Helen Rumbelow on what it’s like to read the Epstein files:

As the hours of my time on the site turned into days I started to see these files themselves as a Rosetta Stone through which women might understand male power.

Powerful men often have their identities, in the email and messages chains, redacted. Powerless girls have their faces, in photos, blacked out. Yes, there are the publicised emails, such as Epstein’s draft alleging that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, acquired an STD from “having sex with Russian girls”, or Richard Branson advising Epstein on how to recover from his little sex-offending public relations problem. Branson requests Epstein visit his Caribbean island again “as long as you bring your harem!”

The DOJ has cautioned that the release “may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos”. Yet the three million files are a vast careless jumble that takes shape the more you read. There are multiple sets of “soap on a rope” in the shape of vaginas; girls’ disembodied limbs; and rich, often anonymised, men using punitive, humiliating terms for women. There are Epstein’s searches for porn using categories like “wild teen” and “sexy teen babe” right next to depositions of young girls talking of being raped. I read the Palm Beach report from 2006 — “her head was being held against the table forcibly as he continued to pump inside her” — that led to men in power letting Epstein off with a slapped wrist.

…

Andres Serrano emailed Epstein three days after the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016, saying, “I was prepared to vote against Trump for all the right reasons.” Serrano is a New York artist whose photographs include those of women bound by the wrists and splattered in blood. “But so disgusted by the outrage over ‘grab them by the pussy’,” Serrano continued, “that I may give him my sympathy vote.” 

That one really took my breath away. (That’s not just a metaphor, at least not in my case. I really do stop breathing for a bit when something shocks me.) He’s disgusted by the outrage at a powerful rich man boasting about thrusting his hand between women’s legs without permission? He’s not disgusted by the man boasting about hand-raping women, he’s disgusted by the outrage at the man boasting about hand-raping women?

Well there it is again, Greer’s famous reminder – women have no idea how much men hate them.

The mountain begins to stir?

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has issued a broad recommendation against gender transition surgeries for youths, becoming the first major medical association in the United States to narrow its guidance on pediatric gender care amid a crackdown by the Trump administration.

Yessssss!

Never mind the Trump admin. It’s the only thing they’re right about.

A statement sent Tuesday to the group’s 11,000 members and obtained by The Washington Post recommends surgeons delay gender-related chest, genital and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old. Fewer than 1,000 minors in the United States receive such surgeries every year, according to research published in JAMA, the American Medical Association’s journal, and the vast majority of the procedures are mastectomies, not genital surgeries.

But there’s an intense debate over when young people should be able to get medical interventions as more have sought gender transition and some systematic reviews have suggested the evidence for the benefits and risks of pediatric transition is insufficient. Supporters of transition care for youths have pointed to the widespread endorsement by U.S. medical organizations.

Ahhhhh no. That item is tainted. It’s tainted by years of frantic, enraged, threatening rhetoric about suicide and anguish and the divine wisdom of the trans communinny. People are pushed to endorse, they’re bullied and threatened and ostracized and shouted at and accused of monstrous cruelty and evil. I know what a fraction of that is like because I’ve had it done to me. I’m just a writer/arguer/nitpicker; imagine being a doctor and getting all that. In one way perhaps it helps being a doctor because you know a lot about bodies, but in another way, when all your colleagues tell you you’re wrong and evil, it wouldn’t help at all because why don’t your colleagues see what you see?

“This is a vulnerable, adolescent population,” said Scot Bradley Glasberg, past president of ASPS who did not vote on the new guidance but has been involved in discussions about the group’s stance. “We are mindful that some of these surgeries are irreversible.”

And another thing about them is that they don’t change the sex of the surgeried.

The group, which represents plastic surgeons primarily in the U.S., has evolved its stance on the issue. In 2019, the group opposed attempts by states to restrict transition care and said “plastic surgery services can help gender dysphoria patients align their bodies with whom they know themselves to be and improve their overall mental health and well-being.” 

Except that they’re wrong about knowing themselves to be. If they know themselves to be a rabbit they’re wrong about that. People can know themselves to be anything, and lots of them do. Trump knows himself to be an enormously long list of things he isn’t. We see him enacting that confident knowledge and the gap between it and the reality every day. What people know themselves to be is not an accurate guide to anything, including what they will know themselves to be next year, or tomorrow. What’s in the mind is in the mind; it can’t cause us to grow wings or jump over houses or live on the ocean floor.

I dropped into PCC Market this afternoon to get a loaf of bread and saw they had some sort of motto board in the little cafe area. I was curious to see what the current deepity was so I looked. It goes like this:

The future is coming this way.

Let us go out to meet it.

