Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • What should it be called?

    Is it racist?

    Former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson has been suspended from the party after “refusing to apologise” for comments aimed at Sadiq Khan. The Conservative Ashfield MP told GB News on Friday “Islamists” had “got control” of the mayor of London. Responding on Saturday, Mr Khan described the remarks as “pouring fuel on the fire of anti-Muslim hatred”.

    What should be said then?

    Islamism and Islamists are real, and the words are not simply pejoratives or epithets. In a way they’re otiose, because Islam itself teaches that Islam should be in charge of everything including government, but in reality there are liberal Muslims who don’t think Islam should be in charge of everything including government. Some do, some don’t. It’s not wrong to distinguish between them. We talk about religious fundamentalists here in the US, and it’s not racist or racist-adjacent to say so, it’s just naming a reality. The Catholic church in the US is absolutely determined to force women to give birth against their wills, and we get to talk about that without being called racist. It ought to work the same way with Islamism.

    The BBC is bizarrely parsimonious in its account of what Anderson said and what he meant by it.

    Speaking on GB News Mr Anderson said: “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London
 He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.”

    That’s it, that’s all the information. What did he mean, what was the context, please explain.

    On Saturday afternoon, Mr Khan responded to Mr Anderson’s comments which he described as “Islamophobic, anti-Muslim and racist”.

    “These comments pour fuel on the fire of anti-Muslim hatred,” Mr Khan said.

    But is there any truth in his comments? I for one can’t tell, because there isn’t enough information in the BBC’s report.

    It’s just reality though that religions can cause people to do horrific things they wouldn’t otherwise do. It’s a bad idea to make it taboo to say that.

  • Any basis for a stay

    Trump is still struggling to avoid paying those overdue library book fines.

    Donald Trump’s penalties in the New York civil fraud case for manipulating the value of his properties to obtain advantageous loan and insurance rates were formally set at more than $454m on Friday.

    The judgment, which includes $354m in penalties plus $100m in pre-judgement interest following the three-month, non-jury trial that concluded on 16 February, will continue to accrue interest if the former president fails to pay.

    …

    In his ruling a week ago, Engoron has said the defendants had shown a “complete lack of contrition and remorse [which] borders on pathological” when he imposed the fine and banned Trump for three years, and his adult sons for two, from serving in as top executive roles at any New York company or seeking loans from any New York-registered bank. On Thursday, he rejected a request by Trump’s lawyer Clifford Robert to delay enforcing the judgments for 30 days in order to allow “an orderly post-judgment process, particularly given the magnitude of judgment”.

    Engoron told the attorney that he had “failed to explain, much less justify, any basis for a stay. I am confident that the appellate division will protect your appellate rights.”

    Oh come on, the basis is that Donald Trump is Donald Trump and he’s not supposed to have to pay anything he doesn’t want to pay.

  • Yo Doc, talk to the kids about your willy

    Erm…what?

    A hospital is encouraging open conversations about sexuality with its staff members in the Paediatrics department? A hospital is encouraging staff members to start cozy chats about sex with child patients?

    Is this hospital staffed entirely by priests by any chance?

  • Thumb on the scale much?

    Compare.

    The BBC today:

    US man guilty of killing transgender woman in gender identity hate crime first

    A man has been found guilty of killing a transgender woman in the US’s first federal trial over an alleged hate crime based on gender identity.

    BBC yesterday:

    Cat killer Scarlet Blake found guilty of murdering Jorge Martin Carreno

    A woman obsessed with death who once livestreamed the killing of a cat has been found guilty of murdering a man.

    When a trans woman is the victim his transitude is in the headline and the lede. When a trans woman is the perp his transitude is not in the headline or the lede.

    This manipulative lying is shockingly bad journalism.

  • Something grim

    This.

    Indeed there is.

    The Beeb, unlike the Guardian, does eventually admit that the guy is trans, but only very late in the piece (and everyone knows that most of us don’t read all the way to the end). Admitting the murderer is a man after many paragraphs of “she offered him a bottle of vodka before she led him towards the river” and the like is as minimal as possible. They really want to pin these violent sadistic crimes on us.

  • Guest post: It’s a holy confusion

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on Behold: an umbrella term.

    “Breaking gender stereotypes” is the ultimate thought terminator for many.

