Author: Ophelia Benson

  • A bright lad

    If the Telegraph is not omitting important information here, it’s a tad horrifying. Judge all but cuddles a boy who stabbed a girl because she declined his advances.

    A judge told a 14-year-old boy who stabbed a girl 10 times that prison was the “last place” for a “bright lad” like him, The Telegraph can reveal.

    The boy attacked the girl with a six-inch kitchen knife at a shop in Cirencester, Gloucs, after she had spurned his advances.

    He pleaded guilty to wounding with intent, inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent and possession of a bladed article in a public place.

    However “bright” he may be, he doesn’t get to stab female people who decline his advances. That’s not how that works. Brightness isn’t a ticket to stabbing female people.

    Transcripts of court hearings in the case, seen by The Telegraph, reveal that Judge Ian Lawrie KC’s principal consideration was the offender’s rehabilitation.

    “You’re a bright lad – I’m going to impose a curfew,” the judge said. “You’re not to contact directly or indirectly by any means, social media or otherwise, [the victim] and her mother, and also keep out of mischief.”

    Mischief??? Seriously? Stabbing girls who say no is “mischief”???

    “My own view is custody is the last place you should be… What I’m trying to do is find a sentence that’s best constructed to help you and give you support.”

    No actually the last place he should be is anywhere near the girl he stabbed ten times. That is definitely and literally the last place he should be.

    It’s true that the boy should be rehabilitated; it’s true that the boy should end up a better boy, who understands and agrees that it’s profoundly wrong to stab people with knives. It’s also true that he should go through some misery to get there.

  • Guest post: Just enough and not too many

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Arty’s Just how creative expression works.

    …the trans movement doesn’t want male and female to be completely arbitrary categories, it wants them to be just a little bit tweaked so that a few outliers can sneak into the other camp. It wants the categories of male and female to remain relatively intact, stereotypes and all, with just a small change: let the “special ones” truly and completely cross the aisle.

    Exactly. When it comes down to it, trans activists don’t even want “equality” amongst themselves. Cheating males lose their advantage if women’s teams are flooded by too many other males claiming to be women. Why is it that male sex offenders who suddenly “discover” their “trans” status in prison want to be moved to female only prisons? Because they are full of female prisoners. If they are followed by other opportunistic, predatory males like themselves, they’re back where thay started, back in a male prison. They don’t want that, do they?

    Without actual female human beings who are forced to accept them in their spaces, TiMs don’t get to have the thrill of “being” women, and among women, taking women’s awards and spaces and making women accept it. The sex offenders don’t get to continue assaulting women while imprisoned. Mediocre males don’t get to win so easily (or at all) if too many mediocre males “discover” they’re trans.

    This is why third spaces, specifically for trans identified people, have been non-starters for trans activists. They don’t want to be shunted aside and ghettoized as “trans”, they want to invade women’s spaces as “women.” They want to blend in with women, but make sufficient noise about it that they are still seen as “special” or “more than” everyone else. They still want their Days/Months/Years of Pronouns/Visibility/Remembrance/Victimhood/Martyrdom. They “just want to live their lives like everyone else,” while reminding EVERYONE, ALL THE TIME, that they exist, and the world OWES THEM constant linguistic vigilance and self-policing, attention, remembrance for non-existent victims of a non-existent war, all to the drum-beat of emotional blackmail of threats of suicide if any of the above is questioned. How one blends in while pushing themselves into the spotlight is anyone’s guess, but our role in allofthis is to let them keep us in shadow. In parallel with their simultaneous craving for both anonymity and visibility, they continue to claim vulnerability and marginalization while having been handed unearned, disproportionate power, influence, and “rights” by the organs of government, industry, and civil society.

    It’s not just those wanting to “switch teams” who are out for themselves in this way. Precious, special EnBees lose their special status if everybody is liberated from Gender Jail. They only want to break their own chains, while leaving everyone else imprisoned. Without dull, boring, unimaginative cis people to serve as a backdrop, they can’t stand out from the grey mob of conformist schlubs that they’ve been clever enough to rise above.

