Trump and Fox News are working hard to turn immigration into a military issue.

Trump has already enmeshed the United States military in domestic law enforcement operations involving immigration to an unprecedented degree. He has authorized a major military buildup at the border. He has maximized the use of military planes for deportations, complete with the White House pumping out imagery of migrants getting frog-marched onto souped-up military aircraft. He sent the National Guard into Los Angeles amid large-scale protests there—and then sent in the Marines.

But an internal memo circulated inside the Department of Homeland Security suggests that Trump’s use of the military for domestic law enforcement on immigration could soon get worse. The memo—obtained by The New Republic—provides a glimpse into the thinking of top officials as they seek to involve the Defense Department more deeply in these domestic operations, and it has unnerved experts who believe it portends a frightening escalation.

The memo lays out the need to persuade top Pentagon officials to get much more serious about using the military to combat illegal immigration—and not just at the border. It suggests that DHS is anticipating many more uses of the military in urban centers, noting that L.A.-style operations may be needed “for years to come.” And it likens the threat posed by transnational gangs and cartels to having “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells and fighters operating freely inside America,” hinting at a ramped-up militarized posture inside the interior.

…

The memo was authored by Philip Hegseth—the younger brother of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who is a senior adviser to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and DHS liaison officer to the Defense Department. As such it also sheds light on Hegseth the Younger’s role, which has been the subject of media speculation labeling him an obscure but influential figure in his brother’s MAGA orbit.

Fox News is in charge.

The larger context here is that the administration has taken extraordinary license in its invention of pretexts for draconian domestic operations. The administration has insisted we are under foreign “invasion” to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of people with little to no due process. Government agencies have hyped supposed evidence of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 ties to justify illegally renditioning him to a Salvadoran prison. Trump has a long history of lying about crime to justify immigration crackdowns. He invented numerous fake pretexts for sending troops into L.A.

The memo suggests further operationalization of that tactic. “They see Los Angeles as a model to be replicated,” Lee said.

All this comes as ICE is about to receive well over $100 billion in new funds. The memo raises the question of what that use of military personnel detailed “within ICE and CBP” will look like with all that money.

In a sense, the administration seems to be supercharging immigration “invasion” agitprop to manufacture a sense of national trauma similar to the one that arose after the September 11 attacks. That led to another type of war-on-terror hyper-militarization at home (as well as abroad). The administration seems determined to outdo that—this time against the new internal enemy.

“Normalizing routine military support to law enforcement could create a kind of domestic ‘Forever War,’ but one that is uniquely dangerous,” the Brennan Center’s Nunn told me. “As the Founders well understood, a military that is turned inward is a threat to both democracy and individual liberty.”

Trump is cool with that.

Good title.

Universities ‘on notice’ after Kathleen Stock treatment, says minister

Name in the headline! There’s glory for you!

Universities have been put “on notice” to uphold free speech following the treatment of Kathleen Stock, a minister has said.

Baroness Smith of Malvern, the universities minister, told The Telegraph that higher education institutions must take lessons after the University of Sussex was hit with a record fine for breaching Dr Stock’s free speech.

The Office for Students (OfS), the higher education watchdog, fined the institution £585,000 in March and ruled that it had failed to protect the academic from being hounded out over her gender-critical views.

Yes, it “failed to protect” in the sense of all but applauding.

Baroness Smith said universities could face even larger sanctions if other academics were subjected to similar treatment, with new free speech laws set to come into effect on Friday.

“We have seen too many instances where those on campus have had their voices silenced and the chilling effect that has taken hold in some institutions cannot continue,” she told The Telegraph.

And what voices are silenced? The ones that say women have rights too, and that men should stop bullying us and stop trying to force us to play along with their magic gender fantasies. How did universities get to a place where women defending our own rights are seen as malevolent evil monsters while men in lipstick are treated as holy martyrs?

It marks a change in tone from the Government after Labour last year tried to shelve free speech laws drawn up in the wake of Dr Stock’s case and other high-profile episodes of cancel culture on campus.

Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, pulled the plug on flagship Tory legislation designed to protect academics last July, days before it was due to come into effect, and said she would consider repealing it altogether.

The Government later U-turned on the decision following widespread backlash from academics, with the new free speech laws now coming into force on Aug 1 – a year behind schedule.

Labour thinks women should be punished and driven out of their jobs for saying that men are not women. Make it make sense.

Another hon in the Mitfordian sense:

One Tuesday evening last month in his mother’s house on the Wirral, the recently ex-Harvard philosophy professor Jimmy Doyle took to X to say, at last, what he really thought about the state of free speech in American academia.

In one tweet he wrote: “For unrelated reasons I’ve resigned my position at Harvard. But I haven’t been able to speak frankly with anyone for [about] five years. And it’ll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation’s intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society.”

In another he identified exactly what he had been unable to be frank about. He accused the trans movement of “provoking the most obvious social contagion since the Children’s Crusade”.

To his surprise, many of the (many) responses were non-hostile.

At Harvard, he says, there was just one person to whom he could speak frankly. This was Alex Byrne of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a prominent critic of transgender rights who last month outed himself as one of the anonymous authors of the Trump administration’s report on gender affirmation care for children. Byrne, he says, earned notoriety for saying what “no one would have batted an eyelid at ten years ago”.

Or twelve, or fifteen. The monstering was well under way ten years ago.

Byrne’s wife is Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist who in 2021 said on Fox News that it was a big mistake if medical school professors were shying away from using scientific terms such as “male”, “female” and “pregnant woman”. She left her job at Harvard in 2023 claiming a lack of support from colleagues when she was attacked for her remarks. She had been left with “no choice” but to leave.

Steven Pinker, Harvard’s superstar psychology don, took her side, but he was “one of those too-big-to-fail guys” and more or less alone.

Pinker also took Jerry Coyne’s side when the Freedom From Religion Foundation monstered him. Isn’t it bizarre that there’s a “side” that insists men can be women?

When he first taught in America, constraints on academic free speech were few. Had anyone, until a decade ago, said someone with a penis was a woman, they would be asked what on earth they meant.

Again: more than a decade. Not a lot more, but a decade ago the fire had enveloped the whole house.

“And it’s not as though the introduction of that proposition into the discourse was accompanied by any kind of explanation or justification. I mean, in logic, an axiom is a sentence that you can assert without having to prove it. The point of an axiom is that it’s a proposition on the basis of which you can prove or justify others. If you didn’t have any axioms, you wouldn’t be able to prove anything interesting. But the slogan ‘trans women are women’, that couldn’t possibly have entered the discourse as something that people had arrived at a consensus about.

“And I think that’s a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry.”

…

He says he once had a trans student, a young father, who asked to be called “she/her”. He would have been in a “world of trouble” had he declined but is still in two minds about whether he should have. “‘Why be an arsehole?’ is a legitimate question independent of any ideological considerations. But on the other hand, it’s one thing to be an arsehole but another to be required, on pain of ostracism, not to be an arsehole.”

I don’t actually think it’s being an asshole to refuse to pretend a man is a woman. It may feel like being an asshole in the moment, but when the dust has settled, who is really the asshole? Someone who doesn’t call a man a woman, or a man who expects people to call him a woman? Trying to oblige people to call you something you’re not is an asshole move. Not hurting people’s feelings by calling them ugly or boring is one thing, and pretending they’re the sex they’re not is another.

Although he is a new entrant to the public trans debate, he has a personal reason to know the territory. His sister, Ursula Doyle, worked at the publisher Hachette in London, where she acquired a book by Kathleen Stock, the British philosopher who resigned from the University of Sussex after being attacked by colleagues for her views on gender.

Doyle, who suffered online abuse for her part in the book’s publication, left Hachette last year claiming she had been treated “as an emotional basket case who made a fuss about nothing”, and brought a (now settled) employment tribunal case against her employers. Her brother is a fan of Stock’s, trans-critical writers such as Graham Linehan and Hadley Freeman, and his sister.

