I guess Rhys has finished sulking over quitting his job because everybody hated him.

Except no he’s not so no he doesn’t. Again, lies don’t become true through repetition.

Live Science on the collapse of the Conger Ice Shelf:

A massive Antarctic ice shelf that covered an area about the size of New York City or Rome just collapsed into the ocean. Scientists warn that while they do not expect significant impacts as a result of this event, melting ice in this historically stable region may be a foreboding sign of things to come.

Satellite photos reveal the sudden disappearance of the Conger Ice Shelf on East Antarctica between March 14 and March 16. “The Glenzer Conger Ice Shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years and it’s not ever going to be there again,” University of Minnesota glaciologist Peter Neff told NPR. While the Ice shelf had been slowly shrinking since the 1970s, recently accelerated melting preceded this month’s sudden and unexpected collapse.

West Antarctica has unstable ice, so collapsing ice shelves are not unusual. But

East Antarctica is one of the coldest and driest locations on planet Earth, and because of this, ice shelf collapses are unheard-of there. According to the AP, this is the first major ice shelf collapse in East Antarctica during human history. 

…

While scientists don’t expect any major consequences as a direct result of the Conger Ice Shelf collapse, they do warn that this could be the beginning of a troubling trend. According to Neff, ice shelves act as a buffer to protect Antarctic glaciers from melting, as they insulate those glaciers from the warm seawater. If glaciers in East Antarctica melt, they could be a major driver of sea-level rise in the coming decades. 

Ok, coming decades, so not our problem, so keep those cruise ships cruising.

Yes but how do you know?

Oh yes they are. But of course Tom is being evasive here, in the usual way. By “men” he means men who don’t identify as women, while we mean men.

Oh really. How do we know? How does anyone know? What’s the cutoff point? A week of claiming to be a woman? A month? A year? What are the criteria, what is the evidence, what is the test, who are the experts, how do we know?

It’s such bullshit. Of course it is. The whole thing is a fiction, and there are some ways it could be possible to accept the fiction socially, but that’s not good enough, we have to treat it as not a fiction, and as absolutely mandatory on pain of ostracism. Unless it’s a whim, of course.

First ever all-transgender team to play a football match!

There’s just one slight problem.

The transgender team is all trans women.

The other team is all women.

Of course the news article doesn’t admit that up front. They never do.

A local football club will play against a team of solely transgender women in a “world first”.

Dulwich Hamlet will compete against Trans Radio UK United FC (TRUK) on 31 March.

TRUK United’s squad will consist only of transgender women, who will take to the pitch against Dulwich Hamlet’s womens team.

Very validating for the trans women no doubt, but what about the physical safety of the women? Not to mention the fair competition aspect.

Event organiser Lucy Clark says the match, which will take place at Dulwich’s Champion Hill, will “make history” as it is the first time an all transgender female squad has been fielded in a football game.

Lucy Clark, “the world’s first openly trans referee”:

The game is in aid of Transgender Day of Visibility, an annual event dedicated to “celebrating transgender people.”

“[This] is an important date for the transcommunity and is the perfect day for this important match,” says Lucy, “not only because it is a first and is making history, but will also show, that despite all the anti trans negativity that seems to be everywhere, there is a place for transgender and non binary people in sport.”

And that place is in women’s competitions no matter what sex the trans players are.

Updating to add a snapshot of Referee Lucy:

H/t Blood Knight

Well but wait though.

Right, being same-sex attracted is not a choice and it’s homophobic to tell people it is. But then what about trans people? What are same-sex attracted people supposed to do here? Specifically, are lesbians allowed to be not attracted to trans lesbians (men who identify as lesbians)? If a radio presenter asked Benjamin Cohen that question what would he say?

Does he though?

Mikhail Iossel shared a remarkable piece of street art from Lyon:

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Never mind Ukraine what about trans people?

It’s probably not helpful to make this about intelligence. I have been interested in cults for a while now*, and one particularly pernicious myth is that only weak or stupid people (or at the very least people who suffer from other major problems) join cults, when in fact cults are usually not interested in “damaged goods”: They are mainly interested in strong, healthy, intelligent, highly functional people who can go out there and recruit others (not a simple task!) and put down countless hours of voluntary work (including some highly specialized tasks that require great skill and competence) for the cults. In fact, I seem to remember former cult-member turned anti-cult activist and exit-counselor Steven Hassan once saying that when he was recruiting for the Moonies back in the 1970s, the ideal recruit was someone who thought they were too clever to be recruited by a cult. So, at the risk of sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut, that’s what they (i.e. cult recruiters) want you to think. It’s a mindset that only works in the cults favor and to your disadvantage.

