Greater Manchester Police lie to the public about a man who sexually abused a child.
Not a man and a woman; two men. “Naomi” there is a man. Greater Manchester Police knowingly lied about it; we know they know, because they turned off replies when they posted the lie.
Such childish door-slamming where journalism should be:
The court of session ruling upholding the UK government’s veto on Scotland’s gender recognition reforms contributed to a “sense of exhaustion” in the trans community, said Jennie Kermode, a writer, film-maker and adviser for Trans Media Watch, based near Glasgow.
After that we get five paragraphs of Kermode blathering as if trans people were the only people who have any stake in this issue. Hello? Guardian? Libby Brooks? Are you aware that women exist? That in fact there are a lot of us? That we have rights too?
Dylan Hamilton, a climate activist, said the ruling was “as much an issue about Scotland’s democracy as it is about the human rights of trans people”.
Gender recognition reform amounted to “a small administrative change that makes our lives slightly easier to lead”, he added. “I think the fact that this cannot even be passed is a dark symbol of how strong the opposition to our right to exist is.”
And yet no one is denying trans people’s right to exist.
Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx tells us:
A Hobart City Council member is under investigation by the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner for “inciting hatred” after declaring “trans women are men.” Louise Elliot is now facing a costly formal inquiry by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in a case which has the potential to restrict freedom of speech. If the tribunal rules against Elliot, she may be ordered to publicly apologize and pay a fine of up to $4,000.
For saying that men are men.
What else will we be ordered to pay large fines for saying? Fire burns? Oceans are wet? Pigeons are not tigers?
In March, Elliot attended a Let Women Speak demonstration organized by Standing for Women and led by British women’s rights campaigner Kellie Jay-Keen. The event was intended to provide women with a platform to express their concerns or criticisms of gender ideology.
As part of a prepared speech she gave during the event, Elliot stated that it was impossible to change sex, that “trans women are trans women and remain biological men.”
It is impossible to change sex. Trans women are men. How can tribunals fine people for saying that men are not women?
Meanwhile billions of people believe in a magic sky daddy, but it’s people who know that men are not women who are being punished and impoverished.
Peas on what now?
Peas on toast???
Come on, you’re joking, right? Aren’t beans on toast horror enough? Who tf puts peas on toast? You might as well put toast on toast. You don’t pile starch on starch on starch; that’s not how any of this works.
I’ll spell it out for the confused. No mashed potatoes on toast, no pasta on toast, no baked potatoes on toast, no lima beans on toast, no hashbrowns on toast, no toast on toast. If you’re going to put something on toast make it something that’s not bland heavy carbs.
The tension between free speech and discouraging genocide continues.
Harvard University’s president apologized as pressure mounted for the University of Pennsylvania’s president to resign over their testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism that critics from the White House on down say failed to show that they would stand up to antisemitism on campus.
“Their” testimony meaning Harvard’s and U Penn’s. I thought at first that was some weird random gender neutral wording but then managed to figure it out.
In an interview Thursday with The Crimson student newspaper, Harvard President Claudine Gay said she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.
Gay told The Crimson she was sorry, saying she “got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”
“What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,” Gay said.
…
Universities across the U.S. have been accused of failing to protect Jewish students amid reports of growing antisemitism following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The three presidents were called before the committee to answer those accusations, but their lawyerly answers drew renewed blowback from opponents.
…
The episode has marred Gay’s early tenure at Harvard — she became president in July — and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus. On Thursday, Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from a new committee on antisemitism created by Gay.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Wolpe said “events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.” A statement from Gay thanked Wolpe for his work, saying he helped deepen her understanding “of the unacceptable presence of antisemitism here at Harvard.”
See: Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week.”
Article by Eric MacDonald
Conservative Christians are increasingly intruding themselves into matters of public concern about which they apparently either know nothing, or choose to ignore what they do know. The example that I will use is a short essay, recently published in the ultra-conservative Catholic journal First Things.1 Written by Thomas M. Ward, an associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University of Waco, Texas, the article shows all the hubris of conservative religion at its worst. It is written as though its author lives in a vacuum, without access to any other word than his own. It is as though no one else had written on his chosen specialist subject, so that he can simply make it up as he goes along, using words that seem to have no connexion with anything in the world.
As an example, consider the title: “Indi Gregory and the Future of Death on Demand.” Death on demand is something, apparently, already available. All Ward is doing is to spell out, given his starting point, the future of death on demand. And yet, despite beginning there, he provides no evidence that there is anywhere in the world where death on demand, as he calls it, is legally available. Nor does he even attempt to define what he means by this term of art, which gives him the liberty to hoover up anything that is even remotely associated with whatever it is that constitutes what he means by death on demand, giving him carte blanche to say anything at all that he thinks relevant to his purpose.
