Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • A marked acceleration into uncharted territory

    Hotter.

    The world is almost certain to experience new record temperatures in the next five years, and temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, scientists have warned.

    The breaching of the crucial 1.5C threshold, which scientists have warned could have dire consequences, should be only temporary, according to research from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

    However, it would represent a marked acceleration of human impacts on the global climate system, and send the world into “uncharted territory”, the UN agency warned.

    Bad uncharted territory.

    New record temperatures have been set in many areas around the world in the heatwaves of the past year, but those highs may only be the beginning, according to the report, as climate breakdown and the impact of a developing El Niño weather system combine to create heatwaves across the globe.

    El Niño is part of an oscillating weather system that develops in the Pacific. For the past three years, the world has been in the opposing phase, known as La Niña, which has had a dampening effect on temperature increases around the world.

    As La Niña ends and a new El Niño develops, there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, the scientists found.

    There’s more. It’s all grim.

  • State of climate update

    This seems ominous.

    Oh well. We can always escape the heat by taking a cruise to Alaska.

  • Guest post: Social media influencer failure

    Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on The customer shouted negatively.

    Is there a pattern here?

    Non-binary social media influencer Deni Todorovic has detailed the moment a baggage issue at Melbourne airport led to an encounter with Australian Federal Police (AFP), causing them to miss their initial flight to Sydney for Australian Fashion Week.

    The 34-year-old, who goes by they/them pronouns, claims they were checking in their luggage to a Jetstar flight on Monday when the weight of one of their bags triggered an alleged verbal dispute with airline staff.

    Todorovic, who was accompanied by their mother at the time, said their bag was an extra 10.5kg in weight which they said came with a surcharge of $100.

    “I started yelling, yelling, yelling, yelling,” they told The Daily Telegraph after landing in Sydney the following day for Fashion Week’s Erik Yvon show.

    So, the airline staff did their jobs, requested payment for the overweight luggage, and instead of either paying or calmly trying to negotiate a lower fee, “I started yelling, yelling”. I’m not sure that has ever worked as a negotiating tactic post kindergarten.

    The model last made headlines a few weeks ago when they rallied against labels and brands they previously worked with including Bonds and gin brand Tanqueray.

    Prior to this, the model copped backlash for their statement “some women have penises” after responding to criticism regarding a photo featuring Todorovic in lime green Seafolly bikini bottoms.

    I’ve seen this movie before, and it doesn’t get any better on subsequent viewings. But, here is a new one.

    Queer activist Deni Todorovic’s Australian Fashion Week woes have continued, with the social media influencer being denied entry to an event by someone they “thought was a friend”.

    The non-binary 34-year-old, who goes by they/them pronouns, was forced to spend Wednesday night in their Sydney hotel room after security guards said they weren’t invited to a fashion show on day three of the event.

    “I was just refused entry to a fashion show by someone I thought was a friend,” Todorovic shared in an Instagram story on their backup account @hellodarlingsmedia.

    Who knew that gatecrashing a major event wasn’t socially acceptable? Not only ill-informed about how sex works, but Todi is also unsure about who his friends are and who invited him. Was it the security guard, as it seems from his above quote? No, it was former WAG and drug snorter turned fashionista, Nadia Bartell.

    It’s understood Todorovic was making their way to Nadia Bartel’s offsite Henne runway at St Barnabas in Ultimo when they were turned away from the venue.

    (…)

    According to The Daily Telegraph’s Confidential, Todorovic never received an invitation to the event with sources telling the paper they weren’t a friend of the designer.

    As we say in this Great Land Down Under – What a fucking wanker!

  • Just take Jade’s word for it

    A Madison, Wisconsin tv station claims there have been “anti-transgender” graffiti and stickers showing up around town, but tells us nothing more detailed about them – that is, it doesn’t tell us what they say. So how do we know they really were “anti-transgender”?

    We don’t.

    Were they perhaps simply the definition of “woman”?