    Far too many people have been encouraged to just turn off their brains and feel the heavenly transcendence of the contradiction at the heart of gender identity ideology. It’s a holy confusion. Like the Trinity: how can three gods be one god at the very same time? That’s just it! They can’t! You can’t think your way through this; you just have to feeeeeeeel it.

    Likewise with the conflation of sex and gender. How is reifying gender stereotypes breaking them down? How is obsessively promoting gender stereotypes erasing them? That’s just it! You can’t think you way though this.

    The appeal is in the enigma. It’s an act of loyalty to the tribe to obstinately not sit down and think it through.

    And I swear, this is precisely the psychology that I detect among so many gay people and their purported allies. Any critical inquiry conjures crippling anxiety and feral defensiveness. They’re very aware that gay people can feel both trapped by gender stereotypes and drawn to them at the same time. They’re sensitive that there’s a lot of hurt and pain among gay people to do with this confusion around gender and sex. And they’ve been lulled by gender ideology to believe that the solution to this contradiction is to make it sacred and to equate anything but turn-your-brain-off-and-give-in-to-gender-chaos as an existential threat. Anything to do with parsing the difference between sex and gender, anything to do with defining the boundaries between the sexes, any critical thought about these topics is as blasphemous to many gay people as pointing out the inherent contradiction in the Trinity is to devout Catholics.

    They’ve built up a whole identity around not knowing the answers to some fundamental questions. Rather like Christians and their three-but-one-but-three-at-the-same-time god.

    I see this even among some gay people who have become critical of gender identity ideology. They’ve figured out that there’s a problem with gender extremists’ views, but they still get hostile if you apply too much scientific inquiry into the connection between gender nonconformity and homosexuality. Questions like, why do so many extremely gender nonconforming children grow up to be gay in adulthood, and why are gay men so drawn to gender stereotypes in other men while we’re so averse to applying them to ourselves? These kinds of questions are held as taboo, even though from where I’m standing they look like exactly what we need to be asking in order to understand why gay people and their allies are so susceptible to gender identity ideology.

    They — the science-hostile gays — are also of the mind that the topic should remain a sacred mystery; they’ve just drawn the lines around it a little differently.

    I think we need to fling the doors wide open and let the sunlight in. This means that no topic is off limits to inquiry. No wonder the activists call “gender expansive” an “umbrella” term — they’re all about blocking the sunlight.

    Look at the horrors hiding in the shade of that umbrella: young gay people are suffering from a mental health crisis and they’re being medically experimented on! It’s time to shut the umbrellas.

  • Lying right in the headline

    Another ratchet. It’s usual for the news media to admit they’re talking about a trans person at least once, isn’t it? As opposed to just straight-up leaving that little detail out when reporting on a gruesome murder by a revolting sadistic man?

    Cat-killing woman guilty of murdering man as he walked home in Oxford

    But he’s not a woman, he’s a trans woman. Yet the Guardian never once mentions that fact. Not once. Lie after lie after lie after lie.

    A woman who livestreamed herself killing, dissecting and blending the body of a cat before months later brutally attacking a man and leaving him to drown to death in a river has been convicted of murder.

    Scarlet Blake, 26, targeted Jorge Martin Carreno, 30, as he walked home from a night out in Oxford in July 2021. She led him to a secluded riverbank where he was hit on the back of the head with a vodka bottle, strangled and then pushed into the River Cherwell where he drowned, Oxford crown court heard.

    [Also odd, though not so directly woman-hating, to switch to the agentless passive at the moment of the murder. “he was hit on the back of the head with a vodka bottle, strangled and then pushed into the River Cherwell” by whom? On second thought maybe it is still part of the woman hating, because it would strain credulity a little to say “she” did all that.]

    During the trial, the court heard Carreno had been out with co-workers in Oxford city centre and was trying to get home when Blake found him sitting in the street.

    She was captured on CCTV walking the streets of Oxford wearing a heavy military-style hooded jacket, face mask and carrying a rucksack, looking for a victim.

    Prosecutors suggested she was carrying a “murder kit” in her rucksack, including a garotte and leopard-print dressing gown cord, which she rejected. 

    …

    Prosecutors said Blake had an “extreme interest in death and in harm” and got sexual gratification from violence and killings. At one point, jurors were shown a disturbing video of Blake consensually tying a ligature around her then partner’s neck from behind and pulling it tight until she appeared to fall unconscious.

    Never once in the entire article does the Graun admit Blake is not a woman.

  • Legal protection from WHAT?