It’s not just that being that overconfident means your guard is down and you’re less vigilant. But, perhaps more importantly, if you’re that invested in your self-image as too clever to be recruited by a cult, then, if the cult can just get you to make some small concessions (perhaps in your sleep-deprived state at four o clock in the morning after hours of relentless guilt-tripping and peer-pressure), you are that much more prone to rationalize it. The idea that perhaps you weren’t too clever after all simply doesn’t compute (think “Syntax error”, think “This program has performed an illegal operation and is shutting down”, think the “Blue screen of death”), so if you did make those concessions it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do: “Only a weak-minded dolt could be persuaded to make such concessions because of peer pressure and simple sleazy sales-techniques. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, and I did make those concessions. Therefore it had to be the smart, rational, clever thing to do!”

So you rationalize, i.e. you come up with some spurious, after the fact justification for why making those concessions were the smart, rational, clever thing to do. And of course, once made, those rationalizations don’t just exist in a vacuum: They now become part of the lens through which you view every other question. The same rationalizations used to justify concessions a,b,c make it very difficult to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconsistent and hypocritical even to yourself (practically the definition of cognitive dissonance). And if the inconsistency and hypocrisy is not immediately obvious to you, you can be damned sure the cult leader (as well as every other person in the room) is going to point it out to you: “We didn’t force you to make these concessions! You have agreed that this is the right way to look at it! These are your own words! By your own logic, you should be making concessions d,e,f, and yet you won’t? I see… so that’s what your word is really worth etc.. etc…”

So you get caught in the logic of your own rationalizations (what some have called a “justification spiral”): Going back and admitting you shouldn’t have made concessions a,b,c leads to cognitive dissonance (i.e. “syntax error”/”illegal operation”/”Blue screen of death”), but staying where you are and going no further leads to charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy and hence more cognitive dissonance. The only way to go is forward, and so you make concessions d,e,f which, by the same logic, make it very hard to resist concessions g,h,i etc… etc… In the end, by the time you get to x,y,x, even forcing Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide down your children’s throats with syringes before drinking it yourself may appear less unacceptable than admitting to yourself “I have dedicated my life to an unworthy cause and a lie. And not only that, I have recruited others, and they are now in this same mess because of me. I have told malicious lies about others for telling the truth about the vicious cult I’m in. I have done inexcusable things and gotten my hands irredeemably dirty, all in the service of a lying megalomaniac, a psychopath, and a monster.” There is more too it, but ultimately I think this is how you get caught. This is when the cult owns you.

I think highly educated and intelligent people are often the easiest people to recruit, in part precisely because they think they’re too smart to be recruited, but also because their intelligence makes them even better at rationalization (according to Joachim Fest the one truly brilliant mind of the 3rd Reich was Josef Goebbels). Even back in my movement skeptic days I thought skeptics tended to over-emphasize logical fallacies and under-emphasize heuristics and biases, cognitive dissonance and rationalization, motivated reasoning and wishful thinking etc. It always seemed to be implicitly assumed that those things were limited to the “true believers” while skeptics were immune to that kind of thing. If you’re that surprised that people like Solnit and Myers could be persuaded to drink the Kool-Aid, it might mean it’s time to look closer at some of your own assumptions.

* I recently finished reading Tim Reiterman’s biography of Jim Jones The Raven. A real world horror-story if ever there was one!

** The cult Aum Shinrikyo, infamous for the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, disproportionally recruited scientists.

I get the feeling the venom is getting more venomous.

I guess that’s the “d’Amour” part? Very lovey-dovey I must say.

Anyway Philip Pullman approves of it.

Feminist women are cunts, and Philip Pullman tells us to go to hell if we object to his endorsement of that view. Strange times.

Updating: It’s even worse than that.

Oh, yes, that’s fine then. Call us cunts all day long if you think we’re “transphobes” i.e. women who don’t agree that men who call themselves women are women. Cunts are very filthy disgusting things after all, which is why men are so much better at being women than women are.

They’re obsessed.

You’d think this was the only civil liberties issue on the planet. I see variations on this ad often and I don’t see ACLU ads that talk about mass incarceration or abortion rights or workers’ rights or any other civil liberties you’d think the ACLU would care about. Maybe this is because of Facebook’s algorithms but I talk about women’s rights a lot more than I talk about trans rights yet the ACLU seems to want to convert me. All it’s doing is convincing me it’s completely lost the plot.

