What’s wrong with this picture?

Too easy. The story is about a heatwave. What do you do in a heatwave? Try to stay as cool as possible. What do you not do? Lie in the sun in a bathing suit.

Well of course he does. He always did. He didn’t want to be bounced out in the first place. We all want nice things, but that doesn’t mean we always get to have them.

The Duke of York has asked the Queen to be reinstated as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, The Telegraph understands, as he pushes for a return to royal duties.

But he was uninstated for a reason, so it seems pretty toddleresque to whine at Paddington Bear’s friend to let him come back. Has he taken to lying on the floor drumming his heels and screaming?

A source said: “The colonelcy of the Grenadier Guards was his most coveted title and he wants it back. Having remained a Counsellor of State, he also believes he should be included at royal and state events.”

Of course he wants it back. That goes without saying. It was taken away for a reason.

“Most importantly for him is his status as an HRH and ‘Prince of the Blood’ and he feels that should be reinstated and his position recognised and respected.”

Despite that whole underage sex thing. Ain’t nobody gonna respect him now.

He’s in a hurry to get it done because it’s only Brenda who might say yes. Choss has said a firm no.

Originally a comment by Papito on What kind of “experts”?

Experts said that in today’s world, children must fight against the devil for their souls even while they’re asleep.

Really, what’s the difference?

The difference is that the believers in gender ideology have so completely captured the media elite that, though a reporter may question whether children have “souls,” none may question whether children have “gender identity.”

A reporter who went on NPR or wrote in the Times about how today’s children had to guard their souls against the devil would be seen as religious, and the media organization would fence them in with a counterpoint. No counterpoint is allowed for the hundreds of times a week they assert that all children have a “gender identity.” Nobody comes on after to say “not everybody believes that people have gender identities.” It’s presented as revealed truth.

If a kid came home from a public school saying that their health teacher was telling them about their souls, few angry parents would hesitate to call the school. When kids come home from public school saying their health teachers are telling them about their gender identities, parents have to weigh whether they will be labeled a bigot for protesting.

What do young people really have, that’s different from yesteryear? Proselytized from every newspaper, radio, and school, they have the reified “gender identity.” At the top of the cultural menu of explanations for psychological distress, they have “gender dysphoria.” In previous generations, a different thing would have been at the top of that menu: the work of the Devil, multiple personalities, possession, repressed trauma. In this sense, “I’m really a boy” is the new “I saw Goody Osburn cavorting with the Devil.”

Most of the kids who identify that they are suffering from “gender dysphoria” have an interpersonal conflict with their same-sex parent. As did innumerable adolescents of generations past, they don’t want to grow up to be their dad, or to be their mom. The difference is that today, instead of being told they can grow up to be a different sort of man, or a different sort of woman, they are told right away that they can grow up not to be a man at all, or not to be a woman at all. That’s what a firmly implanted belief in gender identity promises them. That’s what teaching kids from Kindergarten that all people choose their genders and their pronouns teaches them.

Do we forget that second word exists? Gender… identity. There it is. A fundamental goal of the psyche during adolescence is defining the individual’s identity. That’s what an adolescent brain is meant to do, and it does it, first and foremost, by reaction to and against his or her parents. What am I? Not like my dad… and that is when gender ideology hijacks individuation. Did anybody in the Sixties imagine that someday “tuning in, turning on, and dropping out” would seem like a more mainstream choice? Did anybody imagine that someone could convince adolescent boys to sign up to become eunuchs? And convince their parents to go along with it?

I saved my son from the gender ghouls, and these days he thanks me for it. Now I have to lay the groundwork to save my daughter. I have nerdy, non-conforming, empathetic, quirky kids, and such kids are the prime targets of the gender cult. Kids aren’t ever going to believe everything their parents tell them, and nor should they. But whenever the topic of “gender identity” comes up, I remind my daughter that not everybody believes in “gender identity,” just like not everybody believes in “souls.” I don’t have a “gender identity,” I tell her. Her mother doesn’t have one, her brother doesn’t have one. We’re just who we are, and we live the way we want to. If the way we want to express ourself comports with what someone expects of a person of our sex, then cool. If it doesn’t, then, well, that’s also cool. It’s just not terribly important. What we have are identities. “Gender” is just one tiny little blind alley in the vast cities of our identities.