Even the examples that he uses do not provide any evidence of death on demand. One concerns a little girl in Britain, Indi Gregory, born on 24 February 2023, in Derbyshire, sadly afflicted by a mitochondrial disease, a genetic condition that, according to the Guardian’s Josh Halliday, the National Health Service says is incurable.2 In the end, the courts decided, based on medical argument of what was in Indi’s best interests, that treatments for her condition should cease, because it was only prolonging the suffering life of a child, and that Indi should be removed to a hospice and given comfort care until she died.
Had death on demand been available in England, what need was there to bring all this before the law courts in London? Why was Indi not killed immediately if demand were all that was required? Yet the case was argued before the High Court and the court of appeal,3 where it was deemed not to be in Indi’s best interests that treatment for her incurable condition should be continued, not only because of the costs of treatment which had no chance of success, but because of the cost to Indi in the suffering involved in needlessly prolonging her life. In the end specialists removed life support and Indi died.4
Despite this, Ward tries very hard to link Indi’s death, and the basis on which it was determined, with the choice of an Italian actor who, having no choice of assistance in dying in her native Italy, went to Switzerland where she was able to receive the assistance to die that she sought. “Italy did not want her to kill herself,” Ward says, “but Switzerland was indifferent.”
This is the type of argument in a vacuum that I mentioned above. What does he mean by saying that Italy did not want her to kill herself, but Switzerland was indifferent? The law certainly forbade it in Italy, but what did Italians think? And where are the thoughts of Italy recorded? Laws prohibiting assisted dying are often very unpopular. In Canada more than 80% of Canadians were in favour of its legalisation before the Supreme Court ruled that it was a human right. What does it mean to say that a whole country was indifferent to the choice of an individual to receive help to die? Especially in view of the fact that the Swiss are almost unanimous – and have said so in a referendum – that help to die should be provided, not only to Swiss citizens, but also to those who are not citizens; notwithstanding a few religious holdouts who condemn assisted dying for religious reasons. Indeed, the actor, Sibilla Barbieri, whom Ward takes as his example, like many others who come to Switzerland for this purpose, made a public occasion of her choice to highlight the injustice of laws in Italy which prohibit the practice, thus publicising her view of the injustice of preventing people who are suffering intolerably from choosing to die when that seems better to them than remaining alive in conditions of great misery. No doubt many Italians agree with her, is the case also in many other places; though the Constitutional Court in Italy has refused to allow the question to be addressed by a referendum. In the UK polls have shown that the approval rates vary from as low as 66% to a high in 2019 of 84%.
But now, mark the difference. Ward wants us to think that the cases of Indi and Sibilla are similar in relevant respects, although he seems to misjudge where the similarity lies. The similarity resides solely in his belief that to help someone die is a harm.5 For Ward, the question of choice is irrelevant. Ms Barbieri chose to receive help to die in Switzerland where assisted suicide is legal, and has been legal since 1942 — without, it needs to be added, the grim sequelae that Ward predicts.6 Little Indi Gregory was dying, and at some point attending physicians believed that it was time to withdraw life support. She could not have chosen, given her age, and it is ridiculous to suppose that this does not matter.7
Yet Ward thinks it germane to say:
On the surface, death and Italy are the only commonalities between the Barbieri and Gregory cases. But these events taken together grimly foreshadow a world that will become increasingly difficult for opponents of assisted suicide to navigate.8
It is hard to see what he means by the grimly foreshadowing premonitions that disturb his sleep. After all, supposing Italy a common factor derives solely from the decision of the Italian Prime Minister, in an effort to publicise her religious or moral bona fides, in a moment of drama granted Indi Gregory Italian citizenship, and a promise that Italy would carry on with experimental treatments that Britain refused. Sadly, Ward seems not even to notice that in both cases there was someone who was suffering grievously. Further, the assumption that there were experimental treatments that could have been tried is not explored by Ward,9 as it should have been, though it seems to me likely that the High Court and Court of Appeal in London did make sure of this. Nor does he weigh the human costs to Indi herself of using her as a guinea pig at this point in her short life.
The problem, for Ward, really has nothing to do with Italy or with death as such. This is simply window dressing. But Ward’s concern can be quickly stated. According to Ward it applies equally to Indi as it does to Sibilla:
Today, the Hippocratic orthodoxy to do no harm has become optional. In Canada, Holland, and a fifth of American states, doctors are now allowed to kill people who want to be killed.10 Slippery slope predictions are coming true: not just the terminally ill, but also those with physical disabilities and mental illnesses are choosing to die — and in some cases, being encouraged to die.
