Who was it who instigated the attack on the Capitol?

Around the same time President Biden said former President Donald J. Trump encouraged the violence that took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6, some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent supporters deflected blame for the attack during an appearance on a live online show.

It’s not a “show.” It’s a vanity project-insurrectionist plot.

On the show, hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, one of Mr. Trump’s top former advisers, Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene laid responsibility on Democrats, the Capitol Police, the federal government and others.

The socialists, the FBI, the Critical Race Theorists, the Pentagon, the feminists, the State Department. They’re all in it up to their eyeballs. ALL of them.

The circular belief system in action.

See, no women I know carry themselves with grace and respect for the goddess energy, nor would I want them to. I certainly don’t carry myself that way, and would be horrified if anyone accused me of it. Yuck. What women need to carry ourselves with is confidence that we have a place in the world just as other humans do. “Grace” is the wrong kind of thing for that. “Grace” is submissive and supplicant. Grace is apologizing for being present, and attempting to make up for it by being elegant and winsome and small.

Women aren’t accessories, women aren’t tools for prettying up the world for the aesthetic enjoyment of men, women are people just like other people, and we get to be as clumsy and obtrusive and scruffy as anyone else. Boy George can keep his “grace”; women need assertion instead of grace.

As for respect for the goddess energy – I have nothing but fart noises in response to that.

And in conclusion – “critical thinking”? That’s what that is? You may now laugh yourselves sick.

How dare ANYONE politicize a violent attempted insurrection in the form of physical invasion of the legislature complete with weapons and threats? Could there be anything more outrageous?

Yeah, that Biden, man, politicizing something as obviously apolitical as an attempt to prevent him from taking office after he won an election. Brazen indeed – practically harlot-level brazen.

This seems fairly astounding.

Those numbers. Seven hundred sixty five thousand pounds to from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office??? For what?? It’s not as if they’re building anything or healing anyone or feeding anyone. Their “work” is telling people what to think – how is it possible to spend £765,061 on that? Plus £616 k on the Coronavirus Job Retention scheme, where you’d think the need for Stonewall’s views would be zero*. £256 k on all of the Welsh government seems thrifty in comparison (but is actually quite profligate).

Jobs for the boys, eh?

*See comments for corrections on this point. It’s a grant to keep employees paid, not a payment for stonewalling.

Lord, I pray, take pity on this cardboard cutout of a deranged criminal.

And yet another follow-up to the story – Jon Stewart says with much emphasis that he’s not calling Rowling anti-Semitic and that Newsweek is full of shit for saying he is.

That’s roughly where I am, except that I’m much less keen on Harry Potter, precisely because of the crude stereotypes and Manicheanism.

More on that theme.

This is what it looks like to me – not that she did it deliberately, but that she drew on tropes without thinking about them. She didn’t have a subtle mind when she wrote the first Potter book; I’ve been surprised by the quality of her writing on the trans ideology wars.

I’m not overjoyed about saying this but it’s no good ignoring it or hiding it.

There’s a new front in the war on Rowling.

Jon Stewart has accused JK Rowling of antisemitism for her depiction of goblins in the wizarding world of Harry Potter.

A recent episode of the late-night show host’s podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart, has begun making headlines for his takedown of the Gringotts Bank goblins, which he believes are depicted as Jewish “caricatures” in the series.

Stewart’s argument – that Rowling perpetuates anti-Jew stereotypes in Harry Potter – was based on the similarities between the books’ goblin creatures and an illustration from an antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903.

Now you could ask if there’s any reason to think she was aware of the Protocols when she wrote the book, but the trouble with that is that it was what we now call a meme. Like all of us, she could have had the stereotype knocking around in her head without knowing where it came from.