The gender cult wants to make that tiny little alley the main thoroughfare of kids’ identities. That is, ultimately, spiritually impoverishing. Not only do the sacrifices of body parts and functions the cult requests of children in service to subordinating identity to gender weaken and harm them, but so does the sacrifice of their own psychological wholeness. In my state it’s illegal to provide psychological therapy to children who suffer from gender dysphoria. There is only one legal remedy: affirmation. A therapist who doesn’t do that could lose his license, and so he will commonly refuse to see such patients, thus turning away a significant proportion of the adolescents needing therapy today.

Asking what’s really causing them trauma, what’s really behind their suffering, is impermissible. The answer is gender, and you will provide that answer. Send them down the path to mutilation. Only someday later, perhaps in another state, can they start to explore the reality of their suffering. Now, with more suffering. Perhaps infertile, perhaps sick, perhaps unable ever to experience a sexual relationship. But they’ve got “gender identity,” right?

Does the belief in “gender identity” harm all children? I can’t say whether it does, no more than I can say that the belief in “souls” does. I’m content to let people believe what they want in their churches. If we’re not taking kids away from Christian Scientists, who won’t give them aspirin, then we can’t take kids away from gender ideologues. What I can say with all certainty is that the mandated belief in “gender identity” harms more children than it helps. We must do our best to push back against the reification of this belief.

I guess “white supremacist” is a kind of all-purpose political orientation that starts with hating everyone? A group of them were interrupted at a Pride parade in Idaho.

Police in the US state of Idaho have arrested 31 members of a white supremacist group and charged them with plotting to riot at a gay pride event.

Someone saw them piling into a truck with shields and masks, and called the cops.

The vehicle was soon stopped, and the men – members of the Patriot Front group – were arrested.

“They came to riot downtown,” Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said.

He added that riot gear and a smoke grenade were found in the vehicle.

The lorry was stopped near where the North Idaho Pride Alliance was holding the Coeur d’Alene Pride in the Park event.

In case you’re wondering how Coeur d’Alene is pronounced, it’s disappointing. Coredalayn.

The arrested members of Patriot Front are from 11 different US states – and only one of them from Idaho, police said.

Crossing state lines to create a ruction. It’s sort of good in a way though – they could rustle up only one rioter in Idaho and had to go trawling around the rest of the country – and then all they ended up with is 31 wannabe rioters.

Just for fun: Jordan Peterson having a very reasonable calm thoughtful moment.

Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room 8.

Per the New York Times:

Experts said that young people increasingly have the language and social acceptance to explore their gender identities

This drives me crazy. What kind of “experts”? The journalistic principle in play should be to weigh the testimony of “experts” against the possibility of influence by a religious belief system that’s applying pressure on the debate.

If you’re talking about any other religious belief — say, Scientology — it becomes very clear that there’s two kinds of “experts” about it: believers themselves, and those who look at the belief system from the outside. Everyone on the inside will of course have nothing but good things to say about it because they have to. It’s people on the outside, who at least ostensibly have more freedom to look at it critically, who journalists should seek out for comment.

Of course with trans ideology you could still be under pressure to keep quiet and/or play along with their beliefs even if you don’t personally identify as one — far more so than with Scientologists. Obviously you won’t get an objective take on Scientology from Tom Cruise or Elisabeth Moss, but nor will you from anyone whose line of work could one day put them on the set of The Handmaid’s Tale or a Mission: Impossible movie. For the rest of us trapped in Gender La La Land, disagreeing with trans ideology is the same, and possibly worse: we could even find ourselves in trouble with the law.

So the press really has to take the social pressure aspect into account any time they cite “experts.”

But journalists don’t see it that way because journalists (a) don’t recognize that trans ideology is a quasi-religious belief system, based on ideas that are not backed by science, rooted in feelings that can’t be quantified scientifically; and (b) journalists don’t recognize the extent of the pressure people are under to affirm these religious beliefs. They conflate nonbelief in gender ideology with fringe characters who lack expertise in gender “science” and are motivated by an ideological hostility to progress.

