Stalling
The Scottish government is refusing to pay its bill.
A women’s campaign group has condemned the Scottish Government for failing to settle a legal bill six months on from a crushing Supreme Court defeat.
For Women Scotland won the landmark case in April when the UK’s highest court ruled that the definition of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred to biological sex.
A subsequent court order ruled that the Scottish Government must pay at least some of For Women Scotland’s legal cost during the lengthy court battle, which ran to a total of around £417,000.
But no payment has yet been made – leading to claims ministers are stalling so that the money isn’t used for further legal action about the SNP Government’s policies on single-sex spaces.
Or, more simply, so that the money stays with them. I mean there’s no need to search around for a specific use they have for the money, surely: they’re just being defiant and hostile because they are defiant and hostile.
At a Tory conference fringe event yesterday, Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, condemned public bodies for failing to fully implement the Supreme Court ruling.
She said: ‘We came out of that courtroom and it was like waking up from a bad dream. But it seems like an awful lot of organisations have not yet woken up, and many of them are hostile to the judgement.
‘It is kind of extraordinary to see people mouthing off that those judges got it wrong. I think their brains have been broken by the illogicality of trying to treat some men as women, and thinking that makes them the good guys. So now they can’t bear to be the bad guys.’
But they’re well content with being the bad guys to women.
It’s truly fascinating watching the reactions from the UK left to the Supreme Court decision. I’ve always been fascinated by cults that collapse. What do doomsday cultists do after the deadline passed and the apocalypse never came? What goes on in their minds? The UK Supreme Court decision is rather comparable to that: an incursion of sobering reality that the delusional can’t simply pretend didn’t come to pass. It’s a devastating blow to the cult’s whole folkloric worldview and social structure.
Fascinatingly, many doomsday cults persevere even after their deadlines pass — the very ones they were so absolutely adamant were guaranteed to mark the end of the world, 100%, no margin for error — this is the day, and there’s no possibility that the apocalypse won’t come this time. And then the day comes to pass, and the apocalypse doesn’t. Yet, some of them stay with the group, more adamant than ever in its rightness, even in the face of its incontrovertible, humiliating wrongness.
(The Jehovah’s Witnesses were a doomsday cult, predicting specific dates for “Armageddon” from 1915 to 1925 or so, constantly revising as each day came and went. Most of the cult members walked away, shattered, but the hardcore only hardened: eventually they decided that Jesus did in fact come back and they witnessed it! But they’re still here on this mortal plain for now, for some reason or another. There’s some spiritual mopping-up to be done, loose ends to tie up, or something. I’ve no interest in the nitty-gritty of it. The details of their beliefs don’t actually matter. The fact that a tribal cohesion was formed is the bit that matters; logic was cut off for them from that point onwards, so who cares what crazy stories they’ve been telling themselves after that point.)
That’s the power of the human brain’s limbic system. We’re wired to prioritize tribal allegiance over rational thinking. It cuts off cult members’ access to their own critical thinking faculties so completely, they can’t process the most basic, simple, pieces of logic if they pose a threat to that tribal bond. The poor frontal cortex — the part of the brain that us non-cult-addled outsiders have such easy access to, and which can process so utterly, completely clearly that those poor saps have been led into a trap — that brain-processing region simply isn’t available to them, and therefore the basic facts of reality that only it can perceive, are quite literally invisible to them.
This was illustrated well in the HBO sci-fi drama Westworld, with its characters’ mantra, repeated incessantly: “That doesn’t look like anything to me.” It’s one of those puzzle shows, like Lost or Twin Peaks, where everything is a mystery. In this case, half the characters don’t know that they’re actually synthetic robots — biomechanical androids — living as cast members in an elaborate amusement park, while the flesh and blood among them are the wealthy patrons. But it turns out there are layers upon layers of illusion, and pretty quickly the viewer is puzzling through an intricate maze of artifice versus reallity. What’s fascinating and relevant here is the mechanism by which the androids are prevented from seeing the evidence that’s right in front of them, that they’re obviously robots: their artificial brains simply refuse to process anything that will give the game away. Upon being challenged with a photograph or any piece of evidence that they’re robots in a theme park, the inevitable response is a passive, “That doesn’t look like anything to me.”
https://youtu.be/o0iAY0f-BIM?si=UdZSxBqL2TftoCeU&t=108
“They cannot see the things that will hurt them. I’ve spared them that” says Anthony Hopkins, playing their creator. (Hammily. Entre nous, I’ve always found Hopkins a ham. Even his Hannibal Lecter was just a bit much for me, though I loved The Silence of the Lambs. Remains of the Day: another good film. Hopkins was still hammy AF in it.)
