Facts and names

Feb 12th, 2025 11:35 am | By

Are words magic? Or no?

On Tuesday the White House broke with decades of precedent and blocked Associated Press reporters from attending two of President Trump’s media availabilities. The AP said it was blocked because it hasn’t changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.”

The newswire’s executive editor, Julie Pace, immediately condemned the action. And in a followup letter on Wednesday to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, she signaled a likely legal challenge.

The actions “were plainly intended to punish the AP for the content of its speech,” Pace wrote, adding that “the AP is prepared to vigorously defend its constitutional rights and protest the infringement on the public’s right to independent news coverage of their government and elected officials.”

At Wednesday afternoon’s briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the ban may remain in place.

Leavitt confirmed that the dispute is over a body of water. “It is a fact that it is now the Gulf of America,” she said.

Ahhhhhhh no it isn’t. That’s where you go so very wrong. It also, by the way, wasn’t a fact that it was the Gulf of Mexico.

The fact would be something like: the official name of this body of water is, in English, the Gulf of Mexico. The new fact would be the same but with the final word changed from “Mexico” to “America.” There are no facts about what the body of water’s name actually is, because names for bodies of water and mountain ranges and planets are human inventions rather than facts.

This does not change just because it’s Trump who says the new name is Gulf of America.



Guest post: Respect minus respectability

Feb 12th, 2025 10:09 am | By

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on All your words are wrong.

I think one of the big problems we have as a global society, is this idea of “basic respect” minus the idea of “basic respectability”.

You see it with the Republicans in America. They’re not respectable people.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing inherently disrespectable about being poor, about going through rough times or anything like that. What is disrespectable is – relying on federal aid and then voting to take it away from other people.

This is why the leopards have been feasting, the Republicans who are now crying about how their funding has been cut – knew it was going to happen, they just didn’t expect it to happen to them. That’s not respectable.

Similarly, the whole trans debate – it is a demand to respect something that just isn’t respectable. Strip it down to its core, and we just don’t believe what the trans are saying is true.

Demanding people say things that they don’t believe are true for your personal comfort is not respectable. Threatening to commit suicide if they don’t, is not respectable. Trying to silence any and all debate against what you say is not respectable. Throwing temper tantrums like a toddler when people don’t comply is not respectable.

So why should we respect it?



Real safety at work

Feb 12th, 2025 9:37 am | By

This guy…

[NC is Naomi Cunningham, the barrister representing Sandie Peggie; DU is Upton]

“Real safety” ffs – he’s a man, intruding on the women’s changing room, claiming to seek “safety” from a woman who doesn’t want a man in the women’s changing room.

“Why would I make it up?” he says – oh I don’t know, maybe for the same reason you made up being a woman? Because you make shit up???

Hey dude how about YOU treating colleagues with respect? By not invading their changing rooms for a start?

What an unbelievable shit this guy is.

Also Naomi Cunningham is a rock star.



Amateur hour

Feb 12th, 2025 8:50 am | By

Former Fox News personality says Ukraine just has to submit.

Donald Trump’s newly appointed defence secretary told allies on his first international trip that the US was no longer “primarily focused” on European security and that Europe would have to take the lead in defending Ukraine.

Pete Hegseth, speaking to defence ministers at a lunchtime meeting in Brussels, said Europe had to provide “the overwhelming share” of future military aid to Kyiv – and recognise that restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was unrealistic.

The Pentagon chief said he was “here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe”, though the language was notably toned down from a draft briefed in advance to the press.

This is a tv personality, remember, not someone with decades of experience relevant to being a top government official.

He also reiterated Trump’s position that “stopping the fighting and reaching an enduring peace” in Ukraine is a top priority – and that Kyiv must recognise that it cannot win back all the land occupied by Russia.

“We must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Hegseth said, sketching out an initial position for any peace negotiations with Russia.

“Chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering,” he added, though this could be interpreted as effectively acknowledging the annexation of Crimea, and large parts of the Donbas by Russia.

This could be interpreted as effectively handing Crimea and large parts of the Donbas to Russia on a plate.



Efforts to slash

Feb 12th, 2025 8:37 am | By

The winnowing continues.

The next stage of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal workforce is underway.

Agency leaders have been told to begin preparations for large-scale layoffs, known as reductions in force, or RIFs, under an executive order President Donald Trump signed Tuesday. They will work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to carry out the mandate, expanding the role of the billionaire’s team in reshaping federal government operations.

Titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” the executive order also severely limits federal departments’ ability to bring on more staffers and mandates that agency heads closely coordinate with their DOGE representatives on future hiring plans. Once the hiring freeze that Trump put in place is lifted, agencies will only be allowed to replace one of every four employees who leave and hiring will be restricted to the highest-need areas.

Yay. A week or two more and it will be as if the New Deal had never happened.

The order specifies that the reductions would not apply to public safety, immigration enforcement or law enforcement.

You know – the stuff that matters. Frivolous crap like public health, education, weather, national parks, the environment, labor, global warming, poverty, opportunity, disaster relief, and the like can just die off. Enjoy the ride.



All your words are wrong

Feb 11th, 2025 5:40 pm | By

The BBC repeats the lie yet again.

A transgender doctor is “only asking for basic respect” when it comes to having their gender identity accepted, an NHS employment tribunal has heard.

But it isn’t “basic respect” he’s demanding. It isn’t “basic respect” to pretend a man is a woman. It’s way beyond basic, and it’s not actually respect.

How about we start demanding some basic respect? Step one would be to tell these bullies to stop ordering us to pretend they are the opposite sex. We all have our own lives and concerns and goals, and we’re fed up to the back teeth with being told to waste a ton of intellectual energy on entitled brats who want us to devote a lot of our attention to them. No can do, children. We don’t know you and we don’t want to know you, and we sure as hell don’t want to jump just because you tell us to jump.

Dr Beth Upton also repeatedly insisted on being a woman after being called a man by lawyers during cross-examination.

You mean he insisted that he is a woman, or you mean he insisted on being called a woman. A man’s insisting on being a woman is just futility.



Guest post: The tribe itself is the “individual”

Feb 11th, 2025 11:01 am | By

Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.

On the “berdache” thing,

A couple points to note about “gender roles” in indigenous cultures:

The most important distinction between indigenous cultures and modern Western culture is the deep social and psychological distinction between collectivism and individualism. Virtually all indigenous cultures were (and are, in the case of those that still exist) collectivist, which is to say that everyone within them was/is raised to conceive of themself as a part of a whole — that the tribe or community itself consists of the “individual” and that each of us serves a small role within it. In a tribal collective, we are only a small part of the “person” that is conceptualized as the shared sense of connectedness with the collective. In a deep psychological sense, the tribe itself is the “individual” and one’s sense of purpose and accomplishment in life is derived from serving the tribe — ably and nobly doing one’s duty to the collective.

In this context, males and females in indigenous North America were designated right from birth into two separate channels of upbringing, to prepare them for the limited menu of roles available to women within the collective such as foraging, housekeeping, and child-rearing, and the limited menu of roles available to men within the collective such as hunting, governing, and tribal defence/warfare. So-called “third gender” roles such as berdache represented males whose demeanors were deemed ill-fit to serve the roles of hunters, governors, or warriors, because these men failed to socialize into the aggressive masculine behaviour profile and social role that males were expected to perform. In the modern context, we recognize these males to have been feminine, and most likely homosexual, men, but in the context of collectivism, they failed to meet the utilitarian standards associated with manhood, so they failed to be categorized as men at all.

But, indigenous cultures being very efficient with their resources, rather than exiling or executing feminine young men, they often found alternate uses for them within the collective. If a young male was perceived to be failing to sufficiently masculinize himself during his upbringing, he was re-categorized as a “berdache” — a separate “gender role” from both the masculine “man” gender role and the feminine “woman” one (he surely wasn’t a woman either, because he couldn’t bear children) — and he was given an alternative “third menu” of roles he could serve within the collective. This menu consisted generally of being put in charge of rituals and spiritualism — he became the village shaman — or he was assigned an alternative kind of household management — something akin to a “spinster aunt” who helps with childraising and other duties within a sibling’s household. Berdaches’ costume options were designated as separate from men’s, too, and they were generally more in line with the costumery typically prescribed to females within the tribe.

So feminine men were given a “special” status within many indigenous tribes (at least the resource-conserving ones that don’t simply choose to quietly execute the “runt” gay males instead), and they were often treated as extra spiritual and more in touch with the supernatural world. (This practice has even carried over somewhat into the modern Western world, for example with many feminine homosexual men going into the clergy because they couldn’t bring themselves to marry and settle into a straight household, or find any other comfort within the straight social roles that society makes available to men.)