Nancy Kelley says look look it’s all been proven look for yourself.

So I’m reading. First item: the title, subtitle, and first sentence all carefully obfuscate the issue in the way the obedient media outlets always do.

Title: Critics accuse trans swimming star

But the issue isn’t “trans” it’s man. He has an unfair advantage because he’s a man competing against women.

Subhead: The NCAA champion has sparked controversy and become a hate figure among conservatives, but statistics show little evidence that she performed any differently to other women, Io Dodds reports

That one’s a whole list of obfuscations. He became a “champion” by competing against women. He didn’t randomly become “a hate figure”: he cheated women out of their chances to be champions. We’re very far from all conservatives – most of us are fiercely feminist. “She” is a he. Women aren’t “other women” in relation to him, because he’s not a woman. Io Dodds is a trans woman, i.e. a man. He “came out” as a transwoman in June last year.

First sentence: In 17 March, Lia Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win America’s top trophy in university sports when she swam to victory in the women’s 500 yard (457 meter) freestyle race. Yet again the sly “transgender athlete.” The point is that he’s a trans woman i.e. a man. He has the body of a man.

Now for the rest of the article.

Her right to compete in women’s races, and sometimes her gender itself, has been attacked by sports stars, politicians, activists, her competitors, and even some of her teammates’ parents, as well as protesters at the NCAA championship last week, who argued that her time living as a man gives her an unfair advantage.

No, not his “time living as a man” ffs, his male body.

After that it’s a few thousand words of strenuous special pleading which seems to boil down to “she didn’t get the highest score ever therefore it was totally fair.”

The Washington Post on Putin’s repression of all traces of dissent:

The speed of Russia’s transformation to Soviet-style “self-purification” has been astonishing. When Russia invaded Ukraine last month, state TV went to wall-to-wall propaganda blaming Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” and “nationalists.” Now, shadowy pro-Putin figures are daubing the words “traitor to the motherland” on the doors of peace activists and others.

The propagandists are seriously busy – I’ve even had a couple here trying to post the “Ukraine–>neo-Nazis” crap in comments.

Despite the risk of fines and jail time, others keep protesting. More than 15,000 people have been arrested since the war started.

Anastasia, wearing a jacket with the words “No to War,” was grabbed by riot police earlier this month as she walked toward a small group of protesters in Moscow. She was arrested and fined.

“It makes me really angry,” said Anastasia, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons. “On top of anger, I feel a kind of desperation and sadness and regret, specifically a regret that there is nothing good in the future any more.”

Cars carrying imperial flags and bearing the letter Z, a symbol of support for the war, have appeared in Russian cities and towns.

Kirill Martynov, political editor of Novaya Gazeta, was denounced as a traitor and dismissed recently by two universities where he taught two philosophy courses. A parent had heard him tell students that civilians were being killed in Ukraine.

He got out of Russia.

[T]here is a thread of messianic rhetoric from top Russian officials, pro-Kremlin journalists, religious figures and academics, laying out the mission to revive Russian greatness. They revile Western liberalism and applaud conservative, authoritarian orthodoxy.

Make Russia Great Again. It’s not a coincidence that Trump drools over Putin.

And speaking of the worship of Peak Bullying, Trump is still flattering his tits-out hero.

Donald Trump chose a rally in Georgia on Saturday night once again to praise Vladimir Putin, calling the Russian president “smart” even as he said the invasion of Ukraine amounted to a “big mistake”.

Putin is “smart” the way any successful crook is “smart.” It’s not a very admirable form of intelligence.

The Republican former president also had warm words for China’s president Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and referred to such leaders collectively by saying: “The smartest one gets to the top.”

The “smartest” in the sense of the most ruthless, shameless, brutal, determined, conscienceless.

He spoke admiringly of Xi in terms of the fact that he “runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist” and referred to Kim as “tough”.

That’s Trump all over: admiring the iron fist. We’re living in a world of abject power-worship.

There’s conservatism and then there’s whatever this is:

After Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election to Joe Biden, Fox skewed further from news to comment, ending its 7pm nightly broadcast, firing the political editor who had been part of Fox accurately projecting on election night that Trump had lost the crucial state of Arizona and promoting Tucker Carlson, the populist commentator and host who has consistently downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by extremist Trump supporters, the New York Times noted.

Carlson and other voices aired by Fox have spent the past four weeks playing down Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going soft on Putin, and undermining the messages of the invaded country’s sovereignty and the Biden administration and Nato in supporting Ukraine.

