Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Gluttons for punishment.

The Green Party, in any given country in the West, has more closely resembled a cult of feelings far more than it has a political organisation. In Germany, where our Greens have been part of the actual government for the last few years, the party is not only completely through the looking-glass on social issues which have absolutely nothing to do with preserving the environment (and some of which threaten the very fabric of German social cohesion), it has done far more to harm the environment than any party since the founding of the Federal Republic.

This is not hyperbolic extrapolation from the Greens’ irraitional anti-nuclearism, either, though that is bad enough. It saw them follow through on Angela Merkel’s closure of *every single nuclear plant* in the country, for example. The end of this plan coincided with Russia’s reactivation of its adventure in the Ukraine, to which Germany stopped importing Russian gas in response…gas which Germany had spent the last thirty years, thanks in large part to Merkel and to her predecessor Gerhard Schröder (himself a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin), making Germany’s industry and domestic heating apparatus almost entirely dependent upon.

No, the Greens’ commitment to the environment not only saw them dogmatically follow-through on the death of the German nuclear industry, it saw them recommit to closing German coal mines and to filling them with concrete (along with other more “environmentally friendly” materials for the mines’ “restoration”), which on the face of it sounds reasonable, or at least good-hearted (if one can ignore the folly of rendering such mines permanently inoperable even in theory).

But the realities of German energy production in 2022 up to today meant that we had a choice between activating (and building) more coal-fired power plants or facing regular blackouts and brown-outs in the depth of winter. So the German State, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution (which means for the first time in history), has had to start importing coal to keep the lights on. This coal comes mostly from Columbia, which is…not exactly known for its environmental protections or worker safety laws, nor even for banning child labour.

And now we have German electricity produced on the back of coal dug out of the Andes, some of it by children, and shipped across the ocean so that the Greens can say they delivered on their twin promises of closing nuclear power plants and coal mines. Thanks, in no small part, to the Greens’ ideological intransigence when it meets geopolitical necessity.

But wait, there’s more. Even where Green environmental policy “works”, it has untold costs which will take us generations to sort out.

We have landfills filling up with fibreglass from wind turbines made and shipped out of China, which tend to last only a few years and which themselves cannot reliably produce enough energy to offset the carbon released during their manufacture, transport, installation, and disposal; a great many of these wind turbines are set up in forests, which necessitates removing one or more trees per turbine.

we have solar panels everywhere in a country where the *sunniest* region receives less sunlight in a year than the *least sunny* regions of the continental United States and thus cannot even theoretically produce enough energy to offset the carbon it takes to make, ship, and dispose of them.

In concrete terms, the city famed for the most sunny days in Germany is called Freiburg, a quaint little university town in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg. It receives, according to its own city’s website, “almost 1,800 sunshine-hours per year”, which in addition to giving it a “Mediterrannean flair”, makes it the most ideal place in the country for solar energy.

Seattle, Washington (where I believe our humble host has deigned to erect her domicile) receives, by way of comparison, 2170 sunshine hours per year.

The wisdom of basing a significant proportion of Seattle’s electrical grid on solar energy, much less a country whose *most-sunny location* receives only 80% as much sunshine, is an exercise left to the reader.

In any case, I could never countenance voting for the Greens in this country. I care about the environment far too much to ever do such a foolish thing as that.

Without hyperbole they have nothing. Their fundamental claims are a denial of reality, and their sweaty efforts to make that denial of reality mandatory for everyone are a rejection of sanity and of basic justice.

So what we get is a nonstop torrent of hyperbole.

It’s not “dehumanising” people to say they can’t change sex. Humans can’t change species; is it dehumanizing to say that? Humans can’t become planets; does that dehumanize them?

It’s the other way around. Claiming people can change sex dehumanizes them in the sense that it portrays them as something other than human.

Whittome doesn’t mean it literally, of course, it’s just a way of expressing demented rage at Rosie Duffield for refusing to join the new religion.

Also, trans people are not one of the most marginalized groups in society. More like one of the most pampered groups in society.

