Liberation.

H/t KB Player

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug at Miscellany 9.

We have all seen countless lists outlining the various features of pseudoscience such as Bob Park’s “The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”. Some of us have even written such lists ourselves. I thought it might be interesting to attempt something similar for Bogus Social Justice Movements (henceforth referred to as BSJMs). Examples of BSJMs include MRAs, incels, the dominant strand of trans rights activism, NAMBLA, the pro porn/pro “sex work” lobby etc*. Attempts to portray legitimate criticisms of Islamism as “Islamophobia” or portray legitimate criticisms of the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “antisemitism” can be understood in the same terms**. As with pseudoscience, there is no non-arbitrary place to “draw a line”, such that everything on one side is 100% legitimate social justice activism and everything on the other side is 100% bogus social justice activism. Rather than a sharp definition we must make do with a set of criteria. Most BSJMs will probably meet most of these criteria to some degree, but none has to meet all of them 100%. So, without further ado, I give you

The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Social Justice Movements

1. People vs. Ideas

• The goal of every legitimate social justice movement is to protect real live human beings from injustice and harm.

• BSJMs are usually more concerned with protecting ideas, behaviors, belief systems, ideologies, cultures, traditions, policies, or ways of life. Criticism of what people think, say, or do is re-interpreted as an attack on who they are.

2. Unstated Premises

• BSJMs make frequent appeals to non-specific “rights” that their opponents are accused of denying or violating. Even the most basic tenets of their cause are based on premises and definitions that are best left unspecified.

3. Dubious Connection to Harm

• Every legitimate social justice movement can provide endless examples of obvious, demonstrable injustice and harm.

• BSJMs make exaggerated claims of “harm”, as well as “oppression”, “hate”, “persecution”, “violence” etc. based on a Danish cartoon or the proper use of pronouns (!). The alleged “harm” only shows up at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations and stretching of word-meanings beyond the breaking point. Quite frequently the apocalyptic rhetoric boils down to the implicit threat that the alleged “victims” themselves will hurt themselves or others if they don’t get their way.

4. No Debate

• Every legitimate social justice movement is actively seeking to change hearts and minds through open debate. If anything, their opponents are the ones who are trying to shut down debate because their position is indefensible.

• BSJMs are more concerned with silencing dissent and forcing their views down people’s throats unexamined through intimidation and bullying. Anything other than blind, unconditional agreement in advance is spun as debating their “right to exist” (#2) etc.

5. Conflicts with Real Social Justice Movements

• No real social justice movement is attempting to make other oppressed or marginalized groups less safe from injustice or harm.

• What BSJMs call “oppression” usually boils down to other groups having rights on their own (the right to free speech, the right to leave the dominant religion, the right of lesbians to be uninterested in your “lady cock” etc.).

6. Appropriation/Forced Teaming

• BSJMs appropriate real social justice movements and claim monopoly on speaking in their name while being actively hostile to their goals (#5). Every right and protection gained by other marginalized groups is re-interpreted as belonging to the usurpers instead of the people for whom they were originally intended (and the people who did all the actual work fighting for them).

7. Institutional Capture

• Real social justice movement usually play with open cards.

• BSJMs are more inclined to work by stealth to capture institutions from the inside and change legislation with little or no meaningful debate or accountability (#4). One favorite strategy is sneaking weasel words into bills that were introduced to protect other groups (#6) and use them as a trojan horse for the BSJM’s own agenda.

* As I recently commented there was a time, not too long ago, when the same applied to smokers.

** This remains true even if we concede that bigotry and hate against Muslims and Jews is a real and very serious problem.

After liberating his village.

Another man stomps all over women to public acclaim.

I wondered how Doctor Teetus Deletus is doing these days so I went looking. The Daily Mail (sorry) reports:

A Florida-based plastic surgeon who dubs herself ‘Dr Teetus Deletus’ — a glib reference to breast removal surgery — has been reported to America’s consumer watchdog for using her huge TikTok following to ‘unfairly and deceptively’ sway teens into having sex-change operations.

In other words she promotes such operations, she markets them, she advertises them. She acts like a Hollywood cosmetic surgeon, as opposed to a responsible health-oriented medical doctor. Her clients, however, have immature brains, so they’re less defended against her marketing than full adults are.

A complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) obtained by DailyMail.com, says Dr Sidhbh Gallagher, who runs Gallagher Plastic Surgery in Miami, talks up the benefits and downplays the risks of sex-reassignment surgeries.

Besides which, the “benefits” in question are very doubtful – they risk being temporary, and in the long term extremely harmful. A girl who gets her breasts cut off at 15 because Gallagher’s marketing convinced her it would be good fun could be in for decades of furious regret.

It accuses Dr Gallagher, who says she carries out between 400-500 gender-affirmation surgeries a year, of using catchy videos with pop music backing tracks on social media platforms as a marketing gimmick to attract ‘vulnerable and impressionable’ minors to everything from breast removals to ‘bottom surgery’.

Is there some other reason for using catchy videos with pop music backing tracks on social media platforms?

The clinic said in a statement that the videos aim to ‘educate’ and ‘celebrate’ a marginalized group, and that Dr Gallagher has become a ‘target of attacks and complaints’ because of her politically-charged work with transgender teens.