But it is in fact not true that the Hippocratic oath is now optional. Nor is it true that in the named places doctors can kill people because that is what individuals want. What has happened is that what is deemed to be a harm is undergoing change. It is no longer taken for granted that death is, as such, a greater harm than being forced to continue to live in conditions of intolerable suffering from which only death can set us free.11 Slippery slope predictions are only coming true if in fact we continue to think it appropriate to force people to prolong their lives if life has become intolerable to the suffering person. In Canada forcing a person to go on living without the option has even been declared a human right by the Supreme Court of Canada. Being forced to continue living is now reasonably considered a harm to a person whose life has become for them a living hell. Life is, in itself, no longer considered to be always a benefit. There may be religious beliefs — though Ward does not mention any — according to which a chosen death is always a harm, but there is no reasonable general basis for making this claim, and religion should keep to its own lane in this respect, instead of trying to foist its strange beliefs on others who do not share them.
Notice that this does not mean that help to die should be provided, as Ward so unjustifiably characterises assisted dying, simply on demand.12 Indeed, assisted dying strives to avoid providing on demand assistance in dying. To do this conditions are prescribed in the law in terms of which a request for help in dying can be honoured. It must not be done according to the demand of a person wanting to be killed. Since Ward does not think there is a difference between one act of helping to die and another, which are, he assumes, acts of suicide, or simple acts of killing, he he seems to believe that any provision of assistance in dying is already to stand on a banana peel, but nothing that Ward says shows that our footing is that insecure.
Since law is the operative condition for providing help to die, the scenarios explored by Ward, about freeing up beds that could be filled up with worthier patients than those with severe illnesses that cause great suffering, can be done simply by providing help to die to those who are … Well, yes, to those who are … what exactly? Ward is predictably unclear at this point, for he is really in a cleft stick here and does not want to deal with the options available to him. Who does he have in mind when he says that some beds “will be taking up valuable space that could be given to worthier patients?” A less worthy patient, he thinks, will be one who in the future will just be killed indiscriminately, because he thinks this is the inevitable result of legalising assisted dying. But no one who supports assisted dying laws governing assisted dying reasonably reject such callous disregard of the value of human life. Assisted dying is a matter of choice under the law. It is not something that is compelled, nor should it be encouraged.13 It is Ward, and not those who support assisted dying, who is making this kind of egregious comparison, and then excuses it because he believes this will be the consequence of permitting people to receive help to die when suffering is intolerable and irremediable. But that is because he knows nothing about assisting dying and its protocols.
Ward even goes much further than this, painting as lurid an imaginative picture as possible of what he surmises will happen under the governance of something he characterises as “socialised healthcare.” Despite his misunderstanding, socialised medicine is healthcare which is available to every citizen as a matter of right, so that, unlike the United States, patients do not need to impoverish themselves, as in the United States, to receive health care. Instead, it is free, because everyone has a right to healthcare, and everyone’s life is valued. In other words, if Ward wants to understand things better, socialised healthcare is not socialist health care, but healthcare that is provided to everyone as a matter of social justice. The misunderstanding that welfare states are socialist is a mistake that could be made only in the United States, where anything that provides assistance from state or federal resources is widely held to be socialist or even communist and thus deeply suspect.14
Nevertheless, having done the American thing by merely positing that where socialised healthcare is provided, dangers will abound, he continues undaunted on the wings of fancy. The debate about Obamacare looms when Ward says:
In places with socialized healthcare, like the United Kingdom, agents of the government (“death panels”) rather than insurance companies will determine the threshold at which interventions [to save lives] are impermissible.
The reference to insurance companies and imagined death panels derives from his equally imaginative idea that insurance companies (at least in the United States) will someday, because of the availability of assisted dying, likely “refuse to cover life-prolonging and life-improving interventions when patients are past the [quantifiable] threshold” of suffering15 as determined by insurance companies themselves. This is ridiculous, of course, because there is no way to quantify suffering. As Elaine Scarry says (The Body in Pain), pain and suffering are known with certainty by those who are suffering, and doubted by those who are not. Each person suffers in their own way; and there is no way to quantify it. Undaunted, however, Ward suggests that where medicine is “socialised” this function of judging the quantity of suffering will be performed by government “death-panels,” instead of by insurance companies. There is no basis for any of this speculation. His wings are beating furiously, but he has not achieved liftoff.
