Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Trump sulking

    Trump and 9/11:

    Trump is not planning to attend a ceremony in Manhattan for the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in part because he wanted to deliver a speech and the annual event has long barred remarks, according to four people with knowledge of the events.

    Mr. Trump’s team had conducted advance visits at the site and had initially signaled to officials in New York and in Washington that the president intended to visit the memorial space known as ground zero, two of the people with knowledge of the events said.

    The president’s interest in speaking on Sept. 11 was conveyed to memorial planners in recent weeks, three of the people with knowledge of the events said. But since 2012, politicians have been barred from speaking at the site. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, has worked rigorously to keep the venue nonpartisan and focused on the solemnity of the day.

    So Trump grabs his ball and goes home. If he’s not allowed to make it about him well then he just won’t go at all, so there, ha.

    Mr. Trump, who was in New York on the day of the attacks, spoke to a New Jersey television station in the aftermath, saying that a building he owned had gained in stature because the twin towers had fallen. That building, 40 Wall Street, “actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually — before the World Trade Center — was the tallest.”

    He went on, “And then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” (The statement was not correct; 70 Pine Street, nearby, was taller than Mr. Trump’s building.)

    Of course he did. He always does go on. On and on and on.

  • Guest post: The liberal ecosystem promotes social triangulation

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Call it a mishap.

    When liberal institutions like the CBC pull boneheaded moves like this, they only inflame the biases they’re attempting to quell.

    Bigots are emboldened when they see liberals denying the terrorist nature of the 9/11 attacks, or claiming Jason Arday was a victim of “lynching”, etc.

    DEI hysteria, Islamophobia panics, transphobia panics, homophobia panics, racism panics. All of these cases of liberal overreach are used to justify conservative overreach — they drive conservatives to become overly dimissive of the very causes liberals hold dear. And thus the culture war grinds on.

    You’d think the CBC would be easing off on its overzealous “woke” bias, given that cries for its defunding on the political right are growing ever louder, but no: here they are, doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the very behaviour that infuriates, emboldens, and validates their critics.

    The same can be said for much of the academic humanities, arts institutions, NGOs, publishing, cultural organizations. Faced with mounting hostility from outside, they’ve largely responded by pushing back harder rather than asking whether any part of the criticism is warranted.

    The question surrounding all of this is: why?

    That’s really one of the great questions of our political age. I’m struggling to piece together a theory.

    What I’ve got so far is that liberalism and the political left have undergone a cultural shift: away from a culture of actively open-minded thinking and toward a meta-social culture.

    Liberal intellectual culture has historically placed considerable prestige on skepticism, critical thinking, intellectual experimentation and standing apart from the crowd. Challenging the prevailing liberal consensus could itself be understood as a liberal act. Now, the social incentives run in the other direction: what matters is positioning oneself correctly within the moral and political landscape of the group.

    This can be understood as a shift from first-order thinking to second-order thinking: where once the liberal ecosystem promoted thinking for oneself — What do I think? Is this true? What does the evidence say? — now it promotes social triangulation: you predict what others in your group believe, then you come to believe things (or at least profess to) that would position you most favourably among your peers. What do people like me think? What do the people I oppose think? What will my peers infer about me if I say this? Who will be helped if I concede that point? Where does this belief position me socially?

    Of course, to some extent, everybody has always done a bit of both. But the second set of questions has gained significant authority over the first.

    Once second-order thinking has overtaken first-order thinking, beliefs cease to be anchored to material reality by the principles of critical inquiry. They start resembling a chain gang: everyone’s beliefs attached to everyone else’s, each person taking cues from the people around them, a mass formation, ungrounded and adrift. That’s when you get the feedback loop, the purity spiral, the madness of crowds, the stampede — pick your metaphor. A position shifts slightly. Everyone notices and adjusts, each adjustment becoming fresh information for everyone else. Everyone is using everyone else as “evidence,” and the whole formation veers off on a tangent.

