the font on this thing. This one is TINY so it slows me way the hell down. I’d be more chatty but I can’t seeeeee.
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Hurray! Ophelia is back! :)
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Oooh I found out how to enlarge the font. No stopping me now.
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Yaay!!!
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Mind you, I can’t do anything, because I would have to go through a million new password hassles and I can’t face it. But at least I can whine here.
Sorry about the seeming to be dead thing. It’s all the fault of the damn cord/charger racket!
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Back atcha Dave! I missed you guys!
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Also Mostly Cloudy!
(I am very clumsy on this unfamiliar laptop.)
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Normal service will resume in a few days, I think. Cord/charger is on its way – we thought it already was but it turned out to be a DIFFERENT one that a DIFFERENT fool accidentally left behind. Apparently I carefully put mine in one of the desk drawers in order to leave it behind, while my predecessor left hers/his plugged in under the desk. We all have our own ways of failing to pack the cord/charger. That desk must have a hex on it.
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This is very good news.
I have never had a problem finding a replacement cord. I have left many behind. But perhaps Ophelia is stuck on Gilligan’s Island, and the Professor can’t make a USB type A out of coconuts. I tend to forget my cords in places with stores.
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I thought it would be completely simple and routine but noooooooooo – they carefully make different ones for each laptop so that they can drive you crazy.
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It’s A Christmas Miracle!
GodBlessUsEveryone!
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I was actually starting to “research” Private Detectives.
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Hello!
I’m sorry, but who are you?
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I’m really glad you’re back! Please take your time; you probably have better things to do at this time of year than deal with computer hassles.
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Welcome back, Ophelia!
Merry Wednesday, everyone :)
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Apropos of nothing, I recently learned that “The Professor” on Gilligan’s Island actually had a name: Dr. Roy Hinkley.
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I thought it would be completely simple and routine but noooooooooo – they carefully make different ones for each laptop so that they can drive you crazy.
Indeed, but that is becoming a thing of the past. I believe every modern laptop these days is charged via USB-C, a universal standard. So if you ever get to upgrade to a newer one, expect some relief on that front.
And welcome back from the presumed (!?) dead!
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Thanks for popping your head back in! Enjoy your holiday(s)!
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Now look here, my head never popped out, so I had no need to pop it back in!
Hurr hurr
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Now look here, my head never popped out, so I had no need to pop it back in!
Too bad. I was so looking forward to an Ophelia Benson bobblehead in my stocking!
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Xmas just isn’t the same without one.
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My guess is the truant cord/charger will be delivered Friday, so normal broadcasting should be restored.
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I’ve been away with no internet for a few days in the middle of all this, so was both alarmed and then very relieved reading through the thread. It’s really lovely that we have a community that cares about its members/host enough to take real world action.
It’s a funny old time of year what with the enforced jollity and expressions of goodwill which very few people seem to remember a week later. Wherever you are and whatever you believe (or as most of us probably don’t), please have a restful, fun break, or at least a safe and secure place to be with people important to you. My wife and I are having a quiet time for a few days but hope to catch up with friends in a few days.
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OB: Very good news,! You are back,!
I was about to write you a letter c/- PO Seattle, as I don’t know your exact postal address. I think you will find that your email inbox is chockers.
The other possibility (admittedly pretty distant, like at the far side of the Universe) was that you had decided that transwomen are women after all, and had hit the trail with one.
(Aside) Come on, Tonto. Our work’s done here.!
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Omar
My fever-dreams were running more to kidnapping by a radical trannny cult.
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Welcome back! Happy to hear the trauma is almost at an end. Please take all the time you need to curate the thoughts that have germinated during your enforced isolation from your appreciative audience.
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Oh my goooooood what a wonderful Christmas treat! So glad to see you back, Ophelia!
Yaaaay!
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It’s good to be fine, as Mandrake said to Ripper in Doctor Strangelove.
Mind you, the weather here is not playing along. The sky is a solid dreary grey, not the kind with interesting clouds but just the cold hard steel effect, and it feels absolutely ICY. It feels colder than it would if it actually were colder, if you know what I mean.
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Oh wow! Welcome back, Ophelia!!
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Since Ophelia suggested we could post essays while she is gone for guest posts, I took her up on it, because I have been stewing about something I need to get off my chest. So here it is:
I was reading an article in a favorite magazine lately, another in the endless run of tedious articles by political liberals living on the east coast who decide to vacation in the middle of the country. They drive through places and talk to people, and when they come back, they have to tell us this amazing fact they learned that everyone else has not learned, or is ignoring…the people in the middle of the country are nice! They have wives, and kids, and walk their dogs, and go to the grocery store without great big guns on their backs…just like us. They just have to tell the rest of us that we need to get with the picture and understand these people.
Well, for some of us living in the middle of the country, spending every day here, this isn’t news. These are our neighbors, our colleagues, our students, maybe even our family. We have known this for a long time. We are sick of hearing the awe-struck progressives tell us to shape up and listen to these people. We do…we have few choices. We are right here, right in the middle of Trump country. And yes, many of the people are nice…and they’re housebroken, too!
It seems a lot of people subscribe to what I like to call the Ebenezer Scrooge theory of sociopolitical thought. [Full disclosure: I am not an expert in sociopolitical theory, and as far as I know, this is my own creation, not an actual designation made by those who study this stuff.] They believe somehow that unkind thoughts will show, that the people will be alone in all ways, living a cold, barren existence, sans family, sans friends, sans loved ones, sans everything. This simply isn’t true. Some of the most courteous, polite, and friendly people I’ve ever met were…get ready for it…Trump voters. MAGA. Why? Don’t worry, if you talk to them long enough, they will tell you. Often it’s immigrants; that’s the most common thing I hear. There are also other concerns they express, such as the fact that white men are being genocided. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yep. There are now non-white, non-male faces in the office, on the television, in the movies, etc. Even as the white male still remains on top of the heap, it is clearly…CLEARLY!…genocide.
The expectation that the MAGA nature of someone will manifest in a lonely, pathetic life, or a ranting madman at literally every moment of the day, tells me we learned too little, or forgot too much, from the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps you remember this little thing Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil? Nazis committed one of the most horrendous crimes of history, but in the long run, they weren’t that different from you or me (except they spoke German, and I don’t). They were loving husbands and fathers, possibly took care of their elderly parents, maybe walked their dog and stroked their cat. They committed bloody, horrific atrocities, then went home at night and embraced their family.
I have seen a number of times where people revised their view of a movement after meeting some of the people involved in it and discovering how much like us “they” are. This can be dangerous. It isn’t difficult for ‘nice’ people to hold ‘evil’ thoughts and perform ‘evil’ deeds. They simply don’t see them as evil. They believe they are doing ‘nice’ things for the benefit of everyone…except, of course, the drug dealers, the criminal elements, and the dangerous terrorists. They have a different reality, but they are still human, and they function much as other humans do. They are us.
This is important to remember. It is a sobering thought to realize that people who seem to be wonderful people actually hate a substantial number of us. I see it on the left, too. Otherwise friendly, helpful people who single out some group…let’s say, TERFs…to hate with a passion and an obsession that consumes them. Meanwhile, they may still seem to be nice, good people in their daily lives.
The message that is required is not the one the ‘east coast liberals’ are putting out there, a message of our shared humanity. The message that needs to be taken from all of this is that ordinary people, during the course of an ordinary life, do some extraordinarily awful things, and not out of coercion but out of conviction. It is a sobering message, because it suggests the possibility that you and I, in spite of the fact that we see ourselves as ‘nice’, could someday be persuaded into an atrocious position. In fact, we may already hold atrocious opinions that seem to be sensible, appropriate positions to us.
The most important thing to remember is that the other political side is not ‘them’ – they are simply the flip side of ‘us’.
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WaM, I didn’t know that! I haven’t confess to not being a huge LL fan. It does however prove my long held belief that true originality of thought is a hard thing to achieve in a population as large as humanity over the time span of history.
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iknklast, your essay reminds me of a quotation from Hannah Arendt I remember reading decades ago that I can paraphrase this way: If you can’t picture yourself shoving Jews into ovens, then the lesson of the Holocaust has been lost on you (or something like that).
“Nice” people become very un-nice when they have been convinced they are under attack by outsiders
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Rob,
I used to think I was something of an original thinker. Then the internet came along.
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Eichmann in Jerusalem is a stone-cold masterpiece. One striking thing about it is that it started life as a (super-long) article in the New Yorker. Made waves.
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Of course “Otherwise friendly, helpful people who single out some group to hate with a passion” for many people describes not the people who hate terfs but terfs themselves. We can say it’s the ideology, not the people who push the ideology, but they can say that’s a distinction without a difference.
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A terrible tragedy about the fate of The New Yorker. I’m writing a very long piece right now that calls that magazine in its current form under David Remnick, “the poisoned well at the heart of the plague.”
My, how the New Yorker has fallen. To go from Arendt to Orwellian dreck about William “Lia” Thomas having always been a woman, and nonsense about families fleeing the US to “protect” their “transgender” children.
It’s worse than a shame. It’s sick.
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Seriously.
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The working title of my essay is “The Power of the Powerful”.
I wonder how many will get the reference…
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So glad to see you are okay Ophelia, like others i worried!
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Sorry about the worrying! Sheer bumbling incompetence on my part.
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#135 Artymorty: Is it a reference to the Samuel Moyn statement about how “human rights inevitably became bound up with the power of the powerful ?”
https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-126/human-rights-and-history/
The essay sounds very interesting – I am looking forward to reading it.
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It’s only 364 days until Christmas.
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I just hope the skeletons in Santa hats will go away soon.
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They will be replaced by bunnies with hearts and shamrocks.
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It’s only 364 days until Christmas.
Chigau!
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@Mostly Cloudy
I wasn’t aware of that reference! No, I was referring to Czech poet/playwright/dissident/eventual President Vaclav Havel, and his famous 1978 essay about “post-totalitarianism”, The Power of the Powerless. His allegory of the greengrocer, who must post a sign in his window that says, “Workers of the World, Unite!” regardless of whether he believes in the Communist party is extremely apt in our age of forced pronouns. He argues that even a small gesture like the sign is an act of humiliation meant to remind you of your submission to a lie you don’t believe. See what I mean? Very apt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
But that reference of yours is great and I think I’ll steal it and sneak it into my essay. Thanks!
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@Ophelia,
I hadn’t actually known (or perhaps forgot) about the banality of evil‘s origins in The New Yorker. That’s definitely going in the essay!
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Well I’d forgotten, what I just re-learned from a quick Google, is that The New Yorker sent her to the trial as a reporter.
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I can confidently say I once knew that, because she says it in a Note to the Reader on the first page of the book. The House of Memory hath many holes in the floor.
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Excellent essay, https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2025/miscellany-room-14/#comment-3088254
They simply don’t see them as evil. They believe they are doing ‘nice’ things for the benefit of everyone…except, of course, the drug dealers, the criminal elements, and the dangerous terrorists. They have a different reality, but they are still human, and they function much as other humans do. They are us.
@iknklst
I think that this is why the movie The Zone of Interest was so chilling. Life was mundane for Hoss and his family, if you ignore the screams from the other side of the wall.
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#145 Artymorty :
I wasn’t aware of the Havel reference, but now I’ll check it out.
And I’m grateful you found my reference to Moyn’s work inspiring.
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Ick. Huff Post UK is running an article promoting the ghoul Susie Green and her new charity, Anne Health :
“Quelle Surprise”, the women involved both have gender-special children.
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@Mike
I place The Zone of Interest near the very apex of films that have immediately and permanently altered how I think. It was a genuinely life-changing encounter with a work of art — one that opened new lines of thought and shifted my perspective on the world. My film-watching life could arguably be divided into the period “before The Zone of Interest” and the one after.
It was also one of the most difficult films I’ve ever sat through, precisely because of the horror it depicts.
It’s Arendt’s banality of evil rendered in cinema. What haunts me most is a simple scene: a ladies’ afternoon tea at the Höss household, adjacent to the Auschwitz grounds. You hear the gunfire, the executions — the machinery of death clanking, the furnaces burning, the occasional scream. You hear all of it, yet you see nothing but a group of women engaged in ordinary social chit-chat. They hear the same sounds you do. They simply choose not to acknowledge them.
I’ve had many anguished nights — lonely, resentful of my exile from former social circles — when I’ve thought about that scene, and about how powerfully it resonates with what’s happening today.
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I recall: I mentioned The Zone of Interest a few weeks ago here at B&W in another thread:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2025/replacing-outdated-diagnostic-categories/#comment-3086621
There’s never enough opportunities to promote that brilliant, but awful, film.
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Lookie here. Comedian Amy Sedaris has raised eyebrows with a joke made on the CNN New Year’s Eve broadcast.
Host Anderson Cooper asked her, ‘Where’s the the best place to meet a man in 2026?’ – at the behest of a watching viewer.
Sedaris shot back ‘Oh, where’s a good place to meet a man? I’d say in the ladies room, but-‘,
https://www.tmz.com/2026/01/01/amy-sedaris-trans-joke-new-years-eve-cnn/
I say good for Sedaris. I wonder if the “Be Kind” Brigade will go after her now.
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First I heard of the Sedaris joke was in reports that people were calling her a transphobe over it, so yes, they did.
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I’ve started to watch Jack Smith’s testimony before the House judiciary committee. I can hardly listen because of overwhelming feelings of anger, betrayal, and depression. It brings to mind a few of my inner harsh judgments against things that other people have done or failed to do.
One of my judgments is that I will never forgive President Obama for just lying down and taking the Republicans’ pronouncements, that it’s somehow unseemly or illegitimate for a lame duck president to make appointments to the Supreme Court, simply because there is an election coming up at the end of the term, and the sitting President is not a candidate. On the strength of that assertion, the do-nothing Republicans vowed to reject (do nothing, ie, refuse to confirm) any candidate proposed by Obama, regardless of qualifications. For decades, the Republicans have had little to no interest in any kind of governance. They just want to retain power, continue to be returned to office, just for the purposes of (1) the power itself, (2) the perks and benefits they receive as a consequence of holding office, and (3) breaking or obstructing normal institutions of government, and just aggrandizing any tax savings to themselves and their corporate donors. If the Republicans were determined to play unfairly, and to ignore the ordinary rules and procedures, Obama should have had the guts to bend a few rules himself. He could have made an interim appointment, and ensconced his nominee in the job de facto. I will never forgive him for failing to have that vision, or at least doing SOMETHING to counter the Republicans’ illegitimate tactics.
Of course, I am somewhat sobered now by the realization that the candidate Obama was putting forward was Merrick Garland. Garland’s performance as Attorney General in Biden’s administration has proven that his moral fiber and courage are considerably lacking; he may not have had the proper steel in his makeup to have been an effective Supreme Court Justice. Ah well. At least he wouldn’t have been, say, a Brett Kavanaugh.
In any event, Garland has his own unforgivable actions/inactions that he is responsible for. He should have been on top of the Jan 6 prosecutions from the date of his confirmation in office. In the interest of not wanting to “appear partisan,” he dragged his feet so long before opening an investigation and appointing Special Counsel, that DJT’s delaying tactics worked, and Jack Smith simply ran out of time to bring the matter to trial.
So, yes, I bear certain grudges. Some are of considerable age: I will never forgive the members of SCOTUS who voted to halt the counting of ballots in Florida, effectively installing Dubya as President, instead of finding out whether Gore had actually won. (Shortly after that ruling, Sandra Day O’Connor visited the court where I worked. I did NOT meet her; couldn’t bring myself to attend the ceremony.)
I will never forgive Obama for not doing something, like making a pocket appointment to SCOTUS, in view of the Republicans’ refusal to fulfill their obligations.
And I will never forgive Garland for not having the guts to diligently prosecute the mastermind of the insurrection to overturn the results of a valid election. There should be a special place in hell for those who had the actual power to do something about these Constitutional crises, but who failed to act, or to act promptly and decisively.
