The BBC did a story on the Ukraine famine last week.

Resentment of Moscow in Ukraine has deep historical roots. In the Great Famine of the 1930s, as many as four million Ukrainians died during the forced collectivisation of farms by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The BBC’s Fergal Keane has been to the eastern city of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and met some of the last survivors of the famine.

…Petro Mohalat, now aged 95, remembers the first food raids in the winter of 1932.

He was five years old when the communist “brigade” arrived in the village. His grandmother told the children to hide anywhere they could.

“It was very scary. The brigade had pitchforks and they came to every house searching for bread,” he recalls. “They used crowbars to come inside. Then they went to all the barns trying to find any buried bread.”

Acting on the orders of Stalin, Communist officials seized food and prevented peasants from leaving their villages to search for supplies. They were being punished for resisting the forced collectivisation of farms.

Ukraine calls the deaths of an estimated four million people in the famine of 1932-33 the Holodomor – killing by starvation.

Putin is against all this Critical Famine Theory.

Russia denies that Ukrainians were politically targeted for starvation because Joseph Stalin feared nationalist sentiment. Just over a decade before they had fought to establish an independent nation – but were defeated by the Red Army.

It says much for official attitudes that Russia’s Supreme Court recently ordered the closure of Memorial, Russia’s oldest NGO devoted to uncovering Soviet-era oppression.

Do they call it the 1934 Project?

Dr Drobovych is keen to point out that responsibility for the horrors of that period doesn’t lie with Stalin alone. The repression and the forced collectivisation could not have happened without the participation of vast numbers of Ukrainian Communist officials.

He sees in modern day Russia’s attempts to impose its will on Ukraine worrying echoes of the Soviet past.

“They protect Stalin, they hide truth, they attack us. They don’t recognise us as an independent country, why? We don’t understand why.”

The usual reason. The same reason trans activists and allies don’t recognize women as an independent sex. It’s a power play, it’s dominance, it’s Us Up and You Down, it’s aggression, it’s We Win You Lose.

As all nations know, memory is a powerful weapon. The story of the Holodomor is central to Ukraine’s idea of itself as a country that defies Russian domination.

So Putin is telling them oh no you don’t.

The Atlantic October 2017: Anne Applebaum on the famine Stalin created in Ukraine:

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, and farm animals. At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food.

This wasn’t the potato famine. The grain didn’t rot in the fields, it was seized by the state along with all the other food, and the doors were locked.

Foreign journalists didn’t report on the famine, partly because they were threatened with expulsion if they did and partly because they were limited in where they could travel (Ukraine was forbidden). An aide of Lloyd George’s named Gareth Jones got off the train south early and walked through part of Ukraine, uncovering the truth. Journalists united to say he was nuts, an opportunist, deluded, blah blah blah – he was a terf, in short. His story was largely buried.

On March 31, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, [Walter] Duranty himself responded. “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” read the New York Times headline. Duranty’s article went out of its way to mock Jones:

There appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with “thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation.” Its author is Gareth Jones, who is a former secretary to David Lloyd George and who recently spent three weeks in the Soviet Union and reached the conclusion that the country was “on the verge of a terrific smash,” as he told the writer. Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones’s judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a 40-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad.

I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.

It wasn’t the popular narrative at the time, so Duranty laughed it off, knowing it was true.

Duranty continued, using an expression that later became notorious: “To put it brutally—you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He went on to explain that he had made “exhaustive inquiries” and concluded that “conditions are bad, but there is no famine.”

But there was, and he knew there was. He wanted to stay in Moscow and keep his role as the bigshot NY Times reporter on the Soviet Union, so he waved away Jones’s reporting.

Misogyny spotted in the wild.

Speak out, the man says, so a woman speaks out, and he swats her away as if she were a mosquito. I do not like this Michael Cashman.

Internecine war continues.

Is he?

Yes.

Not wrong. Claimed rights of trans people – that aren’t actually rights, but the ideology insists that they are – to be “validated” as the other sex and to take over the other sex’s spaces and prizes and sports and jobs do indeed conflict with the rights of women. Lia Thomas is one current illustration of how that works. Cashman is either wrong or lying when he says trans rights don’t conflict with the rights of women. No skin off his ass is it, since they’re not his rights.

