Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • The 22‑foot colossus

    Golden calf pig.

    A towering gold statue of Donald Trump was unveiled at the president’s golf course in Doral, Florida, during an emotionally charged ceremony presided over by an Evangelical pastor.

    Placed on a pedestal in a clearing of palm trees, the 22‑foot colossus depicts the president thrusting his fist into the air, echoing his defiant gesture after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

    I wonder if it ever occurred to anyone involved in this that putting up a statue to yourself is…erm…not exactly a reputable way to go about things.

    At Wednesday’s dedication ceremony, the sculpture was draped in white and blue fabric, resembling a Greek toga. It was encircled by a few dozen guests seated in chairs, as Pastor Mark Burns — a member of Pastors for Trump — spoke at a podium.

    “Today at Trump National Doral Miami, we witnessed an unforgettable moment,” Burns wrote on social media before emphasizing that the gilded effigy was not a false idol.

    Excuse me excuse me pastor sir – yes it is. If ever anything could be called a false idol it’s a giant statue of the worst human being on the planet.

    The statue, of course, is both hideous and laughable. His paunch is neither concealed nor minimized.

    The statue — which rises 15 feet atop a 7-foot base — was commissioned and bankrolled by a collective of crypto investors seeking to boost visibility for their memecoin, $PATRIOT, according to The Daily Beast.

    Oh I see, so it’s basically a commercial.

    Feast your eyes.

  • Permission to appeal granted

    Yessssssssssss

    …full consideration. They warrant full consideration, is how the tweet ends. The more in “see more” is just one word. Whatevs.

  • Just barely

    Lining up the obstacles:

    When President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — but just barely.

    If faced with the same tests today, those guardrails and the people who held the line would largely be missing, a ProPublica examination found.

    At least 75 career officials who once held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety are gone. Two dozen appointees — including many who either actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote or are associates of such people — have been hired to replace them. And once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers.

    But Trump can’t run again. What are they planning here? A coup that looks kind of sort of legal?

    Mind you, Trump won’t be on the ballot in two years anyway; he hasn’t got that long.

    Since the start of his second term, Trump and his appointees have made significant changes at federal agencies tasked with helping to safeguard elections. In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, the Department of Justice and other agencies have left, been fired or been reassigned, ProPublica found.

    In their place are roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of those people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election-denial movement.

    So who is the Trump Chosen Successor?

    It won’t be anyone Trump chose or endorsed, because he clearly thinks he will live forever, but his enablers must have someone in mind, to go to all this trouble.

    Officials at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had provided research to the first Trump White House that disproved many theories claiming that the 2020 election had been hacked. CISA also played a crucial part in publicly countering these claims by producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them.

    Then, only weeks into Trump’s second term, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. They also froze CISA’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks. Eventually, all CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred.

    Get all the truth-finders out. Replace them with liars. Result: Trump in the job for all eternity.

    FBI Director Kash Patel dismantled the agency’s public corruption team, which had previously been deployed to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded.

    (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

    The voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. Trump then filled the section with conservative lawyers, including at least four who participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

    Conservative lawyers are one thing and Trump-assisting lawyers are quite another. There’s nothing conservative about Trump. He’s destructive rather than conservative, and corrupt more than he’s anything else.

    We’re so screwed.

    H/t Mostly Cloudy

  • We’ve been here before

    Hey kids it’s time to rejimcrow the south.

    Amid raucous protests Thursday, Republicans in Tennessee enacted a new U.S. House map that carves up a majority-Black district in Memphis, reshaping it to the GOP’s advantage as part of President Donald Trump’s strategy to hold on to a slim majority in the November midterm elections.

    The final Senate vote unfolded as demonstrators chanted loudly in the galleries and hallways. Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver stood on her desk in the Senate chamber, holding a banner denouncing the redistricting as a “Jim Crow” effort, then clapping and dancing. Other Democratic senators linked arms in the front of the chamber. Republican leadership quickly adjourned the special session, sending the new map on to Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who promptly signed it into law.

    …

    Tennessee is the first state to pass new congressional districts since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week significantly weakened federal Voting Rights Act protections for minorities. But more Southern states could follow. Republicans in Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina also have taken steps toward redistricting.

    We’re rushing backwards as fast as we can.

  • Handcuffed and shackled

    No stone left unturned.

