Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Big weekend for cheating!

The NY Times reports:

A federal judge in Georgia has temporarily blocked part of a state law that prohibits hormone replacement therapy for transgender minors. 

But is “hormone replacement” actually therapy? Or is it medical malpractice? Or something in between?

Calling it therapy puts a big thumb on the scale in this contested issue. What if it’s quackery rather than therapy? What if it’s the new thalidomide, driven by trendy but magical ideas about people “born in the wrong body”?

Judge Geraghty, who was appointed by President Biden, said in her ruling that the ban “is substantially likely to violate the Equal Protection Clause.”

But maybe the equal protection needed is protection from quack medicine sparked by wack ideas about magic gender?

The Georgia law, Senate Bill 140, prohibits doctors in the state from providing gender transition surgery and hormone therapy for the treatment of gender dysphoria in people under the age of 18.

The law does allow minors who were already receiving hormone therapy to continue their treatment, and it allows doctors to prescribe puberty blocking medications to minors.

On June 29, the families of four transgender children filed an emergency request asking the federal court in Georgia to block the law from taking effect.

The plaintiffs said the ban violated the rights of parents to make medical decisions regarding their children; they also said it violated the “guarantees of equal protection by denying transgender youth essential, and often lifesaving, medical treatment based on their sex and on their transgender status.”

The only sense in which this “treatment” can be “lifesaving” is if it prevents kids who are convinced they’re trans from committing suicide. It’s not lifesaving in a medical sense at all. The whole thing is in the head: it’s about ideas, feelings, thoughts, concepts. Sometimes medical treatments do help with broken or distressing thoughts and moods. Depression can respond to medical treatment, for instance, and that’s a good thing. The situation with “gender dysphoria” is different, and the “treatment” is drastically different. Prozac is one thing and cross-sex hormones are another.

The legal challenge to the Georgia law will move forward. During the litigation, transgender young people in the state will still be able to receive hormone therapy, but not gender transition surgery.

“It is vital that, as a family, we have agency in our own medical decisions that are in the best interest of our child — that includes gender-affirming care,” said Anna Zoe, one of the plaintiffs, in a news release after the emergency request was filed.

But maybe “gender-affirming care” is not in fact in the best interests of her child. Some people who have had it have massive regret.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on From Joe Hill to Rich Men North of Richmond.

The Republicans of today are benefiting from the abortion and gay rights strategy of the Moral Majority. Before they embarked on that, most Catholics were Democrats due to the social justice aspect of being Catholic. It also picked up on many of the blue collar workers who didn’t want rampant gay sex and loose women getting welfare checks during the Reagan era. These are now Trump Republicans who sincerely believe that he is going to drain the swamp and end child trafficking.

Our Billy Bragg has written a responsorial to this song (I know, I know!) Rich Men North of Earning North of a Million. Tonatically it’s a bit dreary, but perhaps it’s so intended. I used to like Billy until I found out about his ears of stone.

I’d like someone to write a responsorial to Jason Aldean’s “Try That in A Small Town,” too. I have some thematic ideas of what it’s like to grow up in a small town and not fit in. Country music is no longer listenable for the most part, and is far from its roots in Scots-Irish backwoods and early African-American expression of angst in poverty and survival in coal mines. Now it’s a bunch of “All Hat – No Cattle” guys waving the flag around.

Hate to see folk music going the same way.

This fool should be a dictionary entry for narcissism. “So whenever someone looks at me, and they can’t tell what I was born as – [thumb up] – that’s perfect to me.”

Perfection to this fool is strangers looking at xir and not being able to tell what xir “was born as.” Not a fiery sunset, or a walk in the forest, or making a baby laugh, or helping someone, or learning something, or laughing xirself breathless – but causing a stranger to pay xir extra attention.

What a pathetic, witless, empty, futile, claustrophobic form of “perfection.”

Interesting. Innnnnnnteresting. It’s fine to have a Trans Pride event, but it is not permitted to have a lesbian/gay/bi event. No LGB without the T but definitely T without the LGB.

Why is that exactly?

I guess Maggie Chapman must be really quite thick? Not to have noticed? That she was promoting a trans event and in the same breath saying no lesbian gay bisexual without the trans?

Sigh. Yes it is. Of course it is. Men don’t need to shed the endometrium every month. Men don’t have any endometrium, because they don’t have any uterus.

Menstruation isn’t just a women’s issue, say Lib Dems

But it is, just as pregnancy is “just” a women’s issue. Women aren’t being selfish and mean by hogging all the menstruation – they’re stuck with it because of being women. It’s idiotic, insulting, frivolous, fatuous, rude, absurd, grotesque, for adult political parties to start whining that men get to bleed out their uterine linings every month too.