    If so, the Madison tv station should pause to think.

    Anti-transgender graffiti and stickers appear to be showing up in public places across Madison, leaving many in the community frustrated and some worried for their safety.

    Several members of the LGBTQ+ community on the isthmus are raising the alarm because they want people to know how pervasive the anti-trans messages have been.

    But not what they say.

    Transgender woman Jade, who asked to only be identified by her nickname citing concerns over safety, is mapping their appearance.

    She and others are taking the messages down almost as quickly as they go up, but she said it’s important to recognize they were once there.

    “It’s kind of a threat,” she said. “It’s a little bit of like you might be accepted generally but there’s still a pocket, of women mostly, who just hate my guts.”

    Well, Jade, do you think that could possibly be because you accuse them of hate crimes for knowing who is a woman and who isn’t?

  • The customer shouted negatively

    Ben Hunte, former LGBTQXYZ correspondent for the BBC, talks to the former Starbucks worker who screamed at a customer to GET OUT because she “misgendered” him.

    Exclusive: Luna Spain lost her manager’s job after an interaction with a customer was covered by right-wing media. She told VICE News she is being treated as a criminal despite being the victim of transphobia.

    Define “transphobia.”

    Luna Spain said the customer called her and another trans colleague “trannies” and shouted negatively about gender in the packed Starbucks store. 

    What does “shouted negatively about gender” mean?

    After two years as a manager, Spain said she was fired without even having a meeting with her bosses at work. 

    Police have told us they are investigating the incident, which took place in April, as a potential transphobic hate crime, and Spain said she was considering legal action against the customers as well as her former employer. 

    Why aren’t the police investigating the incident as a potential misogynist hate crime? Maybe they are, but if so Ben Hunte didn’t see fit to mention it. He’s not the most reliable journalist I’ve ever read.

    It’s also interesting that Hunte seems to agree with the fired starbucky that being “negative” about trans ideology is a good and justifiable reason to shout at a customer to GET OUT!!!, including when the customer is at a physical disadvantage compared to the shouting starbucky. I differ with Hunte on this pointe.

    Spain, 28, said that her name, address and contact details were published online after the video went viral, and that “transphobes have started knocking” at her home and her family’s homes. 

    Not in the reporting I saw they weren’t.

    Footage taken at the Starbucks in Southampton, in southern England, showed Spain arguing with a woman, identified as Vanessa Thomas, while a man, understood to be the woman’s partner Mark Andrews, filmed the incident. 

    So Ben Hunte sees fit to publish the customer’s name? I take it he’s hoping people will knock on her door?

    The video also features Spain asking the customer to leave the store while clapping in her face, and calling her “Karen.” The video ends with Spain walking up to the man filming the incident and apparently knocking the phone out of his hand. 

    Yes, so how is Spain the victim here?

    But in an interview, Spain told VICE News that the video only showed the end of the incident, and was not reflective of what really happened.

    “The viral video doesn’t show the customer calling us trannies and going on a rant about gender. It doesn’t show how it started with her screaming about why we don’t accept cash, and demanding that we do. The internet’s been filled with lies,” she said.

    That’s his case? It’s pathetic. Maybe she was a rude customer, maybe she was a rude and demanding customer. That’s certainly possible. Such customers do exist. But is it Starbucks policy for employees to respond to rudeness with orders to GET OUT and name-calling and face-clapping? I doubt it. I think the policy in customer-facing jobs is generally to be as calm and non-confrontational as possible with angry and/or rude customers, to de-escalate as far as possible, complete the transaction, and move on.

    “I’m the victim of a transphobic hate crime, but I’m being treated like a criminal,” Spain said – visibly shaken.

    Oh fuck off. Take your pity party somewhere else. He towered over her, so no, I don’t believe he’s “visibly shaken” a week later. Visibly in a misogynist rage, yes, but shaken, no.