It’s a dark reminder to all of us that the primitive, tribal part of our brains, the ape that processes our monkey emotions, is ultimately in charge, and it only lets the critical thinking part pretend to take the wheel occasionally, only at times when the ape inside of us — the ape that IS us — doesn’t feel threatened. And boy, is it easy to trip the threat wire on our inner apes. You and me and every one of us is a slave to our limbic system: we’re easily wired up to ally ourselves to charlatans, and once that happens, we’re trapped. It can happen to virtually any of us. I’ve said repeatedly that GC Twitter turned into its own kind of tribe, and therefore fell into its own set of blind spots, inaccessible to critical thinking.
(I maintain that I’m a rare breed, somewhat uniquely immune to tribalism, owing to my uniquely traumatic childhood: because I had no friends and no tribal bonds to form as a child, my limbic system’s tribal-latching mechanism didn’t develop properly. And because it didn’t get wired up properly, because I had no friends as a feminine little boy, I’m better equipped to call out tribalistic bias when I see it. Which is fucking everywhere, all the fucking time. I’m a pain in the ass to virtually everyone, because I’m really really good at seeing everyone’s tribal biases, and I have a habit of saying so.)
Anyways, the UK Supreme Court decision that “trans women” are in fact men is one of those cult-devastating moments, like a doomsday clock ticking on past its deadline. And the way the UK left has reacted to it has had much of the same shape of cults facing their reckonings. The less-committed ones capitulate and let go. (Wes Streeting of the centrist Labour Party, for example, who finally gave in.) For the ones who’ve committed themselves too much to it, the sunk cost fallacy kicks in: like gambling addicts, they’re in a hole. They’ve sunk too much into asserting “trans women are women” and they just can’t bear the cost until it destroys their lives, and they hit rock bottom. Your Green Party nuts, your Owen Joneses and your Billy Braggs.
(sorry for all the typos in that. I wrote it in a tizzy. I’ve re-read it now and… I stand proudly behind all of it. Well, except for the typos. I wrote it fast, in an excited, agitated state! Pros: stream-of-consciousness connections and raw ideas. Cons: spelling mistakes everywhere!)
Two found and fixed so far – and I’m pretty far down the page. I don’t think there are all that many,
And it’s a good tizzy; worth the typos.
OH… god I LOVE this place. It’s intellectual heaven. I’m so lucky and so proud to be a patron here.
Love you back!
Three more. Let me know if I missed any.
That part about your solitary childhood really interests me, because same. Except that I don’t really see it as traumatic. There was some traumatic stuff, but I think my love of running off into the fields after school to explore and have imaginary adventures all by myself was…just who I was, I guess. Between 3 and 8 we lived in town and I played with the kids next door all the time, but I always missed the country and when we went back – that was my happy place. And it still is. I’m the kind of person who would have made a good shepherd, off on the hills every day, happy as Larry.
I’ll gp it tomorrow. Letting it catch its breath first.
You could be describing me. Traumatic childhood? Check. No friends? check. Pain in the ass to everyone? Check. Habit of saying things? Check. Feminine little boy doesn’t check, but other than that…I was a sort of neutral little girl, forced into femininity by my mother, who believed in the patriarchy. But I wasn’t very feminine in spite of it. I wasn’t masculine, either. I just…was. And still am.
Well, now that’s interesting. My brain has a fresh rush of blood to it, thanks to that. I don’t think I parsed out the difference between my solitary childhood and my traumatic childhood. It’s all just become an anecdote to tell, all mushed together. But you might be right: I didn’t necessarily think the solitariness itself was traumatic.
I can see how I enjoyed my solitary time in a lot of ways. But also: I can see how I was lonely, and that anti-gay sentiment and paranoia is what led to the other kids not playing with me. (Or their parents explicitly barring them from playing with me, as in the ignorant parents who vocally protested to the school board and to my mother that they didn’t want me giving their kids AIDS. This happened to me, and though my mother is dead, I can’t ask her if that was the real reason we fled Toronto’s suburbs for a small sattellite town — to escape a pitchfork mob that had developed around flaming ten-year-old me and my hyper-faggy-ness.
So I guess I see your point, but also, it’s hard to parse the difference in my case between being “traumatically alone” and just being alone, while simultaneously having traumatic shit going on. It’s fascinating, though! I’ve never thought about it that way.)
Thanks, @iknklast.
We have such different life experiences — I’m a man; you’re a woman, just to start! — and yet sometimes we don’t seem to have such different experiences. I love that. I’m glad we can riff off each other and find comparable moments despite our different backgrounds. It means a ton to me! Years now, I’ve read your commentary, and I love it. Glad to find occasional moments where we align so well. Cheers!