    So what changed? I think at least two enormous forces helped push liberal culture away from first-order inquiry and toward this more meta-social, second-order mode.

    The first is social media.

    The behavioural ecology of social media is unusually hostile to the expression of actively open-minded thinking. AOT asks you to slow down, entertain contrary evidence, tolerate uncertainty and risk changing your mind. By contrast, with its likes, reposts, ratios and pile-ons, social media makes the social landscape quantitatively visible, with social reward and punishment data continually feeding you in real-time. This makes the meta-social layer highly salient — you’re bombarded with information telling you what other people are thinking about what you’re thinking. This is practically a machine to drive people to prioritize second-order thought: see what gets applause; see what gets punished; learn where the boundaries are; adjust.

    The second change is ideological homogeneity.

    Liberalism has become the overwhelmingly dominant political identity within many of the institutions I’m talking about (culture, etc.). That changes what dissent means inside those environments.

    When the surrounding establishment is conservative, challenging establishment assumptions can easily coincide with liberalism. When the surrounding establishment is itself liberal, genuine open-mindedness requires challenging your own people, and that is psychologically harder to do.

    Thus, these institutions have shifted to a coalitional mindset: liberalism as a political identity has quietly displaced liberalism as an epistemic ethic. The prime directive shifted from What principles should we apply? to What position should our side take against theirs? Us-versus-them reasoning moved upstream of critical inquiry.

    Social media then supercharged the whole thing. Ideologically homogeneous institutions supplied the coalition; social media supplied the surveillance and instantaneous reward system. Together they activated some extremely old primate tribal machinery: conformity, status sensitivity, fear of ostracism, coalition loyalty, imitation.

    So I suppose that’s at least part of the answer to why.

    Then comes the harder question: how do we fix it?

    I don’t know. But it’s got to come from the leadership. The heads of schools, media outlets, non-profits, they have to take concrete, active steps to re-engineer the ecosystems they lead, altering the incentive structures of the institutions they run. They have to create environments in which challenging consensus is professionally safe, changing your mind is treated as intellectual strength, disagreement isn’t automatically interpreted as disloyalty, and people gain rather than lose prestige for identifying errors in their own side’s thinking.

    In other words, they have to make actively open-minded thinking socially rewarding again.

    (MAOTSRA! Where’s my hat?)

    I imagine some absurdly grand gathering of liberal institutional heads convened specifically to confront the problem. Davos for editors-in-chief, university deans, publishers, arts administrators and nonprofit CEOs.

    Or perhaps the analogy needs to be even more ridiculous.

    Paris, 1919.

    The war is over; liberal democracy has survived, just barely. Everyone arrives with maps under their arms. The borders have collapsed, several empires are in ruins, nobody entirely trusts anybody else, and somehow a roomful of exhausted people has to decide what the liberal world is supposed to look like now.

  • No she did NOT

    Ewwwwww.

    Ew ew ew ew ew.

  • Lake Donaldisaputz

    Today in Go ahead sonny but no one will follow your lead:

    Trump said Thursday he is renaming Lake Ontario to be known as “Lake America” in the United States as he escalates his trade war with Canada.

    The Republican president signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. Trump cannot force Canada to follow along, however.

    And he can’t force us. He can force some federal institutions, I suppose, until he’s out of there, but he can’t force anyone else. Ontario is a prettier name than America.

    Canadian officials dismissed Trump’s move.

    Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the move, invoking the lake’s Indigenous roots and noting that the name predates both Canadian Confederation and the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

    Oh jeez, trust Canada to use an indigenous name, right? Unlike us, with our Mississippi and Missouri and Ohio and Dakotas and Minnesota and – hang on a second, I’m going to need a bigger boat.

  • Call it a mishap

    Ok I’ll bite – why not?

    CBC tells staff not to call 9/11 a ‘terrorist attack’

    Seriously: why not? What else would you call it? What has ever been more of a terrorist attack? I don’t mean because the most violent ever or the one with the most casualties ever, because obviously not, but the one most intended to send a message? The one most like a lavish tv extravaganza bit of advertising of a threat? Come on – nothing comes close to the telegenic drama of those planes exploding into those conspicuous office towers.