To some degree, gender stereotype defying females also got designated as “third gender” or “berdache” and they, too, were given a small alternative menu of social roles they could perform within their indigenous tribes. But that was a less common occurrence because, alas, many tribes wanted to make sure every adult capable of bearing children (i.e., every female) got slotted into the social role that made that happen.

Another important distinction about “berdache” is that it wasn’t a choice that any male or female could freely make: these were collectivist cultures in which free individual choice was so limited as to be almost an alien concept. Males were desginated “berdache” by collective consensus (or decree by the tribal chief or council), by virtue of demonstrating their inability to live up to masculine “gender roles” (and to a lesser degree females were designated berdache by demonstrating an inability to live up to feminine gender roles) and demonstrating their suitability for the spiritual one instead.

It’s a common misunderstanding among people who have been raised in the modern individualist context that the existence of “berdache” in the North American indigenous past is proof that people back then were more free to “gender express” than they are today. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Modern cultural individualism is founded in the Enlightenment principle of individual freedom, which strives to dispose of the concept altogether that any one of us is born into a limited menu of roles designed to serve the tribe or clan or fiefdom we were born into. Individualism stems from a much more advanced, more complex, and more large-scale organization of society, which posits that if we all coordinate en masse and offer more social mobility to everyone, that each individual may find his or her way to the role in life that best satisfies their own personal desires, and that they may set their own life goals as a result. A pauper could in principle become President; a woman could become a firefighter; the son of a railroad tycoon could find his bliss as a Spanish Flamenco guitar teacher or whatever. And feminine males and masculine females are free to pursue whatever goals they like, because in a big enough society, there will always be a role for them that maximizes their chances at satisfaction and fulfillment in life.

The trajectory of liberalism in the West has been mostly to make strides toward such an ideal world. That is, until transgender ideology came along, which represents a massive lurch back towards the idea of assigned “gender roles” at birth and strict social categories based on sex.

Transgender ideology is a terrible conflation of the strict division of sex in terms of its role in human reproduction and sexuality (in which context sex is indeed fixed and unchangeable), with the old outdated strict division of sex in terms of limited assigned roles within small tribal communities that struggled to survive in harsh environments. It’s an absolute wrong turn. It’s a complete misunderstanding of the foundational principles of the Enlightenment, of humanism, and of progress itself.



Major Powergrabs

Feb 11th, 2025 10:04 am | By

Hahahaha Trump whined back in 2012 about Obama’s habit of…

wait for it

…issuing executive orders.

Snopes:

Claim:

In 2012, future U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted, “Why is Barack Obama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?”

Rating:

Correct Attribution

It’s fine when a white guy does it.



A nightmare colleague like this

Feb 11th, 2025 9:37 am | By

What I keep saying. It’s all about the narcissism.

Trivial??? How very dare you??!!



The suggestion box

Feb 11th, 2025 9:33 am | By

Executive branch v courts:

Trump and key members of his administration are lashing out at judges who have blocked some of his second-term agenda, suggesting they don’t have the authority to question his executive power.

Parenthetically, why do journalists so often say “suggesting” instead of “saying”? I suppose it’s an excess of caution for the sake of peace, but at the price of enfeebling the journalism. Trump and his people are saying these things very loudly and explicitly, so to call it “suggesting” is both absurd and cowardly.

So far, the courts have pushed back on Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship, freeze federal grants, and the overhaul of federal agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Over the weekend, the administration hit another roadblock when a federal judge temporarily restricted Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s vast federal payment system, which contains sensitive information of millions of Americans.

Musk accused the judge of being “corrupt” and called for him to be immediately impeached.

Please note: not a suggestion.

Their pushback against the judiciary comes as Trump and his allies assert a sweeping theory of presidential power, one they say gives him sole control of the executive branch. Legal experts told ABC News they believe the Trump administration is trying to set up cases to test that theory before the Supreme Court.

Democrats say Trump is trying to subvert checks and balances under the U.S. Constitution, including the role of Congress in setting the scope of federal agencies and conducting oversight.

“I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced certainly since Watergate,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “The president is attempting to seize control of power, and for corrupt purposes.”

Also not a suggestion. Neither side is suggesting.



