Sigh. President of Humanists UK.

I guess women aren’t human enough.

Hmm.

Iowa.

I was waiting outside the PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte, North Carolina after Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally when my phone started to blow up. Ann Selzer, the vaunted pollster of Iowa, had just dropped a poll showing that Harris was leading Trump by three points in the Hawkeye State — a state Trump had won twice. Everyone in the political world wanted to talk about it.

The Trump campaign knew how bad this news looked. Tony Fabrizio and Tim Saler, the Trump campaign’s data men, released a memo challenging the findings almost immediately.

Not long afterwards, a New York Times/Siena College poll showed Harris leading in North Carolina, as well as Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. If Harris wins all four, she would not even need to win Pennsylvania, Arizona or Michigan in order to win the entire election.

Interesting.

30 hours or so and we’ll know.

Wait a second.

I’m reading an article about heterodoxy and how goony both the left and the right can be and yadda yadda but then I stumble to a stop.

Until recently, within the heterodox slice of the cultural spectrum, opposition to Trump was the obvious response to his singularly reckless and destabilizing political presence. The number of self-described centrist “Never Trumpers”—starting with Trump’s current running mate, who once compared him in this magazine to “cultural heroin”—were legion. But as the race tightened in recent months, I’ve been struck by a palpable shift in attitude among many liberal and centrist voices—a slackening of vigilance, and a softening on Trump.

This is not to be confused with the 180-degree pivot of prominent MAGA converts such as Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Ackman, as well as writers and journalists such as Naomi Wolf—erstwhile Democrats who’ve become outright Trump fans. What I observed this past summer, as Joe Biden’s campaign self-immolated and Kamala Harris seized the nomination, was a more general exhaustion among many heterodox thinkers, and a disinclination to support the alternative to Trump that was now on offer. Harris, many agree, is not an ideal candidate. But given the enormous stakes, I wanted to understand how anyone not already ensorcelled by the cult of MAGA could hesitate to support her.

I just can’t understand that – that disinclination. I can’t understand even if you think her policies are worse than whatever actual “policies” Trump favors.

The reason I can’t understand it is (as I keep saying, to the point of tedium) because he’s such a horrible human being in every way. I couldn’t vote for him even if he had better policies. Or at least I can’t imagine doing so – maybe if the reality were different I would change my mind, but here and now, I can’t imagine ever voting for him because he is such a pulsating tower of mindless sadistic cackling greedy self-dealing ruthless vengeful horror.

How do “heterodox” types manage to see him any other way?

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, [Coleman] Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed a lot more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as not right-wing enough.” He’s learned, he told me, to “discount” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his businessman instinct. He literally talks about this in The Art of the Deal. You start by saying something crazy, and then you walk your way back to a point of leverage in negotiations.”

No. Wrong. You can’t “discount” what he says, because what he says is what he says. I don’t care what he says in his ghostwritten book; the point is that people at the apex of government shouldn’t say horrible sadistic bullying dangerous crap. Nobody should ever “discount” a head of state who does that – especially one who does it every waking minute of every day. He’s a bad man. It’s a terrible mistake to install a bad person as head of state.

In 2020, Hughes voted for Biden, whom he viewed as a moderate liberal and a politician with a record of reaching across the aisle. This is not at all how he perceives Harris, whom he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and “deeply destructive to the long-term flourishing of the country.” When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen even a 10-second clip of her impressing me by analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so forth,” he told me. “I have basically zero signals of her competency as a manager or executive.”

While Trump, on the other hand?

I give up.

So. It’s in the news that Imane Khelif is indeed a man. Also, dogs can’t read.

Maybe now men will stop saying women should be beaten up for saying a man is not a woman?

No, of course not, now it will be women should be beaten up for getting it right too early, kind of like the premature anti-fascists of last century.

Baddy Kennedy in charge of public health: now there’s a plan.

Donald Trump suggested vaccines could be banned if he becomes president, in the clearest sign yet of a radical shake-up in public health policy should he put his ally Robert F Kennedy Jr in charge of it.

Trump on Sunday told NBC that Kennedy, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and former independent candidate who dropped out and endorsed Trump, would have a “big role in the administration” if [he] wins Tuesday’s presidential election. Trump said he would talk to Kennedy about vaccinations.

Why? Why talk to Dumb Kennedy about vaccinations? He’s not a doctor or a researcher so why talk to him? Why treat a public health issue as a political football instead of a public health issue?

Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, a theory scientists have debunked. He has also said in recent days that Trump has promised him control over a broad range of public health agencies if he returns to the White House, potentially putting him in a position to implement his most radical theories.

Trump did not contradict that claim and held open the possibility of banning certain vaccines. “Well, I’m going to talk to him and talk to other people, and I’ll make a decision, but he’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” the Republican nominee told NBC.

One, no, he’s not very talented, two, strong views are not what’s needed on technical questions.

Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s campaign, gave further credence to the weight Kennedy’s views might carry in an administration when he told CNN that he could be given access to federal data on vaccines safety. He also appeared to endorse Kennedy’s opinions on the supposed risks of vaccines.

“He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe,’” Lutnick said. “Let’s give him the data. I think it’ll be pretty cool to give him the data. Let’s see what he comes up with. I think it’s pretty fun.”

Ah yes, that’s what destroying public health is, it’s “pretty fun.”

Trump is publicly saying he thinks “leaving” after losing an election is optional. In other words he’s saying that if you lose a re-election it’s up to you whether you “leave” or not. He’s wrong. If you lose a re-election then leaving is mandatory. That’s the point of the election.

By the way there are other situations where leaving is mandatory. Say friends invite you over for dinner. At some point after the dinner part, you have to leave. Inviting you over for dinner is not the same as inviting you to move in. There is some wiggle-room – in fact it would be bad form to swallow your final bite and then immediately rise and head for the door. But it’s wiggle-room, it’s not “stay forever if you want.”

With two days left in his third presidential campaign, former President Donald J. Trump told supporters at a Pennsylvania rally on Sunday that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House at the end of his term, escalated his unfounded claims of voter fraud, and said “I don’t mind” if reporters are shot at.

With the remarks, Mr. Trump used the final days of his campaign to offer voters a stark reminder of the violence that came at the end of his term when, after weeks of his false claims that he had won an election he had lost, a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to try to prevent the certification of President Biden’s victory.

And yet he was allowed to run for the same office again. This country is badly broken.

On Sunday, at an airport in Lititz, Pa., Mr. Trump diverted from a closing argument about the stakes of the race with Vice President Kamala Harris and instead, his voice audibly hoarse and his speech sluggish, indulged in his personal grievances as he called the Democratic Party “demonic.”

No you are.

Reflecting on the state of border security at the end of his tenure, Mr. Trump said he regretted ever leaving office.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “we did so well, we had such a great—” and then cut himself off. 

After openly announcing he wants to be an unelected dictator. He wants to force himself on us the way he likes to force himself on women. The force in both cases isn’t a regrettable necessity to get what he wants, it’s much of the thrill of the thing. He likes forcing himself on people who don’t want him. Bullying takes him to his happy place.

Trump in cognitive decline:

When I say insane asylums, and then I say, Doctor Hannibal Lecter, does anybody know? They go crazy. They say, oh, he brings up these names out of— Well, that’s genius. Right. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. There’s nobody worse than him. Silence of the Lambs. Who the hell else would even remember that? I have a great memory, but they always hit me. I don’t bring it up too much because they have to take such a— he brought up Hannibal Lecter. What does that have to do with this? What is it? It has everything to do with it, right? He was – that’s who we’re allowing into our country, and, we don’t want to allow that into our countries, so I’ve done something for you for you that I haven’t done in 20 speeches. I brought up Doctor Hannibal Lecter and we’re allowing him, you watch, you watch these fake people will say again, he brought up Hannibal Lecter has absolutely nothing to do. You know I do the weave, right? The weave. It’s genius. You bring up Hannibal Lecter, you mention insane asylum. Hannibal Lecter. You go out, no. There’ll be a time in life where the weave won’t finish properly at the bottom and then we can talk. But right now it’s pure genius. Hey, I have an uncle, my uncle, Uncle John, my father’s brother, 41 years at MIT, longest serving professor has so many degrees, he didn’t know what the hell to do with them all in the most complicated. I understand a lot of this stuff, you know, I believe in that. Like, I mean, Jack Nicklaus is not gonna produce a bad golfer. Right. You know, that’s the way it works. It’s just one of those things and it’s in the family and it’s whatever

Originally a comment by Mostly Cloudy on It’s more than just a habit, it’s an aesthetic.

It does make me laugh that the article says today’s teenagers and twentysomethings are taking up smoking to “rebel”.

This is a generation that panics when someone uses the term “adult human female”.