    “The woman in the video was rude and abusive all the way through us trying to serve her,” she said. “She was furious about not being able to pay cash, but it’s quite a common reaction from some older customers in our store, so I was ready with a response. But she just wouldn’t accept it.”

    So he called her a Karen and screamed in her face and told her to GET OUT, GET OUT.

    Nope. Not acceptable.

    Spain said the customer started “losing her mind after she deliberately misgendered my colleague standing next to me and I corrected her pronouns,” adding that “it was deliberate and spiteful, not a mistake like she seems to be claiming online.”

    Surely it is not part of Bozo’s job description that he needs to “correct” what pronouns customers use to refer to other employees. Especially when what he means by “correct” is the opposite of ordinary usage. Starbucks customers don’t need to be educated on the magic gender specialty pronouns of the baristas. They’re there to buy a caffeinated drink, not get the exciting details of the identity of the guy who hands out the chocolate peanut butter toffee espresso.

    “She said, ‘what is it with you trannies and all this gender stuff’ and ‘with you trannies it’s always all about gender’ – I cut her off and told her she’s not getting served. I asked her to come to the till and get a refund. But instead, she started getting louder and louder. She was calling me ‘a man’ as much as she could, and calling my colleague who is a trans man ‘a woman’ in front of a full store of customers and colleagues.”

    I don’t care. Nobody cares. Give her her drink and shut up. Move on with your day.

    Asked why she grabbed the customer’s partner’s phone, Spain said: “I wanted the video to be deleted. I didn’t want to be online and shamed like so many other trans people have been. When I didn’t get it, I grabbed the other customer by the bag and escorted her out of the store, then immediately closed the door – which unfortunately cracked the glass.”

    Hahahahahaha how unfortunate – and nothing to do with how he closed the door of course.

    Asked what is happening next with the incident, Spain told VICE News she has reported the female customer to the police. Spain said, “she very clearly committed a hate crime against me – and my colleague – just for being trans.”

    Did she clap her hands in his face?

  • People have been suspicious

    Oooooh I saw her talking to them about those yesterday ooooooooh somebody call the authorities ooooooooooh did you ever?

  • Dons sign letter

    More Silence the Woman at Oxford:

    More than 40 academics – including Prof Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, and Prof Nigel Biggar, the theologian – have intervened in support of a planned appearance at the Oxford Union by Prof Kathleen Stock, a leading feminist, in a letter to The Telegraph.

    In the biggest row to erupt at the university since Rhodes Must Fall, students have tried to cancel Prof Stock’s talk – claiming that she is transphobic for her view that it is fiction to claim “transwomen are women”.

    It’s a funny thing that none of the other movements for justice or rights or equality or whatever you want to call them have been fiction-based. Workers’ movements were about workers, racial justice movements were about black and brown people, women’s movements were about women, lesbian and gay movements were about lesbians and gay men. Nobody was pretending. None of it was based on “You have to validate my fantasy about myself.”

    The letter from the Oxford dons is one of the most significant interventions by academics in recent controversies over free speech on campus.

    They say they possess “a range of different political beliefs, Left and Right”, but are united in their belief that “universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument”.

    The letter adds: “Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting.”

    They could have skipped the “hardly.” Until very recently everyone simply took it for granted that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient.

  • Not negotiable?

    UN Women is confused. Very, very confused.

    Women’s rights are NOT negotiable, they say, yet they cheerfully hand them over to men just because the men say they are women, and they ignore all the women who object. If our rights are not negotiable why is the UN giving them to men who claim to be women?

  • Read the room

    2.2 million views. 180 approvals.

    Two point two million now.

  • Hairline

    Classic “no you are.”

  • Motivated cancellation

    J. Michael Bailey asks why his gender research is being cancelled.

    Updating to add: H/t Mostly Cloudy

    Since my academic paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria was published last month, it has been downloaded more than 38,000 times and is ranked in the top percentile of similar articles in terms of online attention. One might think that the academic society associated with the journal — the International Academy of Sex Research — would be delighted. Instead, its officers are trying to cancel the article.