My little rant/essay on “things I can’t forgive.”
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CNN reporting that the US has attacked Venezuela and “captured and flown out” President Maduro:
https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/venezuela-explosions-caracas-intl-hnk-01-03-26
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Is it time to mention Maureen Dowd’s infamous “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk” piece again? I do believe it is:
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Jeezus.
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Trump now says Maduro is in US custody.
https://bsky.app/profile/jamesdaustin.bsky.social/post/3mbj5bvo4z224
Regardless of your opinion of Maduro, this is disturbing. It means the Trump Administration now sees attacking another country and kidnapping its leader as a matter of “Law Enforcement”.
Also, people are looking at Iraq after the US-UK invasion and worrying if something similar will happen to Venezuela now.
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A very good rant it is, maddog.
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I concur: What’s to hate more, the depravity of the Rs or the fecklessness of the Ds?
The Ds ran an accomplished prosecutor against a convicted felon and still couldn’t look like winners.
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I for one will never forgive the millions of “ordinary folks”, who voted for the orange sewage fountain, whether in 2016 or in 2020. Without them Trump would just be another rambling village idiot, the loudest drunken asshole in the bar at closing time, the emptiest barrel on the shelf. The “best” thing I can say about these people is that they have not been “duped”, or, if they have, it’s because they were determined to be. As I keep saying, Trump is many things, but subtle does not belong on the list. One of the very few things the guy can not be accused of is having a hidden agenda. They knew exactly what they voted for, and now they have to own it.
Somewhat paradoxically, two of the recurring themes (in some cases coming from the very same people) on the “crisis-of-democracy”-themed podcasts I follow are:
1. The American Exceptionalist case for optimism: The MAGA movement will ultimately fail because “We are America! This is not who we are as a people [1] (despite having put Trump in the White House twice, the second time with the knowledge that he tried to steal an election). Something in our DNA, our culture, our institutions etc. ensures that the methods that have already killed democracies elsewhere are not going to work here”.
2. To win elections Democrats should stick to talking about economics and affordability and ignore the topics that people don’t care about like democracy and the rule of law. Democrats also need to become more “populist”, substitute memes and slogans, for arguments and analysis, and appeal to the gut rather than the intellect, to Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 rather than System 2, since people don’t have time for any argument, or piece of information, that isn’t condensed, oversimplified, and dumbed down to the point of being useless, or even just plain wrong. Since people are not receptive to good reasons, we need to give them bad reasons to do the right thing [2].
If people are too lazy and indifferent to be bothered with good reasons, I can see no hope, since the bad reasons always favor the authoritarians.
[1] The unstated premise being that it is indeed who Hungarians, Venezuelans and Turks are as people.
[2] Obviously no one is going to come straight out and say it just like that. Still it’s hard to avoid the implication. As they say, any philosophy sufficiently simplistic to be summed up in a nutshell doesn’t belong anywhere else.
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maddog, Bjarte, there is a lot in your rants to chew over. And the Dems continue, with enough of them defecting on the budget to pass it, in spite of the numerous problems. Their idea of compromise is all too often giving the other side what they want, and going back to whatever they were doing before the other side interrupted.
Also, if we need to reduce information to memes and slogans, then we lose nuance. That is the fault of the voters, not the politicians. If they don’t have time to figure out even the most basic of issues, then how do they have time to vote? We as voters have rights, yes, but we also have responsibilities. And many voters are shirking those responsibilities (I’ll admit that I have been guilty of that in many elections, like those for water resource districts or city offices; I am doing better now, reading the long articles the paper writes detailing their positions, asking them questions when I get the chance, and actually trying to get someone who is going to be at the least a decent human).
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At least Trump is the only president of our era that has never started a war… /s
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Senator Bernie Sanders condemns Trump’s attack on Venezuela:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/bernie-sanders-venezuela-attack
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It means the Trump Administration now sees attacking another country and kidnapping its leader as a matter of “Law Enforcement”.
Killing a chicken to scare the monkeys. I’m guessing Trump will now expect Canada and Greenland to become more compliant and agreeable.
Looks like it might already be working:
Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canada stands by the Venezuelan people’s “right to decide and build their own future in a peaceful and democratic society” after U.S. President Donald Trump announced American forces captured Venezuela’s president early Saturday morning.
“Canada has not recognised the illegitimate regime of [Nicolás] Maduro since it stole the 2018 election,” Carney said on social media Saturday evening. “The Canadian government therefore welcomes the opportunity for freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people.
The prime minister added that Canada has “long-supported a peaceful, negotiated, and Venezuelan-led transition process that respects the democratic will of the Venezuelan people” and it calls on all parties to respect international law.
In his statement, Carney said that “Canada attaches great importance to resolution of crises through multilateral engagement and is in close contact with international partners about ongoing developments.”
“We are first and foremost ready to assist Canadians through our consular officials and our embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, and will continue to support Venezuelan refugees,” the prime minister added.
Carney did not directly comment on the legality of the U.S. actions in his statement.
I know that sometimes discretion is the better part of valour, and as America’s neighbours we have to be cautious, but some mention of this violation of international law would have been more reassuring.
Meanwhile, on Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s Twiiter feed:
“Congratulations to President Trump on successfully arresting narco-terrorist and socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, who should live out his days in prison,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in a social media post on Saturday morning.
“Down with socialism. Long live freedom,” Poilievre added.
Clearly, Poilievre is auditioning for the post of traitorous Quisling Governor, should Trump follow up on his threats to take over Canada. But did he take the time to see if Trump was following him? How can he be sure he’ll get the message? He’ll have to start forwarding his reume, and running ads on Fox, proclaiming in advance, his loyalty to our new American overlords.
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Argh. Bad to worse to worser.
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Trump is being used and played by the powers behind the golden toilet. He’s not so much leading as he is being led. A little flattery and ego stroking and he sits up believes the last thing he’s been told, with all his might, thinking he’s the first person in history to come up with the idea. Never mind that it contradicts the last thing he belived with all his might. For those who are actually running things, Trump’s a convenient fall-guy and scapegoat in the making. Once he’s exhausted his usefulness, he’ll be disposed of, far enough into this term so that Vance will still be able to serve two full terms of his own after finishing Trump’s interrupted second, assuming that they’re even bothering with trifles like legality and the Constitution any more.
I think there are a couple of ways this can go. At some point, Trump will be deemed to have “gone too far,” and the powers that be will bruit invoking the 25th Ammendment, and suddenly, things will fall into place. I don’t even want to imagine how far things in the US will have deteriorated before “too far” is reached. The messier scenario (one in which Trump, inexplicably, still retains sufficient mass popularity to make the option of the 25th too risky), involves an assassination that will be pinned on “Leftists”, conveniently getting Trump out of the way, into a martyr, and providing a pretext for even more extreme repression, all at the same*. Fun times ahead.
In the meantime, under Trump and through Trump, we see the deliberate destruction of the norms of international law (such as it is), and a full blown return to the 19th century era of Imperial spheres of influence, with each of the Empires (in our case the US, China, and maybe Russia, whose shakey bid for the return of Empire has become bogged down in the Ukrainian “special military operation” that was originally supposed to have ended some two hundred weeks ago), where each Empire could do what it wished with the subjects under its control. The American action in Venezuela announces the fact that any and all governments in North and South America hold office only with the sufferance of US power, which assumes for itself the right to remove them. Trump certainly likes this idea, but it wasn’t his. I don’t believe for a moment that Trump has a strategic bone in his body. I doubt that he’d even heard of the Monroe Doctrine until someone told him about it, and they probably larded the explanation with more mentions of Trump’s name than Monroe’s. Trump’s minders are hoping for a cleaner, closer, cheaper, version of what supposed have happened in Iraq under Bush II, a nice, fast, self-financing invasion that will be over before too many flag-draped coffins start coming home. This is likely to be just as successful.**
*Of course any such conspirators, in whever scenario, would be playing a dangerous game, not so much because they might get caught (though there’s always that, and sometimes truth will out, however much you cook the evidence), but because there’s nobody else in this ramshackle, lowbrow, inept dictatorship that is remotely as popular as Trump himself. The Constitution spells things out precisely as far as the Presidency, but there is no clear (or any) line of succession in MAGA world. How things are actually working has gotten a long way away from how things are supposed to work, so “constitutionality” is decidely much less salient than it used to be. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a malady that I’m much more inclined to ascribe to Trump’s supporters than his opponents. Is MAGA likely to survive Trump? In some form or other, for a time, probably: that kind of ignorance and narrowness doesn’t go away overnight. But it’s likely to fragment without the gravitational pull of the Great Orange Couch Potato, who seems to think that shunning physical activity will give him the key to immortality(As if Trump ever would permit any equal, rival, or competitor to arise within MAGA itself, while he was still breathing, or brook the idea that anyone could succeed him. I’m sure he would prefer some kind of Republican (or American?) Götterdämmerung to the thought of himself being replaced. After him, the Deluge.) MAGA is so closely intertwined with the Trump brand, it’s hard to imagine one without the other. Are Trumpistas going to accept Trumpish bullshit from someone who is not Trump? Is J.D. Vance going to inspire that kind of blind devotion? Or
Count OrlockSteven Miller? Not bloody likely. They are riding tiger.**This might be a case of Marx’s observation that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
In place of Iraq’s WMD, and “Axis of Evil,” Trump offers up “narcoterrorist” powerboats that could never reach the US from Venezuela, and Cartel of the Suns. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, we were supposed to believe that the corrupt, secular Saddam Hussein was somehow in league with fantical Islamic fundamentalist Osama Bin Laden. In the run-up to Venezuela, “narcoterrorist” was mashed up to make people belive the even less believeable idea that profit-driven drug-dealers were also out to take violent, public, politically-motivated action against the United States. The fatal bait in each instance of adventurism? Oil. Having failed to learn the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, or worse, believing they have, the US launches another ill-advised exercise in attempted imperialism. Trump’s gang makes Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. look like Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Throw in the TACO factor (Trump Always Chickens Out), and who knows what will happen?
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As unnerving as Trump’s advancing, domestic tyranny has been to watch, seeing him take it to global level is frightening, preceded as it was by the murderous demonstration in international waters that the US military is willing to follow illegal orders, and commit war crimes. I’m not really surprised by Trump’s actions, but the military actions against putative, chimeric “narcoterrorists” is shocking. Maybe I’m terribly naive, but I was expecting better, or at least different. Lesson learned. Again.
I wrote to Prime Minister Carney, and my local Member of Parliament, who is, like Carney, a member of the Liberal Party. My letter to the latter contains my letter to the former. Here’s what I wrote:
Mr. Fragiskatos;
I have sent the following letter to Prime Minister Carney:
Dear Mr. Carney;
I’m writing to urge you to speak strongly against the American invasion of Venezuela. Donald Trump’s violation of international law and norms must be condemned clearly and openly. It is a dangerous and frightening escalation of Trump’s beligerence and lawlessness. Canada must respond. You must respond. It doesn’t matter that Maduro is no angel, and that Canada did not recognize his government. That is something for Venezuelans to work out themselves. Trump has crossed a line, and he should be called out on it. His are the actions of a crime boss, not a responsible head of state. He’s not interested in law or justice, he wants Venezuela’s oil, and has said as much.
I can understand, to some degree, the need for caution, tact, and deliberation, but silence will not save us. We are already in Trump’s sights. Before long, Trump will covet, demand, and take what he wants from us, maybe oil first, but then our water, as anthropogenic climate change dessicates large parts of the United States. The next line he crosses might be our border. I gave you my vote because I thought you were the best choice to stand up for Canada against Trump. I’m holding you to that, because it needs to be done. Trump is taking America into tyranny and dictatorship. That’s something that Americans have to work out amongst themselves. But violating international law demands a swift, vigourous response. Trump must not be allowed to treat the rest of the world as his own territory or possession. Canada is not for sale, but at the same time the world is not Trump’s for the taking. Quiet diplomacy sends the wrong message, or worse, no message at all.
I look forward to your response.
As my Member of Parliament, I urge you to tell Mr. Carney to speak out on this urgent matter. Dictators should not be flattered or appeased. We must not be silent or timid in our response to Trump’s clear, blatant, wanton, violation of international law, which threatens to push the world into a dangerous game of Every Strongman for Himself. This must not be allowed to become “business as usual”, or the “new normal”. As I have said above, our silence will not save us. As my dad used to say, “Silence means consent.” Canada should not remain silent. We must not appear to agree with Trump’s actions. We should let the world know where stand, and that it is not at Donald Trump’s side.
I look forward to your response.
I’ll let you all know if and when I get any reply.
I might even write to Polievre to register my anger and disgust with his congratulatory Tweet to Trump. If I do, I’ll post it here as well. I will do my best to not break into swears. Believe me, it will be hard, but I don’t want him to use any obscenity on my part to disregard my message (which he’ll ignore for other reasons, but I want him to know that I am pissed off at his cowardice and servility.
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Colin Wright has put up a post where he criticizes the Paisley Currah piece mentioned above:
The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) recently published an article by trans-identified female and Gender Studies professor Paisley Currah criticizing @HHSGov’s definitions of “sex,” “male,” and “female.”
She claims that “Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia.”…
But how do we assign individual traits a male or female “direction” unless we have some universal trait they are correlated with independent of the trait in question? For instance, how do we know that having a Y chromosome or a prostate gland are in the male “direction” unless we already know what males are independent of Y chromosomes and prostate glands?
Her argument against the binary nature of sex rooted in the type of gamete an organism has the biological function to produce actually presupposes the reality of the sex binary. It’s unavoidable.
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So apparently Eddie Izzard is going to be across the river in DC for a couple of weeks in March and April, performing
herhis solo version of Hamlet, in whichshe plays all the parts. Sadly I’m going to be washing my hair and clipping my nails those weeks, so I’ll have to pass. -
Oooh I’m so tempted to zoom across the country for that. So tempted.
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Too bad you scheduled your paint-drying watch for those weeks, right?
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It’s unprecedented but I just might have to rip that schedule up.
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I saw a local actor’s one-man Hamlet a few years ago. I couldn’t recommend it to any of my friends. I wouldn’t even recommend it to my enemies. It was a stupendous show in ruining Shakespeare (unfortunately, he went on to teach in the theatre department at a local college renowned for its theatre program; he handles all the Shakespeare, being considered an expert. I would say the only way he is an expert on Shakespeare is how not to do his plays). It was the first time I had seen an audience laugh at Ophelia killing herself.
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Which is to say that my boiled egg peeling is scheduled for then, and I’ll just have to miss it. Darn.
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I recently finished rewatching a nine part television series called Playing Shakespeare, which I remembered seeing bits of soon after it was produced, back in 1984. It’s essentially a series of workshops by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, introduced/guided/directed by John Barton. It’s worth it just to see (the impossibly younger versions of) Judi Dench, IanMcKellan, Patrick, Stewart, David Suchet, Ben Kingsly, and others do short scenes, and how small changes of emphasis or pacing, suggested by Barton, will shift the meaning and tone of the bit being staged. A really neat behind the scenes look at how Shakespeare can be done in a variety of ways.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLboSQWmG70j_S2nWkRlncZYW49nLeFKWj
As a bonus, here’s a link to a similar workshop programme done a few years before, presented by Trevor Nunn:
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It was the first time I had seen an audience laugh at Ophelia killing herself.
I did a double-take there. “Oh, right, the other Ophelia.”
Which is to say that my boiled egg peeling is scheduled for then, and I’ll just have to miss it.
Pity, but those eggs ain’t peeling themselves.
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Why, yes, YNnB, I was looking for another rabbit hole to run down. How did you know?
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I was in two minds whether to post this, (given even *mentioning* the gentleman in question’s name is likely to start an argument) but….this is about Graham Linehan.