    Oh good lord. Do play the clip to see reeking oozing entitlement in action. Large pallid man whose accent rivals that of Choss Windsor in poshitude bleats about being “misgendered” in court because listen here he’s not a “he” he’s nonbinareeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

    Bonus: the “microaggression” ploy.

  • Behold: an umbrella term

    Oh good, even more nonsense to keep track of.

    But what does gender expansive mean? According to national LGBTQ+ advocacy group PFLAG, it’s an umbrella term for individuals who don’t align with traditional gender categories, or who expand ideas of gender expression or identity.

    “It might be used because someone has identities outside of what’s socially accepted,” said Mackenzie Harte, PFLAG’s manager of learning and inclusion, adding that the term is one they’ve increasingly heard used by parents and educators regarding to youth. “It’s where someone is not conforming to social ideas of what gender should be.”

    Geddit? It means they’re special and rebelly and fascinating and original and above all better than you.

    Gender expansive is not synonymous with nonbinary, PFLAG notes; even cisgender individuals can embrace the term. Instead, it’s another way of saying gender non-conforming — the more preferred term, according to the group.

    Yeah but any old prole can be gender non-conforming. Gender expansive is for the special people, the ones who soar above the rest of us like gender angels.

  • It was a secret

    Britain’s only trans judge quits over fears of ‘politicising’ judiciary

    A trans judge is someone who knows nothing about the law but identifies as a judge?

    No, they mean a man who claims to be a woman.

    Master Victoria McCloud, who transitioned from a man to a woman in the 1990s, warned the situation meant she is “now political every time I choose where to pee”.

    Whereas before “the situation” he was free to violate women’s rights with impunity.

    McCloud’s gender identity was kept private but became public knowledge after being published by a national newspaper.

    Why was it kept private? How is that fair?

    Referring to the rise of gender-critical campaigners, McCloud added “it has been open season on me and others” and argued this meant “the dignity of the court as well as personal dignity is at stake”.

    It’s not “open season.” Nobody is stalking him in hopes of serving him for dinner.

    McCloud, who worked on high-profile cases stretching from a KGB double-agent to Donald Trump, played a role in writing the judiciary’s Equal Treatment Benchbook. The 54-year-old contributed to the guidelines which includes a section on “acceptable terminology” concerning gender-identity, including titles and pronouns. Such guidelines proved controversial in the case of male-born transgender rapist Isla Bryson.

    This is why his trans idenniny should not have been kept secret.

    McCloud previously welcomed the prospect of more transgender judges to encourage diversity.

    Another male judge is not “diversity”; another male judge is just more of the same.

  • Very bad man

    Fairness? What’s that?

    As far as I can tell the guy calls himself Anne Andres and stars in this story:

    The Canadian Powerlifting Union’s trans inclusion policy says athletes can self-identify into the category of their choosing. 

    “At both recreational and competitive levels, an individual may participate in their expressed and identified gender category,” reads the policy.

    Anne Andres, the transgender powerlifter who won the bronze medal during the event, said all but one fellow competitor was supportive of her participation, and that the presence of the ICFS group had little impact.

    “I noticed there was a bunch of signs there, but any time I approached the platform, the rest of the powerlifting community held up bigger signs to block out everything,” said Andres. “Nobody was tolerating their malarkey.” 

    According to Blade, the ICFS action was meant to draw attention to policies that they say elevate transgender women inclusion over other considerations.

    Or to put it more bluntly they let men cheat women.

    His rant is the rant of a disgusting entitled bully of a man who is busily ruining power lifting for women. Notice his hope that all of us who object to his theft of women’s sport “die painfully.”

  • Striking

    Why is Jonathan “India” Willoughby unaffectionately called Botox Chuckie?

    Oh right.

  • Non-binary and WEARING A FUCKING WIG

    Sing it!

    Alllllllll the attention.

  • Guest post: What children of powerful people do

    Originally a comment by Eava on All rotten.

    Hunter Biden gets his share of blame for this, parlaying Daddy’s job into a fat salary for him.

    This is what children of famous people do, opportunities find them.

    George W. Bush had Saudi investors bail out failing businesses. He was majority owner of the Texas rangers and almost became the commissione of baseball. Jenna Bush is a talk show host with multiple book deals. Chelsea Clinton gets book deals. Andrew Cuomo got positions in the Clinton Administration. At the same time, these are people who are highly educated and steeped in the business/political world. Hunter wasn’t a strung out junkie when he was on the Burisma board.

