Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Guest post: Nature doesn’t do “framing”

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Could completely reframe.

    Elliot Page is back with a documentary that could completely reframe what we’re told is “natural”

    “Reframing” doesn’t change reality, only our perceptions and explanations of it.

    …scientists explore more than 1,500 animal species that display same-sex behaviour, change sex, raise young in Queer pairings and organise themselves outside rigid male-female hierarchies.

    Penguins. Albatrosses. Clownfish. Bonobos.

    Oh, look, it’s the same dishonest, misleading, irrelevant cherry-picking. All these check-marks ticked off in this-grab bag of forced-teamed “science” lack the one thing you hope we won’t notice, the one thing that you so desperately wish it would, because you’ve paid the price in your own flesh. Get back to us when you find humans (or even just a single mammal) that can change sex. This is just a bad-faith smoke screen that rehashes the pointless analogies that can’t support the arguments you can’t make.

    The rest of the animate world is not the balm and comfort you would like it to be, or that you would have us believe. There are a multitude of “is-es” that you would never, ever want to become “oughts.” For every happy, glitter-rainbow story of clownfish and Bonobos, there are dozens of horror shows of unimaginable cruelty, pain, and suffering that would fuel the nightmares of a thousand lifetimes. The stories you would decide to highlight are few and far between compared to the multitude of ones you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Parasitism. Infanticide. Cannibalism. Rape.

    Male lions routinely kill the cubs of females whose young have been fathered by another male. Those females routinely mate with those murderous males.

    Birds that are the young of nest parasites will push the young of the host species out of the nest; in some species of bird, the first to hatch will push the unhatched eggs of what would have been their siblings out of the nest. In lean years, parent birds will let some of their chicks starve because there’s not enough food to go around.

    There are parasites that cause their hosts engage in self-destructive behaviour that allows the parasite to complete its life cycle in the guts of the predator that catches and consumes the first, suicidal host.

    And when it comes down to it, a lot of things that die are eaten alive. That can’t be fun.

    Reaching for “natural” can get you bitten, in more ways then one. There are a whole lot of “natural” things you’d never want to see on the ingredient list of any of the groceries you buy, because they would kill you. Naturally. Horror, death, and pain are as much a part of how the world works as its awe-inspiring beauty and elegance, which is something Darwin felt keenly when he realized the tremendous cost of natural selection. The price of evolution is death of the unfit. Not just the death of the individual, but the extinction of entire species. Those who wish to apply this “natural” logic to human society as a whole are rightly reviled, because even though we arose from this process, we don’t have to employ it ourselves. We get to pick and choose. Do you want to draw upon these perfectly “natural” traits and behaviours and hold them up as models for humans to emulate? I would hope not. We are not lions, or parasitic wasps whose young slowly eat their hosts alive until they’re ready to emerge from the bodies of their victims. And no, we are not clownfish, either. Analogies are never perfect. some are less perfect than others. But mostly, analogy is not reality. It’s an echo or parallel, not identical. Not an “identity.”

    Nature has no moral judgement above that of differential survival of naturally varying offspring, and their reproduction. And that survival is geared to and determined by current conditions. There is no planning for tomorrow, only the eternal now. Future usefulness of current traits is never guaranteed, only the luck of the draw. Today’s dominant phylum can easily become tomorrow’s experiment in taphonmy and fossilization. And “Nature?” No regrets, no tears. It doesn’t do “framing.” It’s not there to provide lessons or morals. It’s examples are multitudinous and contradictory, confounding and shocking human sensibilities. Nature has its own agenda, and making people feel less bad about their own poor, misguided choices is not part of it.

    Sorry “Elliot”. You’re a mutilated, female, human, mammal.

    Try again, but don’t blame “nature” or expect it to plead your case. The laws it follows aren’t ones you will find useful or comforting.

  • Could completely reframe

    Hmmm. Not sure this is one hundred percent accurate.

    Gay Star News on Facebook:

    Elliot Page is back with a documentary that could completely reframe what we’re told is “natural”

    In Second Nature, which Page narrates and co-produces, scientists explore more than 1,500 animal species that display same-sex behaviour, change sex, raise young in Queer pairings and organise themselves outside rigid male-female hierarchies.

    Penguins. Albatrosses. Clownfish. Bonobos.

    Turns out, the natural world never signed up to “biological reality” as it’s often weaponised.

    Page put it bluntly this week: “This idea that nature is organized around a cis heteronormative system is just completely false.”