Team Trans-skeptical. We have the best jokes.

Several layers to this, but worth it.

A massive crack in the dam!

High fives all around.

Jane Russell again! And [pause to choke back laughter] Robin Moira White.

At this point I look away from Trump a lot of the time because I can’t stand it, but this particular tidbit is especially…what it is.

Most bizarre was Trump’s explanation for why he finally banished Epstein from Mar-a-Lago more than 20 years ago.

“That’s such old history, very easy to explain, but I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it,” Trump said. “But for years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk because he did something that was inappropriate.”

Shockingly, Trump doesn’t mean all the sex trafficking and child rape. No, what he considers “inappropriate” and truly unforgivable is that Epstein “stole” employees from him.

“I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again,” Trump complained. That’s when Epstein became “persona non grata” in Trump’s view. “I threw him out, and that was it. I’m glad I did, if you want to know the truth.”

The “employees” were young girls prostituted by Trump and then Epstein.

Even worse is the revelation that the employees Epstein “stole” were in fact underage girls, including then 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to wealthy and powerful sex predators. She died by suicide in April.

“I don’t know,” Trump said when a reporter pressed him further about Giuffre. “I think she worked in the spa, I think so. I think that was one of the people — yeah, he stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”

This revelation alone would be a presidency-ending scandal in a normal administration. Ghislaine Maxwell — the convicted sex offender Trump is considering pardoning — recruited and groomed Giuffre for Epstein’s sex trafficking ring at Trump’s own residence. Trump was aware enough of what was going on to hold a grudge against Epstein for “stealing” what he considered his property, but he remained silent.

By the way, where’s Ivanka these days?

Ah good, the move from stupid deepity to even stupider deepity.

Abstract

Recently, the concept of “gender identity” has enjoyed a great deal of attention in gender metaphysics. This seems to be motivated by the goal of creating trans-inclusive theory, by explaining trans people’s genders.

Wait, slow down. There’s such a thing as “gender metaphysics”? I mean, such a solid established thing that it makes sense to talk of a great deal of attention in gender metaphysics? There really are lots of people, or at least some people, paying a great deal of attention to the concept of genner idenniny in genner metaphysics?

Not that I can find, but hey, maybe they’re all in bunkers.

In this paper, we aim to unmotivate this project. Notions of “gender identity” serve important pragmatic purposes for trans people, such as satisfying the curiosity of non-trans people, and, relatedly, securing our access to important goods like legal rights and medical care.

Hahahaha as if those things are just minor ruffles on the surface of the water as opposed to being the whole point.

Guess what: genner idenniny is meaningless and worthless without an admiring/dissenting audience. The whole point of luxury genner is to draw attention to oneself. It’s a persona, a costume, a moment on the stage. What these deep thinkers disdainfully call “satisfying the curiosity of non-trans people” is the reward of claiming to have a luxury idenniny. The putative curiosity of non-trans people is what gets the people of idenniny out of bed in the morning.

Moreover, we argue that trans people primarily use “gender identity” to explain ourselves to non-trans people, rather than to discuss ourselves among ourselves.

But explaining yourselves to non-trans people is not a thing apart but your whole existence, to coin a phrase. Showing off your magical selves to an admiring world is the meaning and purpose of trans. Call it trans metaphysics if you like.

Trans man Freddy McConnell tells us:

The supreme court judgment on the application of the 2010 Equality Act has rendered the UK’s system of legal gender recognition entirely hollow. It has ruled that men like me who have gender recognition certificates are defined as women in equality law, which applies to organisations ranging from workplaces to public services and sporting bodies. Vice versa for trans women.

But of course trans men are women, just as trans women are men. That’s what the word “trans” is doing there.

What choice do trans people have at this point? Over the past 10 years, their rights have been chipped away in Britain, their lives made increasingly difficult by anti-trans lobbyists with more influential connections and far more money. Systemic transphobia has captured our public institutions with terrifying speed. For its part, the supreme court refused to hear any interventions from trans people before deciding on its recent, devastating ruling.

