Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • Guest post: Government by da feelz

    Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on A new power.

    Canada: government by da feelz. Canadians (and everyone really) could do with a crash course in the relationship between sentimentalism and fascism. Unfortunately our standard cultural template for totalitarianism is 1984 and while Orwell had a keen understanding of bureaucracy and the ways it can be perverted I don’t think he had any real understanding of the way propaganda works. (Of course he understood how it was used – he practised it after all – but he didn’t consider it important. In the novel it’s just AI generated mush for keeping the proles in their place. Neither it nor the proles themselves are considered particularly interesting, something I found puzzling when I first read 1984 and I still find puzzling many decades later. Maybe someone with a better understanding of Orwell’s politics can explain it for me.)

    Anyway lengthy asides aside, what I came here to say is that had Orwell paid as much attention to Goebbels as he did Stalin and his cronies he might have replaced the “two minutes hate” with a “two minutes love”. Goebbels knew that hate justified by a sentimentalised love is far more powerful than hate alone. The truth may be “a boot stamping on a human face – forever” but the lie that sustains it is the the image of the boot of the monstrous other stamping on the face of our most vulnerable again and again.

  • A new power

    Canada losing the plot again:

    Justice Minister Arif Virani has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not yet done so already.

    This is Canada we’re talking about. We know it won’t be people announcing on Twitter that they’re going to shoot up a classroom full of women. We know it will be people saying trans women are not women.

    Since it was published on Monday, some lawyers and constitutional experts have raised fears that Bill C-63 could chill free speech.

    The bill would allow people to file complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission over what they perceive as hate speech online – including, for example, off-colour jokes by comedians. People found guilty of posting hate speech could have to pay victims up to $20,000 in compensation.

    But not jokes about women of course. Those are 1. sacred and 2. harmless.

  • We just want

    Remember “Katie” Neeves who is so thrilled that he’s been “accepted as a UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women”? Well here he is in action.

    “We just want to wee in safety, the same as you do.” Yes, dude, you just want to wee in safety by making it impossible for us to wee in safety. In “Katie” world the only women who matter are the ones like him.

  • It’s not a personal view

    The Telegraph on the BBC’s enforcement of lying to the public:

    A listener complained that the comment amounted to Mr Webb giving his personal view on a controversial matter in breach of the BBC’s requirements on impartiality.

    But it’s not a “view”; it’s reality. It’s “controversial” only because way too many damn fools have made it controversial. News organizations can’t be letting damn fools make basic facts about reality “controversial.” Next it will be controversial to say evolution is true.

    The BBC’s complaints unit, in a ruling published on Thursday, said it was not in a position to determine Mr Webb’s personal opinion on the issue but that it was not necessary to do so in order to judge whether he had breached impartiality rules.

    It said: “The ECU understood Mr Webb’s intention in using the phrase ‘trans women, in other words males’ was to underline the question arising from the FIDE guidelines but noted a press line issued at the time included an acknowledgement that his phrasing did not convey an entirely accurate impression.

    “In relation to impartiality, however, the ECU considered it could only be understood by listeners as meaning that trans women remain male, without qualification as to gender or biological sex, and that, even if unintentional, it gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area. It therefore upheld this aspect of the complaint.”

    No. You can’t do that. Your job is to report the news truthfully, that is, without lying. Pretending that men can be women is just lying. That’s not the job of a news organization. Do. your. fucking. job.

    On Thursday. Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at the women’s rights group Sex Matters, said: “Today’s ruling clearly shows the BBC has lost sight of its statutory duty, as the national, taxpayer-funded broadcaster, to be impartial.”

    And to tell the damn truth.

  • You get what you vote for

    Lie down with rats, get up with fleas.

    Lauren Boebert has said she is heartbroken over her teenage son’s arrest but that he will take responsibility for his actions and should be held accountable. The Colorado representative’s son is accused of taking part in a series of car break-ins and credit card thefts in his mother’s home state.

    Trashy enough yet?

    Tyler Boebert, 18, appeared in court virtually from jail on Wednesday but was later released to return in April. He is facing multiple felony charges.

    The list of 22 charges include four felony charges of criminal possession of ID documents, one count of conspiracy to commit a felony, and over a dozen misdemeanour charges, the Rifle Police Department said in a Facebook post.

    Hey, it’s called family values. Have some respect.

    The Boebert family has made headlines several times in recent months. Lauren Boebert’s ex-husband, Jayson Boebert, was arrested on assault charges in January during an altercation with another son.

    And in September she was asked to leave a theatre for causing a disturbance, including vaping, singing and using phones. She later apologised.

    As I said. Trash.