I have to be honest here: this is why I stopped reading Harry Potter back in 2001, and it’s what I disliked about the one non-Harry novel of hers that I’ve read. It was all the crude stereotypes, and the division of people into Good, like Harry, and Bad, like the people he lived with. It was the whole idea of “Muggles” – it’s just another brand of snobbery, but one you get to be enthusiastic about. I think she may have improved since then, and I certainly think her writing on women and trans ideology is far better than that, but she does have this pattern of disdainful caricatures of people. In that one novel I mentioned? Fat people. Intense and unembarrassed contempt for fat people. It’s ugly stuff. I don’t love saying it, because she’s been both brave and right about the trans ideology wars, but honesty requires it.

I’d like, or half like, to be able to say Stewart is full of shit, but I can’t. I read the passage where she introduces the bankers and…he’s not wrong. They’re little, “swarthy,” clever…and they’re bankers. All that is from The Big Book of Anti-Semitic Stereotypes. She may not have been aware of them as such when she described them, but…what can I tell you? She should have been.

Stephen Marche tells us it’s not if but when – the US is going to be dealing with a second civil war. One reason is to do with the people who go into policing and security.

The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organizations have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.” The watchlists are among the most effective techniques of counter-terrorism, but the FBI cannot use them. The white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.

Recent calls to reform or to defund the police have focused on officers’ implicit bias or policing techniques. The protesters are, in a sense, too hopeful. Activist white supremacists in positions of authority are the real threat to American order and security. “If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power, they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence, and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says, ‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,’ and the government says, ‘Oh my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I will go after these thugs.’ And of course once that broad power is granted, it isn’t used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official security apparatus or an auxiliary force.”

Maybe we can…talk them out of it?

Andreia Nobre and Anna Slatz at 4w tell us:

The Brazilian edition of Marie Claire magazine has named a trans-identified male convicted of pimping and accused of facilitating child sexual exploitation as one of the country’s top inspirational women’s rights activists.

A pimp. I feel inspired already.

While the list profiles brave female advocates such as Joênia Wapixana – the first Indigenous woman in Brazil to become a lawyer – and Maria da Penha – an abuse survivor who fought to increase legal penalties for domestic violence – one name stands out.

Indianara Siqueira, a biological male prostitute who identifies as a woman, was featured on the list as the magazine’s 6th pick.

Between 2007 and 2010, Siqueira served a prison sentence in France after being convicted of aggravated pimping. In addition to his jail time, he was ordered to pay financial compensation to the trafficking victims in the amount of €50,000 (approx. $56,000 USD), but shirked the bill. Following his sentence, he was deported to Brazil and banned from entering French territory.

So inspiring!

In 2019, Siqueira was expelled from the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) of Brazil in which he had been campaigning as a politician. The Party removed him after public outrage surrounding his “takeover” of a non-profit art charity house of cultural significance, illegally converting it into boarding and brothel for trans-identified male prostitutes.

According to a PSOL ethics committee testimonial, children were also sexually exploited in the brothel operating out of Siqueira’s camp, with “various forms of human rights violations” taking place within the house as per a teenager who filed a legal complaint against Siqueira.

Just screams “inspiration,” doesn’t he.

Despite Siqueira’s disturbing history, a lauding documentary was made on him by trans activists in 2019 titled Indianara, which won 5 awards and was nominated for a total of 14. While the film was shown in Cannes, Siqueira was unable to attend due to his ban from France on his past criminal convictions for pimping.

I guess pimps identify as inspirational now.

Officially celibate religious boss says it’s selfish not to have children.

The Pope’s comments came as he was discussing parenthood during a general audience at the Vatican in Rome.

Hey if you want to know about parenthood, who better to ask than a prelate whose religion forbids him to be a parent?

“Today … we see a form of selfishness,” he told the audience. “We see that some people do not want to have a child.”