And then the author’s name, which I didn’t write down and don’t remember.

But: what??? That’s such wisdom it’s worth finding the alphabet blocks and pinning them on the board?

The future is the future; you don’t say!

Let’s go out to meet it??? I don’t want to be harsh but there’s no need to summon or advise us to meet it, because we have zero choice in the matter. Tomorrow is tomorrow whether we “go out to meet it” or stay in bed with pillows over our faces.

And if we did have choice in the matter – well hey, maybe going out to meet it is a shit idea. It will be just more Trump, and global warming, and children dying of measles, and pangolins gone forever. Let’s not go out to meet it, let’s go back and fix our mistakes.

There it is – there’s that giveaway. He tells Kaitlan Collins to go ahead then interrupts himself to shout insults at her.

“You are the worst reporter – no wonder CN – CNN has no ratings because of people like you – [looks to his left] you know she’s a young woman – [looks to his right] I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile, I’ve known you for [grimaces] ten years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face.” [Collins tries to speak, he shouts over her.] You know why yerr not smiling? Coz ya know yer not tellin the trueth.”

He can launch the nukes.

I somehow missed this at the time, but Trump got very busy erasing women from all the things too. I knew about the big picture “get rid of all DEI blah blah blah” but I’m not sure I knew women were included in the purge.

As President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI agenda comes to bear on NASA, we’re getting a revealing look at what his administration considers to be too woke: women.

In a directive sent out just days after Trump’s inauguration, NASA personnel were commanded to excise all mentions of anything “specifically targeting” women on the space agency’s public websites, 404 Media reports.

And by “targeting” they don’t mean harassing or mocking, they mean mentioning.

“Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today,” the directive reads. “This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request.”

The list of verboten terms includes “DEIA,” “accessibility,” “indigenous people,” “environmental justice,” and finally: “anything specifically targeting women,” such as “women in leadership, etc.”

Yeah that’s a very eccentric use of the word “targeting” – a more normal way of saying it would be “specifically mentioning/singling out/promoting” and the like.

To lead the agency down this path, Trump hand picked Janet Petro as the space agency’s acting head — a nomination that’s reportedly surprised even NASA officials — which makes her the first woman to serve as the agency’s adminstrator.

“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” Petro wrote in a memo about the agency’s termination of diversity programs.

Huh. So Trump “targeted” Petro by making her the head of NASA, but it’s not ok for NASA to “target” women by mentioning their leadership roles. Totally makes sense.

That’s funny, because when Petro was the director of the Kennedy Space Center, she said this in a 2021 interview: “At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success. The entire NASA leadership team stands behind this commitment,” Petro said.  “KSC has embraced the link between diverse teams and innovation,” she added.

You could argue that Petro’s hand was forced, but the fact that she accepted the job knowing full well what Trump’s agenda was, not to mention her about-face on the issue, suggests she’s doing it all with mercenary intent.

Or at least promotionary intent.

H/t iknklast

Take down that information!

A week after taking down signs at Independence National Historical Park referencing George Washington’s ownership of slaves, the National Park Service has been ordered to remove signs and displays pertaining to climate change and Native Americans at a handful of national parks in the West.

“The moves are the latest actions by the Trump administration to whitewash and sanitize history at National Park Service sites by removing or changing signage about slavery, climate change, Native Americans, transgender rights, and other issues,” the Sierra Club said Tuesday in a statement.

[How did “transgender rights” get in there? What can such undefined rights have to do with national parks?]

“The Trump administration continues to politicize our national parks by censoring facts to sell a sanitized version of history. Removing signage about slavery, climate change, and Native Americans doesn’t change history,” said Gerry James, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign.

No random mention of “trans rights” – was that just thrown in at the top because it’s Forbidden to not mention trans something?

The administration shortly after taking office a year ago ordered a review of signage and displays in the National Park System to ensure they were in line with President Donald Trump’s bid to ensure that “interpretive materials … ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values,”

Nope nope nope. Not accuracy, not honesty. Vanity, hostility, alignment with trumpian politics.

Signage and displays reportedly targeted in this order include information pertaining to the slowly disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana due to climate change and interpretive panels at Grand Canyon National Park explaining how Native Americans were displaced from the area.

Maybe Trump should go pay a long visit in Germany, and while there he should urge Merz to get rid of any and all interpretive panels at the death camps.

The display removed last week from the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park depicted individuals who had been enslaved by George Washington, along with a timeline detailing the history of slavery in America. Washington and John Adams both resided at the site during their presidencies.

John Adams on the other hand did not enslave anyone. The fact that Washington (and Jefferson and others) did is important and of interest. Yes it’s a downer, but it’s a necessary downer.