    Well you don’t say. So is this idea that nature is organized around chess, or ballet, or the stock market, or figure skating. But the éclat fades out a little once you remember that there are a vast number of human practices and labels that nature is not organized around so it’s kind of odd to get all agitated about the fact that nature doesn’t have a human vocabulary.

    Be careful out there.

  • The third man

    A reader has pointed out that the knife guy stabbed three people, not two.

    The Guardian:

    A man has appeared in court charged with the attempted murders of three people during two knife attacks in London.

    Essa Suleiman, 45, is accused of stabbing two Jewish men in Golders Green on Wednesday, having already attacked another man over a personal dispute in south London.

    The prosecutor Emma Harraway told the court Suleiman had attacked Ishmail Hussein at his home in Southwark. He had then travelled to Golders Green, in north-west London, arriving shortly after 11am, and attacked two Jewish men.

    Prosecutors said he first set upon Shloime Rand, 34, before attacking 76-year-old Norman Shine. They said both men were clearly identifiable as Orthodox Jews by their clothing.

    Strange. I wonder if the thinking was “two Jews for every Muslim.”

  • Incorrect, sir

    I missed this one.

    No you don’t.

    I suppose he’s never been to a grocery store or a gas station.

  • Two visibly Jewish men

    From the Guardian four days ago on the Golders Green stabbings:

    Prime minister Keir Starmer said he would visit Golders Green “as soon as possible” after today’s “appalling attack”.

    He chaired a Cobra meeting after two people were stabbed in Golders Green, north-west London, in an incident that police are treating as a terrorism offence.

    Starmer also said he would meet with criminal justice agencies on Thursday. Speaking to broadcasters, he said: “The Government is taking action in relation to security, cohesion, extremism, but of course it’s our responsibility to coordinate the immediate response here to this appalling attack, to ensure security is in place, to take other measures.”

    Cohesion. Is cohesion even possible? Anywhere, ever? Are humans simply incapable of it? Are there always and everywhere differences that prompt and motivate and solidify the formation of tribes and thus rivalries?

    The UK had a massive labor shortage after the war, and it recruited people from part of what had been The Empire. I wonder how much, if any, thought was given to the favored religion of that particular bit of The Empire, and how amenable it is to co-existing with other religions.

    The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council have released a joint statement after the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green on Wednesday morning.

    The statement said: “We are sickened by yet another terrorist attack on our community, this time targeting two visibly Jewish men on the streets of London. This comes after weeks of arson attacks targeting Jewish premises, and just seven months after two Jews were murdered in Manchester on Yom Kippur. For many in our community, this feels relentless.

    “Our thoughts are with the victims, and we pray for their swift recovery. We also thank the police, Shomrim, Hatzola and CST for their swift response.”

    The groups then outlined that there were factors which led to this event taking place. “We cannot ignore the context: a wave of antisemitic hatred driven by extremists at home and abroad, including Islamist extremism that motivated the Heaton Park attack, and attempts by the Iranian regime to orchestrate violence against British Jews,” it said.

    Is the whole point of religion the creation of ferocious hatred of people outside one’s favored religion? It so often looks that way.

  • Operational policing

    Who is the aggressor and who is the victim?

    The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, thoughtlessly undermined the confidence of officers to deal with dangerous people by sharing a critical social media post after the Golders Green stabbings, according to the head of the Metropolitan police.

    Officers were filmed detaining the suspect after two Jewish people were stabbed in the north-west London suburb on Wednesday.

    Polanski retweeted, without comment, a post on X alleging that officers were “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head” when he was already incapacitated by a stun gun.

    In a letter to Polanski, the Met commissioner, Mark Rowley, described the claim as “inaccurate and misinformed commentary”. He praised the officers as “nothing short of extraordinary”, adding: “Without their efforts to stop him, I dread to think what the outcome could have been.”

    More stabbings at least. A guy who stabs two Jewish people is probably looking to stab as many as he can before he is stopped.

    Speaking on Friday morning, Rowley told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the letter was not an “intervention to politics” and expanded on his criticism of Polanski.

    He said: “I’m simply dealing with operational policing and defending my officers because I want them to have confidence to protect Londoners … Officers need confidence in confronting these dangerous people, and if an eminent person thoughtlessly steps into that and undermines that, then I’m going to deal with that.”