    For those who believe that their pronouns are the most interesting and important thing about themselves, I can almost see how they would translate doubts about “transness” and “gender identity” into denials of “their right to exist.” Without them, they would have to actually go out and do something to easrn respect, rather than simply expect and demand it.

  • Guest post: Just how creative expression works

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Real world v virtual world.

    Ian and JA,

    You make a very good point that much of the now-quasi-“official” interpretation of The Matrix as a trans analogy may have come later, as a kind of convenient retroactive explanation. I’ll gladly concede that parts of that almost-too-perfect interpretation may be ret-cons.

    But that said, retcon or not, the film does indeed align perfectly with trans ideology. (And so does their previous film, Bound. The Wachowski Brothers were, consciously or not, very much exploring transgender themes in their work, years before they both “came out” as “trans women”. )

    The thing about art analysis is that the artist doesn’t have to consciously, deliberately intend something for it to be detectable and recognizable in the work. It happens all the time that an artist’s work contains themes that the artist herself wan’t fully conscious of until after the fact. That’s not some airy-fairy argument, either: it really is just how creative expression works. We’re watching people spill their inner feelings into a medium: a typewriter or a guitar or a canvas or a film camera. It can be quite raw when it comes out, and it can take years to interpret the context and conditions around which the art emerged.

    For example: I doubt Hitchcock was aware that he was showing the world how much he hated and feared women when he made his fims. Nevertheless: there it is. You can write a very clear, clean story of Hitchcock’s fear of women by simply watching his films, and yet there’s no question that he wasn’t aware that he was telling such a story at the time. And it’s rather indisputably there. The man was a flaming, neurotic misogynist and it doesn’t take any retconning to see that a major underlying “meaning” behind many of Hitchcock’s (admittedly brilliant though morally dubious) films is woman-hatred, woman-terror, and woman-obsession.

    The connection between The Matrix and trans ideology is that it takes everyday reality and says certain special people can change reality’s seemingly hard-coded rules if they feel something deeply enough. And that’s exactly parallel with trans ideology: Neo discovers he can “manipulate the code” that The Matrix — the operating system of reality — runs on; trans ideology says that sex may seem hard-coded to the “operating system” of humanity, but if you — oh-so-special you — can embrace your magic genderfeelz hard enough, you’re actually opening a line to a super-truth-y dimension: you’re Neo-ing the “code” of reality. Or something along those lines.

    It’s basically “faith” — the same concept at the heart of every bullshit religion story. Believe it hard enough and magic just happens, and the proof is that you both feel the warmth of it deeply in your heart, and you discover that you live among ice-cold, dangerous enemies who are out to take your magic feeling away. You’ve suddenly got a new purpose: both a new goal to strive toward and a new enemy to strive against — your life is far more exciting now, because it’s suddenly shot through with cosmic-scale purpose, and it’s cast in chiaroscuro extremes of light and dark.

    (Evolutionary behavioural scientists might object that you’ve actually just activated buried old vestigial survival instincts, and basically reproduced chimpanzee tribal warfare behaviours. But, whatever…)

    I’ve clearly seen The Matrix many times, so I’m not quite sure what you’re on about by critiquing my rather mundane interpretation of it. Yes, it comes with a bunch of sci-fi backstory. That backstory is interesting in that it isn’t quite a full-on postmodernist rejection of baseline reality in favour of total ontological relativism. Instead, it simply argues that our perception of baseline reality is one step removed from the true firmament of baseline material reality, which nevertheless is there and exists. (The Matrix is a virtual layer in which humanity is led to believe we’re all living happy mundane lives in 1999, but in reality it’s about 200 years in the future and humans are immobile “batteries”, enslaved by AI, fooled by technology wired up to their brains.) The premise still asserts that there are such things as real and not-real, as true and false, it’s just that we’re all inhabiting a world which is one “layer” removed from it.