This is a generation that bullies a writer (Elizabeth Gilbert) into withdrawing a book that’s set in Russia in the 1900s, because they think that the book is somehow pro-Putin.

This is a generation that has “challenging” books removed from their university courses because the rich little snowflakes are so easily triggered.

“Rebel?” The majority of today’s youth are conformist, philistine and easily offended. Somehow, we’ve raised a generation of Mary Whitehouses.

Laura Nyro and Joe Strummer wouldn’t recognise today’s pampered identarians, who love cigarettes but fear thought and action.

From the Sheer Unadulterated Stupidity Files: Hay kidz smoaking iz bakk.

…singers, actors and influencers seem to be bringing smoking back into vogue – quite literally, with cigarettes making a return as on the New York Fashion Week runways earlier this year as accessories.

So, why are cigarettes being glamorised again?

Lucy, a 20-year-old university student, says she took up smoking recently because “it’s just what everyone does”. Almost all her friends also smoke and she says it’s more than just a habit, it’s an aesthetic.

“I definitely think everyone trying to be brat has influenced people to start smoking because Charli herself says you have to have a pack of cigs if you really want to embody the vibe.”

Hunh hunh hunh yeah and if Charli herself takes a nap in the middle of a freeway you should do that too, right? Embody the vibe, maaaaan.

Journalist Olivia Petter says the cigarette has become a symbol that represents our nostalgia towards a bygone era of carefreeness, frivolity and hedonism and it’s making an comeback in pop culture.

You what now? Setting a dried plant on fire and putting it in your mouth is carefreeness, frivolity and hedonism? An addictive poisonous fire stick is luxurious fun?

Jessica, a 26-year-old who works in marketing, says smoking has “become so normalised again”.

“I didn’t know anyone that smoked a few years ago but now it seems like everyone is doing it and you sort of forget how bad it is for you.”

Well, if you’re really really stupid you do.

In the end the BBC admits it’s just bullshitting.

But, overall, the number of young people smoking is declining – official estimates show that fewer than one out of every 10 young adults in the UK smoke cigarettes – a steep drop from a quarter of 18-24-year-olds 12 years ago.

So smoking is making a comeback except that it’s not. Brilliant journalism.

The NY Times editorial board concisely sums up the bad guy:

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

They left something out though.

He’s just bad. He’s a bad human. He’s thoroughly awful in just about every way one can think of. (Can you think of any exceptions? Is he funny? Nice to children? Loyal? Honest? Charming?) The result is he’s an inspiration to thoroughly awful people to be even more awful. He’s a role model for how to be a complete shit. He’s a bully, he’s cruel, he’s greedy, he’s ungrateful, he’s vain, he’s a liar – and on and on. He’s poisonous, and it’s degrading and demoralizing to have him squatting in the top job.

OutKick reports:

As OutKick reported earlier Saturday, San Jose State suspended associate head volleyball coach Melissa Batie-Smoose. 

The university sent a statement to OutKick confirming the news, but did not provide a reason. “The associate head coach of the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team is not with the team at this time, and we will not provide further information on this matter.” 

Batie-Smoose filed a Title IX complaint against the school earlier this week alleging that San Jose State showed favoritism for transgender player Blaire Fleming at the expense of the women on the team. 

Following her suspension, Batie-Smoose spoke exclusively to OutKick. 

“We had a match today at 12 p.m. [Pacific Time] versus New Mexico. I was there at 10:15 a.m. [because] we were scheduled to take court at 10:30 for our pass and serve time,” Batie-Smoose recounted. 

“I walked into the building and was walking up the stairs to the gym, and I was met by administration, who asked me to step outside [and speak privately].” At that point, SJSU officials informed Batie-Smoose that she was suspended indefinitely, effective immediately, and forced to turn over her keys and school ID. 

She was not allowed to gather her belongings from her office, told to leave campus immediately, and instructed not to return to campus until further notice. “They said I would have to contact personnel at a later date to get into my office to get any of my belongings,” she said. 

In short they treated her like a criminal.

Officials handed her an envelope with the notice of her suspension and instructed her not to speak with the media or any of the players on the San Jose State volleyball team. 

But Batie-Smoose said she wanted to speak to OutKick, despite the mandate. “This is just another form of what San Jose State has been trying to do – silence people that are speaking up for their First Amendment rights and for what’s right,” she said. 

All for the sake of letting males invade and thus ruin women’s sports.