No need to be impolite, missy

Feb 10th, 2025 3:36 pm | By

Peak Smug Male Jumps In to Lecture Women Who Know More About It Than He Does And Have Vastly More At Stake Than He Does chapter 87 billion.

Oh, gee, thank you, Peak Smug Male; as if we hadn’t already done that and only been punished for it anyway.

Says Peak Smug Male who has nothing to lose in this dispute, in sharp contrast to women who have so fucking much to lose.

How sad for you. We’re so bored with [n.b. not “of”] being told what to do by people who don’t lose anything when men take women’s jobs and titles and spaces and changing rooms and competitions and prizes.

Even though some of them are? Why cannot we? Who put you in charge?
  1. (Dan Hodges []
  2. (Dan Hodges []
  3. (Dan Hodges []
  4. (Dan Hodges []


Share the room and like it

Feb 10th, 2025 9:58 am | By

But sir…

“You are a man.” “Disagree.”

You can’t “disagree.” It’s not an opinion or a guess, it’s a fact. It’s a very very basic fact that everyone knows pretty much from birth. You can’t just wave it away with “I disagree” because it’s not subject to “agreement.”

The client is a torturer. A psychological torturer as opposed to one burning flesh, but a torturer all the same.


Whatever he wants

Feb 10th, 2025 9:30 am | By

Dashing into dictatorship:

While Trump and his henchmen deconstruct the administrative state, his lawyers are embracing the logic of dictatorship. The core argument emerging in their legal filings and executive orders — one without support anywhere in the Constitution or the law — is that simply by being elected, Trump has the power to do whatever he wants.

Trump’s imperial ambitions have made for some laughably thin legal theories. As Just Security noted, the government’s argument in defense of Trump’s birthright citizenship EO does not reference any citizenship statutes nor point to any authority that would give Trump the right to undo birthright citizenship via the stroke of a pen. Instead, after quoting the relevant part of the Fourteenth Amendment — ”All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — the EO just goes on to state that it “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

The problem for Trump is that the Fourteenth Amendment has absolutely historically been interpreted to do just that.

But Trump doesn’t recognize it as a problem, and nobody is forcing him to do so.

It can’t be stressed enough that there is no meaningful legal support for Trump’s actions. Yes, Republicans for a few decades now have flirted with the unitary executive theory — the idea that the president’s authority over the executive branch is absolute, particularly in national security contexts and when it comes to hiring and firing. (Well, to be perfectly correct, Republicans flirt with the unitary executive theory only when Republicans hold the presidency. When Democrats do, the constant drumbeat from the GOP is that the president should have very little authority.) But even the unitary executive theory hasn’t gone so far as to say that the president can do things like unilaterally close government agencies. Even when Project 2025 called for radical changes to USAID, for example, they didn’t argue it could just be closed.

But it doesn’t matter because no one is stopping him. We’re on a steep downward slope, and it’s freezing over.



Once the structure of the Self is dismantled

Feb 10th, 2025 8:22 am | By

It’s useful to have philosophy people on the scene.

The reference to the ‘how many fingers?’ torture bit towards the end of 1984 is very interesting. There’s a similar case in Severance, where Holly has to read out an apology script over and over again, ‘until she means it’. It’s a kind of set piece in epistemology texts, about ‘doxastic in/voluntarism’. Can I *will* my beliefs (doxa)? Can I believe something just because it’s in my interests to do so, and hence something I want to believe. Doxastic voluntarists think you can do this, doxastic involuntarists think you can’t. Doxastic voluntarists often point to torture cases, because they – torturers, not doxastic voluntarists – try to induce a breaking down of the structure of the will, together with the structure of the Self. Once the structure of the Self is dismantled, the victim can reconstruct their beliefs in a way that coincides with their interests, and end their pain. So the claim is that, if you can put people under enough pressure, you can make them believe that four is five, that black is white, that a man is a women. (None of this is terribly supportive of the NHS Fife position)



Some people have

Feb 10th, 2025 7:51 am | By

The Upton fella is having his turn at the tribunal.

NC points out that he knew some women would be unhappy having him in the room where they changed their clothes. He replies that some people – not women, of course, but the evasive “people” – have BIASED, MISINFORMED, UNPLEASANT OR BIGOTED OR TRANSPHOBIC VIEWS ABOUT TRANS PEOPLE.

The fucking nerve of this guy. No no, it’s not that women will be unhappy having this grotesquely self-absorbed callous misogynist shit staring at them when they take their clothes off, it’s that these bitches have NAUGHTY VIEWS about heroic people like him.