Of course – to continue along the same dream sequence for a moment longer – Ward assures us that the heartlessness of insurance companies will have no purchase in the United States, because in the US insurance companies “are still accountable to the law and its judges.” Does he really imagine that dreaded “socialism” in the United Kingdom means that insurance companies in England are not responsible to the law and its judges? The mind reels at the mere suggestion that the United States and Britain differ in the way imagined. Ah, but you are forgetting the chief difference — Ward will no doubt assist me at this point — that in socialist Britain, while what might be done by insurance companies in the United States can be reined in by the law, decisions by government death-panels in the United Kingdom will be done by government itself and will therefore be beyond the reach of the law. If that is what Ward really believes, then he is believing things in a vacuum that he established long before he began writing; for in a government ruled by law, even the acts of government are not beyond the law. The idea that where healthcare is free as a matter of justice there will be death-panels that will be beyond accountability “to the law and its judges” is absurd. There is no more reason in Britain that government will ever decide (socialistically, in Ward’s sense) when the sick will die than there is in the United States, for both are governed by law, and are not directed by the whim of either business or government. The case of Indi Gregory is not an example of England saying no, and Italy saying yes, as Ward avers; it is as clear a case as could be hoped for that matters like this are answerable to the law, since the decision was made by the High Court and upheld on appeal.
This was the entire reason that Ward raised the issue of Indi Gregory in the first place. For he thought it gave him reason to say that despite the willingness of Italian doctors and the Italian government to try additional experimental treatments and do their best for [Indi], England said no.
Actually, it was English medical authorities who argued before the High Court that further treatment was futile, and should not be done, because at the centre of the dispute was a dying child who continued to suffer while attempts to save her were fruitless, and could only prolong her suffering. Ward seems to forget the suffering child at the centre of the dispute. For him the use of experimental medicine on a dying child was not too long a moral reach, since death is for him an unquestioned harm, and further treatment, no matter the harm done, is always morally more acceptable without demonstration than helping to die or letting die. It never occurs to Ward that using little Indi as a guinea pig for experimental treatments is not obviously the best course to take when dealing with a child unable to make her own judgement about what she might prefer, were she able to say.
The rest of Ward’s article is devoted to highly imaginative scenarios that could only, it seems, be dreamed up by an American whose jaundiced view of government thinks that we are best served by individual action rather than by government sponsored services. Forget the fact that individual action in the United States allows more poverty in a highly developed and immensely rich industrial power than is tolerable anywhere else in the developed world, and increasingly in the developing world as well, while charity medicine is the only form of healthcare that is available in the United States to the lamentable poor, if it is available to them at all. Forget the fact that one of the political parties of record in the United States never stops trying to get federal sponsored health insurance (which the American poor cannot afford) declared unconstitutional, or attempts to do the same for social programmes that help the poor to survive at all.16 Forget the fact that there are more privately owned small arms designed for war in the hands of American citizens than there are in many militaries around the world, so that people can be killed indiscriminately by those upset by some trivial matter that accessible mental health care might mitigate. Also worthy of remark is that America is the only country in the world where school children are routinely murdered en masse to satisfy a lust for weapons that can be carried about as if the United States as a whole were modelled on the Wild West where every man (and now, as equal opportunity dictates) every woman too can walk the streets armed to the teeth.
As I say, Ward is resident in a vacuum, and has not allowed his highly charged imagination to range outside the limits of the prison house of his own mind. I cannot think of one “good” argument or one “reasoned” explanation in his article that can reasonably be thought able to survive outside of his fevered imagination. I say this with regret, but I say it sincerely believing it to be true. And all of this is offered to us in an orthodox Catholic journal for our instruction in the one true faith.
© 2023 Eric MacDonald
1 Accessible here: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/indi-gregory-and-the-future-of-death-on-demand
2 This is of course careful newspaper speak for we cannot say that it is or isn’t, but that is what is claimed for it, even though it is doubtful that the court would have acted as it did had it not been established that, given available treatments, Indi’s condition was incurable.
3 The European Court of Human Rights declined the opportunity to hear the case.
4 This is not an uncommon thing to do when suffering is great, and no chance of survival is likely. Most of us have experienced the same or similar situations, and all Ward’s agonising over death on demand will not change this fact.
5 He suggests that the only relevant similarity is Italy, and, unbelievably, death, which is a palpable attempt to mislead us.
6But does he really forecast horrors? Or are his horrors what others think it is reasonable to plan for, and have been thought reasonable by some ever since Miguel de Montaigne and John Donne wrote about assisted dying, not to mention support for suicide in the classical world of Greece and Rome — by Plato and Epicurus, for example. Regarding the use of the term “assisted dying” here I am prepared to support the use by referring to the writings of both Montaigne and Donne where they speak clearly in terms of help to die.
7 I will only say here that the only thing that can justify assisting someone to die is choice, voluntarily made in conditions where the stability of the decision is known, and the conditions are such as to warrant it on the grounds that the person making the choice is suffering in ways that cannot be remedied, and that the choice is in accord with the laws that govern assisted dying in the jurisdiction concerned. Choice matters for assisted dying, as all the laws governing assisted dying declare.