    A Frenchwoman who moved to the United States to marry a Vietnam war veteran she first met six decades ago returned to France Friday after she was detained by US immigration authorities, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said.

    The 85-year-old Marie-Thérèse Ross “returned to France this morning, and we are pleased about that”, the foreign minister told reporters on a visit to the southern city of Montpellier.

    She had moved to Anniston, Alabama in 2025 to marry the former Air Force colonel, and was seeking a green card, which allows people to live and work permanently in the United States.

    Well, at least we didn’t shoot her in the head. That’s pretty generous of us, right?

    They had met sixty years ago but married other people.

    Decades later, after they were both widowed, they reconnected.

    According to the New York Times, Ross gave up her life in the French city of Nantes and moved to Alabama, where the couple married in April 2025.

    But the American died suddenly in January at the age of 85, throwing her immigration status into uncertainty and leading to her detention by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

    Good for us. That’s how we do things – no fiddling around with compassion or a sense of proportion or a consideration of likely risks or their absence, just pull our socks up and throw people into the hoosgow the instant their spouses join the choir invisible.

    Ross had entered the United States in June 2025 on a tourist visa that allowed her to stay for 90 days. However, she was still in the United States “seven months later,” according to US authorities.

    Citing accounts from US neighbours, her son told AFP that his mother was arrested, “handcuffed and shackled”.

    I repeat: that’s how we do things.

    H/t Athel Cornish-Bowden

  • Toy soldier

    Mark Kelly is not backing down.

    Senator Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., remained defiant today as he attended oral arguments in the case stemming from his lawsuit challenging the military’s actions against him.

    “After 25 years in the Navy, I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by an administration that does not want to be held accountable,” Kelly said. “I will not back down.”

    The oral arguments at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals come after a lower court’s order that blocked the Department of Defense from taking steps to demote him or reduce his military retirement pay.

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to take those actions following Kelly’s participation in a video with other members of Congress, urging troops and members of the intelligence community to defy unlawful orders.

    Pete Hegseth is a punk.

  • Papers please

    They’re promising mass deportations.

    Top Trump administration officials this week reinforced their plans to execute mass deportations as a key strategy on immigration.

    Speaking at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Ariz., White House border czar Tom Homan praised the work of Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers over the last year and said the high number of arrests and deportations was expected to continue.

    Immigration officers arrested more than half a million undocumented immigrants last year, according to officials speaking at the Expo, and are now making about 1,200 arrests a day; President Trump had campaigned on a promise of a million deportations a year.

    I have to wonder…did Trump’s mother have permission to immigrate here? Did his paternal grandfather have such permission?

    • Mother (Mary Anne MacLeod): Born in 1912 on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, she immigrated to the United States in 1930 at age 18, worked as a maid in New York, and became a naturalized citizen in 1942.
    • Father (Frederick Christ Trump): Born in 1905 in the Bronx, New York, he was the son of German immigrants (Friedrich Trump and Elizabeth Christ).

    Trump’s ancestors didn’t hobnob with Jefferson and Adams; they weren’t here yet. They hadn’t immigrated to the US yet.

    The rules have changed since then. Fair enough. But this venomous raging hatred of people who immigrate without permission is a tad rich in a guy whose own mother did the same thing.

  • Teach the children well

    The Telegraph:

    Secondary school pupils are being taught it is their responsibility not to offend other people.

    Not the best lede I’ve ever seen. It’s not crazy to teach children not to be gratuitously rude. It all hinges, of course, on what “offend” is taken to mean.

    A GCSE revision guide for citizenship studies states that Britons have a responsibility “to use freedom of speech but not offend”.

    The textbook is designed to help 16-year-old pupils prepare for their Pearson Edexcel GCSE in citizenship studies. Almost 21,000 pupils took the subject in England in 2025.

    Labour has made citizenship a central pillar of its education strategy, making the lessons compulsory for primary school pupils.

    Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has described this as part of a “plan for change” to help young people “step boldly into the future”.

    The same Bridget Phillipson who has refused to release the new guidance on single-sex spaces until after the May 2026 local elections. I think we can assume she considers it “offensive” to say a man is not a woman. I think she’s not one of the people we want telling us what we can’t say.

    Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, told The Telegraph: “It’s utterly wrong-headed to teach children they have a right not to be offended. Schools should be places where ideas are tested and debated, not repressed.”