    He was a Georgetown undergrad and Yale law school graduate. He had high level jobs in the finance sector, worked at the Department of Commerece during the Clinton Administration and the George Bush appointed him to a five year term on the Board of Directors of Amtrak. When Joe became VP he stepped down.

    Biden was on the board of directors of World Food Program USA, a 501(c)(3) charity based in Washington, D.C., that supports the work of the UN World Food Programme from 2011 to 2017; he served as board chairman from 2011 to 2015.

    Before he joined the Burisma board, Biden was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, while still an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, something he was more than qualified to do. Him joining the Board after that isn’t surprising.

    The whole conspiracy theory that Burisma had him on the Board to get Biden and the US to fire the prosecutor allegedly investigating Burisma has been debunked repeatedly. The prosecutor was corrupt and wasn’t investigating the company. Keeping the corrupt prosecutor in place would have been in the company’s interest.

    One of his partners in his investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was John Kerry’s step-son. RSP was an investor in a Chinese private equity fund. No one is going after John Kerry, who was Secretary of State for part of the time RSP was invested in the Chinese fund.

    Hunter did nothing wrong, and nothing but what the vast majority of well connected people do. The fact that Russia is feeding stupid US politicians lies isn’t Hunter’s fault. Hunter wasn’t the one working in his father’s administration selling information to the Saudis in exchange for a $2 billion investment once he left office, for a fund in an area he has no expertise.

    And Russian interference absolutely changed the outcome of the election, on multiple levels. They ran a propaganda operation to turn off Democrats from voting or to vote 3rd party. Given the narrow margin by which Trump won several states, which was smaller than the 3rd party vote, it had the desired effect. It was especially targeted to Black voters, which partially explains Clinton’s loss in Michigan, the votes they expected to come in from Detroit never materialized. Paul Manafort turned over detailed voter data to a Russian operative so Russia could precisely target people with specifically crafted propaganda.

  • Guest post: Religious beliefs are open to hermeneutical variety

    Originally a comment by Eric MacDonald on No exception for extrauterine children.

    On what basis can anyone say that “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God.” Of course, we should simply dismiss the idea since there is no God. But if we take it in terms of the beliefs expressed in Genesis, we have to ask what does speaking about the image of God even mean? We have no idea. But it is implausible to think that reference is being made to fertilised eggs, since no one knew of them at the time, so it couldn’t have been part of the meaning of ‘image of God’. The implication is that it refers either to physiognomy or mental characteristics. We are in the image of God in respect of our ability to know good and evil, for example, for it is in that section of the story that the idea of the image of God arises. Or we are in the image of God in that we have a physical structure that may have been thought to reproduce God’s image.

    What is more striking is an American state making laws grounded on religious beliefs. This simply determines what people must believe, since religious interpretations bind people to the beliefs of those defining them. Yet I thought that no religious test was required for citizenship in the US.

    Besides, religious beliefs are open to hermeneutical variety and resulting confusion. There is no way we can pin down definitive religious beliefs, unless we have an ecclesial structure that provides the means for defining dogma. Is the Alabama Supreme Court going to start defining Christian (or any other) religious dogma which will be binding on Alabamans?

    What a peculiar country the US is. It began with 13 colonies that were seeking religious freedom, and yet the country itself is overburdened with fundamentalists of various stripes who want to define what everyone must believe. I’m glad I live in Canada!

  • And then all of a sudden

    Trump helps the prosecution again:

    Special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in June for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. During a Fox News town hall on Tuesday night, host Laura Ingraham asked Trump why he hadn’t simply returned the material when the government asked him to do so.

    “First of all, I didn’t have to hand them over,” Trump said bluntly. “But second of all, I would have done that. We were talking, and then all of a sudden they raided Mar-a-Lago.”

    Of course, he did “have to.” He’s just brazenly lying in his usual way when he says he didn’t. He may in some sense “believe” he had the right to take them, but he has no right to believe that, because he’s been told otherwise a billion times. His “belief” is just the stubborn toddleresque “I can if I want to” bratty enitlement that is his entire worldview.

    The former president faces 41 criminal counts for willful retention of national defense information, making false statements, and conspiracy to obstruct justice, among other things. He has repeatedly insisted that he had every right to keep the documents. He does not.

    And, epistemically, he doesn’t even have the right to believe he has the right. (There is no supreme court of epistemic justice though, so he’ll continue to get away with that one until he shuts up for good.