8 My italics. A difficulty which we should celebrate, by the way. But notice Ward’s use of the term assisted suicide, which he prefers to assisted dying, even though assisted suicide has undesirable historical associations which assisted dying does not force upon us. Self-killing or self-homicide, which is what the word suicide means, are very different than being assisted to die, yet Ward insists on the former, as though this is what we must mean.
9 Or he might have argued, as is often done, that there is always the possibility, no matter how remote, that a treatment may soon be available – so we should wait.
10 My italics. This is strictly speaking not true. It is not wanting to be killed that justifies assisted dying, but choosing to be helped to die in situations of great and irremediable suffering. Wanting has nothing to do with it, for those who ask for help to die do not want to die, as such, but in their own view, need to die before living swallows up all value in life and leaves them with nothing but suffering.
11 There are important facts here about the increasing severity and frequency of suffering because of modern medicine and its success which I forbear to speak of here. I mention it simply to alert the reader to the fact that other factors enter into the issue of assisted dying that did not obtain before the increasing success of scientific medicine, which leads to the fact that more people now suffer from long-term degenerative conditions that were spared those who more often died of short-term acute conditions than is now the case.
12 I shall continue to use the term assisted dying instead of assisted suicide, or simply killing, as Ward prefers, since there is no reason to use any other term. Dying is something we can do, as many a martyr will testify. There is therefore no reason for supposing that it is not something we do or can be helped to do.
13 The problem with encouraging someone to seek help to die is that it confuses the issue for the suffering person. Assistance in dying must be both informed and voluntary, and anything that interferes with either condition must be avoided. Ward seems to be unaware of such limitations and that is because he is arguing about assisted dying in a vacuum.
14 Of course, Ward does not even mention the fact that in the United States the Catholic Church is making every effort to buy hospitals and other healthcare facilities so that people’s choices in extremis will be limited to those allowed only by Catholic doctrine. Even in Canada, where healthcare facilities are provided by our tax dollars, the Catholic Church still makes every effort it can to make sure that the church has an influence on medical options provided.
15 The problem here, which I will not discuss in detail, is that suffering is not quantifiable. The idea that there is a quantifiable threshold of suffering is simply to imagine such a thing without any sound basis for holding that there is such a metric, but it plays a crucial role in the vacuum which Ward inhabits. I wonder that he is not gasping for breath at this point!
16 Which ends up, for Ward, in describing individual action regarding health care in terms of “members of independent communities of medical care [which] would shoulder an enormous burden of practicing medicine in ways that are just”! And he says this without even a hint that he can see the almost dream-like irony of the idea in a country in which millions have to do without healthcare altogether.
Judges have ruled that the UK government acted lawfully in blocking Scotland’s gender self-ID reforms. Legislation making it easier for people to change their legally-recognised sex was passed by the Scottish Parliament last year. The UK government blocked it from becoming law over fears it would [have an] impact on equality laws across Great Britain.
The Court of Session in Edinburgh has now rejected a Scottish government legal challenge to the veto.
The Scottish government can appeal.
Campaigners against the reforms warned the legislation could risk the safety of women and girls in same-sex spaces such as hospital wards and refuges. Supporters argued it would make the process of obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC) easier and less traumatic for trans people.
And, shockingly, the Scottish Parliament were happy to sacrifice the safety of women and girls – half the population – for the convenience of trans people, who are a tiny fraction of the population. One has to wonder why letting a tiny set of confused people “change their sex” (which is impossible anyway) is worth putting the female half of the population at risk.
Popehat says people who paid attention to Elise Stefanik’s “yes or no” are credulous and stupid. He’s probably right.
America faces many problems. The easy ones we solve or ignore. We struggle with the hard ones. Hard problems raise complex questions that lack glib, one-word answers. The stubborn thirst for simple answers to hard questions is bad for America. It’s anti-intellectual, pro-ignorance, pro-stupidity, pro-bigotry, pro-reactionary, pro-totalitarianism, pro-tyranny, pro-mob.
Other than that…
He’s right though.
Take this week’s Congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” A generous interpretation — a credulous one — would be that the hearing was designed to inquire why colleges aren’t protecting Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. A more realistic interpretation is that the hearing was a crass show trial primarily intended to convey that a wide variety of dissenting speech about Israel is inherently antisemitic, that American colleges are shitholes of evil liberalism, and that Democrats suck. Since Democrats do suck, they mostly cooperated.
The core Two-Minute Hate of this carnival was Rep. Elise Stefanik’s demand for yes-or-no answers to questions about whether policies at Harvard, Penn, and MIT would prohibit calling for the genocide of Jews. You might think Elise Stefanik is an unlikely standard-bearer for a crusade against antisemitism, given that she’s a repeat promoter of Great Replacement Theory, the antisemitic trope that Jews are bringing foreigners into America to undermine it. But if you bought Stefanik’s bullshit, you probably didn’t think that far.