    And when you think about it: that’s exactly what trans activists want: the trans movement doesn’t want male and female to be completely arbitrary categories, it wants them to be just a little bit tweaked so that a few outliers can sneak into the other camp. It wants the categories of male and female to remain relatively intact, stereotypes and all, with just a small change: let the “special ones” truly and completely cross the aisle.

    Anyways, I’m more interested in the way that Ready Player One handled its Black lesbian protagonist, and how it handled the moral questions about reality versus pretend reality. I thought was a lesser film in some ways, but that its moral argument was the stronger of the two.

  • An unlawful effort

    But Trump doesn’t pay any attention to court rulings.

    A federal court has ordered the Trump-Vance administration to stop an unlawful effort publicly touted by President Trump that would irreparably destroy a priceless piece of American history by converting a much-loved public recreation space into an exclusive, high-end golf course. The preliminary injunction (PI) comes in DC Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, a lawsuit brought by the DC Preservation League and two local residents, and builds upon a temporary restraining order issued previously. Democracy Forward, Lowell & Associates, and Democracy Defenders Fund represent the plaintiffs in the case. 

    Today’s PI stops any further tree removal at East Potomac Park, placing a temporary halt on the National Park Service’s planned efforts to implement Trump’s Washington National plan that will undermine access to East Potomac Park and seek to build in its place a golf course designed for professional tournaments and private events for the president and wealthy golfers. The judge’s order also requires the Trump-Vance administration to give ten business days’ notice before any closure or other irreversible modifications of the golf course, including chopping down any more trees.

    That’s good, but will they pay any attention? They never do, so why would they start now?

  • Guest post: Any number

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on No one calls him Honest Will.

    No other words required.

    I’m not sure I get his point. What exactly is he mocking? If it’s the small number of protesters, we can see that his cropping of the original image is dishonest. But even so, the truth and justice of the claims made by these women is not determined by their numbers. The scores of pro-trans block-heads behind them does not make trans “rights” true or just. Reality is not a numbers game. It will not change its mind just because millions of people believe something impossible.

    Or maybe Willoughby is mocking the fact that one of the women in his cropped photo is old. He should be so lucky to live to be this old. Not everyone is afforded that privilege. Given trans-activism’s well-earned and well-known reputation for violence and intimidation against women, I think she’s very brave to put her body on the line like this. I salute her. I can only hope to have the same courage if I am lucky enough to reach her age. If the government of the UK had been doing its duty, she wouldn’t have had to be there at all, as her rights as a woman would have been protected from theft by the likes of Willoughby and his allies. Instead, her safety and dignity were given away by the very authorities and institutions that were entrusted with defending them. So she has to step up herself to do the job they failed to do. By rights, she should be wearing one of those t-shirts that says “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.” All of these women have been betrayed and victimized by their own government on behalf of men like Willoughby.

    He’s not subtle.

    I’m sure that not many have accused him of being smart, either. After all, it’s his “cause” that can be dismissed on the strength of showing a single image and “No other words required.” In fact women have any number of images from which to choose, all courtesy of trans “activists” themselves:

    -any number of trans activists sporting clothing, signs, tattoos, etc., advocating the ape/torture/murder of women defending their rights;

    -any number of trans activists intimidating, harassing, blocking, assaulting, etc., women defending their rights;

    -any number of trans activists brandishing baseball bats, knives, guns, nooses, guillotines, etc., against women defending their rights;

    -any number of trans identified males on podiums, stages, platforms, etc., stealing awards, medals, jobs, scholarships, etc. from women;

    -any number of trans identified males intruding on women’s spaces and facilities, including washrooms, hospital wards, changing rooms, rape crisis facilities, dating websites, and prisons;

    -any number of trans identified males writing, posting, or speaking out against women defending their rights, demanding access to women’s spaces against women’s wishes;

    -any number of trans identified males, period. Some of these chave already made appearances in one or more of the above pools of evidence. “Karen” White. “Barbie Kardashian.” “Isla” Bryson. “Veronica Ivy.” “India” Willoughby.

    Any one of these images (of which this is but a small sample), could be posted as “advertisements” for tramns “rights” with the caption “No other words needed.”