    He added: “Of course there will always be inaccuracies, eccentricities and nonsense online. But when someone eminent puts something out there, which goes fundamentally to the confidence in my officers to act in the protection of London, when we’ve had two officers confront someone they believe to be a terrorist, who wasn’t complying and they were afraid he might have an explosive device – can you imagine fear and how difficult it is to deal with? I’ve sat down with those officers when they’re in shock after the event. Those officers need to know they’ve got my support, and public support, when they do that.”

    It’s so difficult trying to keep track of which people are the wicked powerful oppressors and which are the downtrodden victims.

  • Funny kind of human rights act

    Another win for the cheaters.

    A settlement has been finalised in trans powerlifter JayCee Cooper’s case against USA Powerlifting after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled the organisation violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act by barring her from women’s competitions.

    But Cooper is not of course a trans powerlifter, he’s a trans woman, i.e. a man. How is it a violation of human rights to bar a man from women’s competitions? How is it not a violation of women’s rights to force them to compete against men?

    The settlement was announced on 28 April by the Legal Director at Gender Justice, which represented Cooper, as per CBS News. They said: “We celebrate this victory, but we also remain vigilant and ready to take action to ensure that all Minnesotans, including transgender Minnesotans, can participate in sports, schools, employment, and health care without facing discrimination because of who they are.”

    But male transgender Minnesotans could compete against their own (stronger/faster) sex instead of insisting on competing against the other, not as strong or fast sex. They don’t have to compete against women; they want to, whether because they will win or because it’s fun to be shitty to women or both.

    The dispute started when Cooper, a transgender woman, was barred from entering two women’s powerlifting competitions back in 2018.

    A transgender woman is a man, therefore he should not be entering women’s competitions. End of story.

    She sued, arguing that it was discrimination under Minnesota law. USA Powerlifting claimed its approach was based on what it described as “strength advantages” related to sex assigned at birth, rather than Cooper being transgender.

    Yes, strength advantages, not “related to” but rooted in sex at birth (and until death). Those advantages are real. They’re not something that belongs in scare quotes.

  • Their private army

    Graham Linehan writes:

    For 10 years, a small group of activists has used the police and the courts as their private army. The Supreme Court has finally said what most people already knew. Now the state has to catch up.

    For over a decade now, ever since I first spoke up for women in the face of an aggressive rights grab by trans activists, I’ve been pursued by a small group of men who seemingly use UK police as their private goon squad.

    “Stephanie” Hayden, “Lindsay” Watson, and more recently “Sophia” Brooks could not have generated a more enthusiastic police response if they’d been wearing chief superintendent’s uniforms.

    Has that ever been the case when the favored set of people was not men pretending to be women, but just plain women? The kind who don’t have to pretend because they really are the thing they would be pretending to be? Why, in short, are men who pretend to be women so fascinating to the cops while just plain women bore them into comas?

    My view is that there’s no such thing as “trans people”. There are transvestites, transsexuals, perverts, and distressed young women suffering from a virulently fashionable new form of anorexia. In other words, men and women in various states of distress and confusion.

    But there are also predatory petty criminals and sadistic activists, and it’s these in particular for whom UK police seemingly cannot do enough.

    It’s one of the reasons I left the UK. I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t get a knock at the door at any moment, from a police force that works harder for men dressed as women than it ever has for women themselves.

    Again, why is that? I mean, it’s not as if women have no value at all. Even if you think women are boring feeble demanding pampered bitches, the fact remains that without women there are no people at all. Women do the gestation and pushing out thing, and there is no one else who can do it, so isn’t that some reason to think women are not just useless expensive trash? Just a thought.

    Set the slow, feeble response to the Rotherham rape gangs against the speed and efficiency the police bring to a complaint from a trans activist. The miracle of modern British policing is that a man only has to put on a dress to be treated, finally, like a woman should be.

    …

    Keir Starmer famously said it was wrong to claim that only women had a cervix. David Lammy seemed to think men could actually grow one. We have a political class so terrified of being called bigots by the millennials in their staff that they’re prepared to look completely ridiculous in public. I fear nothing will change while such useful idiots are in charge.

    Maybe we have to wait for the next generation to be old enough to kick the millennials out.

  • A broader pattern

    Trump considers himself a dictator. He wouldn’t necessarily use that word but he is very clear in his own mind that his power is without limit.

    Just his, mind you. Not any other president’s, past or future.

    When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the president’s mass deportation effort.

    Instead, a top Justice Department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.

    Top Justice Department Official to federal judge: You’re not the boss of us.