    Yes but again, it depends. If children are calling people racist or sexist epithets, the school should tell them to stop.

    Free Speech campaigners have criticised the resource for “whipping up cancel culture in schools”.

    Lord Young of Acton, the director of the Free Speech Union, told The Telegraph: “This revision guide is encouraging children to cancel their classmates for saying something they find offensive. It’s whipping up cancel culture in schools.”

    That could be true or it could be a matter of not gratuitously and/or bullyingly calling other children harsh names. There is a difference. To spell it out, no the schools should not pretend men can be women lest they “offend” men who pretend to be women, and at the same time no the schools should not let kids call each other “nigger” or “faggot” or [and especially] “cunt” – which is a very popular epithet in the UK.

    “If children are being taught in school that the right to free speech doesn’t include the right to be offensive, God help us.”

    Quoting Lord Justice Sedley, he added: “Free speech includes not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to promote violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

    Does name-calling of the kind I mentioned tend to promote violence? Probably. It may be something people do instead of violence, but it may also be a step in working up to violence. That’s a pretty familiar dynamic, right? A quarrel starts, the words get harsher, the fists fly?

    But then comes a whole new problem with this “textbook”.

    The textbook also states that it is “discrimination” to provide lavatories only for men and women and that “human rights come ahead of the right of a country to conduct its own affairs”.

    As examples of discrimination, it includes “gender reassignment discrimination, eg toilets provided only for men or women”.

    The textbook seems to be incoherent as well as wrong. What is “toilets provided only for men or women” supposed to mean? Do they think toilets should be provided for rabbits or horses or the local chimpanzees? What kind of toilets are schools supposed to provide in addition to those for women and men?

    In the “Answers” section at the back of the guide, it adds: “Gender can change individual identity. For example, an individual born in one gender might choose to change to another gender, with changes in appearance, clothing, and practical aspects such as which public toilets they use.”

    But they’re still going to use either women’s or men’s.

    Also, of course, the usual – the claim that an individual born in one gender might choose to change to another gender is just the familiar magic bullshit. People born one sex cannot change to another sex; gender is just make-believe; eat your spinach and do your homework.

    The guidance appears to go against the findings of the 2024 Cass review, an independent NHS England report carried out by Dr Hillary Cass, which found there should be “no exceptions” for single-sex facilities at schools and colleges, including lavatories and changing rooms.

    Campaigners said it was “grossly irresponsible” for the exam board to tell teenagers that it was lawful for someone to change to another gender and use the lavatories of their choice.

    It’s irresponsible and it’s bad pedagogy. Magic changeable sex is a fantasy, and should never be taught to children as a fact.

  • At the morgue

    Pro Publica reports:

    At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.

    Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.

    In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.

    Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families’ fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.

    Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough.

    Post-pandemic plus contemporary with Robert Kennedy’s loud confident quackery.

    Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.

    “I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.

    “That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”

    …

    Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot, research shows, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, where in many cases oxygen can’t reach their brains and blood pools around their skulls. Perhaps most alarming is that, according to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.

    But Kennedy refuses to use his influence to warn parents. Nice guy.

  • Proud to tell people

    Oh goody, another news story about pronoun people feeling seen at last.

    It was at a ClimbingQTs event that Luce first felt “proud” to tell people they were non-binary.

    Well-placed scare-quotes. People don’t need to “feel proud” to tell people they are [whatever tedious item it is]. People don’t need to feel proud all the time, especially not about invented fashionable idenninies that are of no interest to anyone but the possessor.

    ClimbingQTs is an LGBTQIA+ advocacy group and the largest social climbing club in Australia.

    Unfortunate wording. “Social climbing” is a pejorative for attempts to appear more classy than one was born.

    Nineteen-year-old Phoebe, who is a trans woman, had a similarly positive experience.

    Because she was in the process of undertaking gender-affirming care, she was mandated to see a psychologist, who recommended the group to her.

    “It was nice to have other queer people, especially older people, navigating all the silly bureaucracy of getting on gender-affirming care,” she said.

    Ah yes that silly bureaucracy of not rushing to put confused teenagers on cross-sex hormones.

    For Luce, competitive climbing was a world away from the progressive bubble of social climbing.

    Despite being non-binary, they participated in the women’s category at youth championships, given the binary nature of elite sporting competition.