Hadley Freeman on why she stopped being a good girl, i.e. a people-pleaser. The shift began in 2014.

I was reading the New Yorker one evening and came across an article with the headline “What is a Woman?”. It was, according to the standfirst, about “the dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”, a subject about which I knew nothing. I read it, vaguely interested in the social shift that meant being “transgender” no longer refers to someone who has undergone a sex change operation, but is now “how someone sees themselves”, as the writer Michelle Goldberg put it. This meant, Goldberg continued, that women-only spaces were increasingly changing to women-and-transwomen spaces, even if those transwomen still had male bodies — and to query this risked accusations of bigotry.

I remember that article. I remember reading it, and agreeing with it, and not feeling free to say so. I remember specifically not talking about it, I remember deciding not to talk about it, especially after seeing a lot of “she’s a terf” reactions from friends. I remember wrestling with the fact that even a thoughtful, careful article like that, by a thoughtful intelligent feminist writer like Goldberg, drew a torrent of venomous othering. I remember feeling frustrated that the subject was off-limits. I think I knew or half-knew that this couldn’t go on forever – that I couldn’t keep biting it back forever. I didn’t know how fast and abrupt it would be though.

What really interested me was how quickly institutions were falling into line with this new ideology: venues cancelled talks if a radical feminist was on the bill; all-female bands pulled out of women-only festivals for fear of looking transphobic. How strange, I thought, that those with authority capitulate to the obviously misogynistic demands of a few extreme voices.

Same.

Hadley has a lot of friends who are angry about all this.

They talk about JK Rowling, vilified for saying that women — not people — menstruate and calling for single-sex spaces to be preserved. They talk about Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor, who had to leave her job at Sussex University due to ongoing harassment from gender activists. They talk about political parties which explicitly describe women’s sex-based rights as transphobic, including the Green Party and the SNP. They talk about politicians who say things so stupid about gender it’s impossible to believe that they truly believe what they are saying, from Dawn Butler’s claim that “a child is born without a sex”, to Layla Moran’s insistence that she doesn’t care about a person’s sex because she can see “their soul”, to Keir Starmer’s stammering insistence that it’s wrong to say “only women have a cervix”.

Much of the Left would like to ignore these women talking, Hadley continues, but we’re not going away.

People who claimed to care ever so deeply about women’s physical safety during the MeToo movement now sneered at any woman who expressed doubt about sharing private spaces with male-bodied people. The most obvious example here was JK Rowling, who wrote about how her experiences with domestic violence informed her views, an inconvenient truth her critics conveniently ignored. Women are raised to fear male strength, and with very good reason. And now we’re called bigots for doing so.

Called bigots and punished as severely as possible.

So I questioned myself. Of course I did. Would my children be ashamed of me in twenty, ten, five years time? “Am I the baddie here?” I asked myself. But I just couldn’t make it square up: how can feelings (gender identity) always take precedence over material reality (biological sex)? Trying to convince myself that I was wrong and the gender ideologues were right was like trying to convince myself that one plus one equals a unicorn. How can you shut your eyes to your own experience and say something that makes no sense? Apparently some people can, but I could not.

Again: same. I test it regularly – “does it seem any more credible now? Now? Now?” And it never does. It just goes right on seeming like childish magical thinking, unbecoming in adults.

It felt at times like men’s rights activism as a religion. Whenever I or a female colleague dared to voice our doubts about gender ideology, we were pilloried; whenever a male colleague did, he was given a free pass. It was, in the vast, vast main, women who were condemned as bigots, all because they didn’t believe the right things, because they were trying to defend their legal rights. Left-wing men — both in person and online — told me that unless I repeated the mantra “trans women are women”, I was a bigot.

“Terf” is a hate-word for women; there is no equivalent for men.

Many of the people demanding these institutional shifts were and are not transgender themselves. They are bullies who set themselves up as moral arbiters, using self-righteous hysteria and factually questionable claims to demand censorship, instilling fear that anyone caught engaging in wrongspeak or even wrongthink will be publicly shamed and professionally destroyed. Bullies who insist they need to reshape women’s rights entirely, and then accuse any woman who even wants to discuss this of being hateful, stupid and dangerous.