  • You DO NOT

    So we’re literally not allowed to talk about LGB without any T. It’s literally mandatory to paste the T onto any mention of LGB. We will literally be called names and accused of evil intentions if we try to talk about LGB without any T.

  • Another one

    Meanwhile…

    Not a joke, apparently. He has a public post about it on Facebook.

    I am delighted to announce that I have been accepted as a UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

    The UN CSW is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.

    And it sees fit to disempower women by giving their roles to men.

  • Crucial to understanding

    Some reactions.

  • About speech acts

    More on the Justin Webb issue.

    Also it’s about what we’re allowed to say, and according to whom.

    It’s not a trivial matter, when and if we’re allowed to tell the truth about who is a woman and who is not. It’s extremely important and extremely basic. It’s shocking and dangerous that a news organization, especially one with the clout of the BBC, is telling its personnel that they are required to lie about it.

  • What are we, chopped liver?

    My thought exactly.

  • In breach of the BBC’s requirements on impartiality

    BBC to its talking heads: you WILL say men are women; that’s an order.

    The BBC has upheld a complaint against Today presenter Justin Webb after he said “trans women, in other words males”.

    Webb made the comment during a discussion about new International Chess Federation (FIDE) guidelines on 22 August last year regarding whether being biologically male can give players an advantage in the game. A listener complained that the comment amounted to Webb giving his personal view on a controversial matter in breach of the BBC’s requirements on impartiality.

    The only sense in which it’s “controversial” to say a man is a man is the one where tiresome people make a big stupid stink about saying a man is a man. That’s not a very important or urgent sense of the word, and it has nothing to do with the truth of the matter.

    The BBC‘s executive complaints unit said, in a ruling published on Thursday, that it was not in a position to determine Webb’s personal opinion on the issue but that it was not necessary to do so in order to judge whether he had breached impartiality rules.

    It said: “The ECU understood Mr Webb’s intention in using the phrase ‘trans women, in other words males’ was to underline the question arising from the FIDE guidelines but noted a press line issued at the time included an acknowledgement that his phrasing did not convey an entirely accurate impression.

    “In relation to impartiality, however, the ECU considered it could only be understood by listeners as meaning that trans women remain male, without qualification as to gender or biological sex, and that, even if unintentional, it gave the impression of endorsing one viewpoint in a highly controversial area.  It therefore upheld this aspect of the complaint.”

    But it isn’t a “viewpoint.” It’s a fact, a reality, a true statement. Ask a farmer. They don’t ask their cows and ewes what gender they identify as. Why don’t they? Because it would be otiose. Cattle and goats don’t bother fretting over their magic genders, they just eat their grass and stay away from wolves. Be more like cattle.

  • Oh but he has a certificate

    The Telegraph:

    Transgender women who are convicted of a crime must be recorded as men if they have not legally changed their gender, Downing Street has said.

    The intervention comes after The Telegraph revealed that Scarlet Blake, 26, a male-born transgender woman who was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a stranger and killing a cat, has been recorded as a female criminal in official statistics.

    And that’s not ok even if he has “legally changed his gender” – which is frankly a meaningless phrase. If “gender” is just the social bit then why tf would it justify falsifying the statistics? If it’s sex we’re back where we started: no he is not.

    The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “The PM has been really clear on this issue. And the definition of a woman is the biological sex and that biological sex matters. So it is important that we take that approach to these issues.

    “Police forces should follow the College of Policing guidance that a person’s gender is that which was registered at birth unless they have been issued with a gender recognition certificate under the Gender Recognition Act.”

    Those two claims cancel each other out. If the definition of a woman is the biological sex then “a gender recognition certificate” might as well be an all-day bus pass.

  • Point missed, Downing Street

    This is how we get inched into it.

    That’s not good news at all. Who cares if they have “legally changed their gender” or not? It doesn’t matter. Men’s crimes should not be reported as women’s crimes.

    Laws aren’t magic. It’s futile to pass a law saying dung is ice cream; you still don’t want to eat it. You could pass a law saying Mars is an easy 5 hour trip by plane, but it wouldn’t be true. Laws can change some kinds of reality, but not all kinds.

  • Attention deficit

    Joan Smith writes:

    A couple of months ago, it was revealed that 1,151 police officers in England and Wales are under investigation for sexual or domestic abuse, including 657 of Couzens’s former Met colleagues. One in seven of the overall total has been allowed to continue working as usual while 428 have been placed on restricted duties. Only 378 have been suspended. Allegations against officers are so widespread that the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, admitted last year that he couldn’t guarantee that a woman reporting a rape wouldn’t be interviewed by a predator. Is anyone surprised that so many rape investigations go nowhere? 