JD Vance made a speech attacking the media’s coverage of Renée Good’s death, including falsely claiming that Good tried to ram an ICE officer with her car. Glinner reposted it on his X account, and added: “Bullseye from Vance”.
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Mumsnet thread about Glinner’s Vance comment here (where I heard about it):
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5473175-glinner-bullseye-comment-on-x
Renée Good’s death has nothing to do with the trans controversy. Linehan isn’t supporting the Trump Administration because he thinks such support is a regrettable necessity to stop harm to women, gay people and minors – Linehan’s simply turned into a extreme right-winger.
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YNNB @ 178 – I absolutely LOVE that series – it helped nudge me into a massive obsession with Shakespeare, aided by the BBC’s Hamlet with Derek Jacobi. John Barton was brilliant. I was (and am) pleased to see that it’s in the public library’s collection of online movies & tv shows.
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The body cam (or smartphone?) video of the killer has been released. It doesn’t add a lot to the story, but it shows the interaction he had before the shooting with Renée and then her wife; the camera is turned away when he shoots.
But the most telling point is that you hear him mutter “Fuckin’ bitch” as he walks away. Misogyny on display.
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Ya I just posted the clip. Horrible.
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This turned up in my substack feed.
https://badfacts.substack.com/p/dr-benjamins-fantasy-world
It traces all the elements of the modern trans movement back to one Harry Benjamin (1885-1986). Benjamin was a mostly quack doctor. He got his start X-ray’ing people’s gonads; later he moved on to transing them.
Pull quote
No book has shaped trans ideology more than Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon. Published in 1966, it’s built on personal testimony, emotional blackmail, contradictory theories, and literal mythology. Its nightmarish vignettes, many of them perverse or obviously false, read like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But the concepts and arguments are familiar to the modern reader. That’s because if you’ve flipped through I Am Jazz, listened to The Protocol, or studied Bostock v. Clayton County, then you’ve encountered the Disney version of The Transsexual Phenomenon.
Long, but interesting.
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There was a different blogger, an American, whose work I followed because he did a great job refuting gender ideology. Over the years, his commentary shifted to be less about gender ideology and more about politics, and he took an increasingly right-wing stance. His post about this murder blamed Democrats for the incident. That was the last straw. I stopped following the blog.
I have a feeling that reactions to this incident are going to lay bare some surprising political rifts.
I have a conservative friend who is battling his conservative friends on Facebook because my friend thinks the officer was in the wrong at least partially. I’m actually impressed to see him take that stance, in public, and continue to defend it.
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#186 Steven :
Thank you for that link. It’s interesting that Harry Benjamin seems to have created many of the canards of modern transgender activism, particular the one that people with gender dysphoria will commit suicide unless they receive hormones and surgery.
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Today I wrote to Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, and Leader of the Opposition.
Mr. Poilievre;
I’m writing you today to express my anger and dismay at your congratulating Donald Trump on his kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. In your misplaced and hasty enthusiasm at the misfortune of a bad guy you don’t like, you have forgotten or ignored Trump’s trampling of much more important principals, those of national sovereignty, and the standards and norms of international law. If you were reading the room, you would see that that is the case, and would not have pressed “enter” on this poorly thought-through message. But no. You have given him a pass on his violation of Venezuelan sovereignty because of your shared dislike of the people he conspired to abduct. You sign off your your post on X with “Down with socialism. Long live freedom.” This is a non sequitur. Donald Trump is not an agent of freedom. He is an agent of corruption, greed, and unbridled power. He is plunging the United States into tyranny and dictatorship. But, apparently, because he dislikes socialism, that’s okay. You have abandoned the very foundations of international law to become a cheerleader for a dangerously unhinged, aspiring dictator who believes in “Might makes right.” But don’t take my word for it, here is Trump advisor Stephen Miller:
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
And here’s Trump himself:
Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Of course he’s looking to hurt people. He’s fine with killing people. He authorized and orchestrated the murder of scores of people in international waters, claiming they were “narcoterrorists” bent on attacking the United States (while piloting small powerboats that, from Venezuela, could never reach American waters.) We were supposed to take his word for it. Any proof or evidence of his claims was destroyed, and went to the bottom of the sea, along with those people who were killed without arrest, killed without trial. These acts, and Trump’s declaration of Venezuelan airspace as a “no fly zone” constituted acts of war. But Maduro was a bad guy, so you’re willing to brush that off, so long as Trump is supposedly fighting “socialism”.
Venezuela was apparently a test case. The day after his Venezuelan kidnapping outrage, Trump resumed his verbal campaign against Greenland. In Trump’s mind, because he wants it, he gets to have it. These are not the actions of a serious, responsible head of state. They are the musings of a mob boss armed with nuclear weapons. Is Greenland run by “narcoterrorists”? No. Is it a threat to the United States? No. Do the people of Greenland get a say in this? No. But because Trump claims he “needs it” for “national security”, he’s going to take it:
At a meeting with oil and gas executives at the White House earlier on Friday, Trump had said Greenland was crucial for US national security. “We’re not going to have Russia or China occupy Greenland. That’s what they’re going to do if we don’t. So we’re going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way,” he told reporters
His words, not mine. This is not a joke. This is a threat. To an ally.
How do you respond to that Mr. Poilievre? You’ve already abandoned the high ground of international law. How do you dissuade or prevent Trump from invading Greenland, an act of war which will destroy NATO and embolden America’s enemies? If you give in to him on Venezuela, on what grounds do you refuse him Greenland? Because after Greenland comes Canada. Trump will see this big space on the map north of the lower 48 States, east of Alaska, and west of Greenland. For the sake of “national security”, and to complete his continental empire, Trump logic will demand that gets to “have” Canada too. Your craven, servile congratulatory message to Donald Trump doesn’t sound like something that’s written by man who wants to be the Prime Minister of Canada, but someone angling to become governor of the 51st State.
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Bravo, YNnB.
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If anyone’s interested, here’s my latest essay at my Substack. I spent quite a lot of time on this one.
It’s aimed at the legacy media. I blame them above all for the transgender mess, and, by extension, for undermining the legitimacy of the fourth estate, creating a backlash, and helping to usher in the authoritarian right.
https://artymorty.substack.com/p/the-power-of-the-powerful-blame-the
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” Institutions are expected to treat self-declaration as more authoritative than observable facts. ”
It’s frickin’ brilliant, Arty.
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Good for you, , YNnB.
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Can I second Mike B’s praise for your Substack essay, Arty.
I liked this bit:
At its core lies a false premise: that there exists a special category of people who are somehow exempt from the material facts of biology — or who must be treated as if they are — and that the rest of society is therefore obligated to refrain from making ordinary, accurate references to their biological sex.
That premise isn’t just wrong; it’s fundamentally illiberal.
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Having read Arty’s substack essay, I think that is what I need to link to whenever the subject of Trans comes up.
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“The ‘LGBTQ’ Threat to Gay Rights” with Prof. Ronan McCrea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yOIsPVzDHQ
Is the success of the gay rights movement guaranteed? Or are there hints that, eventually, gay rights could be reversed?
One of the most peculiar strategies of gay activist organisations has been to hitch their wagon to a revolutionary, non-binary, gender-fluid, LGBTQIA+ ideology. Is it time for gay rights and trans rights to quietly uncouple?
Ronan McCrea is a Professor of Constitutional and European law at University College London whose new book is “The End of the Gay Rights Revolution: How Hubris and Overreach Threaten Gay Freedom”. He argues that the combination of the Christian right, socially conservative migrants, and backlash to LGBTQIA+ extremism is putting gay rights at risk. He joins Josh to propose a solution.
my NOTE: instead of talking about “forced teaming” discusses the [mistaken] ”hitching” of different campaigns together that had ‘’overlap’’ but are not “the same” and have significant differences and tensions [in goals].
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[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany […]
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Thank you, Jim, Mike, and Mostly.
It’s a shame, I can’t really promote my Substack writing on Twitter/X, because that platform aggressively censors links to Substack, or mentions of Substack. Elon has an extremely capitalist idea of free speech: tweets that could threaten to undermine his dominance in the social media market are very much not allowed.
But still, I hop onto Twitter from time to time, mostly to keep my account from going cold, and to try and drum up some attention whenever I post a new Substack piece. But whenever I log onto Twitter/X, I find the place just gets sadder and sadder.
My Substack piece is, ultimately, about exactly the phenomenon I’m seeing unfold on Twitter/X: that without a healthy, centralized fourth estate that has legitimacy in a majority of the populace — at least one or two central media outlets that are considered palatable by a wide, diverse swathe of the people — society collapses into psychodrama and chaos. Lord of the Flies, indeed.
Because I only get glimpses of twitter in snapshots a few months apart, rather than an incessant dopamine drip feed of it, I think I can see much clearer than the regulars can, how much it’s devolved — and continues devolving — into a cesspit. Imagine, we used to imagine Twitter as society’s agora, a place for people to come together and share ideas; now it’s the exact opposite of that: a place for people to hate each other for their divergent ideas.
What a tragedy.
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we used to imagine Twitter as society’s agora, a place for people to come together and share ideas; now it’s the exact opposite of that: a place for people to hate each other for their divergent ideas.
I don’t know. It seems like that is what it is, really. It’s just that the people sharing their ideas have such horrible ideas.
In the past, the malcontents lived on the fringes of society, shouting at their TV and newspaper, and gently (or not so gently) mocked by their neighbors. Now these fringes are finding each other, and it turns out there are more of them than we thought. There are enough of them to move the Overton window, to change the political landscape in the country. This is also because they shout louder, making them sound like even more than they are. This is true both on the right and the left, with both sides embracing cancel culture, but only for one side. They want to be sure their voices are heard, but not those of people who disagree with them.
I suspect this was inevitable, once Twitter became a ‘thing’. People don’t have to work hard to put up a short post; they can spew hatred and discontent all over the world at the touch of a button. They don’t have to spell correctly; Twitter/X gives no points for that. They don’t need punctuation, or capitals, or can use all caps, and emojis can do a lot of the work.
People with a beef no one has ever listened to (often because it isn’t a legitimate beef, like the supposed genocide of white people or the alleged shredding of the rights of men to be women) suddenly find themselves among like minded people. They are listened to, the get likes on their posts, people know their name (if they’re using their name). They have become important.
They take it on themselves to turn a presidential election, and do it. The other side takes it on themselves to make otherwise respectable, adult organizations discuss ‘her penis’ with a straight face, and do it. Now they are powerful.
A lot of people say this is giving power to the powerless, a voice to the voiceless, but I’m not so sure. What it is doing is giving credibility to a lack of expertise (‘lived experience’), breaking down the boundaries that have allowed us to protect our privacy, and destroying any hint of social behavior.
But it is definitely bringing people together to share ideas.
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@Iknklast
I agree! as it echoes what I’ve been thinking and writing.
You said this:
A lot of people say this is giving power to the powerless, a voice to the voiceless, but I’m not so sure. What it is doing is giving credibility to a lack of expertise (‘lived experience’), breaking down the boundaries that have allowed us to protect our privacy, and destroying any hint of social behavior.
And I just published this:
Liberal democracy needs a functioning fourth estate [i.e., legacy media, not twitter] for the same reason it needs independent courts or competitive elections: there has to be some institution capable of maintaining a shared frame of reference. Without that, disagreement devolves into factional psychodrama instead of democratic dispute.
…Havel wrote about the power of the powerless — the courage of dissidents to live within the truth. But there’s also the power of the powerful: the ability to define what counts as truth in the first place. That’s what legitimacy is. In authoritarian systems, legitimacy is enforced by the state. In liberal democracies, it’s mediated by the press. It is the mechanism through which societies decide what is serious, what is fringe, what is respectable, and what is mad. And in modern liberal societies, that mechanism still runs through the legacy media. They don’t just tell people what’s happening, but what to make of it.
…Shared reality is the substrate of liberal democracy. The press is the institution tasked with maintaining it. When the press loses interest in describing the world as it is, and becomes obsessed with instructing the public on how it ought to be spoken about, legitimacy collapses. And when legitimacy collapses, reactionary politics quickly follow. The civic sphere becomes a kind of Lord of the Flies contest over who can offer a sense of order: Ralph, who believes in rules and cooperation, falls to Jack, who promises order through force, fear, and spectacle. In American politics today, Trump is Jack.
I don’t think these ideas are too far apart. I daresay they’re very close.
As for Twitter, there’s another factor to consider: bots/AI. You may be right that Twitter was by design destined to become a mobhouse, but the slide toward outright anarchy was certainly slower before than it is now. And I think there’s something to be said about bots in that. I saw a Gurwinder piece at Substack today (it’s actually from a couple years ago) that said,
It’s getting ever harder to distinguish humans from bots, not just because bots are becoming more humanlike, but also because humans are becoming more botlike.
As knowledge of human psychology evolves, algorithms become better at shaping human behavior. Step onto social media and you’ll see the same groups of people getting outraged by the same kinds of things every single day, like clockwork.
Back when he wrote that, it was probably far more likely the case that twitter addicts were acting like bots. But nowadays, with advances in AI, I think a lot of these flame wars on X are actually fuelled by bots. I see acounts that are just too neatly aligned with trans ideology, with dubious backstories and dates of account creation, just plausible enough… it smells like large-scale data psyops to me, a lot of the time. (Years of being on the gay dating apps means I’ve already had my share of run-ins with foreign bots posing as interested men, gathering data on us gays for who-knows-what reasons. Blackmail? They fishing for closeted politicians or something?) That may seem paranoid, but then think of it this way: we all know that massive resources are being spent on information warfare and state-backed “IO” or influence operations. It’s just that we get weirdly coy about what that actually looks like. In reality, it probably looks very much like Russian bot farms descending on the gender critical Twitter scene. (And then pushing odd narratives about Ukraine with those same accounts…)
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I’m something of a social media Luddite. My sister invited me to join Twitter years ago to help sell my book, and I did, but after one week of observing the goings-on, I thought, “This Twitter shit is fucking asinine,” and I immediately got off the platform. Arty and iknklast, thanks for confirming that I was right.
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The Mighty NPR just told me a child “assigned male at birth” has been “presenting as a girl since she was a child” and is a girl “because she experienced puberty under female hormones.” Is this a thing? Can a born male “cross over” as it were if administered hormones through puberty? This is the first time I’ve heard of this.
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Nope. It’s the same bullshit as all the other bullshit.
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Oh look. Another author of pro-TRA Young Adult books, Craig Silvey, turns out to be a creep:
Neil Gaiman, David Walliams, and now Silvey. What is it about this particular cause that attracts sleazy, hypocritical men?
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The opportunities.
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Quote of the Week:
Nixon was a presidency who had a scandal.Trump is a scandal who has a presidency.
David Frum
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On the same note, I believe it was Charlie Sykes who once made the point that Watergate – until recently considered the political scandal of all times* – wouldn’t even make the headlines nowadays, as it wouldn’t even be the greatest scandal of the day. If any other president in our lifetime had done anything comparable to what Trump is doing multiple times every single day it would dominate the headlines for weeks (at the very least!). Now it’s forgotten the next day, pushed out of the news cycle by half a dozen equally outrageous atrocities.
* Hence the obligatory efforts to brand every new (real or fabricated) scandal or conspiracy as “Whatever-gate”.
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Hey, there’s even more alarming fuckery coming from the Trump admin, from the EEOC no less. They are demanding a list of Jews at UPenn
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/upenn-trump-jews-list?CMP=share_btn_url
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.
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Mike H, it almost sounds like the Jews at U Penn don’t want to be protected by the Trump administration. Gee, I wonder why? :-(
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And I’m surprised the EEOC still exists…
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How long before jews are required to wear a yellow star of David…
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[…] Mike Haubrich at Miscellany Room: […]
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…To better protect them, of course.
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@iknklast “And I’m surprised the EEOC still exists…”
The “Ministry of Equalities,” of course.
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More from Glenna Goldis
Queers Rush In (Part 1) – How two lesbians rebelled against feminism
https://substack.com/inbox/post/179093216
A take-down of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler.