At last it’s permissible to bully women again. They can’t believe their luck.

I’m currently writing a book about anorexia. Multiple doctors have confirmed to me what I already suspected, which is that there are obvious parallels between what gender dysphoric teenage girls say today — about their hatred of their body, their fear of sexualisation, their assumptions about what being a woman means — and what I said while in hospital as a teenager.

This is a fact, and an important one about adolescent mental health, and yet when other people have tried to make similar points in print, they have come up against enormous barriers. Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, which looked at the disproportionate rise in numbers of teenage girls seeking gender transition, was ignored by progressive newspapers and magazines, even though it sold well. A US supermarket stopped stocking it after protests by activists. The deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU, which still claims to be a free speech organisation, said that suppressing Shrier’s book was “100% a hill I would die on”.

Chase Strangio, that is – the worst thing that ever happened to the ACLU.

I don’t feel like I’ve become radicalised, because I don’t think anything I didn’t already think six years ago. I do, however, feel much better about myself for not just thinking it but saying it. I have learned that there is something worse than people telling me I’m a bad person, and that is allowing bullies to reframe the world, to dictate what we can all think and to define my reality. They might have triumphed over some institutions, but they haven’t triumphed over me. It turns out life is much better when you’re no longer the good girl.

Yer darn tootin’.

Putin’s going to do a tv talk soon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to give a televised address soon and he’s expected to speak on whether to recognise the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”.

Russia-backed rebels in those areas – located in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – have been fighting the Ukrainian military since 2014 but Moscow has not officially recognised their self-declared republics.

Step one. Step two is sending in Russian soldiers to defend the new “republics.”

Sure enough, he backed out.

Graham Linehan on Jon Ronson on Michfest:

His documentary about Michfest is, of course, a disgrace: the denigration of second-wave feminists is so facile that it actually includes a reference to them “not shaving their legs”; his barely-disguised cheerleading of third-wave feminism—what a coincidence, the porn-positive feminism that most benefits Jon—is grimly revealing. Jon’s compassion is infinite… if you’re male. If you’re female, your rights are subject to the whims of fashion.

Not shaving their legs? Really? Does Jon Ronson shave his?

And of course, there is the unmistakable attempt, one with which feminists are wearily familiar, to place trans-identified males inside the same moral framework as black people experiencing racism. This relentless propaganda, combined with the ambient soundtrack which swells every time words like ‘intersectional’ come up, have the effect of making it feel like a cult initiation recording.

Most insultingly, he portrays AGPs bullying a lesbian festival out of existence as if it was the Camp David accords. It’s a grotesque piece of revisionism. In one section, the principles behind the protest are breathlessly described.. “…headway was made at Camp trans, not least because of the guidelines that Nancy and her friends drew up. “Most festival goers are thoughtful and open minded. Listen carefully and remain calm and patient. Do not call anyone names or belittle their point of view or imply that they are irrational. An atmosphere with love and joy will attract people to us, anger and hostility or turn them away.””

Be polite and tactful as you invade a women-only festival and demand to be incloooded.

Isn’t that lovely? But the worst aspect of the program is not what it contains but what it does not. Ronson fails to even mention that Michfest ended—properly ended—when two lesbians and their adopted son were murdered by one of the Camp Trans protestors.

That would harsh the mellow.

Not a good sign.

BBC Live says all signs are that Russia is invading Ukraine.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says “All the indicators point to increasing numbers and readiness of Russian forces.”

He says the pledge to withdraw Russian troops from Belarus at the end of their joint military drills “was not carried out”.

“The exercise has now been extended until further notice,” he says.

Not good.

And the rest of it.

This is excellent. GB News was looking for volunteers on Twitter earlier because someone else had to back out, and Dennis raised his hand and so did Jon Pike.

Help friends harm enemies: Republican ethics in a nutshell.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is backing a controversial proposal to strip $200m in education funding from Democratic counties that defied his executive order last year banning mask mandates in schools.