In Rush Toward Dictatorship news, Trump is pushing the Steal All the Elections effort as hard as he can.

Trump called in a new interview for the Republican Party to “nationalize” voting in the United States, an aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters.

During an extended monologue about immigration on a podcast released on Monday by Dan Bongino, his former deputy F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states, though he did not name them.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The Times points out that this would be unconstitutional.

Mr. Trump’s remarkable call for a political party to seize the mechanisms of voting follows a string of moves from his administration to try to exert more control over American elections, as he and his allies continue to make false claims about his 2020 defeat.

Last week, F.B.I. agents seized ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election from an election center in Fulton County, Ga., where his allies have for years pursued false claims of election fraud. The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump had spoken on the phone to the F.B.I. agents involved in the Fulton County raid, praising and thanking them.

The Justice Department, which has been newly politicized under Mr. Trump, is demanding that numerous states, including Minnesota, turn over their full voter rolls as the Trump administration tries to build a national voter file.

This is all very bad.

In March, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that tried to make significant changes to the electoral process, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship and demanding that all mail ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day. But that effort has largely been rebuffed by courts.

On social media, Mr. Trump has pushed for even more drastic changes. In August, he wrote that he wanted to end the use of mail-in ballots and potentially the use of voting machines.

Still bad.

She does say that.

She helps herself to take that passionate stand by not saying what she means by “the rights of trans people.” Her passionate stand sounds generous and righteous if you have no idea what purported “rights of trans people” actually are.

If she spelled them out, it would be obvious what a joke it is for her to claim to be a feminist. Trans activists claim the right to be in women’s spaces, steal women’s prizes, compete in women’s sports, take women’s jobs, demolish real feminism.

She sounds as if she’s talking about human rights for trans people, but she’s not, she’s talking about special new creative “rights” to take everything women have and punish women for objecting.

She can’t not know this, so………..

Imagine voting for obsessive illiterate rants about media celebrities. People are weird.

I love the part where he says how bad Trevor Noah is immediately after claiming to have no idea who Trevor Noah is. That is truly joined-up thinking right there.

There are only crumbs of his brain left.

Originally a comment by iknklast on How do we know?

I think to make a moral, rational decision, the ‘is’ column would need to include a few things about what difference this makes to other groups; in short, a risk assessment. We know that men are larger than women (on average). We know that men have held most of the power through the ages, and only recently deigned to share with women (and only after women put in a lot of time, money, and pan to get that). We know that there have been abuses by TiMs in women’s spaces. We know that TiMs on women’s sports teams create a huge advantage for one side over the other. We know that little girls are being exposed to male genitals in supposedly woman-only spaces (something that would be called unlawful if the individual was not TiM).

We know that the trans claim a high suicide rate if denied access. We know that this has not been demonstrated. We know that trans claim a higher than normal murder rate. We know that this has been refuted by the data. (Just the facts, Ma’am.) We know that TiMs claim to be the most oppressed minority ever in spite of evidence to the contrary. We know there have been assaults on women by men in women’s prisons. We know there has been predatory behavior in a certain percentage of TiMs.

All of this, I think, is probably important in making a moral decision. What are the costs to women? What are the costs to men? What are the costs to TiMs? (Time to channel Jeremy Bentham here.)

With this information properly filled in, and evaluated, the moral answer is at least slightly obvious. The problem is that trans allies are more than slightly oblivious, and in fact resistant to even hearing this. They would fill in the ‘ought’ side, even with the data listed, with the idea that they must protect trans, and that women are not in fact oppressed (we’ve had a woman vice president!), and that a few women harmed is a small price to pay for saving thousands and millions of trans lives. Then, of course, they would fill in the ‘is’ side with the ‘fact’ that trans are murdered at higher rates, and that failing to affirm gender identity leads almost inevitably to suicide. Facts be damned.

Trump intends to take over the elections.

Trump urged Republicans to seize control of elections and place voting under national authority Monday — one of his most explicit signals yet that he plans to interfere with the workings of democracy. 

In a radio interview on The Dan Bongino Show, Trump framed voting itself as corrupt, claimed elections were stolen from him and argued that Republicans should take over how ballots are cast and counted.

…

Trump went on to reassert his long-standing false claim that he won the 2020 election, attacking states by name.

“We have states that I won that show I didn’t win,” he said. “Now, you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out, but you know, like the 2020 election, I won that election by so much, everybody knows it.”

Trump’s comments come on the heels of an FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in Georgia last week, where federal agents executed a court-authorized search warrant and seized physical ballots, tabulator tapes, electronic images and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election. The extraordinary action has drawn sharp criticism from local officials and voting rights advocates who say the materials were secure and that the raid feeds unfounded election conspiracy theories. 