    Is the claim that terror was not the goal? Please.

    What reason is there to refrain from calling a screamingly obvious terror-show a terror-show? Is it “offensive” to call it that? If so, to whom?

    Is it because…[whispers] Islam?

    I suppose. Islam is persecuted, you see, because too many people have noticed how horrible it is.

    With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 on the horizon, the CBC has circulated a memo to reporters and editors across all its news platforms reminding them not to refer to the attacks that claimed 3,000 lives and changed the modern world as “terrorist attacks.”

    The missive from the broadcaster’s journalistic standards and practices office, a copy of which was obtained by National Post, includes a section of the “longstanding language guidance” on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks carried out by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda.

    “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks,” it reads about halfway through, with the first part bolded and the last two words linking back to the CBC’s internal language guide.

    It’s longstanding, is it? Even though the attacks in question were in fact terrorist attacks?

    “The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and Manhattan. The World Trade Center (WTC in second reference) was destroyed.”

    No no no no no. That’s dishonest reporting. They weren’t mere simple hijackings, i.e. taking control of planes to redirect them to a different destination. The taking of the planes didn’t “lead to” the crashes as if the crashes were accidents; the planes were intended to be flown into large conspicuous and/or powerful buildings to make a political/religious point. That’s what they were hijacked for. Journalism, including state journalism, has no business lying about this.

    The letter was first reported by the Toronto Sun. It is signed BB, who is identified by the Sun as Basem Boshra, senior director of journalistic standards and public trust at CBC News.

    Um.

    The question is obvious. Is he, er, biased at all? Is he, in short, an Islamist, or if not an Islamist, a Muslim?

    To the surprise of no one, it’s been made difficult to find out. None of the respectable news outlets mention the subject – because of course they don’t; that’s what makes them respectable. Front Page declares he is, but Front Page is not respectable, and anyway it doesn’t tell us how it knows, so since I haven’t been able to find out, I suspect it hasn’t either.

    Anyway. Whether he’s an Islamist or a Muslim or a Catholic or an atheist, it’s ridiculous that he’s ordered CBC journalists not to call a highly conspicuous act of terrorism an act of terrorism. It’s also ridiculous that they have obeyed, that no one more senior has withdrawn his order, that anybody anywhere thinks this is how to do the news.

  • Quakers reaffirm commitment to exclusion of women

    Quakers proudly announce they’re forcing women to share their facilities with men.

    Under the arrangements confirmed by trustees, toilet facilities labelled with a ‘female’ sign remain available to cisgender women, trans women, and others for whom those facilities best align with their lived experience.

    Similarly, facilities labelled with a ‘male’ sign remain available to cisgender men, trans men, and others for whom those facilities best align with their lived experience.

    By which it does not mean facilities for trans people, but facilities for non-trans people who will be forced to share them with people of the other sex.

    The statement sets out principles that inform the approach to toilets on Quakers in Britain’s premises.

    These include respecting the dignity and lived experience of every person, ensuring compliance with the Equality Act, protecting disabled people’s access to accessible facilities, and maintaining robust approaches to tackling harassment or discrimination.

    The policy also states that Quakers will not require trans, non-binary or intersex people to disclose or prove their status in circumstances where such evidence is not demanded of others.

    Under the arrangements confirmed by trustees, toilet facilities labelled with a ‘female’ sign remain available to cisgender women, trans women, and others for whom those facilities best align with their lived experience.

    In other words they’re mixed toilet facilities whether you bitches like it or not, so there, bitches.

  • Sending a strong social signal

    Helen Lewis in The Atlantic on the Arday matter:

    For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.