The Democratic counties did what they thought would help protect students and teachers from a dangerous virus, while the Republican ones took the “don’t tell us what to do” route, which is not always clever in matters of public health. In other words the Dem counties didn’t do anything actually wrong or malicious. It seems very piggy to punish the schools in those counties for that kind of best judgement decision.

Promoting women is sex discrimination, giving scholarships to minorities is majority discrimination, free school lunches are wealth discrimination, yaddayaddayadda.

The Republican senator Ted Cruz complained on Sunday that Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court was an instance of racial discrimination…

No it’s a correction of generations of racial and sex discrimination. I’m sure he understands that point, it’s not very complicated, but one must throw red meat to The Base.

“Democrats today believe in racial discrimination,” Cruz told Fox News Sunday. “They’re they’re committed to it as a political proposition. I think it is wrong to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to discriminate.’”

But it’s perfectly all right to discriminate in favor of white men as long as you don’t spell out that that’s what you’re doing.

Brendan O’Neill, in one of his getting something right moments, points out the flaw in Laurie Penny’s “feminism”:

Penny writes an awful lot about women for someone who doesn’t know what a woman is. Ostensibly this is a feminist tract, about how humanity faces a terrifying choice – it either carries on down the road to fascism or it embraces the corrective of Laurie Penny’s feminism. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!) And yet it’s a strange feminist tome that thinks men can be women, too. Penny gets it out of the way early. ‘In this book, when I talk about “men” and “women”… I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories’, she says on page 8. So she’s not really talking about men and women at all. What a way to blow up your own thesis. Men have ruined everything, and only a progressive women’s politics can save us, but men can be women too if they want, so this progressive women’s politics will sometimes include men – that’s this book boiled down.

But Laurie Penny will just say they’re not men, because they say so.

And then there’s the part that crosses paths with the detransition article I quoted this morning:

I really wish that Penny – and all the other talking heads of our fashionably traumatised era – would just keep things to herself. Do we need to know that Penny starved herself as a teenager and ended up in hospital? Do we need to know that all her friends seem to have had terrible and frightening sexual experiences? (Where are they hanging out?) Penny says that she and others – the enlightened ones, presumably – have ‘realised and accepted that we are being abused and terrorised’. I call bullshit. Terrorised how? Again, why should we be made to suffer the neurotic cries of the leisured classes? Penny doesn’t need a political movement – she needs a therapist.

All these unconvincing claims to victimhood play an important role, however. They are the means through which the new commentariat launders its privilege and turns it into suffering.

Ah-ha. The same insight, you see. How does one get out of being a privileged white cishet Karen? By being trans or enby, or by telling us about a traumatic teenagerhood.

This is the fundamental function of identity politics – it allows those from wealthy, comfortable backgrounds to position themselves as the new oppressed. So Ms Penny – privately educated, time-rich, her labour unsold, her hands uncalloused, straight, married, etc etc – can magically reposition herself as a member of the downtrodden by announcing that she is genderqueer, a they/them, abused, terrorised, yada yada. And so do the privileged elites culturally appropriate the language of oppression and position us as the oppressors of them.

He’s not wrong.

Andy Lewis pointed out this article (to Aaron Rabinowitz specifically) by a detransitioned young woman, and it’s got some strikingly explanatory observations. For her it all started with Tumblr.

A major aspect of Tumblr culture has always been social justice ideology. Things that are now being played out and witnessed by the general public on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, like dissociative identity disorder LARPers, demisexuals, neopronouns, otherkin, and everything you see on @LibsOfTikTok, have long existed in an uncannily identical form on tumblr.com. The oppression hierarchy of racial and gender identities now being written into law in many of our once serious nations was the state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr long before your political junkie uncle knew the term “CRT”.  As cultish religions tend to operate, open devotion to the religion is mandatory. Perhaps the outsiders most likely to understand the way social dynamics worked on that website would be survivors of Scientology or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. On Tumblr, the situation was such that any claim to being “oppressed” would accumulate social credibility, while any unfortunate “privileged” status was justification for verbal abuse. As a “privileged” person, you were expected to constantly grovel and apologize, you had no right to speak on any issue involving the group you were “oppressing”, and you could not object in any way to any mistreatment hurled against you because of your race, gender, or sexuality.