I’m so tired of these brainless loonies shouting their brainless abuse day in and day out.

From Pliny:

The BBC tells us the Green Party fucked around and found out.

A bitter legal battle could blow a hole in the Green Party of England Wales’s general election campaign funds. The BBC understands courts could force the party to pay between £200,000 and £400,000 if it loses a case against former deputy leader Dr Shahrar Ali.

The party’s financial auditors note the case has left “uncertainty” about its ability to keep running normally. The Greens are proposing a 50% increase in membership fees to build funds.

So maybe it was a mistake to punish and shun Ali for understanding that men are not women.

A Green Party spokesperson said: “Like many organisations, the Green Party is facing some challenging financial times, however it is wrong to suggest that the party has anything other than a very bright future and strong public support. We are confident that we will be in a better position than ever before as we go into the next general election.”

As they go into the next general election telling us that men can be women, and punishing Greens who don’t agree that men can be women. Better position?

Commenting on the legal case brought by Dr Ali, the party said it “remains proud of its focus on equality and human rights for all and our support for the trans community”.

Equality has nothing to do with forcing people to agree that men can be women. Nothing at all.

The Green Party is taking it well.

A senior activist who won an unlawful discrimination claim against the Green Party of England and Wales has been expelled and told he cannot return for at least two years.

In February, a judge found that the Greens had unlawfully discriminated against Dr Shahrar Ali during a row over his gender-critical beliefs. Ali, who is a former deputy leader, was awarded damages of £9,100. The Greens were also ordered to pay him a further £90,000 in costs in September.

He has now been excluded from the party for a fixed term of two years as a result of complaints made about him in 2022.

What were the complaints? What terrible thing did he do or say?

It is understood that some of the complaints against Ali related to a social media post he shared in July 2022, in which he suggested that teaching the concept of transgender identity to two year olds was a “danger to children”.

In a message on X, he quoted a post by the campaign group Stonewall which said that research suggested that “children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity”. Ali added a comment which said: “Off scale of safeguarding risk. Would we teach 2 year olds concept of schizophrenia?”

That…that’s it? But teaching the concept of transgender identity to two year olds is a danger to children. Small children believe what they’re told.

The party has told him that any future readmission would be conditional on him publicly retracting tweets that had been complained about, apologising and undertaking safeguarding training.

What a pack of brain-dead Stalinists. Honestly.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Read the room.

Would Ferrell have been as enthusiastic if his friend had come out as a bear, or a lawn mower? Would he have been as keen to travel across America if Harper had decided he was a toddler rather than a woman? Would he have changed his friend’s diapers? Would he have been willing to pay that price, to carry that burden, to put up with the imposition? (Quite apart from the hit to his reputation that passing a grown man off as an infant would have inflicted. That would have been fetish too far.) I doubt it. Well, by accepting him as a women, and encouraging (insisting?) that others do so, he’s expecting women to accept him in places he doesn’t belong. He’s pushing the price, the burden, and imposition of his friend’s delusion onto women who might not be as willing to put up with them. Yet they’re the ones with a problem. Supposedly. Ferrell is essentially getting them to “change the diaper” he’ll never have to.

Loyalty and friendship are good things, but when they cloud your judgement about what is best for your friend, and what your friend is asking/expecting/demanding of others, it papers over things that may not be healthy. You can’t assume that your personal experience with your nice, loving, harmless friend mirrors others’ experience of him, because it may not be the same. You’re never going to be the women in the restroom he enters, but you’re going to use your celebrity, friendship, and loyalty to bully women to accept this man’s presence in women’s spaces. You’re not paying the price in fear and uncertainty that the women upon whom he’s intruding will. Your friend is not harmless. Even if he never assaults a women, his presence in women’s spaces is an unwanted intrusion of someone who refuses to accept women’s boundaries. Nor can you apply your experience of him to everyone else who shares his delusion, yet your advocacy for trans “rights” will help other men who are not as seemingly benign and harmless as your friend to violate those same boundaries that your friend does.