    By February, the district court judge, Sunshine Sykes, was fed up. Sykes, a nominee of President Joe Biden, accused Trump officials in a ruling that month of seeking “to erode any semblance of separation of powers,” adding that they could “only do so in a world where the Constitution does not exist.”

    Trump officials do not care.

    Hardly isolated, the case illustrates a broader pattern of defiance of lower court decisions in President Donald Trump’s second term.

    The failure of Trump officials to follow court orders has been highlighted most notably in individual immigration cases. But a review of hundreds of pages of court records by The Associated Press also shows an extraordinary record of violations in lawsuits over policy changes and other moves.

    So we are in a dictatorship. Nothing can stop him, and he does whatever he wants, so what else could we call it?

    In the second Trump administration’s first 15 months in office, district court judges ruled it was violating an order in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices, the AP’s review of court records found. That’s about one out of every eight lawsuits in which courts have at least temporarily blocked the administration’s actions.

    …

    The Trump administration violations in the 31 lawsuits are in addition to more than 250 instances of noncompliance judges have recently highlighted in individual immigration petitions — from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.

    Legal scholars and former federal judges said they could recall at most a few violations of court rulings over the full four-year terms of other recent presidential administrations, including Trump’s first time in office. They also noted previous administrations were generally apologetic when confronted by judges; the Trump administration’s Justice Department has been outright combative in some cases.

    …

    The AP’s review also found that higher courts, including the Supreme Court, overruled the district courts and sided with the White House in nearly half of the 31 cases. Critics say those decisions are emboldening the administration to ignore judges’ orders.

    White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the higher courts had overturned “unlawful district court rulings.” The administration will “continue to comply with lawful court rulings,” she added in a written statement.

    And it will decide which ones those are.

    Very reassuring.

  • Somalia 1 Golders Green 0

    Another one.

    LONDON — Metropolitan Police say they have arrested a 45-year-old man in connection with a stabbing attack that injured two Jewish people in London, which they called a “terrorist incident.”

    “A 45-year-old man, who is a British national, born in Somalia, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder,” Metropolitan Police said in a statement. “He was initially taken to hospital but has since been discharged and has been taken to a London police station where he remains in police custody.”

    Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor told reporters that counterterrorism officers are investigating and working to establish “whether this attack was deliberately targeting the Jewish community in London,” while Commissioner Mark Rowley called it an “attack on British Jews.”

    Britain’s prime minister earlier described the incident in the North London suburb of Golders Green as an “antisemitic attack.” The neighborhood, which has a large Jewish population, has been the scene of a number of antisemitic incidents in recent weeks.

    On and on and on it goes.

  • A chilling effect

    Lara Brown at the Spectator:

    Maybe sex realists really are winning the gender wars. But for every two steps we take forward we are relentlessly pushed at least one back. The most recent victory in the war against common sense has seen the University of Sussex dodge a £585,000 fine over their free speech policies. The fine was awarded after Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her job five years ago following sustained protests over her views on transgender rights and gender identity.

    She was hounded out of her academic job for not believing that men can be women. I will never get over how grotesque that is.

    The Office for Students (OfS) spent three and a half years investigating the circumstances that led to Stock’s departure. Their final report is damning. It notes that the university’s ‘Trans and Non-Binary Equality Statement’ requires ‘any materials within relevant courses and modules [to] positively represent trans people and trans lives’ and makes vague statements such as ‘transphobic propaganda … will not be tolerated’. These requirements all effectively censored course materials and created a culture in which any expression of gender-critical thought was believed by many to be a disciplinary offence.

    And what even is gender-critical thought? Just knowing that men are not and cannot be women. That’s it, that’s the thought. And it’s verboten.

    In the OfS’s own words, ‘a chilling effect was created because the university indicated, through these restrictions, that the expression of certain lawful speech and views was not acceptable at the university’. The result of this policy was obvious to anyone who followed Kathleen Stock’s final years at Sussex. She was harassed by masked students protesting outside her lectures, ‘Stock out’ posters were plastered across the university, flares were set off, and many of her own colleagues signed an open letter condemning her ‘harmful rhetoric’. At one point, just to do her job, Stock had to appoint private security.

    Her crime? Writing a book in which she claimed gender identity should not supplant biological sex. Sussex University did little to nothing to defend Stock from the abuse. The Vice-Chancellor at the time, Adam Tickell, seemed more interested in pursuing his new equality, diversity and inclusion strategy

    But not real equality and certainly not real inclusion. Women who refuse to say that a man is a woman are very much not included.