Sir Ed Davey’s party will vote on a policy proposal that insists period poverty is an issue that affects “some trans and non-binary people” in addition to biological women.

It’s not “in addition” to biological women, it’s just biological women. They can call themselves trans or non-binary but if they menstruate they’re women. Calling women trans or non-binary doesn’t create more women or new categories of people who used to be women. It just sticks a new and stupid label on existing women.

An agenda published by the Liberal Democrats for their annual gathering in Bournemouth includes a motion on period poverty which is to be debated on Sept 23.

The document states: “Conference notes that… menstruation is not just a women’s issue, and also affects some trans and non-binary people.

Why the need to insult women? Why the need to say women are mere? Why the apparent belief that if something is for women it’s not worth doing because meh, women don’t matter? Why the relentless insults??? I for one am beyond fucking tired of them.

Kenan Malik on a trumpy version of a folk song:

A jobbing country singer from Virginia, [Oliver] Anthony’s video of his song Rich Men North of Richmond has gone viral over the past week, clocking up more than 20m views on YouTube, rising to the top of the streaming charts and becoming an anthem for conservatives from Marjorie Taylor Green, the reactionary Republican congresswoman from Georgia, to the rightwing political commentator Matt Walsh, all viewing Anthony as a righteous figure, whose “rawness” and “authenticity” speak to real Americans.

The kind who just love them a criminal billionaire who wouldn’t give them a sandwich if they turned up starving at one of his golf resorts.

Kenan compares Anthony to John Handcox, an actual working-class folk singer during the Depression.

In some ways, Rich Men North of Richmond echoes the themes of Handcox’s song, giving voice to a sense of a world divided into rich and poor, and of ordinary people as menaced by those in power. It also shows the degree to which the working-class tradition that Handcox helped forge has decayed, politically and culturally.

Handcox was not simply a singer or songwriter. He was first and foremost a union activist, and it was out of his activism that his music flowed. He stood in a long line of working-class troubadours. From The Ballad of Joe Hill to This Land Is Your Land, much of what is now called the Great American Songbook emerged from grassroot struggles, songs created to organise, inspire and console…

All helped create a movement in which music became a central strand in the struggle for justice and betterment. It was a tradition that, long before the civil rights movement, was committed to interracial solidarity. Not only were African Americans, such as Robeson and Handcox, an inextricable part of the working-class folk scene, but there was much cross-fertilisation across blues, gospel and folk.

Handcox was an organiser for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), helping stage a major strike of cotton pickers demanding better pay in 1935. The strike was met with ferocious violence from planters, militias and the Ku Klux Klan. The union was crushed, and Handcox, blacklisted and threatened by lynch mobs, was forced to flee, joining the thousands who had formed a great exodus out of the dust bowl, the raw horrors of which were captured in Dorothea Lange’s photographs and in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

Handcox would have understood Anthony’s lament in Rich Men North of Richmond about the precariousness of working-class life. But where he was committed to collective action and unionisation, Rich Men North of Richmond expresses individualised resentment. It is a resentment not towards bosses or the capitalist class, as in the old songs but, as has become fashionable today, towards a nebulous political elite, defined as much by its cultural alienness as by its economic power.

It’s a fiendishly clever ploy, of course. Never mind the billionaires squeezing the workers and tenants for huge profits; go after the organizers, the protesters, the lefties. That’ll work!

Most of those who laud Rich Men North of Richmond as being, in Greene’s words, “the anthem of the forgotten Americans”, have also long campaigned to deny those forgotten Americans their dues. They oppose unionisation and Medicare and abortion rights, view tax cuts for the rich as more important than support for the poor, and despise welfare payments as “money stolen”. A century ago, they would have condemned Handcox and Wiggins, Robeson and Guthrie, as treacherous “reds”, cheered on the strike-breaking militias, and probably joined them, too.

And instead of Roosevelt in the White House there would have been Henry Ford, famous for strike-breaking.

A hunger strike.

A violent man who claims to be a woman and told a rally to “punch a terf in the face” is demanding to be moved to a female prison so that he can terrorize yet more women.

Colin Montgomerie is on Team Men in Women’s Spaces of course.

The full sentence is “You have a seemingly willful blind eye for statistics, Colin, don’t you?”

The ever-popular “but what do you mean by ‘trans rights’?” question.

For once we get an answer.