    …

    Across the industrialised West, there has been an explosion of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls in recent years. In England, for example, annual referrals for child and adolescent gender dysphoria treatment grew in the 10 years between 2011-12 to 2021-22 from 250 (mostly boys) to 5,000 (mostly girls). In the United States, no one is keeping track, but the signs are the same. Two explanations have been given for this trend, and they have provoked a bitter controversy. The first holds that increased tolerance of transgender people has allowed transgender youth to come out earlier and in greater numbers. People who believe this also tend to assume we should not question children and adolescents who declare that they are transgender but should help them if they want to start their transition.

    The second explanation, called “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), suggests that, for poorly understood reasons, adolescent and young adult females are susceptible to a socially contagious false belief that they are transgender. Especially susceptible are girls with pre-existing emotional problems who have been exposed to the ideas that transgender people are common, and that an underlying and unrecognised transgender identity can cause emotional problems only curable by gender transition.

    How many girls don’t have emotional problems in adolescence? Adolescence is problemogenic, if you ask me.

    The idea of ROGD, like the phenomenon that inspired the hypothesis, is quite recent. The first peer-reviewed empirical article was published in 2018 and attempted to determine whether gender dysphoric youth with an ROGD profile existed, according to parent informants. They certainly did. The article provoked a firestorm of criticism and an unprecedented (and shameful) demand by the journal, Plos One, that the author, Lisa Littman, revise the paper to mollify its critics.

    Why? Because the dogma is that being trans isn’t something with a profile or a rapid onset, it’s a sacred holy inspiring beautiful meaningful spiritual awesome Essence. It’s profanity to talk about it as a medical issue or a psychological issue or both; it must be talked about as a combination of religion and stardom.

    In 2018, I attended a small invitation-only conference about ROGD. The conference co-organiser, Suzanna Diaz, presented results of an online survey conducted by the organisation Parents of ROGD Kids. I was impressed by the findings and, given that ROGD was little-known in 2018, I told her she should publish her study. Eventually, we explored co-authoring an article, and the result is the one now threatened with cancellation.

    We focused on parents’ reports on gender-dysphoric adolescents and young adults whom the parents believed had ROGD. You can read the full article here, but the key observations that motivated the cancellation attempt are as follows. First, we identified 1,655 cases of ROGD — a significant number for activists to ignore. Second, parents said that these youth had a high proportion of pre-existing mental health problems, predating gender dysphoria by four years on average. Third, youth with higher preponderance of emotional problems were especially likely to have socially or medically transitioned. Fourth, the best predictor of transition was consulting a gender specialist, and parents who did so tended to feel they were pressured to transition their children. Finally, parents said their children’s general functioning deteriorated after they socially transitioned.

    Yeah well. We can’t be having any of that. Obviously. All of that makes it sound as if Genner Idenniny is socially influenced, and particularly attractive to unhappy kids, and bad for the kids who adopt it. ABORT ABORT ABORT. Genner Idenniny is in the soul, and the kids who have it are the lucky ones, and they are walking talking high-functioning miracles.

  • The veto awaits

    Wait what? There’s an environment, and it needs protection? Who knew?

    The sleeping giant of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stirred.

    In the past month, an avalanche of anti-pollution rules, targeting everything from toxic drinking water to planet-heating gases in the atmosphere, have been issued by the agency. Belatedly, the sizable weight of the US federal government is being thrown at longstanding environmental crises, including the climate emergency.

    On Thursday, the EPA’s month of frenzied activity was crowned by the toughest ever limits upon carbon pollution from America’s power sector, with large, existing coal and gas plants told they must slash their emissions by 90% or face being shut down.

    Not just this month though.

    In April, new emissions standards for cars and trucks [were issued that] will eliminate an expected 9bn tons of CO2 by the mid-point of the century, while separate rules issued late last year aim to slash hydrofluorocarbons, planet-heating gases used widely in refrigeration and air conditioning, by 4.6bn tons in the same timeframe. Methane, another highly potent greenhouse gas, will be curtailed by 810m tons over the next decade in another EPA edict.