Hey now, it’s not that I didn’t think that far, it’s that I didn’t know she’s a repeat promoter of Great Replacement Theory, and I didn’t pause to refresh my memory about her views and actions. Which is kind of the same as not thinking that far, but more ignorant.
He goes on to clarify in detail why her question was bullshit, and concludes with
I don’t blame Jews who feel under siege in America or on campus, even if I sometimes disagree with their interpretation of criticisms of Israel. Feelings are not right or wrong, and in the face of so much overt Jew-hatred, I understand a tendency to interpret ambiguous statements in the worst way possible. I think we should feel compassion and empathy for people who feel that way.
None of that is solved by pretending hard questions are easy. None of that is solved by letting demagogues and hucksters take advantage of the moment to push their agenda. None of that is solved by contributing to what America is becoming — stupider and meaner.
H/t ROB
A York University professor who wrote an award-winning book on the use of direct action in protest movements is among 11 people facing criminal charges in the defacing of a bookstore with red paint and accusations its Jewish founder supports genocide. Toronto Police have described the bookstore defacing as motivated by hate.
Lesley J. Wood, an associate professor, who chaired the university’s sociology department from 2017 to 2021, was charged this week with mischief over $5,000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence by Toronto Police. The allegations relate to red paint thrown on doors and windows at the Bay-Bloor outlet of Indigo, Canada’s largest bookstore chain, and posters depicting its founder and chief executive officer, Heather Reisman, on a fake book cover entitled Funding Genocide.
…
The incident at Indigo sent shock waves through the Jewish community, said Bernie Farber, founding chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
…
But pro-Palestinian activists said it was aimed at highlighting Ms. Reisman’s support of Israel, including her co-founding a scholarship fund for foreign soldiers who enlist in Israel’s army. Rachel Small, a member of the Jews Say No To Genocide Coalition, knows some of the accused and said groups of police officers broke open the doors of homes before dawn and arrested some individuals in front of their children. She called it an attempt to intimidate the protesters.
But they aren’t just protesters. They also (allegedly) vandalized the bookstore. Throwing paint over shop windows is not just protest.
Originally a comment by Freeminder on Referral.
The Enhanced DBS can go much, much further. Arrested but not charged, cautions, even interviews under caution (even not being a suspect) are recorded. Driving offences (speeding etc.) can appear.
It can also go deeper: contact former employers, check present and past addresses, so yes, gossip and personnel records can be examined.
Several government bodies (i.e. health, education, emergency services) regard not using pronouns as requested by an individual as a serious safeguarding issue, which can result in disciplinary procedures or dismissal. It is no surprise the DBS was consulted: it can be used to destroy someone’s career but then also make them virtually unemployable (too many jobs need DBS, from taxi driving to social work). Not being able to produce a clean DBS is sufficient for many companies or public bodies to withdraw job offers. This is a very heavy-handed way of bringing employees into line. Only an employer can refer to DBS, not an individual, so scaring others into compliance. I have seen first hand the damage a referral can do to a colleague: disciplinary, job loss and career gone. There is no appeal, no way back. And the DBS itself appears to have no one monitoring it, it can do what it wants and take as long as it wants.
Worse, many companies make a job applicant pay for the DBS check, in advance, but then add an ‘admin fee’ with a massive mark up. (I have seen 300%.) However the DBS in many cases cannot be transferred to another employer, and that means sometimes having to spend a lot of money or have a large deduction from the first wage slip.
In the UK, vetting is for police, prison and armed forces and goes into even greater depth (financial records, family history, relatives).
Now there is a catch 22.
Today, they’ve told me they can’t come to a decision. Even van driving jobs need DBS clearance.
What is DBS? You can see it under the “caseworker”‘s signature: “Disclosure and Barring Service.”
So there’s a “service” that runs around “disclosing” i.e. gossiping tattling ratting accusing whining pointing to prospective employers, and is in charge of “barring” the people it gossips about?
Seriously???
And in case that’s not bad enough they can also say “Soz we haven’t done you yet, maybe next month, kthanxbye.”
Really???
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Insult & injury=.
I think that what needs to be taught regarding First Nations and their history is that the “Noble Savage” concept is insulting and patronizing. What I have experienced as recently as 4 years ago in my 300 level course in diversity is not indoctrination about the poor natives or brown people but the necessity of broadening our experiences to better understand other cultures and how they have integrated into our own. Those students who have this fantasy about an idyllic pre-Columbian world are likely to have gotten it from anywhere but a UofT anthropology course, like perhaps social media. I think the same thing whenever I see someone claim that indigenous peoples worldwide didn’t have two separate sexes until Captain Cook (or whoever) forced them to.