H/t Dave Ricks

Want to play the most boring game on the planet?

Iiiiiiiit’s Pronouns Pairs!

The Scouts have been encouraged to use gender-neutral language and to drop the terms “mum and dad”. Members have been encouraged to guide children through a card game called “Pronoun Pairs”, which has been devised as a way of teaching them about gender identity.

The game uses the character of “Billy the Butterfly” who is “non-binary” to introduce LGBTQI+ concepts to children.

If Billy is “non-binary” why the fuck is his name Billy? Why not Leslie or Alex or Terry?

The game, which has been branded “indoctrination” by critics, coaches youngsters to use gender-neutral pronouns, and a post-game reflection led by older Scouts suggests other ways in which language could be altered.

This suggests “using ‘sibling’ rather than ‘brother or sister’, ‘everyone’ instead of ‘ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘boys and girls’”. It adds: “You could use ‘parent’, ‘carer’ or ‘grown-up’ rather than ‘mum and dad’.”

But what for? Children who have one or two adoptive or step parents may not want to call them mum or dad, but why does that require teaching children in general about alternatives to the usual words?

For the sake of making a fuss, no doubt.

A guide to the Pronoun Pairs game, on the Scouts website, advises adults: “By taking part in this activity and learning about pronouns, we can celebrate the inclusion and diversity we’re so proud of. 

The game itself is played by turning over cards which depict Sam the dog, who uses “he/him” pronouns, Leslie the ladybird, who uses “she/her” pronouns, and non-binary Billy, who uses “they/them” pronouns. When the cards are turned, children must form a sentence about the character in question using their preferred pronouns, with an example given for Billy as “they ate a sandwich”.

When the game is over adults can talk through the lessons of the game with the Scouts.

Dear god. Have you ever heard of a more boring game in your life?

H/t Acolyte of Sagan

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on The non-optional communinny.

The guide references the BSA, so it’s now out of date. After 114 years of being the Boy Scouts of America the name has recently been changed to Scouting America. I only know this from a Telegraph article about the Scouts (no longer Boy Scouts) in the UK being taught about pronouns use by means of a card game, Pronoun Pairs. The whole thing is ridiculous.

[The game] suggests “using ‘sibling’ rather than ‘brother or sister’, ‘everyone’ instead of ‘ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘boys and girls’”. It adds: “You could use ‘parent’, ‘carer’ or ‘grown-up’ rather than ‘mum and dad’.”

I can see that going down well well at home. “Good morning Timmy.” “Good morning, carer, is grown-up taking me and sibling fishing today?”

The game states: “It can feel awkward or forced when you start implementing gender-neutral language. That’s normal.

Yes, it’s normal for it to feel awkward and forced because it is awkward and forced, you idiots.

The important thing is to keep at it so that it has a chance to become a part of your everyday communication.”

Ah, the old sales mantra; ‘persistence removes resistance’.

Behold: a guide to “inclusive scouting”:

A framework for advancing inclusion and belonging that is rooted in the Scout Oath and Law can guide our actions as we move between the different kinds of knowing. But what other guidelines and actions can facilitate inclusion and belonging in alignment with these values? In this section, we offer best-practices and guidelines to help further advance inclusion and belonging in our movement.

…

Meet people where they are. Given the discriminatory history of the BSA, chances are high that not everyone is committed to advancing inclusion and belonging in our movement. Those people are who we should be striving to speak with the most! It is important that we create opportunities for strong relationships and honest communication so that everyone has the opportunity to learn, challenge old habits, and live Scouting’s deepest values.

Always start with “yes”. If someone asks if they belong in Scouting, even though they’re a girl, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, an atheist, agnostic, or humanist, a person with a disability, or a refugee — and you hesitate — you’ve already made them feel like they don’t belong.

Ok, but what if they’re a bully or a boy who hates girls or a religious fanatic?

That’s one question, but I have another. Notice that there’s only one category that is a “community” as opposed to a simple noun.

I suppose that’s because it takes too long to say gay lesbian and then all the other labels. But the result is that lesbians and men who call themselves lesbians are lumped together into a community with trans people whether they want to be or not, and Scouts are trained to think of them as a community whether it makes any sense or not. It’s kind of like being married off whether you want to be or not. If you’re gay, sorry, you’re drafted into this invented “community” without your consent.

The Guardian insults us and tries to deceive us yet again.

Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. 

The Guardian lies to us in the very first sentence. Imara Jones is a man: he took a break to scroll the news.