That’s not selfish though. It’s not as if there’s a child sitting there, wanting to be had. What he means by having a child is actually making a child where no child was before. It’s not selfish not to do that. It’s particularly not selfish in this world, in the perilous state it’s in because there are so many people in it. If the world desperately needed more people it might be reasonable to claim it’s selfish not to have some, but that’s not this world. It’s doubly not selfish: by not adding children to the problem of too many people driving cars and all the rest of it, and by not having children who will have to deal with the horrors of the approaching disaster.

“Sometimes they have one, and that’s it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children. This may make people laugh, but it is a reality.”

The practice “is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity”, he added.

Then why doesn’t Frank have a passel of children and grandchildren himself?

Originally a comment by Michael Haubrich on Belatedly hearing the voices.

There are a great many issues that can never be fixed when it comes to indigenous poeple in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Obviously the bells can’t be unrung, no matter how many land trusts are bought up and donated to tribal governments. The economies of the people before us have been disrupted, and they long ago began adapting to the new ways.

But what we can do is learn and understand who they were and who they are. The idea that indigenous people were savages that we civilized is not only patronizing, it is wrong. There were some advanced civilzations that waxed and waned over the millenia, doing science in their ways that is just as effective in discovering natural truths as those ways developed by the Royal Society and the French academies of the enlightentment.

There was a recent brouhaha over a New Zealand academic who was brought up on ethics charges, but also had criticized the science standards of New Zealand education because they included Maori cultural inputs in science. The standards have been in place since at least 1993, but they have been newly decried as “wokism gone made” to make sure that Maori “ways of knowing” are included. You can probably guess who complained about it without checking the actual standards. I checked them out and they are actually pretty good and are not equivalent to creationism.

So, we need to know who the indigenous people are, what they had made, and acknowledge their contributions to our societies without assuming they were functionally savages until we came along and led them to civilization (by kidnapping their children.) We can never reconcile, true, but we can move forward with them as participants. We need to acknowledge what he have done to their people, and we can’t just look back and say it was ancient history.

There are pipelines that are being laid in their lands (so-called reservations) that can destroy their water supply, Uranium mines on land that we ceded to them in Treaties, people protest when the decision to honor fishing rights in a treaty signed by the government are going to “hurt the tourism industry.” We can stop this stuff from going on, even if we can’t go back and return the Great Plains to the bison herds that roamed for days.

If we don’t teach a history that includes places such as Cahokia, that Mexican indios developed corn from teosinte, and that the Maori knew their fungal networks long before the British came along, then people will continue to think that Injuns are lucky we saved them from their savagery and that we were justified in slaughtering those who got in the way. They will think of those children buried without markers in the Residential Schools as collateral damage for property. They will continue to think of the Water Protectors as superstitious selfish cretins who deserve the firehoses in the winter or 25 years in prison for trying to stop the pipeline in North Dakota.

We need to admit our own savagery towards the people who came first (“hohogum” in the Pima native language) before we can civilize ourselves.

“Well then I just won’t hold a press conference, so there. That’ll show them. They’ll be sorry.”

Former President Donald Trump has canceled a press conference at Mar-a-Lago scheduled for Jan. 6, the one-year anniversary of his supporters’ insurrection. Trump now says he will discuss the Capitol riot during a rally in Arizona on Jan. 15 instead. The press conference, he said in a statement, was canceled over the work of the House Select Committee investigating the violent mob’s attack. “In light of the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, two failed Republicans, and the Fake News Media, I am canceling the January 6th Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, and instead will discuss many of those important topics at my rally on Saturday, January 15th, in Arizona—It will be a big crowd!” he said.

What sense does that make? He talks as if it’s a punishment for him not to give a press conference. He’s just a stupid boring jobless guy in Florida who wants us to pay attention to him. Talk, don’t talk; we don’t care.

And why’s he holding a “rally”? Besides to hear himself talk? Well I guess that’s the answer – he’s holding a “rally” to hear himself talk, and bask in the approval of a few hundred imbeciles.

Updating to add: yes that sounds more like it.

Live tv coverage for “Trump says stuff” – ha!

