This should be interesting.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make his second visit to the White House on Monday with the daunting task of reversing the damage done to Ukraine’s security prospects by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

Zelenskyy will not, however, be alone as he was on his first trip to the White House in February when he was ambushed and humiliated by Donald Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, who sought to bully him into capitulation to Moscow’s demands.

This time the Ukrainian leader comes to Washington flanked by a dream team of European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who combine economic and military clout with proven rapport with Trump.

Also, unlike Trump, they’re not stupid.

It’s naive of me, I suppose, but I keep being surprised by how easily Trump wins everything when he is such a vacuum. He’s an overstuffed clown doll who can’t utter an adult sentence, but he wins anyway. Wah.

Their mission will be to try to use their individual and combined influence to coax the president out of the pro-Russian positions he adopted after just a couple of hours under Putin’s sway in the sub-Arctic on Friday.

And no doubt they will fail, because Trump is Magic. Can they at least make him look bad? Please?

“A lot of people have learned the lessons of Trump, in terms of how you handle him,” said Kim Darroch, who was the UK ambassador to Washington in Trump’s first term. “There will be a lot of flattery. It’s tiresome but it’s necessary: it gets you to first base. You tell him how well he’s doing, how glad everyone is that he is leading the west to find a solution to the war. But then you get on to the substance.”

How embarrassing is that? You have to flatter him, because he’s a giant baby too stupid to know that the flattery is not 100% sincere.

The fact that all these leaders have cleared their diaries to fly to Washington at short notice is a measure of how alarmed they were by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage. The Russian president, wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes in the wake of his unprovoked full invasion of Ukraine, was feted with a red carpet and a personal round of applause from Trump, who allowed him to speak first after the truncated abortive meeting and abruptly dropped his previous insistence on a ceasefire.

Revisit the personal round of applause:

When Approved Views clash.

Does this make any sense?

One item: mentally ill and deluded are not the same thing. It’s horribly easy to be deluded without being mentally ill. It happens to everyone, all the time – we can get things wrong at first glance, we can have bad or incomplete information, we can have loyalties or hatreds that push us toward mistakes, und so weiter.

Another item: if believing you are the other sex is a mental illness, then that’s what it is.

Another item: if an ideology is based on a delusion, then that’s what it is.

Another item: if an ideology is based on a delusion and hugely destructive of women’s rights and of normal maturation, then that’s what it is.

Let’s get real: the whole point of trans ideology is to treat a delusion as a branch of progressive reform. The problem is there is nothing progressive about pretending men are women. Claiming that men can be women is either a lie or a delusion. However “cruel” it may be to say so, it’s better than pretending it’s true.

It’s hard to believe we have to keep litigating this crap.

A gender-critical lawyer has avoided punishment from the barristers’ watchdog for “misgendering” a trans person in court.

Naomi Cunningham, an employment barrister, said she had been told by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) that she will face no further action over the “meritless” complaint that she repeatedly referred to a transgender female by a male pronoun during a hearing.

In other words that she repeatedly referred to a man by a male pronoun. Gee, you don’t say.

The BSB’s decision is significant because it signals the watchdog does not view it as professional misconduct to “misgender” a person during a court hearing, she told supporters.

“It has been my practice in a number of hearings over the last year or so to use correct-sex pronouns for trans-identifying men whose sex is material to the case,” she said.

It should be everyone’s practice. Doing the other thing upholds a lie, and not a trivial lie but a very significant one. It is not a good plan to systematically lie about what sex people are, much less force everyone else to lie about it.

Punks do what punks do.

A British female sailor has criticised a musical based on her life story after the cast members used their platform to stage a pro-trans fundraiser.

Tracy Edwards made history in 1989 when she captained the Maiden, leading the first all-female yacht crew in the Whitbread Round the World Race.

But she has criticised the musical based on the race, called Maiden Voyage, after cast members used a curtain call to fundraise for a charity that supports transgender inclusion in women’s sports on the night she attended.

That is, a charity that supports male inclusion in women’s sports. Note that a policy of male inclusion in women’s sports would end up removing women from women’s sports entirely.

Ms Edwards has been public with her opposition to the inclusion of transgender women – biological males – in women’s competitions and changing rooms.