All that is very recognizable, and far from exclusive to Tumblr, but it’s interesting that it’s so integral to a [whatever Tumblr is] populated by teenage girls.

And there’s a problem.

On one hand, I had found what felt like the perfect group of friends who understood me on an intuitive level, who I was able to talk to openly about the things I liked and made me “weird” in real life, but on the other hand I was a “cishet white girl” in an environment where that was one of the worst things to be. Since Tumblr users are mostly biological females, the “cishet white girl” holds the position of most privileged and therefore most inherently bad group. In this climate, you are made to feel guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in the world. No hardship you could possibly go through could ever be as bad as the prejudice and genocide POC and LGBT people face every. Single. Day. Insert clap emoji. LGBT people and POC can’t even walk out of their houses without being murdered by cishet white people just like you!

I recognize it, but didn’t know it started so young. It sounds like Pharyngula commenters. Maybe they all migrate from Tumblr?

Its understandable that any young person exposed to this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent being white, “cis”, straight, or (biologically) male. The beauty of gender ideology is it provides a way to game this system, so that you can get some of those targets off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like-minded youths. You can’t change your race, pretending to have a different sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can absolutely change your gender, and it’s as easy as putting a “she/they” in your bio. Instantly you are transformed from an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting cishet white scum into a valid trans person who deserves celebration and special coddling to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly now face.

Ahhhh yes. That fits like a key in the right lock. It fits a thought I’ve had a billion times, which is that this absurd ideology is terribly convenient for people who want a little of that nice cuddly sympathy-for-the-oppressed that’s going around. You don’t have to do anything – you can just say.

Back in November “Grace” Lavery was pining for a debate.

Helen Joyce took him up on it.

Let’s do this thing!

Or…

Everybody is laughing at him.

Another thing about this – or maybe it’s the same thing but just louder –

The other thing. There is no Harry Potter without its creator. Why? Because she’s the one who created it. That thing they love so much? (I don’t love it, myself, so I can take a detached view of the fandom and the ardor.) That thing they love so much is the work of the woman they think they hate so much. You can’t have a Harry Potter without its creator, because that would be something completely different. The creator isn’t incidental to the creation; she’s prior and essential.

Their adoration of Harry Potter means they adore her, whether they know it or not. This isn’t her fingernails we’re talking about here, it’s the product of her mind. In their passion for Harry they have a passion for Jo. It’s idiotic that they think they can split the two.

But then they think they can split people from their sex, so there you go.

Check out this thread if you want a furious denunciation of the Times for publicly trashing JKR.

Shahrar Ali is suing the Green Party.

A Green Party spokesman is bringing legal action against his former colleagues after he was sacked because of his views on the transgender debate.

Shahrar Ali, 53, was removed as the spokesman for policing and domestic safety on February 5 after activists complained that his tweets about women’s sex-based rights were transphobic.

It’s a neat trick to label non-belief in your magical mystery woo “phobic.” I don’t believe extraterrestrials drop in on us now and then for a chat; that’s not “phobic.” I just don’t believe it.

Party officials ruled that “his decision to champion a highly controversial position in the trans rights debate is not compatible” with his role.

But it’s fine to champion the other highly controversial position, in fact judging by this it’s mandatory.

And what are trans rights? For the billionth time, no one wants to take away their rights. There is no “right” to identify as other people and seize their rights.

Dr Ali, a former deputy leader who was a spokesman for nine years, has publicly backed the rights of women to defend single-sex spaces such as prisons, refuges and sports categories, rather than for them to be opened without limits to males who identify as women.

In other words he’s doing the right thing, and the demands are an encroachment on women’s rights.

No, really????

Trans inmates revert to males when they leave Scottish prisons

I’m stunned. It never ever occurred to me for a second that they would do that. I thought they were totally sincere.

A study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, also revealed that some of these prisoners may only have identified as women in order to have sex with female inmates.

Staggered again!

No I’m not. This is what women have been saying all along.

The SPS said it has no plans to make use of the new research.

Sure. It’s only women who are affected, so who cares.