She brings receipts.
Pull quote
Sex has to be a construct in Butler’s view because she is a constructivist. If a woman’s body is inherently meaningful then her career is not. Once you’ve digested thousands of pages of French and German philosophy to write a dissertation on how there are no stable categories, you’ve got to knife any biologist who says “well actually people with disorders of sex development are all classifiable as male or female.”
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Thanks, Steven. Just started reading it and came across this gem:
Queer theory and trans ideology are not the same thing, neither spawned the other, and they are not fully aligned. But queer theory became a vessel for trans ideology, ferrying it through parts of society that defer to English professors, because it loves sex-related rebellion, sophistry, and books about “gender” that don’t say what gender is.
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While liberals thought it funny to refer to women who demand to see the manager, or call the cops, as “Karens,” the right has been reacting to the fact that women don’t vote for nor support Trump as A.W.F.U.L. Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. Even Elon, who fails to take responsibility for fatherhood, refers to women this way because they divorce and don’t allow visitation. (Poor lad.) Story in the Independent. Sorry about the Facebook link, but I couldn’t find a clean one on the Independent page. [Ed: I found one]
The acronym has spread on social media, with one user describing it as “the most precisely accurate acronym ever written.” Another wrote: “AWFUL (affluent white female urban liberal) should be avoided at all costs. They will ruin men’s lives just like they’re ruining western civilization.”
They wonder why there is a “loneliness epidemic.” Never considered being a decent male.
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The next installment from Glenna Goldis.
Queers Rush In (Part 2) – Meet the straight English professor who taught gay biology
https://substack.com/inbox/post/180149621
This one is tough going: Goldis deconstructs academic/literary positions that were never all that coherent to begin with. She helpfully glosses some of the more convoluted points.
Pull quote
Sedgwick likes the idea of replacing the biology-based gay movement that excludes her with a bullshit-based queer movement that includes her. She’s pushing a personal agenda under the pretext of saving feminine boys.
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Via PZ, I found a video from former sceptic Rebecca Watson on the topic of the BBC’s slow shift towards honesty when it comes to reporting on trans people intruding on women: The BBC Chose Transphobia over Science. The video was about a guy called Robin Ince claiming he was forced to resign from a BBC show and the arguments presented are …not very good. I have some comments, with quotes and timestamps to refer to particular passages.
4:48 “…the UK is ‘TERF island’, a land infested with transphobic bullies who pose as concerned feminists who simply must examine the genitals of every person entering in to women’s restrooms…”
A former sceptic, now a liar. No, that is not the position of gender scepticism. The actual position is for UK law to return to the way it was before gender identity certificates were invented: bar male people from entering women’s facilities, a rule that would be mostly socially enforced, with police only being involved rarely.
5:41 “The New York Times of course rebukes this.” No. A rebuke is an admonishment, a scolding, a telling-off; and they did not do that. And…
7:01 “So seeing Robin take such a privileged stand…” She means ‘principled’ I suspect. Where has her proof reading gone?
13:30 “…our brains influence our bodies, our bodies influence our brains, our culture influences our biology and our biology influences our culture.”
The brain is a component of the body, yet she speaks of them as if people think of them as separate entities isolated from each other. Therefore, duh of course they are linked. The word salad then links two things that truly are distinct concepts – biology and culture, perhaps to insinuate that there are as closely linked as brain and body (which is obviously untrue) or perhaps because she is simply confused.
13:40 “Researchers have known for a long time now that you can’t just boil things down to chromosomes and forget about genitalia and hormones that affect our brains and every other part of us; and anthropologists have understood for many years now that you can’t just separate biology and culture as if one doesn’t influence the other.”
More nonsense. Those are conceptually different things and so can be discussed separately. Sex is of the body and culture is social interaction. Sex has most certainly weighed heavily on every culture, we see this in the dominance of male people in almost every civilisation throughout recorded history due to the size and strength advantage. Culture can influence the sexed bodies of people in that people are potentially subjected to different treatment based on their sex, for example FGM, and over long periods can influence the evolution of a population through sexual selection. But they are still separate concepts! The existence of a relationship between them does not mean the line between them is fuzzy, nor does it prevent us from identifying sex as the source of societal problems.
Sex is at the root of numerous social imbalances, and so sex must also be a consideration when addressing those imbalances. We see male people dominating corporate and governmental power… so we create female-only promotion quotas and shortlists to help address this. We see male dominance in sports… so we create female-only divisions in sports where sex makes a difference. We see male dominance in violent and sexual forms of crime… so we create female-only prisons. We see male dominance in voyeuristic and harassing behaviours… so we create female-only amenities where they can go to the toilet, change clothes and similar with increased privacy and safety. So on and so forth, all with a person’s sex identified as the driving force behind cultural imbalances, and therefore with sex identified as the axis upon which these protections must be implemented.
Her wishy-washy ‘everything is interconnected, the lines between them are so blurry’ is easily dismissed as just an attempt to confuse the issue, with the result of letting male people through the protections created for female people.
16:47 “…Sex Matters, a non-profit that advocates for banning trans women from public life…”
A lie. What they actually call for is a ban on male people entering female-only toilets, prisons, shortlists and such. Most male people accept this without a qualm, but if those male people calling themselves women find that intolerable, that is their own concern and they must find a way to live with the fact that they are male.
17:01 “They celebrated that ruling with a letter to the CEO of NHS England, demanding an end to gender-affirming care.”
Another lie, and a whopper. What they actually demanded was to cancel a specific trial of puberty blockers on minors that hadn’t even started yet. Making this lie more egregious is that Watson even displays the Sex Matters statement on screen while lying about it!
17:58 “Famed transphobe Maya Forstater Pictured here smiling with actual Nazi white supremacist Nina Power…”
By now, the word transphobe has been so overused it simply means ‘person who knows women are female’. No actual hostility to trans women is required, just knowing the sham for a sham is enough. And Maya Forstater of course is not hostile to trans women themselves.
I am not familiar with Nina Power, and a cursory search of her found only that she is conservative. Because I know so little of her I will refrain from calling this one a lie, but judging by the previous passages, I suspect this is at minimum an exaggeration.
19:35 “Robert Ince chose good science and compassion for a marginalised group over his own career. It seems as though Brian Cox may have gone the other way, possibly an even easier decision considering he is married to one of the people who has actively made the UK less safe for that marginalised group.”
So he claims, but when Graham Linehan did the same (by siding with actual women), all he got out of the deal from was endless castigation from the likes of PZ and Watson.
And of course no mention of the safety of another marginalised group – women. They did not enter her thinking at all.
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What timing! I popped over to FTB and saw similar stupidity from PZ posted today. In a post talking mainly about some University of Austin – which appears to be a sham university specifically promoting conservatism – he quotes an article which discusses it. One quoted passage deals with people associated with it:
The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.
Guess which person PZ chooses to highlight.
…
Correct! Of all the awful people on the list, he chooses the one decent person as the target of his ire. The charges he lays against her are the usual dreary mix of lies and stupid reasoning.
To single out just one of these rogues, Kathleen Stock. She has said that trans women are “still males with male genitalia, many are sexually attracted to females, and they should not be in places where females undress or sleep in a completely unrestricted way”; she’s a trustee of the LGB Alliance; she has declared that there are only two immutable sexes, man and woman, erasing the existence of people who don’t fall into her binary categorization. Yet she claims she is not transphobic.
The fact claims made by Stock are very good, I only have a minor quibble on the wording. Trans women are still male, and many are sexually attracted to females; the quibble is that she should have added ‘most’ when stating they still have male genitalia. There are only two sexes, and humans do not have the ability to change from one to another, though strictly speaking the words are male and female for the sexes. As I said, just quibbles – any dictionary will show that the words man and woman reference the sexes anyway.
Oh and of course this does not erase intersexed people for fuck sake, they still exist! In fact they really only further demonstrate that there are only two sides to the sex divide. The two sets of sexual characteristics are normally expressed separately; intersex people are unusual in that they have some mixing of the categories in the one body… But there are still only two sex categories to be mixed.
I can understand him arriving at different policy preferences, but the fact claims she makes are simply not refutable.
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Here’s Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the World Economic Forum:
It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry — that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won’t. So what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.
Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works.
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem solving — are under threat. As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable.
A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.
And there’s another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty, sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty, can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum.
The question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality — we must.
The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.
Now, Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, has termed value-based realism.
Or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights.
And pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.
So we’re engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.
We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values, and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.
And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.
We are building that strength at home. Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast tracking $1 trillion of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We’re doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we’re doing so in ways that build our domestic industries. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad.
We’ve agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.
In the past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.
We’re doing something else: to help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry. In other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So on Ukraine, we’re a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.
On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.
Our commitment to NATO’s Article 5 is unwavering, so we’re working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic-Baltic Eight, to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft, and boots on the ground — boots on the ice.
Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.
On plurilateral trade, we’re championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people on critical minerals.
We’re forming buyer’s clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we’re cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won’t ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.
This is not naïve multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.
Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
But I’d also say that great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.
This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.
In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in-between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.
Which brings me back to Havel. What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?
First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.
It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.
It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described, and it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion.
That’s building a strong domestic economy. It should be every government’s immediate priority.
And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it’s a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.
So, Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital talent. We also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.
Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but, a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.
And we have something else: we have a recognition of what’s happening and determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.
We are taking a sign out of the window.
We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.
The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.
That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.
Thank you very much.
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It will be interesting to see how Carney’s speech compares with whatever grotesque madness comes out Trump’s mouth. I can’t imagine anything but grotesque madness from him.
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Interesting timing! If it isn’t Havel’s The Power of the Powerless coming up again. My Substack essay from just last week used that as its cornerstone. It was called The Power of the Powerful.
Seems there’s plenty in Havel’s landmark work that’s been resonating with the people lately…
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The words of Carney’s speech and my essay are eerily close. It’s uncanny, reading his speech transcript!
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I love it when that happens.
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Well, our governor has gone full Trump. In a recent press conference, he frequently used the term ‘libtards’ to describe anyone who disagreed with him. Which is a lot of us, because he is a right wing self-promoting jerk who wants to end the taxes he pays, and rely instead on adding a tax on food to tax those who have a lot less than he does. Even the legislature, a very conservative one, has not given him what he wants.
And even worse, when asked about protestors dressed in red gowns with white bonnets, he said they have lost their brains.
There is a Democrat running against him, and he has two primary challengers. They have about as much chance as an egg dropped into a pan of boiling water has to stay uncooked.
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Well, our governor has gone full Trump. In a recent press conference, he frequently used the term ‘libtards’ to describe anyone who disagreed with him.
Here’s an interesting blog post about the use of “tard” as a portmanteau to signify that one is of a slow mind. The root word turns out not to be “tard,” as I had thought but “ard.”
Anyway, nice to see that the “war against woke” is making progress and people no longer consider the feelings of those who are considered to be disabled when choosing our insults. We are truly becoming Great again. As a liberal I am as humbled by the word “libtard” as I am when I am accused of TDS. Truly.
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The White House is now using AI to alter pictures of arrests. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-ice-protest-arrest-altered-image
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“The Nation” magazine has published an article that has caused a lot of controversy on social media.
It’s called “Why I Didn’t Report My Rape” by Anna Krauthamer.
Krauthamer, who described herself as a ‘staunch prison abolition activist’, said she did not inform the authorities of the crime for two reasons: A) because she wished it had never happened and B) she believes imprisoning the perpetrators will do nothing for her.
I can understand why a rape victim might be be too upset to testify in court, but those criminals are still out there, targeting other women. I believe she should have at least told the police, and alerted them to the fact that there is a group of violent abusive men out there. Her essay doesn’t grapple with this issue at all.
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I’m no fan of prison abolitionism unless perhaps it’s coming from an idealistic child, in which case it’s aww-isn’t-that-cute precociousness. In grown adults, that level of naivety betrays shelteredness and small-mindedness rather than radicalness and an embrace of grand ideas and ideals.
Yes, let’s reform the criminal justice system and make it more about actual rehabilitation wherever possible. No, let’s not just let bygones be bygones every time a crime is committed, and chalk all crime up to the broken social system, and cross our fingers that society will just be better some day in the utopian future. I don’t think that’s how human nature works. And even if I did, I think the order of progress would be: first we cure society of crime, and THEN we eliminate the prisons, rather than the other way round.
(I’m addressing here the concept of prison abolitionism. As to a victim’s responsibility to report a crime that’s been committed against her, I learned a lot one night years ago over a bottle of wine with a housemate who told me she’d been raped and that she hadn’t reported it to the police. I think she called it something like a “second punishment”: that because she hadn’t volunteered to be a victim in the first place, it wasn’t morally just to demand that she place herself in the extremely taxing position of reporting it. She’d most likely be embroiled in it for a long time if she did. That perspective really deeply changed the moral landscape in my mind. One violation of her agency shouldn’t necessitate yet another: she was entitled to the agency to deal with it however she felt she needed to in order to survive.)
Crime is irrational. And so is punishment. Both are connected to our animal nature — products of our primate limbic systems more than our evolved frontal cortexes. There’s only so much we can do to bring the phenomenon of criminal behaviour in line with purely rational idealism. Some criminals won’t benefit from “correction”. And I know I’m being somewhat provocative here, but sometimes punishment for punishment’s sake is what society needs to see following some crimes. I genuinely wouldn’t have wanted Hitler to serve his sentence in a modern cozy Norwegian prison “condo”, meeting with a therapist once a week to work through his trauma.
Prison did nothing to “correct” the man who was ultimately convicted of murdering my father. Immediately upon release, he shot a cop and wound up back inside. Clearly, those two decades of incarceration didn’t “fix” his cirminal tendencies in any way. But that’s more an indictment of how horribly prisons are run than an indictment of prison as a concept.
He was initially sentenced to death (it was Texas), though it was commuted to life, and then that sentence was reduced again, hence his eventual release. In my youth, I thought about him a lot, and I had many fantasies about meeting him and reforming him — even befriending him, even bonding with him — and in so doing, somehow finding peace myself. So I’m glad the state didn’t execute him. I very much saw him as a tragic human being rather than a subhuman monster. But I’m also glad he went to prison. Prison serves three purposes: isolating a dangerous person for the safety of society, attempting to reform and rehabilitate a criminal, and lastly, punishment. This third factor makes the liberal-minded squeamish, for somewhat obivous reasons. But looking back at my father’s killer, and looking at the grand scheme, I think an element of punishment was necessary — for me to make sense of my place in the world, to make some moral sense that I mattered, that the pain caused to me was seen by the rest of the world, and that something was done about it, and that a responsibility landed on an individual.
(Though the specific details of this particular case put his ultimate responsibilty in question; he was undoubtedly the triggerman, but… it’s complicated.)
Liberal humanist idealism is great — I’m a big proponent of it! Huge! But we still live in the real world. A true, deep, whole humanism has to make sense of the contradictions of human nature, and they’re never more raw than when a terrible crime has been committed and unbearable pain and suffering has been unleashed.
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Arty, firstly, can I say I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to your father.
Secondly, the whole idea of prison abolitionism : it’s essentially an anarchistic idea. It’s something I believe someone with a very optimistic view of human nature, like William Godwin or Leo Tolstoy, would advocate. Of course these people also believed humanity could overcome its propensity to criminal violence (“cure society of crime”) and hence such a humanity would not need prisons.
But today’s advocates of prison abolition, like George Ciccariello-Maher, (the “Riots work!” guy) are also advocates of revolutionary violence. I don’t know how they square their opposition to the violence of prisons with their advocacy of riots, looting and even terrorism.
Recall that in the book “Enemy Feminisms” by PA advocate Sophie Lewis, she lauds Hamas as the “armed national liberation party Hamas”. So Lewis’s book does oppose prisons, but says nothing about Hamas imprisoning their hostages.