What is that? Just, Force? The worship of pure Force, stripped of all other values and moral concerns? Or, even more simply, the worship of Bad? Look for the worst people on the planet and grovel to them?

Another Lia Thomas looms into view.

Top women cyclists who have helped Great Britain to historic triumphs face losing their team places after a trans woman announced she would now compete in female events.

Emily Bridges has continued to race against men for the past year while undergoing hormone therapy, and her successes include a gold medal at the recent University Championships in Nottingham.

However, her testosterone levels are now low enough to meet the criteria set out by British Cycling, the sport’s governing body, for her to compete against women.

So he’ll be guaranteed to win everything in sight! Progress!

The 21-year-old recently spoke candidly about her transition and revealed it was ‘always the plan’ to compete in women’s events.

‘After starting hormone therapy I didn’t want to race in the male category any more than I had to,’ she told Cycling Weekly magazine.

And of course what he wants is all that matters. What those stupid women in the female category might want is of no importance at all – they’re mere fodder for his ambitions.

Team GB’s women cyclists, including Laura Kenny, the country’s most successful female Olympian ever, have enjoyed unparalleled success in recent years, including five gold medals at the last three Games.

Blah blah blah. She’s not stunning and brave, she’s just some woman.

More war crimes:

There have been more than 70 separate attacks on hospitals, ambulances and doctors in Ukraine with the number increasing on a “daily basis”, says the World Health Organization (WHO).

…

Since 24 February, the WHO has reviewed and verified 72 separate attacks on healthcare facilities in Ukraine causing at least 71 deaths and 37 injuries.

Most have damaged hospitals, medical transports and supply stores, but the WHO has also recorded the “probable” abduction or detention of healthcare staff and patients.

“We are concerned that this number is increasing daily,” the WHO’s Ukraine country representative Jarno Habicht told the BBC.

“Health facilities should be safe places for both doctors and nurses, but also patients to turn to for treatment. This should not happen.”

Because the war in Ukraine is an international armed conflict between two states, the Geneva Conventions apply.

…

Under Article 18 of the Conventions, civilian hospitals “may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected”.

A breach of that rule can be investigated by the International Criminal Court in the Hague and, if found to be a war crime, individual perpetrators can be prosecuted and punished.

The US is not part of the ICC. I guess that’s because the US wants to be free to commit war crimes. Putin withdrew Russia from the court in 2016.

The BBC has lost its damn mind.

Heavy periods, debilitating pain and infertility – those are some of the causes of endometriosis, a condition that affects one in 10 people of any age in the UK, who are assigned female at birth.

They mean women. Endometriosis affects one in ten women in the UK. Simple, clear, easy to understand. The way they put it not so much.

But what is it really like living with the gynaecological condition?

Two women shared their story for Endometriosis Awareness month.

There you go! Gynaecological; women; you can say it.

A Russian-Canadian academic (he emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union) writes a public Facebook post about Putin’s absurd invocation of JK Rowling:

Earlier today, Putin railed against the alleged “Russophobia” in the West and, moronically enough, attempted to compare Russia to J.K. Rowling in that context.

He shared JKR’s prompt response. The rop comment on his post? Rebecca Solnit libeling JKR.

What a stunningly ugly and untrue thing to say – especially to a Russian-born critic of Putin at this particular time.

She goes on in the same vein, on and on. Kill the witch blah blah blah kill her some more.

She recommends a piece by Laurie Penny of all people.

More from Solnit:

Leaving aside that this is a sarcastic remark, I wouldn’t say that at all, because obviously she’s not commanding any armies or slaughter, but she is advocating for harm against vulnerable people with distortions of fact, and those views do result in real violence and death. (Americans think she’s a solo act; as a feminist who gets interviewed by Europeans regularly, I know her views are quite widespread there.) Putin is a homophobe who has pushed violence and persecution of gay men and other queer people, so they have some things in common.

Disgusting lie. She is not “advocating for harm against vulnerable people.”

We don’t have to choose. There are millions of advocates for Ukraine who are not advocating harm and discrimination elsewhere.

She’s not “advocating harm and discrimination.”

Iossel points out what you’d think Solnit could have thought of herself.

Rebecca Solnit This is not about us. Not about us at all. The absolute majority of people in Russia have no idea what this argument is about. It’s a luxury, discussing this now.

It’s a luxury and on the part of Solnit it’s rude and intrusive and callous. I used to admire her writing.