    Glass houses and sauce for the goose, Mr. Willoughby. And don’t you ever forget, Your side started this. Your side fired the first shot. Your side chooses to violate women’s boundaries. Your side is the one that refuses to accept that No means NO. This is what you promote and defend. You are a danger to women. Just stop. Just shut up and stop.

  • Smack smack

    Yesssssssss.

    A federal judge ruled Monday that the Department of Justice’s firing of New York federal prosecutor Maurene Comey last year was unlawful.

    Judge Jesse Furman ordered that Comey, who is the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, be retroactively reinstated to her job as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. The judge also ordered that she receive back pay in his ruling in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

    Maurene Comey, who had been involved with prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein, his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sean “Diddy” Combs, was fired in July 2025. She later sued the Department of Justice, challenging its right to terminate her.

    Her father has long been a target of criticism from President Donald Trump.

    Comey has long been a target of persecution from Trump. Don’t sugarcoat it.

  • No violation took place

    I have to wonder. Why is it ok for a man to call a woman a cunt but not ok for him to call her a tranny?

    Is it because people who claim to be the other sex matter while women do not matter?

    It’s odd, because if there were no cunts, there would be no people.

  • No one calls him Honest Will

    Willoughby’s version:

    The not cropped version:

    He’s not subtle.

  • Goldipants

    Heh heh heh

  • With the elbow

    Don’t go near Pete Hegseth today, he’s gonna be in a baaad mood.

    “How much time do you think this defense secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning?”

  • Green sneaker elite

    The very best womaning.

  • Could there be a good reason for that?

    Hmm. Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t quite the gotcha he thinks it is.

    If read without pause for thought, it looks like the usual unreasonable rejection of hopeful employees because they are Different in some irrelevant way. But if we do pause for thought, we realize it’s not that simple.

    Knowing which people are women and which are men is a form of Very Basic Knowledge which is part of being an adult capable of employment. Someone who is so confused or clueless about that VBK that he or she gets his or her own sex wrong fails that Very Basic criterion. The thought of the potential employer is something like “This guy thinks he’s a woman, so how is he going to learn the ropes of this job? No thanks.”

    It’s not even complicated. It would get complicated if the candidate got past that first hurdle, but that first hurdle is all it takes. I think most employers want employees who understand the basic facts of the world we live in. Gravity is real, fire is not cold, chewing glass is a bad idea. Hiring a trans person=hiring someone who is unfamiliar with reality.

  • Guest post: They can afford to be blatant

    Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Trump is escalating.

    Power is addictive, and he was just given too much, too fast. He’s got to hang on to the rush as long as he can in his dotage. And this is useful to the billionaire class, because while they think he is a fool they also realize that his cult-like appeal to enough of the Republican activists to keep him in charge will help them. Larry Ellison, for one, who introduced a new way to gather DNA from everyone using a single blood prick. (Sound Familiar?) He announced it from the White House in January of 2025. Ellison says we want this. And he’s a friend of Trump.

    I’ve always thought that the Deep State conspiracy was silly, when in fact there are those who use the levers of government to gain wealth and data and with Trump in office their state doesn’t need to remain “deep.” They can afford to be blatant.

    Here’s an article that explains Ellison’s connection to Elizabeth Holmes. In case you wondered how a 19 year old college dropout managed to attract so many wealthy investors, and a board of the elite.

  • A coarsening

    That former guy:

    Former President Barack Obama on Saturday attacked President Trump’s administration in searing and mocking terms, saying it was defined by “incompetence the likes of which we have not seen in modern times.”

    Appearing in Cleveland at his first campaign rally of the midterm elections, Mr. Obama delivered his most forceful attack on Mr. Trump in recent memory. He also criticized an explosive campaign ad from the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, saying it exemplified a coarsening of American politics.

    Of course American politics have been coarsening since the moment Trump stepped up. Coarsening is his mission in life.