    The central question in this dispute is whether the treatment of Arday—the subject of more than 200 articles in print this year, according to CNN, and hundreds more online—was proportionate. The smaller his alleged offenses, the more easily one can argue that the media hounded him to death. And so Arday has been recast as a small-time plagiarist; academics have lined up to argue that, You know, even that isn’t a very big deal. The “meaning of plagiarism does not cover mere overlap of sentences,” the academic Jason Stanley asserted in a blog post that also bizarrely noted that he hadn’t paid much attention to the story because he had been on vacation in Europe. Stanley’s blithe dismissal will be news to students who are told the exact opposite early in their courses.

    Well. Sure, students are told not to “overlap” their sentences, but the nobility that teaches those students live by a different set of rules. It’s like Downton Abbey but with diplomas at the end.

    Keeping a narrow focus on the doctoral thesis is helpful to the pro-Arday side. He also faced a far more serious charge of academic fraud—that he lifted interviewees’ quotations from a 2016 paper in BMJ Open and inserted them into the mouths of people he had supposedly spoken with in his own research, implying outright fabrication of interviews that never occurred. After Cambridge was made aware of this accusation in 2023 by other academics, the journal Social Sciences took an Arday paper offline and then uploaded it again with the offending quotations excised and other direct quotes edited. (Another paper of his in a different journal was also subsequently corrected.) Arday essentially admitted to the misattribution by agreeing to the amendments, although he had earlier told the researcher who raised the issue that questioning him was “bullying and harassment.”

    You know, people like Jolyon Maugham display outrage that Arday was exposed doing this stuff, but how about some outrage for the people he did it to?

    One of the biggest promoters of the revisionist narrative is the Good Law Project, a nonprofit chiefly known in Britain for its patchy record of challenging legal decisions… The Good Law Project intervened on Arday’s behalf early in the news cycle, describing the initial coverage as a “malicious” witch hunt based on “fake accusations of plagiarism.” It mustered an open letter in his defense.

    But how did the Good Good Awesome Law Project know the accusations were fake?

    Spoiler: it didn’t.

    What followed was a classic Streisand effect: The newspapers defended themselves by seeking further corroboration of Arday’s fabulism. As the allegations mounted, various signatories disappeared from the letter, indicating that they found the evidence concerning. By August 8, Maugham was distancing himself, saying that his decision to “carry—a deliberately neutral verb—an open letter in support of Dr Arday” relied on Cambridge’s judgment. He stated that he had not personally evaluated Arday’s broader trustworthiness…

    After Arday’s death, though, Maugham also offered a new statement, in which he had in fact been closely involved with the letter, and furthermore had intervened in the hope of dissuading the left-wing Guardian from publishing its own damning exposé of Arday. The stated rationale was that the academic was vulnerable, that the right was already attacking him, and that Arday believed (without offering any evidence) that the Guardian reporter Lanre Bakare had a beef with him.

    Evidence shmevidence. Are you going to say Jolyon Maugham doesn’t know what he’s talking about? ARE you???

    A second reason that the story still resonates is that Arday’s death—the version of it in which he is a complete innocent, hounded by feral, racist journalists—is now being used for political purposes in Britain. The Good Law Project and its allies have demanded the resignation of Cambridge’s vice-chancellor for failing to support Arday; the defenestration of various journalists who covered the story or edited the newspapers in which it appeared; and a public inquiry into Arday’s death, with the desired outcome being tighter restrictions on what the press can publish. Groups affiliated with Amnesty UK have even endorsed “Arday’s Law,” whereby the number of news articles on any person would be capped. This proposal is nonsensical. Do activists really believe that, if The New York Times has used up the entire press’s monthly Trump-scandal quota, everyone else should fall silent?

    Well when you put it that way…

  • The human causes

    A climate scientist is fired for teaching climate science. Much sensible.

    The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the US army’s military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency, a lawsuit claims.

    Dr Adam Kalkstein, a civilian professor of geography at the New York institution, was terminated after the spring semester this year, six months after a testy meeting with Brig Gen Shane Reeves, then dean of West Point’s academic board, the court filing said.