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I have included my views on prison reform in some of my books, but I am not rose-colored-spectacles enough to believe it would ever happen. The problem with treating prisoners humanely, and focusing on rehabilitation, is that it costs more, and few people are willing to spend more on prisons (and we might not need to, if we didn’t incarcerate people for non-violent crimes but instead focused on a form of outpatient rehabilitation). Not only that, a lot of people do see prisoners as subhuman monsters, and believe they deserve everything they get. To reform the prisons, we would first have to reform society. That’s hard work, so a lot of the people who dislike the idea of prisons simply advocate for abolition. They are unlikely to get that, they almost certainly know it, so it gives them something to go on about and keep themselves in the spotlight.
Sorry if that sounds cynical, but it’s based on my experiences. If other people have different experiences, I would definitely be open to hearing them.
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@Cloudy,
Yes, anarchistic. That’s exactly the word I was fumbling for. I’ve no patience for that kind of moral simplism.
There’s moral complexity in questions about riots and violent uprisings/resistances. There’s moral complexity in questions about crime and punishment.
You note with irony that prison abolitionists tend to be advocates for revolutionary violence, and I find that insightful, and challenging to my moral framework, in a good way.
You’re right: these are both human behaviours that operate beyond the scope of rationalism — rage is the purest animal reaction. It’s almost uncomfortable to acknowledge their shared roots.
I’ve much to think about…
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@iknklast
To reform the prisons, we would first have to reform society. That’s hard work, so a lot of the people who dislike the idea of prisons simply advocate for abolition. They are unlikely to get that, they almost certainly know it, so it gives them something to go on about and keep themselves in the spotlight.
Yes, indeed. That’s like the moral simplism I was writing up at the same time you were writing this. They’ve never experienced the stakes firsthand, but they yammer on about it.
Then again, my sister experienced fatherless childhood right beside me — the same stakes, therefore — and lately she’s gone full woke defund-the-police… so, who knows…
Maybe this is all just a way for people to say “let’s reform the criminal justice system” without knowing how to say what they mean? The right words aren’t in the “pool” of available political tribes. What they really want is nuanced reform, but they’re angry and afraid, and seeking a tribe to align with, and to express maximal anger, and the closest available option is “to hell with police and prisons altogether!” so they throw themselves at it.
That makes sense. And it reconiciles the good intentions behind the ACAB folks with their misguided arguments. Though I despair at how it exposes how unthinking our damned species is.
Their hearts are in the right place, but their minds are not keeping up.
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Of course, just because the idea of abolishing prisons altogether – or, for that matter, defunding the police – is utterly irresponsible, it doesn’t follow that more incarceration = less crime. If that were the case, we would expect the U.S. to be the least crime-ridden society on earth rather than a place where the small crooks end up in jail while the biggest ones end up in the White House; a place where the innocent are executed without a trial as “terrorists” while the actual terrorists who violently stormed the national assembly to overturn an election are pardoned by the mob-boss in chief (the same one who incited them in the first place).
Speaking of mass-incarceration, I recently finished reading Timothy Snyder’s on Freedom (makes some excellent points, but On Tyranny was definitely better). It drew my attention to another feature of the bottomless ocean of sewage that is American politics:
A second moral hazard is the American procedure known as prison gerrymandering. Incarcerated people are counted as residents for the purposes of deciding how many elected representatives a given district will have. When prisons are built and filled, the bodies of prisoners increase the electoral power of the nonincarcerated people around them. Urban Americans are extracted from cities where they would have voted and placed in the exurbs or countryside where their bodies magnify the voting power of others- very often others who vote for politicians who run on the platform of building prisons. […] In this way, not only are the incarcerated denied a voice, but their voice is taken by others – and precisely by those who have an incentive to see prisons as a source of jobs and of political power. […] [F]or Black people and for Latinos, who tend to live in cities and who together comprise the majority of the imprisoned, the logic of the situation is clear. Their imprisoned bodies are converted into someone else’s right to elect people who build more prisons.
I can’t even…
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Eeeesh. I did not know that. Must read both books.
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Check out On Tyranny first. It’s short enough to read in a couple of hours, and still to this day the definitive book on the Trump era in my view*. I would especially recommend the illustrated version featuring the excellent artwork of Nora Krug. Snyder also comments on his original 20 lessons on his YouTube channel.
* As I have mentioned elsewhere Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. is obligatory reading as well.
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@Bjarte – thanks for the recommendation of the Snyder book, “On Tyranny”.
Some background on the writer of the “Nation” piece :
Anna Krauthamer is a writer and doctoral candidate in English Literature at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, The New Republic, Boston Review, The LA Review of Books, and elsewhere.
It does seem unusual to me that someone would not want to talk to the authorities about a serious crime that happened to her (not even seeking a prosecution, just altering the police to a group of dangerous criminals). But then that person would write at length, under her real name, about that same serious crime in a widely-read magazine.
Also: I don’t think this piece is a good article. I don’t think it says anything worthwhile about the issue of rape or the issue of prisons. If I were one of the “Nation’s” editors , I would have sent this article back to the author for a thorough rewrite.
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If I were one of the “Nation’s” editors , I would have sent this article back to the author for a thorough rewrite.
Unfortunately, I think The Nation’s editors have thoroughly drunk the trans kool-aid, and the unofficial rules of the ideology include ‘thou must never reject the submission of a trans writer (unless, of course, said trans writer is on the wrong side of history, or a detransitioner).
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@iknklast: I don’t think Krauthamer is one of the “locomotive people”, as they say on social media. From the little information about her online, she seems to be a natal woman.
You are right about the Nation thoroughly drinking “the trans kool-aid” though. When I look at its website now, the magazine seems to be publishing Trans This, Trans That, and Trans The Other. Simping hard for puberty blockers and men in women’s sports. This interview in the Nation with writer Holly Hughes has a typical swipe at the Bad Women:
I think a lot of the people who are described as TERFs, are not really Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists because they’re not feminists. They’re just exclusionary.
Some online wit pointed out that the The Nation Magazine has now gone from championing Norman Thomas to championing Lia Thomas.
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Yes, if she isn’t trans, she’s not a ‘trans-writer’. It would probably be more accurate to say never refuse a pro-trans article.
I quit reading the Nation; it was becoming impossible to get through.
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@ Iknklast : “I quit reading the Nation; it was becoming impossible to get through.”
The quality of that magazine has really sunk over the last few years. I wonder why.
On gender waffle, the other leftist US magazines aren’t any better.
The Progressive, In These Times, Jacobin, Counterpunch and Current Affairs all sing from the Erin Reed Hymnsheet.
I gather the situation is somewhat better in the UK – leftist publications like The New Statesman, The Morning Star and Counterfire would occasionally allow some left-wing criticism of gender ideology into their pages.
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Re: Prison Gerrymandering
Do the prisoners count for 3/5 of a vote?
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Jim, I don’t know about that, but I am aware that at least some college students are counted, even if they aren’t eligible to vote (since a lot of them might be from out of the country, and still more not from the state the college is in). One of the colleges where I lived for 20 years pulled that stunt, and managed to stack the vote to be given land by the city (for a Christian college) to redo their campus, and also allowed to shut down a street a lot of people relied on – shut down forever, because it now has parts of the college campus.
The vote is constantly rigged one way or another, and in most cases, rigged to help the dominant party.
Nebraska is currently talking about redrawing the districts, even though it isn’t a census year. They are reliably Republican but Omaha is a blue dot, and Lincoln also tends to vote for Democrats in local and state elections. They want to get rid of all that. They are terribly sore winners, not willing to give even a smidgeon of ground to the Democrats. Never mind that Omaha and Lincoln contain about sixty percent of the population; they want to deny them a tiny fraction of the representation in the legislature. They are already swamped by the smaller counties, who have large voices and large impact.
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Mostly Cloudy, quite a few of the atheist/agnostic publications are the same. I get it in Church & State and in American Atheists; the last convention I attended with American Atheists should have been renamed the Gender Ideology Conference.
Fortunately, Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry tend to allow skepticism of the ideology, and in a lot of cases, it appears to dominate the thinking of many of the writers on those pages.
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Is anyone else wondering why the Trump administration is recognizing International Holocaust Remembrance Day by rounding up people and putting them in prison for no reason? I think they have it a little backwards.
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Some ratbag has attacked Congresswoman Ilhan Omar by spraying her with an Unknown substance during
an anti-ICE speech by Omar:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/28/ilhan-omar-sprayed-unknown-substance-minneapolis
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Jennifer Rubin at the Contrarian: Why, for Too Many, Alex Pretti’s Murder Counted More
The term AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) became a commonplace slur long before Renee Good’s death, and misogyny has long been nearly as key a motivator for white Christian nationalists as racism. In the minds of a great many Americans, horribly, even a white mother of three may not have been sympathetic enough to rouse their fury.
The notion that only some victims are truly deserving, or can be relatable to many Americans, is the unsettling but undeniable conclusion after years of ignoring Black victims of police abuse or of disregarding the cruel, violent deportation of Hispanics. Enumerable studies have provided evidence that a victim’s race significantly affects the level of coverage and public reaction to the tragedy.
…
Then along comes Alex Pretti: white, a VA ICU nurse, a young man of unassailable character — and a responsible gun owner to boot! His unprovoked death and his baseless smearing jarred a great many people not previously disturbed by violence against Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, or women. For seemingly the first time, many Americans could not look away and say, “Well, that would never happen to me.”
It should not matter, of course, that Good and Pretti were white, or that they were admirable, socially responsible people. The government has no right to take any life in contravention of constitutional rights and simple decency. But that abstract principle has seemingly not packed a sufficient punch to generate an emotional tidal wave and national revolt against despotism.
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A small step in the right direction
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpregu.00694.2009
Point: a call for proper usage of “gender” and “sex” in biomedical publications
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“Cambridge student: I was barred from pub over my views on gender”.
There must be no blasphemy against the Religion. Heretics are not welcome!
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Here’s a depressing story about how pregnant immigrant women in Minnesota are suffering stress-related pregnancy complications and missing out on prenatal care because they’re in hiding from ICE. Note that the article carefully omits all mentions of the obscene words “woman”, “female” and “mother”.
https://19thnews.org/2026/01/ice-fears-pregnant-immigrants-minnesota-prenatal-care/
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This is important. US detransitioner Fox Varian has won a medical malpractice
Lawsuit and received 2 million dollars:
Hopefully this might discourage health insurers from funding the maiming of gay and disabled teenagers.
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(nitpick alert, and cynical snark alert… oh god somebody stop me, I can’t help myself…)
Well, technically, she hasn’t “received” the $2 million yet, nor will she, but I truly hope she receives at least a small part of it, eventually. At this point she’s been *awarded* $2 million by the courts. Which probably means her lawyers have a nice payday coming up. And then, lawyers being lawyers, there’s no doubt they’ll seek opportunities to obtain even more out of that judgment, so there’ll surely be appeals.
In US civil court, no one ever wins but the lawyers. The question is only ever who, among the non-lawyers, loses and pays the staggering bill. The defendants might have to *pay* millions — or their insurers might — but the plaintiff is unlikely to see much if anything…
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And, in the US (I don’t know about other countries), corporations are able to ‘bargain’ the settlement down, and often don’t pay anything but attorney’s fees (if that). What they are left paying is often paid ‘in kind’ by doing something for someone – which usually means sending a few officers at the top to ‘sensitivity’ training, expenses paid, in a nice resort somewhere. In the case of environmental lawsuits/fines (which is what I’m most familiar with), they mostly pay with promises and ‘in kind’; the actual money paid out will be whittled down to be a fraction of one day’s profit.
But all we ever actually hear about is the initial settlement. ‘Oh, Exxon had to pay millions for that oil spill!’. In reality, I’m not sure if they’ve paid anything yet; last I heard, the Supremes had knocked the damages down so low Exxon won’t even know it’s gone. And as for that hot coffee case, I’d be surprised if McDonald’s ever paid a penny of the settlement everyone is so up in arms about.
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I’ve reading about the Epstein files and feeling ill that such an obviously evil person was tightly linked with our ruling classes.
It turns out that Jess Ting, a doctor who operated on ‘trans child’ Jazz Jennings, has been named in the Epstein Files.
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There’s a story going around online on genderspecial media that either J . K. Rowling, or “Rowling’s people”, personally invited Jeffrey Epstein to see a production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”, with lots of tut-tutting about those wicked TERFs.
Apparently, what happened is that Jeffrey’s Epstein’s executive assistant, Lesley Groff, got in contact with U.S publicist Peggy Siegel to ask whether she could secure Epstein two tickets for HP&tCC. . Siegal replied that she would reach out to Colin Callender (one of the play’s producers and a major tv/theatre figure who produced Wolf Hall and the All Creatures Great and Small remake).
Afterwards, all communication was handled by Epstein’s team and Rhys Kimmitt from the company Playground Entertainment.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02240802.pdf
AFAIK there was no direct contact between J. K. Rowling and the horrible Epstein.
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Epstein couldn’t just pay for his tickets?
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I suspect Jeff was one of those rich folk who get their PA to organise things like theater visits.
Ultimately Jeffrey got turned away. Cue strop by Siegel:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00828113.pdf
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Side note: I was, like I suspect many people here were, a fan of the Work of Woody Allen. My lecturers introduced me to his work in college and I adored it.
I was vaguely aware of allegations against him. I knew that he was married to Soon-Yi Previn, the half-sister of the three children Allen had adopted with his former girlfriend Mia Farrow, and that there was an allegation of serial abuse against Allen from his daughter Dylan Farrow. But I chalked the former up to showbiz oddness, (wasn’t actress Gloria Grahame married to her stepson?). The latter was disquieting, but it had been investigated and Allen had not been charged. So I continued to watch Allen’s films, albeit surreptitiously after 2017 (when the Farrow family reiterated the allegation, and Allen became a film industry pariah).
I’m revolted at the revelations about Allen and Previn in the files. Befriending Epstein, dismissing the accusations against Epstein’s victims, praising Epstein till the end….Allen comes across as appallingly selfish and cruel. Even before the final revelations, Allen was still defending Epstein.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/style/allen-epstein.html
As with Noam Chomsky’s defending Epstein, there’s no coming back from this for Woody Allen.
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But….despite all that, I’m still going to watch ‘Midnight in Paris’ every so often, because it is a wonderful film.
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What happened to the formatting at 259 and 260? Could you fix whatever this is?
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Sorry. I’m posting from my smartphone (which I don’t normally do). Playing havoc
with the formatting.
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Ah, ok, I’ll fix it at this end.
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Allen was revealed to be a horror quite a long time ago.
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The Woody Allen sub on Reddit is deleting all references to Allen’s relationship with Epstein. Which is ridiculous and makes his dwindling number of overt fans look like a cult.
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To put it mildly. Yuk.
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So do I.
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Hey, the performers in that Vivaldi concerto are pals of mine! I’ve recorded them many times. The theorbo player (that’s the lute with added bass strings) played for our wedding. Any videos on this channel, Voices of Music, are performances as fine as you’ll hear in the U.S., or anywhere really!
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Well how cool is that?!
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Classical music is sorta outside my cultural wheelhouse, (life-long indie-rock fan here) but that Vivaldi piece is a very nice piece of music.
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Bill and Hillary Clinton to testify before Congress about Slick Willie’s relationship with Epstein:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/politics/bill-hillary-clinton-epstein-comer-contempt.html
“Y’know who *isn’t* married to someone named in the Epstein files? That’s right, Bernie Sanders!” – A Vindicated Bernie Bro.
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From the Washington Post:
“The American Society of Plastic Surgeons said doctors should delay gender-related surgeries until age 19, citing “insufficient evidence” that benefits outweigh risks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/02/03/plastic-surgeons-youth-gender-surgeries-guidance/
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The Washington Post cut 1/3 of its staff today!