Gee, I wonder why the sane among us despise this ideology. It’s such a puzzle.



The research cannot find the benefits

Feb 10th, 2025 1:22 am | By

Some fads are more destructive than others.

More than 1,000 patients a year are sent for transgender chest surgery on the NHS. Data obtained by The Telegraph show for the first time the number of referrals for taxpayer-funded “masculinising” mastectomies from specialised gender clinics.

As many as 80 per cent of people using those services are females between the ages of 17 and 25. The 1,000-plus referrals could be the tip of the iceberg, because many people have transgender surgery privately to bypass long NHS waiting lists.

100 percent of people getting “masculinising mastectomies” are females, because males already have the end result of a “masculinising mastectomy.”

Zhenya Abbruzzese, co-founder and senior adviser at the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), said: “We are concerned that young people are being told that these procedures will relieve their distress when the research cannot find the benefits, but the harms of losing a functioning body part are certain.”

And it’s even worse than that. It’s not just that girls are being told that having their tits removed will make them happy, it’s also that they are being told, along with everyone else, that not rushing to have girls’ and women’s tits cut off on demand is peak evil transphobic wicked badness.

An NHS spokesman said: “Masculinising chest surgery is only available to adult patients who have a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a specialist NHS clinic.

Oh really? “Clinical” in what sense? “Specialist clinic” in what sense? What if it’s not real? What if none of it is real, and it’s just a bizarre destructive fad, and cutting one’s tits off for a fad is a seriously bad idea? What then?



Boss of facts

Feb 9th, 2025 4:46 pm | By

But a fact is the very thing it isn’t. It’s the opposite of a fact. It’s a fiction, and a lie. It’s fatuous to claim that X is a fact when X is obviously not even slightly a fact. Stop doing it. Everybody stop doing it. Everybody stop pretending your increasingly absurd daydreams are “facts.” They’re not.



As refugees fleeing persecution

Feb 9th, 2025 10:18 am | By

Trump welcomes refugees. Some refugees. A particular brand of refugees.

Trump’s offer to rehouse white South Africans as refugees fleeing persecution may not spur quite the rush he anticipates, as even right-wing white lobby groups want to “tackle the injustices” of Black majority rule on home soil.

Trump on Friday signed an executive order to cut U.S. aid to South Africa, citing an expropriation act that President Cyril Ramaphosa signed last month aiming to redress land inequalities that stem from South Africa’s history of white supremacy. The order provided for resettlement in the U.S. of “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” as refugees.

Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers, who own most of the country’s farmland.

White people represent 7.2% of South Africa’s population of 63 million, statistics agency data shows. The data does not breakdown how many are Afrikaner.

South Africa’s British rulers handed most farmland to whites. In 1950, the Apartheid-era National Party seized 85% of the land, forcing 3.5 million Black people from their homes.

It’s sad for Trump that there are few if any genuine Nazis left alive. He would so love to greet them at the airport.



Identifying as a victim of genocide

Feb 9th, 2025 10:00 am | By

Uh huh.



The progressives blindly went along with it

Feb 9th, 2025 9:05 am | By

Hadley Freeman tells an important truth:

I assume that, by now, most Sunday Times readers are au fait with gender ideology, which contends that a man magically becomes a woman simply because he claims to feel like one. Left-wing papers and politicians gasped in horror at Trump’s bill, and the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insisted only “bigoted” people would see males in women’s sport as a presidential priority. But President Biden opened women’s sports teams to males on his first day in office. This led to the deluge of videos of males clattering their female opponents, which ultimately curdled public opinion. You can’t argue that the question of males in women’s sports teams is the civil rights issue of our generation, and then insist only bigots focus on it just because you don’t like their answer.

The left was the big champion of gender ideology, and the right the naysayers, but it’s so easy to imagine it the other way round. Arguing that men’s desires should take priority over women’s safety, and any woman who objects to males in their private spaces should be denounced as a prude and a bigot: that really could be a far-right argument. And yet, because rapacious activist groups realised there was money to be made in convincing progressives that trans rights were exactly the same as gay rights, the progressives blindly went along with it. And, in doing so, left the door wide open for Trump and Elon Musk, who only had to say “men are not women” to look like the sane ones in the room.

In short, the left forgets that women matter too yet again. We thought they had learned that lesson.