    According to Kalkstein, who taught army cadets there for 17 years, he told the dean at a November 2025 meeting that an order to cut from the curriculum content about the human causes of climate change was immoral and potentially illegal.

    It’s also dummmmm. Ignoring the causes ain’t going to make them uncause the thing they caused. Trump can hide under his desk all he wants; climate change still gonna climate change.

    Reeves responded by “storming out” of the meeting after telling Kalkstein that Donald Trump was commander in chief, and set the agenda for West Point, the lawsuit alleged.

    An agenda is one thing, and systematic lying is another.

    Kalkstein’s attorney, Michael Sussman, told the Times that his client is a conservative Republican who believes military students need to know the truth about the causes of the climate crisis as a matter of national security.

    “He is loyal to the cadets and the academy,” he said. “And to his perspective, edicts that he can’t say what’s true in a classroom is beyond his tolerance and totally counterproductive.”

    See, it actually is possible to be conservative and see matters of facts and/or evidence as matters of facts and/or evidence rather than political tokens in a big game of Political Chicken.

    In further comments to Stars and Stripes, Sussman said Kalkstein’s position was not ideological. “There are certainly people who, anything Donald Trump does, they want to complain about it and scream and yell about it. He’s not that guy,” Sussman said.

    Ok wait a second. Why would we not want to scream and yell about anything (everything) Trump does? Everything Trump does is bad. That’s the reality. He’s quite thorough about it. (Ok the magic gender issue is the exception. He’s right about that but for his own stupid reasons.)

    Trump has flipped between calling the climate emergency “a hoax” or “a scam”, to admitting it exists but insisting that climate scientists are politically motivated and that the climate “will change back”.

    Yep yep yep. That’s the ticket. The climate will flip, probably in the middle of the night, in January, when everyone is asleep.

  • Name it Alice instead

    Oh COME ON.

    Trump said Thursday he is renaming Lake Ontario to be known as “Lake America” in the United States as he exacerbates his trade war with Canada.

    The Republican president signed an executive order that updated the lake’s name for the U.S. geographic naming service. Trump cannot force Canada to follow his preferred naming convention, however.

    He can’t force us to follow it either.

    Also, “America” is just wrong. Lake Ontario is not Lake Canada, and none of the other Greats are Lake Canada either. Lake New York would fit the pattern; Lake America is just stupid.

    Trump has been floating the idea of the name change in recent days as the U.S. announced it was imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods over the weekend after talks between the countries broke down. Trump has been needling America’s northern neighbor since he returned to the White House last year, suggesting the ally with whom the U.S. once had warm relations should instead be absorbed as the 51st state.

    “Needling” ffs – this isn’t high school, this isn’t a bar, this isn’t the playground. None of the crap that Trump does is cute or funny or trivial; it’s all part of the huge dismaying shameful nightmare that is Trump’s openly fascist dictatorial takeover.

    The office of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The lake is one of multiple Great Lakes that the U.S. and Canada share borders along.

    Multiple? Why multiple? There are five. Why say multiple instead of five? We can all hold the thought of five big lakes without getting lost, surely.

    You know…having a fascist dictator who succeeds at being a fascist dictator because of having a giant fascist brain would be one thing, but seeing an ignorant mushbrain like Trump do it is humiliating. Really really really humiliating.

  • To the throats

    At long last, Jolyon, have you no sense of shame? Do you never stop to wonder why you keep filming yourself telling people to hate and damage institutions you don’t like?

    What I don’t get (one thing about him I don’t get) is why and how he doesn’t see how skin-crawlingly awful he is when he watches himself talking shit like this. It’s not as if it’s subtle.

    He’s a bit like Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham. Pompous, de haut en bas, profoundly satisfied with Self. The Dowager, however, had some charm along with the pomposity. Joly on the other hand is nothing but pomposity.

  • The scope is broad

    Jolyon explains how difficult it all is and how important he is and how necessary it is for everyone to send money.