Great rant Artymorty! Frankly you could have described me as well, although I wasn’t gay or even feminine, I was quiet and withdrawn as a result of shitty childhood and that resulted in constantly being accused of being gay and beaten up. Childhood, Yah!…
A friend recently described me as being painfully fair minded. Maybe there’s something in your hypothesis and this site acts as some sort of cluster point for us?
I daren’t say that my childhood was especially traumatic, or that my experiences were equivalent to those of the other commenters here, but I’m noticing some commonality. I too had no friends, frequently got bullied (though I don’t recall my bullies ever beating me up), and was a loudmouth from an early age. (I got into a lot of trouble that way, but that’s probably more personal.) Maybe these are disproportionately common among B&W readers.
Re the UK left, it’s worth noting, as Jane Clare Jones has, that the Communist Party welcomed the ruling.
I likely have Avoidant Personality Disorder (though a psychiatrist I visited said at my age it’s probably not worth paying for a diagnostic test as I’ve adapted pretty well to it) which puts me in a similar boat, utterly aloof from tribes, able to grok horseshit a mile away, but I was never vocal or a pain in the ass, like you — hence “avoidant”. I can’t even express how fucked up people in this country look right now. I’ve done the equivalent of locking myself in my room and drawing the shades.
@Rob
“Painfully fair-minded” I love that! Sums it up tidily, doesn’t it? I see it as a compliment. It’s ultimately a good thing: we have a complicated, but in the end positive, attribute. Aw, heck, I’ll take it!
Tell me about it. I’m in Canada — different country — but I feel similarly. What happens in the US happens here, too, by osmosis, owing to the sheer proximity. (In fact, my specific neighbourhood, downtown Toronto, is so rife with American tourists and business travellers, it might as well be the States. Until recently I had a job at a bar outside downtown and I appreciated the commute. It was palpable how unamerican it was in my not-downtown workplace. A nice little break from Trumpistan. Nowadays, I work in a downtown bar again, and it’s… a lot of Yanks, and a lot of irritating conversations about Trump to patiently overhear.)
I confess that my tribalism circuit is also defective. As a consequence, I am unable to enjoy spectator sports.
As for trauma in my childhood, there was plenty there on an objective basis, including divorce, frequent moving, fights, fires, guns, knives, running away, etc., but it didn’t seem especially traumatic to me until I was a teenager dealing with age-related angst on top of it all. The secret to my relative happiness was books, and the fact that libraries are (were) all similar wherever you go, and the truant officers never look for you there. It’s only terrible if you can never escape from it. But yes, I agree there may be some continuity between a detached childhood and a detached adulthood.
It seems like tribalism may be involved in the Scottish government’s refusal to pay their bill – they don’t want to give money to the bad tribe. Perhaps it’s time for For Women Scotland to get another judgment specifying the amount owed and the rate at which interest and penalties accrue on it.
Yes but most importantly: will no one challenge me in my hot take that Anthony Hopkins is, despite the endless acccolades thrown at him, kind of a bad actor?
I need to fight someone over this!
Anthony Hopkins is the token, or simulacrum, of an actor. He doesn’t play a part, he plays an actor playing a part. His intensity is dialed up to eleven because his audience has become neurasthenic. They cannot meet him halfway, so he meets them three-quarters of the way.
Oh my god.
That is perfect.
That is what I needed!
No joke:
You have freed my soul!
I couldn’t put it in words, but you did.
Now I feel a weight has lifted.
It’s silly, I know!
But isn’t everything?
Thank you, Papito!
Arty @ 9 –
Just to clarify – I was just talking about my experience of the wandering lonely as a cloud stuff, not yours or everyone’s. I didn’t mean it as a correction, just an addition to the overall picture.
I think now someone here – anyone, everyone, it doesn’t matter – needs to research Anthony Hopkins’s traumatic and/or solitary childhood.
@Ophelia 21
ahahahahahhahaaha!
I’m just very glad to be affirmed in my belief that Anthony Hopkins is actually Bad at Acting. This is part of a greater truth which, if uncovered, will benefit us all. It would close the circle. Complete the picture. Square the circle. (In fact, we could if we wanted to make a cult out of this! That’s how easy it is to make cults out of things!)
I’m ashamed to say I haven’t noticed the Hopkins hammyness. I tend to think of him as rather dry and understated, in fact. Hannibal Lecter is creepily soft-spoken. I’m a philistine!
[…] a comment by Artymorty on […]
hahaha we can agree to disagree about Anthony Hopkins. In fact, I will try harder to see his dry, understated side. Especially because I do love The Silence of the Lambs.
I’m thinking also of Remains of the Day and Howard’s End. Maybe I’ve missed his hammier roles.