    In just a few short months the EPA, diminished and demoralized under Donald Trump, has flexed its regulatory muscles to the extent that 15bn tons of greenhouse gases – equivalent to about three times the US’s carbon pollution, or nearly half of the entire world’s annual fossil fuel emissions – are set to be prevented, transforming the power basis of Americans’ cars and homes in the process.

    I don’t think the issue was that the EPA was demoralized under Trump, as it was that he would have vetoed anything they did.

    But never mind. The Trump-packed Supreme Court will do it instead.

    The various climate rules have involved grueling preparation from an agency still considered understaffed from the Trump years and now face a gamut of challenges. The right-leaning US supreme court limited the EPA’s options for cutting power plant emissions in a ruling last year and further legal challenges from Republican-led states are inevitable.

    “This rule appears to utterly fly in the face of the rule of law,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which triumphed in last year’s case. “We expect that we would once again prevail in court against this out-of-control agency.”

    No doubt they will. Enjoy your luxury vacations, Clarence Thomas.

  • Make that 5000000000 million

    Reduxx reports:

    A man who identifies as transgender and has a disturbing criminal record is suing a New York yoga studio for $5 million in compensation after he alleges employees asked him to use the men’s restroom instead of the women’s. Dylan Miles, who uses the name Ali Miles, filed the discrimination suit against Chelsea Traditional Hot Yoga on May 15.

    Using a mixture of masculine and feminine pronouns to refer to himself, Miles alleges that the personnel at Chelsea Yoga “deprived [him] of his civil rights because he is gay, undergoing a gender transition, and because Miles does not conform to … gender-based preferences, expectations, or stereotypes about how a man/woman should dress and conduct himself/herself.”

    There is no civil right to force other people to pay attention to your customized special presentation of self. Nobody cares. You’re a man; stay out of the women’s toilets.

    He showed up at the studio a couple of weeks ago for a yoga class.

    According to the suit, Miles proceeded to tell the manager and owner of the studio about his “gender status”, and stated that he “most closely aligned with female gender identity,” and that he would like to use the women’s restroom and locker room on the premises.

    In other words his reason for being there was to perform a Validate Me pageant.

    Management informed Miles that he would not be permitted to use the women’s facilities. However, after attending the yoga class, Miles proceeded to enter first the restroom, and then the women’s locker room. At this point, the suit states, “female patrons complained and yelled at Miles about Miles’ presence and use of the single-sex locker room and bathroom labelled Women, and they demanded Miles leave and cease using the facilities.”

    He then alleges that while “feeling shame, humiliation, and frustration,” he was escorted to the facilities designated for men, and was therefore “forced to use a locker room and bathroom that was not most closely aligned with Miles’ gender.”

    Of course the shame and humiliation of women when a man bounces into their locker room doesn’t even register. Who cares about those bitches? It’s all about the man and his feelz.

    You know…if the trans thing were genuine…if he really did feel pain and misery at being in the wrong body…he would genuinely identify with women, so he would get why they wouldn’t welcome him bouncing in on them. The more these assholes make it clear that they hate women and love to abuse them, the less believable it is that they have anything like “gender dysphoria.” More like gender sadism.

    Reduxx can reveal that Miles has a history of stalking and harassment charges lodged against him in Yavapai County, Arizona, before he relocated to New York State.

    Well stone the crows. What a surprise. He’s not a woman, he’s just an abuser of women.

  • Desperately seeking broken necks

    Cold rage for Nancy Kelley.

    Notice a theme? Nancy Kelley is promoting men having the chance to break girls’ necks in rugby.

  • If you can, stop doing this

    Who is on Team Julie-Anne Bloke?

    Nancy Kelley of course.

    Replies are turned off; quote tweets are scathing; ratio is vast.