What are these rights that have been chipped away? It’s not a right to have one’s fictional identity ratified by the state. It’s not a right for men to displace women from women’s rights and organizations and jobs and facilities. It’s not even a right to be flattered and coddled and told how becoming that dress is.

Things were so different in 2016. When North Carolina passed a shocking “bathroom bill” banning trans people from using the correct bathroom, the Labour MP Ruth Cadbury told the Commons that “a bathroom bill would never be passed here in the UK”.

But by “correct bathroom” of course McConnell means “bathroom for the other sex” so it’s not the “correct” one at all. If I go into a public restroom and find a man at the sink, I don’t consider that “correct” at all. (It has happened. The local hipster radio station/hangout place next to a busy bus stop did the toilets free-for-all a few months ago, and I did go in and find a man there, and I got the hell out. Happily they’ve quietly backed away from the whole thing since then.)

MPs who attended the mass lobby probably learned alarming things about what the EHRC’s code of practice might look like, based on the interim guidance it released in April, which is being challenged in the high court by the Good Law project. They might have heard from the news or comment pages that women who are trans may be banned from women’s loos and shelters.

Except of course Freddy means men who claim to be trans, so of course they must be banned from women’s toilets and shelters.

The determination to destroy everything presses on.

The Trump administration is attempting to unmake virtually all climate US regulations in one fell swoop.

At an Indiana truck dealership on Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a proposal to rescind the 16-year-old landmark legal finding which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources.

Because they want their children and grandchildren to be doomed to worse misery faster.

…if the rollback prevails, it would leave the EPA without any authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution amid ever-compounding evidence that a swift reduction in these emissions is needed to avert catastrophic global warming.

“The importance of the endangerment finding can’t be overstated,” said the renowned climate scientist Michael Mann. “It’s been the primary tool that we have had to actually regulate carbon emissions and meet our obligations under various global agreements to address the climate crisis.”

…

It comes as part of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda, which aims to boost already booming fossil-fuel production. Along with the scrapping of the endangerment finding, the EPA said it will kill off regulations limiting pollution coming from cars and will stymie a rule that curbs the amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, spewing from oil and gas drilling operations.

It’s kind of like going for a thrill ride down a steep mountain when you know there’s a lake full of piranhas at the bottom. Yeah yeah yeah piranhas but the ride is such fun!

Trump to Kentucky: you’re on your own.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) denied requests for three Kentucky counties affected by severe storms last spring, and deemed the state ineligible for hazard mitigation grants that would help prepare for future disasters .

Fema officials claimed the areas did not suffer enough damage to merit federal support, in a letter issued to the governor on Tuesday. But the move is just the latest in a series of denials from the agency, as the Trump administration seeks to shift the burden of responding to and recovering from disasters on to states.

Look, if Kentucky doesn’t want to be slammed by storms it should move to a part of the country where there are no storms. It’s not the federal government’s job to help citizens deal with natural disasters, it’s only those crazy communist Democrats who think major disasters are a federal issue.

Last week, Fema also rejected Maryland’s request for disaster assistance after near-record-level flooding in May destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses and tore into roads and public infrastructure, leaving close to $16m in damages.

That’s Maryland’s problem, not ours.

Fema, which is responsible for an on-the-ground response during large-scale emergencies along with coordinating resource deployment, funding recovery and supporting efforts to mitigate risks, has been left critically under-resourced and unprepared for the escalating and compounding catastrophes wreaking havoc across the US with greater intensity and frequency.

Thanks to Musk and his band of pranksters, right? Because they got rid of all those expensive luxuries like federal disaster relief and weather forecasting? Freeing up billions to pay for Trump’s visits to his golf courses in Scotland.