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#256 : J. K. Rowling has now officially denied having any contact with Jeffrey Epstein:
Responding to an X user who asserted she had been “sending invitations to Epstein 10 years after he was convicted,” the author replied: “This is beyond silly. Neither I, nor anybody on my team, ever met, communicated with or invited Jeffrey Epstein to anything.”
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I think that all the money spent on Olympic(tm) Ceremonies would be better spent on funding for fitness programs for children.
or maybe water and food so they have the strength to do some sportsball
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On the Aquatic Ape theory, I sought to get some more information on it due to a back and forth between Omar and Iknklast. So I sought and found an article by anthropologist John Hawks that I had read a few years ago, reviewing the history and current status of it. https://www.johnhawks.net/p/why-anthropologists-dont-accept-the-aquatic-ape-theory – I guess the title is a spoiler.
But halfway through, he reveals the fruits of Morgan’s approach and the reasons she was a proponent. She was dismayed that the male-centric anthropology focused on aggression-fueled developments in human evolution. and her book was called The Descent of Woman. And this led to a branching off of human evolution to examine it from a more feminist angle:
Such ideas helped to recenter scientists’ ideas about how human social behavior had evolved. This new way of thinking can be seen in the 1981 volume Woman the Gatherer, edited by Frances Dahlberg, which went far beyond the stereotype of women gathering plant foods and looked at the diversity of female economic and social life.
This feminist strain of anthropology led to better science, as researchers collected more precise data on how human foragers allocate their effort to collect calories and nutrition from the foods they eat. The human behavioral ecologist Kristen Hawkes showed the caloric contribution of older women, most of them grandmothers, to the Hadza economy. Behavioral ecologists like Hawkes and Kim Hill were joined by archaeologists in examining the foraging behavior of hunting and gathering groups like the Hadza of Tanzania, and Aché of Paraguay. These researchers built a new understanding of how men and women together make choices that balance the costs of hunting and foraging plant foods with their caloric return.
It’s an interesting article for those interested in the history of anthropology.
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This was a good one, too:
The Woman That Never Evolved by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
I didn’t link because there are too many. You choose.
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There has been a school shooting in rural British Columbia. Ten students are dead, including the killer. The police reported that the suspect is “female” but withheld her identity. We all know where this is going.
The police, of course, lied. The killer’s uncle has told media outlets that he’s Jesse Strang, and pictures widely available on the internet show him to be a crossdressing man who likes to take selfies with machine guns in his hands.
As the movement collapses, we’re going to see much more violence from the holdouts, I’m afraid.
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Good article by Kathleen Stock on the Epstein Files fallout:
This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.
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Governor of Puerto Rico Jenniffer González signs a “fetal person-hood” bill criminalizing abortion as murder:
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Well, well, well. Dr. Upton has left the NHS. I guess that not being allowed to watch nurses undress has taken all the fun out of the job.
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Helen Webberley has reported Dr. Hilary Cass to the General Medical Council:
https://archive.ph/zMLWR#selection-397.204-397.294
Webberley’s got some Brass Neck.
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Another man in a dress has gone on a gun rampage.
Police have identified the suspect in a shooting at a high school ice hockey game in Rhode Island that killed two people and injured three others.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves said Robert Dorgan, who also used the name Roberta and the surname Esposito, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound inside the Dennis M Lynch Arena on Sunday.
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Male-pattern violence isn’t something you can just slap a wig on and call female.
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Now that is a quotable remark.
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This might be the impetus behind Trump’s immodest proposal to rename airports after himself:
Trump family business files for trademark rights on any airports using the president’s name
Applications filed by the Trump Organization with the federal trademark office are seeking exclusive rights to use the president’s name on airports and dozens of related things found there, from buses shuttling passengers to umbrellas and travel bags to flight suits. The filings come amid debate in Florida over a state bill to name the Palm Beach airport after Trump and a dispute over funding of a tunnel between New York and New Jersey that is tied up with proposals that both it and Dulles International Airport in Virginia bear his name.
“While presidents and public officials have had landmarks named in their honor, a sitting president’s private company has never in the history of the United States sought trademark rights in advance of such naming,” Gerben wrote on his blog. “These are trademark filings that are completely unprecedented.”
Another break with the past: Presidents usually have to wait for years after they’ve left office to get an airport named after them — or die.
I wouldn’t even name a garbage scow after the fucker.
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Oh for god’s SAKE is there no low they won’t stoop to?
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Indeed. The only thing I want to see named after him is his tomb.
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Article that I think some people here will appreciate. It’s “The Tide Goes Out on Youth Gender Medicine” by Helen Lewis:
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Breaking News – Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested in connection with Epstein files revelations:
https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-arrested-uk-police-02-19-26
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Oh gosh, arresting a piggy royal instead of a feminist woman for a change.
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Today’s Portland (Maine) Press Herald about the R.I. shooter, who worked at Bath Iron Works in Brunswick, ME:
“Police say Robert Dorgan, 56, killed their ex-wife and their son and injured three others before turning the gun on themselves at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket.”
This absurdity, in the face of such horror. I’m speechless.
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Mike B., that actually makes it sound like he killed someone else’s wife and son; actually, more than one someone else’s wife and son.
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It occurs to me, the more trans activists insist on the use of quote they unquote pronouns in such articles, the more they draw attention to the transgender status of these criminals, whereas the truthful pronoun “he” would cover up transgender status! Isn’t that ironic? Perhaps this is a case of the Shakespearean saying, Hoist by their own petard.
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Good grief.
Notice that “killed their ex-wife and their son” has both the crazy version of “their” and the ordinary one. His ex-wife and their son.
I wonder if a sub changed the first one. I think the writer would have worded the whole thing differently rather than be saddled with that howler.
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Montreal salon ordered to pay $500 to “non-binary” customer who was “misgendered” :
Canada, eh?
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Mostly Cloudy, that is one screwed up decision. Seriously. A hair salon needs to know what sort of haircut they will be doing to schedule the right length of time. A ‘non-binary’ haircut could be male, female, or…well, that’s all it could be, thought there are large ranges in those sexes.
There are many places where the sex of the person matters. My doctor’s office uses a standard online form created by who the hell knows who; it’s some sort of third-party service. The medical history, etc, includes ‘sex assigned at birth’, indicating that they know that sex matters, but want to be ‘nice’ to those who are delusional enough to think there are more than two sexes/genders. It makes me not to want to answer the question at all; I wasn’t assigned a sex at birth, my sex was observed. As someone who went through menstruation, had a pregnancy that resulted in live birth, and went through menopause, there is no doubt in my mind, and shouldn’t be in anyone’s, what sex I am.
Also, if they don’t have to ‘look’ non-binary (how the hell would you ‘look’ non-binary anyway? A lumberjack’s jacket over a tutu?) how can anyone possibly be held responsible for ‘misgendering’ you? And since enbees are not all ‘using’ the same pronouns, how could anyone possibly NOT misgender you?
And of course, the big question – why the hell should it be a crime to call someone by the ‘wrong’ pronouns? (Usually indicating the right pronouns, though it is possible to make a genuine mistake in those of us who are just ordinary people without special pronouns, since there are some people who do sort of look androgynous – i.e., non-binary.)
We are a sexual species. We are a species with a bimodal sex. We may be heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, or anywhere in between. Our sexual preferences might truly be said to be non-binary, but our sex is not. Even for individuals with DSDs (I refuse to say intersex), they are one sex or the other. It just may be hard to tell correctly from looking at them.
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UK Puberty Blocker Trial paused over ‘new concerns’ about fertility:
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For the 5 people not convinced Trump is out of his f-ing mind:
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Never mind. It’s probably fake. The fact that we wouldn’t put it past him says a lot.
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Trans activists say restoring traditional Pride flag at Stonewall isn’t enough
Raising the rainbow Pride flag instead of the more inclusive Progress flag excludes the trans community, activists say
The article contains misleading and false information.
This is all in reference to some form of Pride Flag flown near the Stonewall Inn in NYC. As I understand it, a Rainbow Flag had been flying there for some time. It was removed in early February 2026 on orders of the Trump administration. Democratic lawmakers worked to have it restored. When that happened, “trans” activists were upset that the flag being flown was not the Progress Flag, with the TQIAXYZ+++ triangle.
(The history of what flag was flying at what time is unclear to me. The article says the National Park Service stopped flying the Progress Flag shortly after the inauguration, then began flying the Rainbow Flag. I have not been able to confirm the sequence; other sources indicate a Rainbow Flag was flying at Stonewall for several years. There is probably some confusion between the Rainbow Flag and the Progress Flag.)
The article makes the false claim that “trans” people instigated the Stonewall riots. The article claims the Progress Flag is “more inclusive”, rather than an instance of forced teaming. The article doesn’t contain any quotes from anyone who supports flying the Rainbow Flag rather than the Progress Flag.
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Jesse Singal published an article in the New York Times today about the gender issue.
Bluesky (the “sensible” and “moderate” social media site, remember) goes absolutely crazy:
https://x.com/babybeginner/status/2026328180051849612#m
“Jesse Singal fuck off and expire challenge 2026” goes one such Bluesky post.
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Eeesh. “those genocide-enabling assholes” “can’t wait to see the TERFs gassed alongside me” “Jesse Singal fuck off and expire”
An eloquent and thoughtful bunch.
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NPR finds the DoJ has withheld 53 documents specifically to protect republicans. Most damning is the accusation against – you guessed it – Trump, who attempted to force a THIRTEEN YEAR OLD to give him oral sex, and battered her when she refused.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
In unrelated-yet-also-related news, as recently as 2022, Germany charged a man with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder in his role as concentration camp guard. He was 101 years old and the ‘just following orders’ did not stick – he was convicted and sentenced to 5 years imprisonment. They even took breaks for the man’s poor health due to age in order to ensure the trial reached completion, and I truly appreciate the dedication shown to stick it to a Nazi.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-29/101-year-old-nazi-convicted-of-holocaust-crimes/101191848
(Further examples of dedicated pursuit of bastards can bee seen in the sidebar there)
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A shooting incident in New Hampshire has just occurred. The suspect is ” has been identified as Cullan Zeke Daly, 26, a Manchester man who uses the feminine identity Blu Zeke Daly.”
https://nhjournal.com/border-shooting-suspect-a-trans-manchester-resident/
Another genderspecial shooter?
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I think that this is horrible and misguided. There are some rights that people who identify as “trans” do have, and should not lose. I think the idea of changing birth certificates, and using gender ID instead of sex on them and driver’s license is kind of stupid, but the way that the conservatives in Kansas have done it is unconscionable.
With immediate effect. In election year. These people will probably be disenfranchised because of this. There should have been a grace period, at least.
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About Kansas drivers licenses, it’s wrong to invalidate them based on just the sex being incorrect when there’s also name, address, photo, height, weight, eye color, etc. that can identify a legally licensed driver. That I think should be challenged in court as being an undue burden on those whose licenses are being subject to a hastily adopted law.
That said, Sex should be assigned according to what’s on a birth certificate, if you’re going to have it included on a driver’s license. The state is not in the business of falsifying material facts.
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Regarding Kansas’s heavy-handed driver’s license bill, it brings to mind what David Frum said in 2019:
“If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.”
The more the left overreaches, the harder the right lashes back. Always. The gender extremists fucked around and now they’re finding out: they’ve invited a massive backlash that’ll hurt all the people who got caught up in gender madness.
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J.A., I don’t know. When I tried to get a license when we moved to Maine, they insisted on having my birth certificate, some proof of my new address, my marriage license from my first marriage, my divorce decree, my marriage license from my second marriage…I’m surprised they didn’t ask for a DNA sample! As a result, I am still driving with a license that inaccurately reflects where I live. This is a situation a lot of women may find themselves in, since some of us make a decision to change our names.
But if I wanted to call myself a man? Just say “I’m trans!” and they would give me a sex that doesn’t reflect reality. And since Maine is one of the more liberal states in regards to trans, that might have been the case. Now that I’m back in Nebraska, my only problem is that I can’t find the office where you get the new license, because it is on a street so new I can’t find it!
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Trump’s keeping it classy! How does one mark 250 years of American independence? Why, by holding an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn, of course. Squeeze in 5000 lucky ticket holders, cram another 80,000 into the nearby park, the Eclipse, to watch the fighting on big screens and you have the perfect way to mark such a milestone in the nation’s history.
Pity, really, that the Kennedy Arts Centre is closed; they could have held a simultaneous WWE event to give the elites who find the UFC lacking in social clout something to watch.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/mixed-martial-arts/articles/ce3gyqykx2g
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Ewwwwwwwwwwwww
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In January this year, Trump also signed an Executive Order announcing an IndyCar race on the streets of Washington, DC. He wants it to include Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall. I still feel skeptical that it can be organized on such short notice, but IndyCar has it on their schedule for August 21-23, albeit without a track map yet:
https://www.indycar.com/Schedule/2026/Washington-DC
IndyCar is the auto racing series that includes the famous Indianapolis 500 in May. Their season opener race is tomorrow, Sunday, March 1st, on a street course in St. Petersburg, Florida. I will probably watch some of it on TV, because they show some beautiful overhead shots of the cars racing on streets by the water. Fox will broadcast the race live at noon, Eastern time:
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Well, you know that old saying about bread and circus.
And I’m not sure about the bread…
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Oh bloody hell. The US and Israel have attacked Iran:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/28/middleeast/israel-attack-iran-intl-hnk
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Reminder: in 2024 the hateful Stephen Miller accused the Democrats of being “warmongering neocons” and said that “Kamala=WWIII, Trump=Peace.”
https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/2027665169434968208#m
The hypocrisy is breath-taking.
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Before: “That’s never going to happen”
After: “Yes it happened, but that’s a good thing”
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From the article:
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, condemned the US-Israeli strikes as unprovoked and illegal.
I begin to suspect that the more this is true, the more likely Trump is to do the action. He does it because he is not allowed to do it. He does it because other presidents would at least think twice before doing it. He wants everyone to know that nothing will stop him, and that no one can stop him. He truly believes the bullshit about ‘leader of the free world’ and believes that gives him the right to do anything he wants. He seems to believe everyone is his to command, no matter what country they live in, what god they have, or what they might want/need.
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Oh god.
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This is horrendous.
A nearly-blind, non-English-speaking refugee from Myanmar has been found dead in upstate New York after being released from federal immigration custody.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam was found dead on Tuesday, days after US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) dropped him off at a coffee shop miles from his home in Buffalo, where temperatures have been below freezing.
He had been in local police custody for a year because two officers mistook the curtain rod he was using as a walking stick for a weapon and, because he couldn’t understand their orders to drop it, tasered him, causing him to stumble towards them which they interpreted as an attack and tackled him to the ground. They claim that they were injured in the ‘attack’! He was released on bail after a plea deal and handed over to immigration: they couldn’t begin deportation proceedings because of his refugee status so took him to a coffee shop (that was closed for the night) far from his home and without notifying his family. He was found dead 5 days later, 6 miles from where he’d been left.
The DHS seem to think they did nothing wrong.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, said the man had accepted a courtesy ride to the shop and showed “no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance” when he was dropped off.
Apart from the blind thing, perhaps?
The department said that the coffee shop was closer to his home compared to being released “directly from the Border Patrol station” and it was determined to be “a warm, safe location”.
Well, it was before it closed at 7pm.
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Jeezus. That is indeed horrendous.
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Gwynne Dyer wonders if it mighthave been the case that Epstein was a spy for Israel:
As for Epstein’s vast network of information exchanges (which would also have served Epstein’s work as a spy if he really was one), the case may remain open forever. We are left only with speculation – so let’s speculate.
Start with the recent remark of US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, billionaire pal of Donald Trump, that Jeffrey Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever”. Blackmail is usually about money, but it can also be for information.
From the guest-lists at his various houses of ill repute, it’s clear that many of Epstein’s guests were chosen as sources of information or ways of reaching other potential informants rather than just because they were filthy rich. And if they were vulnerable to being blackmailed, it was often because Epstein had taken the trouble to give them guilty secrets.