    Our work is funded by members of the public from whom we crowdfund. In our last financial year they contributed (as our soon to be published financial accounts will show) over 80% of our income. I am enormously proud of this – you are accountable to those who fund you and it is right that we be accountable to the public. 

    But the scope of our work is broad and our inboxes feel like a bottomless pit of human misery – from Black academics and other professionals, victims of sexual violence, trans people, whistleblowers and on and on. Those without money who try to live decent lives and do the right thing experience Britain as profoundly broken – its police, so-called justice system, its notional accountability mechanisms, the whole thing is broken – and frequently they find their way to our door. So there is huge need, and we lack the resources to even scratch the surface of it. We are constantly fundraising to do more.

    To do more what? He doesn’t say. What they do is crowdfunded, he tells us, but what is the crowdfunding funding? What is it that they do? Besides telling us how important it is that they do what they do? And where the donate button is?

    We are profoundly worried about the use of the US driven anti-trans playbook to target Black people. The same lawyers are being instructed, the same “journalists” are being briefed and are pushing the messages, the same tactics are being used (we have moved from “you are a victim of sexual violence not because of men but because of trans women” to “you are struggling not because of the increasingly wealth share of billionaires but because Black people are unfairly advantaged”); and the same press punishment beatings are being used to warn off those who want to advocate for Black community.

    What? Who? Where? There’s a lot of passive voice, but no agents. Who is doing all this targeting and instructing and briefing and pushing and using? Funnily enough, he never says.

    I have seen this coming for some months and I have been asking some bigger funders to fund us to work in this space – we know how the playbook plays out because we have seen it used on the trans community – but we have not succeeded in persuading those funders.

    Seen what coming? What does “this” refer to? Besides the agent-free list of non-specific outrages?

    Meanwhile, Good Law Project now has a huge new workstream connected to Professor Arday, an inbox bulging with requests for help from (understandably) terrified Black people. But little in the way of new resources with which to meet that huge extra demand.

    What help? What kind of help? What’s he talking about? Does he mean legal help? If so why on earth doesn’t he spell out what his Project is doing? Why is he so systematically and blatantly vague and evasive?

    He does finally tell us of one specific action, but after all that hand-waving it seems insufficient.

  • What kind of thing?

    India Willoughby must be a masochist, or entirely blind to reality. Nothing else can explain his self-exposure here.

    Nobody “hit on” him. Nobody. On the entire planet not one person stepped up to that particular plate.

    I mean…I mean…[struggles to find enough words]…Who does this? How many people age 60 try to look like a teenage girl and then claim that people are hitting on them??? The gulfs of humiliation surely discourage even the craziest people, and yet…

  • Men: stop doing this

    Man seeks to insult man, calls him an epithet that means terrible evil woman [and female dog]. Thanks, man.

  • A welcome too many

    Mayor of Hackney Zoë Garbett welcomes trans people using single-sex toilets

    Silly headline. The issue is not single-sex toilets, it’s which single-sex toilets. The point is that people who claim to be trans want to use the toilets of the sex they are not, and that’s dangerous for women, to say nothing of the awkwardness and discomfort of women and men.

    “I consider trans women to be women and trans men to be men,” said Garbett.

    Yeah, see, it’s not an “I consider” kind of thing. At all. It’s just a brute fact. Women are women; trans women are not.

    Mayor of Hackney Zoë Garbett has said she welcomes trans people using single-sex toilets and has asked council staff not to “police access” to services.

    Anything to make life difficult for women, eh?

    Garbett said: “I consider trans women to be women and trans men to be men.” She added: “I want trans people to be able to access services they identify with and that they feel safe and comfortable using.”

    And she wants everyone else – 99 percent of the population – to feel unsafe and uncomfortable.

    Despite public concerns about whether it is safe for trans people to use single-sex toilets, she said: “Absolutely yes it is.”

    Then she’s either stupid or a liar. It’s well known that creepy men like to get creepy in women’s toilets, and she’s giving the ones in Hackney free rein to be as creepy as they like.