Trump has called for dismantling the agency, part of the US Department of Homeland Security, and has already begun to cut funding in key areas. “We want to wean off of Fema, and we want to bring it back to the state level,” the president said, speaking from the Oval Office in June, noting his plans to promptly “give out less money” to states in recovery.

Fema has also terminated a multibillion-dollar grant program funding infrastructure upgrades that build resiliency, a move challenged in court by a group of 20 states earlier this month. Many of these states also filed lawsuits against the administration in May over directives that would link funding for emergency preparedness to immigration enforcement cooperation.

“This administration is abandoning states and local communities that rely on federal funding to protect their residents and, in the event of disaster, save lives,” said the Massachusetts attorney general, Andrea Campbell, in a statement about the elimination of Fema’s building resilient infrastructure and communities program, which was approved and funded by Congress.

Federal funding is for Trump to spend, not states.

Drop everything and pay attention!

Trans darts star releases emotional statement after being banned from playing against women

Let me guess – the “trans darts star” in question is actually a male darts star who pretends to be a woman? And he’s “emotional” because he’s not being allowed to play against women? It’s so interesting how even right-wing journalists carefully avoid clarity on this subject.

Dutch darts professional Noa-Lynn van Leuven has addressed the World Darts Federation’s new regulations that ban transgender women from female competitions.

Seeing as how transgender women are men, of course they should be banned from women’s competitions. Duh.

Earlier this week, the WDF decided to take action to prevent biological men from facing biological women.

But Van Leuven has been left disappointed, with the 28-year-old lamenting the ban and taking aim at officials.

Too bad, cheater. Lament and take aim all you want; you’re still a cheater.

“I want to take a moment to respond. This decision does affect me personally though, thankfully, not too severely at this point in time. But still, it hurts.

Once again, it’s a loss for the trans community in sports. And that breaks my heart.

As a trans person in the darts world, I know how vital inclusion is not just on paper, but in practice. It’s disheartening to see yet another policy framed around ‘fairness’ that ultimately results in exclusion, without truly considering the people behind the labels.”

Blither blither blither. Define “inclusion.” Explain why “inclusion” means including men in women’s sports but not, say, including gorillas in male sports. Explain how we can truly consider the people behind the labels such that it becomes reasonable and fair to allow some men to compete against women. Take a break from throwing around the stale buzzwords and actually explain how this works.

“My heart goes out to all the athletes impacted by this. We remain visible. We keep going.”

Oh you remain visible all right. One way or another, you get on camera.

Jolyon’s racket is taking a massive walloping for this.

Not “so complex that the court needs a few months to recover its breath” but “so sloppy that the court told us to deliver a decent version by November.”

Energy drink pratfall!

US authorities are warning consumers of Celsius energy drinks to check their cans after some were accidently filled with vodka.

Whoops! Happens all the time. You know how it is. The vodka tank and the energy drink tank are right next to each other, and the labels for both say Grape Soda, so the robot gets confused.

The US Food & Drug Administration (USFDA) issued the warning for the Astro Vibe Blue Razz edition of the drink.

Best. name. ever. Astro for reach for the stars, baby. Vibe for vibe, mama, you dig it? Blue for that swimming pool in Palm Beach with all the sexy chicks in it, you know what I mean? Razz for I have no idea but it sounds very vibey, very groovy, very hey nonnie nonnie and a hotchacha.

Jonathon Van Maren writes:

UN report calls for ban on sex changes for children, declares transgenderism a threat to women

A United Nations draft report by the special rapporteur on violence against women affirmed what many critics have long warned: that there is a “concerted international push (to) erase” women and girls, and that gender dysphoria is “socially contagious.”

The report, titled “Sex-based violence against women and girls: new frontiers and emerging issues: Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls,” was compiled by Reem Alsalem of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and warns that transgender ideology has become a threat to women.

He quotes her:

Recently, there has been a concerted international push to delink the definition of men and women from their biological sex and erase the legal category of “women.” Such efforts have undermined the practical achievement of equality between men and women. Women are therefore being denied their rightful recognition as a distinct category in law and society. It is a form of “coercive inclusion” that relies on the expectation that women will be kind enough to sacrifice their own recognition and protection for the sake of others.