That’s better. Do that first; don’t put it off to the fourth paragraph.

Footage from the night showed one performer urging the audience on Aug 12 to give to Pride Sports, the “LGBTIQ+ inclusion charity working to make sports a welcoming place for everyone”.

This charity publicly opposed moves to ban transgender women from female competitions, including the FA’s new rules barring trans players from women’s and girls’ football leagues.

Let men take over women’s sports! It’s the progressive thing to do!

Ms Edwards said: “They had not done it before, or on other dates. It was for my benefit.”

She added: “They are in a little bubble, and I don’t think they think for themselves. They are not activists; they are sheep. The irony of spending 90 minutes singing and dancing in celebration of women fighting for their rights in sport, only to trample all over those rights at the end, is off the scale.”

It’s a perfect illustration of the disdain for women at the heart of this ridiculous ideology.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on What has made it fester.

In the early nineties of the last century, Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro made formal apologies to a variety of Asian nations for Japan’s having conducted wars of aggression in East and Southeast Asia, and for the brutal manner in which these wars were waged.

There are, however, strong nationalist forces in Japan, and in particular the influence of families of soldiers who died in that war is strong over the Liberal-Democratic Party, which won back power after Hosokawa’s coalition, which was difficult to hold together, and fell.

I am in no way seeking to excuse the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese, which were appalling, but, all too often, Westerners refuse to recognise the atrocities that they themselves perpetrated in their colonial wars. The Dutch take over of Bali is a case in point, as well as its attempt to take back Indonesia after the Japanese defeat; British behaviour after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and, subsequently, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, not to mention the destruction of the economy of India as a whole and the numerous famines under British rule; the genocide perpetrated by the Germans in Namibia, Belgian behaviour in the Congo, American behaviour in the Philippines (about which Mark Twain was so eloquent) and American behaviour towards the indigenous people of North America… one could go and on.

Japan’s proposal to abolish racial discrimination at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was not accepted, and this led to increasingly racist ideas about the virtues of the Japanese race within Japan – ideas that certainly persist in certain quarters (as of course they persist elsewhere, as we may see from the activities of the Trump regime). There is a lot of bad faith in Western attitudes towards Japan, and this derives from the fact that the Japanese were the first non-white people to challenge and defeat “white” powers, beginning with Russia (although, of course, they were ultimately defeated in World War II). And, as Omar rightly points out, the Japanese broke the “mystique” of the white powers.

Since Omar mentions kamikaze pilots and gives us a very good story, here is a true story from my first days in Japan, oh, hundreds of years ago, before I could speak Japanese. My wife & I were in a taxi in Tokyo, and the driver asked my wife where her husband was from. From Britain, my wife replied. “Oh,” exclaimed the taxi-driver, “I love the British! You see, I was a kamikaze pilot and we were attacking a British ship and I got shot down. The British fished me out of the ocean and looked after me. I love the British. Driving a taxi in Tokyo is far more dangerous than being a kamikaze pilot!” Indeed, in those days, taxis really did scoot around in Tokyo. They are rather more careful these days, though, still, in the southern city of Fukuoka, taxis dash madly about.

Classic.

CNN news item: global warming is giving us bigger faster hurricanes.

Advertisement: Cruises are awesome!!

One weird little tidbit from yesterday’s picnic in Alaska:

The Russian leader’s transparent manipulation of the US president and Trump’s credulity will worry Ukraine. On Fox, Trump said Putin praised his second term, saying the US was “as hot as a pistol” and he had previously thought the US was “dead.”

Putin also publicly reinforced Trump’s talking point that the invasion three years ago would “never have happened” if he had been president. “I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” said Putin.

And we all know that Putin would never lie about anything.

Trump told Fox’s Sean Hannity that he was “so happy” to hear validation from Putin and also that the Russian leader had reinforced another one of his false claims, telling him that “you can’t have a great democracy with mail-in voting.” That a US president would take such testimony at face value from a totalitarian strongman is mind-boggling — even more so in the light of US intelligence agency assessments that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win.

Also Putin told Trump that he Trump is the smartest and handsomest man on the planet, so yaboosucks to all the naysayers.

