Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on That turning of the tide has been slow.

To me the most memorable and useful concept from 1984 was Doublethink (I believe the closest You get to a synonym in Oldspeak is “compartmetalization”):

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or

… Read the rest

For some reason this stupid banality from Laurie Penny, similar or identical to millions of others, has gotten on my nerves.

If someone tells you they would prefer to be addressed by different pronouns, or that they’ve changed their name, it’s basic good manners to respect that. You’re entitled to your personal philosophy of sex and gender, but you don’t get to tell anyone else how to identify.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) December 20, 2019

It’s banal, we’ve seen it a billion times, but all the same, it’s infuriating – because it’s so stupid. It’s not “basic good manners” at all, it’s a new and clunky and sometimes totalitarian bit of etiquette, which if pushed to the extreme becomes … Read the rest

Jane Clare Jones’s analysis of Judge Tayler’s ruling is mammoth (in a good way!) so I’ll take small bites.

Judge Tayler’s operating ontology surfaces in his refusal to recognise that for women to adequately express their political critique of trans activist demands it is necessary to point to sex and sometimes, even, to the sex of specific individuals – a refusal which effectively corresponds to an easy dismissal of the political stakes for women, and a blunt lack of respect for our specific political interests. The half-explicit denial of sex is also central to Tayler’s refusal of Maya’s claim that the GRA creates a legal fiction, a refusal that makes sense only on the basis of denying that there is 

… Read the rest

From the other direction…

https://twitter.com/RayyaGhul/status/1207967805401968640

It is though. Being female, aka having a female body, is what makes her a woman. It’s what follows from that that is a choice, and that should be a free choice.

https://twitter.com/RayyaGhul/status/1207967821566754816

But that’s there anyway. We deal with it via rights, justice, arguments, regulations, organization. We don’t deal with it by saying “Look, some women have male bodies, therefore you can’t say women aren’t as strong as men!”

https://twitter.com/RayyaGhul/status/1207967824771272706

No. It’s not “policing women’s bodies” to say that men are not women, because the bodies in question are not women’s bodies. It’s not “policing women’s bodies” to say that people with penises don’t get to take over feminism by announcing that they are … Read the rest

Soraya is pretty obviously right about this.

She is speaking the absolute truth, explaining what most people know, even if they don’t admit it. I’d like to think this would be seen as honest and strong, but I’m doubtful. The biases she’s talking about yield strong negative responses when women defend their own interests. https://t.co/QSm3IhtsMr

— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) December 20, 2019

Do we think a woman whose job experience for being president consisted of being a small town mayor would get any traction?

Don’t make me laugh.… Read the rest

Hmmm.

Ardent ally just cannot understand it.

She took a great ruling for trans people, a good news day, and she shit all over it, and made it about her, and I simply don't understand the abject cruelty of that. I never will.

— Aidan Comerford (@AidanCTweets) December 19, 2019

She made it about her? Really? I missed that – I didn’t think it was about her at all, but rather about reality.

Let’s see it again.

Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

— J.K. Rowling

… Read the rest

It’s nice that the discussion is so reasonable, so nuanced, so careful and thoughtful and temperate.

https://twitter.com/sea_of_shoes/status/1207712587129016320

That person has 90 thousand followers.… Read the rest

There’s much buzz about the fact that Billy Graham’s mag Christianity Today says Trump must go.

Much of what it says about why is wrong, of course, but not all of it.

We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.

That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love. We love and pray for our president, as we love and pray

… Read the rest

David Roth on what the Trump aesthetic tells us about the Trump:

As with most things about Trump, there’s not a lot to unpack here. Unrelenting artlessness has been Trump’s signature for as long as he has been a public figure, and that is something that cannot and will not change. The man himself cultivates and inhabits a world of luxury that’s frozen in the 1980s, and he’s spent most of his life doing the same things over and over again. They’re things that, as a friend once put it to me, are what a child thinks a rich person would do, like take a limo to McDonald’s or wear a suit to a baseball game.

Or have a … Read the rest