Like Iknklast, I do not think that campuses are completely captured by postmodern fact-free thinking about gender and sex and world history; the bias of the news that we concentrate on receiving influences the perspective of what we read and see. There are student groups dominated by LGBTQ but I don’t think that you are forced to take an LGBTQIA+++ loyalty pledge to be a professor, student, or admin on campus. It may be necessary to be a closeted TERF in some situations, but Campuses are not the “woke hellholes” that some people paint them to be.
The events that are allowing trans ideology to dominate memorials of real women killed by violence from men are disgusting, and need to be turned back, but I do not know how we will get to that point with those who think that trans ideation of their oppression trumps all. We need to be able to convince those “allies” who claim it doesn’t harm anyone to let people believe that they are the other sex that this is a clear example of harm; and it’s enabled by using chosen pronouns, allowing males to enter wherever woman want to have their own spaces or groups.
And this definitely erases women’s experience of violence. Wasn’t there already a full month of remembrance of trans everything including violence?
Republican Liz Cheney has made no secret of her criticism of former President Donald Trump. It’s what made her an outcast in her own party and cost her her job in Congress last year.
The former Wyoming representative was one of just 10 Republicans to back his second impeachment in 2021. She became one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, for which she explicitly blamed Trump.
Cheney’s vocal and sustained criticism of the former president led to her losing her leadership role as the No. 3 House Republican and, eventually, her primary campaign for reelection.
You know…the surprising thing is not that Cheney does this but that more Republicans don’t. At first blush it seems obvious why they don’t, but if you pause to think about it…why aren’t more of them disgusted and horrified at what he’s done and is doing to their party? Being conservative doesn’t have to mean being rude and trashy and disgusting, but with Trump at the wheel, it certainly looks as if it does. You know? It’s like Freethought Blogs. By the time I left that place I was ecstatic to get away from it. It wasn’t “oh damn I’ll miss all those thoughtful careful eloquent people,” it was “ew ew ew ew get me out of here.” Why isn’t it like that for more Republicans?
This week Cheney releases Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, a no-holds-barred accounting from inside the Republican party of the days before and after Jan. 6, Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and her often-lonely role in trying to thwart them.
Cheney name-checks members of GOP leadership too, including former and current House speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson.
Cheney tells Morning Edition‘s Leila Fadel that the dangers she describes in the book are ongoing, from Trump’s defiance of the institutions meant to check him, to the Republican politicians who she says put their own career ambitions ahead of their duty to the Constitution.
I guess that’s one answer to my question. It’s not the party, it’s their careers.
“People really, I think, need to understand and recognize the specifics, the details of what he tried to do in terms of overturning the election and seizing power and the details and the specifics of the elected officials who helped him,” she said. “I do think it’s very important for people to understand how close we came to a far greater constitutional crisis — and how quickly and easily — in a way that is, frankly, terrifying.”
Cheney does credit a handful of brave Republicans in state and federal offices from stopping “the worst of what could have happened.” But she says many of those people won’t be there the next time around. The stakes for the country, she adds, “couldn’t be higher.”
…
Cheney isn’t afraid to name names in her book.
Among them: She describes McCarthy, the former speaker, as a coward and hypocrite who knew Trump’s election claims to be false but defended them publicly anyway. She calls Johnson, the current speaker, an election denier who was easily swayed by Trump’s flattery well before he ascended to House leadership.
Many others were simply scared.
Cheney writes that some members of Congress told her at the time that they believed Trump should be impeached but couldn’t vote that way because they were afraid for their security and that of their family. She urged listeners not to gloss over that fact.
“People really need to stop and think about: What does it mean in America that members of Congress are not voting the way that they believe they should because they fear violence instigated by, then, the sitting president of the United States?” she adds, calling that “a place we haven’t been before.”
And she says once her colleagues took that position they were able to rationalize it, which helps explain where the party stands now.
“Once you’ve accepted something that is so indefensible, then it’s hard ever to sort of go back and say, ‘Well no actually, I should have stood against that.’”
So they didn’t, and we’re doomed.
Oh look, how sweet, NPR chose yesterday as the day to run a flattering story about trans “woman” Kai Cheng Thom. Who’s he? He’s the one who gave the keynote at the University of Toronto event nominally to commemorate the 14 women murdered for being women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. How adorable of NPR to puff him up on the very same day he had the unmitigated gall to center himself instead of the 14 murdered women and women in general.
The byline is Jess Kung, Lori Lizarraga, Leah Donnella, Dalia Mortada. All women? All trans women? Half and half? Three and one? Who knows. They’re all helping NPR insult and displace women. Fuck NPR and them.
What’s the story?