Solnit replies, still rudely intrusively callously:

This is a conversation taking place in North America where trans people are also dying of violence and being targeted for hate. Which is why I think it’s worth rethinking highlighting her as a hero.

Trans people aren’t “dying of violence” more than other people; that’s a myth. Russia’s war on Ukraine is a more significant issue right now than what JK Rowling has said about women and trans women, especially when discussing a post by a Russian-born academic talking about that war.

Solnit continues her lecturing until Iossel tells everyone to take it elsewhere and limits who can comment. What a shitshow.

There are some very strange ideas about rights and entitlements out there.

Russia has approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads – the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In an interview on Saturday, Medvedev said Russia’s nuclear doctrine did not require an enemy state to use such weapons first.

It’s a nuclear doctrine, you see. Bullies have a fist doctrine, murderers have a gun doctrine, Russia has a nuclear doctrine.

He said: “We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons. There are a few of them, let me remind them to you: number one is the situation, when Russia is struck by a nuclear missile. The second case is any use of other nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies.

“The third is an attack on a critical infrastructure that will have paralysed our nuclear deterrent forces. And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”

Medvedev added that there was a “determination to defend the independence, sovereignty of our country, not to give anyone a reason to doubt even the slightest that we are ready to give a worthy response to any infringement on our country, on its independence”.

There you go. It’s all very official and written down. No one can complain that it’s not clear. Russia has a right to use the nukes if someone in charge claims to think its independence needs defending. You can’t say fairer than that.

Here’s a surprise. Protesters in Ukraine did such top quality protesting that they got Russian soldiers to go away.

A mayor in a Ukrainian town occupied by Russian forces has been released from captivity and the soldiers have agreed to leave after a mass protest by residents.

Slavutych, a northern town close to the Chernobyl nuclear site, was taken by Russian forces but stun grenades and overhead fire failed to disperse unarmed protesters on its main square on Saturday.

The crowd demanded the release of mayor Yuri Fomichev, who had been taken prisoner by the Russian troops.

Attempts by Russian troops to intimidate the growing protest failed and on Saturday afternoon Fomichev was let go by his captors.

I find that quite astonishing. Usually invading troops who fail to intimidate the populace just move on to the mowing them down stage. This seems to hint that some (or perhaps most) Russian soldiers don’t want to make war on the people of Ukraine.

Western officials have said that Vladimir Putin had planned to take Ukraine’s capitals within days of announcing his “special military operation” on 24 February but had come across unexpectedly fierce resistance.

And maybe unexpectedly unfierce attack? By reluctant soldiers who don’t see Ukrainians as enemies?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The obvious rejoinder.

Maybe the trans people aren’t getting enough recognition after all, so let’s create trans athlete divisions…. Give them what they want; proper divisions with little sexless statuettes for the winners.

But that’s not what they want. Having a separate trans division would deny them their validation as “women” in exactly the same way that “third space” toilet facilities would. Trans activists don’t want a solution that’s “fair” that does not give them the hit of affirmation they crave. They don’t want to put a spotlight on their “transness”, they want to be centered, celebrated, and rewarded for their “womanliness.” The idea behind TWAW and “NO DEBATE” is to bulldoze over the fact that they are not women. The point of institutional capture was to use the power of these institutions like so many medieval siege engines to breach the boundaries of women’s spaces quickly and quietly, without discussion or consultation, so that TiMs’ presence in them would become a fait accompli. Somehow, this was disguised and passed off as a progressive, compassionate movement. Only one thing stood in the way. Women. Women’s resistance is painted as bigotry and hatred, instead of the defence of women’s rights and safety. To put this struggle in another way, it’s aggressive, “colonial expansion” vs. spirited, self-defence of the “homeland.”

The TiM argument that “we’ve been in women’s washrooms for years” is more gloating than anything else. The denial of a conflict of rights is hard to maintain without the strenuous denial of women’s legitimate needs. Proponents of this supposedly “progressive” position are forced to publicly defend more and more indefensible things, Thomas’s blatant cheating among them. Add that to prisons, hospital wards and women’s shelters. It’s amazing how much some of them are able to stomach with a straight face. Without the collusion of the media, it would be much more difficult. Ophelia has highlighted so many stories where the denial of the material reality of sex completely transforms the meaning and import of headlines and entire stories, with ideological positions passed off as “politeness” and ” journalistic style guides” rather than an active taking of one side (and one side only) at the hearts of these very stories. Actual, unbiased neutrality would not do this.