And why is the work “politically charged”? Because it’s quackery, and highly destructive, and because Gallagher’s approach is grotesquely flippant and reckless.

How exactly are we defining “discrimination” here?

Hospital managers have been warned they could be guilty of discrimination if they put transwomen in single rooms to avoid upsetting patients in female-only wards.

That’s bad stupid wording, that insinuates women are neurotic whiny bitches for not wanting men in women-only wards. Hospital managers have been warned they could be guilty of discrimination if they put men who claim to be trans in single rooms to avoid forcing them on women at the expense of the women’s safety, privacy, and comfort.

Also “have been warned” is pointlessly obscure. Why not say who did the “warning” in the lede?

Guidance for Scotland’s biggest health board also says that any woman who complains about a transwoman sharing their ward should be advised that “the ward is indeed female-only and that there are no men present”.

It comes as ministers have asked health boards around the country to explain how they accommodate trans patients, with some campaigners concerned that the trans-rights agenda could put the safety of women in female-only spaces at risk.

More crappy wording. There’s no “could” about it: of course the “agenda” to force men on women in women-only wards will put the women’s safety at risk.

The campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) described the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde guidance as “gaslighting and insulting”.

None of your silly journalistic circumlocution for them.

A spokeswoman said: “No ill and vulnerable woman wants to wake up from an operation to find a bloke staring at her from the next bed. If the NHS can’t tell the difference between a male body and a female body then it really is in dire straits.”

Sadly, we know the NHS can tell the difference, and is choosing to ignore it for the sake of a trendy but stupid ideology.

No red wave this time.

Democrats have kept control of the Senate after the crucial race in Nevada was announced in their favor, cementing a midterms election performance for the party that widely beat expectations.

Democratic US senator Catherine Cortez Masto has now beaten Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump, according to the Associated Press.

That’s a whole separate piece of good news. Trump’s endorsement turns out to be not worth all that much any more, which is another stake in the heart of his plans to continue to dominate everything all the time.

For the Republicans, it was another blow after they steeply underperformed in many races. The party had touted hopes of a “red wave” that could sweep across the US and deliver the upper chamber of Congress into their hands. Instead – with a few exceptions, such as Florida – the wave was more of a trickle.

The Democrat[ic] win in the Senate is likely to prompt further recrimination in Republican circles over who is to blame for the poor showing. Much attention has so far focused on Trump after he backed rightwing or celebrity candidates in several key races who lost, such as Dr Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.

Loser! Trump is a loser!!

Meanwhile, the loss of the Senate will focus minds sharply on Trump’s ongoing dominance of the Republican party. Fissures have opened up, with some prominent Republican figures openly appealing to Trump not to announce a 2024 run, as he is widely expected to do next week.

Loser loser loser.

Eliza Mondegreen at The Freethinker on the new politics of marginalized idenninies and the trans movement:

What began as an informal social and economic pressure campaign has crossed over into a formal effort by coercive state agencies to restrict freedom of expression, assembly, and conscience. In Norway, a feminist organiser named Christina Ellingsen could face up to three years in prison for tweeting that males who identify as women cannot be lesbians or mothers, because this statement violates Norway’s newly expanded hate crime laws. In Canada, a human rights tribunal entertained the complaints of a trans-identified male against religious-minority women who refused to provide intimate hair-removal services. Professors like Selina Todd and Kathleen Stock have needed security to accompany them on their own university campuses after voicing concerns about proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. In England, police have investigated ordinary citizens for tweeting salty limericks or displaying ‘transphobic’ stickers.

Not something the UK police have ever done in response to misogynist limericks or stickers or shouts or taunts.

In November 2020, a prominent lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted that ‘stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on’—referring to a book that questioned the sudden spike in girls identifying as transgender. Feminist groups attempting to organise in-person meetings have faced bomb threats and cancellations by venues nervous about optics and security risks. Teachers have been suspended or fired for refusing to use students’ preferred pronouns.

All for the sake of men who claim to be women. It doesn’t get any less strange as time passes.

Civil liberties have become distinctly uncool, panned by young activists, and more than a few grown-ups who ought to know better, as tools of marginalisation and oppression. Advocate for the right to freely speak your mind and activists will accuse you of harbouring specific heresies. In an interview with the BBC in September 2021, Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, defended his party’s decision to cast out a female member for asserting that women are adult human females: ‘Well, we absolutely believe in free speech but we also believe that we need to protect human rights and we believe in equality.’

But it’s neither a human right nor equality for a man to pretend to be a woman and order the rest of the world to agree with him.

Why do trans “activists” have such a hostile relationship with civil liberties? Because their claims are bullshit. They can’t defend them so instead they enforce them.

The short answer is that the trans movement threatens civil liberties because the movement is not what it claims to be and thus is threatened by free and open enquiry. If a movement cannot withstand scrutiny, it will create and enforce taboos—and undermine civil liberties in the process.

That’s a hella good point. Where arguments should be, there are taboos instead.

Rather than make a compelling case for why trans inclusion should trump fairness, trans activists seek to make sex—the very crux of the conflict—unspeakable. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter whether or not placing trans-identified males in women’s prisons puts female prisoners at risk. ‘Trans women are women’ means no scrutiny and no debate.

The downside is that it’s so stupid. Unfortunately, that’s not as much of a barrier as you’d think it would be.