Ah, that “right.” Ok so now explain to us how that can be a right without demolishing the right to single sex spaces. Explain how it can be a right for men to force themselves on women in changing rooms and toilets and rape crisis centers and homeless shelters. Explain how “identifying as” the opposite of what a person in fact can be a basis for human rights.

We’ll wait.

British Columbia’s turn:

About 30,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia province, where nearly 400 wildfires are raging.

Two huge fires in the Shuswap region merged overnight, destroying blocks of houses and other buildings. To the south, travel to the waterside city of Kelowna has been restricted, and smoke from nearby fires hangs over Lake Okanagan. Fires have charred homes in West Kelowna, a nearby city of 36,000.

…

The province’s emergency management minister said officials “cannot stress strongly enough how critical it is to follow evacuation orders”. Bowinn Ma added: “They are a matter of life and death not only for the people in those properties, but also for the first responders who will often go back to try to implore people to leave.”

…

Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). Experts say climate change [aka global warming] increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.

I’m familiar with that just from Seattle summers: the grass gets visibly (and touchably) dryer and more brittle as the rainless months add up. By September it’s like straw.

Robin Ince promotes LGBT Youth Scotland, is reminded of the allegations of grooming and trafficking, boasts that he views the people reminding him as flat-earthers.

It’s a particularly odd comparison, because it wouldn’t be supernatural or an overturning of a huge chunk of science for LGBT Youth Scotland to have a history of grooming.

It’s also callous and smug.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on We can say it; he can’t.

We could say the same about the word “nerd”, which people tell me isn’t an insult anymore. They tell me that it’s cool to be a nerd now. They tell me to look at how nerd subculture is mainstream with comic book superheroes reigning at the box office.

Permit me to doubt. What I see is the cool kids saying, “I’m such a nerd,” in the same way and the same tone as they would say, “I’m such a bitch.” I see basic functionality locked behind menu options with labels like “stats for nerds”, implying that to understand or care about such things is abnormal. I see actual nerds seeking popularity through embracing Genderism, or else being shunned for lacking the social graces to shut off their hyperanalytical minds and go along with it.

The only person who can call me a nerd without being an asshole is me, and I’m an asshole anyway.

And “nerd” isn’t spat with anywhere near the venomous rancor as “terf”. It’s not in the same ballpark. It’s not even the same sport. There aren’t people making bank on shirts about nerds like the ones that say, “Kill TERFs”. Nor are there people telling crowds to attack nerds like the ones getting cheers for saying to punch any terfs they see right “in the fucking face.”

The gall of trying to claim it’s just an acronym with no connotations is simply stupendous.

India Willoughby spits venom at The Telegraph for saying “terf” is a slur. Such a lovely guy.

He says, echoing every racist who wants to say “nigger” because theyyyyyy dooooooooo so whyyyy cannnnnn’t weeeeeee? Thick as a plank and nastier than rancid fish.

Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on The situation evolved rapidly.

Terrible as this is it’s almost the best case scenario. The worst case scenario would be that the planet warms more or less uniformly with the tropics slowly becoming uninhabitable while the industrialised world looks on with much hand-wringing but precious little useful action. This way everyone is on notice that it’s their life or at least their property that is on the line.

Now, I’m not pretending that anyone is voluntarily going to give up their lives of consumption-for-the-sake-of-consumption. The sense of entitlement is too deeply engrained in the wealthy and the wannabee wealthy. But we have an opportunity to make the worst of the destructive behaviours along with opposition to necessary change socially shameful. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of climate activists are stuck in a mindset that has outlived its usefulness. What’s so shocking about dyeing the Trevi fountain black when the land is being burnt black? We know the problem. Stunts whose only effect are to publicise that there is a problem look, and are, self indulgent. And for that reason they backfire, badly.

I don’t want to do the “young people today” thing. It was people of my generation who created a world where performative narcissism is almost the only sane, or at least effective, strategy.But I suspect a little bit of genuinely subversive thought would go a long way. (I’m looking at you Penny, Maugham and Ince. The house of the self-regarding is getting crowded.) Of course, that requires actually thinking and who has time for that these days?

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on More threats.

It’s an easy, and lazy, argument to make that chess is played with the brain, not the genitals or the muscles therefore saying there is a need for a separate women’s category is demeaning to women. It relies on the trope of men’s brains and ladyeez brains and assumes women’s intellect is inferior to men’s.

Susan Polgar – Hall of Famer, the Winner of 4 Women’s World Chess Championships,12 Olympic Medals (5 Gold, 4 Silver, 3 Bronze), and the first woman in history to break the gender barrier in chess would like to disagree.

“Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s tournaments?”

This is probably one of the top 5 questions I have most often been asked over the past 15 years, since creating the Susan Polgar Foundation in 2002.

I would like to walk you through some history and then explain to you some challenges girls / women face in chess. But before we start down this journey, I want to make one thing abundantly clear. I have not changed my point of view. I do strongly believe that if given equal opportunities, women are just as capable in chess, and many other STEM fields, as are men. However, I still adamantly believe that there is a serious need for SOME “girls only” or “women only” events.

Polgar then goes on to address the 5 questions, pointing out how hard it is for girls to compete against aggressive males, that women’s achievements are belittled and diminished, how barriers are put in their way at every level.

When she qualified to enter the world championships, she was told she couldn’t enter because she wasn’t a man. Can’t have a girly brain showing up those muscular manly brains, can we?

The article concludes

Within 48 hours after I posted my article about “Why is there a need for Girl’s or Women’s Tournaments?”, between my website and various social media outlets, this article has reached well over 400,000 readers. Many made comments in the comment sections, in private messages, email, and tweets, etc. While the overwhelming majority were very supportive and understanding, some comments were eye openers. Here are just a few of the best ones:

– Why is it a problem if some girls are sexually harassed by male players at tournaments? It will make them stronger to deal with the real world.

– …shielding girls from the realities of the world isn’t the way to improve the conditions. What this does is subconsciously reinforce the notion that they are somehow inferior.

– If the girls didn’t provoke first, there would be no problem at all.

– If you have Girl or Women’s tournaments that exclude men, then shouldn’t you have Men’s tournaments that exclude women?

– Oooh, you’re so pretty. Are you married?

– If girls can’t deal with the reality of chess, maybe they could try something less challenging?

– Get a grip. Girls won’t ever be as good as boys.

– It’s good to have more girls in chess, especially the pretty ones.

– Chess is a men’s sport. You can’t change the fact.

– Girls are surely seeking attention when they go to chess tournaments. What do they expect?

– Why do you always wanna to rock the boat? Why can’t you accept it?

Now, why wouldn’t women want to be in a room with men like these?

It’s never not weird that Giuliani started out as a scourge of mobsters and then turned into one. Maureen Dowd writes:

Giuliani went from cleaning up corruption to ginning up corruption, from crimebuster to criminal defendant in Georgia and unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1” in D.C. Rudy, the prosecutor who made his reputation aggressively pursuing RICO cases, is now Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, a defendant in the Georgia RICO case about the deranged plot to steal the election.

We have seen many cases of mobsters turning state’s evidence for prosecutors. But now we have the rare experience of seeing a prosecutor turn into a mobster.

After all those years spent prosecuting the Five Families in New York, Giuliani surrendered himself to the lamest mob boss there ever was: Don Trump.

We saw the coup attempt play out, but it’s startling to see the Georgia indictment refer to “this criminal organization,” “members of the enterprise,” “corruptly solicited” and “acts of racketeering activity.”

Trump, mentored by mob lawyer Roy Cohn, always loved acting like a mobster, playing the faux tough guy, intimidating his foes, swanning around like John Dillinger, Al Capone and John Gotti. He told Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” that he admired Gotti because the mobster sat through years of trials with a stone face. “In other words, tough,” Trump said.

Which Trump isn’t. He’s many things, but tough isn’t one of them. He’s sadistic, ruthless, self-dealing, callous, all that, but he’s not tough. He’s a big whiny baby.

“Trump both fetishized mobsters and did business with them,” O’Brien told me. “The way he fetishizes mobsters informs this fascination he has about Putin and Kim Jong-un. He loves ‘bad-ass’ guys who roll like they want to roll. He sees himself the same way.”

But he’s not bad-ass, he’s lard-ass.

The passive-aggressive self-flattery is off the charts.

We get it – you want everyone to think you’re very very very very kind, you’re all about kindness, you put kindness first on all occasions, you’re a kind kind kind man. We get it; we get that you think that. We get that you think you’re massively kind and we’re cruel bitches. We get it.

But you’re not. You’re not, for instance, “kind” to women. Being “kind” to men who claim to be women entails being very unkind to women, and that’s what you’re doing.

We get that you think the default for kind people is to heap flattery on men who call themselves women while ignoring all the objections of women. We get that. We also get that you’re wrong, and that you keep flattering yourself in the most blatant embarrassing way.