The sheer blind stupidity and absence of thought in this stagger the mind.

“I don’t know why trans people are meant to be threatening to me as a cis male. I don’t know why Harper is threatening to me…why would you care if somebody’s happy? Why is that threatening to you? If the trans community is a threat to you, I think it stems from not being confident or safe with yourself.”

He says it himself and doesn’t even fucking notice he’s said it. Yes, bozo, you are a male, and therefore men pretending to be women are not a threat to you. That does not, however, mean they are not a threat to anyone at all. Can you figure out why? With that rather forceful nudge? Do I have to spell it out that it’s because NOT ALL OF US ARE MALE?

God almighty.

Updating to add:

An unhappy distinction for New Zealand.

Doctors are prescribing up to seven times more puberty blockers for gender dysmorphia to young transgender patients in New Zealand than other similar countries, a new medical reseach paper has found.

The paper published by academics Charlotte Paul, Simon Tegg and Sarah Donovan, was published today in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

In their paper, “Use of puberty-blocking hormones for gender dysphoria in New Zealand: descriptive analysis and international comparisons”, the authors found that use here was approximately 1.7 times higher than in the Netherlands, and between 3.5 and 6.9 times higher than in England and Wales, and 3.9 times higher than in Denmark. 

Not a race you want to win.

H/t Rob

There are things the law can’t do. Lots of things, actually. A big thing the law can’t do is change physical reality. You can pass a law saying the sun orbits the earth, but the sun will continue to not orbit the earth. The sun is not subject to human laws. There are lots of things you can replace “the sun” with in that sentence.

“Caster Semenya is legally female, was assigned female at birth, raised as female, and identifies as female. It seems clear on the face of it, therefore, that Semenya is female.”

Interesting choice of word, “seems.” “Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.'”

In fact, of course, no it doesn’t seem clear on the face of it that Semenya is female. Not on the face of it or the foot of it or the buttocks of it. All four items in that fatuous list are social, aka a matter of choice, aka artificial as opposed to natural, aka fantasy as opposed to reality. And speaking of on the face of it, the faces of the women Khelif punched know damn well he’s not female.

It’s cringey seeing adults continue to say these ridiculous things.

Weirdo Kennedy can’t get a date for the prom.

On August 23, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his presidential campaign. Citing the war in Ukraine and the “war on our children,” as well as “relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” the scion of the famous Democratic political family announced his support for the Republican candidate.

“These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” he added.

In reality, Kennedy had tried just a week earlier to sell his support to the Harris campaign in exchange for a position in her cabinet, preferably as Secretary of Health and Human Services. After getting laughed out of the room, Kennedy decamped to Team Trump, where the candidate wouldn’t commit to a cabinet post, but was at least willing to appear publicly with him.

Attaboy Junior! He won’t dance with you but at least he’ll let you hold his…er…flowers.

“In about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name, and I’ve already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me,” Kennedy said that day in Phoenix.

In fact, Kennedy is working hard to be a spoiler for Harris, fighting to keep his name on the ballot where it could harm the vice president’s campaign and to remove it where his appearance might hurt Trump. It’s a remarkably shameless ploy for a man who spent his career as an environmental attorney and is now willing to get in bed with a politician who thinks windmills cause cancer and fossil fuels are the future.

They match up well though. Spoiled, entitled, empty. A pair of greedy conceited hacks with no morals.

JD Vance wants to make medical insurance Great Again.

“You also want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them. A young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. We want to make sure everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.”

Jesus christ. How stupid do you have to be? That’s how insurance works: everyone pays in; not everyone needs to use it; it’s there for the people who do need it. Universal health care/insurance=everyone pays in and not everyone needs it. The one-size approach is the one that works; any other approach is just back to pay as you go, which does not work.

By invoking a “deregulatory agenda,” Vance is pitching a return to the bad old days when people with preexisting conditions couldn’t get coverage. Harris put this in personal terms during her debate with Trump: “I don’t have to tell the people watching tonight, you remember what that was like? Remember when an insurance company could deny [coverage] if a child had asthma, if someone was a breast cancer survivor, if a grandparent had diabetes?”

