Today in You Cannot Be Serious: one Lloyd Evans, who writes for The Spectator.

The setup: a historian named Lea Ypi gave a lecture at Darwin College, which Lloyd Evans attended but didn’t actually listen to, because he was too preoccupied with her hair. It got him all worked up, so he bought some sex, and then he wrote this piquant episode up for The Spectator.

Advice for scholars: next time you lecture on Kant and revolutions at “Downing” (@DarwinCollege) Cambridge, make sure your hair is neatly tied and that you’re not blonde. Or else your research impact will be on the @spectator libido section. pic.twitter.com/j9qbo0p2Ai

— Lea Ypi (@lea_ypi) April 18, 2024

It’s interesting for a lot … Read the rest

Grooming much?

Scottish primary schools are appointing children as “LGBT champions” and are being urged to ask pupils as young as four if they are gay, lesbian or trans, The Telegraph can reveal.

Documents show that schools are setting up LGBT clubs and “gender and sexual orientation alliance groups” for pupils as part of their membership of a scheme run by the charity LGBT Youth Scotland.

The charity, which received nearly £1 million of taxpayer’s money last year, also urges head teachers to install gender neutral toilets and mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, an event critics say is designed to reinforce myths spread by trans activists.

Wait, I have an idea. Here’s what you do: just change every child’s genitalia … Read the rest

More stupid stuff to round out the day:

Humza Yousaf has hit back at [retorted to] JK Rowling over her “ludicrous” outspoken attack on his plans to ensure biological men identifying as female are protected by a new misogyny law.

The Harry Potter author accused Mr Yousaf of displaying “absolute contempt for women” on Tuesday after he said transgender women would fall within the scope of the legislation.

…

He insisted that extending the law to transgender people did not diminish the protection being offered to women as he hit out at rebuked “bad faith actors” who are “intent on turning every issue into a culture war”.

Mr Yousaf also accused them of “deliberate disinformation” and argued it made

Originally a comment by Papito on Peaceful but conspicuous.

The greatest amount of coercion employed in this “not very subtle form of proselytising” is against other Muslims, or people who were born Muslim and may be moving away from Islam. The rest of the students are just “kafirs” and the holy rollers don’t really care about them. Group prayer serves a function of guarding a society against apostasy – whoever didn’t show up and participate properly can be persecuted. Unlike in many other modern religions, in Islam apostasy is very strictly judged – it is punishable by death in some countries. Insisting on group prayer is insisting that you can do violence to those who waver.

The ruling was … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on How not to change minds.

I understood that she had received unacceptable abuse…

But some abuse is acceptable?

…and had been taken unawares by the responses to her initial feelings.

I’m sure she had a very good idea of what she was in for when she posted her “This is not a drill” message in support of Maya Forestater. And, she’s received abuse over saying facts, not over “feelings.”

Latterly I felt she could have been calmer & kinder …/

Tell that to those who continue to smear her and heap abuse on her. Tell us why Rowling is not entitled to use all the anger, sarcasm, and disdain … Read the rest

Someone called Kirstie Allsop has been doing a lot of clueless uninformed social media lecturing on How To Be Kind to our trans siblings blah blah blah, so I finally got exasperated enough to find out who she is to be lecturing from such a great height.

She’s a tv personality.

Gareth Roberts at Spiked almost exactly a year ago:

We all know people who are totally unaware of the complexities of a situation, but who are still totally confident in opening their big gob to pronounce on it…For much of the past week, I’ve been watching with a mixture of amusement and horror at the Twitter travails of TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp, who has now entered the trans

Trump thought he was supposed to be able to reject as many jurors as he wanted.

Donald Trump complained Wednesday that his lawyers were not given “unlimited” chances to reject prospective jurors at his New York criminal hush money trial.

Mr Sir, if you could reject prospective jurors without limit, then there would never be a trial at all. That’s not how this works. Hope that helps.

“I thought STRIKES were supposed to be ‘unlimited’ when we were picking our jury?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Imagine admitting you’re that stupid. Imagine making it public of your own free will.

Samantha Chorny, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City, told CNBC that if there were

Wrong.

Today's High Court ruling sets a dangerous precedent.

It targets Muslim students, and cannot be removed from the ramping up of Prevent and recent govt extremism definition.

No child should be policed for the peaceful practice of their faith.https://t.co/lHUuTRoeo8

— Runnymede Trust (@RunnymedeTrust) April 16, 2024

It’s a secular school, which means it’s open to children from all religious backgrounds and none. Group public prayers go against that. Runnymede Trust should have a long hard think about the moral pressure public prayers exert on other children from Muslim backgrounds at that school.

Public prayer is a not very subtle form of proselytizing. Secular schools should not be forced to allow it.… Read the rest

Joan Smith on Humza Yousaf and misogyny and law:

Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, let the cat out of the bag when he revealed yesterday the real intention behind the SNP’s proposal to bring in a standalone law on misogyny.

Yousaf claims that men can be victims of misogyny — and that they’re as or more likely to be targets than women. “Trans women will be protected as well, as they will often be the ones who suffer threats of rape or threats of disfigurement for example,” he said, offering no evidence for the assertion.

And also, of course, offering no reason to believe that men can be women.

Yousaf doubled down, repeating one of the most cherished illusions

No YOU are.