Why would he do all that? It seems too elaborate if Epstein’s intention was just to create a modern version of the Hellfire Club (look it up), but it was the ideal tool if his intention was to gain access to a wide selection of powerful and well-informed Americans.
Some of them just wanted free holidays, some of them wanted to rub shoulders with other famous people, some of them wanted to have sex with under-age girls. Whatever their tastes, Epstein satisfied them.
So what intelligence agency would have the greatest interest in knowing America’s secrets, including especially political and commercial secrets? Well, the leading candidate is obviously the one that is most dependent on American support in almost every aspect of its existence: Israel.
https://cyprus-mail.com/2026/03/01/arrests-linked-to-epstein-fail-to-touch-americas-powerful
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Andrea Long Chu has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for two articles, one of which was an attack on Pamela Paul for Paul’s gender critical views:
https://xcancel.com/benryanwriter/status/2027506652610445366#m
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Now it’s getting personal. Trump is threatening to cut off my wine supply.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to halt trade with Spain and said he had instructed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to “cut off all dealings” with the country, amid a dispute over the use of jointly-operated military bases on Spanish soil.
“We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain,” Trump said during a sit-down with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office. “We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”
Trump can’t even tell a tapa from a pintxo.
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Depressing but unsurprising….”Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by Trump gets life sentence for child sex crimes” :
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.”Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by Trump gets life sentence for child sex crimes”
What are the odds that, feeling sympathy for a kindred spirit “interested” in underage girls, he’ll pardon him for this, too?
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Graham Platner, Dem running against our Trans-coddling current governor for Collins’ Senate seat, just said what everyone is thinking about our rotting president. Will he stand by it?
“HE MIGHT BE A PEDOPHILE”
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Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that if you’re trying to counter right-wing protestors who claim that Islamists are taking over the city, tossing a couple of IEDs near the mayor’s mansion may not be the most effective strategy.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/09/nyregion/gracie-mansion-bomb-investigation-nyc
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I’m beginning to think that my grasp of the English language isn’t as strong as I thought. Perhaps it’s part of the aging process, or perhaps it never was that great, but I’m finding that words don’t seem to mean what I think they mean. “War”, for example. Suppose a country–say, Denmark–were to start a bombing campaign against the US, destroying the White House, killing the President and much of the political leadership, hitting military bases and energy infrastructure, destroying an elementary school during a school day, sinking our ships in international waters, and vowing to continue to do so until we surrendered unconditionally. Surely that would be war, yet I’m hearing from some Republican politicians and online warriors that when we do it, it’s only war if Congress declares war (which makes me wonder: what’s the point of giving Congress the power to declare war if the President can do all kinds of warlike things without any check? Isn’t that the domain of monarchs?); otherwise it’s, I don’t know, sparkling murder?
“Woman” is another word I thought I understood, but apparently I was wrong. It doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, and when I think I’ve caught the new sense, it slips out of my grasp.
Clowns to the left of us, fascists to the right….
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Headline: “Therians: the humans who identify as animals. The trend is growing and leading to controversy”
One more thing that we were told was ‘’never going happen” and “isn’t a thing”! The number of things we were screamed at as not a thing…amazing how many turned out to be a thing…this is just one more..
Not sure how legit this is, but it easily foreseeable as there is zero gatekeeping allowed for any claim of identity and no questioning of any identity is allowed, which, we all know, is labelled bigotry and hateful. So, this identity was just a matter of time from combining neopronouns, creativity/imagination/fun, and wanting to identify in a different way.
1. I’ll just repeat J. K. Rowling, [this was second tweet that ause the avalanche of hate against her], at least here I won’t get criticized for it
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033?
2. Yes let’s also be aware of, see links below:
Mental health specialists consulted by media outlets agree that there is no evidence that therian identity is, in itself, a psychiatric disorder. The key lies in distinguishing between subjective identity and psychological functioning. If the experience does not affect a young person’s ability to form relationships, attend school, or maintain healthy routines, there is no reason to automatically pathologize it.
3. And whether we all will be told/forced to validity the identity and forced to deny reality?
“to be kind” “to be compassionate”??
https://aldianews.com/en/wellness/investigation/how-support-therians
https://theweek.com/culture-life/therians-internet-identity-social-media?
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I wonder if someone decided on “Therian” over “Furry” because the former sounds more serious, scientific, and real, whereas the latter sounds silly, fun, and made up?
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My two cents:
If an adult enjoys dressing up and pretending to be an animal in private, that’s their business.
But if such an adult goes round *demanding* that everyone else go along with his or her claim to be an animal, or be punished, that’s very different.
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Since B&W has discussed the odious Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor before, I thought people here might be interested in Andrew O’Hagan’s LRB review of two books about the Awful Andy and the Foul Fergie:
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He’s not a fan, is he! Good stuff; thanks.
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Everywhere he went, Andrew was described as rude, arrogant, petulant, shallow, uninformed, unethical, contrary, childish and spoiled.
If he were American we’d probably elect him president.
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Project Nettie: Scientists and academics supporting the biological reality of sex
Emma Hilton [Developmental biologist. Sex. Sport. Science.] Mar 02, 2026
The Project Nettie statement
Male and female are scientific descriptions of the two sexual reproductive functions evolved to produce two specialised types of sex cells: small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm or pollen) and large, immobile gametes (e.g. eggs).
In humans, there are two classes of individuals, each with a molecular and anatomical developmental pattern corresponding to adult reproduction via either sperm or eggs.
This division of the two reproductive functions across two classes of individuals is a simple outcome of our species’ evolutionary history.
In humans, anatomical developmental patterns are fixed during early embryonic development, and sex does not change throughout the individual lifespan.
While (rare) individuals have medical conditions that affect their anatomical reproductive development and/or function, not one of these individuals represents an additional sex class. One’s inability to produce gametes (e.g. those who are infertile or post-reproductive) does not change sex from that defined by reproductive anatomy.
Attempts to recast biological sex as a social construct, which then becomes a matter of arbitrarily chosen individual identity, are wholly ideological, scientifically inaccurate and socially irresponsible.
https://fondofbeetles.substack.com/p/project-nettie-scientists-and-academics?
Here is one explanation of background, which will be familiar to many of you:
https://lgbcouragecoalition.substack.com/p/the-heretics-list?
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Today March 21 2026 is Detransitioner Awareness Day
For too long, detransitioners have been sidelined while institutions failed to reckon with mounting evidence of harm, leaving those affected without accountability or viable avenues for redress.
https://genspect.org/detrans-awareness-day-2026/
videos from last year’s panel: https://genspect.org/announcing-detrans-awareness-day-2025/
Since its inception in 2021, Detrans Awareness Day has played a crucial role in raising international awareness about detransition. Thanks in large part to the courageous personal testimonies of detransitioners, important discussions around medical ethics, legal protections, and medical and cultural support are finally gaining momentum in the United States.
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Of all the ridiculous, petty, asinine things the Trump administration is doing, this is one of them:
People Magazine: Trump Admin Drops the Olive Branch from U.S. Seal on New Dime Coins, Keeps the Arrows
A new dime coin entering circulation in 2026 is sparking conversation after eagle-eyed Americans noticed a small but significant detail in its design.
The Emerging Liberty Dime, unveiled late last year, no longer features President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the face, nor does it display the former torch, olive branch and oak branch on the reverse.
In the new face design, a determined Lady Liberty turns to the right as tailwinds push strands of her hair forward. On the reverse, an eagle in flight carries arrows in its talons on one foot, and looks back at its other foot, which is notably clutching nothing.
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Another good article from Jamie Paul, called “How Trans Activism Became So Radical”.
In 2014, trans issues were hardly a blip on the public’s radar. By the end of the decade, institutional America marched in lockstep with trans activism while the mainstream press covered its most contested edge cases as though they were settled issues.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-trans-activism-became-so-radical
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Indeed, Mostly Cloudy, it’s a good essay.
Instead, flush with newfound cultural power and a sense of invincibility, the trans movement regarded public opinion, persuasion, civility, incrementalism, and even winning elections as irrelevant. Trans activists’ experience was not one of clawing their way into relevance by playing the long game like the gay and bi activists of yesteryear. Rather, it was, as I wrote in 2023, the understanding that they could “bypass politics altogether and simply seize progress and carry it off like an unprosecuted shoplifter in a San Francisco Walgreens.” And so they did, wielding accusations of transphobia like a cudgel and watching the professional classes fold like cheap suits. Why bother trying to convince dissenters when you can circumvent or steamroll them? Why worry about protecting past gains when new ones come so effortlessly?
I wonder if this sudden capture will indeed be its downfall. I wonder if there will be a breach in the dam through athletics? Right now, the reaction from the left side is that there aren’t many boys playing ball with the girls, so not a big deal. But, as he pointed out, more swinging dicks in the locker room may finally catch the attention of those who see the threat of older males playing sports with college freshman women as a problem and realize that it suddenly is their business to safeguard women and girls in sports.
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Well Mike, this image has been circulating for over 11 years (according to my image search) and it doesn’t seem to have swung the… pendulum very far yet.
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WaM, it just doesn’t stop, does it? Almost like having power…any sort of power…makes men act badly.
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It certainly doesn’t surprise me.
But it shocks me.
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Yesterday (March 19, 2026), the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) reported on the military “exercise” called “Arctic Endurance” in Greenland that started in January 2026, and will continue at a lower level for the rest of the year. I used Google Translate to read these two articles:
The battle for Greenland
Key sources in Denmark and Europe are now telling for the first time what happened in the most critical days when Donald Trump threatened to take Greenland “the hard way”.
The battle for Greenland
It’s one thing to have a marital breakdown, it’s quite another to file for divorce. That’s why “Arctic Endurance” was carefully described as an ‘exercise’.
My quotes are from the first article, which is long and detailed:
• DR explains their sources [italics mine] — “The story is based on 12 central sources at the top of the Danish government, the Armed Forces and central sources in our closest allied countries in Europe, whom DR has spoken to since Donald Trump’s statements about Greenland in December 2024. The information is confirmed by at least two, but typically significantly more, independent sources. The sources assess that the situation around Greenland remains so tense and sensitive that they can only speak anonymously. DR has also verified the information with other sources who have had insight into parts of the process.”
• DR explains the timing [italics mine] — “Eight of DR’s sources describe one triggering factor in particular: the morning of January 3, 2026, when they woke up to the news that the United States had attacked Venezuela and removed the country’s president. That’s where it blows up, says a high-ranking source in the Danish security apparatus. … When Trump keeps saying he wants to take over Greenland, and then what happened in Venezuela happened, we had to take all scenarios seriously, says the source. The source also says that the assessment of the threat of a takeover of Greenland included “the fact that the official US is not functioning as usual”: Trump doesn’t have the same level of people around him as before who would talk him out of it. It’s super dangerous.”
• DR lists five countries involved — “With little delay, an advance command with Danish, French, German, Norwegian and Swedish soldiers was first flown to Nuuk and Kangerlussuaq. Immediately after, a main force followed, including soldiers from the Dragoon Regiment in Holstebro, elite soldiers from the Jægerkorps and French alpine hunters trained for war in cold, mountainous areas. At the same time, Danish fighter planes and a French naval vessel were sent towards the North Atlantic.”
• DR explains the point [italics mine] — “The goal of having soldiers on land in Greenland — with as many different flags on their shoulders as possible — was, according to six of the sources, so that the Americans would be forced to take a major hostile action if Donald Trump actually wanted to occupy Greenland militarily. That should deter the US from even trying. … All this even though none of DR’s sources had any illusions that it would be possible to hold out against an American attack. “The cost to the US would have to be raised. The US would have to carry out a hostile act to get Greenland,” says a high-ranking Danish defense source about the historic defense plan that could have plunged Denmark into conflict with our most important ally since World War II.”
• DR explains their article subtitles about blood and explosives — “For regular military exercises, where the purpose is to train with allies, blood and explosives are not packed, defense sources say. On the contrary, it is part of the procedure when preparing for a possible attack. Several other sources confirm to DR that the dispatch of soldiers to Greenland was about preparing a real defense of the Commonwealth.”
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the fact that the official US is not functioning as usual
How true. When the official US is Donald Trump, it cannot be expected to. But even here at home, things are not functioning as usual.
In local news, I learned that there are plants in the primaries this year. The governor has planted some of his friends to take votes away from the primary challenger of his preferred candidates. The primary challengers are Democrats (though we do elect our legislators non-partisan, we still have partisan elections for federal elected officers). The ‘plants’ have either changed their registration, or are just running as Democrats. Our state Supreme Court has stated this activity is illegal. The governor doesn’t care one whit; he’s doing it anyway. (He ran against a major MAGA candidate as the ‘sane’ Republican – which is questionable in itself – but now is full-speed ahead MAGA.)
Business as usual? Nope. It’s way, way, way off kilter.
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[…] a comment by Dave Ricks at Miscellany […]
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Craig Murray has a new post up:
What if Trump’s apparently chaotic thought processes and intuitive decision making are all a blind, a charade? What if we are really witnessing, in the Middle East and more widely, a carefully constructed plan with very definite objectives? Has Trump in fact “planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway”, while flinging the chaff of apparent chaos? I realise that this is not intuitive, but bear with me…
What kicked off my thinking was the revelation by Lockheed Martin that they had been instructed by Trump, months in advance of the attack on Iran, to massively increase production of interceptor missiles, with a short term goal of quadrupling capacity of THAAD. In January, before the start of the current conflict, Fox News was already reporting on various deals, including a trebling of PAC3 MSE interceptor deliveries, having been finalised between Lockheed and the Department of War. [More]
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Testing this new WordPress style or template:
• Testing “i” for italics.
• Testing “b” for bold.
• Testing “em” for emphasis.
• Testing “strong” for strong.
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This is sooo much nicer than the old layout! The combination of a too small font and fixed width in the old design was driving me nuts sometimes. I can even read B&W on my phone now!
Just a couple minor points, though:
The bold is a bit too subdued and hard to spot. But I think that may be due to the font. If I increase the font-weight setting (in CSS) from the current 300 to 350, the bold immediately gets too shouty (which is, unfortunately, the standard across most websites). So perhaps better to keep it like it is now.
The other thing is that the margins get too generous on the phone. Especially inside a blockquote, where the text gets so narrow a normal sentence fills much of the screen in the vertical direction.
Quick demo of the effect:
This is a blockquote.
And here is a nested blockquote, for a bigger challenge.
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To illustrate my point, a screenshot of my post above as seen on my phone.
(I assume we aren’t allowed img tags in the new setup?)
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Harald, thank you for pointing out that bold is there, but hard to spot (for me on my phone right now). I assumed it was not working at all, until your comment prompted me to zoom into my test cases. So I would like bold heavier than it is right now.
I would also like to see comment numbers, which I do not see on my phone right now.
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Ah, yes, we want the comment numbers back. And when I look again, the current bold is so anemic it would likely be better to leave it on the too heavy side. “font-weight: 350;” should take care of it.
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Murray’s post is interesting, but the ramp-up of production of Patriot missiles etc. is the least interesting part. Those were already badly depleted by the war in Ukraine; no further explanation was needed for a request to increase production.
The most interesting part of the post is looking at the Venezuelan oil embargo, capture of Maduro, and suborning of Rodriguez as preparation for the inevitable disruption to Persian Gulf oil.
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Oh wow! A new WordPress Theme has been installed. It looks very different around here.
It’s great to see a refresh. I applaud the newness!
All the same… here comes feedback! May I humbly offer a few suggestions for tweaks to forward to your web designer that he/she might consider?
Twenty Twenty-Five, the new off-the-shelf WordPress “skin” for B&W, is a classic choice for a modern WordPress theme. All honesty: I feel like that particular theme is maybe a wee bit too minimal for the sheer amount of activity that goes on here — it’s geared more towards, say, a photographer who posts pictures occasionally, and so it’s perhaps not the most ideal choice for a content-heavy, multiple-posts-a-day blog with such a lively and vital comments section.