Life on a cooking planet:

About 15,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia, as firefighters battle raging wildfires that have set homes ablaze. Officials said a “significant” number of buildings caught fire in West Kelowna, a city of 36,000 people, and more than 2,400 homes were evacuated. A state of emergency has been declared for the entire province, where hundreds of separate fires are burning.

Meanwhile there are only about a thousand people left in Yellowknife.

In British Columbia, evacuation orders grew from covering 4,000 homes on Friday afternoon to about 15,000 in the space of an hour. Another 20,000 homes are under alert. Premier of the province, David Eby, said that evening that the situation had “evolved rapidly” and officials were braced for “an extremely challenging situation in the days ahead”.

“This year, we’re facing the worst #BCWildfire season ever,” Mr Eby wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Given these fast-moving conditions, we are declaring a provincial state of emergency.”

…

Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).

Experts say climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.

We’re all living on a stovetop with all the burners on.

Blah blah blah women must not be allowed to have anything for themselves blah blah trans blah blah blah.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) says it is temporarily banning transgender women from competing in its women’s events. The FIDE said individual cases would require “further analysis” and that a decision could take up to two years. The move has been criticised by some players and enthusiasts.

…

Yosha Iglesias, a trans woman professional chess player with the FIDE rank of chess master, said the policy would lead to “unnecessary harm” for trans players and women. “This appalling situation will lead to depression and suicide attempts,” Iglesias said.

See? That’s all he’s got. Men must be allowed to take what belongs to women or they will get depressed and kill themselves. Trans “activism” should be called The Infinite Blackmail Note. Just take a hike, dude. Chess for women is by definition for women, so get lost.

Another shipment of pestilent bullshit:

I am reading it and it is indeed horrifying. The case:

My name is Almut Gadow. For almost 10 years, I taught law at the Open University. I was dismissed for questioning new requirements to indoctrinate students in gender identity theory, in ways which, I felt, distorted equality law and normalised child sexual exploitation.

I am bringing an employment tribunal claim arguing that I was harassed, discriminated against, and unfairly dismissed because I reject gender ideology and believe in academic freedom, and that this breached human rights protections for academic free expression.

…

In 2021/22 the Open University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion department announced plans to incorporate its political ideologies into ‘all current curriculum’.  The law degree on which I taught was redesigned around a ‘core theme’ of ‘liberating the curriculum’, reflecting these ideologies.  

Criminal law tutors were told that, to ‘liberate the curriculum’, our classes now had to introduce diverse gender identities and teach students to use offenders’ preferred pronouns. I questioned if incorporating gender identity theory might be an unnecessary distraction or even unwise. I described gender theory as hotly contested, and as recently developed in wealthy Western countries. I pointed out that (not) believing in gender identity is a protected religious or philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010, and said law tutorials are no place to promote one’s beliefs.

I also highlighted some of the implications of describing offenders according to self-identified gender in our work. I said a criminal lawyer’s role is to present facts, that sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies, and that no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts.   I said an assailant’s language about himself and his offence should not automatically be adopted over his victim’s, and that lawyers and courts sometimes need to describe offenders in terms with which the latter might not agree – calling the innocent-identifying perpetrator ‘guilty’, or the trans-identifying male ‘he’.

When I raised these questions, in an online forum for law tutors to discuss what they teach, management had no answers.  Months later, they were cited as reasons for my dismissal. Managers spuriously alleged that my ‘unreasonable questions’ had created an environment which ‘isn’t inclusive, trans-friendly or respectful’, thus violating the transgender staff policy and codes of conduct. In fact, I had broken no lawful rule by probing the academic soundness of what I was expected to teach. 

Christing fuck. Imagine the lawyers that are going to emerge from this form of “education.”

But don’t worry, it gets worse.

I further incurred the wrath of the curriculum liberators when I asked them to define their key concepts such as ‘LGBTQ+’. It had become apparent to me that some treated ‘minor attraction’ (i.e. paedophilia) as part of the ‘diverse sexualities and gender identities’ Open University law teaching now seeks to ‘centre’.  The criminal law module culminated in an assignment in which students had to discuss a relationship between an adult and a minor. Students would gain marks by describing child and adult as each other’s ‘boyfriends’, but lose marks if they considered whether the adult was grooming the child or committing a sexual offence.

My request for clarification was spuriously described as further misconduct. Curriculum liberators complained that it had made them feel undermined, harassed, bullied and reputationally damaged. In fact, asking colleagues to explain core concepts of their output is just part of everyday academic work, but curriculum liberators were unable to do so here.

I despair. Dangerous idiots are taking over everything.