    Well yes. The binary nature of elite sport is because women and men are physically different. It’s not some stuffy rule imposed for no good reason; it’s about the reality of bodies. The people-making sex is not as strong as the other sex, and that’s why there are women’s categories.

    But while an inclusive competition is welcome news for many gender diverse participants, Hamilton acknowledges that it does not solve the issue of trans women who want to compete in the women’s category.

    Hamilton doesn’t mean the issue of men who want to invade the women’s category and need to be told No.

  • of everything he says

    No, see, that’s where you go so very wrong.

    It’s that “the comedic nature of everything he says” bit that’s so wrong. That’s one of the things that’s so repellent about him. Not one of the most important, for sure, but definitely one of the most annoying. Maddening. Make you twitch infuriating. He thinks he’s a comedy genius and he’s not. He’s not funny at all, ever.

    It’s quite a common thing, people who think they’re funny but aren’t. Bill Murray specialized in being that guy some decades ago, and he was good at it. Trump does it without rehearsal.

  • More more more more

    No opportunity for graft left unused.

    Trump has trademarked the name “Donald J. Trump International Airport”—and could soon generate millions of dollars for his family.

    Palm Beach County commissioners will vote on Tuesday on whether to use taxpayer dollars to rename Florida’s Palm Beach International Airport the “President Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

    They have now voted. They did not vote to tell Trump to fuck off.

    If they approve the name change, a trademark deal between the county and DTTM Operations LLC—a company run by Donald Trump Jr.—will force the airport to run all airport-branded merchandise by the Trump family for approval.

    Why? Why did the county make that deal? What is wrong with everyone?

    Trump would become the first and only president with an airport named after him who has trademarked his own name in this manner.

    While Trump’s companies have claimed that the trademark is only for legal protections, and that Trump won’t directly profit, the agreement signed by Trump and reviewed by the Miami Herald would leave loopholes for the president’s companies to sell “President Donald J. Trump Airport” branded merchandise off-site, and even gives the president control over biographical information included at the airport.

    So why didn’t the Palm Beach commissioners just tell him to go soak his head? Or, better, to set his dick on fire?

    The agreement also allows Trump to create the list of “approved retailers” from which airport stores have to buy Trump-branded items. If the county or any retail businesses want to sell DJT Airport merch, they have to buy those products “exclusively and directly from such entities designated by Licensor.” The licensor is DTTM—of which Trump Jr. is the president.

    Just say no. Everybody just say no. Tell these relentless greedy pimps to go far away and never come back.

    Doubts about the ethics of the deal were raised months ago, with Palm Beach lawmakers stating over email that the airport renaming would confer “a commercial benefit upon the president and his companies.” Even still, the deal may very well be approved on Tuesday, giving perhaps the most blatantly corrupt president yet another free pass.

    It was, so it did. We can never get out of the sewer.

  • A thertain law pwoject

    Oh dear oh dear – is it all over between them?

    Onlookers point out that Joly doesn’t care about wins, he’s in it for the fame and glory. Martyrdom is very glory-bestowing.

  • The Great Seats Removal

    I would love to know more about this, but haven’t yet found anything.

    He says Obama took the seats out of a Boeing 757 and filled it with cash to send to Iran.

    That………………….doesn’t sound very plausible. I haven’t been able to find anything that even resembles it.

  • Aging out

    A snip from a comment on a public Facebook post:

    In some schools, a large percentage of girls begin identifying as something else as early as middle school. Most of them are just exploring, which in itself is a good thing, though the moralistic or victim overlay that goes with it is harmful. However, it’s become sort of a thing to try on these identities…

    That struck a chord with me because it reminded me of me. As a child I was always pretending to be something or other, usually some tv character who rode a horse. That probably isn’t very unusual, right? Lots of kids do it? Just playing at being someone else inside your head, without necessarily acting it out in front of others. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that the fashion for transing could be a version of the tendency to fantasize in youth. It wears off over time because it just doesn’t work – one starts to feel silly. The trans craze makes it possible, maybe even desirable, to keep doing it well into adulthood.

    I know I’ve mentioned this before, sorry to be repetitive, but of course it keeps coming up. It’s a touch bizarre that it used to be normal to stop fantasizing as one aged out of it but now it’s considered an idenniny, and a sacred one at that.

    Maybe there should be an age limit. People have to show their ID, as with alcohol, but in this case they want to be seen as younger than they are rather than older. No really, I’m still twelve, and I still like to pretend I’m a ballerina.