They want to ask Sean Hannity some questions.

The 6 January committee is seeking information from Fox News’s Sean Hannity, the group’s chair Bennie Thompson and vice-chair Liz Cheney have announced.

In a letter to Hannity, they wrote:

The Select Committee now has information in its possession, as outlined in part below, indicating that you had advance knowledge regarding President Trump’s and his legal team’s planning for January 6th. It also appears that you were expressing concerns and providing advice to the President and certain White House staff regarding that planning. You also had relevant communications while the riot was underway, and in the days thereafter. These communications make you a fact witness in our investigation.

The House select committee investigating the 6 January insurrection last month revealed that Hannity had messaged former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the riot at the Capitol. Hannity has been a major supporter of Trump on his Fox show, as well as an adviser to the former president.

Not that there’s any conflict of interest or impropriety there at all. Hannity would think it was perfectly fine if Jake Tapper were “an adviser” to Joe Biden.

No doubt he’ll say “Shan’t” and nobody will do anything and we’ll just keep ambling toward the fascist takeover.

Originally a comment by Pliny on Risks.

As a retired surgeon I can offer a couple of thoughts. When I was teaching residents I used to tell them that we didn’t have a healthcare system but rather a methodology for treating middle-aged white guys. Much of the medical literature of my formative years described signs in symptoms in men predominantly. One of my proudest moments was when an AI system I was developing identified a variant presentation of a deadly condition in a woman because it recognized the significance of sex and ethnicity in disease and injury presentation.

I also told the residents that if men had to carry a fetus to term our species would be long extinct. Despite the cliches associated with such things, women in both my experience and the literature, tend to have much higher tolerances for symptoms like pain. Higher tolerance can lead to diagnostic delays which lead to more advanced disease and hence higher mortality.

Also, up until recently, many women had their symptoms pooh-poohed as well which lead to the same delays and consequences.

One of these is not like the others.

She’s a barrister, who specializes in women’s rights, including FGM cases, so she can’t actually be stupid, but…come on. Being literally [the thing that makes you not-privileged in the first place] can’t possibly be a form of privilege! Being literally Black as opposed to being another Rachel Dolezal is not a form of privilege. Obviously. Everybody knows this…except, suddenly, when it’s women. Then somehow everything becomes its own opposite and we rapidly lose track of where we are. Is that the sky over there, or is it the water?

Rich women have privilege compared to poor women, for sure. Able-bodied women over disabled women, same again. Education, location, health, influence – lots of things can convey or withhold privilege on women or anyone else. Actually being a woman cannot, because being a woman is not separable from the disprivilege of being a woman. It’s ludicrous to claim otherwise.

“We fight for all women” doesn’t mean we fight for men (men can do their own fighting). “We fight for all women” doesn’t mean we fight for men who say they are women.

I’ll never understand how intelligent people can buy into this nonsense.

This is startling:

Women who are operated on by a male surgeon are much more likely to die, experience complications and be readmitted to hospital than when a woman performs the procedure, research reveals.

Women are 15% more liable to suffer a bad outcome, and 32% more likely to die, when a man rather than a woman carries out the surgery, according to a study of 1.3 million patients.

Yikes. I wonder what would even explain that.

The findings have sparked a debate about the fact that surgery in the UK remains a hugely male-dominated area of medicine and claims that “implicit sex biases” among male surgeons may help explain why women are at such greater risk when they have an operation.

…

“On a macro level the results are troubling. When a female surgeon operates, patient outcomes are generally better, particularly for women, even after adjusting for differences in chronic health status, age and other factors, when undergoing the same procedures.”

Hmm maybe that hints at an explanation – women have to be better at it to get in the door at all. Good-enough men get to be surgeons but women have to be spectacular. Except no, because it’s only women who have worse outcomes; men do the same no matter what the sex of the surgeon.