    Following the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling, Garbett spoke out in solidarity with the trans community, calling the decision “shameful”.

    She said: “London is a city that attracts millions around the world, and it should be a welcoming and safe place for both trans visitors and trans Londoners alike.”

    But not for everyone else.

  • Guest post: The inability to tolerate the nuances

    Originally a comment by iknklast on Just ask women.

    It seems possible to me that Linehan (and I don’t know much about him, except what I’ve read here) may be falling victim to the same problem so many people have: the idea that all goodness must be manifest in those you agree with (even on one issue) and all badness must be manifest in those you disagree with (even on one issue). The inability to tolerate the nuances of political and social issues, where someone you disagree with vehemently on many issues may actually have one or more issues where you agree with them, seems to be the order of the day anymore.

    I felt that once, when I found myself agreeing with Dubya on something important. Then I discovered I agreed with Jonah Goldberg on something. It disturbed me, until I realized that there are none of us who are perfect, and no one I am in perfect alignment with on all issues (and that includes everyone here, and I hope you can understand that those places where I disagree do not make you nazis in my mind). I find I don’t even agree with myself all the time; some of my views have changed over time, and I wince at things I have thought, or written, or said, in the past.

    There is a great deal of discussion on whether we should align with our enemies on any issue where we agree, even though we disagree on almost everything else. I think we should; we should keep our opinions nuanced, and able to disagree with those people on everything else, and be willing to be outspoken about that. There are many places where I agree with the left, and several places where I think they are absolutely bonkers (trans, for instance, and many of their more extreme environmental views). That doesn’t prevent me from considering myself leftist, progressive, but not ‘woke’, at least not in so far as it requires adopting the entire package, including the nutty beliefs.

    As for aligning with the right on the trans issues, I think we should be in uneasy alliance with them, accepting that they are our only allies right now on this issue, but recognizing that they have vastly different, and dangerous, reasons for their anti-trans views, and that they are not really being pro-woman. I don’t believe you always get up with fleas if you lie down with dogs, but I do think you need to be assured you have adequate flea medicine handy, because fleas do tend to jump around.

    It is a shame that the ability to work across the aisles on areas of agreement, while maintaining disagreement with all other issues, has given way to purity politics. I retain the right to disagree with anyone about anything, even while agreeing strongly with them about others. This ‘with us or against us’ and ‘purity or death’ mindset is destroying us.

  • A particular kind of man

    Jolyon the Womenhater is getting reamed.

    Sarah’s full comment:

    It’s all so utterly fascinating. A particular kind of man is hardwired to insult women for their revolting choice to get older. The obvious sub text being that post 18? 25? we are dried up old hags, of no use or ornament to any man, valued only for our ability to provoke euphoria in his trouser region.

    I am sure Maugham is genuinely shocked to be called a misogynist, but once he reaches for that ‘grandmother’ insult for a woman older than 35 who doesn’t toe his line, then I am afraid he has revealed himself to be nothing but.

    I note for e.g. that Matthew Scott was not excoriated for dressing like a ‘grandfather’ even though his criticisms of Maugham were arguably more savage.

    I would add just one thing: it’s not only that we are no use or ornament, it’s that we are actively disgusting and horror-movie material.

  • Slogan not true shocker

    Amnesty has a new slogan. To the surprise of no one, it’s utterly stupid.

    That’s just not a generalizable slogan. Lots of people are not what they say they are. Just look at Trump! Look at con artists, fabulists, conceited people, depressed people, confused people, misinformed people, criminals, evangelists, quacks, advertisers, public relations experts – the list is endless. No, people are not automatically who they say they are. In many circumstances it’s a good idea to keep that in mind.

    People who claim to be the sex they are not are definitely not “who they say they are”.

  • There is only a threat

    Via Laurence Moran, Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail on Trump v Canada:

    This is not a negotiation in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an extortion racket. A negotiation involves an exchange of offers. But there is no offer on the American side. There is only a threat: Give us what we want or we will hurt you. The demands, what is more, as often as not have nothing to do with tariffs, or trade, or the economy.