Of course they got this idea in the first place by treating gender ideology believers as “experts” at the outset, and from the very moment journalists took the gender gurus at their word that they knew what they were talking about and that anyone looking in from the outside who disagreed was not to be trusted, this bias just became self-reinforcing.

So we really need to push hard on the fact that gender ideology is a new religion rather than a new science, and one that’s using manipulative tricks to push its agenda. It should be so obvious that this is true! But —by Xenu — look how well their strategy is working: half the atheist movement has fallen for it.

L. Ron Hubbard, crazy as he was, had shrewd insights into how to spread his cult, one of them being to glom his beliefs onto the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, because that’s what had the most appeal to Americans at the time. It wasn’t just a new science, it was a new science that made you glamourous and successful! In just the same way, the pseudoscience of trans ideology has been yoked to the virtues of progressive politics: gay and lesbian rights; identity politics; the civil rights movement. In a way that’s even more fiendishly clever, because its appeal is deeper than aspirations to fame and fortune: it’s morally righteous. Righteousness is stubborn as an ox, and prone to blindness. Blind righteousness is dangerous.

Another one of those “rights” that isn’t a right.

‘We have a right not to be insulted,’ demonstrator claims as Cineworld fears for workers’ safety

Well, no, you don’t, not exactly, and especially not if you define “insulted” so broadly that it includes living in the same city as a movie house that’s showing a film about Mohammed’s daughter.

A cinema chain has been forced to pull a film about the prophet Muhammad’s daughter over fears for the safety of its staff.

And you don’t have a right to threaten and terrorize people, either.

Demonstrators outside branches in Bolton and elsewhere claimed the work was blasphemous and that freedom of speech should not apply to the subject of Islam. In response, filmmakers decried the suggestion that people offended by a film should be able to dictate what Britons can watch at the cinema.

Britons or anyone.

Check out this jackass:

“You will have repercussions.”

Nous sommes Charlie. Piss off.

Jason Stanley is going all-in on the abuse, not to say libel.

That’s an academic colleague he’s talking to.

Interesting times. Not in a good way.

Updating to add: I see it’s a continuation of his accusations yesterday, which I shared at the time. He’s consistent, at least.

Morality aside, it just doesn’t seem sensible or reasonable or adult to talk this way to a colleague (or anyone else, but administrators could be watching the colleague problem). Bye Felicia at the Washington Post just learned that a couple of days ago.

Women’s cis privilege in China:

CCTV footage of the incident widely circulated online shows a man placing his hand on a woman’s back as she shares a meal with two companions at a barbecue restaurant in the city of Tangshan in Hebei province in the early hours of Friday.

After the woman pushes him away, the man strikes her before others drag her outside and deal a barrage of blows as she lies on the ground. Another woman is also knocked to the floor.

Why are women so cruel and violent to men?

The video quickly went viral on China’s internet and renewed a debate about sexual harassment and gender-based violence in a country where the conversation around women’s rights has grown in recent years despite pressure from a patriarchal society, internet censorship and patchy legal support.

Much like the rest of the world, in fact, except the internet censorship is probably a lot more stringent.

The attack has shocked China and prompted many to ask why this has happened. “The reason that these men felt they could freely assault the woman for rejecting their harassment is because so many men in the past have gone unpunished by the authorities for doing the same,” said Yaqiu Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Bullying and dominating women never goes out of style.

Virginia Thomas is even more coup plot-involved than we thought.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona — 27 more than previously known — to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

Which means she tried to leverage Clarence Thomas’s position to bully state legislators into stealing the election.

The Post reported last month that Thomas sent emails to two Arizona House members, in November and December 2020, urging them to help overturn Biden’s win by selecting presidential electors — a responsibility that belongs to Arizona voters under state law.

She used an online platform that facilitates mass mailings.

New documents show that Thomas indeed used the platform to reach many lawmakers simultaneously. On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.

Telling them to help steal the election.

On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors …consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”

…[T]he revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote — an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era — intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.