And “for the sake of others” here necessarily means “for the sake of males.”

Alsalem’s report reads like an outright rejection of the transgender agenda. She states that gender dysphoria is “socially contagious.” She praises the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that the legal definition of woman refers to biological sex,” stating that it “protects women and girls under a distinct category.” She even refers, at one point, to the “harmful consequences of social and medical transitioning of children” in a truly bombshell section that rejects the concept of “gender-affirming care” almost entirely.

None of this would have needed saying 20 years ago. What a lot of time and energy we’ve wasted in those 20 years.

You’d think District Councils would be required to follow the law.

That’s so remarkably pissy. “Should others not wish to share the ‘ladies’ or ‘gents’ facilities with a trans person then it is they, not the trans person, who must use alternative facilities.” Why is that then? I mean, even apart from the fact that it’s the opposite of what the Supreme Court ruled, what’s the thinking? There are women, minding their own business, using their own facilities, but now a man bounces in and the women have to go look for a man-free facility? Make it make sense.

A couple of things…

Dr Searle said: “I don’t agree we would have classed it as misbehaviour.”

Ms Cunningham said: “I think you’ve already confirmed that email to Isla Bumba on December 8 was prompted by a conversation about Sandie removing herself from the changing room when he was there, that’s right?

“You ask if there’s any policies around transgender staff and suggest Dr Upton might be keen to help develop some; is it fair for the tribunal to infer the possibility of developing policies to make it easier for Dr Upton to take matters further?”

Dr Searle said: “No, I don’t agree. I think there needs to be an NHS Fife policy on how everyone can feel comfortable in changing areas of their choosing.”

Sigh. There can’t be such a policy, because it’s not possible. Either you provide women-only changing areas or you don’t. Either way someone will feel not comfortable. You have to bite the bullet and decide which discomfort matters more. Should it be women’s discomfort with the presence of men? Or should it be men’s discomfort with the absence of women? Should women be allowed to undress without men ogling them? Or should men be able to ogle women undressing?

You have to pick one. The two are incompatible, so you have to pick just one. There is no way of squaring this circle.

Second thing.

Asked by Ms Cunningham at one point whether she is female, Dr Searle said: “Female is on my birth certificate.”

Asked to elaborate on how she came to have “female” on her birth certificate, Dr Searle replied: “It is usually a medical decision made at birth by the biological characteristics visually seen when delivering the baby. I am not an expert in it.”

And yet you are a medical doctor.

Threat level high.

Trans activists have called for their community to be “armed” after a Supreme Court ruling barred biological men from women-only spaces.

A protester on the London Trans+ Pride march on Saturday carried placards reading: “DIY or Die. Trans emancipation. Not rainbow capitalism. Arm trans people.”

Another sign read: “Bitch trolls from hell,” with pictures of JK Rowling and the bosses of For Women Scotland, who won the Supreme Court case against the Scottish Government on gender in April.

https://twitter.com/NoShirleyNo/status/1949355256577466733

Ah well in that case we’ll change our minds and decide that trans people are the nicest, most reasonable, least demanding and entitled, best in every way people you could ask for.

Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy for human rights charity Sex Matters, which campaigns for clarity about biological sex in law and life, said the signs revealed the “central hatred of women is to trans activism”.

She said: “The reason this movement treats JK Rowling and the grassroots campaigners of For Women Scotland as enemies is simply that they dare to say no to men who want to transgress women’s boundaries. One side in this debate stands up for everyone’s rights to safety, dignity, and privacy in single sex spaces. The other calls for violence against women. It shouldn’t be hard for politicians and public figures to decide which side they are on.”

Welllll but you have to take into account the fact that many politicians and public figures hate women, so they’re happy to jump on board a movement that puts women-hatred front and center.

Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.

I don’t think there’s anything remotely “chicken” about Sackbut’s in-person strategy for handling the gender issue. I think it’s courageous and commendable. Yours, too, Mike B.