  • Humility

    Trump demonstrates his shortage of cognitive dazzle in the act of claiming he has the most cognitive dazzle. People with real cognitive dazzle tend not to brag about it, because they’re clever enough to realize that it’s not attractive and it’s a mine field. Trump doesn’t grasp either of those not very complicated thoughts.

    At 25 seconds he shouts that he’s the only president to take a cognitive test. Sir, sir, that’s because the gaping holes in your cognitive function are so massive and so fraught with peril that even the people around you know it’s a problem.

    He goes on to say Obama’s rilly rilly stupid and he, Trump, is rilly rilly not.

    It’s funny how Obama never ever ever got up on a stage to brag about how clever he is.

  • The fighter jets are a nice touch

    Update: It’s probably fake; see Harald’s comment.

    It’s cropped a little at the bottom – look at the original to see what the eagle is doing.

    Also how does Lady Lib manage to deliver the baby without rumpling the flag at all? New technology is it? And why are some soldier dudes standing around watching a woman deliver a “baby”? Did she get any say in the matter?

  • breasts & blood test results

    Meanwhile in another part of the forest:

    They say I cant be a delegate this year at the Labour National Women’s Conference this year (I was in 2022), despite having a female birth certificate, breasts, & blood test results which show I am female. Because of surgery, I cant produce gametes – but neither can others who have had a hysterectomy. Surely you can see the injustice? Please support my legal case…

    Surely everyone can see the justice? Men can’t be women no matter how much they fiddle with their anatomies. Men need to stop shoving women aside.

  • Schemiest scheme ever

    Weirdest BBC News headline and news story ever?

    Former Chick-fil-A employee charged in $80,000 mac-and-cheese scheme

    Speak English! What the hell is Chick-fil-A?! What is mac-and-cheese??!

    Still, at least they give us a quick dietary lesson in the process of reporting this global story.

    US media named the suspect as 23-year-old Keyshun Jones. Records show he is currently in custody at Green Bay prison in Forth Worth, Texas. The New York Times reported that Jones’s lawyer declined to comment.

    The Chick-fil-A catering menu lists the cost of a large tray of its mac-and-cheese at around $100 depending on location. The number of calories in the baked macaroni dish, which features three types of cheese, is almost 10,000 (40,000 kilojoules).

    The Beeb goes into careful thoughtful detail.

    CCTV footage shows the man wearing a brown puffer vest, blue jeans and backwards white cap, not the chain’s branded red polo uniform.

    What is this “puffer vest” of which you speak? On the one hand they chat knowingly about mac and cheese and on the other hand they rave about a “puffer vest”.

    The BBC has contacted Chick-fil-A’s media office for comment.

    Good good good. Let us know what they say.

  • The case should never have got to court

    “The decision of the Court to throw out this case , is very welcome – but this case should never have got to court.

    There has been a troubling pattern of police forces around the country to ‘believe’ trans-rights activists, time and time again, even when there has been overwhelming evidence that complaints have been made against gender critical campaigners, in bad faith.

    The police have failed in their duty to properly and fairly investigate – preferring instead to support one side over the other in a debate. All this has done is erode the faith the public should be able to have in the police. We are sick of two tier policing and I hope with today’s verdict it will end.

    I have suffered greatly in my fight to protect women and children from what I believe to be a dangerous ideology. But I am proud that I have never given in and I will not do.

    I have been lifted through support from friends and strangers, from women’s rights groups to London cabbies who have taken the time to stop and shake my hand.

    I am very grateful to my legal team; Daniel Berke and Sarah Vine KC and to the team at the Free Speech Union”.

  • Add to basket

    Barristers just wanna have fun.

    Jolyon Maugham: less dignity than Donald Trump.

  • Around mid-fourth grade

    I probably saw this back in 2018, and maybe wrote a post about it, but it remains interesting.

    Trump Speaks At Fourth-Grade Level

    President Donald Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in life was a result of “being, like, really smart”—communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

    The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.

    …

    The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed in 1975 for the U.S. Navy to assess the relative difficulty of training manuals. A database of Trump’s words, compiled by the incomparable factba.se, ran the comparative analysis yesterday, in response to the president’s claim that he is “a genius.”

    …

    Factba.se has collected interviews, speeches and press conferences from previous presidents, using material publicly available from presidential libraries, and including the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, which contains presidential press conferences going back to Hoover in 1929.

    The website excluded communiques issued by the last two presidents on social media and limited the study to unscripted words uttered at press conferences and other public appearances.