    Mr. Obama, who has been selective about publicly criticizing Mr. Trump, condemned his Republican successor’s stewardship of the country in language that was personal and pointed. He said in Ohio that Mr. Trump’s second term had amounted to “two years of chaos and cruelty and corruption,” argued that top administration officials were not “not serious people” and said Mr. Trump had led the country into an economically painful war in Iran “that nobody asked for.”

    Mr. Obama, describing Mr. Trump as “you know who” or “this guy in the White House,” said America had never had a president “excel so wildly at just straight-up grifting.” And he cast Mr. Trump as disconnected from Americans’ needs, engrossed instead by White House renovation projects.

    “He should be on HGTV,” Mr. Obama said, ridiculing Mr. Trump’s focus on applying gold trimmings to the White House. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere.”

    Honestly? A Saddam Hussein Cheesecake Factory would probably be nicer and in better taste than Trump’s White House.

    The appearances by Mr. Trump and Mr. Obama on Saturday were striking in their contrasting styles: While Mr. Trump’s speech was lengthy and meandering, Mr. Obama’s two speeches were far more scripted.

    Mr. Trump spoke longer in his one speech than Mr. Obama did across two.

    And we can be sure that Obama said far more than Trump did. Trump repeats and babbles and repeats again.

  • Now known as Lis

    He’s at it again.

    The transgender doctor who quit Scotland for a new job in a sun-soaked Australian coastal resort after a high-profile tribunal is at the centre of another gender row.

    The Scottish Mail on Sunday has learned that Dr Beth Upton, now known as Lis, has been named in an alleged incident at a New South Wales hospital where a woman patient refused treatment from the male-born medic.

    Well now which is more important, the safety and comfort of hospital patients or the jollies of one doctor?

    Her family claim that fears she would be ‘bullied’ into accepting the 6ft doctor as female meant her husband refused to leave her bedside. Under Australia’s controversial self-ID laws, transgender doctors are under no legal or professional obligation to disclose their gender history or trans status to patients.

    …

    Australian women’s rights campaigners demanded that the government investigate the incident after earlier warning that the country’s health regulator had listed Upton’s sex as female.

    Doncha love it when the government shamelessly lies about what sex your doctor is?

    Women’s Forum Australia CEO Rachael Wong said: ‘A woman in hospital should not have to defend her boundaries from the very people entrusted with her care.

    ‘The New South Wales health minister must urgently investigate why a vulnerable woman seeking emergency care felt she needed her husband’s protection to ensure her wish to be treated by a female doctor was respected.

    ‘The minister and Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority [AHPRA] must also explain what assessment was made of Upton’s breathtakingly entitled assertion, made under oath, that he would treat women who had specifically requested a female doctor and what safeguards were put in place to protect the dignity, wellbeing and consent of female patients.’

    That will be none and none.

  • Trump is escalating

    Politico:

    Trump is escalating his crusade to exert control of America’s elections as his party barrels towards a potentially bruising midterm.

    The Justice Department has already filed lawsuits in nearly every state to try and gain access to voter files. Trump revisited his longstanding bid to restrict mail voting, sparking a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court. He sought to make anti-terrorism funds for state and local governments contingent on how they administer elections. He has threatened to withhold federal election funding from states that refuse to change voter registration forms and sparred with Republican lawmakers over a bill to overhaul elections.

    But with most of those efforts stalling, on Thursday, just 12 days before Election Day, the DOJ took things even further: In an extraordinary move, it asked a court to preemptively block Alaska’s Senate results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, stunning current and former election officials in both parties.

    “Boy, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. It feels like a real desperation play to me, because it has got zero basis in the law,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election law expert who was counsel to George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.

    The gunk at the bottom of that barrel is dictatorship.

    At virtually every corner, courts have rebuffed Trump’s efforts, and legal experts expect the latest DOJ maneuver to have the same outcome. The requests for voter rolls were blocked repeatedly by members of Trump’s own party and struck down in court. The attempt to restrict mail voting was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court. Federal judges blocked both the anti-terrorism and election funding efforts. The SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship at the polls, has stalled in the Senate.