One day, GCs & Sex Realists will reflect on how they "once believed something" – that trans people are an ideological cult which recruits children, & harms women – & it will strike them "as absurd, even unhinged" just as those who once believed in Satanic abuse did in the 1980s pic.twitter.com/TStFlKeqY5

— Prof. Stephen Whittle OBE, PhD, DLaws, FAcSS, (@stephenwhittle) April 16, 2024

Whittle thinks that our awareness that people can’t change sex will one day strike us as “absurd, even unhinged.”

That day will not arrive. Why not? Because people can’t change sex, and we won’t one day decide they can, just as we won’t one day decide that people can fly or live under … Read the rest

I remember when Republicans were the Law n Order party. Seems like forever ago.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of a charge federal prosecutors have lodged against hundreds of people who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

While the court’s three-justice liberal wing signaled support for the charge, the conservative majority raised a series of skeptical questions about its potential scope and whether it would criminalize other conduct, such as protests.

A decision against the government could reopen some 350 cases in which defendants have been charged with “obstructing” an official proceeding by pushing their way into the Capitol in 2021. The charge can tack up to 20 years onto a prison sentence.

I … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The Three Anti-imperialists.

I’ve never understood people who worship Marx like a god and treat his writings like holy text. The philosophers and thinkers of the past had good ideas and bad ones. As I see it, the general rule is, the further back you go in time, the more surprising it is to find good ideas that hold up today — and the more credit is due to those who came up with them — and the more apt you are to find bad ones that didn’t hold up so well. Because that’s how knowledge is built: over time. So it seems weird to me that anyone would revere thinkers from centuries … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Looking fixedly in the other direction.

In the James Rieger edition (1974/1982) of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), Rieger’s introduction says this about Shelley’s father William Godwin:

Of all the tracts published by the Johnson circle, none had so great or enduring an impact as Godwin’s Enquiry considering Political Justice (1793).

Godwin argued that once the mind has been cleansed of superstition, emotionalism, and respect for custom, the free and rational man will necessarily perform virtuous actions, which will be socially useful and, at the same time, personally pleasurable.

Legislatures, courts of law, monarchy, marriage, and all other forms of “positive institution” with wither away, and the wise world will enter upon

Hamza Yousef says men will be protected under new misogyny laws.

Scotland’s first minister has said transgender women will be protected under any new misogyny laws. Humza Yousaf insisted that “anyone affected” by misogyny would be covered, whatever their biological sex.

That is moronic. Anyone can be “affected” by anything; it’s meaningless. Hatred of women is bad for women. There’s no “anyone” here; the word is quite specific.

Women were not included in the recent Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 that was introduced on 1 April – a decision that Mr Yousaf said had followed discussions with a number of women’s groups.

What kind of discussions? The kind where Mr Yousaf says “You bitches don’t … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Sonderval on And a crime in Germany?

Actually, the situation is more complicated than described in the article by Tagesspiegel.

A biology PhD student (who is the focus of a lot of TRA criticism and hate since she dared trying to give a talk about the biology of sex) said that the Nazis did not pursue trans people. TRA activists then accused her on Twitter of being a holocaust denier.

The court clearly said that she is not a holocaust denier in the normal sense or anything like that, but that if you are a trans activist focused on this topic only (and only then), your opinion that the Nazis did pursue trans people is an … Read the rest

Attempt to force secular school to stop being secular fails:

A Muslim student at a London school has lost a High Court challenge against its ban on prayer rituals. Michaela School in Wembley was taken to court by the girl over the policy, which she argued was discriminatory. The non-faith state secondary school previously told the High Court that allowing prayer rituals risked “undermining inclusion” among pupils.

Theocrats will of course retort that secularism undermines inclusion of theocrats, which is true enough, but secularism has the advantage of neutrality. If the school allowed prayers for one religion then it would risk “undermining inclusion” for all the other religions and for secular neutrality. That, of course, is the goal.

In

The glorious future.

The Multipolar world is taking form.

No longer is the global majority going to turn the other cheek.

American imperialism, just like all of its imperial forefathers, will fall.

Only through the destruction of the empire and the tyranny of capital can we #FREEAMERICA and the… pic.twitter.com/917wFImO4v

— Midwestern Marx (@MidwesternMarx) April 13, 2024

… Read the rest

I’m pretty sure Willoughby is lying about this.

Smithsonian Magazine did an article on the Nazis and “trans people” last September, except that it admits up front that it’s not exactly about “trans people” for the simple reason that they weren’t a thing at the time.

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case. It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians before

It’s in The Sun, so I don’t feel like reading it, but I gotta say, that banner would make me feel the very opposite of welcome.

Sun: Shock as @NHS bosses unfurl banner featuring 21 'genders or sexualities' in hospital reception@UHNM_NHS — one of the country’s worst performing — insisted the flags help patients “be themselves” & supports "LGBTQ+ ahead of June’s Pride month"https://t.co/MjtdfkH7Dx

— Emily Wilding Davison (@Wommando) April 15, 2024

If all that gender chopped salad is welcome then gender skeptics are not welcome. Just for one thing, we don’t have a colorful stripey flag. We are aflagual. … Read the rest

Guy goes to a shopping mall to kill people.

I say “people” but of course that’s wrong. Sheer habit; sorry.

He went there to kill women. A man tried to stop him so he killed that one man too, but the rest were all women. Women are shit; women need killing.

The man who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre appears to have targeted women, police say.

Appears?

What would it take for the BBC to omit that “appears to have” part?

The New South Wales police commissioner told Australia’s ABC News that it was “obvious” Mr Cauchi focused on women.

The only man killed in the attack was security guard Faraz Tahir, 30, who