Are we going to sleepwalk into this?

In recent weeks, Trump has also suggested that the United States should not even hold the 2026 midterm elections, remarks the White House later dismissed as joking. 

Yeah. That’s a great kind of joking for a president to be doing. Truly hilarious.

Yes but let’s be clear about this.

It’s not that “the Kennedy Center is (or isn’t) closing.” It’s that Trump is closing the Kennedy Center. It’s not a thing the Kennedy Center is doing, it’s a thing that Trump is doing to the Kennedy Center, and to all of us.

It’s really important never to lose track of the direction of causality here.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on How do we know.

Sometimes I like to imagine the moral-philosophical questions surrounding transgender as a debate between Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk.

We’d ask each of them to break all the variables down into that great moral philosopher David Hume’s two columns: what “is” and what “ought”. Everything in the “is” column is a morally neutral statement of fact, or what’s close enough to fact based on the evidence. Everything in the “ought” column is a prescription for behaviour that rests on value premises and moral sentiments.

The primary difference between the gender criticals and the gender zealots is the order in which the table gets filled in. Do you start by filling in the “is” column or the “ought” column? Critical thinkers start by filling in the “is” column: first, they gather the facts. Then they feed these facts into their moral calculus to determine what should or shouldn’t be done about the matter. That’s how they fill in their “ought” column. Rational, logical, scientific. Like Mr. Spock.

If Spock flew his spaceship back in time to Earth today and decided to investigate the trans phenomenon, starting with facts, and only assembling a moral case after the facts were gathered, he’d build up an “is” column that looks something like this:

– Transwomen are biologically male.

– Decades of studies show that some heterosexual males are autogynephilic, and some of them will mentally conceptualize themselves as “women” as a result of the neurochemical rewards associated with erotic and romantic pleasure that are activated when they do so.

– Decades of studies show that some homosexual males will also conceptualize themselves as “women” as a result of a handful of complex psychological conditions related to distress surrounding their sexual and behavioural atypicality.

– It’s an undeniable fact that teenage girls virtually never mentally conceptualized themselves as “men” until very recently, coinciding with the advent of social media.

– There’s overwhelming evidence that social media is the instigating factor in girls and young women recently taking up trans identities in droves.

From there, he’d have a very easy time filling in the other column with a list of oughts, marking out the moral boundaries of transgender acceptance in secular society. Those bounds would be mostly limited to their personal social sphere. He’d no doubt be fine with cross-gender dress and presentation, and he’d be fine with people engaging in whatever personal activities they like, imagining themselves however they like within the scope of personal private lives, just like with other groups, such as religious affiliations.

But he’d find very little merit in arguments for changing the sex marker on people’s passports or allowing males with transgender identities unfettered access to women’s spaces. And he’d no doubt be appalled at the misapplication of the label “transgender” onto children — he’d rightly see that as an egregious category error — taking an adult psychological/superstitious/sexual concept and re-framing it as an innate state of being.

Gender zealots, on the other hand, lead with their feelings, like Captain Kirk. They start by filling in the “ought” column. The first order of business upon hearing the word “trans” is to establish one’s value premises and moral sentiments. Am I a good liberal? Do I care about “LGBTQ”? Isn’t it virtuous to support smashing barriers around “gender”? Don’t I just hate those horrible Klingons homophobes who were so cruel to gays and lesbians? Then, after their moral framework has been laid out, they start to fill in the “is” column: they go out and gather facts, unwittingly letting their biases influence where they’re getting their data from.

– They suddenly find themselves eagerly swallowing postmodernist gobbledygook in order to justify their biased desire to conclude that transwomen are not, in fact, biologically male.

– They willfully accept absurd claims that “autogynephilia is a myth” desipite the comical abundance of evidence that cross-sex erotic roleplay is a massive kink for some men.

– They block out their own memories of their own childhoods, where “trans kids” clearly didn’t exist, and none of their classmates and neighbours killed themselves because they couldn’t get sex changes before they were old enough to get a driver’s licence.

On and on. From there, once they’ve got both the “is” and “ought” columns filled in, they see the whole picture quite differently. That’s why they’re so utterly blind to the scandalous goings-on. They think they’ve got the complete picture already. But because they started assembling the picture with their biases, the rest of it ended up terribly biased as a result, and there’s no room left in either column for dissenting views.