A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.

No mention of women or feminists, of course. Pfffffff, who cares about them.

Also, the “equality” trick. Trans “activism” aka bullying has nothing to do with equality. It’s not “equality” to pretend that men are women, or that men can become women. Equality is equal rights and protections for women, the half of humanity that has been denied rights and protections since forever.

Since then, the urgency of her work has only grown. Republicans have spent more than $65m on anti-trans television ads in recent months, according to the New York Times…

But of course what the Guardian means by “anti-trans” is just pointing out the ways trans pseudo-rights demolish women’s rights.

And in 2023 and 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced each year.

Any bets on how many of those bills were not about LGB at all? But the Guardian loves to use the cheap trick of lumping the T and the Q in with the LGB so that the T and Q can ride for free on the LGB ticket.

On her podcast, Jones – a Black trans journalist and founder of the platform TransLash Media – investigates the anti-trans industry with a conversational tone, all while centering the voices and experiences of trans people.

A trans journalist is a fake pretending to be a journalist. Funny that they would admit it.

Thanks, Guardian. Even when talking about women’s safety, do be sure to include a man who pretends to be a woman, despite the fact that that kneecaps the whole issue.

Saoirse Ronan’s comment about women’s safety on The Graham Norton Show has gone viral after she said using a phone as a weapon is something “girls have to think about all the time”. Ronan later said the reaction has been “wild” and that the moment was “opening a conversation”.

Here, six women tell us what they think about the comments and how they feel about women’s safety.

Except it’s actually five women plus one man for the sake of inclooooooooosion. Which is like having one tiger in a conversation about humans’ safety from large predatory animals.

I’m a trans woman who only came out fully a couple of years ago. My style is everyday, nothing provocative, and I’m always taken for a woman. Walking home from the bus at night for the first time and feeling really unsafe I suddenly realised – this is what women go through the whole time. I’ve always been aware and supportive of women’s issues but even so, it was a horrible, shaming epiphany to realise that I’d seen past this basic fact of women’s lives. It’s so easy to ignore a danger or threat if you don’t have to experience it yourself. Kim, 60, classical musician, Sweden

To be fair, he is admitting his own cluelessness about this basic fact about women’s lives, but still – when the Guardian tells us here are six women commenting it should refrain from sneaking in a man.

If the union won’t stand up for women, women will walk. Janice Turner in The Times:

[Lisa] Lockey, 51, is one of five Darlington nurses in dispute with their NHS trust over its policy of allowing a trans-identified male colleague to use female changing rooms. When the health secretary, Wes Streeting, heard they were suing for sexual harassment and sex discrimination he was “horrified” and offered to meet them. Last week they travelled to London where he heard their concerns, including those of a nurse who has PTSD after being sexually abused as a child.

This meeting incensed North. It was “deeply concerning”, he tweeted, “that Wes Streeting appears to be once again pandering to anti-trans bigotry”. Three quarters of the workers North represents are female, yet here he castigates a Labour minister for listening to women, including some of his own members.

And there it is – the boulder we keep crashing into. Women are required to sit down and shut up and obey, because men who pretend to be women matter more – far far far more – than they do. Than we do. We women are the brutal oppressors, and men who announce that they’re women are our victims. BANG that’s the end of women’s rights. We finally had some, after all these centuries, but now they’re being yanked back again, on behalf of men who think they’re the only women who matter.

None of the Darlington nurses had a view on the “trans debate” until last August: they were too busy caring for patients or their own families. Then a male theatre nurse who calls himself Rose began using the female facilities where they change before and after a shift. Rose has not transitioned. He wears men’s clothes and apart from long hair he presents wholly as male, nor, say his colleagues, does he take hormones because he and his girlfriend are trying to conceive. Parading around in boxer shorts, staring at nurses in their bras and asking one woman repeatedly “are you going to get undressed yet?”, Rose made nurses feel so uncomfortable some started changing in the disabled toilet.

Yeah women always do that – ask other women in the locker room “are you going to take your clothes off yet?” We just can’t stand the waiting.

But when they complained to management they learnt that the policy of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust is that trans staff can self-identity into any changing room they choose.

Which means that female staff can’t. If men who claim to be women can self-identity into any changing room they choose, then women can’t choose a changing room with no men in it, because the men will always choose to follow them in. Heads they win tails women lose.