And then trying to subvert an election sets her apart some more.

Absolutely classic oblivious male lefty sexist pig type guy. Sports editor at The Nation.

Right? Right?? That precious little Susie, who does she think she is? Bitch.

Uh huh. He’s really in a lather about those “young Black women,” and the irrepressible joy of sporting success. Any excuse will do when it comes to dismissing girls and women who want fair competition in their sports.

Dave Zirin and Jason Stanley should be a dual act, like Laurel and Hardy.

The ACLU is promoting this shockingly bad and dishonest article by Chase Strangio and one Gabriel Arkles:

Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked

The dishonesty is apparent already: the issue isn’t “trans athletes,” it’s male trans athletes invading women’s sports. They know that of course, and carefully pretend not to.

Upholding trans athletes’ rights requires rooting out the inaccurate beliefs underlying harmful policies sweeping through state legislatures.

What are “trans athletes’ rights”?

No athletes have a “right” to cheat by playing in categories that are for people smaller or younger or less muscular than they are. That’s it, that’s the issue.

For years state lawmakers have pushed legislation attempting to shut trans people out of public spaces. In 2020, lawmakers zeroed in on sports and introduced 20 bills seeking to ban trans people from participating in athletics.

Seeking to ban male trans people from women’s athletics. Are there any bills that seek to ban all trans people from athletics? I don’t know because I haven’t examined all of them, but the ones that have made it into news stories and think pieces have all been about not letting men – trans or otherwise – invade women’s athletics. Strangio and Arkles are carefully hiding that fact, as the trans dogmatists always do.

Though we are fighting every day in the courts and in legislatures, upholding trans rights will take more than judicial and legislative action. It will require rooting out the inaccurate and harmful beliefs underlying these policies. Below, we debunk four myths about trans athletes using the expertise of doctors, academics, and sports psychologists serving as experts in our litigation in Idaho.

First myth:

MYTH: The participation of trans athletes hurts cis women.

Many who oppose the inclusion of trans athletes erroneously claim that allowing trans athletes to compete will harm cisgender women. This divide and conquer tactic gets it exactly wrong. Excluding women who are trans hurts all women. It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being “too masculine” or “too good” at their sport to be a “real” woman. 

So instead women should just put up with men taking all the prizes?

Further, this myth reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection.

Oh fuck off. Don’t pretend any of this is feminist reasoning. It’s just a fact that men as a class are bigger and stronger than women. That’s one reason the fight for our rights never ends. It’s not a “stereotype” that Lia Thomas has an obvious advantage over the women he is competing against.

The real motive is never about protection — it’s about excluding trans people from yet another public space. The arena of sports is no different.

Note the complete, callous, brutal indifference to women.

On the other hand, including trans athletes will promote values of non-discrimination and inclusion among all student athletes.

Then why discriminate against athletes on steroids? Why discriminate against tigers or gorillas or elephants? Why discriminate against athletes on motorcycles or in tanks?

It’s all bullshit. There are rules and stipulations and qualifications in athletics; there is no blanket value of total non-discrimination and inclooosion. Competitions “discriminate” against all the athletes who didn’t make it to the competitions. That’s how competitions work. It’s all discrimination and exclusion: the winner excludes everyone else.

Dr. Mary Fry adds that youth derive the most benefits from athletics when they are exposed to caring environments where teammates are supported by each other and by coaches. Banning some girls from athletics because they are transgender undermines this cohesion and compromises the wide-ranging benefits that youth get from sports. 

But those “girls” are not girls; that’s the whole point. These stupid childish language games are just that”: stupid and childish. The ACLU is making a complete fool of itself.

The other “myths” are just as ludicrous.

MYTH: Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes.

No, male athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over female athletes. Not a myth, a stone-cold fact.

MYTH: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics. 

Not a myth, a stone-cold fact.

FACT: Trans girls are girls.

Not a fact; a lie.

You’d think an adult who works in a job where he has to handle philosophy would refrain from publicly saying fatuous nonsense like this.

It depends what the “embattled minority group” is, obviously. I mean OBVIOUSLY, spoken with all the heavy disdain of an enlightened teenager. Duhhhhhhh-uhhhhhhhhhh.