    But Trump keeps pushing, telling reporters Friday that he had personally green-lit the Alaska lawsuit: “I’m the one that said ‘Do it.’”

    Keeps pushing and keeps bragging about it.

    POLITICO reached out to the offices of every Republican statewide election official in America for a response to the DOJ’s action in Alaska. Four declined to comment, and the rest did not respond. Their silence shows just how powerful Trump remains in the party, and how few are willing to cross him just days before November’s midterms.

    …

    The Justice Department, in a statement posted on social media, said “claims that DOJ is trying to stop Alaska’s election are FALSE.” Instead, the DOJ argued it was “seeking to protect election integrity, consistent with the National Voter Registration Act (enacted by Congress) and ensure the will of Alaska voters is respected.”

    The DOJ is shouting at us in all caps. Bad sign.

  • That’s…not the criterion

    AI malfunction.

  • Self-satisfaction wins again

    Maybe, just maybe, it’s not actually such a nice thing for a man to get a woman to gestate a baby for him, and then walk off into the sunset with that motherless baby. Maybe it’s not actually all that cool to produce a motherless baby on purpose.

    My son, Elijah Northwood, was born just before midnight earlier this year, on Sunday March 8, 2026, International Women’s Day. There is something touching about this. I am his dad, but Elijah is the product of not one but two international women: his Venezuelan egg donor and his Mexican birth mother.

    That double helping of good women will have to do him for now, though, because I am a single dad and, what’s more, a gay single dad, hitting the ground running, alone with my son in an Airbnb in Mexico City for as long as it takes to get him both a Mexican and a British passport. Suddenly, I have to be both mother and father to him with no real preparation except anticipation, helpless except for the daily breast milk deliveries from his birth mother, the Google translation app that enables her to contact me with tips and advice, and Uber Eats, which keeps me from starving.

    If it were an accident it would be very poignant. But it’s not an accident, he did this on purpose.

    In 2021 I bought a house in Mile End, east London, that would be suitable for children even if, as I began to realise during the lonely days of lockdown, I might have to do it on my own. I faced up to the situation and told myself, “I know you want someone on this journey with you but, you know what, let’s just do this.”

    Let’s create a baby who will never have a mother. On purpose. Because dude wants one.

    As soon as I made that decision, I felt euphoric. I was taking control of my future — and my family’s.

    Yes, you were taking control of your kid’s future in quite a drastic way.

    The basic cost from the agency is about £65,000 but, typical me, I kept going for the expensive options. The egg donors priced themselves according to how they pegged their “worth” when it comes to looks and genes. I could have chosen a donor at £4,000, but I went for the beautiful donor who priced herself at £15,000. 

    Great god almighty. I hadn’t read that bit when I started writing this. What a horrible man.

    For the first eight weeks the surrogate expressed breast milk for Elijah and got her boyfriend to deliver it to us. I will never lose touch with her and I will be transparent and open with my son from the start, telling him the whole story and showing him pictures of her and her family.

    Oh, how sweet. There’s no chance at all that that will backfire. No way will the kid end up resenting and grieving the substitution of photos for having an actual mother present in his life.

    My lowest point was on Mother’s Day, just another day for me and Elijah in the park, but looking around me at all the mums and dads, taking it in turns to hold their kid, I was supersensitive to the fact that Elijah has no mother, that I didn’t have anyone to do that tag-teaming with. It was 3pm and everyone I love was still asleep back in the UK, so I couldn’t even call anyone. I felt very alone.

    Oh, honey. That’s so sad. Now think about how the kid is going to feel. Forever.

    In my world especially, there is every combination of parenting and none of it is perfect. You just do the best you can to make your child feel healthy, loved and special. And at least I get to be my own boss, with no one telling me what to do. Being on my own with Elijah in Mexico City soon turned me into that dad who isn’t afraid to be totally stupid with him, who sings to him, dances with him, plays peekaboo for longer than I could have believed possible.