Captain Kirk was a passionate man, who led with his emotions, and he saved many people — and aliens! — with his daringness and bravery. But he was also flawed: good liberal that he was, devoted to the Space UN Federation’s progressive, pluralist, diplomatic, largely pacifist, science-embracing objectives, his passions also gave him a prejudice: a hatred for homophobes and by extension transphobes Klingons that lasted for several years, from 2285 to 2293 (or, from Star Trek III to Star Trek VI, if you must). Ultimately, it was combination of persuasion from Spock and personal experience that helped him see past his biases around this touchiest of subjects, those blasted transphobes Klingons.

Hopefully, with a combination of persuasion from us gender-criticals plus personal experience as a result of the mounting chaos the gender mess has created, the otherwise well-intentioned gender zealots will eventually come to the light of reason. It took Kirk eight Space Years to reconcile with the Klingons. How much longer until the gender zealots come around?

Oof. Watch this.

He’s so different it’s startling. Not better, of course, but very different. Fast, sharp, New Yawk energy type different. He doesn’t come across as stupid. Evil, yes, but stupid, no.

So anyway. This business of grabbing the Kennedy Center only to shut it down.

What about that, eh? What next? Is he going to grab the Metropolitan Museum of Art so that he can shut it down? The Art Institute of Chicago? The National Gallery of Art right there in DC?

It was revolting and vomit-inducing enough when he slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, but now that he’s admitted (aka bragged) that he did it in order to demolish it, we have to wonder how many items of this kind will be turned to rubble over the next three years.

Litigators also wonder.

Sounds like a fun evening.

In a frenetic presidency that has been marked by jarring contrasts, he added another Saturday night: suiting up in black-tie regalia and telling jokes about invading Greenland and bombing Iran even as demonstrators assembled across the nation to rebuke his aggressive roundups of noncitizens in Minneapolis.

In one sense, Trump’s appearance put him inside one of official Washington’s longtime traditions: the annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club, an exclusive organization of CEOs, politicians, and other Washington luminaries. But it was done in characteristic Trumpian fashion, at once unapologetic and awkward, with barbs aimed at political adversaries, grievances over perceived slights and punch lines that at times fell flat before a bipartisan audience.

Ah yes, unapologetic and awkward, more commonly known as vulgar and rude. In characteristic Trumpian fashion=trashy and stupid.

Spending his Saturday evening, as he himself put it in his remarks, in a room that included “people I hate” was an unlikely but somehow fitting end to a week in which he continued to test the limits of his power but also found time for distractions.

They aren’t distractions though, not to him. His war on everything and everyone with the slightest trace of basic decency is his favorite thing.

It was the first time Trump addressed the Alfalfa Club, speaking before a room whose membership includes such foes as JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (whose bank he is suing), David Rubenstein (whom he fired as head of the Kennedy Center), and Jerome H. Powell (the outgoing Fed chairman whose role he is investigating).

Some jokes landed with a thud, and the room fell silent repeatedly.

“So many people in the room I hate. Most of you I like,” he said, according to an attendee. “Who in the hell thought this was going to happen?”

Huh. Gee, with wit and eloquence like that it’s hard to figure out why the room kept falling silent.

Oh gawd.

The writing. It gets worse every day.

“many Highly Respected Experts”

Just go back to kindergarten. Go. They will give you milk and cookies.

A question asked in a gender critical Facebook group:

How do we know we are on the right side?

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve become extreme and captured…Are we on the right side? How do we know?

I think about that often. I’m sure all gender-skeptical types do.

One of the first things I think when I ask myself that question is the fact that I couldn’t believe in it if I tried. Even if I decided kindness or compassion or basic decency required me to, I couldn’t. The best I could do is fake it. Am I wrong not to fake it? Am I on the wrong side because I can’t fake it?

There are at least two parts to the belief problem – at least two things to believe or not. The first is whether or not men can be women (and vice versa but the men one is the one that raises all the power issues), and the second is if they can, what are we required to do?

I can imagine believing that men can (sort of kind of, in some sense, etc) be women, but I stumble at trying to believe that therefore it’s perfectly fair for men to take everything away from women. I couldn’t do it, not without becoming a completely different person, one I have no interest in being and no interest in interacting with.

It’s a bit of a brick wall.

Also: right side of which?
There are at least two aspects of the ideology that require taking a side.
One is whether or not men can be women and vice versa. A factual question.
The other is what do you do if you decide that men can indeed be women. A “now what?” question.
Even if I could bring myself to agree that men can be women, or at least that men can genuinely think they are women, I would still have to think about what to do about men who claim to be women.
Even if I could manage to believe that men can be women or deeply convinced they are women, I would still think they have no right to take what belongs to women.

Miller says the quiet part out loud.

I haven’t so far found any more details on this but I expect they will be forthcoming. Meanwhile: siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

It’s International Women’s Day; you have to include some men.