Trump just wants Ukraine to surrender, that’s all.

Russian officials and commentators were especially enamored by Trump’s unusually warm red-carpet greeting to Putin on Friday in which they saw an opening to pull America away from its traditional allies in Europe. 

Of course they were. Every time Trump goes belly-up to Putin, that “opening” gets wider.

Within hours of the meeting, Trump had discarded his previous position — and that of Ukraine and Europe — that a full ceasefire was required to allow the details of a peace agreement to be hammered out. The move enables Russia to keep fighting without the risk of U.S. sanctions, and puts pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to Russian terms or face open-ended attacks.

In other words Trump is Team Putin all the way. We know.

Trump told Zelensky that Putin had demanded that Ukraine cede all of Donbas, which includes Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and other occupied territory…Trump told Zelensky that Putin was “ready to promise” to end the war and not start wars against other nations, in exchange for Donbas and the other Ukrainian territory he has seized, the official said. Zelensky is unwilling to give up any more territory, he added, but Trump wants a fast deal — setting the stage for a potentially difficult clash.

In other words Trump told Zelensky to do whatever Putin wanted him to do, aka lose the war and see Ukraine absorbed back into the Russian empire.

Trump’s call to inform Zelensky and European leaders about the summit, which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the leaders of France, Germany, Finland, Italy, Britain, Poland, NATO and the European Commission, was more tense than the phone call between the Europeans and Trump earlier this week, a second official said.

I should damn well hope so. Trump is helping Putin devour Europe; this is not the sign of a glorious future.

Putin’s other important wins at Friday’s summit included deflecting, for now, tough new U.S. sanctions that would hamper his capacity to keep waging war on Ukraine and repairing his fraying relationship with Trump.

Trump told Fox News after the meeting that his relationship with Putin was “fantastic,” adding there was no need to go ahead with sanctions at this point.

Pro-Kremlin commentator Sergei Markov said Trump had natural empathy with Putin and natural antagonism with the Europeans and Zelensky — and he was moving closer to Putin.

Yeah, we’ve noticed.

Former Swedish prime minister of Carl Bildt said that “from the European point of view the best thing that could be said about the meeting is that it could have been even worse. Combined European efforts blocked at least any deal over the head of the Ukrainians,” he wrote on X.

But he said Trump had suffered “a distinct setback” as Putin once more deflected the full ceasefire he had demanded. “What the world sees is a weak and wobbling America.”

Because it’s been captured by an amoral conceited nincompoop.

Donny’s Day Out in Anchorage:

The two leaders took no questions. Perhaps Mr Trump knew he would be asked about his pre-summit threats of “very severe consequences” if Russia did not end the conflict. Just before landing Mr Trump had told Fox News: “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of ceasefire.” There was no immediate sign of a three-way summit with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Mr Trump had previously floated.

…

Ever the showman, Mr Trump took care to impress Mr Putin. Their planes parked close to each other; the two men stepped out more or less simultaneously, shook hands warmly and walked towards a rostrum as a B-2 bomber, escorted by four F-35 fighters, passed overhead. Four F-22s on the ground formed a guard of honour. Mr Trump may have wanted to demonstrate America’s military power. Instead, he displayed its diplomatic weakness—having repeatedly set deadlines for Russia to cease fire, then done nothing when they were ignored.

America’s current diplomatic weakness is Donald Trump’s weakness, especially the total weakness of his brain.

In his first term Mr Trump often liked to speak to Mr Putin alone, without officials or note-takers. It was a relief, therefore, when it was announced earlier in the day that the planned one-on-one meeting in Anchorage had been expanded to include two other senior officials on each side. But as they stepped off the podium, Mr Trump invited Mr Putin to get into his limousine, known as The Beast—securing the private chat after all.

See? Weak brain.

The honours for Mr Putin were in sharp contrast to the public humiliation that Mr Trump and his advisers inflicted on Mr Zelensky during his first visit to the White House earlier this year.

To put it mildly.

Great.

Trump says he agreed with his Russian counterpart in talks Friday that the Ukraine war will end with land swaps and some type of security guarantee from the US.