(B&W is no ordinary WordPress site: it’s got a vast and important archive, an extreme amount of new content publishing on a daily basis, and a very active commentariat. It’s more like a small magazine than a typical WordPress blog. I’d say that, for a WordPress, it’s very much on the Big Side of things.)
But the Twenty Twenty-Five theme also has some great pros, one being that it’s a very mainstream, widely-used theme, so it’s very manageable, and — great news! — it’s very configure-able. It’s got lots of settings that can be tweaked and customized.
(This is all from the perspective of a user visiting the website on a desktop/laptop, not a phone or tablet.)
There’s a lot of white space on the screen, not just to the left and right of the main column, where the actual content lives, but above and below it, too. This is called “padding” in web-design speak, and the site designer could probably tweak the padding down quite a few notches, across the board. As it is now, there’s so much padding it almost feels like something failed to load?
The font for the body text, where the meat is, is sans-serif and a bit of a strain to read. This kind of font is visually pretty, and it’s great for advertising, or for short snippets of content to accompany some glossy pictures. But there’s a reason literary magazines virtually never publish longform articles in sans-serif fonts: they strain the eyes when we’re doing deep, intensive reading, of the kind this site provides. Literary publishing always goes with serif fonts for reasons that have been honed over more than a century. Serif text helps guide the eye across vertical lines of text, but it comes at a cost of being less pretty when you step back and look at a page as an aesthetic object in itself. This is where design and function sometimes clash: when one is in design-mode, it’s easy to prioritize what’s visually appealing and exciting over what is undoubtedly more boring but also more functional when one reverts back to practical, daily-usage mode.
There’s also some feedback from the comments that we can’t make out bold text clearly enough in this new font. (Again, this font looks great from a designer’s standpoint. From a reader and writer’s one, it’s not as practical as the old one. It’s also hard to make out angle brackets in this font, so HTML markup is difficult to parse within it, and we commenters use HTML markup a lot for italics, bolds, strikethroughs, and blockquotes.)
Some distinction between the body text and the bells-and-whistles around it might be nice. A border around the body text, or a background colour change? Something to break up all the white? And to separate the sidebar from the main content? But that’s not as vital as the other two things…
The header image and the (extremely large) search box seem off-centre, perhaps imbalanced. In web-design-speak, they look pre-responsive. Not scaling properly together, or with the screen. Again: not a biggie. But a flag that something’s a bit off.
There’s my two cents, for what they’re worth. Either way, bienvenue to the new B et Double-V.
Overall, yay! Cheers
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Arty, you might be stuck with sans serif. When I was working, we were required to use sans serif, because it works better for the readers used by those who are visually impaired (at least, that’s what the official word is. I actually like it, but do all my literary work in Times New Roman, because that is what all the publishers use, and it is easier to read a lot of times.) The white background is also possibly there because of ADA and accessibility issues; no accessibility checker likes color. We were told at work we could not use any color for anything major. I, being the wag that I am, asked if that meant I had to stop teaching map making in my map making class, since maps thrive on colors, and those colors are important and meaningful. To their shame, they couldn’t answer, but their body language said ‘yes, you will have to stop using color in your class’. Also, a lot of science relies on colors. We ignored that instruction until they finally gained some sense and backed down on the black on white only.
As for liking it, perhaps it’s just the newness, but I hate it. It looks awful, it looks amateur (to me), and I can’t see the difference between blockquotes and other text, except that the blockquotes are indented.
I do like the fact that I don’t have to fill in my name and email every time, though. But I have to agree about comment numbers.
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I am aware that not all features from the previous design are working yet. Comment numbers, for example, were provided by a plugin which hadn’t been updated in over 11 years, and that plugin does not function at all after the update. I’m going to have to find a new one, rewrite the old one, or write a completely new one myself. The old theme, likewise, was circa 2011, and could not be updated, hence the abrupt move to TwentyTwentyFive.
This isn’t necessarily the final look and feel — it’s what I could put in place quickly so the site would function at all after nearly everything broke at once. Thank you for the feedback and for your patience as I figure out what to do to fix a site that had essentially received no updates in 15 years.
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Aw jeez Josh you’re the one who gets all the thanks here. You are a SAINT among volunteer webmasters.
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Thank you Josh!!
Thank you for your work, and for explaining your work.
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Thanks so much, Josh! I just popped in today and already it looks wunderbar!
Ooh, and I love that it remembers my name and email address when I go to comment.
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Nice job, Josh
The new layout looks just fine to me :)
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Thank you for the serif font.
really
truly
Josh is a magician or a saint
whatever works
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Getting the site back up and running was absolutely Job One, and thank you for that, Josh. Tweaks can be done in their own sweet time.
Top of my wish-list would be a “Dark Mode” button, going from black-on-white to green-on-black, but others likely have higher priority for other folks.
Also, since this is the Miscellany thread, here’s a video for folks to enjoy, about the relationship between the earliest days of cycling and feminism:
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Thanks, Josh! When it comes to B&W, something is better than nothing.
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Freeemage:
Your Youtube link doesn’t get me to a video it just goes to the top of the miscellany room 14 page.
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Top of my wish-list would be a “Dark Mode” button, going from black-on-white to green-on-black, but others likely have higher priority for other folks.
Nonono, not a dark mode button. Better to have the web page adjust when the browser (or the computer, and hence the browser with it) goes to dark mode. For the technically inclined, see the prefers-color-scheme documentation at mozilla. I know nothing about wordpress templates or how they are tweaked, so no idea how it’s done in that corner of the universe. But you can see it in action at the linked site, or even at my own homepage.
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Make Autogynephilia Great Again: An amusing scandal has occured involving the husband of Trump supporter Kristi Noem, Bryon Noem.
A story has come out claiming Mr. Noem likes to don sexualized women’s clothing and fake breasts while chatting to sex workers online. He also alleged shared his details and paid large sums of money to online fetish models.
https://people.com/who-is-bryon-noem-kristi-noem-husband-11791850
I wonder is this why Kristi Noem was fired? That her employers learned her husband’s behaviour was a security risk?
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Although I agree with Artymorty that serif fonts are generally more legible than sans-serif, I am going to offer a contrarian view here:
I think the current font (Literata) comes out less readable than whatever sans-serif font that Josh used initially. A large part of that may be because it is more condensed, a bit like a newspaper font made to conserve paper – like the Times Roman font was originally designed to achieve. But also, I suspect that the “serif is more legible than sans-serif” principle is stronger on paper than on a computer screen. I think I have read something to that effect, though I have no references handy. But the two media really are very different, so one cannot willy-nilly transfer what is known about one to the other.
But also, perhaps it is just my ageing eyes that give me trouble. I find reading on a screen much more tiring than I used to.
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Harald, aging eyes are a big issue for me, too, which could be one reason I hate the new look. It makes my eyes hurt. Too much brilliant white space, with dark type. I know it’s supposed to be easier to read, and it is definitely easier than some (yellow on green comes to mind; way too many films are subtitled in yellow on some background that just makes it disappear). But it acts like a strobe light on my eyes.
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And on the topic of dark mode, today’s xkcd cartoon seems like an odd coincidence. Or does Randall Munroe follow the discussion here?
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Yeah, I was going to mention kerning, but didn’t want to annoy. The current font seems pretty tightly packed. Here’s a funny tidbit – when you’re typing a reply into the box the font isn’t as crowded. I’m going to press the button and watch it condense.
What it reminds me of is the compact books I used to buy – you know, like Moby Dick but it fits in your pocket.
It’s trying so hard to be so small, but it has all this white space on the margins, it seems like it could relax a bit.
But I like it better than the other font anyway.
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Here’s a funny tidbit – when you’re typing a reply into the box the font isn’t as crowded.
Looking at it in my browser inspector, it appears that the only difference in the font specification is the font weight: 300 in the posted text, 400 in the input text box.
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What a Maroon:
Thank you for correcting my link–that was, indeed, the video. I may have to experiment with how the links work on the new site someday.
Anyway, folks, go watch a video about cycling and feminism. It’s fun.
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I’m so energized by all the newness around here! It looks really great and refreshing!
If we’re discussing fonts and readability, in a continuation of the stuff we’ve riffed on about serifs… yeah, I hear what you guys are saying, in that, this current font is indeed a serif font, but it’s still a kind of “display” font and not a made-for-block-text bread-and-butter one. Kerning is tight, and so is line spacing. (There’s not a lot of white space above and below each line). It’s a great font! But what I think you’re saying is that you’d prefer a strictly literary body-text kind of font for the body of our comments, as our comments are literary and intellectually heavy — as in, we just want the words injected into our brains with as little fuss as possible along the way.
An interesting way of looking at it is: what are our favourite online literary sources, where the big impactful reads are, and how do they present their text? I would look at, say The New Yorker or NYT or Harper’s (which uses Garamond, and has a generous line spacing), or Granta, or The Atlantic, or even Substack’s defaults…
It’s usually Garamond, or Georgia, or Times New Roman, or Baskerville, set at about 17 points, with line spacing around 1.5 or 1.6***. Pretty routine; pretty predictable. And that’s ok! All the fun design stuff happens around the body text, while the body text itsef generally sticks to the boring repertoire that is more-or-less analagous to what you’d find in a printed book. By analogy: we wouldn’t want to read a novel whose entire text was printed in, say, Papyrus or Comic Sans! Ideally, the body text should remain ultra-conservative and, alas, super boring, in its design choices. That’s what I think, at least.
***Line spacing is kinda the secret sauce, tho: the other factor in addition to serifs that makes big bodies of text really sing is having good line spacing, at about one-and-a-half normal spacing. That’s what Substack did, and I genuinely think that’s what made Substack take off so quickly: they picked a good font and a good spacing frame. Pieces on Substack are just REALLY REALLY READABLE to the eye! Let’s make it like that here!!
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And now for something completely different: Animal rescue!
A woman in New Zealand fell down a waterfall and injured herself – apparently, a miracle that she survived at all – but her dog, a border collie, went missing after the accident. Friends collected money for a helicopter search, and the dog was found and rescued a week later. Here is the story, from CNN.
But what I really wanted to show you is this nice video from the rescue, by the helicopter company. (Sorry, it’s facebook. I never visit facebook voluntarily, never ever post a link to facebook, but this was worth an exception.)
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Ah thank you, I love rescue stories.
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I thought it was interesting that the rescuer brought another dog along. I suppose the idea is to put the dog to be rescued at ease, lest it be scared and run away. Especially since helicopters are incredibly noisy machines and must be really intimidating to a dog not used to them.
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Also interesting that the guy was able to make his way down from that waterfall with a large dog under each arm. Strength AND balance.
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My opinion, I set up a dark mode on my smartphone and/or its DuckDuckGo browser (I don’t remember which), so I can doomscroll my way in bed.
If B&W had a dark mode on WordPress, I would not use it, because I already have it covered.
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And while Trump is busy threatening to annihilate Iran, JD Vance is in Hungary campaigning to help Trump’s fellow authoritarian Viktor Orbán stay in power while accusing others of meddling in the election.
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Laurie Penny is in Smug Mode:
May I take this opportunity to congratulate all the anti-wokers for winning their precious little culture war. Well done, guys, hope the liberal tears were worth it.
https://bsky.app/profile/pennyred.bsky.social/post/3miwx2tcmfc2z
Isn’t this the same Laurie Penny who was lecturing us for years about the need to stand up to powerful men who mistreat women? And then said nothing about Neil Gaiman ‘s mistreatment of women for months after the story broke in the media, because Neil was Laurie’s friend?
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Cathy Young responds to Penny:
Hon, when you tell people if a “woman” waves “her” penis at their teenage daughter in a locker room it’s the teenage girl’s fault for “staring at other people’s junk,” maybe many of them will be turned off your political side
(and yes Laurie really did say that)
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I just ran across this line from Christopher Hitchens’s Letter to a Young Contrarian, which made me think of the B&W Miscellany Room…
One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others.
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Hitchens could be described as a secular patron saint of B&W in general.
I went to a couple of talks/book promos of his. The first was before he was all that well known, so I got to chat with him a bit.
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I used to be quite a keen reader of Christopher Hitchens, but I stopped reading him after he began shilling for the Great Bush & Blair Armed Pilgrimage to Iraq.
Quite a few of those writers celebrated as “Rationalist” heroes in the 1990s ended up falling for some big scammers. For Hitchens it was George n’ Tony, for others it was the Trans lobby, or Jeffrey Epstein.
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He remained a good writer though, and politics was far from all he wrote about.
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And to his credit, he was able to change his mind about whether water boarding was torture. He went through it, and from then on called it torture.
I probably agreed with him more than I disagreed, but those disagreements could be some big ones – the Iraq war, of course. But he was also opposed to abortion; he didn’t agitate against it, and he didn’t feel there should be no choices for women. He wanted safe, legal, and free birth control, because he felt that was the best way to end abortion. He was right…mostly. I don’t imagine it would totally end abortion, because there are always accidents, and because there are always dangers to women’s lives. But he would at least discuss it in a manner that didn’t leave women twisting in the wind without anything.
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Iknklast,
I recall reading Hitchens’ misgivings about abortion and disagreeing with them.
Something else Hitchens wrote that people found disturbing was a 1992 article in “The Nation” about the protests against Christopher Columbus.
Hitchens dismissed the anti-Columbus movement as an “ignorant celebration of stasis and backwardness”. He then went on argue that the conquest of North America by the white settlers ““deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto.”
https://forward.com/news/148355/a-non-jewish-jew-hitchens-welcomed-finding-h/
Did Hitchens think people should “celebrate” King Philip’s War, the Trail of Tears, the Dawes Act, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and residential schools?
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Mostly Cloudy, I never saw the anti-Columbus day articles; I was reading almost nothing in 1992, and missed it. I often wondered if he sometimes stirred things up just to provoke, but that seems really out of step. At some point, he left the Nation entirely because they wouldn’t get in step with his Iraq war views, even though for a long time he’d been writing things and the other writers disagreeing with him. He must have really taken that one personally.
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It’s me.
Where’s my gravatar?
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oh, there it is
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Typo in your address was the cause. Odd that the comment appeared anyway!
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iknklast:
This is a link to the article where Christopher Hitchens wrote defending the Columbus Day celebrations:
Hitchens didn’t have this article reprinted in any of his prose collections – perhaps he thought it was too controversial. However, when Hitchens started championing the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, some of his detractors like Norman Finkelstein, Margaret Kimberley and David Stannard recalled and criticized this article.
They saw a parallel between Hitchens’ justification of the settlement of North American by a ” more developed society” and his claims that the Bush Administration would bring Western-style democracy to Kabul and Baghdad.
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Finally, some good news. The odious Viktor Orbán concedes defeat in an election, after 16 years as Hungarian Prime Minister.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/12/world/live-news/hungary-election-orban-magyar
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Some appropriate music :) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M&list=RD3GwjfUFyY6M&start_radio=1
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Mostly Cloudy, there was also his treatise on why women aren’t funny:
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Since Mostly – we’re all on a first name basis here, right? – suggested some appropriate music, let me also dredge up a classic that Ophelia posted here a long, long time ago:
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Those are very good news indeed! As someone who has been to Hungary four times (before its turn towards authoritarianism) and have some very fond memories from the country I couldn’t be happier for the Hungarian people. To make it even better, I strongly suspect that the support of JD Vance and the MAGA movement was ultimately more of a liability than an asset to the autocrat. Here’s to hoping the EU will finally be able to provide some serious pushback against Russian aggression now that the Hungarian Mini-Putin is no longer capable of vetoing everything.
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Harald Hanche-Olsen : thank you for posting that. That was an impressive performance by the musicians!
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I for one would dearly love for someone to shout a question to Vance about his flaccid impotence as a champion for far-right autocrats.
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