Kai Cheng Thom is no stranger to misanthropy. There have been stretches of her life where she’s felt burdened by anger, isolation, and resentment toward other people. And not without reason. Her identities, especially as a trans woman and a former sex worker, have frequently made her a locus for other people’s fear and hatred.
Diddums. Try being a woman locked in a classroom with a man who hates women and has a gun.
Here is the disgusting narcissist in person, whining about how “afraid” he is to be there, shoving dead women aside so that he can talk about his pretense of being a woman. He actually does have the gall to call it “pure spite” for us to object to his role as keynote speaker at an event remembering 14 women who were murdered for being women.
A very carefully defined version of “inclusion.”
Academic specialist in inclusion calls for ‘evil’ Jewish conference to be ‘blown up’
A senior academic at the University of Bristol who specialises in inclusion, inequality and discrimination has called for someone to “blow up” a conference organised by the Jewish Labour Movement.
Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol Harriet Bradley made the comment while reposting another remark about the gathering which read: “If you wanted to know where you can find every racist, n**ce and sh**house in Britain, now you know.”
Above that post, which included the poster advertising the JLM event, Bradley wrote: “Somebody blow up the venue!”
I’ve had a look at her Twitter and to be honest it’s hard to believe she’s not a troll. Her tweets are so simple-minded she sounds either 12 or a troll or soft in the head.
The ex-Labour councillor has since deleted the tweet but other inflammatory posts by Bradley remain online.
In one she says about the conference: “God preserve us. I’d walk through mud and nettles rather than listen to these evil people.”
Another message from Bradley, posted on 5 December, reads, “All Zionist supporters should go straight to hell. They are demons not human beings”.
Does that sound like an Emeritus Professor of anything to you?
Reduxx on another male usurpation of an event to commemorate women:
The University of Toronto invited a trans-identified male to speak at a memorial ceremony dedicated to the women who lost their lives during the École Polytechnique massacre. Despite it being the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women in Canada, the speech instead focused on “addressing transmisogyny.”
Hosted by the University’s Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Center, the event was held today at the St. George Campus in downtown Toronto. While the official announcement claimed the event was intended to memorialize the 14 women slaughtered during the École Polytechnique massacre, the keynote speech was almost completely unrelated to the horrific shooting.
The event was first introduced by two students of the University who began with a speech suggesting that pre-colonial Indigenous cultures did not practice any form of violence against women.
And how would those two students know that exactly? And is it likely? Is it even slightly plausible? All cultures practice violence against women.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and Vice-Provost Sandy Welsh also spoke before the keynote was introduced, with Welsh giving out a number of awards “recognizing individuals who’ve shown a commitment to ending gender-based violence.”
In other words they carefully, deliberately avoided saying “violence against women.” Quislings.
The keynote address was delivered by trans-identified male Kai Cheng Thom, who focused on the “rise in transmisogyny and violence against queer and trans women globally.” Thom, a writer and former prostitute, identifies as a “non-binary trans woman”
In other words he’s a man talking about himself at an event that should have been about 14 murdered women.
During his speech, Thom read poetry by a trans-identified male and condemned those who opposed his platforming at the event.
In other words he’s a narcissistic man berating people who think an event to commemorate murdered women should be about those women and violence against women, not about self-obsessed men like him.
During the keynote, the University of Toronto provided audience members with a website link they could use to propose questions for Thom to be asked during the Q&A. The submission link was quickly shut down after a barrage of inquiries were submitted asking why Thom had been invited to speak on transmisogyny on a day intended to commemorate a femicide.
Yes how dare people object to letting a man do all the talking at an event to remember the systematic slaughter of 14 women by a man. How frightfully rude to object.
This represents the third year in a row where an event commemorating the massacre centered a trans-identified male speaker focusing on transphobia rather than the femicide.
In 2022, Fae Johnstone, a trans-identified male, gave a keynote address at Durham College in North Oshawa, Ontario, during the 33rd anniversary of the massacre.
…
The previous year, in 2021, the Prince Edward Island Advisory Council on the Status of Women invited Anastasia Preston, a biological male who identifies as a woman, to speak on “gender-based violence” at a vigil honoring the women murdered in the École Polytechnique massacre.
One insult after another, year in year out.
Kemi Badenoch in action.
Encouraging.
I think Kendi needs to get around more. He’s very parochial. “Whiteness” just isn’t the root of all injustice in the world. Racism is not just white USians v everyone; there is racism among and between people of all hues. There is also rivalry, hostility, aggression, competition, war, oppression, exploitation among groups of every kind you can think of. Humans are very good at seeking out differences, no matter how slight, in order to create ingroups and outgroups. Believe it or not, at some times, in some places in the world, the people on top had darker skin than the people on the bottom. It happens.
In short “whiteness” isn’t as interesting as he thinks it is.