Asked by Fox News’ Sean Hannity about territorial concessions that would give Russia land it didn’t have previously and potential US security assurances for Ukraine, Trump said it was a point of agreement with Vladimir Putin.

“Well, I think those are points that we negotiated, and those are points that we largely have agreed on,” he said. “Actually, I think we agree on a lot. I can tell you, the meeting was a warm meeting.”

He called Putin a “strong guy” and “tough as hell,” but said the meeting was positive. “I think we’re pretty close to the end. And look, Ukraine has to agree to it,” he said.

Brilliant. Peachy. Trump gives Putin whatever he wants, and says Zelenskyy has to agree.

Trump’s advice to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “Gotta make a deal.”

Trump tells Zelensky he gotta lose the war and give chunks of Ukraine to Putin. What a diplomatic coup!

Taliban celebrating:

Thousands of men gathered across Kabul on Friday to watch flowers being scattered from helicopters to mark the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power – a celebration that women were barred from attending.

Naturally. Men are people, so they get to attend; women are things that make people, and of course things are not invited to parties.

Three of the six “flower shower” locations were already off-limits to women, who have been prohibited from entering parks and recreational areas since November 2022.

For obvious reasons. If women were allowed to enter parks and recreational areas they would always be flopping down and spreading their legs, and then their husbands might find themselves raising other men’s children.

Rights groups, foreign governments and the UN have condemned the Taliban for their treatment of women and girls, who remain barred from many jobs, education beyond sixth grade and most public spaces.

How else are the men supposed to guarantee the women are not fucking other men?

Earlier in the day, the Taliban leader had said God would severely punish Afghans who were ungrateful for Islamic rule in the country, according to a statement.

Oh yes? Then why hasn’t God already done it? Why wait? Why is it “would” punish instead of “has already” punished?

This year’s anniversary celebrations are more muted than last year’s, when the Taliban staged a military parade at a US airbase, drawing anger from Donald Trump about the abandoned American hardware on display.

Of course. Abandoned American hardware, terrible thing; abandoned Afghan women, yawwwn.

Another preening withdrawer steps up.

Last week, I withdrew my nomination from the longlist for the Polari first book prize. The awards had become mired in controversy due to the nomination of the Irish author John Boyne, best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for the main prize for his novel Earth. Four days before the longlist announcement, Boyne had written in the Irish Independent, celebrating JK Rowling “as a fellow terf” and saying of women who had “pilloried” her for her gender activism: “For every Commander Waterford, there’s a Serena Joy standing behind him, ready to pin a handmaiden down as her husband rapes her.”

I think such a viewpoint is abhorrent, but Boyne is free to hold whatever views he wants. What was unacceptable was a statement from the Polari prize addressing the backlash, emphasising its commitment to “support trans rights and amplify trans voices”, but defending Boyne’s inclusion on the grounds that submissions are assessed purely “on the merits of craft and content” and that “within our community, we can at times hold radically different positions on substantive issues”.

I immediately withdrew upon reading it, after the resignation of judge Nicola Dinan, who won the prize last year, and withdrawal of fellow longlisted author Mae Diansangu. Since then, a further judge has withdrawn and at least 16 authors across both lists have excused themselves from consideration. It was not a difficult or painful decision – I felt misled about the principles underpinning the organisation and I no longer cared to be awarded by it. 

So the principles underpinning the org include the “principle” that men can be women?

But it’s not true that men can be women. It is true that men pretending to be women are 1. an insult and 2. detrimental to women and their rights.

The prize has always been for the entire LGBTQ+ community…

But there is no such community. T is not comparable to L and G and can be a threat to them – men invading lesbian spaces and organizations for instance. Q doesn’t mean anything. + means either nothing or everything, neither of which is helpful.

The prize claims that it does “not eliminate books based on the wider views of the writer”. But a prize claiming to be a celebration of LGBTQ+ inclusion should know that the condition of trans people isn’t reducible to a debate in which people are simply holding “different positions” – they are a minority group facing unprecedented levels of harassment and political antagonism.

But “a monority group” is not automatically a group we must or should support. Nazis are a minority group. Catholic priests are a minority group. Torturers are a minority group. As for political antagonism – we are allowed to do that. We are allowed to dislike some political views or causes or organizations. It would be very odd if we weren’t. We are allowed to say that trans ideology is both wrong and harmful.