An “embattled minority group” can be anything. It can be rapists. It can be murderers. It can be mass murderers. It can be men who stalk and trap and overpower and rape and murder women. It can be men who stalk and trap and overpower and rape and murder women and are cops. It can be lying cheating thieving heads of state. It can be anything. Just being embattled and a minority does not guarantee you are good or other-regarding or halfway decent people.

Jason Stanley can’t be so dumb that he doesn’t know that, yet he talks the childish slogany jargon anyway.

This guy should be stripped of all assets and forced to clean out sewers for the rest of his life. Without a shovel.

Professional philosophy of the highest order.

Jason Stan continues to cover himself with glory.

Jason has met only “pro trans” feminists, therefore Jane Clare Jones doesn’t speak for all women. (Mind you, she’s never claimed to speak for all women, and Stanley’s sneaky insinuation that she does say that is…sneaky.) It’s not a very powerful argument. Jon Pike puts it more bluntly.

What did our not at all lazy philosopher do? Debate the complex issues? No…

Another philosopher:

That’s what I was railing about a couple of days ago – all that wild, reckless name-calling of feminist women, as if we were a gang of Proud Boys or similar.

I’m sure people will be admiring that tweet 200 years from now.

Boola boola.

Obama deals with the “Oh no identity politics ew ew we’re all individuals and only individuals matter” trope a lot more briskly than I did.

Steve Phillips at the Guardian makes an important point:

The last time the United States failed to properly punish insurrectionists, they went on to form the Ku Klux Klan, unleash a reign of murderous domestic terrorism, and re-establish formal white supremacy in much of the country for more than 100 years. As the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack begins televised hearings this week, the lessons from the post-civil war period offer an ominous warning for this moment and where we go from here.

It’s true. The insurrectionists weren’t much punished and the victims were not even slightly compensated, and the results were and are horrific.

In 1860, many people believed that America should be a white nation where Black people could be bought and sold and held in slavery. The civil war began when many of the people who held that view refused to accept the results of that year’s presidential election. They first plotted to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln (five years later, they would succeed). Then they seceded from the Union, and shortly thereafter started shooting and killing people who disagreed with them.

…

Mere months after the ostensible end of the civil war in April 1865, half a dozen southern young white Confederate war veterans gathered in Pulaski, Tennessee, in December 1865 to discuss what to do with their lives, and they decided to form a new organization called the Ku Klux Klan. The first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Confederate general who had been pardoned by Johnson. In less than one year, Forrest would go on to orchestrate “336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill on freedmen across the state [of Georgia] from January 1 through November 15 of 1868”.

The Proud Boys and the rest of them are of that type.

…the enemies of democracy in the Republican party have only become emboldened, like their Confederate counterparts of the last century. Just as happened in the years after the civil war when the prospect of large-scale Black voting threatened white power and privilege, the defenders of white nationalism have engaged in a legislative orgy of passing pro-white public policies. From trying to erase evidence of racism and white supremacy from public school instruction to laws making it increasingly difficult for people of color to cast ballots. As journalist Ron Brownstein has warned, “The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as many areas grow significantly more racially and culturally diverse. Voting laws are intended to reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate; the teaching bans aim to shape the attitudes of tomorrow’s.”

And it looks as if they’re going to win.

I guess preening Yale philosophers don’t have to know anything about history.

It didn’t matter whether or not women were “supportive of” lynching, whatever that means. Nobody asked them. Nobody cared. Women had no power. It’s grotesque to talk about them as if they had just as much power to “be supportive of” lynching as men had. Women could have favored communist revolution or fascist counter-revolution or a takeover by Martians, it would have made no difference to anything.

World’s most conceited philosophy academic continues his campaign to malign feminist women.

One guy retweets something=”this alliance.”

(Who’s Jerry Dunleavy? I’ve never heard of him. Google tells me he’s a reporter for the Washington Examiner. Somehow that’s feminists’ fault?)

And that’s why he’s a Yale professor of philosophy and you’re not.

Feminists like chocolate and so does the far right!!!