  • Brass neck

    Crowd justice:

    Fighting the ban on trans women in rugby

    by Julie-Anne Curtiss

    Curtiss blurbs himself:

    I am a human being. Beyond that I am a transgender woman & believe that trans-rights are human rights. The purpose of this campaign is to challenge the legitimacy of RFU’s ban on trans-women in rugby.

    Trans people should have human rights as all humans should. Men playing women’s rugby is not a human right.

    Who am I

    First and foremost, I am a human being. I happen to love playing rugby. I also happen to be trans. Following transition, I started playing rugby for an amateur women’s club. Anyone who loves sport will know how much community is built within a team: for the first time I was able to play the game I loved, as myself. 

    He can say he “happens to be” trans all he likes, but that doesn’t change the fact that male people don’t get to play in women’s sports.

    In July 2022, the RFU essentially decided to ban all trans women & girls from playing rugby at all levels. This meant I was suddenly unable to play the game I have loved my whole life, simply because I am a trans woman. 

    No, not because he’s a trans woman; because he’s a man.

    I don’t think this is fair and I am here to challenge it.    

    So he does think it’s fair for men to endanger women and cheat them in sports. What a peculiar notion of what is fair and what isn’t.

    The new RFU policy has resulted in me suddenly not being able to participate in amateur women’s contact rugby this season because I am trans. 

    No, dude, because you’re a dude.

    The first part of the process is the ‘pre-action’ stage. For this, my solicitors sent a pre-action letter to the RFU asking it to explain why it thinks its new policy is lawful. 

    We have now received a response to our pre-action letter. We are not able to provide the RFU’s response because it is confidential, but I can confirm that the RFU seems intent on defending its policy.

    I should damn well hope so. You seem intent on cheating women out of their own sports.

    What a contemptible piece of dung.

  • Get a load of those shoulders

    The hostile replies on The Nation’s tweet of that ridiculous article defending “Lia” Thomas and accusing women of “frenzy” continue to pile up. Could it break the record for disastrous ratio? Confidence is high.

    https://twitter.com/GoodyCorvid/status/1657657070957502464

    Yeesh that photo. I don’t think I’d seen that one before.

  • The punitive measure

    Reduxx reports:

    Japan’s longest-running rape crisis center has been declared ineligible to receive public funding following statements made by the facility’s director which were deemed by government officials to be discriminatory against males who identify as transgender.

    So government officials punish a rape crisis center for not “including” males. Kind of misses the point of having a rape crisis center at all, if you ask me.

    Tokyo’s Rape Crisis Center was founded in 1983 by six women, half of whom were survivors of sexual assault. Michiko Orita, one of the founders, first confirmed the punitive measure during a meeting held last year in May organized by women’s rights campaign group Save Women’s Spaces, which was primarily concerned with the potential ramifications should gender identity policies be adopted in the nation.

    “There have been various attacks and obstructions against our association [Tokyo Rape Crisis Center] throughout the last year. In one specific example, the director of the Minato City Center for Gender Equality carried out a speech suppression and power harassment attack against us for more than an hour, based on criticism that not referring to ‘transgender women’ as ‘women’ is detrimental to the promotion of gender equality and diversity in the Minato Ward,” Orita said during her 2022 presentation.

    Well that’s backward. It’s pretending that men are women, and punishing women for not pretending that men are women, that’s detrimental to “gender equality.” I don’t know what “gender diversity” is supposed to be.

    The issue was again brought to light during an emergency press conference held in Tokyo on May 1 to address concerns about a proposed LGBT bill that would codify “gender identity” into law while banning “unfair discrimination” on that basis, without clearly defining either term.

    “Male self-identified ‘women’ ignore the purpose of having a women-only space,” Orita said. “The desire not to have physical men in women-only spaces is not prejudice or a discriminatory attitude, but comes from evidence-based reality.”

    But evidence-based reality is detrimental to the desire of some men to bully and punish and ostracize women.