And to me, the real celebration of LGBTQ+ literature has come not from the prize, but from the community that has rallied behind the withdrawn authors. Our withdrawal has been followed by a 800-strong petition to remove Boyne from the longlist. That is not about him per se – he is obviously suffering great personal upset at this situation. It is, once again, about the stated aims of the organisation.

Oh right. We’re doing this shitty thing to him, but it’s not about him. We’re hoping he’s very miserable, so we pretend it’s obvious that he is, but it’s not about him, it’s about some much more high-minded thing that I am not allowed to specify.

We have, of course, been subjected to the usual name-calling: described as the “Trans Taliban” and “Queer Isis” by Julie Bindel; accused of being proponents of “radicalised”, “totalitarian” politics by Canadian novelist Allan Stratton.

Aw, Diddums. Won’t they let you do your ostracizing and bullying in peace? That’s so unfair.

Daniel Kodsi and John Maier say Philosophers Shouldn’t Duck the Gender Debate.

Over the last decade, elite academia has uncritically embraced gender-identity ideology, according to which self-identification as a boy or girl, or a man or woman, takes priority for all practical and legal purposes over whether one actually is male or female. No doubt a contingent of true believers in gender-identity ideology exists within academia. But mantras like “trans women are women” became accepted in universities in part because many academics who don’t agree with gender-identity ideology failed to speak up against it. However expedient or harmless it may have seemed to give gender-identity ideology a free pass, doing so was a serious mistake.

I can’t really figure out how it seemed even expedient or harmless. The harms are obvious and were sharply pointed out, and the expedience is questionable. I think what it seemed was 1. the latest in the chain of overlooked victims of Prejudice and 2. one of those things you have to do if you don’t want to get yelled at. That’s expedience, I suppose.

How was our essay greeted by the discipline at large? It’s hard to tell. It kicked off a wave of discourse on social media, which crested with an article by Kathleen Stock, a prominent gender-critical philosopher, turning the screws on the cowardice of philosophers, though of course many others in academia, journalism, and medicine are implicated, too. We also received some supportive emails from far-flung individual philosophers—including a prominent, now-retired moral philosopher; an Asia-based philosopher of mathematics; and some prominent public observers of the academy.

But the primary channels for sharing professionally relevant articles—the blogs The Leiter Report, hosted by Brian Leiter, and The Daily Nous, hosted by Justin Weinberg—declined to disseminate it. As Weinberg wrote to us: “Thanks for sharing your essay with me. I finally had a chance to read it, and I’ve decided that I won’t be linking to it or posting about it at Daily Nous. I understand that this may come as a disappointment to you. One thing to note is that I get many requests to share or discuss material at DN, and I turn down a good number of them. I do not normally elaborate on these decisions. Particularly in cases in which people submit material on hot-button topics advancing positions they believe I disagree with, I’ve learned it is difficult to say anything to them, as I turn them down, that they accept as reasonable or in good faith.”

That’s so Justin Weinberg. So quietly boastful, so smug so de haut en bas. You’d think he was The New York Times or something.

On previous occasions, Weinberg has found room on his blog for an unevidenced 5,000-word post by a self-identified trans graduate student in philosophy who had decided to quit the discipline on account of alleged transphobia in the profession. Around the time that he sent us the email quoted above, among the many fresh links on his site was one to a routine by a stand-up comic who “brings up [philosophy] in his act sometimes.” More ironically, one popular recent post on Weinberg’s site, by the philosopher Elizabeth Barnes, was devoted to celebrating the importance of engaging with philosophers with whom one seriously disagrees, lest, among other things, one foster “harmful silos and echo chambers” and acquire bad or lazy philosophical habits.

Hahahahaha that’s truly funny.

What makes this regrettable is that philosophers are well positioned to contribute productively to debates about the myriad issues caught up in the sex-gender nexus. At around the same time as the Skrmetti decision was handed down, the MIT philosopher Alex Byrne wrote a Washington Post column revealing that he was one of the coauthors of a systematic review by the Department of Health and Human Services of treatments for gender dysphoria in minors. As he explained: “Philosophy overlaps with medical ethics and, when properly applied, increases understanding across the board. Philosophers prize clear language and love unravelling muddled arguments, and the writings of pediatric gender specialists serve up plenty of obscurity and confusion.”