Oh, Howards End! I forgot he was in that! Ah, yes, he was the patriarch of the conservative Wilcoxes. How I dearly love that novel. And the film was a splendid adaptation. Well done, James Ivory!
Ok, I might concede that maybe, just maybe, I was a wee bit harsh on old Hopkins.
Same same same about the novel.
He was the Wilcox of the Wilcoxes. His wife wasn’t. She didn’t mean to rebel, but she just wasn’t True Wilcox. Fancy giving Howard’s End to Margaret just like that! So non-Wilcox.
Only connect!
It’s notable, in our current state of affairs — the culture war — how relevant Howards End is, all over again. I might have to re-read it this afternoon. In fact I will do. I’ve got the day off and that book is a warm blanket on a chilly autumn day. Which it is! How perfect!
Yes, she wasn’t a true Wilcox, was she. Not a Schlegel, either, but the connection is there. She was the bridge between them. The connection. The one who embodied the bigger picture. The fusion of the left and the right. Oh, yes, I will read the holy hell out of that book today. Yay!
I also love how the book, despite its emphasis on humanism and connection and relation between liberal- and conservative-minded clans and people, had its thumb pressed firmly on the liberal side of the scale, as if to say — rightly — that such connection and humanistic synthesis can only be found by acknowledging that one of these clans (the conservative Wilcoxes) has deeper flaws than the other. It eschewed a cheap, even-stevens, both-sides-ism for a genuinely balanced look at the world. And *genuine* balance means that, while both sides have their flaws, one side is more harmful than the other.
Hopkins strikes me as not just an actor playing an actor playing a role but more specifically as an actor playing Richard Burton playing a role.
Add me to the list of solitary children (who became solitary adults) and never got interested in spectator sports. Bookish too.
AoS @ 33 – What are you, some kind of Cymruphobe??
I’m fascinated that there are so many of us solitude-loving types here.
Ophelia @ 35 – How very dare you! I even have a Welsh friend.
Another one for the list of people here who spent a lot of time by myself as a child, although it wasn’t easy escaping from my siblings, especially as – being the eldest – I was expected to supervise them. So I would escape, whenever possible, into my library books; or, if the weather was fine and I wasn’t allowed to stay indoors, take my toy animals and vehicles into the back garden to play. I think that I might be best described as accidentally gregarious; not necessarily my preferred state, but I’ve never had the opportunity to spend any serious amounts of time on my own.
However, I’m not amongst the illustrious company of independent thinkers here. I’m naturally rather gullible, and it’s been too easy for people in the past to persuade me to join any group, as I lived in the hopes of meeting people who think the same way (although not necessarily the same things) I do. Most people don’t, and trying to socialise with them is hard work and exhausting after a very short while. I generally like people.
But I suppose that my comparitive isolation from what would be considered a normal social life would be considerably harder to bear if I were really gregarious, so I’m fortunate to be able to be content with my own company for hours on end.
Another introvert, who doesn’t mind being alone.* I like solitude.
I was a shy kid, the so-called wall flower at school dances and such. I’m not good at initiating conversations, especially with people I don’t know. And I wasn’t all that interested in the girl-kid stuff I was suposed to be interested in. And being a “brain”, wore glasses, read science fiction and fantasy, + other stuff, put me at the bottom of the pecking order in my grade school classes. I did have some friends in high school. Looking back, after high school, we would joke that we were so out even the out crowd didn’t want to hang out with us.
And being allergic to pollen led to solitary time. Symptoms were quite bad when I was a kid. I regularly had trouble breathing, which meant I had to take it easy quite often and not run around like the other kids. Sometimes I had asthma attacks. Got yelled at by parents and teachers and playground supervisors for not running around and playing like the other kids. Even sometimes when I was visibly having some trouble breathing they would yell at me. “It’s fresh air. It’s good for you.” “It’s just allergies”. I noticed a correlation between running around and playing too much when having trouble breathing and the asthma attacks. When I tried explaining this to the adults, I got “oh what do you know, you’re just a kid” attitude. So I got very good at: sneaking a book out of the house to read somewhere, moving around the playground to make it look like I was playing more than I actually was, finding ways to not be seen. Once I reached the age where I was supposed to be getting interested in boys, I used getting a suntan as an excuse to relax in the back yard and read a book.
*And who has found a home here.
Same about high school. I went to one (all girls) school from kindergarten to senior year, but a core set of the in-crowd girls switched to boarding school in 9th or 10th grade, and I think that shifted the dynamics…or maybe it was just being older. Anyway I did have close friends from then on. Looking back I think the preppy girls left and the more nerdy ones stayed.