    The words were run through a variety of lexicological analyses, besides the Flesch-Kincaid, and the results were the same. In every one, Trump came in dead last. Trump also uses the fewest “unique words” (2,605) of any president—Obama was the best at 4,869—and uses words with the fewest average syllables, with 1.33 per word, compared to positively multi-syllabic president Hoover at 1.57.

    “By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring “off-script” words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker,” Factba.se CEO Bill Frischling wrote. “The gap between Trump and the next closest president … is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap.”

    It’s a huge part of why he is so intensely annoying – it’s because he’s so dumb, so vacant, so threadbare, so empty, so without anything of interest to say. One big clue: he says the same thing all the time. He has a few stock phrases and he utters them when he should be making new combinations of words. That’s what makes him seem so childish and buffoonish.

    And it matters, because it reveals how threadbare his thinking is. Result? Wars started as if they were games of checkers. People killed in small boats or sent back to countries where they will be killed as if said people were toys instead of sentient human beings. He’s too stupid even to have compassion.

  • Any of this pish

    Golly. What a pack of lies.

    Trans rights trans rights trans rights, she says, without saying those are. Nobody I know of wants to take away the human rights of trans people, but purported “rights” specific to trans people are another story. No, it’s not a genuine “right” to be able to force people to endorse a man’s claim to be the sex [or “gender”] he is not.

    Why don’t journalists learn to ask this question? What rights are you talking about exactly? Please explain, clearly and without obfuscation.

  • Some ever-so-subtle rebuttals

    The NY Times on the flashy visit:

    And yet, on the first full day of a state visit focused on the shared history between the United States and Britain, the king sprinkled in some ever-so-subtle rebuttals to Mr. Trump. Charles spoke on Tuesday of the value of the trans-Atlantic alliance, the importance of checks and balances and his passion for the environment. He even spoke of his time in the Royal Navy, after Mr. Trump belittled British naval capabilities in recent weeks.

    The king tucked his rejoinders into a mostly lighthearted speech to Congress on Tuesday afternoon and during evening remarks at a formal banquet at the White House.

    What the Times neglects to mention is that the king says what the government tells him to say. He’s not there to chat about himself and his views, and he’s not free to say whatever he likes. We Yanks tend to forget this, because US presidents combine the ceremonial and the governing jobs into one office, which Trump’s presidency has revealed to be a very risky way to do things. Charles has no power to override or ignore Parliament, while the current PM does get to tell him what he can and can’t say.

    Trump is furious at Britain for its refusal to join the fight against Iran, and his administration continues to accuse the British government of denying free speech to conservative voices. In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer vows not to be dragged into another war of America’s choosing, and bristles at the president’s description of Britain’s aircraft carriers as nothing more than “toys.”

    Those differences were never likely to be erased by the king’s first visit to the United States as the British monarch. By law and tradition, the king is supposed to rise above the disputes that often bedevil the leaders of both governments.

    There you go. They should have said that up front, because we tend to forget it. Charles has no real power; he’s there for ceremonial and public relations reasons, that’s all. Trump is falling for it, because of course he is, but he’ll also forget all about it the moment the royal plane is wheels up.

    Trump was a guest of the royal family for a state dinner at Windsor Castle in September, an experience he described as “one of the highest honors of my life.”

    Of course he did. He takes it seriously. He’ll forget about it tomorrow, but he also takes it seriously. He thinks royalty is still a real thing.

    He also drew a standing ovation during his speech to Congress when he spoke about how the concept of checks and balances in American government has its roots in English history. Mr. Trump has worked to significantly expand executive power.

    Charles said the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society found that Magna Carta was cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, “not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

    Zing. Well done, Prime Minister.

    He spoke of “the natural wonders” of the United States and “our shared responsibility to safeguard nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset.” Charles is an avid environmentalist; Mr. Trump, by contrast, pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change, making the United States the only country in the world to abandon the international commitment to slow global warming.

    Perhaps that part was Chuck’s idea and Starmer allowed it.

    While it was unclear whether the king’s appeal would be enough to mend the wounds in the trans-Atlantic relationship, Mr. Dickinson said the British were probably hoping the visit created a pathway to recovery.

    “That’s why the government values the royal family as a diplomatic ace in the hand,” he said. “It’s not a magic wand, but it helps.”

    Especially when it’s a Trump the government is trying to manage. It’s not a magic wand but Trump pretty much thinks it is.