Well that’s why it’s so necessary to protect them by banishing all critics and dissenters.

Byrne’s path has not been cost-free. Like other academic philosophers who have criticized aspects of gender-identity ideology before him—such as Kathleen Stock and Holly Lawford-Smith—he has been targeted by cancellation attempts and a hostile open letter from his academic colleagues. But his perseverance, again like that of Stock, Lawford-Smith, and others, is proof that philosophers and other academics can defy the trend of complacent adherence to gender-identity ideology.

Important clarifications need to be made, and bad arguments refuted. We hope that more of our colleagues find the courage to use their expertise to help advance the truth about sex and gender identity—not suppress or obfuscate it.

And that they then apologize.

Is the tide turning?

An NHS board has admitted breaking equality rules by allowing a transgender doctor into a women’s hospital changing room without assessing the consequences.

NHS Fife has confirmed it carried out no impact assessment regarding the provision of single-sex changing facilities for staff, the UK’s equalities watchdog has disclosed.

…

Baroness Falkner, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has now said an impact assessment was a requirement to meet the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). In an unprecedented intervention, she said the EHRC had ordered the board to produce an assessment, and anticipates it will be published by Sept 30.

She said the watchdog had also made clear that NHS Fife must comply with April’s Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not women for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010.

…

In May last year, Ms Peggie submitted a formal claim to an employment tribunal against NHS Fife and Dr Upton for sexual harassment, belief discrimination and victimisation.

She has recently been cleared of gross misconduct by an NHS Fife disciplinary hearing.

After the first part of the tribunal in February, the EHRC wrote to NHS Fife “reminding” the board of its obligations about the provision of single-sex spaces.

Lady Falkner said: “Earlier this year, we asked NHS Fife to provide us with information on the provision of single-sex changing facilities for staff and the rights of different groups in the application of these policies. At that point, NHS Fife confirmed no equality impact assessment was available.

“Undertaking an equality impact assessment of relevant policies or practices, and publishing the results, are requirements of the PSED specific duties in Scotland. We believe NHS Fife failed to meet these requirements and told them to carry one out immediately.”

It’s about goddam time.

Tess White, the Scottish Tories’ shadow equalities minister, said: “This damning directive from the EHRC confirms that, on top of being negligent, incompetent and biased, NHS Fife broke the law in relation to the Sandie Peggie case.

“The shameful admission from the health board confirms that Sandie Peggie was hung out to dry from the very beginning of this tawdry scandal simply for standing up for her rights as a woman.”

As anyone with a brain could have seen all along.

And then there’s China-Japan.

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

…

For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.

What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.

Of course in a sense Japan can’t really own up, because the people of contemporary Japan aren’t the perpetrators. Once enough time has passed it becomes impossible to get justice in the sense of accountability from the people responsible.

Human history must be full of such horrors, that can never be apologized for or forgiven because the perps are long gone.

It’s not easy being the National Library of Scotland.

Scotland’s national library has been accused of “cowardice” after removing a bestselling gender-critical book from a major exhibition following staff complaints.

The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, co-edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, features more than 30 essays from contributors including JK Rowling, former MP Joanna Cherry KC, MSP Ash Regan, and former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss.

It charts a five-year campaign opposing Nicola Sturgeon’s bid to reform Scotland’s gender recognition laws to allow so-called self-ID law.

Well not “reform” so much as “change” – because “reform” implies improve.

The collection received four public nominations for the National Library of Scotland’s Dear Library exhibition, twice the number usually needed to guarantee inclusion in the 200-title display, which opened in June to mark the library’s centenary.

Then that’s why. Two is the right number; more than two is just greedy.

[D]ocuments released under Freedom of Information reveal the library’s LGBT+ staff network raised concerns at a meeting with managers on May 7, later warning that the book carried “significant risks” to relationships with authors and stakeholders and could cause “severe harm” to staff.

They claimed it promoted “hate speech” comparable to racism.