    To say the Trump administration are not free traders is not just understatement: it’s beside the point. They’re not even protectionists, really. Their objective is not to replace free trade with managed trade. It is to use tariffs as a weapon to advance their broader foreign policy objectives – namely, hemispheric domination.

    They have no interest in getting a deal, ever. They want rather to perpetually hold out the threat of trade war to hammer us into submission. Either we agree to their demands – to align our external trade policy with theirs, to give the U.S. privileged access to our resources, to buy only from American defence contractors – and accept being reduced to a vassal state. Or they bomb us into the stone age, economically speaking.

    But in fact that is not the choice. Because even if we accept their terms, there is nothing to stop Mr. Trump from bombing us anyway, or threatening to. Indeed, accepting his demands may simply persuade him to make further threats and further demands, since we would have proven that threats work.

    At the moment there is much concern that retaliation on our part might lead Mr. Trump to escalate (indeed, he already has). But returning to the bargaining table may as easily do the same. Mr. Trump, in short, will do what he will do. He plainly wishes us ill, for whatever reason, and there is nothing much we can do to alter his behaviour.

    What we can do is refuse to ratify it. What we can do is refuse to reward it. What we can do is preserve our freedom, our independence, and our dignity – to show Mr. Trump that whatever he throws at us, we cannot be coerced. Walking out of the negotiations was the easy part. Staying out is the test.

    Snuggling up to China and Russia and trying to demolish Canada. That’s the US now.

  • In the court of public opinion

    Sall Grover on Facebook:

    A few weeks ago, I sent a cease & desist concerns notice to Pride In Protest, Trans Action Network & Macquarie Uni Queer Collective as they were distributing & posting material calling me a racist, twansphobe & saying demonstrable lies about Giggle. It is my opinion that the intention was incitement. They all ignored the notice & doubled down on the material.

    I’m actually not a litigious person, nor am I an idiot. I am not going to take the most powerful demographic in the country – trans – to court. Why would I bother? It would achieve nothing.

    My plan was always to use it in the court of public opinion, the most important court there is, with the evidence to prove how this demographic is behaving, using their unprecedented legal & social capital to intimidate the women they so desperately want to be (but never will be).

    Trans will win some battles along the way, but we will win the war, because reality does always win. Sometimes you just have to fight for it.

    For years and years and years you have to fight for it.

  • A stark indicator

    Hottest oceans.

    The world’s oceans were hotter than ever previously recorded on Saturday, according to the latest data.

    The average surface temperature was 21.1C, with the rising marine heat a stark indicator of the climate crisis. More than 90% of the heat trapped by carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning enters the oceans.

    Hotter oceans exacerbate the sea level rise and extreme storms that threaten billions of people, as well as driving marine heatwaves that decimate sea life and undermine coastal livelihoods, scientists warned.

    Other than that, it’s no big deal. Go on, buy that new SUV, you know you want to.

    The northern hemisphere summer has already been hit by record-breaking heatwaves, drought and wildfires in Europe and North America, and intense rain and typhoons in Asia.

    …

    “The record is another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the new data. “El Niño is adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming. The consequences are already visible: the number of marine heatwave days globally has more than tripled since the early 1990s.”

    …

    “The record is another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which produced the new data. “El Niño is adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming. The consequences are already visible: the number of marine heatwave days globally has more than tripled since the early 1990s.”

    Warmer oceans contribute to sea level rise because of thermal expansion of the water, increasing flooding risks for coastal communities and low-lying island nations. Higher ocean temperatures also supercharge extreme weather events, because warmer seas transfer more energy and water vapour to the atmosphere, intensifying rainfall and storms.

    Most of the planet-heating CO2 from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction is absorbed by the oceans. However, a hotter ocean is less efficient at absorbing CO2. This is potentially weakening one of the planet’s most important natural buffers against global heating, the scientists said.

    Oh well.