  • Worse than what did you say?

    The ancient hatred.

    A suspended Green Party candidate who was arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred will still be on the ballot paper for the party at the upcoming local elections.

    The Telegraph revealed that Sabine Mairey, who is standing in south London, had been arrested by the Metropolitan Police on Thursday after allegedly posting anti-Semitic comments online.

    A post allegedly shared by Ms Mairey included a picture of a man holding a placard that read “ramming a synagogue isn’t anti-Semitism, it’s revenge” above a picture of two children that it said had been “murdered by Israel”.

    The label “anti-Semitic” doesn’t really cover that. It’s promoting violence, which is a big step beyond being anti something.

    The post also appeared to suggest that Israel was worse than Nazi Germany, with a photo of Auschwitz that said the Nazis “had to hide what they were doing”.

    Is there an Israeli equivalent of Auschwitz? If there were surely we would have heard about it.

    Three days after her arrest, Ms Mairey was seen campaigning alongside Green activists in Clapham, south-west London. The Green Party was also distributing newly printed leaflets featuring Ms Mairey to residents at the weekend.

    Ms Mairey was arrested last week alongside Saiqa Ali, a fellow Green candidate who was standing in Streatham. She has also been suspended from the Greens.

    Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, told the BBC on Sunday that while it was “impossible to withdraw” candidates at this stage, he would tell voters not to support them.

    Mr Polanski, who had overseen a surge in party support since his election last year, has seen his own popularity plummet following his response to the Golders Green attack.

    He reposted a message on X criticising the police’s arrest of the man suspected of stabbing two Jewish men last week. He later apologised for sharing the post “in haste”.

    Hmm. He was in too much of a hurry to grasp why the police would arrest a man suspected of stabbing two Jewish men? Why the rush?

  • Smith sisters

    News flash: if you admit males who idennify as females to an all-female college then you no longer have an all-female college.

    Today, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened an investigation into Smith College, one of the nation’s largest all-women’s colleges, for admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams. OCR will determine whether the college violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) by allowing biological males into women’s intimate spaces.  

    Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies—but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity. An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX. 

    The two are not interchangeable. They do not mean the same thing. They are in fact opposed. Males who profess a vague non-tangible spirichooal idenniny are still males and thus do not belong in colleges that call themselves all-female. It’s very simple, yet constantly denied.

    When an institution holds itself out as being an all-women’s college, it is not just promising to deliver female-only dorms and bathrooms, and single-sex athletics; it is also committing to maintain a student body that makes possible a particular form of sorority and camaraderie.  

    And even solidarity. I don’t expect the Trump administration to call it that, but that’s what it is. It makes as much sense to insert males into that as it would to insert billionaires into a miners’ strike.

  • Diagnostic

    Seriously now…the fact that he keeps saying this, that he keeps bragging about it, is the test itself, and he fails it 100 percent.

    And remember, kids, he can push the button.

  • Guest post: A small asterisk

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Could completely reframe.

    Not to sound too contrarian, but I’d like to put a small asterisk next to the charge of naturalistic fallacy here.

    The naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of applying moral justification to a belief or action based on finding examples of it in “nature”.

    But “natural” also has a real meaning, as in the philosophical term, natural kinds: these are categories that have a basis in material reality rather than subjective human thought.

    The gender-critical argument relies heavily on the argument that the biological sexes are natural kinds — objective, material categories of humans (and all other mammals) with a very clean division between them. Gender activists could just as well throw the charge of naturalistic fallacy at us for making the argument that transgender ideology is bogus because the sexes are natural, “real” categories while “gender identities” are not.

    With enough drilling down, one finds that virtually all moral arguments eventually ground themselves in claims about the material world, about the nature of reality. Every ought is ultimately anchored to an is. This can lead to what I like to call the naturalistic fallacy fallacy: argue about anything long enough and it will start to look like it rests on the naturalistic fallacy.

    For both gay rights and women’s rights, I believe that nature is in fact our friend, not our foe: the material basis of our differences has come to matter more and more in the battle to protect our freedom and dignity.