But Vance and his horrible friend want to go back to that.

“Any slave girls you may own,” he says.

Soapy Molly and the furious tantrum:

Somebody who calls xirself “Pride in Labour” exclaims:

STATEMENT: Our Response to Labour Councillor’s Transphobia

Transphobia according to whom? The person or people exclaiming, of course.

Between the headline and the piece there’s a shiny banner screaming “Labour must take immediate action against Laurie Burton”. Oh yeah? Maybe Laurie Burton should take action against Pride in Labour.

The pomposity of them is a sight to behold.

Pride in Labour is aware of incidents of transphobia by a Labour councillor in Southend Council. The councillor in question has made deeply transphobic remarks towards the Scottish political activist, Sophie Molly on Twitter/X, and made comments more widely about the trans movement. It is clear there is an issue with transphobia within the party.

Ooh, aware, is it? Well I’m aware of incidents of stupidity by Pride in Labour. Now what do we do?

Who decides what remarks are transphobic? Who decides what remarks are deeply transphobic? Who appointed the deciders? Who asked for any of this?

The councillor has been posting transphobic remarks, including referring to trans women as “blokes”, engaging with people known to push hateful ideology against trans people, and reposting content from the LGB Alliance.

So?

Trans women of course are blokes. Women are women, and trans women are blokes. That’s what “trans” means.

What does “engaging with people” mean? What business is it of Pride in Labour what people a councillor “engages with”?

The claim about “hateful ideology” is of course just their enraged name-calling, which gets less credible the more they do it. It’s neither ideology nor hateful to say that men are not women.

Nobody needs the permission of Pride in Labour to share content from LGB Alliance.

We recognise that people are entitled to their views on any matter

Like hell they do. That’s exactly what they don’t recognize. They think they get to tell us what views we can have.

but when those personal views turn toxic and become harmful to another person who is protected under the Equality Act, disciplinary action must be taken.

And what exactly is Pride in London’s method of determining when personal views “turn toxic”? How does it know when such views “become harmful to another person”? Which person are they talking about?

Pride in Labour will be writing to Southend Council to lodge a formal complaint and will also lodge a complaint with the Labour Party itself. There is no room in the Labour movement for transphobia, and it is important the party acts immediately.

So Pride in Labour doesn’t recognize that people are entitled to their views on any matter. It says it does but it then instantly demonstrates that it doesn’t. Quite a pointless exercise.

Oh good, another luxury idenninny.

Germany’s parliament will be reviewing proposed amendments submitted by a pro-pedophile group tomorrow, sparking concerns from child safeguarding advocates. Krumme-13, a lobby group which advocates for lowering the age of consent and legalizing child pornography, is seeking to add language to the constitution which would establish “pedosexuality” as a protected sexual identity.

Can we spot the problem here? I think we can. I think it’s pretty god damn obvious. Children are children. Adults raping children should not be legalized. The age of consent is necessary because children are not born with adult brains.

Dieter Gieseking, the founder of Krumme-13, announced the upcoming vote to his supporters in a post made to the group’s website last week.

“K13online calls for a ban on discrimination against gays and lesbians AND pedophiles in the constitution,” reads the statement. “The vote… will be broadcast live on Parliamentary TV.”

Not the same thing. “Gays and lesbians” refers to adults. Men who want to rape children are not comparable to lesbians and gay men.

Gieseking, a 68-year-old former Federal Border Guard official, founded K13 in Trier in 1993 and promoted the group as a “self-help” organization for “pedosexuals.” He has been repeatedly charged with the possession of child pornography.

In 1996, Gieseking was sentenced to eighteen months, for which he served one year in prison, on charges related to operating a mail order child pornography service from a van. In 2003, Gieseking again appeared in court accused of possession of child sexual abuse materials obtained between July 1999 and January 2001. The pornography was found on Gieseking’s computer after a search of his residence in August 2001. His devices contained a total of 216 image files of naked children, and he was sentenced to eight months in prison.