Scarlett McNally, who has been a consultant orthopaedic surgeon for 20 years, said there was “increasing evidence of a different experience for women surgeons, with many being put off surgery and reporting historical ‘microaggressions’”. In addition, female patients may feel more at ease talking to a female surgeon before the operation, including steps they should take to improve their chances of a good outcome, such as stopping smoking to help ensure a bone graft takes, she added.

If surgery is one of those occupations that promotes a kind of macho culture, that could make male surgeons that little bit more off-putting to women patients. What a dismal thought.

From Reporters Without Borders:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is appalled by the suspended prison sentences passed yesterday on two Nigerien journalists who published an international report about drug trafficking and corruption in Niger. These totally unjustified sentences send a shocking signal about the state of justice and the fight against corruption in this country, RSF says.

In a terrible start to the year for journalists in Niger, L’Événement news website editor Moussa Aksar was given a two-month suspended jail sentence and freelance reporter Samira Sabou got a one-month suspended jail sentence for publishing a report by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) in May.

Describing Niger as a “nerve centre” of regional drug trafficking, the GI-TOC report said that, according to multiple sources, part of a big hashish haul seized by the Nigerien authorities in March 2021 had been reacquired by the traffickers, and blamed this on close links between traffickers and part of Niger’s political and military elite.

Therefore: jail sentences.

What petty childish performative bullshit.

A secondary school specialising in performing arts has quietly cancelled Harry Potter author JK Rowling – replacing her as a house name over her ‘comments and viewpoints surrounding trans people’.

The Boswells School in Chelmsford, Essex, had honoured the writer for one of its in-school groups, which had also been labelled with the quality of ‘self-discipline’.

But it emerged today she had been replaced over the summer with Olympic hero Dame Kelly Holmes.

The school had announced plans to review Rowling’s name in July after ‘requests from students and staff’. 

…

The school’s issues with Rowling, 56, were laid bare in a newsletter seen by MailOnline, which featured an image of the house logo with the writer’s name erased.

See? See? We blanked her! Aren’t we clever and grown-up.

It said: ‘The Boswells House System embeds a sense of community, friendship and healthy competition amongst both students and staff.

A strong house identity empowers our students to participate and thrive in all aspects of school life, both in and out of the classroom. Here at the Boswells we have 6 Houses which are represented by British citizens who have excelled in an area of our Boswells Learning Bridge which includes integrity, emotional intelligence, grit, resourcefulness, self-discipline and bravery.

‘However, following numerous requests by students and staff we are reviewing the name of our red house ‘Rowling’ and in light of J.K Rowling’s comments and viewpoints surrounding trans people. Her views on this issue do not align with our school policy and school beliefs – a place where people are free to be.’

Implying that Rowling thinks people should not be “free to be,” which of course is bullshit.

It’s ironic, to me at least, that they share her approval of this idea of school “houses” and how they foster Healthy Competition or something. I don’t think that’s true at all, I think it’s a crappy idea for schools to promote rivalries among the students. I also think it’s crude and silly to portray a house system in which one house calls itself “Slytherin.” It’s always reminded me of the Monty Python bit in which a burglar rings the doorbell and announces himself: “Burglar, madam.”

La lutte continue.

So I read the other guy’s 6 and 7 so that I’d know what Andy was replying to. I became very tired when I got to this bit:

In my first letter, I gave a definition of gender that highlights that it is a complex construction involving a wide range of inputs and outputs, and that we are still actively involved in the process of understanding how those factors interact.

No it isn’t complex, except in the sense that it’s become fashionable to misunderstand it and try to make a personality out of it.

Andy’s response to that part:

I am not going to pick apart your ideas on gender, but for the record, it looks as if you gave up on trying to define what a “gender” is and resorted to a “it’s complicated” type non-argument. And that leaves me with not a clear target to address. Science requires precision. And your approach, to be honest, looks more like mysticism and hiding behind the supposedly ineffable. 

Precisely. It’s tiresome.