  • Turn the burners up

    Yes indeed, the thing to do when the planet is relentlessly heating up such that future humans are going to have a giant nightmare to deal with is have more children.

    A Conservative MP has claimed the UK’s low birthrate is the most pressing policy issue of the generation and is caused in part by “cultural Marxism” stripping young people of any hope, at the start of a populist-tinged conference in London.

    Addressing the National Conservatism gathering, run by a US-based thinktank, Miriam Cates said western countries faced an existential threat from falling reproduction…

    Of course that depends on how you define “existential.” I assume she means “western countries” are going to change a lot because people from non-“western countries” will be migrating to them. By “western” of course she means white. But change isn’t automatically an existential threat. What’s really an existential threat is a planet that’s hot, dry, and empty.

    She explained the conditions for “starting a family” i.e. having children.

    “You must also have hope for the future. And that hope is not reaching so many of our young people today, because liberal individualism has proved to be completely powerless to resist a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.”

    “When culture, schools and universities openly teach that our country is racist, our heroes are villains, humanity is killing the Earth, you are what you desire, diversity is theology, boundaries are tyranny and self-restraint is oppression, is it any wonder that mental health conditions, self-harm and suicide, and epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion characterise the emerging generation?”

    Hang on. The bit about the earth – that’s not “cultural Marxism.” The floods in Pakistan were not cultural Marxism, the dead coral reefs are not cultural Marxism, the drying up of the Colorado River is not cultural Marxism, the deadly wildfires in Australia were not cultural Marxism, the worse and more frequent hurricanes are not cultural Marxism, the deadly heat waves in Europe and the western US were not cultural Marxism.

    The use of “cultural Marxism” as a description by the Penistone and Stocksbridge MP is controversial because it is a term referring to a conspiracy theory often associated with the far right and antisemitism.

    When Suella Braverman, the home secretary – who is addressing the conference later on Monday – used the phrase in a 2019 speech, she was criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

    Cates’s argument for a higher birthrate echoes those made by European populist leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, although they are explicit about contrasting this with what they see as a parallel threat from immigration.

    Let’s make cultural Orbánism a label.

    Cates said the low birthrate was “the one overarching threat to British conservatism, and to the whole of western society”, and was a greater concern than the climate emergency, Russia or China.

    If she really thinks that she must not know a damn thing about the climate emergency.

  • What is a definition?

    Interesting…

    “Well, it’s an adult human female, but Neil our laws have changed and attitudes are changing where there are people now who identify differently to their biological sex. And what I have always wanted is to respect that and include people.”

    This “include” thing – it’s a puzzler. Sometimes “include” is neutral and passionless. You can include tomatoes on your shopping list, you can include socks when you pack a suitcase, you can include chairs when you furnish a room. Sometimes “include” has to do with human relationships – you can include people among your friends, or not; children can include classmates in their birthday party invitations, or not. But it’s a new and confused idea that we can “include” people in definitions in defiance of the meaning of the definitions, and that we ought to do so because if we don’t we’re failing to “include” those people the same way children fail to “include” the nerdy kids in their class. Definitions are not birthday parties or clubs or picnics or circles of friends. Definitions cease to function as definitions if we start “including” items in them for the sake of not hurting someone’s feelings.

    So it is with this idea of “including” men who pretend to be women in the definition of women. It’s not necessary, and it misses the whole point of a “definition.” It’s beside the point that some men may feel hurt or angry or dissed if they’re not “included” in the definition of “women,” because the meaning of the word relies partly on the fact that men are not women. The two words are mutually exclusive. Men are not women; they are not-women. Women are not men; they are not-men. “Including” some of each for the sake of “including” people because that’s the nice kind non-bullying thing to do just doesn’t make any sense. You don’t add a few token giraffes to the definition of “lion” and you don’t add a few token lions to the definition of “giraffes.” It doesn’t matter if some giraffes or some lions will have hurt feelings about this. You can invite them to the parties, but you can’t “include” them in all the definitions.