But but but his sexual idenninny makes him want child pornography which means children have to be sexually tortured for his enjoyment, because it’s his idenninny you see, which should be protected.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Remains.

So, to sum up:

1. Over the last few decades, Catholic “special educational” institutions the world over have been exposed at best (at *best*) as safehouses and private gardens for pedophiles, and at worst as infanticide factories where the mothers of neglected-to-death babies were also enslaved for years, most famously in Ireland but really in every country where the Catholic Church has any presence at all. (Germany’s own pedophile scandal hit in those halcyon days of 2021 and caused a large number of lapsed Catholics to actually strike their names from the Church’s rolls, which in this country means the government finally stopped giving the Church taxes on those peoples’ behalf.)

2. In the wake of George Flloyd, and on the back of decades of First Nations activism and many scandals within Canada itself (such as multiple reservations being so horribly mismanaged they didn’t, and probably still don’t, have reliable access to potable water), some activists and academics revived Canada’s longstanding conversation over its own Christian-run “residential schools”, the last of which closed down less than thirty years ago. It’s notable that the State allowed the Catholic Church to run more than half of these, in a country that also had policies discriminating against Catholics into the 1960s that effectively barred them from becoming public servants or working in large private companies (except within the province of Quebec, of course, where there weren’t enough Protestants to staff the required positions).

3. These activists and academics gathered some anecdotes and made inferences based on the Catholic Church’s horrible track record in other countries, and began speculating quite…forcefully…on the probable existence of mass graves in Canadian residential schools on a scope and scale of the Irish “mother-and-baby homes” aka infanticide factories. As part of their speculative research, they organised ground-penetrating radar of residential school grounds which indeed showed that those grounds were not uniform.

4. The Canadian government, at the same time it was classifying protesters against COVID restrictions as domestic terrorists, took the foregoing speculations and hypotheses and dubious evidence as dispositive, and publicly toyed with the idea of criminalising any public or private statements against the existence of mass graves in residential schools in an analogy to Holocaust denial, which itself was only made illegal (at least in the context of “promoting antisemitism”) in Canada in 2022 on the same wave of woke religious fanaticism.

5. Wherever these putative “mass graves” have been actually excavated, no evidence for any human remains has been identified. Not one single time. And as this process has gone on, the claims have been walked back from “mass graves” to “unmarked graves”, some of which may well exist, possibly because any original markings had at some point been removed or worn away without having been replaced.

I am no friend at all of the Church (Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise), and I am certainly not a “conservative Catholic”, but I admit to raising a bit of a skeptical eyebrow when the government demands, on pain of imprisonment, that I have to affirm belief in facts which are not in evidence simply because they affirm a general narrative that is currently in-vogue with a bunch of people drunk on their own sense of righteousness.

Notwithstanding the dubious justness of their own cause, they don’t seem to understand that one day the winds will shift again, and the positions they insist are true today will one day be vilified as calumny. It would be wise if, at such a time, those villains did not have a precedent of having been thrown in prison for saying things the governing regime insisted (based on very little evidence) were false. It seems to me plainly obvious that dismantling our hard-won norms of free speech, giving all-too-human governments the power to arbitrate what is true, is simply a terrible idea destined to backfire and redound to the detriment of everyone, very much including its proponents.

But perhaps that makes me a “right-wing extremist”, after all.

Be careful what you like where others can see you.

In 2023 the playwright David Greig had to apologise to staff at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, where he was artistic director, for being “careless and harmful” after “liking” two tweets that a writer alleged were transphobic.

Yes children that’s right, there are people monitoring what you “like” (i.e. what you register your liking of or agreement with or respect for by clicking the “Like” button on one social media platform). Who knew anyone had the time? Let alone the inclination? Let alone the malice and stupidity and feeling of entitlement to tell all of us what we can and can’t say or even “like”?

From the Department of Things No 5-year-old Ever Said:

But what if you identify as benefiting from chiropracty?