This policy is pure Stonewall playbook, part of the trans “toolkit” of measures it has long insisted every institution or company adopts, especially the rule that it is unhappy women who must be banished from their own facilities rather than — as the nurses have requested — a dignified third space being found for a trans person.

It’s almost as if that’s the whole point, isn’t it. Not really the female soul trapped in a woman’s body, but the male soul rejoicing to have found a way to bully women and watch them take their clothes off.

A vicious, vengeful trans lobby, which dubs opponents bigots, has frightened many into silence. The Darlington nurses were always whispering in hospital kitchens with distressed colleagues too fearful to go public. But they are determined neither to resign from jobs they love, nor to back down. Their tribunal case, which has a preliminary hearing this month, could set a major precedent. They also have a strong ally in Streeting, Labour’s least tribal thinker, who is determined to unravel NHS policy at source. Introduced by stealth it has turned loyal, hard-working nurses into unlikely campaigners.

Solidarity.

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on The rules of play.

From the Cass review and various whistleblowers, we can be pretty sure that the castrations are a punishment for the crime of being a little boy who displays all the behaviours associated with a high likelihood of becoming a gay man after puberty. As has been announced in the Westminster parliament, the Tavistock clinic, who were brought little gender-nonconforming children by their panicking homophobic parents, and egged on by the homophobic sociopaths of Mermaids and Stonewall, were openly ‘transing the gay away’.

My siblings and I, and our children, and my grandchildren, were allowed to play with whatever toys we wished. As the meme says, if the toy isn’t for the genitals, it’s for both boys and girls; if it IS for the genitals, it’s not for either. Yet, so far, not one of the boys who played with ‘girl toys’ – not even the one who displayed all the other signs of being a proto-gay – has turned out to be anything other than straight, after having gone through a normal adolescence.

If Suzie Green hadn’t been so afraid of her son possibly growing up to be gay, he could now be a healthy young man, both physically and mentally. Possibly gay, probably straight (as most men are) but in either case, intact and cognitively mature. Instead, he’s mutilated and brainwashed. Even worse, his evil mother took over and changed Mermaids, which used to reassure parents that gender confusion was almost inevitably solved by going through puberty, and turned it into a cult organisation, ensuring that many more parents would ensure that their poor gender-nonconforming kids (disproportionately same-sex attracted and/or autistic) went through the same process as her son, retroactively justifying her otherwise unjustified manipulative behaviour.

At this point in time, I’m amazed that so many same-sex attracted people still support the parasitic attachment of the T and all the other alphabetti spaghetti to the LGB.

Anne Applebaum on the “vermin” trope:

The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin did the same thing, she goes on to say. So did Mao, so did Pol Pot.

It doesn’t just influence the audience, that kind of thing; it also influences the people saying it. Call sets of people “vermin” enough times and you start to think of them as literal vermin.

Normally I wouldn’t write about reactions to my writing: I have opinions and others have them too. But this time, the response of Trump supporters – or rather, people who are going to vote for Trump because he might lower their taxes – interested me, because it reminded me of things I’ve seen in other places.  Other than the usual suspects – posters on 4chan, the website of Russia Today, and Elon Musk – I also got a response from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Under the headline “the fascist meme re-emerges,” the editorial board dismissed my article and others as “hyperbole,” said that there’s nothing to worry about and, tellingly, threw some insults at Joe Biden. A couple of weeks later the historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the Daily Mail, dismissed the whole conversation about “fascism” and then attacked Kamala Harris as undemocratic on the grounds that some people around her have argued for constitutional change. This is a phenomenon that the Poles call symmetrism: whenever something ugly emerges about  someone in your political camp, search immediately for something ugly to say about your opponents, whether or not it is equivalent.

It’s also called lying.

H/t Tim Harris

Meanwhile, Twitter itself considers it violence or threats or harassment to say that trans women are men and that men don’t experience rape exactly the way women do because men are more physically powerful than women.

Oh surely not. Surely I exaggerate. Don’t I?

This morning I’m in receipt of an email from the Twitter censors telling me:

Your post was detected by our systems and has had its visibility limited for violating the X rules. Specifically:We have determined your post violated our rules against Hateful Conduct.You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. Ophelia Benson@OpheliaBenson@fran_amery There are no “cis” women. There are only women. “Trans women” are men. Men DON’T experience the exact same thing when raped, because men are more physically powerful than women.

Women are not allowed to say men are stronger than we are and therefore we need some spaces where men can’t follow us. NOT ALLOWED.