    There are online trolls criticising me for choosing to be a single gay dad through surrogacy — there’s a thread on Mumsnet that asks, “In which country will he be purchasing an infant?” and others that say being gay is no reason to “buy babies” — but I have never had the slightest sense of that in the village I have built around me.

    I see, the people who think men shouldn’t buy themselves motherless children are trolls while he is…what, a saint? A kind generous benefactor who deliberately commissions and pays for a child who will never have a mother? No, potential occasional visits to the nice mujer in Mexico do not count as having a mother.

    I had always planned to have two children, but with the shock of being a new dad, that idea went out the window. Now I’m starting to think again about a sibling for Elijah. As I said to myself the other day, as we lolled together in our courtyard in the sunshine, “I’m good at this. I’m a bit of a natural.”

    I don’t care what anyone thinks. I was born to do this.”

    He doesn’t care what anyone thinks, including his baby in 10 or 15 years.

  • Guest post: Real world v virtual world

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Deepity of the day.

    Yes we can have a fantasy that we’re the other sex. Yes we can try to live that fantasy 24/7, but we shouldn’t, because it has consequences beyond our personal contentment. In any case living the fantasy 24/7 is not the same thing as reality. Living any fantasy 24/7 is not reality.

    There are two major Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters that address this very question, and I’ve always felt like they’re in a kind of dialogue or debate with each other.

    The first is The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix. Most of us know by now that the film is an allegory for trans ideology. (Helen Joyce devoted a whole chapter in her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality to an analysis of it, and the writer/director duo now both identify as transgender “sisters”.) The film acts as an argument for “living the fantasy 24/7”: it argues that the plane of existence we know as the material world may actually be just an artificial level of reality, a virtual world, whose rules can be bent to our wills if we can attune ourselves to the true reality hidden beneath. This idea is surely catnip to the men whose malfunctioning sex drives compel them to wish so badly to be female that they’ll believe any fantasy that offers them the possibility that their wish might come true.

    The second film is Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. The film is set in a dystopian future where the real world is in ruins and humanity spends most of its time online in a virtual reality universe. You can see already the similarity in themes between both films: real world vs. virtual world. And, as in The Matrix, gender identity comes up: an ostensibly male character we meet in the virtual world turns out to actually be a female in the real world. We learn that she’s a butch lesbian who takes comfort in role-playing as a man in her online life. But unlike in The Matrix, her character recognizes that she’s still a woman in reality, and she comes to terms with it, reconciling her fictional identity with reality as the film progresses. In fact, the big moral at the end of Ready Player One can be seen as a direct rebuttal to that of The Matrix: after the big conflict is resolved, the heroes decide to implement limits on humanity’s use of the virtual world, forcing people to make sure that they remain grounded in material reality, no matter how much they may prefer the fantasy and escapism that the online world provides.

    The trans activists made a film that argued for “living the fantasy 24/7”. But Spielberg rebutted them with a film that argues instead, as you said, “Living any fantasy 24/7 is not reality.”

  • We would know about it

    Trump is on Team Russia & Iran.

    Ten days ago:

    Trump said on Monday he did not believe that China and Russia were helping Iran “at all,” even as US intelligence reports in recent months have found that both countries directly support Tehran’s war effort.

    Trump said on Truth ​Social that he had seen comments from his critics and opponents that China and Russia were ​helping Iran. Moscow and Beijing maintain close ties with Tehran.

    “If they are, it’s ⁠at a very low level, but I don’t believe they are at all. They have too much ​to lose, and we would know about it, and know about it very fast,” Trump wrote.

    U.S. intelligence assessments ​from recent months have shown that Russia and China are providing military support to Iran in the form of satellite imagery for targeting purposes and components for weapons, according to two people briefed on the matter.

    Well that cuts no ice with Trump, because he knows better. How? His genius brain, that’s how. His uncle taught at MIT.

    In September, Trump brushed aside a report that ​Iran acquired satellite images of a base in Jordan from Chinese entities before an attack that killed three US troops there in ​July.

    Reports shmeports. Trump’s brain knows better.