  • All rotten

    Hm. It seems Russia has been faking stories about Hunter Biden and the Republicans have been lapping them up and now they can’t any more. What a normal and healthy situation.

    Representative Jim Jordan seems to be struggling with the realization that Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden appears to be founded on a bed of lies peddled by the Russian government.

    On Wednesday, the Ohio Republican got caught up in his own words, insisting that the inquiry still had merit, despite the Justice Department indictment against its primary witness, Alexander Smirnov…

    On Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed that Smirnov admitted to prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in developing the Hunter Biden narrative.

    Well good, that’s excellent. We want Putin’s Russia deciding what we can have.

    On Thursday, special counsel David Weiss announced the indictment of Smirnov on one count of making a false statement and one count of creating a false record, related to what he told the FBI in 2020 about alleged corruption by the Biden family and its connection to Ukrainian-owned Burisma Holdings.

    Hunter Biden gets his share of blame for this, parlaying Daddy’s job into a fat salary for him. The Bidens aren’t as bad as the Trump’s but they’re not good, either. It seems we don’t get to have good people.

  • No exception for “extrauterine children”

    Frozen objects in test tubes are children, according to the Alabama Supreme Court. Not potential children, future children, the makings of children, but children.

    Referencing antiabortion language in the state constitution, the judges’ majority opinion said that an 1872 statute allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child applies to “unborn children,” with no exception for “extrauterine children.”

    “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion.

    But. But. But “God” isn’t real, “God” is an idea invented by humans. We don’t even know what “the image of God” would look like, because there are no photos. You might as well say embryos in test tubes have the image of Jane Eyre or Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam. “God” is just a name, with nothing to stick it to. And what does it mean to “efface” someone’s “glory”?

    If only we could lock the god-botherers and the gender-botherers in a room and let them argue with each other from here to eternity. So many problems solved.

  • Text us when you make the border

    Gannett refuses to publish Doonesbury.

  • A ceremony that almost didn’t happen

    NPR chatted with Masha Gessen about comparing Gaza to Nazi ghettoes back in December.

    Prominent Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen received a prestigious award for political thought over the weekend, in a ceremony that almost didn’t happen due to backlash over their recent writings on Israel-Gaza.

    Israel’s air-and-ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 people in the 10 weeks since the Hamas-led attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage.

    Why did Israel commit this air-and-ground assault on Gaza? Because that’s where Hamas is. It didn’t do it as part of a broader campaign to kill all Muslims or all Arabs. It can still be a war crime, but comparable to Hitler’s genocide it is not.

    Gessen, who is Jewish and whose family lost loved ones in the Holocaust, has been criticized for a New Yorker essay published earlier this month in which they likened the Gaza Strip to the WWII-era ghettos that Nazis developed to segregate and control Jewish people in occupied Europe.

    Gessen of course is also the damn fool who blew up her own reputation for serious journalism by “coming out” as a they/them.

    Gessen notes there are key differences between the two: The Nazi claim that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from disease “had no basis in reality,” while Israel’s stance that the isolation of Gaza is necessary to protect against Palestinian terrorist attacks “stems from actual and repeated acts of violence.”

    “Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate — and now, mortally endanger — an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own,” they contend.

    Well, that’s misleading, because “entire population” refers to very different things there. The entire population of Gaza is a tiny fraction of the entire population of European Jews circa 1940. Also, “in the name of protecting its own” has very different meanings in Gaza today versus all of Europe circa 1940.

    LF: And you also make a comparison that caused backlash, saying Gaza right now is like a Nazi era Jewish ghetto and that right now the ghetto is being liquidated. But you must have known writing it would get this type of backlash. Why did you make that comparison?

    MG: Well, the comparison is very much the centerpiece of the article. And I think that we have a moral and one could also argue, legal obligation to compare the Holocaust and the atrocities committed during the Second World War to the present. If we take the promise of never again, seriously, we once again have to constantly be asking ourselves, are we laying the foundations for the mass murder of millions of people? Are we employing or is part of the world employing the same kinds of tactics that were employed by the Nazis? I think there’s every reason to say that that is exactly what’s happening.

    You know, the Nazis weren’t the last occasion of mass murder of large numbers of people. Remember the Balkans? Remember Rwanda? The Rohingya? Uighurs? Cambodia? Partition? We keep doing this. Bad analogies don’t help anything.