This is a war! It really is. All resistance is good resistance. Even just “passive” non-compliance adds a bit of weight on the good side of the scale rather than the bad one. (By that I mean avoiding the use of coerced pronouns.) Anything at all to avoid putting one’s full weight on the other side of the scale is a win in this war. Size doesn’t matter. Even just not putting pronouns in one’s email bio. Or if even that could get one in trouble, avoiding them in Zoom meetings… et cetera, et cetera. Any act of defiance, no matter how small, counts. It’s ok to be a civilian in a war — nobody’s obligated to throw all their personal responsibilities away to join the Resistance. Even neutrality is better than coerced compliance with the other side.

The stakes are genuinely big to people’s livelihoods, no matter how metaphorical this war can feel at times. That’s what makes this war so strange — it feels simultaneously like the heaviest burden and the lightest one. It’s all-consuming weight — or perhaps it’s a bunch of abstract nothingness, mostly just online noise and academic ideas. Even many people who “kind of” see our point of view often accuse us of that. We’ve all encountered them, the ones who don’t disagree with any of our points, but who can’t see the weight of them when the whole picture comes together.

That contradiction can claw at one’s self-esteem, making people feel guilty for perceiving the weight of it instead of its purported weightlessness. Fuck that! That’s why I won’t put scare quotes around the word war here. It’s perhaps a smaller war than, say, Viet Nam, but I want to emphasize the real cost to so many people — especially women — so I won’t diminish it. I refuse to treat the gender war as weightless or superficial.

Once again, one of Graham Linehan’s many insights comes to mind: he compared this war to the many Young Adult fantasies in which there’s a secret war between vampires and werewolves or wizards or whatever, while the broader public carries on largely uninterrupted, blissfully unaware of the epic battle going on in its midst. (Rowling’s Harry Potter series is an example of this trope.) But because ours is a war that’s explicitly about reality rather than fantasy, even though the closest analogy to it is, well, fantasy… it puts us rationalists in the trenches in a position that’s almost too difficult for even our own selves to compute. It’s so logically improbable and inexplicable, the contours of the Gender War. When virtually every single liberal media outlet calls us crazy, Occam’s Razor almost begs us to find a way to write ourselves off, to dismiss our own side’s point of view as too improbable to be real.

But here we are. It’s all too real. But it’s much easier to fight this war online, in the domain of abstract ideas, than in the real world, where its absurdity feels so comically unreal and out-of-place it can short even the most robust circuits.

How to deal with it in the real world as opposed to online is a question worthy of much, much more discussion, I believe. There’s much anguish about the IRL front, because the rules are completely different from online.

It’s all about class today.

And today I learned that Jane Russell is married to John Russell, 7th Earl Russell and grandson of Bertrand Russell. It doesn’t get a whole lot more posh than that.

Yes good plan. Let’s do that with everything. Repeal the knowledge that people need oxygen to live; goodbye suffocation. Repeal gravity; we’ll be able to fly! Repeal agriculture; there are plenty of nuts and berries out there. Repeal the science of medicine; rely on miracles.

President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday proposed revoking a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.

The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule would rescind a 2009 declaration that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

And by rescinding that declaration Trump’s administration would cause it to become not true. What a brilliant move!

The “endangerment finding” is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the proposed rule change on a podcast ahead of an official announcement set for Tuesday in Indiana. Repealing the endangerment finding “will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America,” Zeldin said on the Ruthless podcast.

And any kind of regulation is a terrible thing. We must not regulate traffic, or commerce, or sports, or policing, or farming, or the use of rivers and streams, or anything else. Freedom freedom freedom!

“There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Zeldin said. “They created this endangerment finding and then they are able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources, to basically regulate out of existence, in many cases, a lot of segments of our economy. And it cost Americans a lot of money.”

Yup they created it, they just made it up out of their own heads, the way Trump makes up everything he says. It’s not based on any science at all whatsoever.