    It has been clear for a long time that there are failures at every point in the system, from vetting of police recruits, training and supervision of officers, and investigation of complaints. Various initiatives have been announced in an attempt to regain public confidence, including Operation Onyx, which reinvestigates allegations against officers where lines of inquiry might have been missed.

    But none of this is happening quickly enough for women who find themselves agonising over whether to report a rape. Couzens should never have been allowed to become a police officer, but how many more does that apply to? Scarcely a week goes by without another officer being charged with a whole series of serious sexual assaults, but it’s often taken years before they were exposed.

    I have to wonder if more attention would have been paid to this issue if people hadn’t been so busy giving all their attention to the plight of Our Trans Family. It’s as if there’s been a collective decision that feminism won a long time ago and there is no longer any need at all to stand up for women, while men who pretend to be women are writhing in agony on a bed of coals as we speak.

  • Opportunities were missed

    The Beeb:

    Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer and opportunities were missed to stop him, an inquiry has said. A radical overhaul of police vetting and recruitment is needed now, the independent review found.

    …

    Police “repeatedly failed” to spot warning signs about his unsuitability to be an officer, the inquiry said, and it identified at least five incidents which were not reported to police. The inquiry said this included evidence Couzens allegedly committed a very serious sexual assault against a child, described as barely in her teens, before his policing career began.

    Yebbut boys will be boys. It’s just nature. You can’t correct nature. You want the cops to be tough and scary, right? Macho? Macho men will be macho men. If you weed them all out you’ll have nothing but wimps and [shudder] women in the police.

    His crimes were “the culmination of a trajectory of sexually motivated behaviour and offending”, including indecent exposure, the sexual assault on a child, sexual touching and sharing unsolicited photos of his genitals, the report found.

    He was a horn dog, we get it. Horn dogs make great cops.

    The report found that “Couzens’ crimes “sit on the same continuum” as sexist and misogynistic behaviour within police culture.” Imagine our surprise.

    Sexist misogynistic behavior is everywhere, so it’s going to be within police culture unless the police can get it into their heads that women are people too. These days they seem to be too busy sobbing over the plight of their trans mates to fix their attitudes to women.

    Jamie Klingler who founded the group Reclaim These Streets in the wake of Ms Everard’s murder said she felt worse about women’s safety and police conduct than she did three years ago. “I’m not scared there’s one more Wayne Couzens on the Metropolitan Police, I’m scared there’s many, many of them,” she said.

    Never mind that, what have you done to validate and uplift our trans fam lately?

  • Officially recorded

    Oh ffs.

    The crimes of a transgender cat killer and murderer will be officially recorded as having been committed by a woman, The Telegraph can disclose.

    Scarlet Blake, 26, who was born male but identifies as a woman, was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 24 years in prison on Monday for the murder of Jorge Martin Carreno in Oxford, having previously mutilated a cat.

    Blake has been sent to a male prison, but was referred to as a woman during the trial.

    Despite the fact that he is in reality a man.

    If just saying things were enough then he could escape all this hassle by simply saying he didn’t murder Jorge Martin CarreĂąo.

    Dr Kate Coleman, director of the campaign group Keep Prisons Single Sex, said it was “outrageous” and “complete misrepresentation of the facts.”

    Maya Forstater, founder of the campaign group Sex Matters, said: “Police should always record suspects and perpetrators’ sex, both in order to keep them and officers safe during custody, and so that crime statistics are an accurate base for research and prevention.

    “No law requires police to record false information about criminals’ sex or to mix it up with the nebulous concept of ‘gender identity’. It is high time that the Government told police forces to stop affirming criminals’ fantasies and get back to their day job of investigating crime and bringing wrongdoers to justice.”

    …

    As the row over the case has grown, lawyers have taken issue with official guidance from the Judicial Office which urges judges to “respect” the gender identity of those who appear in the courts by using their chosen name and pronouns.

    Naomi Cunningham, a barrister in discrimination law at Outer Temple Chambers, and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Cabinet minister, called for the guidance in the Equal Treatment Bench Book to be reviewed, but the Judicial Office has stood by it.

    Because endorsing people’s fantasies about themselves is more important than having accurate information on which sex is more dangerous than the other.

  • You couldn’t make it up but he could

    The lies they do tell I must say.

    “Marianne” is a bloke.

    Look at that makeup. Might as well be burnt umber shoe polish.

  • Guest post: Such a terrible flaw

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Many doctors share our concerns.

    Doctor groups like the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) and the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) came out swinging.