Ah but you see it’s not comparable to racism. That’s where the ideology gets it so very very very wrong. It’s not like racism at all. Men pretending to be women is not like Medgar Evers attending the University of Mississippi (and being murdered for it). India Willoughby is not comparable to Fannie Lou Hamer. Men being told they can’t barge into women’s toilets is not like the murder of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

On May 14, the network was told the book would be included, with “safeguarding measures” in place. An internal note described it as “a book that calls for exclusion of a section of society” and asked whether calling it “divisive” would “minimise the harm” of including it.

That’s a lie though. Knowing and saying that men are not women is not a form of cruel/unwarranted/phobic exclusion, just as it’s not “exclusionary” to say that potatoes are not lemons or bicycles are not airplanes. We’re allowed to know the differences between things, and in fact we have to know them in order to function. If we refuse to know differences we’ll be eating dog shit and throwing away ice cream. Knowing the difference between women and men is very literally how we got here. Without it? No humans at all.

In a letter to Ms Shah, Ms Dalgety and Dr Hunter-Blackburn said: “The material disclosed makes clear that you, and some of your senior colleagues, allowed activists on your staff to characterise the very existence of the book as harmful, hateful and akin to racism and homophobia. By conceding to this internal lobbying, not only have you allowed this defamatory misrepresentation to go unchallenged, but you have in effect endorsed it.”

And you are a library.

Ms Dalgety and Ms Hunter Blackburn called for Ms Shah and chair of the Library, Sir Drummond Bone, to meet them and explain “why our book was deemed too harmful to the Library to be treated like any other”. Ms Cherry said she was “appalled” the library had “bowed to pressure from a small group within their staff to censor a book written by feminists, sex abuse survivors and lesbians, about their experiences during an important period in Scottish recent history”.

Bathgate and Linlithgow MP Kirsteen Sullivan tweeted: “Absolutely ridiculous – censoring a book that gives detailed accounts of women who have been unjustly censored!  I’ve had my copy since day one – if you’ve still to read it, now’s the time to buy!”

I suppose this will sell more copies. Always look on the bright side of life.

It turns out the disheveled person in a T shirt who (incorrectly) told us it was not true that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheest was censored is not a random intern or even a junior reporter at The National; she is the editor.

She’s the editor and she’s casual about the truth. Not a good look, even before we talk about the T shirt.

Remember this from…uhh…yesterday?

Scotland’s national library banned a book about feminists’ fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law after staff complained its contents were “hate speech” comparable to racism.

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been accused of a “shameful” capitulation to censorship after it emerged that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, had been cut from a major exhibition celebrating the institution’s centenary.

Now we’re told it was all lies, lies lies lies I tell you!

Check out what the slob in the T shirt has to say, because she’s remarkably annoying.

You may have heard that a gender critical book has been “banned” from an exhibition by the National Library of Scotland. Well, it hasn’t.

Uh…yes it has.

She goes on to say people can still read it, but that does not alter the fact that it was withdrawn from the exhibit because fanatics pitched a fit. It was, indeed, withdrawn from the exhibit.

It’s really quite a brazen lie.

Exclusive: Medical journal rejects Kennedy’s call for retraction of vaccine study

Aug 11 (Reuters) – An influential U.S. medical journal is rejecting a call from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal’s editor told Reuters.

That’s the US Health Secretary.

He has no medical training of any kind, nor does he have any upper level science education. He’s a random crank with a famous name. If you’re a random crank with a famous name you can set about endangering the lives of a huge population and get away with it.

Kennedy has long promoted doubts about vaccines’ safety and efficacy, and as health secretary has upended the federal government’s process for recommending immunization. A recent media report said he has been considering whether to initiate a review of shots that contain aluminum, which he says are linked to autoimmune diseases and allergies.

He says a lot of things. He knows nothing.

The study, opens new tab, which was funded by the Danish government and published in July in the Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed nationwide registry data for more than 1.2 million children over more than two decades. It did not find evidence that exposure to aluminum in vaccines had caused an increased risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

The work is by far the best available evidence on the question of the safety of aluminum in vaccines, said Adam Finn, a childhood vaccination expert in the UK and pediatrician at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study.

So Kennedy says nope and throws it in the trash.