    Take, for example, the moral argument for banning gay “conversion therapy”. It’s one thing to say, “there’s nothing wrong with being gay, so people shouldn’t be forced to get therapy to un-gay themselves.” But that only gets us up to justifying a ban on forced conversion therapy. The moral argument that homsexuality is harmless justifies gay people’s right to not be forced into therapy to “cure” ourselves of it. Ok. So far, so good, no obvious naturalistic fallacy here. But then: what about gays who want to be straight? There are countless homosexuals who wish they weren’t (Elliot Page probably being one example). Why would we ban them from seeking therapy to at least try to straighten themselves out? Here, the argument suddenly draws upon material reality — nature: science has recently identified homosexuality as an inborn trait that is as-yet not modifiable. The moral argument for banning people from undergoing gay conversion therapy even if they truly want it is that homosexuality is natural, and it’s clinically proven to be harmful to even try to change it with the technology we have today. Now, imagine if doctors get better at brain surgery: it’s not entirely unfathomable that some day soon we will have the technology to modify people’s sexual orientations. Well, guess what? Homosexuals would be even more dependent on the argument that homosexuality is natural to defend ourselves then, wouldn’t we. It’s a tricky bind we could very well end up in.

    So we ought not dismiss the appeal to the “natural” so quickly. It’s becoming more imporant all the time, as technology restructures our civilization.

    Which brings us back to sex, “transgender”, and the medical technology used to modify the cosmetic appearance of people’s sex, like Elliot Page.

    I don’t fault Elliot Page for trying to prove that she’s changed sex by reaching for examples in nature. In fact, I think she’s on the right track to look to nature for answers: by that I mean she should be grounding her facts and her morals in the material world — in reality, which is… nature.

    It’s just that she’s done a terrible job doing that. Cherry-picking things that have nothing to do with material reality as it applies to her specifically. In her case, she really has stumbled into the naturalistic fallacy. Rather than looking at nature and finding comfort in the fact that she is exactly what she is — a female ape, with her own unique personality and attributes, and there’s nothing “wrong” with that — she wandered around the zoo looking for “natural” things that might back up her misguided idea that mammalian sexes aren’t natural categories at all.

    Ironically, she’s at once fallen for the naturalistic fallacy and something of an anti-naturalistic fallacy: she seems to have looked to nature to prove that her sex isn’t natural.

    Leave it to trans to make an illogical pretzel out of everything it touches…

  • Here for food

    What the hell are those pesky bison doing on our land???

    “This is a part of our country’s heritage,” said Alison Fox, executive director of American Prairie, a deep-pocketed nonprofit that has spent two decades buying ranches and grazing leases on public land in northern Montana to create the newly embattled home for bison.

    The conflict centers on 900 bison owned by the group, which was allowed by multiple administrations, including President Trump’s first, to graze on federal lands, much to the consternation of politically conservative ranchers who wanted the land for cattle.

    How dare those bison stomp all over land that ranchers want for cattle? It goes against God’s plan!

    This winter, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management reversed course and canceled the bison grazing permits. Citing the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, the agency said the federal grasslands where the animals grazed should go to livestock being raised for food, not bison largely enjoying their right to roam. The agency deemed the bison to be wildlife, not production livestock.

    Yeah let’s do that with everything. If it’s mere wildlife, get rid of it; keep only the animals that humans like to make into burgers.

    Conservation groups condemned the decision, as did Native American tribes, who say the anti-bison effort threatens their own herds as they try to revive bison populations that were hunted to near extinction by 19th-century settlers.

    Blah blah blah. McDonald’s doesn’t care about conservation or Native American tribes. Get with the program.

    But Montana ranchers like Perri Jacobs celebrated. She said the federal government, a perennial boogeyman for Western conservatives, finally seemed to be on her side.

    “These lands are here for food,” said Ms. Jacobs, whose family has raised cows in northern Montana for nearly 110 years. “We have to understand that progress and time march forward. Bison just don’t fit on the landscape anymore.”

    The lands are for food: they feed bison. The lands aren’t automatically “here for” whatever the new people decide they’re for.

    The state’s powerful land board — which includes Mr. Gianforte and other high-ranking Republican elected officials — is also taking steps toward kicking bison off Montana state trust lands.

    “We must ensure that public lands remain accessible and productive, rather than being locked away for the vision of special interests,” Mr. Gianforte said after the federal permits were canceled.

    How is it “special interests” to try to preserve some existing wildlife and their habitats? How is that not a general interest? It seems to me the profits of ranchers are a pretty special interest.