    Doctor’s groups aren’t the same thing as patients’ groups, though. And doctors’ groups aren’t even the same thing as groups of doctors. Doctors’ groups are special interest bureaucracies, and the policies they advocate are not always in line with the interests of the patients at the receiving end of their respective fields of medicine, and they’re often not even in line with the majority of doctors working in the fields they purport to represent. Doctors’ interests diverge from patients’ interests all the time. That’s why medical scandals keep happening. And doctors’ groups’ interests diverge also from doctors’ interests, because the doctors they purport to represent are often too busy treating their patients to rigorously vet all the various policies the groups endorse, and the groups themselves are made up of office busybodies with plently of time to get persuaded by pharmaceutical lobbies or other parties with financial interests.

    It’s lazy journalism to assume doctors’ groups speak for all doctors, just like it’s lazy journalism to let supposed gay rights lobbies like GLAAD, HRC & Stonewall UK speak for all gays & lesbians.

    And maybe that’s the real reason for the intense pressure. People who have already transed want company.

    They want company. And clout. And most of all, they want cover. Some adults who engage in unreasonable behaviours and make unreasonable demands want the veneer of legitemacy that comes with associating their behaviour with vulnerable children born special.

    And other adults with obvious mental health conditions have made bad decisions they can’t undo. This group, trapped by the sunk cost fallacy and haunted by the truth seeping in through the cracks, are seeking solace by vicariously convincing others that “transness” is an innate state and that going ahead with transition is never a mistake.

    It’s such a terrible psychological flaw in humans, our capacity to do great harm to others rather than admit that we made mistakes and harmed ourselves.

  • Capitalist inkloosivvitee

    James Esses tells us that incloooosion stretches even to the pet industry.

    There’s a handbook.

    This Handbook sets out to members of staff the policies and terms & conditions they must adhere to at work. Pets at Home describe this as â€œour expectations of you as one of our colleagues”.

    At the beginning, this reads like any other corporate virtue-signalling manifesto (which, unfortunately, are ten a penny these days). Pets at Home state: â€œDiversity and inclusion is an important part of who we are and what we do…We aim to create an inclusive experience for our colleagues where everyone can connect to our purpose, be themselves and make their best contributor to our business”.

    Everyone can be themselves? What if my self is lazy, slow, selfish, grumpy, disobliging, careless, rude, incompetent?

    Employees are also told: “We ask that you support diversity and inclusion everyday by recognising that your individual actions will impact on others and that you have a responsibility to help us create opportunities for diverse people in an inclusive environment”.

    How do I know which people are diverse and which aren’t? What do I do to help you create opportunities for diverse people in an inclusive environment? Are you going to create opportunities for me in an inclusive environment? How can I tell if I’m diverse enough or not? How can I become more diverse so that you will create opportunities for me in an inclusive environment? How can I get in on this scheme?

    Very quickly the indoctrination ramps up, as employees are directed towards a guide on “how to be a better ally”, entitled ’10 Ways You Can Make A Difference’.

    Why do I have to be a better ally? Why do I have to make a difference? When will I have time to stock the shelves and ring up the dog food?

    It goes on and on and on and on in that vein. Anyone would think it was a (colossally captured) university as opposed to a chain of shops.

    Read the whole thing.

  • GIGO

    Should we just give up and hand it all over to the bots?

    Gemini is essentially Google’s version of the viral chatbot ChatGPT. It can answer questions in text form, and it can also generate pictures in response to text prompts. Initially, a viral post showed this recently launched AI image generator create an image of the US Founding Fathers which inaccurately included a black man. Gemini also generated German soldiers from World War Two, incorrectly featuring a black man and Asian woman.

    Yebbut diversidee.

    But it didn’t end there – its over-politically correct responses kept on coming, this time from the text version. Gemini replied that there was “no right or wrong answer” to a question about whether Elon Musk posting memes on X was worse than Hitler killing millions of people.

    There’s no right or wrong answer to anything, maaaaaan.

    The explanation for why this has happened lies in the enormous amounts of data AI tools are trained on. Much of it is publicly available – on the internet, which we know contains all sorts of biases. Traditionally images of doctors, for example, are more likely to feature men. Images of cleaners on the other hand are more likely to be women. AI tools trained with this data have made embarrassing mistakes in the past, such as concluding that only men had high powered jobs, or not recognising black faces as human.

    In other words AI tools are trained the way we’re all trained. Donald Trump all by himself is the US’s trainer-in-chief. Bias in bias out, yadda yadda.

    “There really is no easy fix, because there’s no single answer to what the outputs should be,” said Dr Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at Huggingface. “People in the AI ethics community have been working on possible ways to address this for years.”

    Same with the rest of the world. We’ve been working on it for years, and progress is hella slow, and easily reversed. See above about the teachings of D. Trump.